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Chapter 1: How do you prioritize food for health and public good?
how do you prioritize food? And so the first argument is why would you prioritize food? And you'd prioritize food if you want healthy environment and a healthy body and sort of public health and longevity and all these other things. So if you agree, well, food is important, then how's the investment? What's the investment in food look like?
And my argument, and this is, you mentioned Community Kitchen, not by name, but Our nonprofit, Community Kitchen, but many people's argument is we have a department of education. No one asks it to make money. We have a department of transportation. No one asks it. The military, da, da, da, da.
There's all this stuff that we invest in for our common good, and we don't invest in food for our common good. And once we do that, we can start to, quote, unquote, fix things.
And in order to do that, you have to wrest it away from these gigantic food corporations. It's breaking bread. This is a real treat. Thank you for being here.
Chapter 2: What does the investment in food look like?
Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean, you can't be in the bread world, food world, without running across your name for what seems like decades now.
Yeah, the bread is relatively new, but the food world thing, yeah, it is. It's going on five decades. Yeah, five decades. Like finishing, going on 50 years. Amazing. 45 years, I think. 46 years since I wrote my first piece.
That's wild.
It was a long time.
I mean, just telling people that I was, I'm in comedy. It's, you know, there's a lot of comedians that come on this podcast. The real celebrities to me are food people. And when I mentioned your name that I was, we were going to sit down, everybody pops off with questions. I love that. That's great. Everybody is very interested and I've got some in my pocket.
But I wanted to start with bread because you made famous the no-knead And made famous somebody else's process.
I mean, that's how cooking is. No one invents anything.
No, it's bread. I know. It's funny. This is called Breaking Bread. And Tony Shalhoub came out with a CNN show called Breaking Bread. And all my fans were irate, as was I.
And what was his thinking?
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Chapter 3: How did the no-knead bread trend start?
We moved past that. Sourdough natural fermentation is a better way to make bread. It's better for your gut. It's better for people with allergies. It works better. It tastes better. All of that. And then the next level is really whole grain. And you can't make whole grain. You can't make good whole grain bread unless... you use sourdough unless you ferment it naturally.
And that's how bread was made all the time until like 1875. I mean, 10,000 years and then we screwed it up instantly and it's been pretty bad since then. And I think it's gonna turn around the way You know, wine turned around, then coffee turned around, then all this other stuff has turned around. Bread's going to turn around.
Yeah. Yeah, and it actually got worse. It got a lot worse for a long time. And to the point where people were saying, like you said, bread was the enemy. And I would always go out there and preach, why have human beings been eating bread this whole time? And now when it's my time to have some toast... I can't get a good piece of bread. Yeah, and it's the enemy, and it's going to kill me.
I mean, what's funny is that when we... I mean, I don't know about you, when I was growing up, you know, I thought wonder bread was perfectly fine. It was like, oh, yeah, that's what bread is.
It wasn't a bad product, honestly.
Well, it was pretty good. And then my grandfather would come over and he'd take a roll or a bagel or whatever, and he'd take all the white stuff out and, like, throw it away. Yeah. And he'd be like, I'm only interested in the crust. It's the only good part. And, of course, he was right. And we all discovered that as the years went by. And now we're discovering... You know, bread can be delicious.
It can be healthy. It can be a very plant-forward food that you should be integrating into your diet. And it is.
It really is. Yeah. Once I started making it, I couldn't believe because I would shop for my family all the time and thinking I was getting them nice bread because of the, you know, the wooden ā logo, you know, and it looked like it was carved in country and then 50 ingredients.
And then when I started baking bread, it was like, oh, this is, it's like when you travel and you eat a real piece of fruit someplace, you know, if you go to the islands or something, you're like, oh, my, this is... You don't want to eat it anymore. This is not what's in my supermarket. It was the same kind of thing of just eating this real bread. And there was just no going back.
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Chapter 4: What impact did COVID have on bread-making culture?
You know, you can make a really good, I don't know, spaghetti amatriciana, you know, and then you go to somebody who's been making it every day for 30 years, eight times a day, 20 times a day. It's like, there's just these things that people learn to see, you know?
Yeah. I mean, there is that process. Like when you first made your first loaf of bread and you first start doing it, and you just remember how sticky it was with all of your hands, you couldn't handle it.
Flour everywhere.
And just from repetition, it all gets cleaned up and you're able to handle that same hydrated bread with no stickiness. It's just purely time.
Well, my first loaf of bread was white bread from Joy of Cooking with butter and milk in it, and it was a mess. And... Really, it was when we did the no-knead bread that I learned that more water, more water, more water, and it makes it less sticky because you've got it sort of slippery, and it does make it easier to handle. It also makes the bread better.
It turns out bread is like a gas bag ofā
flour held in suspension with water and that's what it is and it's incredible that it's so good it's insane i mean that's a reason why it's been talked about for all of human history uh do you ever read that was it the bread and what's the giant bread bible bread enthusiast or bread Oh, no, the something kitchen.
You know what I mean?
It's like volumes. No, I have not read volumes. Man, the science behind it. You know, these MIT guys, and they start getting into food, and they start going after, like, the... I look at that. It's almost like I'm a baseball fan. I love baseball.
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Chapter 5: Why is sourdough considered better than commercial bread?
I was living in Massachusetts. I couldn't root for the Red Sox. I didn't have anybody. And then I wound up a Yankee fan, which is sort of default for New Yorkers.
Yeah, me too. My grandfather was Yankee, so luckily I'm stuck with them.
Aren't you living in L.A.? You could be rooting for the winners now.
Oh, man, I know. I was at that game last year before when it was the Yankees against the Dodgers, and Freddie hit that grand slam home run off Nestor Cortez, and I was there as a Yankee fan. But the joy from that state when he hit that, the explosion of joy in that stadium... Even though it was against everything that I was rooting for, you couldn't help it. It was just so fantastic.
I've been at games like that.
Twins. Angels-Twins game when the Twins are up 8-0 and the Angels came back late in the game and won a playoff game in 2000, 2001. I don't know. I'm not good at this. I'm really... I am better at talking about bread than about... I have no memory for dates. I'm the same.
I'm the same. When people are justārattle off, like, the play, 98, thatāI forget it.
Well, there's idiot savants out there, like Bill Simmons, who can just remember everything. Unless he has a really good producer who's got notes in front of him all the time.
I don't know. You've written how many books? Twentyā Something. Twenty-something books. And I saw a comment, as I was complimenting your writing, that youā You were starting, it was an interview about the nonprofit, and you were saying that you wanted to take a step back from writing for a while. Tell me about that, because you've been writing for a very long time.
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Chapter 6: What role do community kitchens play in food accessibility?
It's good. I'm happy about it. I'm satisfied with it. And I'd like to do something else like that.
What about it are you proud of?
I mean, I did a lot of research and I think put it together in a way that is in my, what I hope is usual style, very straightforward, candid, muscular, it's sometimes said, which means you don't use a lot of flowery adjectives, adverbs, metaphors. I don't do that stuff mostly.
Yeah.
I tend to write like I talk, which is semi-articulately because I'm better on the page because you can fix stuff. Hemingway-esque. Yeah, I hope. Yeah. Was it the subject or was it theā The subject isāI mean, it's fascinating. The history of agriculture, humans and food is fascinating. And, you know, I sort of blitzed through the first, I don't know, Well, 200,000 years.
Well, they do the first 200,000 years in seconds, but then the history of agriculture from 10,000 years ago until the real agricultural revolution, I cover that. And then the last couple hundred years, it's really been, you know, we ate... Locally, according to what was available, according to our genetics and so on, we as a species did that for ā it's arbitrary, but let's say 9,800 years.
And then the last 200 years, we completely screwed it all up. So how do we get to a place where ā We're eating what our bodies need and we're treating land the way land should be treated and we're not ā like you could trace so many of the world's problems back to the way we handle food and our relationship with food.
And most of that started becoming perverted with colonialism in the 15th, 16th century and then accelerated with the Industrial Revolution.
Globally or ā Nationally.
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Chapter 7: How has the food industry changed over the years?
We're number one. And we haven't screwed it up for everyone yet. And sometimes I think, well, there are other countries that look at the U.S. and are like, well, we don't want to go down that road. But American agriculture is run by very powerful companies who would love to spread their products and their way of doing things around the world.
And it's kind of an economic colonialism that is unfortunate, let's say.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really, uh, my sister runs a nonprofit in New Jersey called City Green and they have local farms in Clifton, New Jersey. It used to be farmland.
Route 46.
Yeah. Right.
Right there.
Right there. Right. Grove street in 46. And, uh, She's revived these farms and provides food to Passaic and Patterson and Learning Gardens, all this beautiful stuff. But it is just being around her, and she's been doing this for 15 years, It's just, you realize what it was, like you're saying, and what it's become, what this food process has become.
The idea that there were multiple farms like hers around that area, and that everybody was feeding off of that, and now it's this unique nonprofit. It's almost like a museum piece, right? And they're in there and they're making this stuff with the same soil and bringing these crops, and it's beautiful and tastes amazing.
But then if you were to go to the supermarket and get your food for that day, who knows where that came from.
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