Disgusting kitchen
Today we are talking about disgust.
Do I disgust you? I might. Coming up, Ask Adam. Brendan: Hey, Adam. My name's. Brendan. My question today is, how many liberties do you feel it's safe to take in the home kitchen compared to the super strict rules that are laid out for professional food service kitchens? Because my brother really likes to get on me, because he was a fast food manager, about my home food safety. He seems convinced that you're 100% guaranteed to get sick if you don't follow everything exactly how a professional kitchen would.
I'm personally of the mindset that it's more of a percent chance. It's a risk that you're taking. The reason that businesses follow stuff so stringently is because they could get shut down. Also, the one person out of a million that gets sick could then go on to sue them for a bunch of money. So that's why they're no tolerance. I know this isn't going to be serious medical advice. I'm not going to take anything you say as serious personal medical advice. I'm just wondering what your opinion is on it.
Brendan, I will now read to you the contents of an email that another viewer sent me recently. This was not intended for publication, so I will not read any identifying information. This is nonetheless a real email that I got from a different, not Brendan, consumer of my content. Quote, "Adam, you finger taste or taste straight from your stirring spoon in nearly every video lately. It is unsanitary, disgusting, and sets a really bad example for your viewers. I tried to leave several super kind and tactful comments on your videos, but you wouldn't likely ever see them. I am a serious, longtime fan hitting his breaking point. I've got to unsubscribe and block.
YouTube from recommending your channel. Please let me know if you ever do a video about keeping your saliva out of what you cook and turn over a new leaf. I'd love to come back someday. It's just going to be bad for my blood pressure to stick around in the community," end quote. I hear that emailer's problem. I respect the reality of their discomfort with my kitchen hygiene, but I am not going to change what I do because this is a "them" problem, not a "me" problem. How I cook on camera is not unduly hazardous, and I do not believe I am setting a bad example for anyone. If anything, the bigger problem among my audience is probably irrational, unrealistic expectations about how clean your world can or should be.
If anything, we're getting too clean in the highly developed world. Except for, of course, when there's a new, highly contagious, poorly understood and sometimes deadly virus sweeping the entire world, and then everyone in health care is pleading with us to wear masks and avoid unnecessary gatherings just for a while, just so we can slow this down and get a handle on it, develop some treatments and vaccines.
When that scenario happens, normally hyperchondriacal germophobes suddenly freak out and refuse to take temporary, reasonable precautions because freedom.
For what it's worth, I also think
That lots of people in the pro-covid-precautions camp also completely lost their minds in the pandemic.
The precautions were about slowing the virus down, managing the risk, not eliminating the risk. The virus is going to have to run its course. I think kind of everybody lost their damn minds during that pandemic. Not our proudest moment.
Hope we do it better next time, because there's going to be a next time. Anyway, that total madness aside, if anything, we are getting too clean in the developed world. I am intrigued to read the ongoing science exploring the hygiene hypothesis. About 20 years ago, scientists started exploring a positive correlation between affluence and certain inflammatory diseases and type 1 diabetes, clusters of related diseases like that popping up in rich places, whereas most diseases pop up disproportionately in poorer places. The hygiene hypothesis states that childhood development may be harmed by insufficient exposure to microorganisms. This would disproportionately affect children being raised in the richer and, therefore, cleaner parts of the world. The hypothesis is way more complicated than that, and it is by no means proven, it has some educated detractors, but I won't be at all surprised if it turns out to be true, in some ways. I am much more convinced that our mental health is harmed when we become so unaccustomed to dirt and the realities of bodily fluids that we become hypersensitive to it.
It's a bad thing to be hypersensitive to dirt when you live in a world of dirt. Now the choice to designate any trait or state of being as a pathology is just that. It's a choice, inherently subjective. But I choose to consider extreme disgust at someone tasting their own food to be pathological or at least indicative of some pathology, like mysophobia, an irrational fear of germs. That's what that is. Absolutely, Brendan, there are different rules for home cooking versus professional cooking, and with good reason. I'm going to go through a number of specific examples, but let's start with tasting your own food, dipping your finger into a simmering pot to taste its contents or sipping off of the stirring spoon. No, neither of those things would be considered cool in a professional kitchen, though they happen there all the time nonetheless, and they probably pose very little in the way of public health risk for several reasons.
One being, that food is really hot when you cook it. If you taste a simmering sauce or soup or something with the stirring spoon and then plop the spoon back down in the pot again, any bad germs from your mouth are going to be virtually certain to die. If the pot is actually simmering, they will die immediately. A simmer starts at 85 degrees Celsius, 185 Fahrenheit. That's considerably above the temperature at which basically all pathogenic bacteria die instantly. If the food is hot but not actually bubbling, well, germs from your mouth might not die instantly, but they'll still die pretty quickly because pasteurization is a function of both temperature and time. Where you do risk contaminating food with your germs is when you are handling food that isn't really hot anymore or food that isn't ever going to be hot, like a salad. In the ServSafe class that Brendan's brother probably had to take for his food service manager job, in ServSafe lingo, they refer to such not hot foods or not very hot anymore foods as ready-to-eat foods.
That's where they focus a lot of their concern because there's a legit concern there. There is a realistic scenario that unfolds in the restaurant industry every day resulting in the most commonly documented foodborne illness in the whole world, which is gastroenteritis, usually caused these days by norovirus. It's our old buddy, the fecal oral route. Somebody who's carrying norovirus goes to the bathroom, which you have to do a lot when you have gastroenteritis, they don't wash their hands or they don't wash them well enough. They go back to work.
They handle ready-to-eat food.
They deposit some fecal matter on the food.
You eat it.
You contract norovirus 12 to 48 hours later. Your day ends abruptly, and then you're real sick for one to three days. Then you continue to carry the virus and be contagious for up to two weeks, according to the CDC. As Brendan mentions, I am not a doctor. I am not giving medical advice. I'm just a nerd who eats and reads a lot, but I consult reliable sources and relay their expert opinions to you. Anyway, contamination of ready-to-eat foods with norovirus is a thing that really does happen. It's probably more likely to occur in fast food or other inexpensive restaurants that hire a whole army of people, don't train them very well, pay them poorly, treat them poorly.
A person working for minimum wage at a fast food restaurant probably can't afford to call in sick when they themselves are struggling with a norovirus infection. They go to work anyway because they're paid by the hour and they need to make rent. Good restaurants tell their people, they say, "If you have diarrhea, stay home. We will take care of you one way or another. You will not lose your job, but do not come into this building. After you've stopped exploding out of one or both ends, stay away from this building for another 48 hours at least.". That's what a good restaurant manager tells their people. It's not just altruism on the part of the restaurant manager.
It is enlightened self-interest. A norovirus outbreak linked to your restaurant might kill somebody, it might not, but it'll almost certainly kill your restaurant. To survive that kind of publicity you have to be The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's restaurant an hour outside London. They had an alarmingly large norovirus outbreak in 2009, hundreds of people sick. It was eventually traced back to oysters, raw oysters that had probably been contaminated by sewage in the sea. The Brits, for all of their technological advancements, have big problems with untreated sewage flowing into their coastal waters. Ironically, this is because they became technologically advanced sooner than most everybody else in the world. Their beautiful old coastal cities have some of the earliest modern sewage systems, and they were built before the days when everybody figured out that you need to have two different sewer systems for your city.
You need to have one for waste water and a different sewer system for stormwater. If stormwater and wastewater go into the same sewer system, that system overflows every time you have a big storm and sewage finds its way to the sea. They had contaminated oysters at The Fat Duck. Some customers may have eaten them. Staff members ate them, and they got sick. Some of the staff came back to work too soon despite a strict 48-hour waiting period policy at the restaurant. There was an outbreak that surely would've tanked almost any other restaurant. The Fat Duck survived because it's got three stars.
It's frequently in the conversation for best restaurant in the world.
The chef is a TV star.
Who knows what else might have happened behind the scenes to save that restaurant, get it through a rough patch. I have no idea if such outbreaks happen more frequently on a per meal basis at less expensive, less elite places, but I imagine they might. If a cook at The. Fat Duck can't afford to stay home sick, then a fast food worker can't afford to call in sick, nor are they particularly motivated to be really fastidious about their hygiene. This is why food service workers are usually made to wear gloves, even though gloves tend to be absolutely filthy in practice and can be a huge vehicle for cross-contamination, but at least gloves cover your hands, which is where the poop would be. The number one thing restaurants are worried about is norovirus.
I have been to many elite-level kitchens at this point in my life, inside many elite-level kitchens, very expensive places where everyone cooking is paid pretty well, or at least they have reason to believe they'll be paid pretty well one day in the future when they ascend to a higher position from their little apprenticeship.
Some elite-level kitchens do use gloves. Some use gloves for certain particularly dirty tasks, but not for others, and some places like that hardly use any gloves at all. I don't think anybody knows if norovirus outbreaks are less prevalent at such restaurants on a per meal served basis. I don't think anyone's ever studied that. But I would guess that they are less prevalent because people who work at such places are motivated and well trained enough to wash their hands properly. When you cook at home, are you motivated to wash your hands properly? I am. The fecal oral route is really the only one that I'm really concerned about at home.
That's a way that I really could pass an infection to my family that is avoidable. Most other modes of transmission are totally inevitable in a house full of people who actually like each other and spend time with each other, actually get physically close to one another because they love each other. My child sneezed directly into my eyeball the other night while we were reading at bedtime time. Families share pretty much all of their germs, at least those germs that are spread in the air or in saliva or mucus. The fecal oral route, however, we can pretty much avoid that one by teaching everybody in the house to wash their hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds after they go number two. That's something we teach around here. When you're cooking for yourself or for your family, I think it's fine to taste your own damn food with your finger or with the stirring spoon. Have you ever seen a major public health authority launch an advertising campaign urging everyone to stop tasting from the stirring spoon? You ever seen any public service announcements about that from the CDC or the USDA or the EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, or the NHS, the beloved, if beleaguered, socialized medicine system in the UK? You ever seen an NHS billboard saying, "Only a tosser would sip from the saucer"? No, you haven't seen that billboard because none of the experts are particularly worried about people tasting from the stirring spoons in their own damn homes for all of the reasons that I've mentioned.
I'll admit, probably also because they know that if an outbreak does occur, it'll be limited in a domestic situation because households aren't that large. The experts focus on restaurants because restaurants serve hundreds of people in a day, and, therefore, they can do a lot more damage. Nonetheless, public health authorities have done information campaigns aimed at home cooks urging people to keep their food out of the temperature danger zone, urging home cooks to be wary of cross-contamination, urging home cooks to stop washing their chicken and their other meat because that almost certainly does more harm than good when it comes to the mainstream meat supply in the developed world.
I have a whole video about that. Go and watch it. Not once in my research have I turned up a public health campaign raising awareness about the risks posed by tasting your food directly from the pot once cooked. People who think that that is way out of bounds for home cooking, I think those people must have never met their grandmothers, which maybe they didn't, and that would be a shame. Grandmas are awesome.
Every grandma I have ever seen cooking in my entire life has tasted the sauce right off of the stirring spoon because grandma ain't got time for your hysterical, irrational, unrealistic, clean freakery. Grandma grew up on the farm. She remembers that life isn't clean.
It is us, more recent generations, who have forgotten.
If you know that there's virtually zero
Risk of infection posed by somebody tasting a simmering sauce and if you're grossed out anyway, then i think that's a "you" problem, not a "me" problem.
You have an overactive disgust response. In one or two specific categories of disgust as defined in the field of psychology, they have terms for this, two specific categories of disgust that are relevant here, in my opinion, core disgust and/or animal reminder disgust. Core disgust is the reaction we have to things like rotting meat, vomit, mucus.
It's a fear of bodily contamination specifically via the oral route. It's the fear that something gross is going to get in your mouth. This disgust obviously serves a very important purpose in our survival. We evolved this disgust response for a reason. But being an intelligent life form is all about managing your animal instincts and, in some cases, overcoming those instincts. Speaking of which, the other relevant category of disgust as defined by psychologists is animal reminder disgust, things we see that remind us that we are animals. They remind us that we're just flesh and bone, heaps of temporarily animate organic matter. The classic example of animal reminder disgust is injuries that reveal the innards of the body.
Some people are particularly freaked out to be reminded that they are "the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world," that "of the earth they were made and into the earth they return," to quote Fight Club and Ecclesiastes respectively. Maybe if I deposit a little spit in the sauce pot, that reminds you that the pot is full of spit and piss and poop. It is a bucket of decomposing organic matter. When you eat it, it will become your spit and your piss and your poop, and you will return it to the earth where its constituent molecules will become new plants and animals, some of which you may eat one day and renew the cycle. Food comes from the ground. There's little bits of bug parts and poop and fungus and whatever else in all of your food because food comes from the ground, as do people, and food is prepared by people, mostly with their hands. I don't know about you, but Instagram keeps serving me this ad where a very handsome, tall. Nordic chef promotes a video course where he teaches about cooking vegetables.
The ad is very persuasive. Like, this guy seems to really know what he's doing, and his vegetable dishes are exquisite. No idea if they actually taste good, but they look like vegetable art. One of the top comments was from somebody complaining about how the chef keeps touching the food with his hands. You got to wonder if this is a person who also bemoans the industrialization of the food system and how food is made with big machines and factories these days. Well, the alternative is for a human being to pick up the food with their fingers, cut it up, do some other stuff to it, and then hand it to you to eat. People make food with their bodies.
Food comes from the ground, so do our bodies, and to the ground, our bodies shall return. We are temporarily animate heaps of organic matter. We are animals. Some people are particularly disgusted by that reminder so much so that psychologists gave it a name: the animal reminder disgust response. You know what kind of people tend to have really, really hyperactive animal reminder and core disgust responses? You know what kind of people usually have those? Intolerant people, disproportionately so. There is a large and growing body of psychological research documenting a very strong correlation between high disgust sensitivity and socially intolerant attitudes, xenophobes, people who really don't like outsiders of any kind, people who don't like other people's religions or ways of life, people who don't like other people's sexual morays or gender identities.
Those people are far more likely than other people to also have very strong disgust responses and vice versa, of course.
Nobody knows which direction the arrow of
Causality points there, but the correlation is documented.
It is real. Scientists study this in a variety of ways. The simplest is just with questionnaires. Subjects are asked to rate their discomfort with a series of scenarios. One scenario might be two men having sex. Another scenario might be someone tasting the sauce with the stirring spoon. Another scenario might be somebody suffering an open wound exposing the bone. You examine patterns in people's responses to questions like that.
The research gets a lot more sophisticated than that, of course. There are studies where they've hooked people up to various physiological sensors: heart rate, respiration monitors, perspiration monitors, that kind of thing. Then they show the people pictures or movies or sounds or smells, and they track their physical responses instead of or in addition to their own self-reports about their level of discomfort or disgust. There's a strong, documented, positive correlation between disgust response and social intolerance. Or at least that's what everyone thought until 2019 when a group of German and Israeli scientists published a group of five pretty large studies that added some nuance to this picture. These five studies they did on hundreds of test subjects in Germany and the United States. The results indicated that only particular kinds of disgust are shown to be hyperactive in people with socially intolerant views. Which particular kinds of disgust are correlated with such views? Core disgust and animal reminder disgust, the two that we've been talking about.
Other kinds of disgust, like different kinds of moral disgust, those are more strongly correlated with people who have what you might call socially tolerant views. Sorry, I can't think of a less politically loaded way to describe those two sets of views. These are strong correlations, but not one-to-one certainties. No doubt, there are pride flag waivers who irrationally get disgusted by potential threats of bodily contamination, and no doubt, there are Klansmen who tromp around in chicken crap every day, and it doesn't bother them one bit. If you are profoundly grossed out by me touching food that I plan to eat myself or serve to my family, and if you know logically that the risk of actual biological contamination is slim to nil, then I think you should reconsider whether this is a "me" problem or if it's a "you" problem. If you are profoundly grossed out by other people's sexual preferences, even though you know that logically they pose no threat to you and your way of life, then I think that you should reconsider whether that is "them" problem or if it's a "you" problem. You're not responsible for your feelings, and nobody should shame you for your feelings. I'm not shaming you for your feelings, or at least I'm trying not to.
You are responsible for how you manage your own feelings, what you do with them, how you express them, if you express them. Look, I have trouble listening to my big brain instead of my little brain, too, all the time. I'm no saint. If I get a batch of vinegar or kombucha with little nematodes squirming around in it, like we discussed last podcast episode, well, I'm throwing that away even if a scientist tells me that the nematodes pose no danger to me. If one of my favorite YouTubers kept drinking kombucha filled with squirming little worms on camera, I might even unsubscribe, but I wouldn't send them an email about it because that's a "me" problem, not a "them" problem. Actually, I don't think that I would unsubscribe in that event. You want to drink buch with harmless little worms in it, you have my blessing. To your other specific points, Brendan, yeah, I try to keep the raw meat at the bottom of the refrigerator just like they do in the restaurants.
I think that's a good pro tip.
Meat packages do leak with dismaying frequency.
They could leak down onto ready-to-eat foods
If you put them at the top of the refrigerator.
Also, the bottom of the fridge is usually colder, especially in a situation where you've just introduced a lot of heat into the fridge, like you just put in a whole bunch of warm leftovers into the fridge. Of course, as we've discussed previously, first, you want to let those leftovers steam off on the counter before you seal them up. That's the fastest way to get the heat out of them, let them steam off. But once they're done steaming, seal them up, throw them in the fridge where they will cool down out of the danger zone way faster than they would on the counter. The downside of doing this is if you put a lot of warm stuff into the fridge all at once, you might raise the temperature in the fridge into the danger zone, and that's bad for all of the other food that's in the fridge.
Warm air is less dense than cold air, so it rises to the top of the fridge. If that is the situation, if that situation were to occur, it would be good that your meat was on the bottom of the fridge because that's probably the highest-risk food that you have in there, the meat, and it's going to be coldest on the bottom of your fridge. So that's a pro tip that I do at home. There are times when I put the meat up top. For example, in a video recently, I was dry brining some raw meat overnight. I wanted to leave it uncovered to dry out the surface. I chose to put that on the top of the fridge because I judged that the greater risk was that my kids would open the fridge, grope around for whatever they're looking for, and end up touching the raw meat. That's the bigger risk.
So I put the raw meat on top that time because they can't reach up there. They're not tall enough. That was an exception to the rule. When you're managing a professional kitchen, especially one staffed by low-paid, low-skilled workers, you give them rules because you don't trust them to think for themselves and make good judgment calls. The problem with rules is that even the best ones only hold up in like 95% of all situations. In the remaining 5% or whatever of the situations, an exception to the rule is called for. The government has to enforce rules for the same reason, food safety rules for establishments serving the public. Much of what your brother is worrying about, Brendan, is stuff meant to appease the local inspector.
Because if a restaurant gets a bad food safety rating, that's public information. Word gets out around town that your restaurant is serving food from dented cans, a critical violation in the eyes of some inspectors, because a dent that actually pierces the wall of the can be a point of microbiological contamination most worryingly from the bacteria that cause botulism. The hole in the can might have been big enough to let in some bacteria but small enough that the pressure inside the can effectively closes the hole back up again and maintains the anaerobic environment in there that the bacteria need to thrive and to create their toxins. That's why dented cans are a critical violation. Never mind that cans these days have plastic linings on the inside that make this kind of contamination pretty unlikely, thank goodness, and never mind that the can in question is maybe a can of tomatoes, which are too acidic for the botulinum bacteria to thrive in. When you're making rules, you got to make them to cover the majority of situations. Almost no rule is going to actually be sound 100% of the time, and that's just the way it is. In your own kitchen, you can make your own rules because you're your own boss, and you can rely on yourself to make good choices.
You are highly motivated to make good choices because you only hurt yourself and your family if you make bad choices. You couldn't possibly follow all of the legal food safety rules in your own kitchen, in part, because you only have one sink. In the US at least, the government usually says commercial food operations have to have at least two sinks, one for dirty dishes and a different one for washing hands. Dishes in the hand sink could be a major violation because theoretically you could contaminate your hands on the dirty dishes. If you have one and only one sink in your kitchen at home, you've already got a major violation on your record.
Except you don't because none of these
Things apply at home.
Home is different. Home is generally less chaotic.
You don't have six cooks all working in the same tiny space sharing the same equipment. In that case, it makes sense to have color-coded cutting boards, one designated for ready-to-eat items, another one designated for everything else. Because when you pick up a cutting board in a professional kitchen, you can't know for sure what one of your colleagues was just using it for like 10 minutes ago, so the color coding helps. When it's just me cooking alone at home, I know exactly where that cutting board has been. And I'm not knocking out a hundred meals a night. I'm knocking out four. There's less chaos. I can keep track of my things pretty well.
I don't need to mindlessly adhere to systems that are designed to keep you out of trouble when you can't keep track of all of your things. Lastly, Brendan, your brother is wrong if he thinks that a foodborne infection or food poisoning is certain should someone violate any of the rules that he learned in his ServSafe training. Generally, for a person to get sick from food a whole lot of things have to go wrong at the same time. For someone to get E. coli from a burger you serve them, for example, a whole string of failures has to occur. Some amount of E. coli in live cattle is probably inevitable, but ranchers can reduce the load through better feed and waste management practices. A failure has to occur at the processing plant where the meat is exposed to fecal matter.
There are massive systems in place at processing plants to prevent that from happening. In the US, there is a USDA inspector watching the entire slaughter process. When the animal's digestive system is removed, the inspector rifles through the intestines looking for any perforations or cuts. I've watched this being done. It's like watching a witch doctor trying to read the future in animal entrails, which, if you didn't know, is an actual practice originating in ancient Italy with the Etruscans, and it persisted in Europe and Western Asia into the Middle Ages. It's called haruspex, reading the future in entrails. Anyway, that's not what the USDA inspector is doing when they're rifling through the entrails. They're looking to see if the entrails were punctured in any way during the slaughter.
If they were, that means the meat could be contaminated with fecal matter and fecal bacteria, and that meat is then pulled off of the production line. So something has to go wrong with that system. Then probably something has to go wrong with the cold chain that brings the beef to your restaurant, some failure to keep the meat cold. The meat warms up, goes into the danger zone, the bacteria are allowed to reproduce and run rampant. Then a failure has to occur in your kitchen where you don't kill the bacteria with heat like you should when you cook it. Then, of course, a failure has to occur in the customer's body. A healthy, adult body should be able to handle some number of live E.
coli bacteria.
There's the acidity of your stomach, and
Then there's your immune system.
They can protect you to a point. That's why, when outbreaks do occur, it's usually only some of the people who ate the thing who actually get sick. Lots of bad things have to happen for somebody to get sick. Food safety violations increase the risk of something bad happening. They absolutely do not make the bad thing certain any more than exposing yourself to a carcinogen makes you certain to get cancer. We're all exposed to known carcinogens all the time. Only sometimes do we get cancer.
There was a research professor I used to consult all the time back in Georgia, real, real smart guy who studies food safety. This is his whole thing. His wife teaches ServSafe certification classes for food service managers, like your brother, Brendan. He told me that they'll be up at night, husband and wife, and they'll be watching food shows on the TV. They just can't stand it because the chefs on TV all don't have their hair up in hair nets. They're all wearing jewelry. They're doing all the things that this professor and his wife are constantly teaching people to not do. But then after he said that, he kind of sat back in his chair, and he acknowledged in so many words, that's just because that's what they do at work all day.
That's what they think about. At home, they don't actually wear hair nets either. They violate all kinds of rules because home is different and legitimately so. Nonetheless, your last line of defense against foodborne illness is a healthy body. You are exposed to foodborne pathogens all the time. You fight most of them off, first with the acidity of your stomach, and then, if any bugs survive that, your antibodies and such go to work on them. Your last defense is a healthy body.
Hey, Adam. I'm Wesley coming at you from central Oregon. I just had two quick questions for you. The first and more important one is, how do you make boiled eggs? What kind of eggs do you use? How long do you go for? Do you start with boiled water, or do you let the eggs come up to a boil? Do you plunge them into ice water afterwards? How do you do it? The second one is, why do you always include personal politics in videos? I know, for me personally, regardless of whether I agree with the views or not, my eyes just always roll a little bit in anybody's videos when they include politics in a video that's not about politics.
Other than that, I absolutely love your videos and the scientific method you bring to cooking. So thanks and keep it up.
This is a more thoughtful version of a question that I get all the time, and it usually goes more like this. It goes, "Why are you talking about politics? This is a food show.". That less thoughtful version of the question at hand implies that the questioner's dispute with me is exclusively related to the relevance of any political content that I might cover or the lack of relevance in their eyes. That's an easy argument for me to poke a gaping hole into because nobody ever asks me, "Hey, why are you talking about history? This is a food show. Hey man, why are you talking about organic chemistry? This is a food show. Why are you talking about microbiology? Why are you talking about botany or epistemology? This is a food show." . Nobody ever says that because their problem isn't that I'm talking about things other than food.
Anyone who's watched more than a couple of my videos or listened to more than a couple of my pods, they know that we don't just talk about food here. We talk about all kinds of interesting things: science, culture, agriculture, language, history, philosophy, business, nutrition, fitness. We talk about all kinds of things with food as the point of entry. We start out talking about food because food is fun. Then we go down a million interesting and probably more important tangents along the way.
Then we usually end up back at
Food because food is fun.
It's the thing that brought us together,
But it's not the only thing we're interested in.
If you want a community that's just about food, then go to one that orbits around someone who is a way better cook. I'm not that good, nor am I that interested in food. I really wouldn't want to make a YouTube channel and a podcast that are only about recipes. I mean, I would do it if I had to. If that was the only way for me to make a living on here, yeah, I would totes make shows that are strictly only about food. It would beat having a real job. But I don't have to do that because lots of people manifestly like it when I talk about food as it relates to a million other more important subjects, which might include things that could be categorized as political. You'd have to expect those conversations would extend into political topics given that politics is, quote, "The set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status," end quote, so sayeth the Wikipedia definition of politics, which I think is pretty apt.
Food is a thing that we produce in groups. We invented civilization to coordinate the production of food. The state exists in no small measure to coordinate the production and distribution of food. So many of our basic social units of organization have their origins in agriculture and food. And, of course, eating is our most basic and arguably most significant act of consumption, resource consumption, and consumption, within a society, is an inherently political act. Consumption is the appropriation of resources for yourself instead of somebody else. If you don't think about that kind of stuff when you shop and eat, well, I am here to help you think about that kind of stuff and to encourage myself to think about it more often. Lord knows I should.
If you don't want to think about how your consumption affects others, I understand that. I don't want to think about it either. None of us should be ashamed for our feelings, though we are responsible for what we do with them. I don't want to think about how my consumption affects others, but I know I should, so I do. If you know you should but you don't want to anyway and you get mad when I try to make you think about how your consumption affects other people, well then, I think that you are, by definition, a bad person. If you're a bad person who really doesn't care about other people, well, I am happy for you to escort yourself out of my little theater. But that's not Wesley. Wesley did not ask the stupid question.
He knows that his problem with me is not that I talk about stuff other than food. He's self-aware enough to know that his problem is with this particular set of non-food topics that we sometimes deal with here that he has labeled as political topics. He has a problem with that set of non-food stuff in particular. I wrote him back, and I said, "Hey, fair question, Wesley. I'm going to try to answer it. Do me a favor, though. Tell me how you would define politics in this context. He wrote back, quote, "In this context, I'm referring to mainly identity, race, and financial politics, what many conservatives refer to as woke politics.
It's usually observations and opinions rather than suggestions for any particular political policy, but the implication is there," end quote, from Wesley.
Fair enough, Wesley.
I understand why you would bristle when a celebrity, or a micro-celebrity, in my case, I understand why you would bristle when such a person starts going off on such political topics, which maybe liberals would refer to as social justice topics. I bristle, too, often. Because lots of actors and musicians and influencers or whatever, lots of them really do engage in virtue signaling, which I think is a real thing, a real thing that is bad. Virtue is not bad. Virtue is good by definition. Being virtuous is great, and conspicuous virtue is good.
I generally think public figures should be conspicuously virtuous so as to set an example for others. That's a pretty universal value, at least historically speaking, that prominent people have a duty to be virtuous as a model for others, a particular duty. Everyone used to believe that until recently. I think that it's virtuous to consider the perspectives, the feelings, the wellbeing of others in relation to myself, particularly people very removed from me and my experience whose wellbeing I am, therefore, not naturally inclined to consider the way I'm naturally inclined to consider the wellbeing, the feelings, the perspectives of my family and people very close to me and like me.
Considering the experiences, the wellbeing, the feelings of people very removed from you, I think that's basically what social justice is. So as I make food-related content, I try to do it in a virtuous way and to do so conspicuously as I believe that is my responsibility. Conspicuous virtue is similar to virtue signaling, but virtue signaling is shallow, hollow, and singularly unpersuasive. It is totally uninterested in persuasion.
That is not its purpose. Its only purpose is confirmation, confirming to the members of one team that you're on their side, usually for your own self-serving purposes. That's what virtue signaling is as opposed to conspicuous virtue. I know that I've been guilty of virtuous signaling in my day more than once, but I try real hard to avoid it. I try to make content that is open and welcoming and persuasive. For example, earlier in this very episode when I was talking all about that research documenting a strong correlation between heightened oral disgust sensitivity and socially intolerant views, when I talked about that, I studiously avoided the label that the researchers themselves use for people who hold such socially intolerant views and who exhibit such sensitivities to oral contamination threats.
The word that the researchers use for such people is conservative. That's research that is explicitly about liberals and conservatives and their respective psychological tendencies.
I studiously avoided those labels in my own discussion of that research for a few reasons. One, I feel very alienated from those labels: liberal and conservative. I don't identify with either of those labels, and I think they are reductive to the point of virtual incoherence. Two, I think that invoking those labels shuts down minds. You say those words and people retreat to their respective tribal corners and they don't come out. Now, in defense of the scientists who wrote those papers, it wasn't just them slapping liberal or conservative labels on people. In every one of those studies that I've read through, the researchers asked the test subjects themselves to self-identify their political affiliations or their ideologies in various ways, and people labeled themselves how they labeled themselves. The scientists simply reported their results.
I don't relish getting into territory that will alienate viewers. I do it when I feel it is called for. I try to be brave enough to do it.
I try to be empathetic enough to
Do it in a way that doesn't needlessly alienate the very people i'm trying the hardest to reach.
I asked Wesley, our questioner here, for
An example of a time when he feels like i shoehorned politics into a food discussion.
Side note, why do people like me use the verb "shoehorn" to describe the act of sticking something where it doesn't belong? That's not what a shoehorn does. A shoehorn is a thing that you use to slide your foot into a shoe. Shoehorns are pretty rare these days because shoes today are better and not so hard to get into.
But in the days of inflexible, usually leather shoes, people used a shoehorn to lever their feet into shoes, which is where they belong. Feet belong in shoes. Shoes exist to contained feet. So when you shoehorn something in, you're not jamming something in where it doesn't belong, which is how we use the word shoehorn. That's not what you're doing when you use a shoehorn. When you use a shoehorn, you are jamming something in exactly where it belongs. It is simply difficult to get it in there. The shoehorn is a tool that helps you overcome the barriers and put something in its rightful place.
That's what the verb shoehorn should mean. Ding. Anyway, food. Wesley mentioned the video that I did a couple of years back about corn versus flower tortillas. He was asking, "Why did you inject identity politics into such a video?" My response is, "I didn't inject a damn thing." The identity politics were already there in the tortillas. For me to not acknowledge them and deal with them would've been weird. It would've been disingenuous.
For lots and lots of Mexicans and people of Mexican descent flower versus corn tortilla, it's virtually synonymous with gringo versus Latino. That might not be what flower versus corn means to you, Wesley, or to me, but it is to other people. It is to a lot of Mexicans, and this is Mexican cuisine we're talking about, so I think we should consider their point of view. I don't know about you, Wesley, but I am really much more interested in cultural points of view different from my own. I'm tired of myself. You're young. Maybe you're not tired of yourself yet. I understand that.
I'm old. I'm tired of myself. I want to learn about other people, especially people who are historically underrepresented or even misrepresented in my media sphere. So I called a Mexican-American guy from Southern California who writes about food history and culture, a guy who wrote a book about taco culture in the United States. His name is. Gustavo Arellano. His book is called Taco USA.
It's great.
You should read it. Called up Gustavo. I asked him where this whole flower tortillas are for white people trope came from in Mexican culture. He explained it, and it was super, super interesting. It was super interesting to hear him argue that the trope is actually misleading, that it mainly reflects a kind of Mexico City point of view, the dominant cultural and media voice within Mexico, the people from the big capital city down south. It's a trope of theirs that ignores the perspective of underrepresented people from the poorer and more arid regions of Northern Mexico and the parts of the Southwestern United States that used to be Northern Mexico until the US seized them by force. Anyway, these are wheat growing regions historically for many reasons. Flower tortillas have always been Mexican up north, and white Americans naturally first encountered tortillas via their border with Northern Mexico, so flower tortillas got up here first.
Here's the thing that I've noticed, Wesley, in my, quote/unquote, "lived experience," as though there's any other kind. Here's something that I've noticed, anecdotally. The people who say, "Why you got to make everything about race and ethnicity and gender identity and sexuality and all that stuff, why you got to make it all about that?" the people who complain that, who say that, those are almost exclusively people of the historically dominant ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexuality.
They, we, are the only people who don't want to talk about this stuff or hear about this stuff. Pretty much everybody else wants to talk about it because it is so omnipresent in their lives. Just because it isn't important to you doesn't mean it isn't important. And if you just didn't know that the issue existed, well, fine. That's my job to bring new and interesting and important things to your attention.
Of course, there's a possibility that this isn't about whether something is relevant to you. There's a possibility that the reason you don't want to hear about it is because it is threatening to you. You don't want to hear stories where you or people who look like you or people who are related to you are the bad guy. Neither do I. I don't want to be the bad guy. I want to be the hero. Everybody does. I want to hear those kinds of stories.
That's how I feel. Feelings are neither good nor bad. What matters is what you do with those feelings. Do we push past our discomfort and consider the perspectives of others even if those perspectives are unflattering to us? I think that would be the virtuous thing to do, and to do the opposite would be the opposite of virtue. I don't think that you lack virtue, Wesley. I just think that you're a young guy who's still learning. You live in central Oregon, an almost uniformly white place. By design, Oregon was founded as an explicitly, all-white settlement with the Oregon Black exclusion laws in the mid 19th century, not that long ago in the scheme of things.
White Oregon settlers hated slavery, but they hated Black people even more.
After what's known as the Cockstock Incident,
Which you can look up if you don't know about it, white oregon settlers became worried that black settlers might incite an uprising among the local indigenous americans.
Now 170 years later, you, Wesley, live
In an almost uniformly white place as a result.
You didn't do that. That's not your fault, but you are an inheritor of that legacy whether you want to be or not. My house, my literal physical house is currently full of messes that I most certainly did not make, but I'm going to have to help clean them up because it's my house. I didn't start the Mexican American War on the thinnest of pretenses so that I could steal half of the Mexican lands, but I am a citizen of the country that did that. I don't think that I have a history of taking recipes from historically marginalized cultures and then using my relative position of privilege to profit handsomely off of those recipes while simultaneously misrepresenting them, making everybody believe that tacos are one thing when actually they're a totally different thing to the people who invented them.
I don't think that I do that, but lots of people in my position have done that before me. That's like a thing in cooking media. So it's my job to not do that. It's my job to try to do the opposite of that. I don't know what your job is, Wesley. I imagine you don't know yet either. You'll figure it out. I hope that my stuff helps you to come to your own enlightened understanding of the world, which may end up being very different from my hopefully enlightened understanding of the world, but hopefully your understanding will be no less enlightened, even if it's different.
Hopefully, it'll be more enlightened. I realize that enlightened, it's another word for woke, but, hey, the United States was ostensibly founded on enlightenment values. I'm all about enlightenment values. I think a lot of what people describe derisively as woke culture does actually deserve derision. Virtue signaling is indeed obnoxious and ultimately self-serving. Diet culture is also a real thing that is actually bad, but that doesn't mean diets are bad. It's not bad to consider what you eat and to modify it in order to achieve your goals, aka, diet. Just because woke culture is obnoxious doesn't mean that being awakened to the experiences of people very removed from yourself is bad.
In fact, being awakened to such things is the opposite of bad. It is virtuous. I try to be virtuous, not be a virtuous signaler. There's people who want me to be a virtuous signaler. For every person like you, Wesley, who writes me saying, "Hey, man. Why do you got to talk about politics?" for every person like you, I've got another person who writes me saying, "How dare you remain silent on issue XYZ. Silence is violence.". I'm doing the best I can to make fun little videos and pods that are sort of about food but are also virtuous in their own modest way, connecting the delicious things that we all like to eat to the bigger, more important things in the world.
Regarding boiled eggs, I have no idea the best way to do that. I will test the methods sometimes soon. I'll get back to you, my man. If anybody else out there has a two-part question where I can way over-answer one part of it and then virtually ignore the other part, well, please send those to askadamquestions@gmail, askadamquestions@gmail.com. Ideally send in your question in video or audio form. Assuming I've not totally alienated you with the last hour or so of gabbing, I'll talk to you next time. Phew...