Why European food are actually bad?

Mussels

Today, someone who toils in the same

Convenience store chain where i once toiled asks for career advice.

Plus mussels, the shellfish, do you really have to throw away the ones that do not open during cooking? But first, the spicy question everybody asks about white people, such as myself. "Ask Adam." Alena: Hi Adam. This is Alena. I'm from Northwestern Europe. And since my question pertains to Europe, I'd like to start with a comment. I've noticed that often when you get questions from here, they have a certain air of smugness and self-satisfaction, and that makes me cringe so much every time. I get the cultural whatever, but just don't be a jerk.

Having said that, my question is why is food from a lot of Europe so bland? I feel like most of the flavor here comes from either meat or fat in some form, like cheese, whereas pretty much the whole rest of the world uses a lot more aromatics for any kind of dish. Now, I know that things like peppers don't grow well on this climate, but a ton of different herbs do. They're just not used. You get a sad sprig of parsley on your plate of boiled potatoes, meat, and some sort of brown sauce. And I have several friends who say that their favorite flavoring is salt and that makes me a little bit sad. I'm going to get to your question, Alena. But first, I must defend the honor of salt. Salt is my favorite flavoring too.

And I'm willing to bet it's also yours. I think the only way salt isn't your favorite flavoring is if you take salt for granted, which I don't think any of us should do. I love coriander, but there are tons of good foods without coriander. Most of the world's great foods have no coriander at all in them. There is almost no good food without added salt. And there may be no good food without any salt. Not all foods need added salt. Salt is naturally present inside most living things.

I think maybe all living things. For animals like us, salt is an essential nutrient and it is a virtually essential flavoring. Virtually every culture on earth uses added salt with the notable exception of extant hunter gatherer societies. Lots of those have been documented to use no added salt. Coastal hunter gatherers get all the salt they need and want from marine foods, and inland hunter gatherers probably get all the salt they need from meat. All animals need salt and thus all animals have salt inside them. Added salt did not become a widespread thing until the Neolithic Age, but once we got it, we never looked back. I think the only way salt isn't your favorite flavoring is if you take it for granted.

If there was suddenly no added salt in your food, I think it would become your favorite real quick, unless you are a rare genetic specimen who processes salt perception in some very unusual way, or something. But I think your broader point is clear, Alena. Before getting myself and possibly you into a huge amount of trouble, let me stipulate that neither of us are nutritional anthropologists or food historians and this very topic is one of intense, ongoing debate within those fields.

Adam: The question is why do white

People, particularly those in or descended from northern europe, tend to use fewer and or weaker flavors in their food.

I'm going to summarize some of the scholarship on this issue that I've read and then I'm going to give you my best guess as to what's going on. And you should, of course, keep in mind that I'm just a monkey with a microphone. I'm not an expert. And I'm also going to talk some about the nature of this conversation, the terms of the debate.

So as you mentioned, Alena, the number one thing that determines why people eat what they do where they do and when is climate, agronomy, that kind of stuff. What grows there. Obviously now we have the global supply chain. Everything grows everywhere. But twas not ever thus. People used to mostly eat what grows right around them and habits formed through all of those thousands of years are still with us today. Adam: Most spices come from tropical plants. Spices come from the hot latitudes.

I quote now from James Brown, Dr. James H. Brown, University of New Mexico. A paper that he published in 2013 in the journal of bio geography. "The higher temperatures in the tropics cause higher rates of metabolism, ecological dynamics, and co-evolutionary processes, which generate and maintain higher biodiversity.". There are just more plants in the hot wet places of the world. More plants growing faster, evolving faster. The odds are that some are going to evolve with extremely tasty seeds or bark or roots that aren't also poisonous.

Those odds are just a lot better close to the equator. This also is why more medicines come from tropical plants. There are just way, way more plants in the tropics and more kinds of plants. So people who are experts in this stuff, I don't think any of them debate point number one there, which is people tend to eat what grows around them and way more herbs and spices grow around people in hot, wet climates, because way more plants of all kinds grow there, including strong flavors that we might not commonly classify as herbs or spices.

Plants like citrus fruit, chili. Adam: It is also not controversial among food historians and nutritional anthropologists and such to say that a diversity of flavors tend to accumulate in the high traffic areas of the world. By that, I mean places where lots of far flung cultures rub against each other. India has arguably the richest spice culture in the world.

One reason for that certainly is you can grow a million things in India's hot and sometimes wet climate. Another reason for that, certainly, is India's position between what Westerners would call the Far East and the Near East. India has its arms reaching out into two totally distinct spheres of human civilization. China on one shoulder, Persia, historically, on the other. Just think of all the totally distinct and interesting tasting plants that they were able to accumulate and combine from those two distinct spheres.

What Westerners would call the Near East

Or nowadays the middle east, also a high traffic area.

Adam: Smack dab between North Africa, Southern

And central asia and eastern europe.

Lots of interesting plants and flavors accumulating and recombining in Anatolia and Mesopotamia and the Levant.

Consider in contrast, Northern Europe. Northern Europe is cold and therefore has fewer interesting tasting plants. Because it has fewer plants because it is cold. Sure, you can grow some super strong tasting plants up north like salvia, sage, but not all year long. So you have less sage and it's usually going to be dried sage because winter. And yeah, that's where you get the great traditional northern sausages flavored with dry sage and garlic. Awesome. But such strong flavors are few and far between compared to cuisines emanating from the Global South.

And one explanation is certainly winter. Northern Europe is also not a historically high traffic area, right? Northern Europe is not at the crossroads between multiple distinct civilizations. It's at the crossroads between Europe and a frozen sea. There are more geographically isolated places on the globe, but they usually have a lot fewer people. Adam: Northern Europe was one of the most geographically isolated yet well-populated places right up until the age of sail. And what did they originally go sailing for starting in the very late 15th century? Spices. Europeans had previously gotten most of their spices via. Silk Road trade.

The land route across Asia. It was extremely expensive to get spices that way, and escalating conflict between the Christian and Islamic worlds made trade with the Turks increasingly politically untenable, and all Silk Road trade to Europe passed through the Turks. So "1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and brought back what? Chilies. As the joke goes, white people conquered the whole damn world to find spices, and then they refused to actually use them. Adam: Except for that last sentence, I don't think that anything I've covered thus far is controversial ground. Yet. Everybody agrees the heretofore discussed factors are highly relevant to the discussion at hand. Here's where it does get controversial.

There is a theory, mostly among Western scholars, that intense flavoring of foods evolved as a means of dealing with accelerated rates of spoilage in hot climates. It is a fact that food spoils faster in higher temperatures. And it is theory that people in hot places would have doused their food in spices to accomplish one or more of the following three goals pertinent to spoilage. One, you'd flavor food to preserve it. Lots of common flavorings also have preservative antimicrobial properties. Two, you'd flavor food in order to make preserved food taste better. A fresh fish filet is delicious, but one that you've packed in salt and dried in order to preserve it, that kind of needs a little sprucing up in order to taste good again so spices. Lemon juice, things like that.

Adam: And perhaps most controversially, number three.

You'd flavor food in order to mask

The fact that it has gone off.

That's the most controversial parts of this theory, but really the whole thing is controversial or it has become controversial in the West in recent years. It used to be as good as fact among Western scholars. Now they, we, have been persuaded to reexamine this theory that is widely rejected by non-Western scholars. It is, I think, somewhat insulting to people from the hot parts of the world to be told by an outsider that the reason they like the food they like is because their food is rotten. I myself in my own work have been insufficiently sensitive to how insulting that theory is to lots of people. Just because it's insulting doesn't mean it's wrong, but it also doesn't mean it's not wrong.

There has been a huge amount of backlash in recent years to what I will call for shorthand, the preservation theory of flavor. Adam: I don't know if anyone calls it that, but I'm going to call it that. Consider for example, the work of Dr. Paul Sherman, evolutionary biologist at Cornell University. Recently retired, I believe. I talked about Sherman in the video that I did a couple years ago about chilies. Anyway, in the late 1990s, Sherman and then-Cornell graduate student Jennifer Billings came up with a hypothesis for what they call Darwinian Gastronomy. They observed the fact that most spices and other strong flavors have antimicrobial, anti-spoilage properties.

That is not contested. That is a fact. Lots of those strong flavors evolved in plants as natural pesticides. Think about the pungent flavors in alliums, for example. They observed that those antimicrobial effects are real and observable with modern science, but they're probably too subtle to be noticed by pre-modern people. This is in contrast to, say, salt and acid. Pre-modern people absolutely noticed that if they packed their food in salt and or acid, that would preserve it. Adam: People noticed that.

And so they applied salt and or acid consciously to preserve their food. The preservative power of garlic in contrast is much more subtle and not likely to be noticed by anyone on an individual level. So Billings and Sherman hypothesized that if you were a pre-modern person living in a hot place where food spoilage is a particular challenge, if you also spiced the crap out of your food, the collective antimicrobial effects of those spices would enhance your food supply in a way too subtle for you to notice but that in aggregate would have allowed your society to be more successful than the neighboring society that didn't happen to have a taste for spices.

Societies that spiced the crap out of their food, because they had access to spices and because they liked them, those societies would've suffered a little less foodborne illness, their food would've lasted a little longer and thus, they were able to feed a few more people. And without even realizing it, they would enhance the survivability of their society such that they could win out over other societies that didn't have spices or like spices. Adam: They could outbreed the other society. They could defeat the other society in battle. All of that.

Darwinian Gastronomy. It's Darwinian because it's unconscious. To test their hypothesis, Billings and Sherman analyzed cookbooks.

They obtained lots and lots of cookbooks

From different parts of the world.

They analyzed diversity and intensity of flavorings

Used in those recipes.

And they compared that data against climate data. They observed a strong correlation between the use of subtly antimicrobial spices and temperature. The hotter the place, the stronger the flavors.

And they did things to try to control for the fact that hotter places are also where the strong flavors naturally grow. Their conclusion was that those societies that preferred strong flavors were able to out survive those that did not in the parts of the world where food spoilage is a particular problem. Their theory has majorly fallen out of fashion in recent years, for a few reasons. Adam: One being that you could call Darwinian Gastronomy a kind of social Darwinism. The notion that certain societies simply have stronger cultures and those cultures will naturally defeat the weaker ones. Nazis and other 20th century psychos used social Darwinism as pseudoscientific justification for genocide and eugenics. So yeah, social Darwinism is kind of a dirty word, with good reason. But it's certainly true that human behavior is constantly shaped and influenced by forces beyond our direct awareness or understanding, and our behavioral adaptations to those forces affect our fates.

I imagine there's a term for that that's less loaded than social Darwinism, but I don't know what it is. Adam: Other scholars have poked holes in the Billings-Sherman theory. I was, not too long ago, corresponding with a very prominent food scientist and he mentioned that he has this problem with Billings-Sherman. He said, "Look at Hungary." He said, "Look at Hungary. Hungary is a cold, white, European country with some very heavily spiced, traditional food. Lots of garlic, lots of paprika. It's the home of paprika.". But I pointed out, I said, "Hey, doc, there is a potential historical explanation for that anomaly and they're called the Turks." Ottoman Turks conquered Hungary, and much of the Balkans.

And they introduced all kinds of flavors they had accumulated in the warm, high traffic area of Anatolia, where they live — their heartland. They got chili varieties that they had developed from chilies that they got via North African and Iberian people who got them from the Americas. And that's why paprika is a word of Hungarian origin, even though chilies are from the Americas. But that's just one small email exchange between an actual scholar and me, a monkey with a microphone. Adam: Here's something quite a bit more substantive. A 2021 paper in the journal, Nature Human Behavior. Title: "There is Little Evidence That Spicy Food in Hot Countries is an Adaptation to Reducing Infection Risk." It's a study by five scientists at Australia National University, Canberra. And basically they just tried to repeat the Billings-Sherman cookbook study.

This is one of the very best things that scientists do. They repeat each other's experiments. Maybe changing a few of the variables or the methodology. And they see if the finding they come up with is the same. Very often the findings don't come out the same, as is the case here. The Australian folks analyzed more than 30,000 recipes from 70 different countries and concluded, "Patterns of spice use are not consistent with an infection mitigation mechanism, but are part of a broader association between spice, health and poverty. This study highlights the challenges inherent in interpreting patterns of human cultural variation in terms of evolutionary pressures." Adam: Does that mean Billings-Sherman is totally bunk? I don't think so.

This is how science works.

Two studies are better than one, but it's still only two. We know way less about this than we know about topics that get hundreds of studies done about them, like certain topics in medical research. So let's put the antimicrobial properties of spices aside and just talk about the anti-yuck properties of spices. Western scholars have historically claimed that pre-modern, pre refrigeration people used spices and other strong flavorings to cover up the taste of spoiled food. Lots of contemporary scholars reject this notion. One argument that I've seen is that spoiled food is dangerous to eat and pre-modern people were smart enough to know this. So unless they were literally starving, they didn't eat spoiled food. Adam: They would not have just dumped some garam masala on the rotten meat.

They would've thrown away the rotten meat because people aren't stupid and they know that rotten meat will make them sick. Strong argument. But I think I have an equally strong counter argument, which is that spoilage is not an absolute property. There are many gradations of spoilage. Many things happen to food that make it kind of gross before it actually becomes dangerous to eat. An obvious example being rancidity and other kinds of lipid oxidation. These spoilage reactions don't really make the food dangerous, but they do give it a funky smell that we are evolved to find unpleasant because it often coincides with other spoilage mechanisms that are acutely hazardous to our health, like bacterial growth. Adam: So it's easy for me to imagine that in hot climates, food goes bad faster, and you wouldn't have eaten it when it's straight up rotten, but you might eat it when it's just a little off.

A slight funky oxidized lipid aroma. And you might quite naturally cover that up with some strong flavorings. And then you would simply develop a taste for those strong flavorings, which happen to grow really well in your climate anyway, and then your whole glorious spice culture emerges and flowers to this very day, for which I am very grateful. I imagine there's a scholarly counter argument to what I just said, but I don't know what it is. Adam: I suppose a problem with this conversation as I and other Westerners have framed it is that we're seeking to explain the behavior of people in the Global South as though it is aberrant behavior and requires explanation. When you could just as easily describe the behavior of people in Northern Europe as being aberrant and requiring explanation. Indeed, Alena, that's exactly what you did with your question. If we look at Europeans and try to explain their behavior, certainly there does seem to be some positive correlation between strong flavors and lower latitude.

The strongest flavors in traditional European cuisine are to be found in Spain and Greece and Italy. Is that because it's hot there or is it because those places are closer to North Africa and. Anatolia and the Levant and strong flavors entered Southern European cuisine via cultural exchange with those other places? I can't imagine it's an either or scenario. It's got to be a mixture of all of the above, right? And certainly let's not forget the influence of the Columbian exchange on Spanish cuisine in particular. No chilies in Afro-Eurasia until Columbus brought them back from Hispaniola. Adam: And while it's certainly true that heat accelerates spoilage, colder climates have their own pressing need for long term food preservation and that is winter. Up north, you have a long, cold winter where nothing grows. Anything you're going to eat, you need to put down, you need to preserve in the warmer months.

And indeed, this is where we do see super strong flavors in traditional Northern European cuisine.

Sauerbraten, Lutefisk.

Lutefisk is many things, but bland it is not.

Another counter argument to the historical Western preservation theory of flavor is that historical European recipes, really old ones, often do include some pretty damn strong flavors. The contemporary stereotype we have of European cuisine, a piece of fresh fish with salt and pepper and that's it, this may indeed be a much more recent phenomenon. As recent as the nouvelle cuisine movement in France in the 1970s, which emphasized simplicity and naturalism. Get good fresh ingredients and let them speak for themselves. Don't cloud the waters with intense spices.

Or more commonly in France, gloopy sauces. Adam: There is a prominent non-Western example of relatively simple, subtle flavorings, and that is Japanese cuisine. Get the very best fish, cut it perfectly, put it on some rice and just eat it. Do hardly anything else to it. And there are examples of super strong flavorings in Japanese cuisine to be sure, but there are exceptions to any rule. There is definitely a traditional value system in Japanese cuisine that emphasizes simplicity and naturalism. I have read scholars who trace this to the broader literary and artistic tradition of Japanese naturalism, which is centuries old and has been influential in the west and influenced by the west. It is notable to me that Japan has something else in common with Northern and Western Europe and the places settled by Northern and Western Europeans like Canada, Australia, United States.

All of these places are rich and have been very rich for a while now. These are the first industrial powers and then the first post-industrial powers. Japan and the west. Rich places. Rich enough for long enough to develop traditional cuisines influenced by industrial and post-industrial prosperity. Spices a long time ago used to be an example of conspicuous consumption in the west. Rich people ate spices because spices were rare and expensive. Not so anymore.

Not for a pretty long time actually. Now the way you show how rich you are is to get some very special piece of produce. Something super ephemeral, super seasonal. And then you showcase that ingredient. You don't cover it up with flavorings. You just put on a little salt and pepper, right? Adam: I describe this kind of derisively as if I'm not that guy, but I'm totally that guy. I talk about how great it is to get something really beautiful and fresh and just eat it almost totally unadorned. I think that is a legitimate pleasure in life.

And it's one that poor people have had access to historically, but in a limited way. They had access to some of their local produce at the peak of the season, but they couldn't get a whole variety of things at peak of season from all over the world, like a contemporary rich person can. Of course, there's always an X factor in any matter of history and human behavior, that factor being happenstance. Different people come to like different things because that's just how it shakes out. For myself, as a white dude, I'm game to be ribbed by other kinds of people who think my food is bland because my people are bland.

Fair.

I think there's a little truth to that, especially on my Anglo-Germanic side. I don't think my Italian side is very bland.

It is many things, but bland is not one of them. Adam: I think there's an element of socioeconomic punching upward in these conversations. People in the Global South who have been brutally colonized and exploited and subjugated by people of Western European descent, they have some really justifiable anger and resentment and ribbing the whites for eating bland food is one of the most benign imaginable expressions of that real and justifiable anger.

But just because Europeans and Euro Americans have committed grievous global crimes doesn't mean that everything they like, everything we like is bad. Some food that people would derisively describe as bland, I might describe as clear, simple. Not simplistic, but simple. And sometimes I think people add a million spices to things totally reflexively when there's really no point. For example, I did a video once where I made a chicken sandwich with aioli.

Not a flavored mayonnaise as aioli has come to mean in the United States, but a real aioli consisting of tons of raw garlic, lemon juice, and extra virgin olive oil and that's it. The chicken, I only flavored with salt and pepper. And someone in the comments asked me, "Hey, why didn't you use any real spices on the chicken?" And I responded that the sandwich is slathered in raw garlic aioli. It gets super strong flavor from the condiment. So that's why I seasoned the chicken simply with salt. Adam: Why I seasoned it with pepper, I have no idea. I just do that out of habit, as Westerners generally do. How black pepper became the spice of habit in the west, I still don't really know.

What. I know for sure is that I like cocktails and I like Shaker and Spoon, sponsor of this episode. Shaker and Spoon is a delightfully fun cocktail in a box subscription. I have the Negroni box right here. It's got all the little vials and bottles of bidders and cordials and stuff that you could need to make three creative, original cocktails that you can't get anywhere else. There's enough to make four drinks of each recipe, so 12 total drinks. And they're all made to work with the same bottle of base liquor. This month it's gin.

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Shakerandspoon.com/ragusea. Use code ragusea for $20 off your first box. Thank you, Shaker and Spoon. Charlie: Hello audience and Adam. I'm Charlie, he/him, and I am also a Pennsylvania native exact Sheetz employee. I mention this, one, because it's coincidental and two, because I was curious about your thoughts, Adam, on the prospects of pursuing creative work. I'm somebody who enjoys nearly all things creative. I write and I draw.

I love to cook, as you may imagine. I have played music and attempted voice work early in my life and I'm getting into programming now. Game design. And perhaps getting into music production as well as part of it, I've even thought about creating YouTube videos for fun, although I'm not necessarily planning on making that a viable income ever. I know it's a hard path to take, pursuing creative work. I personally have gotten nowhere near a professional or even amateur level of creative work done. I haven't been paid very much for any of it, but I would like to be. Working retail and fast food is draining me.

Charlie: And I know that creative work will do practically the same thing, but at least I can have some fun while I give my mind and body to capitalism. So I ask you, do you have any idea on how best to approach these things? I get a bunch of ideas constantly that never ripen into fully formed projects and I can't stick with any one thing for very long due to creative wandering as I call it. Do you have any best practices, approaches, and advice for someone looking to get out of menial labor and into something actually fulfilling? I appreciate it. Adam: Upon hearing your question, Charlie, my first instinct is to defend the honor of menial labor, but that's easy for me to do given that I am no longer toiling in the Sheetz's. It's easy to romanticize something in retrospect. Sheetz, for those who don't know, is a very successful convenience store chain based in Altoona, Pennsylvania, not too far from where I grew up. It has spread all through the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Sheetz is known among other things for a very robust food service operation.

MTO. Made to order. That is how their food operation is branded started out as a sub shop within a convenience store.

Submarine sandwiches.

For those from very distant cultural points of view, these are sandwiches made on long breads, also known as hoagies or grinders. Very popular in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States, chiefly of Italian descent, though other immigrant groups have significantly influenced American sub sandwich culture. Adam: Anyway, Sheetz's MTOs started off as subs with ingredients chosen by the customer made to order, and then it expanded into all kinds of other fast foods and bakery items. Sheetz stores are incredibly popular in their communities.

They usually have the cheapest gasoline. I suspect Sheetz sells gas at maybe even a slight loss in order to get people in the door and sell them food and soda. The lunch rushes at Sheetz are insane. I have never in my life, worked harder than working the MTO line at Sheetz at lunch on a weekday. I still have nightmares about it. Nightmares about falling behind. Seeing the colors on my order screen change from white to red because people are piling up and all the orders are getting old. And when that would happen, I could feel the angry glares of the people lined up around the store and sometimes out the door as they waited for their food, quite impatiently, because they were on their lunch break and they needed to get back to work.

Adam: I remember all the corners that we had to cut in order to survive the lunch rush. The filthy gloves. Oh my god, the filthy plastic gloves. We had to wear plastic food service gloves, and in a rush we'd forget to change them and they would get so filthy. Whenever people on the internet give me grief for not cooking with gloves, I think back to those lunch rushes and I wonder if gloves in practice really are cleaner than bare hands. At least if your bare hands are dirty, you feel that. You're very aware of that. And you want to wash them.

When you've got gloves on, ignorance is bliss. Adam: I remember how bad I used to smell at the end of a shift. The young woman that I was living with at the time insisted that I walk straight into the shower upon getting home to scrape the Sheetz stench off of myself. I remember how badly my feet hurt from day after day of working all day, every day on my feet. Just agonizing arch pain. I waited too long to get insoles that made the situation a lot better. And those brief periods of my life when I worked full-time at Sheetz and did nothing else, those were months when I truly doubted the point of life. I'd go to work, slog, watch the clock, come home too exhausted to do anything fun or creative, go to sleep.

And before I knew it I'd be back at the store. Adam: So on the one hand I want to defend the honor of such labor. Such labor is crucially important and crucially not everyone hates it the way that I did. I worked with people who loved their jobs at Sheetz. And I had some good times with them.

It's not all bad memories.

Not at all.

But it's certainly easier to romanticize it from my current cushy chair where my biggest problem at the moment is that I've been sitting for a really long time and my butt hurts.

I'm certainly in no position to say to you, Charlie, that Sheetz and such places are a fine career and you should learn to appreciate it rather than gazing off into greener pastures. Adam: If you're at Sheetz or another such place and you want out, I certainly understand. I also certainly understand the creative wandering you describe. The indecisiveness, the procrastination, the inability to see any project through to the end. That was me as well. When there is no actual market for your creative work, that's bad. For two reasons. One is obvious.

No money. The other is less obvious. No deadline, no urgency, no external force prodding you to stop diddling, stop striving endlessly and futilely toward perfection. Just make creative decisions, make compromises, commit to them and move on. As much as certain people may bemoan the advertisements in my videos and pods, I can tell you right now that I would not produce content for you with anywhere near the same frequency and regularity were it not for my commitments to my sponsors. I sign a contract months in advance that I will do this sponsorship on this date and I must keep to that. Adam: So when I'm up late at night, struggling on a script, and I want to put it aside and hope that somehow magically inspiration will strike in the morning and the heavens will open up and provide a solution to the seemingly intractable creative impasse that I'm on, I can't do that. I've got to push through and get the shit done that night.

Because I signed a contract to have a video on this day and that means I must deliver the product on time. So I can't be too precious about it. I just have to make creative decisions, commit to it, move on. The video might not end up perfect, but nothing ever is. My job is to make content into which my sponsors can place advertising messages. And if I didn't have the urgency of my sponsors' deadlines, I would never keep to an absolutely exhausting two videos and one pod a week schedule. I wouldn't skip a video out of laziness, but I would skip a video out of indecision and anxiety and inability to make a paralyzingly difficult creative decision. Adam: So the first advice I give to anyone who wants to do creative work is find some creative work, actual work for which someone else will pay you actual money.

Obviously this will require you to reorient the focus of your creative endeavors towards something that's actually marketable. Stop toiling on your first symphony or whatever for which there is absolutely no market. And instead toil on a logo design for your friend's dad's plumbing company, something another person actually needs or wants. Which probably won't be the thing you most want to make and that is good. Writing your magnum opus is real hard, in part because your expectations for it will be impossibly high. You care too much about it. You don't care that much about that logo for your friend's dad's plumbing company, which makes it perfect. You need lower stakes and you need deadlines.

Something you have to do on time that you don't care that much about.

Adam: So that means you can just

Crap it out.

And that's what any developing creative person of any kind needs to do. You need reps. You need to do the thing all the way through every day and be awful at it until either it becomes evident that you have zero talent and you should try something else or you just gradually become not awful. You might even become great. I was thinking the other day about James Hetfield, Metallica. Yeah.

Yeah. Hetfield. Papa Het. If you listen to early Metallica, you can hear that he was always a god-like rhythm guitar player. He had like six months of learning and then after that, he was one of the 10-best rhythm guitar players in the world for the rest of his life. But he was a terrible singer. He had almost no natural voice. He felt it inside him.

Adam: He wanted to be a singer, but he didn't have it. He sang anyway and he sucked. He quit his job at the sticker factory in LA where he worked. He and Lars went all-in on the band. They made almost no gig money and lived like dogs. But he got up in front of tiny rooms of people three, four, five nights a week and he sang, if you can call that singing. He shouted nearly tuneless adolescent shouting and he sounded embarrassing, but it also exercised that muscle. And he kept exercising that muscle night after night after night.

And like three years later, four years later, he's where? He's in a studio in Copenhagen recording the Master of Puppets album and he sounds like a damn god. A vengeful jealous god, thundering proclamations down upon the mortals who have forsaken his commandments. Baby Hetfield became Papa Het. He just sucked at singing until he didn't suck anymore. Adam: I'm sure the constant need for rent and beer money was a good motivator to keep doing club gigs night after night after night, given that he quit the sticker factory. This was my biggest problem during my first act, when I was trying to make it as a musician. I needed reps. I just needed to pump out garbage day after day until it stopped being garbage.

But I had very little external motivation forcing me to finish projects at regular intervals. No one was buying my music. I didn't have a club promoter relying on me to show up and draw a crowd and encourage them to tip their bartender.

All I was doing was school.

I had professors at music school saying,

"do this or i'm going to give you a bad grade." and that was not very good motivation for me.

I had a strong internal drive to create. Adam: I wanted to make things, but it was extremely hard for me to finish them because finishing things requires making compromises and painful choices and I would just put them off. And as a result, I didn't get enough practice to be good.

Things changed for me when I got my first job as a local news reporter at WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. Local news, in particular local papers, used to be a great accessible place where working class people with little in the way of education and social connections could get creative work. They could get paid to write. That's mostly gone now. But I got a little local reporting job, which absolutely was creative work. The part of my brain that wrote music, I could also feel it writing the news copy. But it wasn't that precious to me. I wasn't pouring my soul onto the page.

Adam: I didn't have high-minded artistic ambitions about it. It was just a job. And it was a job that. I did not at the time think was going to become my career. So I just didn't care that much, which allowed me to relax and just get the reps, do the work. And there were deadlines. Constant, rock hard deadlines, which was great. And I sucked, which was also great.

I showed my ass on the radio to everyone around Bloomington, Columbus, Kokomo, and Terre Haute every night. And I kept doing it every night until I didn't suck anymore. So that's my advice to anyone who wants a creative career. Unless you have the internal motivation to complete your masterpiece in your room, by yourself with no external motivation whatsoever, unless you're that guy or gal or other kind of person, just get some actual creative work. No matter how menial, no matter how off target it is from the kind of creative work that you want to do, I believe that all creative work is essentially the same. Adam: Writing, painting, singing, dancing, designing, coding even. I think it's all basically the same stuff that comes from basically the same part of the brain. A fulfilling and meaningful and remunerative career can blossom from some pretty modest and far flung places.

Even the Sheetz's. Adam: While I've got you thinking about your career, let me thank 80,000 Hours, sponsor of this episode. 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with their careers. Your career is, on average, about 80,000 hours long. What do you want to do with those hours? You want to pay the bills obviously, but it'd sure be nice if you could do more than that. 80,000 Hours wants to help you find a fulfilling career that does good too. Go to their website, check out all their research on different career paths, the biggest problems facing humanity today and how your career could help.

Adam: They've got everything from a free

Eight week career planning course to some just quick articles you can read.

 

They also have a podcast. There's an episode with Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, where he says that if you care about animal welfare, if that's your big thing, probably the best thing you can do for animal welfare is to study food science and help develop the next generation of meat replacements.

All the info 80,000 Hours provides is free. They're a nonprofit. Their only aim is to help you find a fulfilling, high impact career. So do you and me both a favor. Follow my link in the video description or in the show notes. They'll send you a free copy of their in-depth career guide.

Learn about what makes for a high impact career. Get new ideas for impactful paths. Make up new plan based on what you've just learned and put it into action. This will also sign you up for their twice monthly newsletter with high impact job opportunities, updates on their research, that kind of stuff. Go to 80000hours.org/ragusea to start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling, and helps solve one of the world's most pressing problems. 80000hours.org/ragusea. 80,000 is represented numerically. So 80000, hours.org/ragusea.

Thank you, 80,000 Hours. Peter: Hi Adam. It's Peter. I'm from the UK and I work in a busy restaurant. The chefs in this restaurant often get into trouble for sending closed mussels. The argument is that these mussels are bad because they're closed and this is an indicator of that and this can potentially kill people. Personally, I do not believe this and I would like to know what you think. Adam: Yeah.

The lore states that mussels that do not open during cooking must have been dead before they ever went in the pot, and that would indicate they're probably dangerous or at least gross to eat. This appears to be a straight-up myth. It's a myth. Assuming that you've cooked them for long enough, mussels that do not open during cooking are no more likely to be dangerous than ones that did open during cooking. That is the conclusion of the only piece of actual scientific research. I, or really anyone else can find on this topic. I mean, do your googling. Lots of people have written about this thing with mussels on the internet, and there's only one piece of scientific evidence anyone can turn up.

And it's technically not scholarly.

It's a 2004 government report from Australia.

The Australian Seafood Services paid a fisheries biologist named.

Nick Ruello to prepare a report on ways to improve post-harvest handling of Australia's farmed mussels and add value to them. Adam: And as a part of that research, Ruello investigated the notion that mussels that don't open during cooking are bad. He hypothesized that this idea is simply a myth that leads to enormous cumulative waste in the industry. Mussels and other bivalves have an array of ligaments at their hinge. These ligaments push the shell open with a springlike tension.

The animal's relaxed state is to be open. It can overcome this outward pushing tension with an adductor muscle that it uses to pull its shells closed and overcome that ligament tension pressing outward. The muscle, the animal must work and expend energy in order to close its shell. Thus, it is rather "puzzling," in Ruello's words, why anyone would think that a dead mussels shell would be closed. Closing of the shell is indication of just the opposite. It's an indication of life. Life protecting itself. Mussels close their shells in response to adverse conditions, such as being removed from the ocean or being subjected to extreme temperatures like a pot of steaming white wine and shallots.

"All or almost all dead mussels will have shells open and not closed. Any rigor mortis is apparently very quick, especially when mussels are cooked. Furthermore, any dead mussels which are closed before they are cooked are just as likely to open with cooking as do the live mussels in the cooked batch. Dead vis-a-vis live muscles have no special properties holding the two shells closed." Adam: Mussels open during cooking, usually, because the adductor muscle starts to break down in response to heat and it detaches from one or both shells. In some percentage of mussels, the adductor muscle just holds on. It may even be an indication of freshness. The muscle is stronger in healthier mussels. Ruello cooked hundreds of mussels in various batch sizes across 33 different experiments over two years.

He found that, on average, about 10% of mussels do not open by the time the rest have opened and everything is adequately cooked. He cracked them open anyway, they were fine inside. "Mussels will not all open during cooking. Some don't open up even after excessive cooking. But you do not have to discard these. You can open these up with a knife and even cook them a little more if you wish to be extra sure.". Where did people get the opposite idea? Where did this very widespread myth come from? Cookbook writers have long said, cook your mussels until they open. Because that's a pretty good indication that they've been cooked enough and it also means that they'll be open and you won't have to open them yourself.

Adam: You won't have to struck them with a knife like you do with other kinds of shellfish. That's why they say cook your mussels until they open. But that's different from saying closed mussels are bad and should be discarded. Ruello traces that myth back to a best selling 1973 cookbook by the famous English cookery writer, Jane Grigson, titled Fish Cookery. Grigson wrote, "Throw away any mussels that refused to open.".

And she gave no reason why.

She repeated the advice in the 1975 edition of the book and it was removed from subsequent editions of the book. Adam: There is a chance that the mussel is closed because it died a very long time ago and its spring-like ligaments that hold the shell open have broken down, and instead there's mud on the inside, holding the shells together with surface tension, or something.

This is highly unlikely, especially with farmed mussels, which are harvested after dangling from the sides of ropes. They have never touched the open sea bottom or seen any mud at all. They've just been hanging in the water. So if you want to be doubly sure about mussels that don't open during cooking, maybe pry them open away from the dish so if there is a bunch of sand inside, it's not all going to fall out and ruin your dish. But this is pretty unlikely. The time to be paranoid, Ruello writes, is before cooking. Assuming the mussels are relaxed and being held in good conditions, they should be open before cooking. Adam: You can tap them or push their shells together and in response, a live mussel should contract its adductor muscle and hold itself closed.

If it doesn't do that, that's an indication the mussel is dead. Ruello also recommends simply using your nose. Wash and clean the mussels and if any smell funky, throw them out. But we really don't have to be as paranoid about mussels as we used to be. People used to harvest mussels from the waters right around cities that emptied their raw sewage right into the harbor or whatever. The contemporary mussel industry has come a very long way from those days. There's definitely still risk of some bacterial or parasitic infection or contamination, but it's nothing like it used to be. What should your restaurant do with cooked yet unopened mussels, Peter? I don't know.

Discarding the unopened ones may indeed still be the best option available to professional kitchens because you don't want to be painstakingly shucking hot mussels right before you serve them. Adam: That'll take too long and the mussels will get cold. It's better to let the customer pry the mussels open themselves. But there's always a chance that the reason the mussel didn't open is it's simply undercooked. And that's not a great risk to take either. The chef could give the cooks a hard timer. Say, "You must steam these mussels for this many minutes. And after that, we consider everything in there safe to eat.".

That might be safer than simply telling the cooks to steam the mussels until most of them are opened. Some of them might not be opened because they're just undercooked, and that would be bad too, because you've got to kill pathogens. Then of course there's the problem of customer expectations. Even if you serve them a perfectly cooked, closed mussel, they still might freak out because this is a very pervasive myth. What do you do when the customer freaks out? Well, Ruello's report is available for download on an. Australian government website. I'll link it in the show notes. It's a PDF.

Print out section 4.3, which is the section about this topic, maybe laminate it and hand it to any customers who freak out. See how that goes. Adam: I'm hoping that as you hear this, I am returning home from a vacation with a belly full of shellfish. I am recording this right before my vacation. It will post the day. I return from vacation. Seaside holiday, as the Brits would say. This means that there will be no videos or pods this coming week.