Ask Adam: Why do we like extremely hot/cold food? Real vanilla vs imitation vanilla? (PODCAST E20)

Today, we'll be talking about vanilla extract

Versus imitation vanilla extract.

But first, how temperature affects taste perception. I'm sure that there are some food groups that we consume that are probably skipping me right now that we prefer to be room temperature, but I'm talking about the majority of foods.

Why do we like them either too hot or too cold? Adam: It's an interesting question, Samuel, especially coming from your part of the world.

There seems to be a thing where people in southern and south-eastern Asia really like food that is literally burn your mouth hot. And I've never really quite understood that. I hate burning my tongue. I burned my tongue last night at dinner, and I am still really bummed about it. Not only does extremely hot food literally burn the inside of your mouth, but it also suppresses taste perception. This has been studied extensively by a sensory biologist in Belgium named Dr. Karel Talavera. Pérez.

He does these experiments where he measures the electrical activity inside taste buds and such, and he has found that taste perception starts to decrease significantly when the temperature of food gets above 35 degrees Celsius, 95 Fahrenheit, which is really not that hot at all as far as food goes. At that point, taste perception measurably decreases. Adam: So, you could hypothesize that some people might have developed a preference for really hot food because their food was bad, and they'd really rather not actually taste it if given the choice, but that's easily as offensive as the hypothesis that people developed heavy spices in their cuisine to cover up the taste of food that's gone off, and I don't really feel like arguing either of those hypotheses tonight.

I do notice, anecdotally, that cultures that love super hot food, temperature hot food, those cultures also tend to be big soup-eating cultures. When you think of Vietnamese cuisine, what do you think of? You think of a boiling hot bowl of pho, or "fuh," I guess it's pronounced. Apparently, some people in Vietnam actually pronounce it "foh," in addition to "fuh," but anyway. Pho. That's what you think of, that boiling cauldron of soup.

Adam: I think that phenomenon is easily explained by the extremely high heat capacity of water. It takes a huge amount of energy to raise the temperature of water. Therefore, it takes a long time for hot water to lose its energy and cool down. Hot soup stays hot for a long time. This is why my favorite soup trick is to boil my vegetable soup until it's cooked, and then right before I want to eat it, I throw in a bunch of frozen peas. The peas absorb a ton of the heat. They thaw instantly. They're still nice and bright green when you eat them.

And the soup is instantly at an edible temperature. Reason number 1005 why I love frozen peas. But anyway, Dr.

Talavera Pérez has also noted that the

Inverse about temperature is also true.

There is a temperature below which we start to lose taste perception, and that's around 15C, 60 Fahrenheit, which also isn't terribly cold. 15C, 60 Fahrenheit. That's not super cold, but that's where things might start to drop off, at least a little. Adam: There's a mouse study that he and some colleagues did where they looked at TRP proteins involved in taste perception.

TRP is transient receptor potential proteins. And what they found is TRP channels related to sweetness perception perk up between 15 and 35C. So, that might explain why lots of cold desserts are great when they're cold, but when they warm up, they're really too sweet. If you've ever made really any frozen dessert, snow cones, Italian ice, ice cream, the liquid base that you make tastes sickly sweet. But then, you freeze it, and it tastes just right. That may be because your sweetness-perceiving TRP channels effectively close off, starting below 15 degrees C, 60 Fahrenheit. And that's a good thing, because frozen desserts need a lot of sugar for textural, structural reasons. Sugar inhibits ice crystallization.

So, if you want really smooth, creamy ice cream, that's not filled with sharp ice crystals, it helps to put in a lot of sugar. Sugar also helps keep the ice cream soft enough to actually scoop, even when it's being held at a very low temperature. Ice cream just works better when you put in way too much sugar. So, it's good that we can't really taste all of the sugar at that cold temperature. Adam: This might lead you to wonder, well, what's the point of ice cream then? Why not just make a sweet creamy dessert that's served lukewarm, and then we won't have to put in as much sugar? None of us needs to be eating more sugar. Good point. Good question. Well, I will say, I think it's safe to assume, or presume, that people like very cold desserts and very cold drinks because they cool us down, hence their particular popularity in hot climates and during hot seasons.

There's nothing like an ice cream on a hot summer day. I don't think we need a scientist to prove that one for us. That is manifestly true. Adam: Here's a weird finding from a 2020 paper out of France. "Consumers spontaneously infer that warm food contains more calories.". This is based on experimental data. They had people on tasting panels who were overestimating the caloric content of hot foods, or more likely, they were underestimating the caloric content of cold foods. The authors of this paper expressed concern that cold-served foods might lead to overeating, because people think they're eating a low cal food, just because the food is cold.

I believe all of these tasting panels were done in the West, so I don't know if this is culturally universal. Certainly in Western food, usually healthy foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, these are often eaten raw and cold, whereas higher calorie foods like meat and bread, those are more likely to be cooked and served hot. So, maybe that's where that association comes from. Adam: But speaking of calories, there is a 2012 study by French and American scientists where they found the temperature of beverages affects how we perceive food that we're eating with those beverages. They had people eat chocolate and cheddar cheese.

Not in the same bite, I don't think.

They had people eat chocolate and cheddar

Cheese with beverages of different temperatures, and they found that if you're drinking something cold with your meal, your perception of sweetness and creaminess and chocolatey-ness, all of that is suppressed with a cold beverage.

The authors conclude from this that those cultures which tend to expect cold drinks with their meal might therefore have a bias toward sweeter, richer foods.

We usually have cold drinks with our meals here in the US, whereas European and Asian people show a greater preference toward less cool water and/or hot tea, and that kind of thing. So basically, this may be another reason why we're so fat in the United States. Our cold drinks suppress our perception of sugar and fat, so we need more sugar and fat to compensate. Adam: Quite a few studies show that temperature affects taste perception in lots of different directions. Beer tastes more bitter as it warms up, that's probably one reason everybody tends to hate warm beer. Salty meats taste saltier when served cold, another study found that. The mechanisms at play are not fully understood. There's one study indicating that temperature itself stimulates taste perception, even in the absence of any food at all.

This is an older study out of Yale, year 2000. They literally just warmed and cooled the tip of people's tongues, and found that warming stimulates a sweet taste, while cooling stimulates sour or salty tastes. So maybe, it's not that cold allows us to taste the salt in the lunch meat, but rather we are simply tasting the cold itself as saltiness, in addition to the salt that's in the cold lunch meat. Adam: I will say, I expected to find much more scientific literature on this topic than I did when I went looking for you, Samuel. I expected to find a million papers titled Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Cold, because that is a lyric from an 18th century English nursery rhyme called Pease Pudding Hot, and the phrase, "Some like it hot," has been a cultural trope in English ever since, used as the title for movies and other songs.

And there are so many scientific papers titled Some Like It Hot: sciencey subtitle. For example, Some Like It Hot: Mouse Temperature Preferences in Laboratory Housing. Obviously a burning question for scientists who depend on rodent experiments, which is a lot of them.

Adam: Here's another one. Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Cold: The Heat Shock Response Is Found in New Zealand, But. Not Antarctic Notothenioid Fishes. Notothenioids are a group of 19 Antarctic fish species and sub-Antarctic fish species, and the heat shock response is a thing that almost all animals have where our bodies do certain things to keep our proteins from misfolding and denaturing in response to heat. These fish apparently evolve to have no heat shock response at all because they live in the Antarctic and it's super cold and they don't need a heat shock response. Adam: The Billings and Sherman paper that we discussed in the last pod about the correlation between hot climates and spicy food. That original paper from the nineties was titled Antimicrobial Functions of Spices: Why Some Like It Hot. I could go on and on with further examples.

I just love the image of a scientist up late at night at the keyboard writing their latest scholarly opus, and doing that hissing retainer laugh when it occurs to them to cheekily title their paper, Some Like It Hot: science, science, science. Anyway, I expected to find a million such papers about temperature preferences in food, and I did not. Most studies on this topic that I have found noted in their introductions the paucity of research on this topic. That guy Dr. Karel Talavera Pérez seems to be doing the most interesting research here. I think I will try to interview him for a video, if he wants to be interviewed. His research suggests that the sweet spot is 15 to 35 degrees Celsius, 60 to 95 degrees. Fahrenheit.

That's the sweet spot for maximum taste perception.

Food served outside of that range starts

To lose some of its taste.

Adam: So, why is nearly every restaurant around the world, at this very moment, working incredibly hard to serve food that is way above or below that very lukewarm temperature range? Well, let me speculate a bit now. First of all, let's remember that flavor is not just about taste. It's about smell, too. In fact, smell might play a significantly larger role in our perception of food. Smell happens when aromatic compounds become volatile, evaporate, travel through the air into our nasal cavity, and bump up against one of our smell receptors. Pretty much all molecules, I believe, are more volatile at higher temperatures.

I think they all are. Hot food is more aromatic as a result. So, that's maybe one reason why we like really hot food. Even if taste is suppressed, smell is enhanced at higher temperatures. Adam: It's also important to remember that hot food doesn't stay hot for long, unless it's soup. So, restaurants endeavor to serve food at a temperature higher than its ideal eating temperature, because they know it's going to cool down. It's going to cool down as the server is bringing it to the table, and it's going to cool down as the customer is sitting there munching on it. You don't want to serve a lukewarm plate, because the customer might then accuse you of serving them something that isn't fresh.

We associate extremely high or extremely low temperatures with freshness, right? At least, modern people do, people who live in the age of cooking and refrigeration. We associate extreme serving temperatures with freshness, because when food has just been cooked, it's still extremely hot. Therefore, heat is an indication of freshness. It just came out of the kitchen. When food has just been taken out of the refrigerator or the freezer, it's still very cold. Therefore, cold is an indication of freshness. When food sits around for a long time, it equilibrates with room temperature. Therefore, room temperature food, or thereabouts, that's an indication of the opposite of freshness.

Adam: Surely, this is a cultural association that we have acquired in response to cooking and cooling technologies, but I do wonder if there's something genetic at play here too, something from our distant evolutionary past. Lukewarm food is in the bacterial danger zone. The danger zone is between 40 and 135 Fahrenheit, five and 60C. That is the zone in which most pathogenic bacteria are happiest, and most able to reproduce. So, maybe we evolved to be grossed out by lukewarm food because that food is more likely to be contaminated with germs. I think the majority view among anthropologists is that cooking technology is old enough to have significantly affected human evolution. So, we may have evolved to prefer really hot food, because really hot food is generally going to be safer, as long as it doesn't burn you. And while mechanical refrigeration is only a century or two old, people have had non-mechanical methods of refrigeration for thousands and thousands of years, like icehouses or caves.

That kind of thing. Adam: Cold also restricts microbial growth, so maybe we really have evolved to like cold food too, for that reason. Or maybe, an evolved preference for cold comes from water.

Consider the difference between a cool, fast-moving

Mountain stream, and a warm, stagnant pond.

Which of those do you want to

Drink from, if given the choice? in warm climates, at least, water warms up when it sits still, and it becomes hospitable to all kinds of dangerous microorganisms.

A rushing mountain stream is colder, and is therefore safer to drink. Freshly collected rainwater is pretty cold usually. It warms up as it sits around, growing bacteria.

That's a pretty good reason for us to have evolved a taste for extreme cold, don't you think? Adam: But getting back to hot. There are anthropologists who have speculated. That may be the reason we like hot meat covered in hot, viscous sauce, is because our ancestors used to feast on the raw, bloody flesh of freshly killed animals, particularly warm-blooded fellow mammals. Really fresh-killed mammalian meat is quite warm, one presumes. Not that I would know from experience. But the prevalence of meat-eating among ancient humans is a point of significant scientific contention, and I don't want to get into right now. Regardless, it is interesting that we seem to prefer food that is served both hotter and colder than that narrow range where our taste perception is strongest. Adam: That seems weird, given that intensity of taste is generally viewed as a positive nowadays, within reason.

Recipe writers, such as myself, we brag all the time about how intense our food is. We rarely brag about it being the opposite. We don't say, "Wow, check out this new recipe I came up with. It's so bland.". And if we do brag about that, we reach for euphemistic words like mild or subtle, delicate. But here, I think it's important to remember that food tastes way better now than it ever did in the past. Food is awesome now, and that's another reason why most of us in the developed world are fatter than we want to be. Food is just so great now.

For most of human history until now, humans have had to choke down really gross stuff in order to survive. So, maybe it was in our advantage to eat foods that are within a temperature range where tasting is suppressed. It's better to not be able to taste it. I don't know. Adam: I do want to sneak in a quick plug for lukewarm food. Lukewarm is easily my favorite serving temperature for pizza. All the elements of a slice of pizza just hold together way better as you eat them when it's lukewarm, compared to a pizza slice that is piping hot. It just falls apart.

And if you've ever thought that the flavor of lukewarm food is stronger compared to that of piping hot food, well, we just established that you were not making that up. Heat suppresses taste above 35C, 95 Fahrenheit, increasingly, right? Starts to drop off around there, apparently. I want to eat pizza and savory pie and meat and baked goods, all at temperatures that are warm enough so that you still have lots of volatile aromatics, lots of smells. It's warm enough that the texture is really succulent, and not stiff or slimy, but it's not so hot that the heat kills taste, kills epidermal cells on your tongue, et cetera. And of course, food that's too hot is less solid. It falls apart easier and that's no good. So that is my plug for lukewarm food.

So, why would it be any different

For baking a chocolate chip cookie? wouldn't it just evaporate out of the cookie? and then, as a bonus question, are there any differences between vanilla extract, the natural kind and imitation vanilla? what are your thoughts on that? anyway, that's my question.

Thank you. Adam: Greetings, Ellie, from the opposite end of the Appalachian Trail. I'm waving to you. Can you see me? It's funny, when I first moved here to East Tennessee, I realized that I've actually moved home to the same Appalachian Ridge-and-Valley system that I grew up in, 600 miles to the north, in central Pennsylvania. Geophysically, it's the same place, just spread out on a very, very long line that reaches all the way up into Western Mass, where you are, Ellie.

I spent the most magical summer of my life in Western Massachusetts at Tanglewood. This one time at band camp, et cetera. Anyway. Adam: Firstly, it is interesting to note that swapping margarine for at least some of the butter in your cookie recipe has been so successful. I am not surprised. It's saving you money, as you mentioned, because, quote unquote, "industrial seed oils" are a lot cheaper than dairy fats, so margarine is cheaper than butter. Plus, margarine has a significantly higher melting point, and that seems to improve the texture of baked goods. Makes them softer and moisture somehow once cooled.

Plus, the fat content of margarine is generally higher than that of butter. Butter is 10 to 15% water, and that probably affects things. People have known for generations that replacing some or all of the butter in baked goods with lard, and then later shortening, that really has some benefits for texture, more so than flavor. Mostly it's a texture benefit. Really, nothing beats butter for flavor, but margarine is basically shortening with artificial butter flavor added. So, that takes care of the flavor problem. Adam: Side note. What makes butter-flavored shortening different from margarine? Butter-flavored shortening is a distinct product marketed by the good people at the Crisco corporation.

How is it not margarine? I suppose the texture is a little firmer owing to the specific mix of fully hydrogenated oil and other oils that they use now to imitate the texture of partially hydrogenated oil that they used to use until governments around the world banned artificial trans fats. Trans fats are created in the process of making partially hydrogenated oil. So, products now contain theoretically negligible amounts of partially hydrogenated oil. Lots of products contain fully hydrogenated oil, which has a very hard, waxy texture, so they have to soften it up by mixing in other oils, and that's where we get today's shortening and margarine. Adam: Anyway, vanilla. Lots of good questions there about vanilla. First question is, doesn't vanilla just boil away when you cook it? Well, the answer is some of it does, but not all of it. Compare it to water.

Water becomes volatile and starts boiling away rapidly at 212 Fahrenheit, 100C, right? But that doesn't mean that the entire pot of water just goes poof the instant that you bring it to a boil, right? It takes a lot of time to boil away all the water. It's really the same deal with everything else. People say all the time, "Oh, you got to bring that sauce up to a boil to burn off the alcohol," as though ethanol hits its boiling point of 173 Fahrenheit, 37C and just goes poof. It does start leaving the pan rapidly as you hit and exceed that temperature, but it doesn't go away instantly. And indeed, lots of research has shown that it takes hours, potentially, to boil most of the alcohol out of food, depending on the temperature and the dimensions of the pan, and all of that.

Adam: Vanilla extract, as you mentioned, Ellie,

Has usually been extracted from the vanilla pod with alcohol, but that doesn't mean the vanilla flavor compounds are alcohol.

The alcohol from the extract boiling away? That is a phenomenon that is distinct from the vanilla flavors boiling away. The alcohol is just a middle man that delivers the vanilla to your food.

Once the vanilla itself is delivered, we don't need the alcohol anymore, though I'm sure the chemistry is way more complicated than that. I'm sure there are complexes formed between the ethanol and the vanilla flavors, and they might evaporate together, all kinds of things. I don't know. Chemistry is way more complicated than I usually make it sound. Adam: What I'm pretty sure I know is that some vanilla flavor does leave your cookies as you bake them. The conventional wisdom is that you should minimize cooking your vanilla. Only cook it as much as you have to, because you will lose some in the cooking, and vanilla is expensive. It is extracted from the seed pod of an orchid that must be artificially pollinated during the only 12 hours out of every year when the flower of the plant opens up.

So yeah, vanilla is expensive. And if you're in a situation where you can put the vanilla in your food after cooking instead of before, well, you might as well go with after, so that you don't lose more of the expensive vanilla than is necessary. Can't do that with cookies, though. You can't stir vanilla into already baked cookies. It's got to be baked in the cake, as it were. So, put in a lot, because some of it will evaporate during cooking. Not all of it, but some of it, or otherwise change in a way that diminishes its flavor. Adam: If you think vanilla doesn't make a difference in cookies and cakes and such, well, do a side by side taste test.

Mix up your cookie batter with everything except for the vanilla, split the batter in two, mix vanilla into one of the batches, bake and taste. If you don't notice a big difference between the two cookies, I would guess that you're just not using enough vanilla. I pour in a giant glug, and I have been criticized for doing so by people on the internet, but. I want enough vanilla that I can really taste it, because I love vanilla. But even a subtle amount of vanilla does make a difference. When it's absent, you might not realize that it's absent, but the cookie or the cake or whatever will taste noticeably empty or a little bland. Adam: I've done the tests to convince myself of that. Similar to the tests I've done on onions.

Every damn savory recipe starts with an onion, and rarely do you taste it in the finished product. So, why not just leave it out? Well, I started leaving the onion out of soups and stews and such, and man, did I notice its absence. Stuff just tastes empty and bland without the onion. I think it's the same way with vanilla in baking, though other extracts can do the job of vanilla. I use almond extract all the time, orange extract, great stuff. They can do the job of vanilla. And indeed, imitation vanilla can do the job of real vanilla.

Real vanilla is the pod from the

Orchid.

People either use the dried and enzymatically

Browned seed pulp from inside the vanilla pod directly, you can put that pulp right into your food, or they use an extract of the pod.

You soak the dried and enzymatically browned pods in alcohol until all of the flavor compounds come out into the solution. Aromatic flavor compounds are usually somewhat oily in nature. Oils are not soluble in water, but are somewhat soluble in ethanol, so we use booze instead of water. That's real vanilla extract. Adam: Imitation vanilla extract tastes surprisingly different to me, at least the ones that I've tried, and I am surprised by that. I would think that modern science could reproduce the flavor of vanilla synthetically by now, but buy a bottle of imitation extract and taste it side by side with the real thing. Every one that I've tried has been pretty different from the real thing.

Not bad, not necessarily bad, but different, which is weird, because the dominant flavor compound in vanilla is vanillin, and vanillin is easily synthesized. It used to be synthesized from eugenol, which is a structurally similar compound found in nutmeg, and basal and cloves. They used to extract eugenol from those kinds of plants, I think mostly from cloves, and they would do a little chemical alchemy on it and turn it into vanillin. That was imitation vanilla. Adam: They also used to get it from beaver butts. That's not an urban legend. That's a real thing. It's called castoreum.

It is a cocktail of pheromones excreted by beavers to mark their territory. Comes out of these little castor sacks that are near beavers' buttholes, and it tastes a lot like vanilla, and has therefore been used as a "natural flavoring" for many decades. Natural flavorings. There's so much better than the artificial ones, right? Sorry. Adam: There's a reason that we refer to lots of food smells as being musky. Musk, pheromones — they're often really chemically similar to flavor compounds in food, perhaps because they are often evolved for the same basic purpose, attracting or repelling animals. Anyway, beaver butt vanilla is not super cost-effective to produce, as you can imagine. How would you like to have that job? And eugenol is cheaper than vanilla, but it still costs money to grow cloves or whatever so that you can extract out the eugenol and then use that as a precursor for synthetic vanillin.

Adam: Science produced a much more cost-effective process, which involves using the lignin in wood as the precursor. Lignin is a class of organic polymers that make plant parts woody. Trees are mostly cellulose, like all other plants, but what makes trees different is that their number two constituent molecule is lignin. For a long time, the dominant way of making paper was this thing called the sulfite process where they treated wood chips with, you guessed it, sulfites, to separate the cellulose and the lignin. You then use the cellulose to make paper, and you have a lignin-containing byproduct left called brown liquor. In the early to mid-20th century, several processes were invented to make vanillin using this lignin brown liquor as the precursor. This should not be surprising to anyone who enjoys a fine barrel-aged spirit like I do. Whiskey and cognac and other liquors aged in charred or roasted wooden barrels.

There's an incredibly complex chemical reaction that occurs over time between the alcohol and the charred wood, that results in real vanillin. Good aged whiskey usually has a little vanilla note to it because of this. Adam: There is apparently still one company that makes wood based vanilla from that paper-making byproduct.

They are in Norway and they're still doing it.

But the way of making paper that produces that byproduct has fallen way out of popularity because of its environmental impact, which is apparently not great. So now, we mostly use other paper-making processes that also happen to not make that byproduct from which you can synthesize vanillin. So now, most synthesized vanillin is made using a petrochemical as the precursor, which sounds yucky, but it's fine. It's the same molecule in the end.

There are some fermentation-based methods for making vanillin on the horizon that governments might allow you to label as natural flavor as opposed to artificial flavor, and that really matters to some people for some reason. I don't know. Maybe those fermentation methods will become more popular in time. Adam: Anyway, vanillin is easily synthesized, so you would think that imitation vanilla extract would taste just like real vanilla extract, but it doesn't. If you don't believe me, do a side by side taste test. The most likely explanation, I think, is that there are other secondary flavors in real vanilla. Vanillin is the dominant flavor, but there must be others in there as well. A vanilla pod is a complex thing with lots of different molecules in it.

It is dried or cured through a pretty complex process that allows a number of enzymatic changes to occur in the pod, giving it a funky, almost fermented smell. In fact, I would imagine that some amount of actual fermentation occurs during the curing process. There's just a lot going on in there besides vanillin. Adam: I will say that some people regard imitation vanilla as tasting stronger than real vanilla. It might be the case that imitation vanilla has more vanillin in it than real vanilla does, depending, of course, on the brand. So, Ellie, given that your goal is to drive down the cost of the cookies that you are mass producing to hand out to hikers on the Appalachian trail, well, my advice would be absolutely just do a test batch with some imitation vanilla and see how you like them. You'll probably like them just fine. We all eat synthesized vanillin every day in a million processed foods.

Chocolate, ice cream, cookies. Imitation vanilla is everywhere. Adam: It can't always be the real stuff, because the real stuff is justifiably expensive. My real vanilla brand of choice, hashtag not an ad, is the double strength vanilla from. Penzeys Spices. Penzeys is based in Wisconsin, but they have a store in Arlington, Mass that I used to go to. It is the best vanilla ever, and now I order it online for nearly a hundred dollars a bottle. Worth it.

It's a big bottle and it's double strength. But, remember that one time where I baked 40 batches of brownies in a weekend so that. I could figure out the secret to brownie skin? I used imitation vanilla for all of those batches, because I'm not crazy. And most of them tasted real good indeed. And Indeed is the sponsor of this episode.

Adam: Indeed is simply the best place

To find people to hire.

It's a platform where you can attract,

Interview and hire talented people all in one place.

Don't spend hours flipping between multiple job sites, looking for people with the right skills for your company.

That's for chumps. Find great talent faster with time-saving tools like Indeed instant match, assessments and virtual interviews. With instant match, more than 80% of employers get quality candidates whose resume on Indeed matches your job description the moment you sponsor a job. That 80% figure is according to Indeed's US data. Adam: As a small business owner myself, I cannot imagine posting a job on a million different places. I want one place. And three out of four US online job seekers search for jobs on Indeed every month, according to Comscore. Indeed is the only job site where you only pay for applications that meet your must-have requirements.

Indeed delivers four times more hires than all the other job sites combined, according to TalentNest. Join more than three million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Start hiring now with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/Ragusea. Offer good for a limited time. Claim your $75 credit now at indeed.com/Ragusea. That link is in the notes slash description. Indeed.com/Ragusea. Terms and conditions apply.

Need to hire? You need Indeed. Thomas: Hey Adam. I am Thomas from New Jersey, 19 years old. Going to school in Boston, but currently stuck in my room because of COVID quarantine. I've been thinking a lot about accents recently, and I think it's an underrated privilege to have grown up with speaking this accent, which is pretty close to the accent of politicians and actors in this country, for the most part, which is definitely not the case for people who grew up speaking African American Vernacular English, or different dialects of English in the American South, where you currently live.

So, as a radio guy and now a freelance communicator, I have to ask, do you think having your native accent helped you in the job that you currently have? Do you think that this is a big, I don't want to say problem, but a point of discussion for public radio, where you worked, and do you think that's changed over the course of your career? I'd love to know your thoughts.

Thanks. Adam: Yeah, so, Thomas, in his email to me, mentioned.

WNYC radio, listening to WNYC where he grew up, in New Jersey, which is near New York. City. Yeah, so, for people who don't know, WNYC is the big public radio or NPR station in. New York City. I worked in public radio for a very long time. Public radio, historically in the US, has been an upscale product. Before podcasts existed, public radio was basically the only source of smart, intellectual audio programming. Some people in public radio still think that they are the only source of smart, intellectual audio programming, because they haven't gotten the memo about podcasts yet, because they are old.

Adam: New York City is a place with a very strong regional accent, but it's mostly restricted to the lower classes.

As I understand it, a few generations

Ago, the upper classes in new york also had their own very strong regional accent.

Not quite the same as the one used in the lower classes. It was a little more British-sounding. Indeed, Northeastern US accents are probably vestiges of how the original English colonists talked, and influenced by further transatlantic travel and exchange among the aristocratic classes in both countries. But upper class New York accents eventually faded into the general Northern US accent that I'm speaking right now. Or rather, they became the accent that became the general Northern US accent. It became the general accent because New York exported it through its dominance of mass media.

I'm not sure which of those two things is the thing that happened. Probably both. Adam: But anyway, the fact that no announcer on. WNYC sounds like Tony Soprano or whatever, this has long been seen as an indication of how distant WNYC is from the working classes that it should theoretically be serving as a philanthropically-supported, distantly quasi-governmental public service. Everybody on WNYC is educated, and the halls of formal education are a place where historically, many aspects of human behavior are standardized. Think of received pronunciation in British English. RP. Also known as standard Southern British.

Anyone outside of the UK would recognize it as the upper class, posh British accent. It's how the Royals talk. Another term for the RP accent is Oxford English, because it is associated with University of. Oxford, where all the fancy people in Britain go to school. Oxford or Cambridge. It's the Oxbridge accent. And BBC radio and TV announcers were criticized for many years for only using Oxford English on the air and thus not representing the public. They purported to serve.

Only relatively recently has the BBC embraced announcers with quote unquote, "regional" accents. Adam: It's a tricky thing, because there is an advantage to having people on the radio or the TV or the pod, whatever. There's an advantage to having those people speak in the dominant dialect, the dominant accent, because usually, everyone knows and understands that accent, even if they don't speak it themselves. And that's a good thing. That's useful. It just sucks that the dominant accent tends to be the accent of the privileged classes. That's why it's dominant. And therefore, favoring the dominant accent in broadcast speech, that just becomes another win that we hand to the privileged classes.

No, Thomas, I don't think that my accent has changed very much over my life. I'm a member of the privileged classes, especially these days, thanks to your patronage, viewership. Adam: When I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, most people talked basically the way that I talk now.

That is, smack dab in the heartland

Of standard northern us english.

The poorer kids at my school, the

More rural kids, the farm kids.

They usually had a slightly different sound in their Os. They would say, "ouw.". And lots of vocabulary from Southern US English, lots of that juts up into that part of Pennsylvania, because it's all the Appalachian mountains, all the way up.

It's all the same place. So, again, the poorer or more rural people I grew up with often said, "Y'all," instead of, "You all.". Actually, Central and Western Pennsylvania, English has a unique feature, where y'all is said in place of you, the singular second-person pronoun, and in place of the plural, you all, they say yinz. "Ouw, yinz guys are going to the Sheetz's?". Grew up with lots of people who talked like that. Adam: Lower class people from rural Pennsylvania are often referred to derisively, but sometimes affectionately, as yinzers. Lower class people from Western PA. yinzers.

I was never a yinzer. I grew up among yinzers, because I grew up out in the woods, but my parents were highly educated professionals, so, that's why I am who I am. I do say y'all, and Lauren always chides me whenever I do say y'all, because she thinks that I am affecting the voice of someone much more down to earth than I am. But I've always said y'all. People where I grew up said y'all. And then, I moved to the South, where they say y'all even more. And then, y'all emerged as the best solution to a grammatical problem of English. Adam: We are rapidly getting hip to the idea that lots of people have never fit neatly into a purely binary gender paradigm, okay? Any reading of history will turn up so, so many people, from centuries ago who were clearly queer or trans or whatever.

This is nothing new, people. Humans have always been this way and we are belatedly getting hip to that fact. But our language has binary gendered pronouns, and this is particularly bad when we need to address a large group of people, many of whom may not identify as ladies or gentlemen. So, we really shouldn't address them as ladies and gentlemen. That shit is rude. We need a gender-neutral, second-person plural pronoun, and as luck would have it, we already have one. It's y'all. Say y'all.

Y'all is a good word. The fact that it emerged from Southern and/or lower class US English is not a reason to not use it. It's a reason to use it. Y'all is a great word. Every English speaker should say y'all. The queen should say y'all. Adam: Yes, Thomas.

I am extremely fortunate to have been

Born into the language and dialect and accent that.

 

I have, because it is the accent of many of the world's most powerful people, and thus, it is the accent that allows me to reach possibly the largest number of people in the world that can be reached with a single sound. Maybe Oxford English is slightly more globally well known thanks to the influence of the. BBC World service, but the global influence of Hollywood is probably even bigger, and most people in the movies talk basically the way that I do. So, tons of people in the world know this voice, and thus, my content is approachable to them. Thus, my very successful career on the YouTubes. These are unearned advantages that helped me get where I am. I have many earned advantages. I have skills that I worked very, very hard to develop, and I worked very hard to deploy those skills and make things with them.

But the accent and the language thing is an unearned advantage, and the other word for an unearned advantage is privilege. I am thus checking my privilege. Adam: That, however, is the only thing about my accent that I feel some semblance of shame over. Otherwise, I think my accent is just fine. I think your accent is just fine. Samuel from India at the top of the show, his accent is just fine. All our accents are just fine. I don't know why people want me to talk like someone I'm not.

Every time I say a word differently from how they say it, or how they think it should properly be said, I get a flood of emails and comments. And if I'm saying a word in some totally weird way that no one ever says, well sure, send me an email, correct me. But when I'm saying the word a way that lots of people say it, the way that people like me generally say it, then please shut up. You don't expect me to pronounce champagne "shampanya", even though that's how people in said wine region of Northeastern France actually pronounce it. They say "shampanya". English speakers the world over say champagne. If I say "shampanya", that's weird, even though that's the way people in "shampanya" actually say it. Adam: Now, that's a particularly loaded example because we have this broader history in the English-speaking world where Frenchiness is regarded as high class.

So, an English speaker who's conspicuously adopting French pronunciation sounds as though they are trying to flaunt how educated and worldly they are, and in the process, they end up sounding like a total tool. But nonetheless, if you're fine with me saying champagne instead of "shampanya", well, you should be fine with me saying "zwy-back" instead of zwieback. Zwieback, or however you say it, is a German word meaning twice baked. It refers to a kind of cake that is baked, sliced, and then baked again to yield a cracker-like texture. Such a food is also known as rusk. Adam: I mentioned zwieback in a video some time ago. I pronounced it "zwy-back" because that is an established United Statesian pronunciation of that word. That's just how lots of people here say it.

Don't believe me? Check the entry in the Oxford English dictionary.