I spend a lot of time on the road and on the indoor track at the downtown YMCA, taking in and burning off calories, respectively. So I listen to a lot of podcasts to help pass the lonely time. Some of my favorites to listen to are about the subject of food like Dan Pashman’s Sporkful and the Southern Foodway Alliance’s Gravy podcast. I also really enjoy the work of prolific writer Malcolm Gladwell that he produces through his Pushkin Industries group of podcasts. With Revisionist History, Gladwell takes a look at topics you thought you understood and peels back the layers of history for deeper analysis. Gladwell is a huge music fan, and several of the Revisionist History episodes deal with the history behind the music, including some that led him to trips to Nashville. This spurred a spin-off podcast called Broken Record, which he produces in concert with iconic music producer RIck Rubin and journalist Bruce Headlam.
Gladwell’s latest target is the world of food, but not viewed through conventional lenses. He has recently released the first few episodes of Food Actually, a Pushkin production featuring James Beard Award-winning journalist Tamar Adler. (She’ll be the guest of honor at an upcoming Butcher & Bee dinner in East Nashville next year, btw.) The podcast is available only through the premium podcast service Luminary, but there are a couple of episodes that you can listen to for free to get a little “taste” of the show, if you’re so inclined.
Adler addresses thorny topics like junk food and the true social cost of making wine; she uses the Gladwell method of seeking to debunk conventional narratives. In the first episode on junk food, Adler opines that the real problem with sweet and salty snacks isn’t the nutritional deficit in the foods themselves. Instead, she says, the snacks have created a disconnect in our genetic connection between tastes we love and the foods that provide our body with nutrition we need. Our brain and body are supposed to operate in a feedback loop in which we should prefer the taste of the foods that provide the nutritional elements we need.
Because of what she calls “fake flavor,” humans have begun to crave foods that don’t contribute to our well-being and instead let the taste determine our choices instead of the nutritional benefits of what we’re eating. She even investigates this effect in other species, where pigs can be convinced to prefer specific flavors that they ordinarily wouldn’t seek out if the foods that those artificial flavors have been added to also offer important elements to their diet that the pigs’ bodies can detect.
It’s really a fascinating study, and Adler presents it in a concise and engaging fashion. If you’ve got some long drives ahead of you over the holidays or you just need a break from the festivities, I encourage you to check out Food Actually.
