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I'm Jack from the UK. And I recently saw the UK is considering moving back to imperial measurements, now that we've left the EU. I was wondering whether you thought to be a good or bad move for the UK. Love to hear your thoughts. Thanks, bye. Adam: So Jack, as I understand it, here is what Boris Johnson's Tory UK government is considering.

They are considering allowing retailers and perhaps some other industries to use imperial measurements, instead of metric, if they want to. Right now, UK shopkeepers are required to display quantities in metric and if they want, they can display the imperial equivalence, but they are required to display the metric. Boris is at least teasing the possibility that he wants to make metric optional for certain industries, such as retail or maybe just, I don't know, small-scale retail. We'll see. He is actually scheduled to make an announcement on this topic in the hours between when I record this program and when it posts. So check the news for updates, if you really care about the details, but let's focus on the enduring big picture. Metrication in the UK began all the way back in the 1960s, when the Federation of British Industry informed the government that they supported metrication. But shopkeepers were not required to use metric until 1995 for packaged goods and the year 2000 for loose goods sold by weight.

That seems pretty recent to an old guy like me, but that's still 27 years ago that mandatory metric began in the UK. Mandatory metric is as old as Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison, and Jimmy Hendrix, and Janice Joplin and Amy Winehouse ever lived. Most people listening to this show in the UK right now have literally never known any other system, because most of my audience is under 35. Some of them may be old enough to remember buying a "sweet" by the ounce — a "sweet" as the Brits would say in reference to candy. Metrication was, of course, intertwined with the UK's European Union membership. Mandatory national metric is, as I understand it, a necessary condition for EU membership. But the metrication movement in the UK predates the very existence of the EU by 30 years. Adam: This is not all about the EU.

It is about the UK's economic integration with Europe, but that is bigger than the EU. The UK remains extremely economically integrated and intertwined with the EU and with Europe, despite Brexit. Though, Johnson's move to re-legalize imperial measurements for those who want to use them, is directly enabled by Brexit. The UK could not have done this and remained an EU member, at least not in theory. In practice, what was Brussels going to do? Were they really going to expel the third biggest European economy from the EU, because some greengrocer in Yorkshire is selling rhubarb by the pound? Adam: Anyway, what do I think of this move? I would say I share what seems to be the consensus opinion among the remaining remainers in the UK.

I think this is an absurd, shallow populist political stunt on the part of Boris, which is hardly surprising. Absurd, shallow populist political stunts are Boris's whole thing. This is a move that only appeals to the olds.

Only the olds want to go back to imperial, and even then probably only. Tory olds, which is what? Half of the olds in the UK? That's a relatively small group, but they are Boris's core constituency, so he is pandering to them, as per usual. I think that revanchism has emerged as the most dangerous political force in the developed world.

Revanchism, in its narrow definition, is a

Political movement to reclaim lost territory.

But in the broader definition, it describes a movement to reclaim or redress losses of all kinds, territorial or cultural, real or imagined. Revanchism is the impulse to reclaimed lost glory, real or imagined. Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a revanchist project in the broad and narrow definitions. Adam: He is trying to reclaim territory that was once held by the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before that and he views his own state as the successor state to those empires.

Therefore, he views Ukraine as lost Russian territory that he is trying to reclaim. But he's also trying to reclaim. Russia's status as an empire, as an empire with great power and influence beyond its own massive, but relatively unoccupied borders. Putin is trying to make Russia great again at the expense of the lives and liberties of the Ukrainian people and at the expense of the lives of his own soldiers, not that he cares. This has been the way of Russian elites for a 1000 years. Just throw the bodies of your own people at the problem, that's what they do. Adam: Peter the Great wants to build a European-facing Russian capital on a freezing feted swamp captured from the Swedes. Well, don't bother inventing engineering solutions to the problems, just conscript half a million surfs to dig with their bare hands whilst they die by the tens of thousands and build St.Petersburg on their godforsaken bones.

Good plan. When you talk about making Russia great again, that is the greatness under discussion. You sure you want it back? Brexit is a much less serious, much less dangerous manifestation of the same revanchist impulse. Make Britain great again. This new world where the UK is a partner and peer in a broader community of nations, this sucks. We want to go back to the days when the British Empire held half the world under its very stylish boot. Now, personally, I think the British Empire's legacy is not all bad, but I'm still glad the empire is gone and I do not want to see it strike back.

Adam: Letting a greengrocer in Yorkshire sell rhubarb by the pound will not revive the empire, but it is a move that is expressly calculated to feed the revanchist beast. Feeding the beast might placate the beast, but it might also make the beast grow bigger and hungrier. I guess I'm not that worried about it, though. The only Brits who want imperial measurements back are the olds. And the good thing about olds is that they die. Adam: Gen Z Brits listening to this show right now, they have never known anything other than metric, and they will keep using metric and thinking in metric for the rest of their lives, whether legally obligated to or not. Metrication is one of the most basic instruments of economic globalism and globalism is here to stay. This is one of those things that is happening, whether you want it or not.

Standing athwart history yelling STOP just wastes energy and makes you look foolish. And I don't think you should want it to stop. I think it's very clear that the benefits of economic globalism outweigh the hazards. Indeed, global trade has made the world safer than it has ever been. Just look at the war in Ukraine, a war that pits the second most powerful military in the world, Russia, against the entire Western world and some of the non-Western world.

Adam: And yet, the war in Ukraine

Remains, and i think will remain, a limited local conflict.

As huge as it is to the

People of ukraine, it is, inarguably, small potatoes in the horrifying history of modern warfare.

And yet, this limited local conflict has majorly disrupted the global economy, because we are all linked together now, because globalism.

And that is the main reason why the conflict is unlikely to escalate very much, as long as Putin remains minimally connected to reality. The possibility that he might lose that connection is what keeps me up at night. But anyways, every country in the world, we all sink or swim together now, because globalism. And that makes us far less likely to wage real total war upon each other and thereby disrupt the global supply and demand chains on which we all depend. This is a good thing, I think. Globalism is, I believe, our best defense against military armageddon — globalism and mutually assured destruction, which of course are related things. Adam: I don't believe the Brits really want to live like Canadians. Canadians are constantly juggling an incoherent tangle of metric and imperial measurements, because Canadians are culturally torn between the UK and the U.S.

like the children of acrimoniously divorced parents. Brits don't want to live like Canadians. Canadians don't want to live like Canadians in this particular regard. And if you think any of my praise for the metric system is inconsistent with the video that I made called "My Problem with Metric," then I don't think you actually watched that video. I endorse metric wholeheartedly, in the kitchen and elsewhere. My problem with metric is that I didn't grow up with it. And so I think in U.S. standard measurements, which are inherited from the imperial system, and translating recipes from one measurement system to another is not as simple as you might imagine.

And, that's my problem with it. Adam: I am very happy that my status as an internationally successful food YouTuber micro-celebrity whatever has provided me with direct motivation to learn metric. I think more and more in metric every day, because I need to, in order to communicate with the majority of my audience, which is not in the United States, Liberia or Myanmar, the three remaining states that have not officially endorsed the metric system. The plurality of my audience is in the U.S., but the majority is elsewhere. This is globalism changing me, the old guy, who otherwise probably would never have changed. Adam: The only reason the United States hasn't fully embraced metric yet is because we are economically powerful enough to do what we want most of the time. And nobody wants to change measurement systems. Nobody.

It sucks. It's hard, it's painful. The UK already went through the pain of tearing off that bandaid and I don't believe that most. Brits want to put it back on again, just to have to tear it off a second time, some years later. And to be clear, my endorsement of the metric system has hardly anything to do with the intrinsic merits of the metric system. I think it's a fine measurement system, but U.S. standard measurements are fine too. The chief virtue of the metric system is that it's what most of the world is already using.

English is probably not the best choice to be the international language.

Adam: English is hard to learn, super

Hard to spell, but historical happenstance has made english the international language and we need an international language, so we just go with it.

English it is. Metric it is. Now you might say, you might say, "Adam, Boris is not requiring anyone to use imperial. He's simply giving his people the freedom to use imperial, if they want to. Don't you Yankees love freedom?" True. No people on earth fetishize a facile concept of freedom more than the people of these United States.

But even our highly constrained federal constitution recognizes the supreme necessity of endowing a nation's supreme leaders with the authority to standardize systems of measurement. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says, "The U.S. Congress shall have the power [ ] to coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures.". Measurements and coinage, two things that must be universally standardized if you want a functioning modern economy. Adam: This is power granted to the U.S. Congress in a constitution that delegates nearly every other matter of domestic policy to state level governments, state legislatures. Even the U.S. Founding Fathers, whose chief motivation was, arguably, to protect the power of their own little local fiefdoms, even those guys recognized that the highest authority must control the currency and the measurements.

If they don't, chaos ensues. See crypto. And Thomas Jefferson himself tried to get the U.S Congress to adopt metric, at the end of the 18th century. He failed and we have been suffering the consequences in the United States ever since. One day we will have to rip off the imperial bandaid. You've already done it in the UK. You've already ripped off the imperial plaster. Brits call bandaids "plasters." You ever seen that old Gordon Ramsey clip, where he flips out at a waiter in his restaurant for wearing a blue plaster on his hand, instead of a skin-colored plaster that would be less obvious? Adam: You've already ripped off the imperial plaster Brits, there's no good reason to put it back on.

Only revanchism, which is silly and embarrassing at best and deathly dangerous at worst. I wouldn't stay up at night worrying about it, though, Jack. Imperial measurements will die with British boomers. Everybody younger is ready for the inevitable borderless future. You know, who else is ready for that future?

Hey, Adam. I'm Half Baked Cat's on most platforms, and due to do recent things, I live out my car now. And that got me thinking, what equipment would you use if you had to live out of your car to cook? Adam: It's such an intriguing question, because the optimal car kitchen setup would depend on so many things, not least why you are living in your car in the first place. And here I am expanding the scope of my answer beyond you personally, Half Baked Cat. Is our hypothetical person living in their car, because they are a free-spirited adventurer choosing to live a mobile compact lifestyle? Or are they living in their car because they're down on their luck and simply have no other place to stay at the moment? Other questions: Are you living in your car primarily in rural environments? Or are you driving around, and parking and cooking chiefly in an urban setting? What kind of car are you driving, gas or electric? All these variables would change my answer.

I was at REI yesterday, the outdoor goods store. A young man there recognized me from the YouTubes, and that may or may not have affected my decision to buy a four-person hiking tent from him. Adam: But anyway, when I was at the store, I was impressed by the new generation of camping grills now on the market. It's not just the little Weber Smokey Joe anymore, though, that remains a fine miniature grill. There are new designs inspired by Japanese hibachi grills, all kinds of things. A miniature charcoal grill made for camping would be a great option for that car life, assuming you are parking in places, where you can have an open fire, i.e., out in the countryside. If in contrast, you are starting a fire in the Walmart parking lot, the management tends to frown upon that. The mini camping grill is great, because it's small.

It's inexpensive, it's easy to maintain. There are no electric parts that could break the fuel. Charcoal is readily available and I don't think charcoal is particularly dangerous to keep in your car. If you buy a chimney starter for the charcoal, that's a low tech way to ignite your charcoal, that does not need to be replenished or refilled, like a chemical starter or an electric starter. Adam: Furthermore, if you're really off the grid, or if you're just really down on your luck, you could fuel your grill with sticks that you find on the ground. Just gather up some free dry sticks. The trick to cooking over a wood fire is to get the fire really, really going with lots of wood, and then wait to cook until the wood has burned down to glowing embers. You can cook next to burning wood, no problem, in like a wood-fired pizza oven, you're cooking next to the fire.

But if you're going to cook over wood, you want to wait until the wood burns down to embers. If you cook over a wood fire when it's still really burning, you're going to get lot's of ash, and soot and such on your food. Plus, you're going to get a lot of direct flame char, which is not great, flavor or health-wise. Charcoal of course, is just wood that has been pre-burned in a low-oxygen environment to drive off the water and all of the other volatile constituents, leaving behind nearly pure carbon, which burns very cleanly. Adam: If you build a wood fire and then you let it burn down to embers, you have essentially made charcoal. Those glowing embers are basically ignited charcoal. They are extremely hot, hot enough to cook your food and they burn very cleanly.

The only real hitch is that they

Are covered in ash.

So you want to be careful about bumping your grill as you cook on it, because if you bump it, you'll knock the ash loose and the hot air occurrence will carry that ash up to where it will stick on your food. But anyway, that's the argument for a camping style charcoal grill. Great for mobile living out in the country. You can fuel it with sticks. And if you get one with a tight fitting lid, you can even bake with it. Of course, you could also buy camper stoves that are fueled with compressed gas, typically propane or butane. Adam: These are a lot more convenient. You can turn them on instantaneously and they're much cleaner.

I just don't love the idea of driving around everywhere with canisters of compressed highly flammable gas in the car. You cannot leave those canisters inside a hot parked car for very long, heat causes the gas to expand, which could make the canister leak or potentially explode. And imagine those canisters in a crash, a bag full of charcoal would also not be great to have in the back of the car during and after a crash, immediately after the crash. But I don't think that it would be as dangerous as canisters of gas, which could rupture on impact and leak and boom. Plus, you can't forage for pressurized butane out in the forest. You have to go and buy that at a store. I do think it's worth considering electrical options. Adam: A modern automobile is, after all, an electrical generator.

So with an adapter, you can plug an electrical appliance into your car. And if I were to do that, I would probably go and get an induction hot plate. It's more expensive than an old fashioned resistance coil hot plate, but induction would probably be safer for that car life, because it doesn't get nearly as hot. Induction heats your pan with a magnetic field that excites the molecules in your pan, thus making the pan hot, assuming your pan is steel, or iron or some other material that a magnet will stick to. I mention this because lots of camping cookware is made of aluminum, because aluminum is light, but aluminum will not work on an induction stove. A magnet will not stick to aluminum. Adam: So the induction hot plate gets kind of hot, because the heat of the pan transfers back into the glass cover of the hot plate, but it doesn't get that hot, and it cools down really fast. So you can cook, and then throw the hot plate right into the back of your car and get going.

And, you wouldn't have to worry about having a super-hot object bouncing around in the backseat. "A super-hot object bouncing around in the backseat" is what they called me in college. Boom. The problem, of course, is that you won't be cooking in your car. You're going to be cooking outside your car. Cooking in your car would be a bad idea, because you could light your car on fire or kill yourself with accumulating gases, particularly if you're cooking over an open flame inside a sealed car interior. Bad idea. Adam: You're going to be cooking on the ground, next to your car.

And if you are driving a petroleum powered car and running an electrical hot plate off of the electricity generated by the motor, well, that means you're going to have to keep your car running while you cook, standing outside next to your car.

And that means, you could end up

Breathing in a lot of your car's exhaust fumes.

A plugin cooking device would be much

Better suited to an electric car.

You could cook even, while you are charging your car, assuming that you can find a charging station where no one will hassle you for cooking while you're charging. But in terms of utensils, I would probably just have a wooden spoon, pair of tongs, Dutch oven, because Dutch oven is the most versatile and enduring piece of cookware that exists. A metal spatula, if you're cooking on a grill, you need something for scraping stuff off the grill. And then, a wooden cutting board and a chef knife. And that a do ya, I reckon, hashtag car life.

Felix Wheatfield: Hello, Adam. My name is Felix. I'm 26 years old and I'm also a Pennsylvania native. I'm from the Lehigh Valley. And my question is this, I've always been told that grinding your own pepper corns is a lot healthier, than buying pre-ground. Does that include the disposable grinders that are preloaded or is it more of, buying your pepper corns loose at the grocery store, and then using them in your home grinder? Is the entire notion a myth, even if not, just sort of marginal difference that doesn't have any real effect on health, or taste or anything? Also wanted to ask, have you been up to anything musical lately? All right, thanks.

Adam: Shout out to Felix, living here in Allentown, or thereabouts. The Lehigh Valley is a historically industrial area of east Pennsylvania that Billy Joel immortalized as a symbol of post-industrial decline with his hit song "Allentown," even though they don't really mine coal around Allentown.

That's more of a Bethlehem thing, but the name Bethlehem didn't fit into the song Billy had already partially written about Levittown on Long Island, where he grew up. Allentown fits into the same musical space as Levittown, so he went with Allentown, and thus forever tarred an actual city filled with actual living human beings with a negative image that didn't actually quite fit them. But anyways, shout out to Felix in the Lehigh Valley. Adam: Felix, this is the first I have ever heard that fresh ground black pepper is healthier for you than pre-ground black pepper. I thought we just ground it freshly, because fresh ground pepper tastes better. And it does taste better, because pepper is filled with all kinds of volatile flavor compounds that either evaporate when exposed to air, or react with the air to create new, less desirable flavor compounds. That much is definitely true in my lived experience, a term I use with hopefully audible disdain, because there is no other kind of experience. Adam: The only thing I don't know is whether it is more true of black pepper than it is of other spices, that we do not freshly grind, as a matter of course, in mainstream Western culinary culture.

Would all the other spices be better too, if we ground those freshly every time we use them? Probably. But my question is, does it make a bigger difference with pepper than it does with the other spices? Or do we just care more about pepper than other spices in mainstream Western culinary culture, for reasons that I am immensely curious about? I do not know how black pepper became the most common spice instead culinary culture.

That's something I want to make a video about, so I can learn it. Apropos of your question, Felix, I have done some Googling and found hippie health bloggers who say that pre-ground pepper is bad for you. Adam: Then again, you can find hippie health bloggers who say that literally anything is bad for you. Certainly, spices have been found to have various health benefits, like anti-inflammatory benefits. It is questionable whether those effects are substantial enough to make any kind of meaningful difference in an actual human body when we consume spices in realistic quantities. But it is certainly conceivable that the oxidation that inevitably follows pre-grinding, might destroy or change the compounds that are theoretically responsible for the theoretical health benefits of spices.

Again, apropos of your question, Felix, I've done some cursory Google Scholar searching for any actual scientific literature on this topic. One of the few marginally relevant studies. I found is a 2016 paper out of Australia, looking at MDMA production, ecstasy, Molly. You can, apparently, synthesize MDMA using the piperine in black pepper as a precursor. The more you know.

These government scientists in Australia made Molly

Out of pepper and household chemicals, and they observed oxidation of the peppering and they observed the introduction of various impurities.

Adam: They did this for the purpose of identifying potential chemical tracers, things that could be used to trace a batch of seized ecstasy back to the underground lab that made it, if they made it theoretically from black pepper. That's not really relevant, but it's funny.

And, it does affirm that oxidation is a thing that happens to black pepper when you grind it, which we already knew. And it does raise the possibility, in my mind, that pre-ground pepper could indeed contain impurities as a result of the grinding process itself. The grind itself could result in bits of metal or stone or plastic or whatever materials are in the grinder getting into the pepper. But of course, your pepper grinder at home has all of those things too, and could also be introducing them into your pepper as you grind it. And it probably is, in very small amounts, and yet you live. Adam: But certainly, pre-grinding pepper would give unscrupulous spice merchants an opportunity to adulterate the product, to cut it with something less expensive, like sawdust. I'm sure that was a big problem in the Renaissance. I don't know how often it happens these days.

So to summarize, pre-ground pepper is definitely a meaningfully different product and an inferior product, in my opinion. There are also numerous test tube and animal studies that link black pepper consumption with anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer type benefits. And it's totally conceivable that grinding-enabled oxidation could negate or eliminate some of those benefits. Though, that doesn't seem to have been studied by anyone yet. And, it's questionable the extent to which those benefits are real, in practice. Adam: There's a super interesting study out of Kansas State from 2015, where they demonstrate that pepper almost entirely prevented the formation of HCAs in burgers, heterocyclic amines. HCAs are the potentially carcinogenic things that are made in beef when beef browns, especially over really high heat, like when you grill a burger over an open flame. HCAs are a big part of why scientists worry that grilling might cause cancer.

And in this study, the scientists at Kansas State found that stuff in pepper prevented the formation of HCAs almost entirely in their test beef. "Test beef" is another thing they called me in college. Bam. Adam: There is a catch, however, they observed this phenomenon when they mixed a gram of finely ground black pepper into a hundred grams of ground beef. That works out, if you do the math, to a lot of pepper. That'd be a spicy burger. Plus, I don't think you want to mix any spices through a burger, at least not a thick burger, because when you mix up ground beef, you form all these protein bonds that make the patty rubbery when cooked and make it bunch up on itself a lot more during cooking. Not a fan of mixing anything into ground beef for burgers.

It is conceivable to me that this anti-HCA effect might actually be stronger if you only season the exterior, as I generally do with burgers anyway. The HCAs form in response to extremely high heat, the exterior gets the lion's share of the heat. So maybe the pepper could actually do more good on the outside than on the inside. But to my knowledge, science has had better questions to answer thus far than that one. Adam: I also wonder about how fine the grind has to be to get this benefit, etc. Get on your shit, science. Answer the questions that really matter to the people.

Also, Felix, yes, I'm always working on

Music projects.

 

No, they will probably never see the

Light of day.

I feel sad sometimes that I never really got the chance to make the musical contributions to the world that I honestly feel I could have made. Like, I think I had actual hit songs in me. But now, two problems have arisen. One, I have turned 40 and I really don't think any songwriter has much of value to say when they get as old as I am now. It's a young man's game, or young woman, young person's game. Old guys who try to rock out are embarrassing. Second problem is, I have now gotten famous enough in another unrelated field of endeavor that any musical project I release is likely to be somewhat successful, purely by its association with the other field of endeavor in which I have properly earned my fame.

Adam: So even if I put out a hit song right now, I would never know if the song became a hit because it's a good song. Or if it became a hit, because I am an internet cook micro-celebrity whatever. If you want to see what happens when an old guy embarrasses himself by playing music that no one his age has any business playing, and doing it whilst capitalizing on fame he earned in a completely unrelated field of endeavor, see Johnny Depp. I don't want to be a Depp, for any number of reasons. Matthew Neal: Hey, Adam. This is Matt out in Santee California. It's near San Diego. I'm standing here in my backyard garden.

I'm a fellow Millennial, so I know your world, just a few months younger than you. So I have a question about whole grains. We eat a lot of white stuff here in the United States, particularly, like white bread example, white rice. So, what's the deal with How did that happen, that we are all eating these non whole grains? And what would it take like, I guess, are whole grains, like infinitely better than the bland stuff, like whole wheat versus regular white flour, etc.? Or as you often are in a quest against carbs, is it still carbs? Is it still just as bad or is there a whole different world when you're eating, like whole wheat? Matthew Neal: And possibly, why do we not like the taste of whole? Is it just conditioning? Like, why not do whole wheat cookies? And then, what Is there resistance, is it just flavor that is a resistance to perhaps getting it more, as I know it has better effects when it comes to blood sugar and other areas.

So love to hear about whole grains, how we got to where we are and what we could do to get more of them in our diets? Adam: Historically, people all over the world, not just here in the United States, historically everybody refined grains for the purposes of making them keep longer, making them last longer.

A grain is a seed, humans primarily eat seeds. A bowl of rice and beans is a bowl of seeds. A loaf of bread is baked seed paste.

Peas are seeds, nuts are seeds, beans, rice, corn, barley, rye, wheat, these are all seeds. We are seed-eating animals. Potatoes, and cassava, and other tubers and such, those are not seeds, but you can grow a potato plant from a potato, so it's kind of like a seed and I'm going to call it a seed for these purposes. Seeds contain everything a baby plant will need to get started in this world, and that includes carbs, yes, but also notably fats. The fats are found chiefly in the germ of the grain, but also in the bran coat. Adam: Those fats are mostly unsaturated, meaning they have bonding sites available that are not occupied with hydrogen, meaning they can react with other things like oxygen and go rancid. Rancidity smells and tastes real gross, it can cause digestive distress in the short-term, and cancer and other stuff in the long term, maybe. Everything gives you cancer, anyway.

So for thousands of years, people have knocked the germ and the brand off of their grains to make them last longer. Arguably, the chief virtue of seeds, as a food source, is they can keep for a really long time. And that means your society can survive the winter when nothing grows, and they can go marching on campaign to go conquer the neighboring society and they'll be able to eat because they're carrying bags of grain that will not spoil whilst on campaign, unlike most other food.

Adam: If you mill your grains, just

A little, grind them between some stones, the first thing that happens is the bran and the germ fall off, because they're on the outside.

And because they're small, you can easily sieve them out, leaving behind the big remaining part, which is the endosperm, which is almost pure white starch, carbs. And almost no vitamins, or minerals, or essential fatty acids or fiber, but it's calories and it'll keep forever. A bag of white rice kept away from animals and water and such, that'll keep almost forever. And if you only eat white rice and almost nothing else, you'll survive for a while, but eventually you'll get scurvy from lack of vitamin C, or beriberi from lack of vitamin B1.

And yes, that is absolutely a thing that used to happen all the time. Adam: Those diseases have been nearly eradicated, even among poor people, significantly by means of fortification, adding vitamins back in to highly refined foods. White wheat flowers and derived products here in the United States are generally fortified. I also think that historically, really white flour or white grains would have been an indication of quality. In order to get your grain product really white, you have to subject it to refining processes that get out all the germ and the bran, yes, of course, but also get out all the dirt, and the sand and other detritus that inevitably gets into your grains, especially when you're using low tech, threshing and milling techniques.

Adam: You may recall a video that I made, where I grew wheat in my backyard and I threshed it on my front patio. Threshing is where you knock the wheat around to separate it from the straw and the chaff. The fibrous outer coat of the grain is the chaff.

And even though I passed my wheat kernels through a modern metal sieve, my resulting bread was sandy. I crunched on sand as I ate that bread, because I had to thresh it on the ground, as humans have generally done until very recently. Adam: And in that video, I asked a professor who wrote a book about the history of wheat, I said, "How did people used to get the sand out of their grain?" And she said, "They didn't, their teeth were terrible.". Seriously. One way that anthropologists checked to see if an ancient people ate grains is to look at their teeth. If the teeth are filled with all kinds of chips and scratches indicative of chewing on sand, then those people probably ate rice, or barley, or maize or whatever. They ate grains. So historically, if you got a hold of a really white bag of rice, or a wheat flour or whatever, I think that would've been an indication that the miller really knew what they were doing and they got out all the sand, along with the germ and the bran.

But that's not really a problem in the developed world anymore, nor do we have to refine grains for the purposes of long-term storage anymore. We have airtight storage, we have refrigeration, we can and do make whole grain products last a really long time, especially with the advent of preservatives. Adam: But, refined grain products remain more popular, sure, because we are conditioned to them. It's what most of us grew up with, white bread, white rice. But we are also evolved to seek out the most concentrated sources of calories we can find, because carbs, and sugar and other basic body fuels are comparatively rare and precious in the contexts for which our bodies are evolved. We are living in a new context now, where pure carbs are cheap and ubiquitous. We are not evolved for this world, so we still seek and destroy empty calories, as though they are rare and precious, even though they are not anymore. Adam: Consumers still manifestly prefer white flour and white rice to the brown stuff, not just in the United States, but globally.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. Germany is a highly developed country, highly developed economy, where brown breads of various kinds are super popular. I don't know how that happened historically. Certainly, Germany's farmland is not as good as the farmland in, say France or Britain. The fact that Germany is a highly advanced society with major shortages of natural resources, that's a fact that has played very big role in world history in recent centuries, hasn't it? Anyway, you only refine grains when you have an excess of grains.

Refining is a process that throws away

Perfectly good food.

You only do that when you have

A really successful agronomy.

Adam: I have no idea if historic agronomy in Germany explains why whole wheat breads have more mass appeal in Germany than they do elsewhere.

I'm just spitballing. If you are an expert in this topic, set me straight at askadamquestions@gmail.com, that's the same address where you can send any questions or comments for this show. Send me a video, or audio file and I'll be far more likely to actually use your question in the show, askadamquestions@gmail. Adam: Lastly, Matthew, yes, you can absolutely use wheat flour instead of white flour in all kinds of things and you will probably be healthier for it, even if you're getting all your essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids from other sources. The biggest thing that most of us First Worlders are lacking in our diets is fiber. We would all feel a lot better if we ate more fiber, and wheat bran is filled with fiber. You can absolutely make cookies with whole wheat flour. I do that sometimes.

It gives the cookie is a nice depth of flavor, even if it maybe makes them look kind of bad, makes them look kind of spotty or even lumpy. The chief reason I use white flour in my bread baking is simply that I mostly bake pizzas and related products, and those come out a lot better if you have proportionally a lot of gluten in your flour. Whole wheat flour has proportionally less gluten, simply because a lot of the bulk in there is other kinds of stuff provided by the germ and the bran. So proportionally, less gluten. Adam: Though, people do make whole wheat pizza crust that they supplement with extra gluten. You can buy pure wheat gluten, Bob's Red Mill makes a brand of gluten that you'll find in a mainstream American grocery store these days. You can mix that into your whole wheat flour, that's something that I keep meaning to play with, so thanks for the reminder. And when I cook rice at home, it is almost always brown rice, because it is better for me and I sincerely prefer brown rice in most situations, probably because I did not grow up in a heavily rice eating culture.

Thus, my tastes were not conditioned so much for white rice, as they would've been if I'd grown up in, say East Asia. My tastes were more malleable. I love brown rice. If you're going to eat a lot of brown rice very frequently over many years, just make sure you're getting your brown rice from a growing region where arsenic is not a super big problem in the soil. Adam: The bran coat has a lot of arsenic if the rice comes from an affected growing region, like the South Central United States. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch my video about rice and arsenic. It's a real thing, it's not just hippie health blogger, conspiracy theory. Maybe if I trafficked in hippie health blogger conspiracy theories, I would have more listeners on this pod.

I don't think I'll do that. I don't think that's what you're here for. I do thank you for listening to the new pod. And if you are so inclined, I would appreciate it if you subscribed to the pod on your podcast app of choice, if you've not already done so. Adam: Podcasts are free. You just subscribe, they're free. And it's awesome, because you can listen to podcasts in the background while you do other stuff on your phone. If you're watching a YouTube video on your phone, it'll stop playing if you try to bring up another app and do something else.