Culture Study Podcast - September 17, 2025


Figuring Out What's Behind Seven Recent Food Trends


Episode Stats


Length

53 minutes

Words per minute

164.13

Word count

8,844

Sentence count

322

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I find it kind of fascinating looking at trends.
00:00:03.520 For example, I was thinking about lava cakes.
00:00:07.240 Oh, right.
00:00:08.720 So, you know, lava cakes were an invention of this French chef, Michel Bras.
00:00:13.200 He invented it in 1981, and it ended up being on the menu at Chili's in 1998.
00:00:21.300 Wow.
00:00:22.440 Which is so...
00:00:23.440 That's like trickle-down effect, right?
00:00:25.300 It's so interesting.
00:00:26.400 That's how long it takes.
00:00:30.000 This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
00:00:37.360 And I'm Evan Kleiman. I'm the host of Good Food, a podcast, former restaurateur, cookbook author, and chef.
00:00:45.800 You've been hosting Good Food since 1997. How has the show changed over time?
00:00:51.720 wow um when i first started doing good food it was actually possible for our team to read
00:01:00.560 everything in the media about food yeah i mean yeah it's you can't even imagine that now and
00:01:08.780 and when i started it was so nerdy i mean even the head of our station
00:01:13.880 i remember she once said how did you find to my producer how did you find someone to talk about
00:01:22.640 food using four syllable words yeah i mean it was you know food was not part of the cultural
00:01:31.400 zeitgeist at all when we started it was much more the arena of um i think nerds and foodies
00:01:39.240 and and not like because i remember my mom had a subscription always to like bon appetit
00:01:46.200 and then like at various times we also would get gourmet which to me was like the highest of high
00:01:52.960 like you know like that's where for a dinner party you would get recipes but like this was
00:01:57.960 much more than just talking about recipes it was more about your it's always about food culture
00:02:03.140 like food as culture? I always talk about good food as like the Trojan horse to talk about life.
00:02:10.560 And we just use food as a lens to bring everything in. So it's art, science, geography,
00:02:18.240 climate. And then of course, there's cookbooks and recipes. But really, I would say that the
00:02:25.740 more important cultural aspects of it come to the fore. That's so true. I mean, I think about like
00:02:31.980 so many other cultural artifacts, like a celebrity or architecture, right? Like all of these things
00:02:38.900 are ways for us to talk about other things. If we study them, if we analyze them, it's a way
00:02:44.580 of thinking about our values, things that are changing, economics, like all sorts of things.
00:02:52.200 And I think you just have to poke at it a little bit more.
00:02:54.400 Absolutely. I mean, like there's all those monographs with titles like Pencil.
00:02:58.640 Yeah, totally.
00:02:59.440 Or like the new book, Tuberculosis, where it's literally the entire world seen through that lens.
00:03:05.520 And certainly food makes that really easy because so much of the ecology of our world is affected by agriculture and what we grow.
00:03:17.280 And so much of it is hidden.
00:03:19.400 You know, the whole working space, labor issues, the politics of food now are laid bare more.
00:03:25.920 But in the past, almost no one talked about them.
00:03:28.520 I also think it's so interesting how like fruits get like marketing campaigns like that there's
00:03:35.760 whole you know there's whole departments behind fruits yeah like and you don't think of like fruit
00:03:40.840 having a marketing department behind it but of course there are companies that are poised to
00:03:46.680 make a lot of money off of certain fruits so like the one that I always think of is Kiwi in the 70s
00:03:51.020 was or was that before yeah Kiwi was sort of brought to the market by actually an LA produce
00:03:56.080 broker, Frida, who is just famous for being a very strong woman in a deeply man's world,
00:04:04.700 who would just do all this research and find these little niche products that she could 1.00
00:04:11.260 bring to an audience and launch them. But if you even think of names like the Apple names,
00:04:18.360 right? So Honeycrisp, Cosmic Chris, all of these, I've always thought that that would be such a fun
00:04:24.000 job to either work in a place where you named nail polish colors yes or gave fruit you know
00:04:34.800 which actually their names are probably z428g is the variety name but then you come up with
00:04:42.680 cosmic crisp or whatever it also makes me think of like how we come up with tastes and like
00:04:49.840 different fashions for tastes and there's a new yorker profile that i remember reading
00:04:54.280 many years more than a decade ago about like how we like figure out what names to put with taste
00:05:02.640 in order to suggest that something is fresher right and i see this right now really vividly
00:05:08.260 in seltzer names where they come up with names of berries like berries that don't exist that
00:05:13.020 don't exist and then yes the idea of freshness where in the end it's just meaningless
00:05:19.420 right because right because it's the siltzer flavor well or even like the the prevalence of
00:05:26.760 black cherry versus cherry because cherry is somehow like cloying right but if you put black
00:05:33.360 cherry in front of it it becomes somehow like a more sophisticated flavor oh yeah my mother was
00:05:39.900 addicted to black cherry soda but what about blue raspberry to me is inexplicable i'm not yet i'm
00:05:46.160 not young enough to have understood blue raspberry oh so i think blue raspberry is all about the fact
00:05:53.340 that kids love having many different colors in a skittles pack or whatever flavor right so like
00:06:01.060 whatever candy they want more colors because that's how you like sort and make it last longer
00:06:06.160 and and take pleasure in it like um i have lots of memories i love candies so i have a lot of
00:06:11.800 I do this myself still, but also I have kids in my life who are always like, when I say,
00:06:17.140 oh yeah, here, like they know I have a candy drawer. And so they come over and they're like,
00:06:20.680 I want one of each color. And so raspberry, if you just had raspberry flavor, which again,
00:06:25.940 blue raspberry doesn't taste like raspberry, but if you just had raspberry flavor,
00:06:29.520 then you would have another in the long line of reds and pinks that already exist in the pack.
00:06:35.920 So how do you add blue? I love that. I love, I love the way that they ask you for each color
00:06:41.780 so it's a way of eating your colors but yes in a different way you know how they tell us to be
00:06:47.240 healthy you should eat your colors you always got to eat the green skittles you still got to do it
00:06:53.020 even though no one likes it um uh and then i think it's also a way for to get more right because
00:06:59.200 you're like well i gotta have like at least one of each color so you have to give me at least five
00:07:04.640 jelly beans, if not two of each color. So it's a very savvy strategy. Very savvy.
00:07:10.900 Okay, so we should get into our questions. We're going to go all over the place.
00:07:14.620 This first one, I think, is particularly well suited to you. So this comes from Becca.
00:07:20.440 What is the typical pathway that a food trend takes on its trendiness trajectory? And how long
00:07:26.820 does it take? I work in corporate food service, think of companies like Aramark and Sodexo,
00:07:31.740 and we are now getting requests for burrata bars at every catering event.
00:07:37.160 I mean, we all love burrata, but I'm so tired of burrata.
00:07:42.400 Wasn't it an upcoming trend like eight years ago now?
00:07:45.580 Does every trend take this long to arrive to corporate food service?
00:07:49.520 And does that mean that it is officially mainstream?
00:07:52.500 I could give other examples, smash burgers, cold brew, rocket salad, etc.
00:07:58.160 I think that's so interesting because I would say that by the time a trend hits mainstream, it's no longer a trend. And corporate food service in particular is often playing catch up because the clients who are often risk averse, like middle managers who have been assigned to create a menu, they don't want to make a mistake, right?
00:08:24.400 So they're not going to pick a food that's on the leading edge of a trend.
00:08:28.620 They're going to pick something safe.
00:08:31.200 And what I was talking about before with Michel Braz's lava cake, which, you know, he invented it in 1981.
00:08:38.500 It's on the menu at Chili's in 1998.
00:08:41.360 It's like a decade.
00:08:42.660 It takes a decade.
00:08:43.440 But I think now it's much faster because things come onto the cycle so fast and then they burn out faster.
00:08:52.600 but burrata never seems to burn out i you know i don't think i had burrata
00:08:59.240 at least in my like maybe my mom made it in some sort of fancy thing that she was trying to make
00:09:05.780 at some point but like first of all we could never source burrata in my tiny town in idaho
00:09:11.320 like we could barely source mozzarella like fresh mozzarella and that was in like when high school
00:09:17.440 That was in the 90s. I have a vivid memory of my mom telling me the first time that she saw
00:09:22.780 an avocado or basil in our grocery store, our local grocery store. Those were things that were
00:09:29.680 not sourced to small towns like ours for a very long time. But burrata also tastes so good. Do
00:09:35.860 you think that's part of it? I have a different view of burrata because I have this very long
00:09:42.000 time decades long linked to italy i i'm there every year i travel every year i lead food tours
00:09:48.460 there and burrata for me was always so linked to region and to italian eating and both mozzarella
00:09:57.400 and burrata there taste very different than they are here still now yes and i'm not a huge fan of
00:10:05.240 it everywhere. I'm a fan of it on a plate with a knife and fork and good bread, but not atop
00:10:13.000 everything. Why does it need to be atop everything? Because it's cheese. And that's what Americans
00:10:19.060 know what to do. Oh my gosh, it's too much. No, and I and that's part of why I thought that this
00:10:25.500 would be interesting, because I think sometimes, how do you think about like these foods that are
00:10:31.120 very much like an everyday food, like almost sometimes a peasant food in countries that
00:10:37.380 are outside of the U.S. that then come and get mainstreamed as like very fancy food here.
00:10:42.720 Well, I mean, that's just what we do, right?
00:10:45.840 Right, right.
00:10:47.440 That's what we do.
00:10:50.740 I'm so the opposite.
00:10:52.280 it i'm such an unrepentant home cook everyday cook who i who i just don't think i'm that driven
00:11:01.000 by trends although who knows it's so in the ether all around us that certainly things must be in
00:11:08.060 but if you take something like beans i bought like 40 pounds of beans during the pandemic
00:11:13.660 good beans the good beans the rancho gordo beans that are you know oh yeah same both melody and i
00:11:19.140 are members of the rancho quarter bean club 25 000 people on the waiting list to get into that
00:11:24.340 crazy crazy crazy crazy um and every once in a while i'll go to a restaurant and i'll be like
00:11:33.140 what are they doing with beans and they'll do some insane thing first of all not cook them enough
00:11:38.660 like they're al dente like who wants an al dente bean and and i'll be like why why is this happening
00:11:46.900 Do you think they just don't know how to cook the bean right?
00:11:49.420 No.
00:11:49.920 I think it's an absolute choice.
00:11:53.000 Interesting.
00:11:53.820 But, you know, I'm in L.A.
00:11:55.560 And the jockeying for customers is, like, real here.
00:12:03.800 And not an easy moment right now.
00:12:07.080 And, yeah.
00:12:09.500 Okay.
00:12:09.740 Our next question about food trends is broad, but also is very TikTok-centric.
00:12:13.980 So I'm glad that we have you as our guest to talk about this.
00:12:16.540 This comes from Emily. I've been seeing a ton of recession meals content lately. While I appreciate
00:12:23.360 that food has gotten more expensive, it feels like there's something deeper going on here,
00:12:28.680 especially when it's influencers shooting in a spotless kitchen and finding its way to my
00:12:33.620 white, dank, affluent for you page. Is this some content farming cosplay of poverty
00:12:40.340 actually helpful? Just part of the recession vibe shift? What's going on here?
00:12:46.540 I found this so interesting, this question.
00:12:49.760 Yeah, yeah.
00:12:50.780 Mostly because how different my TikTok is from hers. 1.00
00:12:55.040 So the recession meal stuff I'm seeing are mostly single moms trying to feed their kids. 0.97
00:13:02.060 So not cosplaying at all.
00:13:05.720 And I would say most of the recession stuff I'm seeing is either reality based that people are really being pressed.
00:13:14.500 Yep.
00:13:14.940 or it's fear. I think it's a way to have control over something when you may feel that your world
00:13:21.800 might be spinning out of control, or you see maybe something coming down the pike at you,
00:13:29.460 and you're not sure what it's going to be. But this is one thing that you can control.
00:13:35.100 Absolutely. And I think, you know, there's one and we'll put the link to it in the show notes
00:13:39.560 that I was watching where she really references like now I understand why my grandma hoarded
00:13:45.280 all of these beans and all of these and was like so into canning and I think sometimes if you have
00:13:51.600 a grandma in your life or a relative in your life whose life was really deeply affected by
00:13:58.040 poverty and lack in some way whether it was from the depression which I think a lot of
00:14:03.160 us in america have a relative who was that way or in a different situation like that's in your
00:14:10.880 bones like you have there's like something that can be activated and i also think there's there's
00:14:16.740 something about it's somehow linked with a return to whole foods because if you look at recession
00:14:22.840 meals you can go two ways the stuff that's cheapest is the ultra processed stuff right
00:14:28.520 The processed meals that you can just buy, whether they're frozen or they're in a bag
00:14:33.780 somewhere or in a pressure pouch, very convenient and inexpensive.
00:14:39.140 But the most inexpensive thing is to make your own food.
00:14:42.740 And what's so interesting about the performative aspect about TikTok is we love watching it.
00:14:50.140 I have no idea what the ratio is of watchers to makers, but I'm sure it's a dramatic fall
00:14:57.080 off.
00:14:57.480 And every time sort of the economy starts to get a bit difficult and people start making recession type meals, I think what they're really doing is going back to the kitchen, which I applaud.
00:15:11.380 The cosplay aspect of it that the listener spoke about, I find like she does that to be fairly disconcerting.
00:15:20.400 I do think that it's maybe as you identified, like that person understands that that's the sort of content that people want. So even if they themselves are not necessarily needing to make thrifty meals, they understand that thrift is compelling in this moment.
00:15:39.340 But who would you rather take thrifty advice from? Somebody? Somebody whose kitchen looks like they clearly don't need it? Or somebody who's in a kitchen that looks less aspirational?
00:15:52.720 Well, I think that's actually you would think that it would be the people who are less aspirational.
00:15:58.800 But I think one of the things that people love broadly, Americans love broadly, are rich people who tell you how to save money.
00:16:08.660 It's this real tension and contradiction between consume like you need to consume and then also you need to get a deal.
00:16:16.040 and I think of something like there's um it's a website that like breaks down how much each meal
00:16:21.700 costs ultimately so it's all about recipes where you can get like each meal costs ultimately 63
00:16:29.000 cents and I think there's a real pleasure in having like being like okay I know and as you
00:16:35.020 said I can control exactly how much I'm spending on what each of these meals will be yeah absolutely
00:16:41.840 actually there's a woman on tiktok who does that she makes meals from one of those sources and i
00:16:48.700 find watching her fascinating because when we're talking about trends we're usually talking about
00:16:54.860 additive trends like we love baroque food here in america more cheese more sugar of many types
00:17:01.480 many different textures all at once and when you're talking about recession type food you're
00:17:06.160 stripping back yeah yeah yeah that's such a good point and to normalize that right while people are
00:17:11.580 making charcuterie boards like actually i don't think we're seeing those charcuterie boards of
00:17:16.000 like not as much 10 meats right no it's like here's how you make this simple beans or a really
00:17:24.280 popular recipe on the new york times cooking app right now is any grain with any bean with any
00:17:31.520 green i mean that's how i love to eat so i love it i'm all in there i'm all in with that trend
00:17:38.040 I made that recipe like 16 times I'm like this is how I'm going to use my actually get my rancho
00:17:44.880 gordo beans under control everything in a plate or a bowl everything I don't even own plates I
00:17:51.560 know every time I go to reach for a plate I'm like but it's gonna slide off such an irrational fear
00:17:57.340 last night uh we had salmon we it's a reef net season here on the island which means that we
00:18:04.580 can get salmon like we i i go down the street and it comes in right off the shore it's incredible
00:18:10.920 incredible fish um but we cooked like this enormous filet of salmon and i my my piece of
00:18:18.420 it was like six inches and i still didn't want to put it in a plate i was like i'm just gonna
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00:22:09.400 Okay, next question.
00:22:10.900 Oh, I'm so excited for this one.
00:22:12.140 This one comes from Brian.
00:22:13.640 Why are Nashville hot chicken places spreading like wildfire?
00:22:17.400 It seems like every strip mall in Northern Virginia has one nowadays.
00:22:21.060 And a buddy in Seattle said they've started popping up there too.
00:22:24.740 What gives?
00:22:25.300 okay so for people who don't know what nashville hot chicken how is that possible well i i do think
00:22:33.400 that its spread has been recent from outside the south i didn't know about it until i did a big
00:22:38.060 story on nashville bachelorettes and there was a huge story in bitter southerner about like who is
00:22:44.640 the real nashville hot chicken but can you describe what it is for listeners so it's um it's fried
00:22:50.600 chicken, but the dredge, so whatever the dredge of choice is, whether it's flour-based, cornstarch,
00:22:59.460 rice, whatever the recipe is, there is just a ton of canned pepper in it. And how hot it is,
00:23:07.960 obviously, is determined by how much pepper, chili pepper, is added to the dredge. So when you're
00:23:16.100 eating it, it can be a nice sort of peppery experience, or it can be, oh, my God, what am I
00:23:24.540 going to do with this mouthful of food? I just put my mouth kind of like, kind of like the hot wing
00:23:31.400 show. Yes, absolutely. But it's huge. And but what's so funny is in LA, the trend started in 0.99
00:23:39.400 2016 when Helen Reyes opened. So the fact that it's still it's trending now and percolating in
00:23:47.260 Seattle, I just think is so weird. Like they're so behind. Well, but in the idea that it's now
00:23:53.520 like almost like in strip malls in Virginia, you know what I mean? It's it's that it's
00:23:58.660 democratized like it's it's being franchised yeah and uh my theory
00:24:04.880 so it became like the hot chicken in nashville became part of the thing that you did when you
00:24:13.960 went to nashville for like a weekend like a cool 36 hours where you do all the things that people
00:24:21.360 do on bachelorette parties or bachelor parties or if you're there just to not do those things
00:24:25.960 just to spectate in that way. And so I think it became like something that people were familiar
00:24:31.640 with. And once you have that familiarity, then it opens up the taste profile. But I was talking to
00:24:37.300 friend of the pod, Amanda Mull yesterday about a piece that will be out by the time that this pod
00:24:42.620 comes out that she just wrote for Bloomberg about how Southern tastes, Southern trends like this
00:24:49.140 are spreading much more broadly across the united states and her larger thesis has a lot to do
00:24:56.060 with air conditioning and how like people want to go like there's more tourism to the south in part
00:25:03.300 because of the prevalence of air conditioning so interesting um yeah there's this it's really
00:25:08.300 complicated but like i thought that was like that this is part of a larger spread of ideas
00:25:15.320 Because food, culture, like the Southernification of the United States and politics are involved in this too.
00:25:21.920 Like this is part of the reason why so many students from across the United States are currently attracted to SEC schools because it represents like this opportunity to somehow be part of like real America, which of course is false.
00:25:35.800 That's so interesting because my, in my mind, Nashville chicken out of its home is like a stunt food.
00:25:44.280 once it gets to the hot to the hottest levels and when i think of stunt foods i think of bro
00:25:49.940 eating and bro cooking so on social media you know who can eat the hottest who can get blown out the
00:25:56.120 most um i mean i remember when jonathan gold you know the famed restaurant critic who was on my
00:26:05.100 show every week for 20 years first covered howlin rays and he was trying to describe to me the
00:26:12.380 experience and realized he couldn't describe it without it becoming unseemly.
00:26:20.140 And maybe the after experience too. Yeah, the after experience. I was going to say,
00:26:25.520 do you think that the more franchise style hot chicken joints are actually that hot? Like if
00:26:33.620 you're buying something at a strip mall, it's probably something that you want to be able to
00:26:37.060 consume. I think that almost all of them have different levels. Oh, that you can pick.
00:26:42.160 So you can pick because why would they want, you know, let's say a couple goes and somebody
00:26:47.780 doesn't even want any.
00:26:48.860 Almost all of these places also offer a mild.
00:26:51.780 I mean, it's just so interesting.
00:26:53.260 I mean, I love heat and I love heat and lots of foods.
00:26:56.720 I also like really good fried chicken.
00:26:59.900 And sometimes if the ratio of heat is just too high, then it shuts down your taste buds
00:27:07.540 and you don't, I personally don't enjoy the experience as much.
00:27:11.200 Yeah.
00:27:11.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you're just concentrating on, like, surviving.
00:27:14.960 Exactly.
00:27:15.820 Getting through a swallowing and what happens after that.
00:27:20.760 But then, you know, I'm sure I'm not the audience either.
00:27:23.980 Yeah.
00:27:24.580 Okay, this next question is from Samantha.
00:27:27.340 Here's a question about tinned fish.
00:27:29.380 When did they become a trendy aesthetic item?
00:27:31.920 And where's the love for other kinds of canned food that can't be Instagrammed?
00:27:35.700 I have such a vivid memory of uh tins of kippers that my dad would eat and I would take remember
00:27:45.140 the Mr. Yuck stickers that were like this is poison no so there were it was like a frowny face
00:27:51.300 and parents would put them on like items in the kitchen that were poison to try to make sure that
00:27:58.800 kids understood like this is bad you will die if you consume this so it would be on you know just
00:28:03.900 like uh things that look like they would be otherwise like candy or you know something fun
00:28:10.200 to drink or whatever like it was a safety measure and i would take the mr yuck stickers and i would
00:28:16.320 put them on the kippers a young critic because i thought i thought they were so disgusting and
00:28:21.840 smelled so bad but now kippers which like my dad grew up eating in part because he grew up in like
00:28:28.520 lower middle class Minnesota home and his dad ate them. Now you can get the fancy kippers with
00:28:36.780 the fancy tints and all that sort of thing. What's your thoughts on this? Well, I'm a big
00:28:40.920 consumer of tinfish. I've always loved sardines, but the trendiness and co-packing of it kind of
00:28:47.120 bothers me. I'd rather buy from a producer than a marketer. Cue the haters now.
00:28:54.180 um you know that's a good distinction though that's a really good distinction and especially
00:28:59.560 in the tin fish space where high-end um you know fishermen spanish and portuguese producers
00:29:06.520 of tin fish um forever they've had this longtime tradition of really beautiful packaging they're
00:29:13.740 kind of like wine labels i mean it's a brand identity and um and now i think for people who
00:29:21.680 don't have a ton of extra cash to spend on durable luxuries. Tinned fish, which can be pricey,
00:29:29.500 let's be clear, is within reach, you know, and it has the cachet of whatever the box looks like.
00:29:37.560 I mean, I did an interview with a woman who has a restaurant here in LA, and also one back east,
00:29:45.900 that I think they serve over 100 different varieties of tinned fish.
00:29:50.560 And after I interviewed her, I was so intrigued by some of the brands she name-checked
00:29:55.880 that I ended up buying a $60 can of redneck tuna from a Spanish producer.
00:30:02.820 $60 for a tinned.
00:30:04.720 How was it?
00:30:06.060 It was a peak eating experience.
00:30:09.140 It was amazing.
00:30:11.540 And I wish I hadn't opened it just for myself.
00:30:14.100 i wish i had saved it for like a dinner party and i will probably one day buy it again
00:30:20.600 but like that was from a spanish producer a restaurant actually who collaborated with
00:30:27.400 a fishing establishment so interesting but other canned foods i i feel like i mean did you grow up
00:30:36.840 eating canned vegetables yes my mom would can some vegetables mostly fruits though like she canned
00:30:44.620 peaches um she canned asparagus that was a it's a big one in the pacific northwest is to can asparagus
00:30:50.380 which is really really it's really good it's completely separate eating experience from fresh
00:30:55.260 asparagus absolutely but yeah it's really good i i have come around in my um snobby thinking
00:31:04.600 my my farmer's market driven southern california thinking um to embrace certain frozen and canned
00:31:12.640 foods again yeah yeah what frozen ones have you embraced i always have in my freezer now
00:31:18.940 frozen artichoke hearts oh interesting because who to do all that work i mean i'm happy to do it i
00:31:25.880 did it this weekend when friends came over but i mean yeah so frozen artichokes i mean you always
00:31:32.780 have to have the blueberries. Um, but then peas and edamame always. Yes. Oh my gosh. I, well,
00:31:40.680 I eat a lot of, I've always eaten a lot of frozen peas. I love frozen peas with a little bit of salt
00:31:44.560 on top. So good. Um, but also just in like, if you're making a little like, I don't know, just
00:31:50.540 like ramen or something like that, just pour little peas in there. But I think that, uh, the question
00:31:56.580 too about like how why there isn't that same aesthetic value to canned things i i would argue
00:32:04.200 that i've seen a lot of like in whole foods and that sort of thing you see fancy canned asparagus
00:32:11.160 it's usually pickled like pickled asparagus like stuff it's in a jar can still be fined yeah it's
00:32:17.640 not in a tin can you can actually see them but i would also say that what's happened to tinned fish
00:32:24.720 in terms of the labeling is happening to some canned foods like what is the name of the um
00:32:31.460 the modern bean company where they're very saucy is it called hey it's called we need to we need
00:32:39.440 to have somebody well we'll we'll find it and put the because i can picture in my head they're all
00:32:45.080 over at whole foods and it's like they they add a one spice to like a bean so it's like garbanzo
00:32:50.960 beans with lemon, right? Like something that makes it seem very fancy. No, but I think they go beyond
00:32:56.980 that. I mean, they actually create sauces. Oh, it's called Hay Day Canning Company. And their
00:33:03.400 beans are like in curry or like a very flavor forward sauce. But the labels on them are so
00:33:13.000 bright and cheerful and the opposite of what you think of when you think of like a dreary can of
00:33:19.200 canned beans and often when i go to the market they're sold out i bet i mean like i'm looking
00:33:25.860 at the pictures i'm like oh this is so amazing uh kimchi sesame navy beans apricot glazed baked
00:33:32.340 beans um let's see what else enchilada black beans so they're just they're making a harissa
00:33:39.500 lemon chickpeas there you go you know there you gotta add the harissa in there um and you know
00:33:45.420 this the the aesthetic here really reminds me as you said of like these tin fish which
00:33:52.520 and you pointed this out like this is a long lineage you know i there were multiple canneries
00:33:58.160 on this island and you can like look in the historical records for all of their the labels
00:34:03.360 that they used and because people have scanned them and you can like you know get prints of them
00:34:07.700 and all that sort of thing like they're exquisite and they look like this and somehow i don't know
00:34:13.020 when they stopped like where where the can just became perfunctory the the artwork on the can
00:34:21.440 became perfunctory and given that what's inside as the listener said is not instagrammable
00:34:28.280 yeah even if it's a delicious food it's like what you call ugly delicious
00:34:32.640 um then the can should speak right yeah
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00:38:59.280 Okay, next question is about mangoes.
00:39:02.300 Sorry, I gave it away.
00:39:03.220 This comes from Carrie.
00:39:04.980 I have an adult onset severe mango allergy,
00:39:09.760 which was pretty disappointing to miss out on delicious mangoes.
00:39:14.060 but I thought at least pretty easily manageable. However, it's one I see on menus all the time now
00:39:20.860 across dishes and different cocktails and sauces and across all styles of restaurants.
00:39:27.020 Mangoes are definitely more accessible to us in Northern Canada now with improved food
00:39:32.380 transportation and globalization, but do they have a rep as a luxury ingredient to be across
00:39:38.460 so many dishes and cuisines, or are they really just that versatile?
00:39:43.740 So I didn't realize that the mango is the most popular fruit in the world, and also in the
00:39:51.160 United States. Because of our huge immigrant population. Yeah. Recently, I interviewed a
00:39:57.240 local mango broker here in Southern California, who brings in Pakistani mangoes. Wow. And sells
00:40:04.260 out of the trunk of his car and people make appointments for him and pay a week in advance
00:40:10.200 to get these exquisitely sweet and amazing mangoes. I don't think the listener is talking
00:40:16.740 about those kinds of mangoes though. No. First of all, I am amazed that there would be a mango
00:40:22.960 food trend. I mean, you know, when I think of single food trends, I think about, first of all,
00:40:28.860 I think they're odd and inexplicable, how they sprang up.
00:40:32.700 But first it was eggs on top of everything.
00:40:35.600 Do you remember that?
00:40:37.140 Yeah, I mean, I still put an egg on top of everything.
00:40:39.040 And then burrata, burrata everywhere.
00:40:42.620 But mango, it's so interesting.
00:40:44.640 I don't think I've seen that on everything.
00:40:48.280 Part of me wants to say it's because Northern Canadians need more vitamin C against scurvy.
00:40:55.840 you know what i bet when you have a sensitivity to something i think it alerts you
00:41:02.440 to the presence of something like oh there's a little mango chutney on the side of this right
00:41:07.980 like it so it might not be that mango is like the forward ingredient in these dishes it's more that
00:41:13.040 it's something that is showing up a lot in like sauces or side dishes that's and i do think that
00:41:19.200 in hot sauces and in barbecue sauces and in condiments it's certainly showing up. And I think
00:41:26.640 probably because it's like this trifecta, right? It brings its amazing flavor, its color, and then
00:41:34.500 its texture. It probably brings a lot of body to whoever is manufacturing those sauces.
00:41:41.700 Yeah, that's so true. Like when you think of like mango, pureed mango, like the consistency of it
00:41:46.860 is really useful. Yeah. Beautiful, actually. Okay. Another food trend. One of my favorite
00:41:54.000 foods. This comes from Elise. My European coworkers always harass me about the fact
00:41:59.320 that in mainstream USA, the only veg option on many menus is Brussels sprouts. I'm a vegetarian.
00:42:07.280 I love Brussels sprouts. And I happen to appreciate the fact that I can almost always find an
00:42:13.320 appetizer or a side dish in just about any odd place in the country, because they'll be on the
00:42:18.980 menu, even if they're fried or candied or whatever. But after they pointed it out, I can't unsee it.
00:42:26.180 Why are Brussels sprouts on practically every U.S. menu and never any other vegetables?
00:42:31.340 Bars, steakhouses, you name it, the option is always Brussels.
00:42:36.140 It's because when they're raw, they're indestructible. So a restaurateur or a chef
00:42:41.480 can buy a giant case of them and they can just sit there in the walk-in until they need to be
00:42:48.440 used, which the same can't be said of seasonal produce. Or even broccoli. Well, I was about to
00:42:55.240 say when I had my restaurant, broccoli was like a very popular side dish. And every time we tried
00:43:00.900 to take it off the menu to put something more seasonal on, customers would revolt. They would
00:43:06.360 bring back the broccoli. That's so true. They're mini cabbages. They last forever.
00:43:12.500 Yeah, Brussels sprouts and cabbage, just like you said, they do. It lasts forever. But I would say
00:43:17.940 to the listener who name checked her friend, that as a person who travels frequently to Italy,
00:43:25.120 where there are a million vegetable dishes, why is it always boiled or sauteed dandelion greens
00:43:32.860 called Chicoria on every single menu, no matter the region. I mean, I love them. But there isn't
00:43:39.600 a lot of variation on European restaurant menus either. I was just in Greece. And like,
00:43:45.900 every island has a slightly different like focus. But of course, like, there's not a lot of
00:43:50.840 variation there either. I also think it's because Brussels, like this person noted,
00:43:56.020 there are many preparations. And most of them happen in the oven. So a chef doesn't have to
00:44:01.720 stand over a pot. It's like you take your Brussels sprouts, you trim them up, you toss them with
00:44:07.760 whatever the flavor profile situation is going to be. And then you throw them on a sheet pan and put
00:44:13.220 them in the oven. Do you remember when Brussels had like their glow up? Like what what time was
00:44:20.420 that? Because I think a lot of people remember Brussels sprouts as like the gross thing that
00:44:26.020 was overcooked absolutely I mean I remember as a child asking to be excused from the table
00:44:33.340 and taking Brussels sprouts with me and throwing them into the neighbor's yard
00:44:37.200 that's great um maybe the early 2000s I want to say yeah I feel like that's it yeah I certainly
00:44:48.520 never ate them as a as a kid and now they're one probably my favorite vegetable tied with
00:44:52.840 broccoli and also i never remember them being in the markets all year round now they're all
00:44:59.640 almost all year round before it was very much a thanksgiving food and i you know at the farmer's
00:45:08.420 market how they display them on like the full stock yeah so awesome which are great because
00:45:13.880 like the little ones are very suck like they're just they're they're they taste really great but
00:45:20.380 it's also a lot of work to cut them all off of the stock if they've never done it yeah but they're 0.95
00:45:24.880 fresher and when they're fresher they cook so much faster well i could talk for a million years about
00:45:30.640 the farmer's market and why it's such a wonderful thing um okay no i have to i have to interject
00:45:39.300 do you know the thing about brussels sprouts though that what we eat today is not the same
00:45:44.480 as what we were eating 20 or 30 years ago.
00:45:47.960 And that Brussels sprouts farmers
00:45:50.180 have been selectively breeding it over the years
00:45:52.840 to breed out the bitterness.
00:45:54.960 So they actually today taste much better
00:45:58.020 than they did when we were younger.
00:45:59.980 That completely makes sense.
00:46:03.040 I'm so glad I got to contribute that fun fact.
00:46:06.800 Well, and also when you cook something like to an oblivion.
00:46:11.160 In boiling water with a little salt.
00:46:14.480 yes it just and then like uh the smell you put some valve the smell on it oh it smells so bad
00:46:23.500 whereas i just like oh i quarter them and then i like pan fry them with a little olive oil and a
00:46:30.820 little like a little sea salt and red chili pepper flakes and i could eat that every meal
00:46:36.280 i'm gonna you know i'm such a suggestible eater that i am now gonna have to go buy brussels sprouts
00:46:42.280 in august
00:46:44.640 okay next question uh mystifies me this comes from ann why do dessert shops go through such
00:46:54.880 intense boom and bust trends we had a zillion cupcake shops then they nearly all closed and
00:47:00.380 we got a zillion frozen yogurt shops and now it's giant cookies like crumble and chip city
00:47:04.820 what is it about desserts specifically and why can't a town just have one cupcake shop
00:47:09.800 one froyo shop and one cookie shop simultaneously i love this well capitalism the reason is
00:47:17.960 capitalism yeah yeah yeah you know don't you think don't you think dessert is also kind of spectacle
00:47:23.820 it's spectacle um i think for a lot of these very focused dessert shops you also don't need to build
00:47:31.000 out a kitchen in the same way and with the same expense so given that most of these shops are
00:47:37.780 probably hedge fund driven or investor driven not so much individual startups it's something that
00:47:45.840 can spring up really quickly and like you said proliferate and then die yeah yeah and and I also
00:47:57.080 think like with the spectacle desserts so something like these giant cookies or like
00:48:01.440 really elaborate cupcakes or cronuts um or like the froyo with a hundred different toppings
00:48:10.060 like a dessert is easier to get sick of I think than a burrito oh well 5,000 times given that
00:48:19.240 the burrito is one of my favorite foods but um I would also say that I'm lucky enough to live in a
00:48:24.940 city that has all those shops open simultaneously and um and there still are like these legacy
00:48:32.560 froyo shops that have been open for like a couple decades now but maybe there's two of them not 20
00:48:39.600 of them i do not understand the giant cookie that crumbles in front of you the reason for it and i
00:48:47.780 think um i think that's going to go away really fast oh yeah i do too cupcakes are different though
00:48:54.380 because children love cupcakes and moms bake cupcakes for children so cupcakes will always
00:49:00.160 be there but a single standalone shop that only sells cupcakes I mean sprinkles now in LA it's
00:49:08.480 vending machines interesting you go and you buy a sprinkles cupcake out of a vending machine
00:49:14.740 ah so stale no my gosh no really oh yeah because people buy them so and they're they're in malls
00:49:24.080 with a lot of traffic. And I've done it. I admit. No, I mean, I love frosting. My thing is I buy a
00:49:32.700 cupcake and then I only eat the top. See, we'd be the perfect, the perfect partners. I only like
00:49:37.520 the crumb. I like the cake part. Do you remember TCBY? You know, I think during the TCBY era,
00:49:46.740 I was building my restaurants. And so I like didn't go out in the world. It was sort of like
00:49:52.420 being in weird cooking jail yeah you didn't go to 99 cent waffle cone wednesday no no that so
00:50:02.180 those those were all over and that was the first wave of the the frozen yogurt popularity in the
00:50:08.400 late 80s and the one thing i do really love about stores like that is that they offer an opportunity
00:50:15.200 to like go somewhere like i would go there after piano lessons oh i love that and it was like well
00:50:21.620 anything that's a ritual like that becomes something more than just what you're eating
00:50:27.200 right exactly it's like that moment of pause and pleasure and yeah but was never as good as the
00:50:35.040 local ice cream shop that had licorice ice cream and instilled in me black licorice instilled in me
00:50:41.540 an incredibly deep love of black licorice ice cream if i see it anywhere like it doesn't matter
00:50:45.840 the time of day i will have black licorice black licorice is one of my favorite candies ever
00:50:51.560 and I love the salty kind even the idea of eating a black licorice ice cream just
00:50:57.720 sounds like heaven to me you've never had one no well if you I know one place I know always has it
00:51:05.440 is the Big Dipper in Missoula Montana so if you ever go there you can get it there but also other
00:51:12.460 kind of more old-fashioned ice cream stores like you won't see it at a new-fashioned
00:51:16.580 ice cream place but the old-fashioned ones still have it and it is exquisite oh so good
00:51:24.360 that's not it never goes out of style no i'm just thinking about black licorice and how
00:51:31.200 all licorice should be black licorice and why those red things are called licorice
00:51:37.240 sorry my brain went off on a tangent this brings us back to the beginning of the discussion where
00:51:43.560 we're like oh let's let's evacuate this substance from the thing that makes it good and distinctive
00:51:50.140 and let's give it a taste that is more nothing like a red vine which just red vine tastes like
00:51:57.400 chapstick chapstick yes yes 100 which i always wanted to eat just a little bit of when i was
00:52:05.880 like five because i was like oh it tastes like flavor you know like you wanted something like
00:52:10.340 that but you don't have to eat chapstick you can you can eat black licorice yeah yeah um where can
00:52:17.760 people find you if they want to hear more from you kcrw's good food is a radio show here in
00:52:24.920 southern california at 89.9 fm it airs on saturday mornings at 10 it is also a podcast everywhere
00:52:32.700 you get your podcasts just look for kcrw's good food and i learn something new all the time and
00:52:40.220 it really is such a great companion to something like culture study because it's culture study
00:52:44.540 takes on food it's wonderful so i love that thank you so much ann thanks for listening to the culture
00:52:52.380 study podcast today paid subscribers got a bonus segment about how to make meal planning suck less
00:52:58.560 featuring a very special guest you don't want to miss it be sure to subscribe wherever you get your
00:53:04.280 podcast because we have so many great episodes in the works and i promise you don't want to miss
00:53:08.820 any of them. If you want to suggest a topic, ask a question about the culture that surrounds you
00:53:13.920 or submit a question for our subscriber only advice time segment, go to our Google form at
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00:53:37.620 discussion threads for each episode. The Culture Study podcast is produced by me,
00:53:42.300 Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me
00:53:47.120 on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodias47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.