Remembering Anthony: “A Seat at the Table with Anthony Bourdain Parts 1 & 2”

To celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, Neil deGrasse Tyson is revisiting his two-part interview with him from 2013, as a single, commercial-free episode with new thoughts and recollections by Neil. Featuring comic co-host Eugene Mirman and NYU Professor of Nutrition Marion Nestle. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/remembering-anthony-a-seat-at-the-table-with-anthony-bourdain-parts-1-2/ Photo Credit: Brandon Royal.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio first interviewed Anthony Bourdain back in 2013 in a show we called "A Seat at the Table" with Anthony Bourdain. It was my first time meeting him, and I was just struck at the time and ever since by his humble beginnings and what they had turned into, what he had made for himself over the years, having begun early on as a dishwasher in a restaurant. And he speaks candidly about these beginnings, his early drug addictions. I had not at the time yet read his memoir on this subject, but he was

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  been quite candid about it his whole life. And to realize that in America you can overcome such curveballs, you can overcome such obstacles and still make a life for yourself, a brilliant life for yourself, not only for yourself but for others. So many people were touched by him, by his personality, by his honesty, his authenticity, that is apparent in every sentence that he utters. I think what we'll miss most about Anthony Bourdain is how much he reminded us, or alerted us for the first time, if we never knew, how important food

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is for bringing us together. Think about it. Often, the food of another culture is your first encounter with that culture, before you even meet a person who represents that food. You eat their food. You know, this is intriguing. Oh, this is odd. I wonder why they did it this way, or what accounts for this tradition or this habit. And Anthony Bourdain wasn't simply a celebrity chef. He was, yes, he was that, but he was also someone who reminded us how small the world is, or how small the world needs to be.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For Anthony Bourdain, your seat at the table wasn't just a place to share food. It was a place to share culture, a place to experience people and places and things that are different from us, but in a completely unarresting way, in a completely calm and honest and embracing way, no matter how different their food is from your expectations or your desires. So, I present for you StarTalk Radio's 2013 interview with Anthony Bourdain.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. I also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I have with me my co-host for this program, the one and the only Eugene Mirman. Eugene, welcome back!

• 3:31Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome back to me!

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We so tap your talents for this. Thank you. And this will not be the last.

• 3:38Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For sure.

• 3:40Eugene Mirman?

  This would be a fun way to fire me.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're still on one of the voices in Bob's?

• 3:44Eugene Mirman?

  I'm still one of the voices of Bob's Burgers, also not replaced.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bob's Burgers?

• 3:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get back to burgers in a minute. Today's show, by the way, is about like food and nutrition. So, I combed the land, then I found someone who actually has the title, Professor of Nutrition at New York University, Marion Nestle. Marion, welcome to StarTalk! Glad to be here. Thanks. She thanked. Yeah, so you'll be the judge of that later, we'll find out. First, I'm intrigued and impressed that there's such a thing as a professor of nutrition. So, I'm glad that somebody has that.

• 4:19Eugene Mirman?

  He thought of it like alchemy.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Nutrition departments all over the country.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I just never ran into, I never ran into one and I'm glad you were here and ready for us.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Ready for you.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in this episode of StarTalk, we have my interview with Anthony Bourdain. He's the famous TV chef.

• 4:40Eugene Mirman?

  Travel chef.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Travel chef. In fact, you know, first he had a New York Times bestselling book in their year 2000 titled Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Bestselling book.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Which I understand is a very accurate account.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So he's been around a while and he had a longstanding Travel Channel show called, of course, No Reservations. And he's moving from the Travel Channel to CNN. And he's gonna do a show, Cuisines of the World. So I just chatted with him about what made him tick, what got him interested in food. In particular, what intrigues me, and we'll get back to you on this in a minute, is just how cuisine can be so different around the world. What some people think is nasty, other people think is extraordinary. And how people just eat differently around the world. So let's go to this first clip right away and we'll have a lot of time to talk about it and carry it into the other segments. My opening clip with Anthony Bourdain, chef extraordinaire.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People always say, "Oh, I've been to this country and this food is a delicacy there." That's cue to me that the food tastes nasty, or some bug that they pulled out of the ground and sauteed. So what's with people saying something is a delicacy?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Well, it's rare or expensive. You know, it's valued more than, you know, the way we look at shrimp or lobster or truffles as the good stuff. A lot of people in this world look at ingredients that many of us would probably have difficulty with. That's an attitude that changes really quickly the more you travel. Something I got over very quickly. Particularly, you know, you talk about, "Wow, their food in Thailand is really repulsive to me." I mean, they eat bugs. But the Thais, who are largely a non-dairy culture, try to put yourself in their shoes. They're looking at us, you eat cottage cheese or Roquefort would be truly horrifying. And if you think about it for a second, what that must look like.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you get some milk and then like turn it into cheese and then let mold grow on it, then eat it?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, just hideous. I got over sort of using words like bizarre a long time ago when looking at how other people eat around the world.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I do find interesting, though, is you go from one country to the next. And one of the simplest measures of this is what is the assortment of flavors that they infuse in their potato chips? Yeah, for example, right? I mean, you know, so i- in Japan, they have like fish flavored potato chips. This, I mean, we eat fish here, but I don't know that that would sell.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  There are whole spectrums of flavors that other countries, other cultures, uh, take for granted and and require in their diet. Uh, the Philippines, there's a whole bitter component that we are almost instinctively not happy with. I mean, they will, they will introduce bile into dishes to give it that welcome bitter note. Cultures like Scandinavian cultures where there's a very limited spectrum of flavors, not a lot of spices traditionally, a lot of fresh fish, fresh fish, frozen fish, more fresh fish, maybe some preserved fish, as well as South Pacific cultures where it's all sort of sweet, fresh fish, not a lot of salty savory.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  There's a tradition of rotting things, like fermenting fish, getting it really offensively funky by our standards just because I think out of boredom.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It introduces another flavor.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  And it's worth noting also that we, Western societies anyway, used to, used to do that. Roman times, the condiment of choice was essentially something called garum. It was essentially rotten fish guts and rotten fish sauce. This was the salt, the principal seasoning ingredient all across Europe. So even our own tastes have changed. For a lot of people, the last frontier is the textural thing. Particularly in Asia, they like, you know, squishy or even rubbery chewy or a lot of traditional European cultures, you know, cartilage texture, that's something that we really have a problem with. We tend to like crispy. Once you cross that border, you, you're really, you're someplace special.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  To get back to you guys about delicacies and value, a lot of I think, you gotta ask always, is there an assumed medical component to what we're talking about also? I think a lot of what we consider the really freakiest foods, the eye popping, what, why would you eat that? A lot of that has either folk medicine, or traditional Chinese medicine applications, or a regular feature in my life in China is if something arrives, still wriggling, or there's a sex organ involved, it's usually accompanied by winking and banging on the bottom of the table, this will make you strong, you know, many, many sons, you know, it's like, oh god.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so Marion, I gotta go straight to you on this. When we think of nutrition, I think of things that are tasty that might be good for me. And for so many of the cultures of the world, I don't know that they have an active science of nutrition, but they just simply know what has worked over the centuries, right? So, is a person more likely to think that something tasty is actually nutritious?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Probably, but the point is that...

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The physiology.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but people eat what's available, you know, if you, before there were supermarkets, and before there was internet food, and before there was food on every corner, people had to eat what was available to them, so they learned to put together a diet that supported life, supported reproduction.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the empirics of that is, if you died, you didn't keep doing it.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, they wouldn't be here if it hadn't worked.

• 10:17Eugene Mirman?

  So, so wait, you were saying that, that people would eat healthy, you would think that some, like, you would think like ribs were delicious because they're, were healthy because they're delicious?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  If you had them.

• 10:27Eugene Mirman?

  If you had them.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  If you had them, because these people survive, these cultures survive, these populations survive.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's self-selecting.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  So it's self-selecting. So, and we know that healthy diets can be made out of almost anything, as long as the foods are varied.

• 10:42Eugene Mirman?

  In India, they drink a bear aspirin soup.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you don't eat too much of them.

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that note, we'll come back to StarTalk Radio after this break.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio and I've got Eugene Lerman. Hello. And this show is about nutrition. So professor of nutrition here, Marion Nestle. Marion, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Pleasure.

• 11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up from New York University. And in fact, you have a book just was published. Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  How about that?

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's awesome. Because calories do count.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  They do.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here we are talking about nutrition all around the world. And so here are people eating local foods. They're not thinking, does it have vitamin C? Does it have vitamin A? But if someone gets sick, or the tribe doesn't continue, presumably they figured out that that diet wasn't good. And so over the generations, an emergent diet comes that happens to work out.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  If it didn't, they wouldn't be here.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They wouldn't be here.

• 11:52Eugene Mirman?

  Everyone who tried to just only eat dirt is dead.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:56Eugene Mirman?

  All the religions and the people who just only...

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the cults and all the...

• 12:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, who would suck on a weird rock and be like, "I still feel hungry." They're all dead.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all dead.

• 12:05Eugene Mirman?

  All we have now is French food and a lot of Asian food.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here in America, I guess since the 1950s, but certainly in recent decades, fast food is a major part of the American diet. It's everywhere. And then with the American cultural influence around the world, our fast food restaurants are showing up in other countries. Is that good? Is it bad? I mean, do you have an opinion on this?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  It's business. There's only a certain amount that people can eat. Americans, they're maxed out on what they can eat. If these companies want to make money, they have to move it overseas.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they can't make us fatter than we are?

• 12:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. We've hit a fat max. And we now need to make everyone in Vietnam fat.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  We're working on it.

• 12:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then when Earth is done with the next planet, right? All right, but fast food shouldn't necessarily make a person fat.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Not if they don't eat too much of it.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they don't eat too much of it. So the issue is not the existence of fast food. It's the regulation of the consumption of food.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yes, and that turns out to be evolutionarily complicated because we have about 100 physiological factors that encourage us to eat more. And one or two.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because historically, on the Serengeti, that's survival.

• 13:15Eugene Mirman?

  If you found a McDonald's in the Serengeti, you would be like, "I'm gonna eat all I can." Because the next McDonald's is

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Far away.

• 13:20Eugene Mirman?

  Centuries away, possibly.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a brother-in-law who grew up in Alaska, and every time we fed him, we said, "You want seconds?" And he said, "You never know when you're gonna eat next." But the fact is, he does know when he's gonna eat next, and it's in three hours when it's the next meal.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Right. So, we're not very well tuned to the environment that we're in. And our physiology is much better at saying, "Eat, eat, eat, eat, you're hungry, better get the glucose to the brain quick." And much, much less effective at telling us when to stop.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When to not eat.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Alas.

• 13:50Eugene Mirman?

  We're like geese trying to turn ourselves into foie gras.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yes, right. Banished in California.

• 13:55Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying the ready availability of fast food is what's contributing to our inability to stop eating?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, the things that encourage people to eat more are having it right there. If we had candy here, we'd be eating it. The fact that you could eat it anytime, night or day, 24/7.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you've got the refrigerator that's got the food through the night, and there's a corner person selling you food.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Particularly in the cities.

• 14:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  So, that makes people eat more.

• 14:22Eugene Mirman?

  You make it sound like gluttonous monsters surrounded by piles of food.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  We're just encouraged to exercise our physiology.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not biologically prepared for the world we've created around ourselves.

• 14:35Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I spoke with Anthony Bourdain about this, just to get his reaction to it. Let's find out what he says.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what about the idea of what Americans have done to some foods? We put cheese in a can. Now, maybe the cheese tastes okay, but that's gotta be an abomination to the cheese cultures of the world.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Increasingly, the French are doing it too. You know, the great cheesemaking cultures, by joining the EU, have agreed to bastardize a lot of their traditional artisanal products, like cured meats, traditional forms of cheesemaking. They've been killing their own products for years.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that not our influence, our cultural influence on them?

• 15:14Speaker 03

  It's a combination of convenience food culture.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, who invented convenience food? Well, America.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  I think it's a byproduct of post-war affluence, less time to kick back.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second world war.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Must specify for the current generation.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  People forget, they lose touch with their roots, they learn to demand newer, saltier flavors. So it's not just us, unfortunately.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's not only a concept of fast food, to which there's been this resistance, I guess they're calling it slow food.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? I mean, has that movement caught on?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  People certainly talk about or think about where their food's coming from a lot more. And not just at the elite foodie levels. People, even if they're not particularly knowledgeable about organics or sustainable or local or artisanal, all of those very fuzzy words, at least they're thinking about it now. You only need to look at, like McDonald's has publicly forsworn any use of pink slime. Pink slime, it is not an ingredient, according to the rules. It is a process that allowed ground beef manufacturers to essentially buy the outer cuts of beef that would otherwise previously have had to be discarded or used for pet food because they

• 16:30Speaker 03

  were more likely to come in contact with hides, excrement, other animals, and contain E. coli. They found that by introducing, as I understand it, an ammonia vapor, basically steaming this stuff, whipping it into a mulch-like paste with bits of extruded fat, mixing it into this slime and processing it with ammonia, that they were able to bring the likelihood of E. coli down. Now, it doesn't sound like good stuff, for sure, and there was clearly a backlash, though not a huge one. The fact that McDonald's and other major retail outlets are saying, "We're not using it anymore." It's not like they're nice guys. They're looking pretty far into the future and seeing that this is gonna come back and bite us.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  We're saving money now, we're making money now, but this could really come back and hurt our brand. So clearly, that's one of many indications of this sort of thinking affecting the marketplace, you know?

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it wasn't, like you said, it was not a separate ingredient, because it's still beef.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Well, that's up to you to decide whether the introduction of an ammonia vapor or whatever is an ingredient or a process. Personally, I would like to know if there's ammonia in my cleaning product, in my meat.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so this is kind of America's hallmark. I mean, agribusiness, growing production and storage technologies. I think America has led the world in this.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  We have.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're spending, I looked this up recently, we're spending a third today of our annual budget on food compared with what we were doing in the 1950s.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Our single largest privately-held company is a food producer. I think Cargill is the biggest American privately-held company.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we're making more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  No doubt about it, you know, frozen food, surely a good thing, most of these things, but, you know, with the good comes the bad, and the bad might be that it is in the financial interest of some very large, powerful companies that you continue to eat badly and too much. And they're gonna spend a lot of money, as any company will do, to make you continue to buy their products. And a lot of these products are not ideal staples of any diet. We need only look at the way Americans look and the state of our health to see that that's the truth.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is processed food bad? I like french fries, I like burgers.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, unfortunately.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a burger last night.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  It's not like cigarettes, it's a matter of proportion. It's not you can't eat it, it's you can't eat too much of it.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh-huh.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  That's hard.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it is so good and so cheap, it makes it that much harder to regulate?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  And the politics come into how come it's so cheap.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what's an example of that?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  We subsidize corn and soybeans, we don't subsidize broccoli.

• 19:10Eugene Mirman?

  And soybeans, what do we do with that that's so bad for people?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Soy oil, it goes into processed foods.

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's your solution to this? Is it to make food more expensive? Is it to change the availability of it? What's the solution?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you wanna change the environment in order to make it easier for people to eat more healthfully. That's what Mayor Bloomberg is trying to do with his 16-ounce soda cap.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's trying to outlaw 20-ounce sodas in the city.

• 19:33Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, he's trying to make fat people illegal, which I think is a good thing.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you over that line? Are you?

• 19:40Eugene Mirman?

  I don't drink a lot of soda. I'm just a regular fat person. But I think that ban sounds pretty good. But what if we subsidize parsley?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  It's not a ban, it's a cap.

• 19:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, it's a cap.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if there is a public good that laws can serve because somebody out there is more concerned about your health than you are?

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Yes, because they have to pay for it.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  If something goes wrong.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. The insurance base, the tax base.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  I mean, there have been estimates, I don't know how good they are, that overweight costs America $190 billion a year.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can go to Mars twice for that.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I would hope so.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow!

• 20:13Eugene Mirman?

  And imagine if the trip was full of people who were overweight. The savings combined with shipping away the problem.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a double.

• 20:22Eugene Mirman?

  Plus the exploration, it's just like, I'm full of solutions.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So lately, fast food has been fortified in ways, so you are getting vitamins and minerals and things, isn't that right?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Oh, it is vitamins and minerals and protein and other kinds of nutrients. It's not soda. Sodas are the only thing that have calories and no nutrients.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no nutrients, yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  And alcohol, sorry.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 20:43Eugene Mirman?

  You think there's no nutrients?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  There's no...

• 20:46Eugene Mirman?

  Not even whiskey?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Especially whiskey.

• 20:48Eugene Mirman?

  What about red wine? It makes pregnant people run faster? Isn't that true? That's true.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more with my interview with Anthony Bourdain. We're talking about nutrition around the world, food around the world. More on StarTalk Radio when we come back.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to a 2013 interview that I conducted with Anthony Bourdain for StarTalk Radio. This was about when his TV show shifted from the Travel Channel to CNN to become Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown. That title is a reminder that on his show, you're not only going to be talking about food, you're going to be an adventurer and an explorer. And that's what his successful TV show had become on CNN. Let's pick up the interview with Anthony Bourdain.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio and I'm with Eugene Mirman.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've got Professor Marion Nestle, spelled like Nestle, I guess, but without the accent. Without the accent. There you go. Too bad, right? Yes. She's professor of nutrition at New York University, has thought a lot about this. And not only nutrition in general, but the role of food and its impact on culture and politics. In fact, you've got a book out called Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics. Excellent title, check it out. So, what's interesting is different regions of the world have different diets and you can look at how long those people live. And say, hey, maybe something's going on in their culture that's not going on in my culture. They've talked about the Mediterranean diet, that is high in, I guess, olive oils and things. There's the Japanese, broadly the Asian diet, which is very low fat, high carbs.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's hear what Anthony Bourdain had to say about it, then we come back and get some of the science of why that may or may not be true. Let's check it out. Tell me about these diets, we call them diets, but it's just the mainstay culinary offerings in various parts of the world. There's a lot spoken of the Mediterranean diet, or the Japanese diet.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they live a long time, heart disease is low. From your life experience, is all that true?

• 23:11Speaker 03

  No doubt about it. I mean, you go to Crete, for instance.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess we know it's true, but are you a bit of a fan of the food, or because there's no stress, or because, how big a factor is the food?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  I'm guessing there's, you know, you're a Vietnamese rice farmer, you're working hard.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're working, well...

• 23:28Speaker 03

  You are working hard, and there's stress in your life. Especially if you've been through three or four wars in the last 30 years.

• 23:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  I don't think that's it. I think clearly the ratio, in much of the world, the ratio of, you know, I'm a confirmed carnivore, but clearly there's something to be said for cultures where the ratio of meat, of protein, to fresh vegetables is completely different. Ours is distorted. Much of the cultures we're talking about, they use meat, or bone, or protein almost as a flavoring ingredient, very carefully, it's much more value.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A condiment, yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  You have delicious, for the most part, vegetables, generally a filler like starch, like whether it's rice, or cassava, or potato, wherever it is. Clearly, it has an impact on... What your body looks like and how long you're gonna live, you know, no doubt about it.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, now, you're over six feet tall. In Japan, people hardly get that height. So, is it a trade-off between that kind of diet and whether you grow tall?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Well, uh, I don't think it's a trade-off we make anymore because they're getting taller and bigger. There's no doubt about it as they become fonder of western food and processed food. I mean, the same thing's happening there as here, the bulking of the world. But I think, uh, yeah, there clearly is. I mean, one of my favorite, I, you know, I'm not particularly well-inclined. As much as it might be good to eat more vegetables and less animal protein, I'm not particularly well-inclined towards really hardcore unwavering of vegans. So, one of my favorite statistics is that apparently vegans in non-industrialized cultures seem to do very, much better than vegans in industrialized cultures.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  And people are trying to figure out why that was, why they're living longer and seem healthier. And apparently, the insect parts and carcasses in rice, much higher in non-industrial cultures.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's left in the product.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, so basically, they're getting a lot more animal protein.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Insect protein. We're flicking away the insects out of our vegetables.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Very high in protein bugs, by the way. People eat those for a reason.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, I happen to know separately that little people live longer than big people. So, if you have a culture where everyone's little, then maybe it doesn't matter what they eat.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Leave them alone.

• 25:56Eugene Mirman?

  That's why babies live forever.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in certain cultures, the people are just smaller. Maybe that's the biggest driver for their longevity. Or is there much truth in these diets that, what can you say?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  The statistics all show that there are plenty of countries in the world that have much better longevity than we do. And they tend to have in common that they eat more plant foods, fruits and vegetables and grains, and they don't eat as much meat and they don't eat as much junk food. And as the American fast food and soda companies...

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just fewer calories, it's the actual mixture of...

• 26:33Speaker 02

  It has a lot to do with calories.

• 26:34Eugene Mirman?

  It's just harder to eat so much parsley that it's as many calories as a burger. I've tried, I've tried!

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Really hard to get fat on parsley. You have to eat roomfuls of it. It's really tough.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now Buddha, last I checked, was a vegetarian and he's generally shown as quite chubby.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yes, but everybody was bringing him rice offerings.

• 26:55Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, he had a very high carb diet.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, alright.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  All day long.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're prepared to say that if in America, if we want to live longer, cut the meat?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Cut down.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, cut the calories.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Cut the calories.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cut the calories and change the balance of the meat.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  And change the balance. Eat more fruits and vegetables, don't eat so much junk food, balance calories and love what you're eating.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that do for you?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  That's my advice.

• 27:21Eugene Mirman?

  Love what, meaning eat, find ways to make foods that aren't burgers delicious.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, or just make sure that you enjoy what you eat.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Burger is the reference frame for all of the food.

• 27:31Eugene Mirman?

  I don't even, I mean burgers are totally fine.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Food is one of great, life's greatest pleasures. You should enjoy it and not make it your enemy.

• 27:38Eugene Mirman?

  It should be your friend.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  To be friends.

• 27:40Eugene Mirman?

  Right? Befriend food, you're like Yoda. You're like befriend food, eat it.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more of my clips with Anthony Bourdain and my in-studio guest, Marion Nestle and of course Eugene Mirman. Be right back.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Radio, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. Find us on the web at StarTalkRadio.net. You can download our archives of shows, great stuff there. Not only that, we're on Facebook, like us there. Just StarTalk Radio, you'll find us. And we tweet, StarTalk Radio, of course. Eugene, you tweet?

• 28:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Eugene Mirman.

• 28:36Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  M-I-R-M-I-N.

• 28:38Eugene Mirman?

  M-A-N.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my special guest today.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  I tweet.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You tweet?

• 28:42Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tweeting nutritionist.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Marion Nestle.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marion Nestle.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Marion Nestle.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Came out of that previous segment, I called you Nestle, I'm sorry.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Perfectly all right.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't be the first one.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  No relation, you're not the first.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm not the first.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  And you won't be the last.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I surely won't be the last. By the way, we're also on the Nerdist channel of YouTube, check us out in video form. So, we're featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He gets around, he makes great food, he eats food that is prepared all around the world. And an intriguing subject, as you know, because not everyone eats the same way. My great disappointment traveling America is the same restaurants are in the same places. And I asked him about food that's sort of good or bad, you know, I mean, you can make that judgment.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  You mean like morally?

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he travels the world, and when you travel, you eat different foods.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I asked him, what kind of good food did he have, what kind of bad food? No, just what didn't taste good.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Taste of good, didn't taste good, that's all. But might be a delicacy in its land, so let's find out what he said.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  The fermented fish in Iceland is something I will never, ever be able to really, even many people in Iceland, probably even the majority, it's a celebrated national dish that they eat on their holidays, and it's basically rotten, sharp. I'm not going to be visiting that again. I could choke down anything to be a good guest. Really, the only real problems, it's a matter of freshness, you know, and it's a really poor culture with very limited access to ingredients.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a hardy digestive system?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, the two times that I've been brought down and lost a day's work were both tribal situations, the whole tribe looking at me, it's bush meat, it's whatever protein they could scrounge, it's not in good shape, there are cleanliness issues.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You took one for the team?

• 30:27Speaker 03

  I absolutely did.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  The surprises are everywhere. Eating street food in Asia changed my life, it ruined my life in wonderful ways. When you've had a really well-made bowl of spicy noodles in Vietnam, even out of a chipped bowl on a low-plastic stool in the street, your old breakfasts just won't cut it anymore. You cannot go back to be the person you were before when you've experienced some of the degree of spice, complexity, and even a little bit of pain. There's an element of sadomasochism in some of that food, that's kind of disturbing and yet enticing.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good and bad food around the world. I mean, this was parodied in, or captured in the Indiana Jones second of those.

• 31:13Eugene Mirman?

  Where he has to eat the little boy's heart? I can't remember what happens.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's when they pull the heart out.

• 31:17Eugene Mirman?

  They give him the Icelandic shark that's...

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He killed monkey brain and eyeball soup. And so, are these real foods out there? They must be.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Uh, whatever they're... If they're being served, they're obviously real foods. Unless they're trying to get you.

• 31:31Eugene Mirman?

  Do they do that? And you go somewhere, they're like, "We eat brains all the time." And they're like, "No, we don't."

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is there study on the nutritional analysis of all these exotic foods?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what do you guys find? I mean, I guess...

• 31:43Speaker 02

  They have nutrients. All foods have nutrients.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the end of the day, they're just eating something that was once alive.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 31:49Eugene Mirman?

  How good are sweetbreads for you, would you say?

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Uh, I think in small quantities, I wouldn't worry about them at all.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a sweet, nor is it bread.

• 31:55Eugene Mirman?

  No, but...

• 31:56Speaker 02

  It's neither sweet nor bread.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's organ meat of mammals.

• 31:59Eugene Mirman?

  But if a tiny bit of it will make you strong and fast and outrun people drinking red wine?

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you love that?

• 32:06Eugene Mirman?

  I'm just trying to have you go like, "Most people don't know this, but eating butter in the morning is very good for you." They're like, "Why won't you tell me this?"

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they've got their safe secrets.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Oh, because I'm one of these people who thinks it's okay to eat whatever you like as long as you vary it and don't eat too much of it.

• 32:20Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, foods that are really horrendous. Do you think there's something... It must be cultural. I mean, a learned taste buds.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if everybody... If you grew up on eating sweetbreads all the time, you would think it was a great delicacy. If you grew up on eating crickets all the time, you would think it was a great delicacy.

• 32:39Eugene Mirman?

  You'd be right about sweetbreads, but wrong about crickets.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Wrong, right? There you are. That's cultural relativism.

• 32:45Eugene Mirman?

  Just to give a world blanket statement.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not Americans are the right answer to this question, hold it aside. What country in the world has the worst health?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  The worst health?

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 32:55Eugene Mirman?

  Excluding America?

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Oh, I would say the countries that are poorest.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, poorest.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Poorest countries.

• 33:01Eugene Mirman?

  So, poorest and then the fattest?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:04Eugene Mirman?

  So go poorest, poorest, fatties.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  That, that, that too.

• 33:07Eugene Mirman?

  And then just like vegetarian Asians.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And what's happening, you know, and what's happening in the developing countries now is that as everybody gets a little money, they start eating more.

• 33:17Eugene Mirman?

  They just, but then they just eat, start eating like Kit Kats and stuff.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And they start eating like we do and they put on weight and develop type 2 diabetes and there it goes. It even has a name. It's called the nutrition transition.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nutrition transition?

• 33:29Eugene Mirman?

  Where it goes from hungry to diabetes, to type 2 diabetes.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  In one fell swoop.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, StarTalk Radio, we're talking about nutrition, my clips with Anthony Bourdain. We'll see you in a moment.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got Eugene Mirman and Professor of Nutrition Marion Nessel.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  The verb, not the chocolate.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, Nestle, that would be.

• 34:11Eugene Mirman?

  Is that what it says on your card?

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The verb, not the chocolate.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain, the TV chef and world traveler, tasting exotic foods. And just interesting to hear how he got to where he is. Everyone's got a story. He's got a story and the stories surprised me entirely. I had no idea this was in his, I guess I could have done my homework, but I wanted it all to be fresh.

• 34:37Eugene Mirman?

  You're surprised because you didn't Google it?

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I didn't Google it. No, but it was all very fresh and it was, it was a delightful success story. Let's, let's check out what he said, what he tells us.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  I was angry, embittered, spoiled. I was a bad kid.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Grew up in New Jersey in the suburbs, right across the river.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What exit?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I was just very disappointed with the way that the 60s turned out and I was a bitter, self-destructive, drug-seeking kid who really had a hard time finding anything to believe in. And I found a home, the way that a lot of people find a home in the military, I found a home in the restaurant business. I mean, this was a world of absolutes that I responded to. I, I liked the science of, to me it was a revelations working as a dishwasher. Why? Because plates went in dirty and they came out clean every time. And if I did my job of washing dishes, I got the respect of hardworking people in the kitchen and that made me feel proud of myself in a way I never had before.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Uh, I'll tell you really.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Transitional.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  Transitional. I went from a very unhappy, self-destructive college kid. A college dropout to a guy with.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Washing dishes?

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. And I live by those. The lessons I learned as a dishwasher were the most important in my life. Show up on time.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds like a book.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Have the.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lessons I learned washing dishes?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  I've written that book. Um, and then at age forty-four, I found myself standing, uh, broke but reasonably happy, uh, next to a deep fryer at a restaurant in New York and I, I'd written an obnoxious, over testosterone account of my life that I didn't think anyone would buy and suddenly I found myself on the bestseller list and my life literally changed in the space of a week from a guy who never thought he'd see Saigon much less Rome to somebody who's now been traveling, uh, for the last ten years. Anywhere I want to go in the world, doing pretty much whatever I please.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, not to over interpret what you just shared with me, but the fact that your life transformed at age forty-four.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's extraordinary. Look at how many people give up long before then saying, look, I'll never make anything of my life.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  I'd never had health insurance. I'd never, uh, owned a car. I'd never owned a home. Uh, I never paid my rent on time. I owed the IRS ten years of back taxes. I went to sleep every night, uh, hyperventilating from fear for who's gonna call first, the landlord, credit card company, or the, uh, you know, uh, the IRS. Uh, I had no hope of ever changing that situation and that was good by previous year's standards. So it came as a big, big, big surprise to me to suddenly have the freedom to see this world and do the things that I'm able to do with the people I do it with. I think it makes me, uh, grateful in a way that I might not be had it happened earlier.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So who would've thought food can change somebody's life that way? It was an extraordinary story.

• 37:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I was a dishwasher for like a year, but I didn't realize I could do this. I had six years before I'm his age and have to have accomplished the same stuff.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotta keep at it, keep working at it.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  You have to work on the dishwashing a little more carefully.

• 38:02Eugene Mirman?

  I know, I feel like I learned a lot, but not quite as much.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Marion, I think most people who care about their health have either only a pseudo-scientific understanding of nutrition, or no understanding at all. So you've gotta be disappointed with...

• 38:15Eugene Mirman?

  Present company excluded.

• 38:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've gotta be disappointed with the state of knowledge out there.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  No, I'm disappointed with the state of science and knowledge in general.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In general, oh yeah, yeah. It's just one aspect of it all.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Well, it's an aspect that hits people personally. We put food in our bodies, and that makes it extremely personal.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's some combination of protein, carbohydrates, fat.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, nutrition's complicated. There are probably fifty different components in food that we need in order to survive, and it's hard to keep them track, and to keep track of them, and you don't know what's in food.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I live off of any one of them if I want to just go all protein?

• 38:50Speaker 02

  No, no, variety, variety.

• 38:51Eugene Mirman?

  You couldn't live off of just Diet Coke?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  It would be very difficult.

• 38:56Eugene Mirman?

  For how long do you think if you just drank Diet Coke would you live? Like two months, a year?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Actually, it's probably very close to seventy days.

• 39:03Eugene Mirman?

  Seventy days, just Diet Coke?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you...

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it has no calorie sources.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  It has no calories, and no nutrients, so it's just like...

• 39:11Eugene Mirman?

  So you'd also have to eat bugs.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  So it's the equivalent of water, and there've been studies, the Irish Hunger Strikers, for example, you know, they were very carefully studied, and on average, they lived about seventy days, once they decided not to eat anymore.

• 39:25Eugene Mirman?

  Wow.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the Diet Coke experiment, proxied with water, would do that?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if they ate something, then they would've lived longer.

• 39:32Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right, right.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta wrap up this hour. It's been an awesome conversation about food and diet. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, and I've had Eugene Mirman, you've seen him and heard him before, and of course, Professor Marion Nessel. Thanks for being on StarTalk Radio.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  A pleasure.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And contributing to the information surrounding my interview with Anthony Bourdain.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to a 2013 interview that I conducted with Anthony Bourdain for StarTalk Radio. And what a kind, sincere, authentic man he was. It's clear. Just listen to this conversation and you'll know. He doesn't hide anything. He's not ashamed of anything. He is candid about his mistakes, about his achievements. And how many of us can really claim that? We'll miss him dearly. Let's get back to the interview with Anthony Bourdain. Welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City, where I also serve as Director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I've got with me, you've seen him before, you've heard him before, Eugene Mirman. Eugene, thanks. We do, you've invited us to your Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, which is a great thing you've got going over there in Brooklyn.

• 41:02Eugene Mirman?

  Thanks.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for having us be a part of that.

• 41:04Eugene Mirman?

  Thanks for being with us.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just recently, we did a show with you and like, our name was on the poster. That was great. Yeah. I've been on a poster before.

• 41:10Eugene Mirman?

  Well, welcome to posters.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool.

• 41:12Eugene Mirman?

  I'm gonna make you a star, Neil.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. So, this show's about nutrition and we're featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain. You might have seen him with his television show on the Travel Channel. He's gonna have a TV show that's, in fact, he's gonna move to CNN and do a food show.

• 41:27Eugene Mirman?

  It'll be like Anderson Cooper in the middle of a food disaster, picking up food, going, "Why?"

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, "I couldn't do this just with Eugene," although Eugene is a bit of a food expert, because you're a voice on Bob's Burgers.

• 41:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, so he's got some food expertise.

• 41:41Eugene Mirman?

  And I got a D in chemistry, so I bring that also to the table.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he eats. But I had to bring in a little more expertise, just no offense here.

• 41:49Eugene Mirman?

  Not offended.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Down the street, we've got New York University, a great institution, one of the jewels in the crown of New York, and we have Professor Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition. Thanks for joining us on StarTalk Radio. Thank you. So, Anthony Bourdain, you certainly know the guy. Yeah, yeah, and so we've got a clip of my interview with him filmed previously, but we talked about just being in the kitchen as a place to experiment, what kind of gadgets are available. When we come back, I want to talk about sort of food science and the science of the kitchen and what that means to you. Let's check out my first interview clip with Anthony Bourdain. What do you think of all the gadgets that help people cook food? They make great infomercials.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  In almost every case, they're completely worthless. The salad shooter, do you really, you know, the ultimate salad delivery system. I mean, is cutting lettuce so hard? You know, something that will cut onions for you is completely insane as far as I'm concerned. There is no better, a good, two good knives, a serrated knife for bread and maybe tomatoes, and a good quality chef's knife is all you need. And a cutting board, a couple of good heavyweight pans, and there's very little that you can't do.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you distinguish between tricks, and I don't mean it in a circus sense, but just secrets versus 10 years of doing it? Because you serve a food to someone and say, "What's your secret?" As though you can just tell that to them and then tomorrow they can do exactly what you made. And at what point do you say, "Look, I've been at this my whole life."

• 43:28Speaker 03

  There are no secrets. This is the, the secret of the restaurant business and professional cooking is there are no secrets. It is a mentoring business. Chefs spend their whole lives learning stuff and then because of the nature of the business, every few months, teach everything they know, invest time they don't have in teaching somebody everything they know so that they can maybe have a Sunday off and that they could count on a crew. It's a military hierarchy. There are no secrets. There are no secret recipes, there are no secret techniques. Everything that you learn in the kitchen, you were either told, open source by your immediate superior and that's been shared with everybody in the kitchen, or you have learned it over time painfully. Uh, you know, the ability to tell when a steak is cooked by listening to it in the pan

• 44:12Speaker 03

  or on the grill or determining that a piece of fish is probably ready to come out of the pan just from the sound of it. Uh, these are things you learn. Through repetition, and that is the great secret. It's that this is how professionals learn. This is how home cooks should learn. People shouldn't be intimidated by recipes. They should understand that professionals learn through getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, starting to get it right, eventually getting it right until it became second nature. It's repetition, repetition, repetition. You learn all of these things, even if you don't understand the science behind why your stew is transforming, why it's becoming thick as it cooks longer, why your egg scrambles,

• 44:57Speaker 03

  why the steak gets dark on the outside when you expose it to heat. You may have no understanding of the science behind that, but you instinctively, of course, through repetition, understand it, you learn to use it, and you count on it.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you've used two words in our conversation as fluently as any scientist that I know. First, E. coli just rolled off your tongue.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And tectonic shift rolled off your tongue. So, what is your science background?

• 45:26Speaker 03

  High school science.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High school science.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  High school science, but...

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I meant you liked it, I guess.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  I did, but, um, you know, people talk about things in kitchens like, you know, what's happening? Why is my steak getting brown? You know, the caramelization of protein, the Maillard reaction, you know? It's kind of cool to know. It helps you out.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm betting you didn't learn caramelization of sugars in high school chemistry.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  But you must have learned it real quick. First time you stick your finger in some, you learn it on a cellular level. How come that's hotter than water? I hadn't counted on that.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's way hot.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that interview, I just became so enchanted by him. I felt like I've known him my whole life during that interview. So, we're back in the kitchen. You like the kitchen.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I love the kitchen.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? It's the one place you can do legitimate science experiments, and no one will fault you for it.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and if you're really a good cook, you keep notes on what you're doing. And if you...

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lab book.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  You keep a lab book, you know?

• 46:31Eugene Mirman?

  If Iran tried to build a nuclear weapon in a kitchen, no one would be so upset.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  You know, so if your cake fails, you try it another way.

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'd be curious if on her shelf of cookbooks, she's got lab books of what fail cooking experiments, successful ones. So is there some experiment you remember most that you discovered yourself?

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Well, it's just anything that you make. You just keep making it until it works.

• 46:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's interesting if you cook protein, it sort of changes.

• 47:00Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, what was he saying when you would burn your finger if you touched sort of...

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you need him to tell you that you'd burn your finger if you touched...

• 47:08Eugene Mirman?

  No, but he said faster than water.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 47:10Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, sorry, I don't know science.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 47:13Eugene Mirman?

  As a physicist.

• 47:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you melt sugar and it's liquefied, it's at a higher temperature than boiling water. And it sticks to your finger.

• 47:18Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it'll...

• 47:20Speaker 02

  And if you look at chefs, you look at their arms and they've...

• 47:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chefs.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Chefs, they've got blisters and cuts all over them.

• 47:26Eugene Mirman?

  Because they've been fighting food for years in a hot kitchen.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so like, for example, you know, egg goes from liquid to this fluffy form because you're heating the proteins. I mean, it's an interesting sort of consequence of it.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Cream whips.

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cream...

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Because you're beating air into it.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. I mean, I love it. I love it. When we come back, more of my clips with Anthony Bourdain, and I've got Eugene Mirman and the good professor of nutrition, Marion Nestle. See you in a moment.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio, we're back. Find us on the web at starTalkRadio.net. You can listen to us three ways. You can download the podcast on iTunes and our website. You can find us in the airwaves, StarTalkRadioRadio. Also, we are on the Nerdist channel under YouTube. Check us out, you'll see us in video form. I've got Eugene Mirman, Eugene, thanks.

• 48:35Eugene Mirman?

  Sure.

• 48:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks, and the good professor, thanks for agreeing to help out on this interview. I interviewed Anthony Bourdain, and I didn't know very little about him, and I got so...

• 48:46Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, do you ever watch his show?

• 48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did, you know, we used channel surf and all the food folks.

• 48:50Eugene Mirman?

  He's wonderful.

• 48:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's, it's great, it's great to learn about, and he's got a new show on CNN where he travels the world, and he gets paid for that.

• 48:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, I think most of the people on CNN... It's a good...

• 49:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess, yes, they are paid, of course.

• 49:02Eugene Mirman?

  Or their skills is just to travel around eating things.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And eating things, and he's just actually pretty slender, so he's watching what he eats. So, in my next clip with him, we talk about the molecular food movement, something I was unsure what that meant, but it's all the rage, and let's find out where that takes us.

• 49:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm reading recently about the molecular food movement, where if you have enough power over molecules, just create the food from a molecular kitchen. What do you think of that term?

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's an unfortunate term. It's treating ingredients in new ways. It's manipulating pre-existing ingredients into unusual forms. And I guess the father of this movement was a guy named Ferran Adria, a great chef, a great restaurant, one of the most enjoyable meals I've ever had in my life, where, uh, called El Bulli in Spain. Fifty cooks cooking for fifty diners, never made a profit, considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world. What Ferran explained what he did like this, he said, he's asking a basic question. Here's a truffle in this hand, here's a perfectly ripe peach. The truffle's fifteen hundred dollars. The peach is a dollar. Which is better? Which

• 50:14Speaker 03

  is better? This is rarer, it costs more money, but isn't more delicious than a perfectly ripe peach in season or a pear? So, he started asking, what if I treat the pear like the truffle? I do everything I can, experimentation and science, if I trick you, would you think you're eating a truffle? If I serve it in a way that you were forced to value it, that draws the eye, that change the texture, what can I do to this, to change its value, its perceived value, to surprise you, to take you someplace you haven't been before, but then bring you ultimately back to something that, at the end of the day, tastes like a delicious, delicious pear? So...

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, they use a lot of natural, mostly natural ingredients like agar-agar, the stabilizers, various processes to either intensify flavor, to trick the mind into, you know, eating a strawberry that doesn't look like a strawberry, or an apple that looks like and feels like caviar in the mouth. That can be fun and exciting in the hands of somebody as talented as Ferran, and it could be a long miserable night in the hands of somebody who read about him and thought it was a cool idea and started doing ghastly and terrible things to food, sheerly to dazzle.

• 51:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, why is that different from I go to the cheap deli and they've got the crab salad, but it's fish made to look like crab?

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Ferran would agree with you, absolutely. There is nothing different. It's a technique and a process, just like making ham. A leg of pork is a good thing, but as it turns out, if you pack it in salt and then, you know, hang it and age it and smoke it, it becomes even more delicious. So it's basically taking that same engine, whether we're talking a sea leg, as it's called, that fake crab, or the making of ham to an extreme degree.

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but at least that's still using natural ingredients or ingredients available to them. It's not really coming out of the chemistry lab.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  This is not chemistry lab.

• 52:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's some molecular movement in it, not the badly named.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  It is a modernist cooking that understands and refined and expect, that, you know, they spend a lot of time in workshops or laboratories, figuring out, why doesn't egg scramble? What process is happening already when you agitate and beat proteins?

• 52:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, proteins get all...

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Right, so what can we do? How can we play with that process? So we're not talking about introducing chemicals. In almost every case, most of the stabilizers or things like, these were extracts of or natural ingredients that are used elsewhere in other cultures. So it's not chemistry class, but it certainly does look like a laboratory. One of his more famous dishes is the spirified olive, which is essentially the extract of the best olives, turned into juice, and then dropped into a solution, treated with a substance, a natural substance, which causes it to basically spirify into a liquid sphere, contained only by itself. So you pick up something very delicately that looks like an olive and it explodes into liquid. It's thrilling and delicious.

• 53:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's like the essence of olive turned into a bigger olive?

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Just as delicious as the original olive, but with excitement, surprise, wonder, and you know, fifty courses of this, it's really like taking off to the moon.

• 53:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're, you're, you're looked stunned by this description of the essence of olive turned into an olive.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  I've had one.

• 53:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've had one, and what is it?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  It's like having a mouthful of olive oil.

• 53:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ew!

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Good olive oil, mind you, but still olive oil.

• 53:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like best ever olive oil?

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Could be.

• 53:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so then what?

• 53:45Eugene Mirman?

  Little, but little, but not as thick or as thick?

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much just tastes it like olive oil.

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you take the essence of an olive, that's oil, right? That's what olive presses do.

• 53:54Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I'll go home and drink some olive oil and be like, that.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  And you'll save yourself a great deal of money.

• 54:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are these chefs gone awry? Is this like?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Oh, I think they're having fun. It's boys with chemistry sets.

• 54:07Eugene Mirman?

  They're not murdering people.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's chemistry sets up. They get to play with all this really cool equipment. They get to play with liquid nitrogen. What could be more fun than?

• 54:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want liquid, I want a liquid nitrogen nozzle in my kitchen.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  See, there you go.

• 54:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've always wanted that.

• 54:22Eugene Mirman?

  I think you probably could have one, right?

• 54:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could probably rig that, actually, now that you mention it.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  So if you had?

• 54:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Liquid nitrogen is very cool. It's nitrogen like in, in the air. In case you didn't know, seventy-eight percent of the air you breathe is nitrogen. If you cool it enough, it will liquefy. But now it's like raging boiling because it boils.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  And very cold.

• 54:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's, it's boiling at a very cold temperature.

• 54:43Eugene Mirman?

  What would happen if you sprayed it on a fish?

• 54:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would instantly freeze the fish.

• 54:47Eugene Mirman?

  And then if, and then you microwave it, would it be delicious?

• 54:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freeze it, then microwave it, then you have a mushy fish, right?

• 54:51Eugene Mirman?

  All right. I'm trying to see how well you know science you've passed.

• 54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so, no, I've never tried that, but I think that's what would happen if you did this. So, uh, maybe there, there are things that a chef could still do to food that these boys with toys haven't yet devised.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Well, they're working on it.

• 55:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're working on it.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  And there are lots of them working on it.

• 55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but don't, wouldn't it help if they knew? The chemical properties of fat versus protein versus carbohydrates?

• 55:17Eugene Mirman?

  Some of them might. I don't know why you're assuming.

• 55:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm asking, what in your experience, do chefs have the kind of...

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Some do, some don't.

• 55:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do chefs have the nutrition knowledge that you have? I mean, you're an expert, of course, but do they have your threshold of knowledge that you think everyone should have?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  I don't think so. They have knowledge about cooking. That's what they're doing. And they're trying to take what little science they know and apply it.

• 55:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would they be a better chef if they knew more of what you knew?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Possibly. Possibly not. Because so much of cooking is about taste and flavor and getting a feel for how you deal with the ingredients.

• 55:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you concern yourself much with taste?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 55:51Eugene Mirman?

  You think people should eat moderately different things?

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Things that are delicious.

• 55:55Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, so that they enjoy it. She's not trying to get everyone to eat weird, like, paste that is neutral of calories.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  I think healthy food should be absolutely delicious.

• 56:04Eugene Mirman?

  That's how you'll convince people.

• 56:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but the stereotype is that the healthy food is nasty and it's like taking your medicine.

• 56:11Eugene Mirman?

  I don't think that is anymore, actually. I think that's changed.

• 56:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says a man who's a voice in Bob's Burgers.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  My...

• 56:18Eugene Mirman?

  That's not an argument.

• 56:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it is. At this moment, I'm invoking it as an argument. Go.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  My idea of a really great chef is somebody who can make vegetables absolutely delicious, so that's all you want to eat.

• 56:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, that's an interesting chef's challenge.

• 56:36Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take a meat eater and have him fall in love with vegetables.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Many, many chefs can rise to that challenge without any trouble at all.

• 56:43Eugene Mirman?

  It's true. Just go to Blue Hill.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Blue Hill is not a bad place to start.

• 56:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you know about Blue Hill?

• 56:50Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, my God. I've had carrots.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  They start out with little, tiny spiked carrots and radishes.

• 56:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me, Blue Hill has their own farm or something, is that right?

• 57:00Eugene Mirman?

  It's really delicious.

• 57:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do. They control all their own vegetable products, if I remember that correctly.

• 57:06Eugene Mirman?

  Just because I'm on a cartoon with the word burger doesn't mean that I eat only burgers.

• 57:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm just...

• 57:12Eugene Mirman?

  Just a weird world.

• 57:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm curious about something. When people eat, different foods react to their systems differently. You know, some people get indigestion. I mean, you study the chemistry of people's reactions to food?

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things that's really fabulous about the human digestive system is that it can take anything and turn it into calories and nutrients.

• 57:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Really, anything. And if there are some people who are sensitive to certain foods and have food allergies and other kinds of problems, but most people just-

• 57:43Eugene Mirman?

  Even tofu?

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Even tofu.

• 57:47Eugene Mirman?

  Just picking short, just curious.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Most people can take anything that was, that used to be alive and that's edible. And turn it into-

• 57:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like a calorie factory.

• 57:55Eugene Mirman?

  Wood?

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Wood calorie factory.

• 57:57Eugene Mirman?

  Wood?

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Wood would be hard.

• 57:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Eugene Mirman?

  But some people could.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  That's not digestible.

• 58:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to talk about eating wood in a minute.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  For that, you need termites.

• 58:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure, exactly. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more on our show on nutrition. Be right back.

• 58:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got Eugene Mirman and Professor Nessel. Nessel. The verb or the net?

• 58:37Eugene Mirman?

  The verb!

• 58:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The verb, excuse me. Two Nessel.

• 58:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 58:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about nutrition. We're featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain. And we were coming out talking about, could you eat wood? Now, of course, termites eat wood. And they're having a field day doing so. Because they have the digestive enzymes that can get calories out of wood.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  They have bacteria in their intestines that allow them to do that.

• 58:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those bacteria, okay.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  We have bacteria in our intestines that can handle food fiber. But I don't think it handles wood very well.

• 59:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. But actually, it doesn't digest the fiber. It just passes it through, right?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  It digests some of the fiber. The bacteria can digest some of the fiber-

• 59:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of the fiber.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  And turn it into little volatile fatty acids that get absorbed, etc., etc.

• 59:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we can eat like, so lettuce, we can eat, but not like oak leaves?

• 59:20Speaker 02

  It would be difficult.

• 59:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would be difficult.

• 59:22Eugene Mirman?

  Would it be poisonous or just unpleasant?

• 59:24Speaker 02

  I don't know whether oak leaves are poisonous or not.

• 59:27Eugene Mirman?

  I'll tell you in a few days.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Why don't you do that? Experiment and be sure and take notes.

• 59:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but think about a future. If there's a food shortage in the world and we managed a way to eat something first that allowed you to digest wood. Because wood has calories in it. It's got energy. That's why you can burn it in a fireplace.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 59:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just not available to the human body.

• 59:48Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 59:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As an energy source. So, we can imagine a day where you can digest wood.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  And what would we do with all the jokes about food tasting like wood chips?

• 59:58Eugene Mirman?

  We would have to swap them out for another object or plant.

• 1:00:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, some food that tastes like wood, not on purpose.

• 1:00:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Tastes like sawdust.

• 1:00:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, which is still wood.

• 1:00:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my interview with Anthony Bourdain, I talked about sort of the animal aspect of eating meat. I mean, if you can eat meat, it's a dead animal, okay? Are you?

• 1:00:22Eugene Mirman?

  Agreed.

• 1:00:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Agreed, okay.

• 1:00:23Eugene Mirman?

  No one.

• 1:00:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not a debatable topic.

• 1:00:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 1:00:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what does it mean to eat something that's been completely, where its origin is completely concealed from you? It's just a burger. It's just a...

• 1:00:36Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I see. Not like a farm-to-table kind of thing, but more of like, just like buying a big pile of meat or finding it in the ground.

• 1:00:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? Would you go out and kill the animal if you knew that's what you were about to eat? Let's find out what our conversation says.

• 1:00:46Eugene Mirman?

  Punch an animal out and murder it.

• 1:00:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Eugene Mirman?

  With a fist.

• 1:00:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe it's more true in America than in other places, but particularly in the carnivorous realm, we shield ourselves from the animal itself. We buy a chicken, you don't see the feet.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't see the head. It's just packaged and it's just a piece of meat. Is that a good thing? Or you probably just say it's a bad thing.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  It's a terrible thing.

• 1:01:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why? Why do you even care?

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Okay, for a whole lot of reasons. It's always good to know where your food came from. It's only fair and just. My friend, Fergus Henderson, was a pioneer of what's called the nose-to-tail movement. He says, "It's only polite." You know, if you're going to kill an animal, or more often have an animal killed for your restaurant or your kitchen, it's only polite to eat as much of it as possible, to not waste. People should understand where their food comes from, how it was raised, what the impact might be on their society as a whole in that process. But I think also, just as sentient, caring people... A decent person would prefer that their animal is raised reasonably happy

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  and killed with a minimum of cruelty.

• 1:01:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if before everyone ordered their cowboy steak, if they said, "Go outside, find the cow that you want us to slaughter, look it in the eye and pull this trigger and shoot it in the head."

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Honestly, I think that's an experience, the more people who are, who can do.

• 1:02:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cow with big eyelashes, you know.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  It is something I've done. When you travel this world, you meet your dinner frequently. It's difficult. When you've killed your first pig, you really start to abhor waste, disrespect to the ingredient. I'm a lot more careful about how I cook my pork now. You know, I understand something died for that pork chop, okay? I think you become a better citizen of the world and a more rounded person when you have seen that process and you've made some personal decisions as part of that. But it is a life-changing thing and I think everyone should take part in it.

• 1:02:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's deep. Do you agree?

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's philosophically enriched outlook on the food that you confront.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Many people don't eat meat because they can't bear the idea of either raising animals for food or killing animals for food. People who do eat meat, if they're thoughtful at all, have to come to terms with what that means. And his coming to terms, obviously, is he wants to respect. It has a lot of respect in it. I think that's a philosophical position that a lot of meat eaters have these days. I want my meat raised humanely. I know I'm going to be killing it, but I want it at least raised humanely.

• 1:03:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My one little part of that, that I do for myself, when I'm eating a shrimp, I eat the shrimp with the shell. I figure the shrimp gave its life, I'm going to eat its shell as well. Plus, it's chewable anyway, it's not like a lobster shell. But also.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  I eat the lobster shell because I'm a little better than that.

• 1:03:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also, when I cook a lobster, you know what I do? I just, I remove the... The claw rubber bands before I put it in the

• 1:04:04Eugene Mirman?

  Oh yeah, doesn't everyone do that?

• 1:04:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I don't think so, because I

• 1:04:07Eugene Mirman?

  You would boil rubber bands with your food?

• 1:04:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I want the lobster to have one last chance to bite me before it goes in. I see. Right, it's just, it's just, it's a

• 1:04:15Eugene Mirman?

  I guess I selfishly do the same thing because I don't want to boil a bunch of rubber bands. So it's good that we're both good people, but me

• 1:04:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back more about eating animals and some of them even carry diseases, when we come back to StarTalk Radio.

• 1:04:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are back, StarTalk Radio, Neil Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I've got Eugene Mirman, comedian extraordinaire, love your stuff Eugene, thank you. And Professor Marian Nessel, recently authored a book, this Why Calories Count. Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, awesome, and it's not your first book. No. It's not your first rodeo. No. You've been writing about this stuff for a while, so thanks for being on. We're talking about nutrition, we're talking about food, talking about cooking. And in this segment, we're talking about slaughtering animals, some of which might have some disease that you want to avoid. And it includes interview clips that I conducted with Anthony Bourdain. Let's get right to at the top of this segment, my interview with Anthony Bourdain,

• 1:05:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  where we just come out of talking about slaughtering animals, facing them in the eye, if you really want to appreciate what you're eating. And the fact that animals are a source of disease in the world, let's find out.

• 1:05:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some pathogens in our culture are directly traceable to viruses that hopped from animals that we either farm or eat or, how does that, does that scare you sometimes? I'm thinking of avian flu or mad cow disease or even AIDS with contact with the rest of the apes.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  You know, I think exercising reasonable caution, the same way you would if you travel around rural America, is a useful thing to do wherever you go. I mean, the days when I would eat way as far out of my comfort zone,

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  you know, as a daredevil, just so that I could tell friends that I drank, you know, live cobra blood. I don't do that anymore. I guess I would advise people against.

• 1:06:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you used to do that.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Early on, I was so grateful to be traveling. I didn't think this whole TV thing would last. I'd never been anywhere. So yeah, when I was in Vietnam, I made sure to get the live Still Beating Cobra Heart and drink its blood, just so I figured when it all ended, six months later, at least I'd get a free beer telling that story, you know? Um, I, I, I long ago changed the way I travel to be much more interested in the typical everyday thing. I think if you use the same philosophy, people always ask me, "Do you get sick? Just stomach problems from traveling around, eating all that street food?" Always ask yourself, "Is this how your average person eats?" You know, is the place busy? Uh, it's generally not going to be a concern. If you're aware that avian flu has become a, a, a concern in the area,

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  yeah, uh, you know, undercooked poultry is probably not going to be a good idea. You'd have to, you will have to think about those things. Uh, if there's mad cow around, you know, maybe, you know, calves' brains at a dodgy pub would, would not be your first option. But I, I, I think if you familiarize yourself with what's going on, as any cautious traveler should, and don't take unreasonable risks, um, you know, eating brains or spine in a, uh, in a, in a mad cow area would be a bad idea.

• 1:07:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just using common sense.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, just like, they're not drinking the water in Russia from the top. You shouldn't either.

• 1:07:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do as the natives do.

• 1:08:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Mary, uh, how much attention do you give in your profession to not only nutrition of food, but the hazards that the eating of food can bring you when they're contaminated?

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Oh, I actually have a book. It's called Safe Food, The Politics of Food.

• 1:08:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Practicing safe food.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  That, that, uh, safe food, exactly.

• 1:08:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I, I, you know, E. coli, botulism, F.A.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  The, the Centers for Disease Control says 48,000 people in America get sick with food poisoning every year, and there's 125,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Those are the standard figures.

• 1:08:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you do to avoid this?

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  I try to, when I'm traveling, I try to eat food that's been cooked.

• 1:08:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cook the food.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Cook the food. Oh, cooking does wonders.

• 1:08:44Eugene Mirman?

  And never a sandwich that you find on the ground. Never eat a ground sandwich in Russia, they always say.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Not more than five seconds.

• 1:08:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait a minute, so you cook the food, but also cooking removes some of the nutrients from food, isn't that right?

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but not seriously.

• 1:09:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  It'll kill a couple of the more dicey ones, like vitamin C and folate, but the others will be fine, and you will be so much better off eating cooked food in places where the water's dirty, that you'll be grateful that you did.

• 1:09:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's... but how about the pathogens that are not organic? Like mad cow disease, isn't that just a folded protein or something?

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a folded protein. That's pretty rare.

• 1:09:25Eugene Mirman?

  Hey, what's a folded protein? You guys are like, "Yeah, it's a folded protein." "Oh, yeah, we know, let's move on." Because everyone knows what that is.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  It's a misfolded protein. That makes it even worse.

• 1:09:36Eugene Mirman?

  What is that?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  There are proteins in your body, and this one happens to get into the brain, and it's bad, and it's folded wrong, and it makes others fold wrong, too.

• 1:09:46Eugene Mirman?

  Uh-oh, and then your whole brain folds wrong, and what a folded brain is a dead brain.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  It's really bad.

• 1:09:50Eugene Mirman?

  That's what I say.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's bad.

• 1:09:52Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  It's bad. You don't want to get that, but it's rare.

• 1:09:54Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, you definitely don't want to get fold-brained.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  It's rare.

• 1:09:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, avoid the fold-brain, and it's something that cooking the food would not prevent.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So avoid eating the brains of other animals.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:05Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 1:10:05Speaker 02

  Excellent. Sorry.

• 1:10:07Eugene Mirman?

  I thought it was really good.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 1:10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more with my interview segments with Anthony Bourdain. We'll see you in a moment.

• 1:10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. And we're coming into our final segment on this program where we're featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain.

• 1:10:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 1:10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Professor, you've been commenting on this, it's been great, just fleshing out what we're trying to explore, what it all means. We came out of that segment talking about folded proteins. You didn't know about a folded protein?

• 1:10:56Eugene Mirman?

  No. And I'm willing to bet a lot of people did.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  Misfolded.

• 1:10:59Eugene Mirman?

  Misfolded. Everybody knows about like a perfectly folded protein. It's the misfolded proteins that catch most of them.

• 1:11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The origami protein where they messed up the third, the third standard form.

• 1:11:08Eugene Mirman?

  Which is a danger that is unlikely and can't be avoided by cooking.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Both of those things.

• 1:11:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right, great, so I'm not afraid.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Don't need animal brains.

• 1:11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how good is cooking at killing viruses as opposed to bacteria?

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  It's fine.

• 1:11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll do that too.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Cooking is really helpful if you're trying to kill bacteria and viruses and...

• 1:11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it could be one of the greatest contributors to our longevity.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  It could.

• 1:11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fact that we started cooking food back when fire was tamed by cavemen.

• 1:11:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yes. If you boil a person with a common cold, you will kill the common cold. The question is how, what's to find that perfect temperature before they die?

• 1:11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's kind of what your body does when it raises its temperature, is fighting bacterial infection. So you were not completely

• 1:11:49Eugene Mirman?

  Wrong.

• 1:11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  crazy with that suggestion.

• 1:11:51Eugene Mirman?

  But I want to boil people to kill the virus.

• 1:11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in fact, your body sometimes doesn't know how high to bring the body temperature and it can kill itself.

• 1:11:58Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 1:11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a fever, yeah. Yeah. So there. So I spoke with Anthony Bourdain about food in interesting, more exotic places, like food in space.

• 1:12:08Eugene Mirman?

  What food island?

• 1:12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What astronauts eat.

• 1:12:11Eugene Mirman?

  Name one person who's ever been there.

• 1:12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we're gonna go to Mars, or we're gonna go someplace, just food at high altitude. Later this afternoon, I'm gonna be speaking with the space station astronauts, and I'm gonna ask them, important, inspired by this conversation, I'm gonna ask them, since it is an international space station, do they ever get together and swap each other's foods?

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  Well, they do. I've spoken to some astronauts about this, and it's really interesting what happens to the palate at altitude and in outer space. Apparently, you know, if you have a stash of hot sauce, you're the go-to guy in outer space. They crave spice and chili sauce, Tabasco, some kind of good spicy relish seasonings.

• 1:12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something to keep in mind, if our next mission to Mars, would you volunteer to be their chef?

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or device and acid on it.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Really be interested in going to Mars. I ain't cooking. I had 28 years of it. Somebody else can bring the food. I'll bring the hot sauce.

• 1:13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could be the spice man, I guess, how to make the food better.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Well, and it's, you know, airline food tastes so differently on the ground and at altitude. They have to completely reimagine it for what it's going to taste like up there. So I think I'd be well, given my experience in Southeast Asia, I think I'd be a good choice for the master of condiments.

• 1:13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marion, I'm intrigued by that. I mean, I conducted that interview, but it didn't hit me until just now. That if your taste buds, your brain taste bud connection changes according to altitude. You need a different cuisine at every stratum.

• 1:13:47Eugene Mirman?

  It's why money tastes so good eating in Aspen.

• 1:13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I mean, so Ed, what do you, what is, what do you know is known about eating at altitude?

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  I don't think it's, I don't think the reasons for it are known. It must have something to do with the loss of oxygen.

• 1:14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  There's just less oxygen.

• 1:14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Less oxygen, and even in, on a, on an airplane, that is not pressurized to sea level. It's pressurized at much lower, which puts less stress on the fuselage, because if they pressurize the cabin at, at.

• 1:14:17Eugene Mirman?

  Sea level.

• 1:14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At sea level pressure, then seals begin to give and it's, it's.

• 1:14:21Eugene Mirman?

  No, I thought at first you were like, you were talking about seal the animal.

• 1:14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, sorry, sorry.

• 1:14:26Eugene Mirman?

  You don't know how planes work. You think they're powered by seals, oh boy.

• 1:14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and in the space station, the same thing. So, so they might up the oxygen level to the same per breath, but the total air pressure is going to be less. And we know you can survive in lower air pressure. So that's, that's fascinating.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Things don't taste as good and it's harder to boil water.

• 1:14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, it's so, well, hard to cook an egg. You can boil the water. It won't cook the egg because it boils at a lower temperature.

• 1:14:53Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 1:14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you can do that.

• 1:14:55Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it's, it's familiar. I don't spend a lot of days boiling eggs in high altitude, but sure, I've heard the thing about it.

• 1:15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happens is as you go to higher altitude, there's less air pressure on the surface of the water.

• 1:15:08Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 1:15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the water's trying to evaporate itself and at, at sea level, and it's fighting all these air molecules. You go to lower, lower air pressure, water's popping up willy-nilly and so the temperature of the water boils is lower. Now you want to cook your three-minute egg. The egg says, I'm ready for 212, but you only gave me 180. So your three-minute egg becomes a five-minute egg.

• 1:15:29Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds like you shouldn't be poaching eggs in space. But you should be making omelets on a nice hot pan, right?

• 1:15:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we need a whole new cookbook for your very...

• 1:15:38Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, your space cooking.

• 1:15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Altitudes.

• 1:15:40Eugene Mirman?

  For the amount we're trying to get to Mars, we haven't thought about how we're gonna cook on the way there.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  You don't have to feed robots.

• 1:15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just give them sunlight.

• 1:15:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we should re-engineer humans so that we can run on sunlight.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  That would be terrific.

• 1:15:51Eugene Mirman?

  I would love a helmet that absorbs solar energy.

• 1:15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then it's not as tasty. The whole of food traditions of our world would be gone. We've gotta start wrapping this up. Professor Nessel, thanks for coming. And Eugene, and your book is out, just came out a few months ago.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  Why Calories Count.

• 1:16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why Calories Count, I'm all over that. And Eugene, are you gonna read her book?

• 1:16:12Eugene Mirman?

  I am. I'm actually totally excited to get your book. She should've brought a free copy for me, but I'll get it on iTunes or something.

• 1:16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was great, I wanna publicly thank Anthony Bourdain again for granting us that interview, and he was such a great guy.

• 1:16:27Eugene Mirman?

  I like your stuff a lot.

• 1:16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he was...

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  I like his food.

• 1:16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was so frank and honest, and he was such a great guy.

• 1:16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to my 2013 interview with Anthony Bourdain on StarTalk Radio. Hope you've enjoyed it. We will all miss him deeply. Not only just for his larger-than-life personality, the fact that he made the world a little smaller for us all, but we'll miss him because the world needs more people like him in it. And his death is a loss. Not only, of course, for his family and for CNN, for all of us who knew him. For me, I think it's even a loss for civilization.

• 1:17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.