The Meat Mafia Podcast

It doesn't make sense. So the more I start to scratch at that stuff, I thought There's just a whole lot more going on. There's this story that isn't being told at all. And I think I've just scratched the surface. I think there's so much more to this. Well, Mark, one of the things that I, or one of the expressions that you use in your book is nutritional wisdom.

And I just kept highlighting as I was going through, because I think it's such a great expression. What, what brought you to that concept, nutritional wisdom? It was, it was, it's a great point. It's, I think it's probably the most important idea in this book and what nutritional wisdom, what that idea is, is that, is that our Our palate, our inclinations, the food we like, the foods we like, our cravings, are in touch with our inner needs.

So something simple, like if you feel like an orange, maybe that's because Maybe you need vitamin C, or on some level your brain knows that oranges are good for you. Um, and a lot of people intuitively think that's true. In sort of the world, like you talk to people at a dinner party, they sort of think there's something to that.

If you enter the realms of, of human psychology and, and the people who study eating, that idea is considered passé and kind of woo and hilarious. But I found if you step into another part of campus, I visited Utah State University and the behavioral ecology department, they study animals in a totally different way.

They study animals within their environment and they study all the crazy things animals eat and the crazy things animals are faced with when it comes to eat. And they have a very different view of nutrition. So most of the humans that study our eating, they think basically we just want to stuff our face with calories.

And that sort of makes sense, right? Like, there's a lot of obesity, a lot of people are overweight, we love pizza and cheeseburgers and potato chips and ice cream and whipped cream, but there's so much it doesn't explain. Like, why are wild mushrooms so expensive and so incredibly delicious? Why does, to me, grass fed steak taste so much better than grain fed mediocre feedlot beef?

I mean, we enslave the population of humans to produce cloves on an Indonesian island. Cloves. Like, cloves. That's like this little seed bud thing that's just sort of packed with flavor, has absolutely nothing in the way of the classic nutrients, vitamins, um. That may be a tiny smattering, but you're getting nothing from that nutritionally.

Um, so it's, it was this behavioral, behavioral ecologist I met named Fred Provenza who, who basically completely spun my mind and made me think of the act of eating in a completely different way. And really what it is, it's an attempt to nourish ourselves. And I think a lot of the people who study humans think we sort of bumble about the world in kind of a dumb way.

hoovering in calories. And by eating a lot of different things, we just sort of happen to get the vitamins and minerals we need. And then there's people like Fred who say, no, in fact, our, our palate is incredibly sophisticated, uh, dynamic in ways we don't even fully understand. And that really opened my eyes and made me see not just how we've gotten eating screwed up, but how the way we're manipulating food is it's like, we're working against ourselves in ways that we don't understand.

Mhm. Yeah, it seemed to mark. I remember something that was really powerful as you were talking about this concept of dilution, whether it's dilution of the chicken that we're eating, dilution of the tomatoes that we're eating. How nature is actually signaling to us that the more flavorful it is naturally, the more nutrient dense the food is.

I feel like that was a pretty core tenant in the book. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because I thought that was really powerful when I was reading that. Yeah. So I think the, what the Dorito effect is, you know, people are always like, well, what is the Dorito effect? And what it is, it's essentially what's happened to food.

It's, it's what's happened to food through the lens of flavor. And there's two trends. And one of them is dilution of whole foods. So just all the whole foods we grow, the stuff that comes off farms, the plants and the animals are getting blander. Not only are they getting blander, they're losing nutritional density.

At the same time, all the processed food, this ultra processed food, the junk food we're not supposed to eat is getting more flavorful. Literally the flavor compounds that are, are being diminished on the farm are showing up. In junk food. So that's the Dorito effect on a very superficial level. It's like, okay, well, that sounds pretty dumb.

We're making good food, bland and bad food. Too tasty. Um, but getting inside what's going on is really interesting. So, and you talk about dilution and that's essentially what's happening to the food we grow. Um, I talk about a study. It came out, I think in the British nutrition journal, and it said that it looked at modern varieties of a produce versus heirloom and said that they're less nutritious.

This caught the attention of, I think it was Organic Gardening Magazine. They were harassing the, um, the USDA asking the, um, You know, it's basically what's going on. And it also caught the attention of a guy named Donald Davis, who was at the Biochemical Institute, I think at the University of Texas. And he took a good look at this, because he said, you know, it may not be that simple.

It might just be that there's a bit more water. He really did some, some really good science looking at the differences. And he found that broadly speaking, when you look at the, you know, the garden crops that we grow, they're losing nutrition, less calcium, less vitamin C, less riboflavin. The reason this is happening is because something called the dilution effect, and this is happening in two ways.

The first is through genetics. We have gotten much better at growing more food. Now on the surface, this is a good thing, right? We have way more mouths to feed. We also have less farmland because, you know, suburbs just keep expanding and everybody wants to live on nice land. Um, but that's come at a price.

And we've genetically, we've made the plants more productive. So they're putting, they're putting more of their energy into growth and into, into producing. You know, the stuff that we want to eat essentially. Um, and also it's the way we raise the plants, the pesticides, the fertilizer, they're always getting a lot of water.

We're essentially coaxing them into being very productive with things like the pesticides, the herbicides. We're saying, you know, don't worry, we'll take care of, of the, of the defense stuff. You just focus on growth. So we're growing lots of food, but that food is in some ways, you could almost say like less food like, like the nutrition is diminishing.

But so is the flavor, and this is where things get interesting, because Most of the essential nutrients in food, and let's say like tomatoes or grapes or something, they don't have any flavor. Vitamin C, I think, is the only one, and it's a bit sour. So if you look at it from a purely nutritional point of view, you'd say, well, it's just getting a little less sour.

But it's the flavor that's also diminishing. And I talk about the work of a guy named Harry Klee. He worked for Monsanto. He actually tried to breed a more flavor, not genetically modify. a more flavorful tomato by getting it to ripen longer and it didn't work. And what he realized is that the flavor story of a tomato, there's a lot more going on.

And what he found is if you, if you take a patch of California real estate, you know, farmland, it's growing about 10 times as much tomatoes now as it did a hundred years ago. So way, way, way more tomatoes, but every time we select a tomato plant for productivity. So we're saying, okay, you're disease resistant.

You've got a nice shelf life. You're producing lots of tomatoes. Every time we don't select flavor. It's like reverse evolutionary pressure. If you don't select a trait, you're going to lose it. And this is pretty much the story of all the fruits and vegetables that we grow. No one's paid for flavor.

There's no one knows of like, um, a more flavorful carrot. I mean, there's, I, I can tell you the kinds, but when you go to the supermarket, it's sold by the pound and everyone's like, well, I'm going to buy the 99 cent ones. Why would I buy the ones that cost 1. 29? So every time we do that as consumers, we're telling farmers, grow this the cheapest way possible.

Just give me more, more, more. And over decades of doing that, we've essentially selected flavor. It's gone. It's just these plants don't have the ability to produce flavor because those genes have, they're just gone to sleep. We've selected against it. We lost flavor for the same reason that we humans don't have a tail anymore because of reverse evolutionary pressure.

Do you think there's no, you're good. You're good. Go. I was gonna say, do you think there's a way to start to reverse the clock on that? Uh, sort of reverse evolutionary pressure, you know, in a way where we can start promoting more biodiversity and more, uh, you know, start filling the whole because I think the dichotomy between Whole foods losing nutrients and then also us producing a bunch of junk food at the same time.

So it almost makes the concept of like, what is food? This, uh, like ever ending rabbit hole that you're, you're, if you're eating whole foods, that's not even, really enough, like you're just scratching the surface. You need to go out and find whole foods that are raised properly, that are, have those nutrients in it.

So is it possible for us to start thinking about food in a way where we can start producing more of these nutrient dense foods? Yeah, absolutely. And what I would say actually is a lot of people get very worried about the nutrient density. And I'm not actually as worried. The worry I have is if a tomato is bland, you're just not going to eat it.

Or if you do eat it, you're going to put like miracle whip on it or ranch dressing. And then like the nutrition is just going totally the wrong direction. If you make that tomato tasty, you're more inclined to eat it. And it may have 20 percent less this or that But if you eat the tomato, you'll, you'll get those nutrients.

I think the flavor is a much bigger problem because if whole foods are bland, people are just not going to go near them. But here's what's interesting is that there appears to be a connection between the nutrients and the flavor. So I talked about this guy, Harry Cleat, and he essentially, when he tried to create this more flavorful tomato from Monsanto, And it didn't work.

He then went to the University of Florida, joined their horticultural sciences, and essentially devoted the last few decades to figuring out how to make tomatoes flavorful. And he had a key insight. He was invited to a meeting by a company called Syngenta, which is a huge multinational involved in agriculture and all sorts of stuff.

And there was a guy named Steve Goff, who was like, Essentially employed by them just to be this big brain this guy who he's like a senior fellow like he had this interesting title and he brought Harry clean to give a talk about how tomato makes flavor and he was talking about, um, one. Flavor flavor compound called phenol ethanol, which is like a rose scent.

It's a it's a key flavor compound in tomatoes, and he traced it back and he said Harry was interested in trying to figure out how does a tomato make flavor because he thought if I can figure out how the tomato makes flavor, I can start to figure out what genes are involved. I can start to Select those genes.

So he he walked this this process back and he said it all starts with an amino acid called phenol phenol alanine. And Steve Goff goes, Wow, that's really interesting because he's like a cellular physiologist. He says, This is a really kind of big expensive amino acid. It's so It's kind of metabolically valuable, isn't that interesting that this valuable amino acid would be connected to this flavor compound, which is an important part of the flavor of tomatoes.

So the two of them got together, and they looked at the most important flavor drivers of tomatoes these flavor compounds, and they found that they're all synthesized from essential nutrients. So if you look at it that way, you can think of the flavor of a tomato is like a sign telling your brain.

there's good stuff in here. Come and eat me. And so what that tells you is that if we improve the flavor of a tomato, we're going to have to get the nutrients right, because that's where the flavor comes from. So I think to some degree, these things hold hands. And if you say, how do you do that? It's a great question.

I think it's a really important question. And it's actually not that hard. You just start to breed for flavor. You start to create sensory panels where people taste these things and go, yeah, that tastes good. And in fact, people are already doing this. The problem is turning around this like gigantic aircraft carrier, which is our food system.

And, and, you know, it's one thing to find it at a farmer's market or some, you know, collective near Portland or something. It's another thing to walk into your local supermarket and be able to buy some tomatoes That tastes great or buy carrots that taste sweet and and densely of carrots so we can do it.

The question is, will we do it? And how do we do it? It's like there's almost no going back after you go to your local farmer's market and shake your farmer's hand and ask them about the strawberries or the blueberries or the tomatoes that they're growing. And then you sit down and cook with those ingredients and like the tomato is literally bursting the flavor right there's not, you don't even need to add anything to it besides salt and pepper and I think you even said that about chicken too.

I think there's that famous Julia Child quote where she said chicken should be so good. That all you need is like salt, pepper, olive oil, and you can just sauté it very simply. And it's so contrary to how we think about food now, where it's like everything is just so inherently denatured and diluted, right?

It's just very interesting where it's like The food is diluted and then the artificial flavoring of this processed food is continuing to increase. So it's like people that would naturally gravitate towards these healthier alternatives are now being pulled to the process stuff because it tastes so good and the quote unquote, healthy stuff is denatured.

So it's like incentivizing the wrong system. Yeah. And it's going wrong in, in like every possible way. It's interesting that you bring up chicken because. I find chicken recipes really interesting. I love to look at old cookbooks. And if you look at old cookbooks, you'd honestly think. Boy, these people were just unsophisticated idiots because they're just roasting chicken with salt and pepper and it seems as though they must have just lived in this really bland world.

But then when you look closely, you're like, well, they actually had curry powder. They had all the spices we have. They had all the herbs we have. They just seemed to use them much more sparingly. And I think the reason for that is their food was just much more flavorful. Now, if you compare the way they did fried chicken back then, They didn't deep fry it, they, they pan, you know, shallow fried it in a pan.

What you do, and I, I mean, if you can get your hands on what's called an heirloom fryer, I strongly recommend it. This, this is an heirloom chicken which is about 12 to 14 weeks old, weighs about two and a half pounds. Nothing like the chicken you buy in a store. And it is just so incredibly delicious. But what they would do is season it with salt and pepper, dredge it in flour, and then sort of, um, fry it so the skin gets crispy.

Then you pour a little bit of hot water in the pan and put a lid on it and it steams. And then you take the lid off and sort of crisp it up. It never really gets crispy the way of like KFC does. It's, it's more, It's, it's, it's more kind of gooey, but it's, it's really, really delicious. Well, now, I mean, that chicken like changed my life.

It was just, it's a profoundly intense, wonderful, happy chicken experience. Then you look at these modern recipes that these sort of hipster chefs kind of have to do for chicken. And it's like you brine it for a day in like bay leaf and Dr. Pepper and lemon and rosemary and it's just endless and then you deep fry it and then you, you put a sauce on it and then you blitz it with something and it's, it's, it's like stoner food.

You're like, this isn't chicken anymore. You're just, you're turning into something kind of like, I want to eat it. It's crunchy, but it's kind of gross at the same time. But you have to do that because I think so much of the chicken has just gotten so bland. I think that was one of the really powerful parts of your book.

As you talk about you and your, I think you and your wife intentionally sourced this chicken from a local farm and you prepared it with that fried method that you talked about. And yet, I think you unintentionally had a bunch of people over for dinner and all of you, like the whole group of you couldn't believe how flavorful it was and they were asking you how you prepared it and it was just this very simple method that's so contrary to how 99 percent of fried chicken is made today.

Yeah. In fact, it was a couple. It was a friend of my wife's. They were moving to New York the next day. They dropped him to say goodbye. And then it's like, oh, you know, stay for dinner. And so this woman, I didn't even know her at all. Really. I've met her once. She emailed me. I've never, and I've never heard from her back.

She just emailed me saying like that chicken was freaking insane. What did you do? Um, it really was an amazing meal. And here's the interesting thing too, because, and I, I talked about this in the Dorito effect, but it's something I've been thinking a lot more about. is the nature of deliciousness. We use that word and it means a lot of different things.

You know, people will talk about eating Doritos and that's like, you're just sort of, your hand goes back in the bag. You kind of feel guilty and gross afterwards. Then there's this other experience of delicious where it's like you're emotionally moved by something. And it's not just the enjoyment of the meal while you're eating it.

It's also how you feel afterwards. It's something we don't spend enough time talking about. We just think about this act of eating. But when I think about a great meal, it's often with great friends and the food is not only good in the moment, it sort of sets you up for this sort of satiated, happy, reflective period after the meal.

We never talk about that. And I think that's such a big part of eating. Mark, I'm curious. You must have traveled a bunch to different parts of the world as you've written a bunch about food. What have been some of your better experiences traveling and finding some of these food stories? Um, I, I'm always attracted to traditional, um, sort of grassroots food.

I, I find high end cooking often misses the boat. Um, it can be impressive. Uh, there's often a lot of theatrics and Um, I feel like there's a sense of like people spending a lot of money to be gratified for you just spent a lot of money on this. I love going to their equivalent of a farmer's market or a small town.

My favorite thing is just driving through Italy and going to small towns in the middle of nowhere and just going to a restaurant and like saying you just serve me what you would have and then like, you know, 15 minutes later you're weeping because the food is so good. Um, my favorite countries to eat in are probably Italy and Japan.

I've only been to Japan once, um, And I was absolutely blown away. Italy and Japan, well, South Korea also to some degree, but Italy and Japan shared the, the, this trait of just being kind of obsessed with food. Um, they have a lot of regionalism going on. These regions kind of sort of fight with each other.

They all think they have the best food that their recipe for this is the best. And oh, their, their recipe over there is terrible. Like they add tomatoes. What kind of idiot would add tomatoes? And then they're like, of course we have tomatoes. They don't have tomatoes. They're, they're savages. Um, and they have this passion.

What is so interesting is, is we tend to think the, the pleasure of eating is our, our undoing. Well, if that were true, in my view, and I think it's easy to defend, Italy and Japan have the best food in the world of any two countries, the western world, eastern world. They also have the thinnest people, so that's gotta be telling you we are getting something wrong.

Um, so I find traveling really interesting, but also, I was doing a story about chocolate for Bloomberg. Magazine in in Costa Rica, and I remember, you know, I was with the scientists. We traveled. We spent the whole day visiting these chocolate farms and we just went to some local restaurant and they had our steak and it was like from some local dairy cow that they killed.

And this is not a steak. You could well, maybe you could serve it. It was a bit more tough. But man, it had just the deepest, most resonant flavor. This was a steak that was, like, from the village, and I was in, among those people, eating what they ate, and that, to me, is a transformative travel experience. I don't want to go to some all you can eat resort where they're flying in the food from some food terminal in, like, Houston or something.

I want to eat what the locals are eating and, um, and, and yeah, I also remember too, we'd stop by the side of the road because people would just be selling local fruit and I was tasting these fruits I'd never, I'd never even heard of and, and you just put it in your mouth and you're like, Oh my God, like that's insanely delicious.

So that to me is like pure happiness. That's just awesome fun.