How to change Italian food?

18, today why do we say cross contamination in the context of food safety? how is that different from contamination? also, we've been singing the praises of beans lately, but what about the obvious and glaring problem with beans that no one really wants to talk about, we'll talk about it.

First though, cooks Italian food all the time and he changes it all the time.

Who does he think he is? Technically it's whom does he think he is, but anyway, here's the question. Nick: Hey Adam, it's Nick from the sauce gravy question, remember me? Now, my fiancé, who I love dearly, just so happens to have been born and raised in Veneto, in the region of Italy where Venice is. So she has some strong words about the risi e bisi video. The most choice being "He's not making risi e bisi, he's making what he likes.". Seeing as you make food that you like, it could be far worse than making food that you dislike, but how do you draw that balance between presenting a recipe of a dish as it belongs to a people if any cultural thing can truly belong to another culture and presenting something which you enjoy making and eating.

Adam: Nick, I will tell everybody else in the audience what you and I already know which is that I replied to your email and I asked for some more details and you were kind enough to itemize the specific disputes raised by your no doubt, lovely Venetian fiancé, and also some disputes raised by your Venetian future father-in-law, whom I imagine to be the scariest guy in the world.

My father-in-law is a Marine aviator, real life Top Gun dude, meeting him was pretty scary, except that now he's retired and he makes pots. He's a potter. He's got a wheel in the basement, and a kiln. Anyway, this is obviously a lot bigger than my rice and peas recipe and the specific disputes at hand, which is why you asked about the bigger issue, Nick. And I'm going to talk first about the bigger issues before I swing back around to the rice and peas. Adam: And I want to emphasize, when I talk about the bigger issue, I'm not talking about you and your in-laws Nick, you have all been quite lovely. I'm certainly not just talking about you, but I do have some actual anger here on this issue and I'm planning to let a little of it out. Just know, Nick, that it is not directed really at you in particular or anyone around you.

So the issue of authenticity in representation is a big one and an important one. And one that has rightfully gotten a lot of belated attention in recent years. I think about it constantly in my work. Early on when I was doing this, there were things I simply did not make because I thought. I had no real right to make them. And when I say make them, I mean, make them on the internet in front of hundreds of thousands of people and make money from the act. Adam: So obviously anybody has the right to make whatever they want to make for their own dinner, within the privacy of their own home, that's not what I'm doing. I'm doing something more than that.

But the operating philosophy I have gradually arrived at is as follows. I'll cook pretty much anything that I want to on the internet from any culture, but I will do my homework. If it's a traditional dish from a culture not my own, I will research the fuck out of it. I will read dozens and dozens and dozens of recipes. And I will seek out recipes emanating from the culture from which the dish descends. Ideally recipes that were written by a member of that culture for other people in that culture rather than being written for outsiders. So that very often means looking at non-English language recipes. Luckily, recipes are pretty simple texts that you can generally translate pretty easily with a little help from the Googles.

Adam: You can figure out what you need to know. So if it's someone else's traditional recipe, I will research the fuck out of it. And when I come to cook it myself on the internet, I will conspicuously note every significant deviation I'm making from the original.

Who says what counts as a significant

Deviation? well, i do because it's my channel and i have to be the one who makes the decisions, but there it is.

Now, when I'm making a traditional dish, I generally try to change it somewhat or do something else to contribute to the body of knowledge orbiting that dish. Otherwise, I really do think I am engaging in simple extraction. I'm taking someone else's thing and profiting off of it. I try to earn my share and that may involve adapting the recipe somewhat to make it more feasible for someone in my part of the world to do, swap out an ingredient that isn't commonly available here or swap out a technique that requires equipment people like me generally don't have, or change techniques that require some kind of lifestyle that people like me don't really lead or maybe I can just tweak things to make a dish more palatable to me and other people who like the kind of food that I like.

Adam: I change the traditional dish and I announce very clearly when I am changing the dish. And I explain why I am changing the dish. The biggest danger in me cooking say a Mexican dish for a German audience is that I will make changes. The German guy won't know or understand that I have made changes and German guy will then live the rest of his life thinking that Adam's version of mole poblano is mole poblano, the authentic item from Puebla. That would be a case of misrepresentation. So instead I make what I want, I make the changes I want, but I show you my work. I lay out my receipts. I'm not misrepresenting anyone when I do my job exactly right.

And no one does their job exactly right, we all make mistakes. We do the best we can and we move on. But I try to show all my work and therefore not misrepresent anyone. Adam: But I tell everyone, I tell everyone that. I make changes and I make an effort to make changes. I make changes not to disrespect the traditional dish, just the opposite. I make changes to contribute something original that earns me the right to make the dish in a professional context. And sometimes my contribution is not a tweak.

Sometimes it's something else. Like I just posted this eaten mess recipe, classic English dessert of strawberries and whipped cream and crumpled up baked meringue. I really didn't deviate from tradition at all in how I prepared that dessert but I tried to make a contribution to the body of knowledge surrounding the dish by making it six different ways in the video. None of those ways was original or novel on my part, I just noticed some big differences in various indigenous Southern English versions of that recipe, specifically in how the strawberries are treated. Adam: So I tried all of them. I tried macerating the strawberries, I tried blitzing them, I tried cooking them, I tried thickening them with a little corn starch or corn flour, as the Brits would say, I tried mixing all the components in one bowl, I tried layering them in a glass like a parfait. I didn't invent any of these things. These are all things that I got from indigenous Southern English recipes for eaten mess.

What I contributed was making all of those different ways side by side and tasting them side by side, giving my honest impressions about how these different versions compare and which one was my favorite, which ended up being the cooked one with the corn starch though raw puréed strawberries were a very close second.

That's how I earned the right to make eaten mess at work rather than just making it home for myself, which is not a right that I need to earn from anyone nor do you. Adam: Furthermore, I'm not all that really concerned with potentially misrepresenting the cuisine of Eton fucking College. Eton College does not suffer from a lack of representation in this world. For those who don't know Eton College is not a college in the contemporary meaning of the word, it's not higher ed, it is secondary school, basically what we would call high school in the US, a boarding school, the boys live there and it is a boys school.

All boys, only boys.

It was founded in the 14th Century

So that's why it was boys only to begin with.

Why it remains boys only I really have no idea.

It seems insane. I saw a comment recently where the headmaster indicated that if a student came out as trans, they would be allowed to remain, but I have not seen any evidence of that having been tested yet. Adam: And Eton is a public school which is to say it's a private school. They called them public schools in the UK because they originally stood in contrast to things like private in-home tutelage among the aristocratic classes or education within the church or education within a guild system. The original English public schools were a place that anyone could go to. And I mean, not everyone, only the right kind of boys but they're not what we would call public schools in the United States which are government funded schools that kids attend tuition free, indeed, they are required to attend. In that meaning of the word Eton is a private school and it is the poshest of the posh private schools in the UK. It is where male aristocrats are educated so much so that Eton mess is often used as a meta name for UK government because the government is a mess and all the dudes in it went to Eton.

It's the Eton mess. All of that is to say, I'm not really sensitive to representation issues when it comes to a dish from Eton College. The perspective of Eton men is well represented. Adam: I am super sensitive to issues of representation when it comes to Mexico. I adore Mexican cuisine. I want to cook it and eat it all the time. And I make it on my channel sometimes, but I tread very carefully because I'm a White guy in the United States and everything I do, whether I want it to or not happens within a historical context where White guys in the United States have horribly exploited and mistreated Mexico and its people. The US annexed Texas and then president James Polk sent US troops to the disputed border, literally hoping that they would get shot at so that he would have pretext to declare war on Mexico and seize most or all of present day Arizona, Utah, Nevada and wait for it, California.

And amazingly, that might not actually be the worst thing the US has ever done to Mexico. Adam: I didn't personally do anything bad to Mexico but I am by virtue of my identity and position in society, I am an inheritor of those spoils of war. So I think that obligates me to be more careful in how I represent Mexican food and the people making mole poblano are not Eton College boys. These are people who do struggle for fair and accurate representation of their culture among other things. I am more careful with Mexico. I'm less careful with Italy for two reasons. One, Italy does not struggle to have its voice heard. Italy for all of its problems remains one of the richest places in the entire world $30,000 GDP per capita compared to Mexico's $8,000.

Italy is a long time major industrial and military power, a one time colonial power. Though honestly, they kind of sucked at empire. I'm not talking about ancient Rome. I'm talking about 20th Century colonial adventures in Eastern and Northern Africa. Italy really sucked at that. Adam: And there's no broader history of the United. States kicking Italy around except for that one time when Italy really deserved it by you know inventing fascism and then allying with the Nazis. The second reason that I am less careful with Italy is that I am of Italian descent, southern.

Italy, Bari specifically.

I rarely cook authentic Italian food on my channel.

I mostly cook Italian American food which is a distinct tradition with a very rich history all its own. And I am part of that history. Anything I do is Italian American cuisine. This is my story and I get to write my part of it myself. Earlier in my YouTube career, I was not as explicit about all of this. One of my first recipes was a bolognese recipe with no milk and lots of tomatoes.

And that made a lot of people in Emilia-Romagna upset because it wasn't authentic ragù alla bolognese. Adam: I didn't say that it was authentic ragù alla bolognese, but I also didn't say that it's not authentic ragù alla bolognese because. I thought that much was obvious. I thought that went without saying. I was an Italian American guy so I figured that it was obvious that I was making Italian. American bolognese which is generally a very meaty tomato sauce rather than being a very meaty milk sauce which is what it is in Bologna. And honestly, I think people who got mad about that did understand that much, they knew what was going on, but there are some things that just need to be said. Some things that just need to be acknowledged out loud even though everybody already knows them.

So when I make Italian food, I try to find elegant ways of sneaking disclosures into their script, ways of economically acknowledging my own cultural perspective on food without making the video all about that which brings me back to risi e bisi which means rice and peas in old Venetian Italian dialect.

Adam: I have long been fascinated by this dish because. I like any combination of rice and peas and because the name is just so darn adorable. If you elide to the E sound at the end of risi into the word E that precedes bisi, then the pronunciation becomes risi bisi, which is delightful. And something I learned from commenters on my video is that people in the Balkans, which of course adjoin Veneto, people in several Balkan countries have a dish they call risi bisi, with no E in the middle. And apparently it's a pretty loose interpretation of the concept. It could be as simple as plain boiled white rice with frozen peas mixed in. Boy, if the Venetians didn't like my version of the dish, imagine what they must think of the Balkan versions.

Risi e bisi is traditionally made with fresh garden peas, not dried peas, not frozen peas. Adam: And so the dish traditionally involves the pods from which you shed your fresh peas. You make a quick broth with the discarded peapods and that's what you use to make what is basically a very loose wet risotto with vialone nano rice and fresh peas and sometimes pancetta and finished with butter and cheese. I've always wanted to try this but fresh garden peas that are not frozen are virtually unheard of in the United States. You can get lucky from time to time especially if you go to a farmer's market or something, but fresh peas are really hard to find. And when you do find them, they often suck because peas start converting their sugars into starch incredibly rapidly. You really have a tiny seasonal window in which to eat them and have them still be sweet. It's kind of how sweet corn used to be before the advent of super sweet cultivars, which did not get popular until the 1990s.

Adam: This is one of several reasons why frozen peas are so awesome. They're able to harvest and process the peas at their ephemeral peak of freshness and sweetness and then to freeze the ephemera. Frozen peas are great, except their interior texture is not quite as nice, tends to be as a little mealy compared to the smooth creamy texture of excellent fresh peas which are exceedingly hard to find in the United States.

So that is the world that I

Was living in one day in june when i walked into the publix and saw bags of fresh peas from what was it, pero family farms, a pretty big company, was founded in upstate new york by the sicilian american pero family.

They now have farms up and down

The east coast, including major operations in florida because.

Florida is where all the New Yorkers end up. Anyway, there they were, the first fresh garden peas I ever recall seeing for sale in a mainstream. US grocery store.

Adam: So I figured finally, risi e bisi, I haven't made that since I believe the summer of 2013 when I got one successful crop of sweet peas from my backyard garden in Macon, Georgia and they weren't even that sweet. I think it's too hot in Macon. There was only one problem with the Pero Family Farm's peas, they were shelled so there were no shells for me to make pea stock. I thought about buying some fresh snow peas and using those to make a little stock but. I figured that'd be kind of wasteful. Then I figured spinach, spinach is cheap, it's ubiquitous and people often have some old bad spinach lying around from a salad that they made three days ago. A little spinach will impart a ton of flavor and color to some hot water really fast. So I figured I'll boil and puree some spinach and use that as my broth for the very loose notch risotto risotto.

Adam: So that's what I did. And I was very careful to say in the video, here's what I'm doing, here's why I'm doing it, here's how it deviates from tradition, you do you, and yet this still very much bothered. Nick's lovely fiancé who said in our subsequent email exchange that my dish looked yummy, it just wasn't risi e bisi, risi e bisi is rice and peas. My other big variation from tradition was that I used a little bit of white wine, which is super common in risotto but not generally used in risi e bisi. I just think it needs it. I think the dish is flat without it. The dish needs acid, but that's just my opinion and I was sure to make that clear in the video. To add insult to injury, apparently I didn't use Venetian wine.

I used Portuguese wine, a Vinho Verde to keep with the whole green theme of the dish. Adam: And yes, I know that's not how you pronounce. Vinho Verde in Portuguese, but it's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced in the United. States and I think I would sound like a tool if I said it any other way. It would be like if I pronounced champagne "sham-PAHN-nyah" — authentic, but douchey. I'm an American. I speak with an American accent and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Anyway, Nick tells me that his father-in-law was especially puzzled by the wine.

He said, "You have to use wine that goes with the dish specifically Venetian wine.". And with all due respect to Nick's soon to be father-in-law whom I imagined is the scariest guy in the world, I think that's just silly. It doesn't matter where the wine was made, what matters is what's in it, what it tastes like. Yes, terroir is a thing, local eccentricities and soil and climate do affect the taste of wine, but not as much as everyone would like to imagine. That Vinho Verde went great with the dish. Adam: It totally matched. Italians are very particular about seasonality, which I generally think is great.

They might say, "If you don't have

The requisite fresh peas with their shells, then don't make the dish, make something else with what's in season and available where you live.".

 

Well, fair enough, to a point. If I held to that standard, though, I would probably never get to make and taste risi e bisi, literally never or what an Italian might say is, "Hey, make whatever you want with whatever good ingredients you have access to just call it something else.". Call it risotto con spinaci e piselli, which is a real traditional dish. But I think what I made was closer to risi e bisi because I only used spinach as a broth, I strained out the solids. Also risotto con spinaci e piselli is not a well known dish outside of Italy. It's not a cultural point of reference for me or for the other people the way that risi e bisi is. So what I did naturally felt much closer to risi e bisi to me because that's the thing that I know. And my cultural point of view matters as much as anyone else's does.

Though I certainly understand why my dish didn't look like risi e bisi to your fiancé's point of view and her point of view also matters as much as anyone else's does. Adam: I remember one time I did a carbonara recipe that I realized in retrospect I pretty much stole from Jamie Oliver. I had totally forgotten where I got the zucchini trick that I use in carbonara, but I later realized it came from a series called Jamie at Home. Now I'm not the biggest Jamie Oliver fan, but Jamie at Home is the most beautifully shot cooking show I have ever seen. The videography in that series is chef kiss, as it were. You should check that out if you can find it, Jamie at Home. But anyway, Jamie put these spears of zucchini in with his carbonara because they are tasty and they make the dish a little more healthy. Carbonara is not a low cal dish.

It's a little less bad for you if you replace some of the pasta with zucchini cut in this special away that I later remembered I stole unintentionally from Jamie Oliver. Adam: I also used a little bit of cream in my carbonara sauce, which of course makes the Italians go bat shit. Traditionally, the sauce is egg yolks, rendered pork fat, cheese, pasta water. I used all of those, but I also added a little bit of cream because I think that enhances the texture a bit. And ironically, what I did was far more authentically Italian than normal Italian American carbonara which is basically a straight up cream sauce. That's what carbonara has become an Italian American cuisine. There are places that make carbonara with no egg yolk at all in it just a pint of cream, I didn't do that. I used just a tiny little bit of cream to enhance the egg yolk and people in the comments say, "Look, make whatever you want.

Just don't call it carbonara, man.". And to them, I say, well, imagine I actually did that, game this out. Imagine I made pasta with a sauce chiefly comprised of egg yolk, rendered pork fat, cheese and pasta water. But I called it something else. Imagine I called it pasta Ragusea or something. You know what you commenters would be saying then if I did that? Well, you'd be saying, "Oh, that's basically carbonara you're claiming to have invented, sir.". And you'd be right to say so because it is basically carbonara, it is so much closer to carbonara than it is to anything else. Adam: It's like the moon in orbit around the Earth.

Yeah, it's not Earth but if you're in a distant galaxy, the moon is basically Earth.

If you live in West New York

And you're in manhattan or brooklyn, and somebody asks you where you're from, what are you going to say? you're going to say, "oh, i'm from jersey.".

Because West New York is in New

Jersey but if you're that same person from west new york and you're in venice, italy, and someone there asks you, "hey, where are you from?".

Sorry for that Mario accent. Somebody in Venice says, "Hey, where are you from?". What you're going to say is, "Oh, I'm from New York.". That's what you're going to say. You're going to say, "I'm from New York.".

Because from the perspective of somebody thousands of miles away in Veneto, West New York is basically New York. Adam: It's right across the Hudson from Lincoln. Square. Two things might be very close together, but they look farther apart if you get right up next to them. We have a couple of figures of speech in English to describe this phenomenon. One is losing the forest for the trees. When you're standing right up against a tree, you might be literally unable to see that you're inside a whole forest not just that little groove of trees and this figure of speech has a negative connotation because it's bad to lose the forest for the trees to become so obsessed with minor details that you lose track of the bigger picture.

Adam: The other figure of speech we have to describe this phenomenon is losing perspective.

And here is where I venture into really a risky territory and I want to emphasize again, Nick, that I'm not really talking about you and your lovely bride to be. I'm talking about the throng of Italian people I have been fighting off in my YouTube comments for the last four years. I think Italian people seem to have a particular problem with losing perspective when it comes to food. A particular obsession with minor details at the expense of the big picture and in defensive. Italians, I think there is one good reason for that, Italian food is generally very simple at least when it comes to the ingredients, dishes tend to be comprised of just a handful of high quality ingredients. I like this. This is clarity, but it does mean that if a dish has five ingredients and you change one of them, you've now changed 20% of the dish, which is a lot, legitimately a lot. I get that, but 80% of a thing is still basically the thing, that's a B in the United States grading system in school.

It's a B, which is pretty good. Adam: If it doesn't look like that to you then I would venture to say, you have lost perspective. You're too close, zoom out. And in the broader scheme of global cuisine, you'll see how something that is 80% carbonara is carbonara. Maybe it's a suburb of carbonara, maybe it's not carbonara proper, but in the global perspective, it's all the same town. And I would venture to say that there is an element of small mindedness to the contemporary collective Italian psyche, a parochialism that keeps Italy connected to its very proud past, but also stymies Italy's full integration into the dynamic global present. And I am only comfortable casting such aspersions on an entire people because A, Italy is a super rich country and they don't need any special handling. And B, I myself am of Italian descent.

And I could go on for much much longer about the small minded national psyche of the United. States where I live. Adam: So that's why I feel comfortable saying that all of that stuff about Italians. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is that I'm afraid of hurting Nick and his fiancé's feelings and or making them very angry with me, which is why one final time, I will say hashtag not all Italians. I'm not necessarily talking about you and I'm certainly not just talking about you and.

I could be wrong about everything that I've said.

That's just how things look from my perspective and all of us lose perspective in our own way. No one sees all.

But now that I've angered lots of people, some of whom may or may not be members of what Anthony Bourdain used to call Italian fraternal organizations, this might be a good time for me to consider life insurance with Policygenius sponsor of this episode. In all seriousness life insurance is tremendously important for a person such as myself. Adam: I am the primary breadwinner for a family with young children. If I kick it unexpectedly, my family has real problems. This is why I buy term life insurance. It's not a scam. It's just a little bit of money that I pay every month to make sure that if I die in the next 20 years or so before the kids have grown up, they'll have enough money to get them raised and through school. Life insurance is great.

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They don't sell it to third parties and they have options that offer coverage in as little as a week and avoid unnecessary medical exams. Head to policygenius.com/raguseapodcast to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. My link is in the show notes or the YouTube description if you're watching this on YouTube policygenius.com/raguseapodcast. Thank you, PolicyGenius. Jelle: Hi Adam. My name is Jelle Plevier, I'm from the Netherlands and I had a question for you because recently you did a video about beans and why beans are so healthy and I've been eating more beans and I noticed the very well known disadvantage from beans, and that is that your farts absolutely stink. And you got to go to the toilet very often. And for me, this is a bit of turn off for beans.

I am wondering, are there ways to reduce the gases that beans create? Adam: Obviously you're not alone Jelle, but there is a little bit of scientific literature for us to consult on this topic because serious people in this world recognize that increased bean consumption would be good for personal and planetary health.

And in order to promote bean consumption, you're going to need to address the elephant in the room, the stinky elephant. So probably the best relatively recent study on this topic is from the US. 2011 researchers in the US from the University of Colorado and Arizona State fed half a cup of beans to people, various kinds of beans for eight to 12 weeks and had them record their farts on paper, I assume they had them record their farts, not on a microphone. This was a pretty big set of studies as far as experimental research goes. About 100 human test subjects involved, including the control group of 40 people who just ate soup every day, not beans. Adam: Of the groups who ate Pinto or navy beans about half reported significantly increased flatulence.

Only 19% of the people who ate

Black eyed peas reported increased flatulence, that's an interesting finding.

 

Pinto and Navy beans are just different

Cultivars of the common bean species whereas black eyed peas are a cultivar of cowpeas, which is a totally different species.

I will say that upwards of 10% of people in the control groups also reported increased flatulence even though their control soup had no beans. When a scientist asks you to think about your farts, you're probably going to end up noticing them a lot more. So anyway, these particular scientists conclude that the popular association between beans and gas is real but likely somewhat overblown as it were. Anyway, first takeaway there is keep trying different beans, maybe get away from the common bean, seek out other species and see how your system reacts to them. Adam: The other big finding of that study is that 90% of the subjects reported their gas went back to normal after three or four weeks, their systems just seem to adjust to getting more fiber. Most notably oligosaccharides which are particularly plentiful in beans compared to other plant foods. Oligosaccharides are basically semi complex carbs where a starch might be a chain of thousands of sugars, oligo saccharides are chains of between three and 10 sugars.

You still can't digest them, but they are easily digested by a bacteria in your gut who creates gaseous waste products as a result, beans have a lot of those. And what this study indicates is most people's bodies adjust to an increase in dietary oligosaccharides after about a month of eating those extra beans every single day. Why? How does your body adjust? Nobody knows for sure. Adam: This seems like an under-researched topic. If we want people to eat plant-based diets, we got to crack this nut. We got to let the air out of this balloon, pop, but one possible explanation for why the body seems to adjust to regular and frequent bean consumption is new gut bacteria eventually start to flourish by eating those gaseous waste products created by other bacteria that eat the oligosaccharides. One bacteria converts the Oligosaccharides into something like methane, a very stinky intestinal gas, but there are other bacteria that eat methane and turn it into something else. It may be that if you stick with the bean routine for a month, you grow a new population of methanotrophic bacteria that literally eat your farts before you can fart them.

That's just a hypothesis so your best bet is to keep eating beans every day, stick it out, it gets better as the expression goes. Adam: As far as cooking techniques are concerned, there is one very old study out of India where they looked at the effects of pre soaking dried beans and then discarding the soak water before cooking. Every soak they did reduced the oligosaccharides but remember that they threw the water out. However, the biggest difference was made by germinating the beans, sprouting them, which happens when beans soak for a whole day or two, assuming that they aren't too old, they will sprout and soaks long enough to make the beans sprout resulted in the most significant decline of oligosaccharides. It might just be that the long soak gives more time for the oligosaccharides to leech out into the water that you then discard but it might also be that the sprouting process causes the bean to start breaking down some more complex carbs into simple sugars for the baby plant. Problem with that of course is we're trying to eat more beans precisely because they have a lot of fiber, indigestible carbs and not a lot of sugar, easily digestible carbs. Adam: That's kind of the whole point of eating beans, but I'm sure that sprouted beans are still a lot better for you than whatever you're likely to eat instead. And anyway, that was an in vitro study, a test tube study, they didn't test the findings in actual human bodies.

Other things that people say to try like a eating certain herbs with the beans, these things are mostly scientifically untested. There's another very old study from India 86, where they found very high concentrations of cloves and cinnamon and garlic and ginger and pepper all had some anti gas effect. The authors attributed that to the antibacterial properties of spices, but that's another in vitro study, not anything they did with actual humans eating actual food. And it's nearly 40 years old, such as myself. Adam: The other thing to try is Beano or one of its copycat products. Beano is a supplement with the enzyme, alpha-galactosidase that breaks down some of the fiber into simpler sugars. There are some studies showing it's a little effective, I use it. You got to take it right before you eat so it's in there with your food, breaking it all down.

There's a 1999 study out of India where they tried hitting mung beans with pesticide levels of gamma radiation to degrade the indigestible oligosaccharides into smaller sugars. And the experiment worked. Not sure what ever happened to irradiated beans, but I'm interested.

The big takeaway is stick with beans.

You'll probably adjust to them and try different kinds of beans, different species, different kinds of processing, every bean is different, every body is different, every business is different. To succeed with your business you need a hiring partner that adapts to your needs. Adam: You need Indeed sponsor of this episode. Indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract interview and hire people to work for you all in one place.

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Join more than 3 million businesses around the world that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Start hiring now with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/ragusea offer good for a limited time. Claim your $75 credit now at indeed.com/ragusea, indeed.com/ragusea. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire, you need Indeed. Carl: Hey Adam, this is Carl, a fan of yours since 2019. And one thing that I really like about your style is how precise your language is, which brings me to my question, what is cross contamination? Emphasis on cross. I hear this term used seemingly interchangeably with contamination, and I'm kind of convinced that's just because people like the alliteration of cross and contamination and it might not actually mean anything distinct from contamination.

You may have done this recently with your discussion of how you crack your eggs on your counter. You say that this could result in cross contamination, and I don't see that obviously. I understand that your eggs might contaminate your counter, but is your counter also contaminating your eggs? I think that would have to be true for cross contamination to make sense as the term there. I think of cross contamination as swapping two serving utensils unwittingly that it result in two things contaminated with one action, but maybe this is a technical term and I'm reading too much into it, let me know. Adam: Certainly Carl, I think it's fair to say that people, myself included might unthinkingly default to the culinary industry term of art, cross contamination because it sounds like an industry term of art. And therefore we hope our use of it will make us sound like we know what we're doing. However, I do think cross contamination does legitimately mean something distinct from contamination and the distinction is meaningful. It's useful to have two different terms to describe these two different things.

Perhaps the problem is that contamination isn't really the ying to cross contamination's yang. Cross contamination is a kind of contamination. Contamination is a category of problems that includes cross contamination and the other kind. What is the other kind? I will now offer what as far as I can tell is a new coinage on my part, direct contamination. The distinction between cross contamination and direct contamination.

Adam: Let's walk through a hypothetical scenario

For both and we'll stay with the egg example that you've brought up, carl.

I did indeed say in a recent

Video that cracking eggs on my counter creates a risk of cross contamination yet i do it anyway because i like to live dangerously, i don't know.

Here's the cross contamination scenario.

Imagine I have an egg that is contaminated with salmonella, and I'm going to use it to bake a cake. I crack it on my counter, some salmonella gets on the counter. I put the egg into my batter and a lot more salmonella gets into the batter. Oh no, catastrophe. But wait, there is an amazing technological solution to this problem. It's called cooking, cooking, what an innovation. We bake the cake to an internal temperature of approximately 205 degrees Fahrenheit, 96. C, which is more than enough to instantly kill the bacteria and the cake is safe.

Adam: The problem arises back over on the counter where I have laid out the fresh berries I am going to eat with my cake. I dumped them out on my counter forgetting that I had cracked my egg on the counter earlier and left a smear of fecal bacteria behind, salmonella are fecal bacteria. The salmonella in the cake is no problem. It dies in the oven. This is one of many reasons why cooking helped enable humanities rise to global hegemony but the berries were not going to cook. We're going to eat the berries raw. I picked them up off my counter. I place them on my cutting board, I trim off the calyxes and when the cake is cooled, I slice and top it with whipped cream and fresh berries.

I eat and sometime within the typical incubation period of six to 72 hours later, I suffer acute diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever, and vomiting for four to seven hellish days. Adam: And that's if I'm a normal, healthy adult. If I'm immunocompromised or if I'm old, or if I'm a young child, there is a not insignificant chance that I straight up die from eating berries that I cross contaminated. I did not directly put salmonella on my berries, I put salmonella on my counter and then I put my counter on my berries. That was the cross in the cross contamination. Why are people always warning you against cross contamination, but not saying a damn thing about direct contamination? Well, I think it is reasonable to suspect that cross contamination is the bigger problem or at least it is the problem about which we need to be particularly mindful when it comes to certain kinds of food borne infections.

Our cake baking scenario also has an instance of direct contamination. Remember what it was? We put salmonella egg directly into our cake, that's direct contamination.

It didn't matter because we baked our cake and heat kills bacteria. Adam: It doesn't prevent all foodborne illnesses. There are toxins created by bacteria and fungi that can be heat stable to a point and still make you sick even after cooking, but in practice, cooking gets you out of most trouble. So that's one reason direct contamination is not that much of a deal and you therefore don't hear about it as much. Another reason might be that direct contamination is it's obvious, you know to not put raw chicken in your salad. I mean, maybe you don't know. Maybe you're the boy who got into a huge fight with me on TikTok because he and his troglodytic four Chan buddies are on a miracle diet where they eat nothing but raw meat like the caveman man, the way nature intended us to eat. And none of them have gotten sick, yet.

Adam: Russian roulette is a totally safe and wholesome pastime, five times out of six.

In order for you to come down

With salmonellosis, a lot of things have to go wrong.

All the systems the poultry industry has in place to prevent salmonella infection and chickens, one of those systems has to fail. All of the processing systems they have in place to prevent fecal bacteria from actually reaching the meat and the eggs, one of those systems has to fail. Either it has to fail big time and you get a ton of bacteria on the food or it just has to fail a little and you get a few bacteria in the food but some step in the cold chain fails. A warehouse guy is moving pallets from the refrigerator truck to the walk-in cooler. One box falls off and ends up sitting at room temperature for a few hours before somebody notices it and instead of throwing it out, like they really should, they just say, "Oh, nothing to see here.". And they just shove it in the walk in.

Adam: But in the meantime, those few bacteria in the food were able to be fruitful and multiply at room temperature. And now there's enough individual bacterial cells to potentially overwhelm your natural defenses if you are stupid enough to just eat it raw. And even then, your stomach acid may kill them all as it has evolved to do. Even if some of them make it deeper into your body, your immune system may kill them all as it has evolved to do. But if something goes wrong at each step in that process, you spend four to seven days on the floor of your bathroom and that's the best case scenario. So maybe it's not like playing Russian roulette with a six chambered pistol. It's more a 6,000 chambered pistol but given that you probably eat 1,000 times a year, those still are not great odds. I wonder if that dude or any of his troglodytic four Chan buddies has gotten sick since we last spoke.

It could happen at any time, law of independent trials. Adam: Anyway, you're not a troglodytic Carl, you seem like an unabashedly modern man. So you know to not directly contaminate your food with raw chicken, you're not slapping a raw chicken breast onto the plate, and then serving it. However, you might handle some raw chicken and then not do a good enough job washing your hands before you go and toss the salad that you're going to eat raw with your cooked chicken, that's cross contamination. And that's something that can happen to a person with basic common sense. That's why people are constantly harping on about cross contamination because you have to be mindful to avoid it. You don't have to be stupid to cross-contaminate food, you just have to be absent minded, either individually or collectively. I think there's a reason why the danger of cross contamination is stressed so much in professional kitchens where lots of people are working in the same space with the same tools.

Adam: And they might be very cautious and mindful as individuals, but not as a collective. You might know what you're doing, but you might not know what the other cook in the room is doing. You might not know what the other cook puts on that cutting board while your back was turned. So this is why professional kitchens have systems designed to prevent such problems like cutting boards marked for ready to eat foods and other boards marked for things that have to be cooked before being safe to eat. Those kinds of precautions are I think less important for someone like me cooking alone, usually for just a few people. I have a small, simple operation. It's pretty easy for me to keep track of potential contaminants. I remember exactly the spot on my counter where I cracked those eggs.

I know to avoid it until I can get a chance to wipe it down. Adam: I know I just used this cutting board for raw meat which is why I immediately walked it over to the sink, scrubbed it with hot water and soap before I started cutting up the veg for the salad on it. This has not stopped internet pedants for saying things like, "Are you crazy? You're supposed to have one cutting board from meat and never use it for anything else.". They say that because the trend over the last 20 years or so has been to bring ideas and procedures and values from the professional kitchen into the home kitchen where they may or may not be applicable. Professional chefs do it so should you. That logic is about a sound as professional race car drivers do it, so should you. Well, driving a car at 200 miles per hour is simply not the same activity as tooling around the neighborhood. Adam: There are things one has to consider when driving 200 miles per hour, that I will never have to consider nor should I, but back to cross contamination.

Is it true that cross contamination is a bigger hazard than direct contamination? I have no idea. And I don't think anybody knows for sure. That simply is not the kind of thing that you could study on the scale necessary to get a conclusive answer but the logic makes sense that we have to be more mindful to avoid cross contamination which is why we talk about it more than contamination. At least when it comes to contaminations that originate with the food. What about contaminations that originate with the cook? The most common foodborne illness in the United States and in the entire world is not salmonellosis, not even close. The most common foodborne illness according to every food safety authority you could think of is viral gastroenteritis caused by Norovirus and Norovirus in food generally doesn't get there via a contaminated ingredient. It gets there via a contaminated cook, the infamous fecal oral route. Adam: Somebody with Norovirus doesn't wash their hands thoroughly enough in the bathroom, they come out, they use those hands to prepare your food.

It's no problem if the food is cooked before you eat it, cooking kills Norovirus but if this contaminated cook is handling ready to eat food, things that have already been cooked or things that aren't going to be cooked at all, then you've got the potential for direct contamination. And what I just described happens all the time. Adam: This is why really good restaurants and other food service operations will say, if you have diarrhea, do not come to work. And the best places will pay you anyway, so that you can afford to not come to work. I'm not sure how many such workplaces actually exist, sadly. Adam: In the global context, probably the more common scenario is water source contamination, untreated sewage contaminating drinking water, probably humanity's biggest public health problem historically at least. Think of all the famous kings of old who died of dysentery. Henry V has the best food and medical care available to a 15th Century person.

He survives an arrow to the face, but no amount of money can buy you safe drinking water at a protracted medieval siege where thousands of men are living on top of each other in an improvised camp in increasingly squalid conditions, excrement mingles with the drinking water, everybody gets cholera or typhoid or dysentery and they die by the thousands, including the king.