Catch Up on the Podcast 🎤

Did you know there's a podcast? There's a podcast.

I am very attached to the structure of the Monday emails I send out, and I think this means the podcast may have gotten lost in the shuffle. So while I’m on an off week, I thought I’d send out a reminder of the last 10 episodes, listed below. They’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and can be added to your preferred app. If you’d like to receive an email when they go out, adjust your settings here. There is always a transcript, too, because I know it’s more convenient for many folks.

Here, I’m only sharing the most recent batch, but there are over 100 episodes going back to 2018, with variations in format and quality. I’ve talked to chef and author of the just-released Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora Reem Assil; High on the Hog and Whetstone’s Stephen Satterfield; chef Brooks Headley from Superiority Burger; chef, author, and editor of Black Food Bryant Terry; Nigella Lawson; and many more.

Upcoming episodes will feature authors Jami Attenberg, Angela Garbes, and Anna Jones; Snaxshot’s Andrea Hernandez; and Millicent Souris, a writer and chef who left restaurants to cook for the food insecure.

Related note: I recently wrote a piece for Substack on my approach to interviews.

---

Daniela Galarza, Food Writer at The Washington Post
“Pastry is so many things, has so many different ingredients and involves so much chemistry. There's so many different components. And I feel it intersects with a lot of different arts, like architecture and the fine arts, and creates emotion for a lot of people in ways that savory doesn't always.”

Robert Simonson, Author, Cocktail Writer at The New York Times, The Mix Newsletter
“And so you start to reapproach your job, reapproach your assignment and say, like, well, who have I been neglecting? And maybe I should stop interviewing the same people over and over again, and look a little deeper and find someone else, you know, and concentrate on bars that are owned by women, that are owned by people of color, also, to look back into history, and find out those forgotten figures.”

LinYee Yuan, Design Journalist and Editor MOLD
“I’m interested in design solutions or solutions that are grounded in systems that can be owned by people that are not—You don't have to pay somebody else to participate in this thing. But you have autonomy. You have agency. You have sovereignty to determine what your food future looks like for yourself, for your community, for your family. That's not the way that technology in the way that we think about it today works.”

Eric Kim, Food Writer at The New York Times, Author of Korean American
“There was a Korean barbecue chapter, and I replaced it with Garden of Jean. I replaced it with a vegetable chapter because I kind of just realized that there were so many more interesting things I wanted to write about and explore and develop.”

Sandor Katz, Fermentation Revivalist, Author of The Art of Fermentation
“Fermentation, for me, is not the ultimate point. It's a means of reclaiming our food. And reclaiming our food means becoming closer to the source of its production.”

Sarah Lohman, Food Historian, Author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine
“And I also don't like this culture of you’re an artist, you can't talk about money. I got bills to pay. I got food to buy. How do you have space to create good work when you don't feel secure in those things?”

Kristina Cho, Author of Mooncakes and Milk Bread
“But I try to maintain a really realistic approach with the way that I recipe-write. I know not everyone's gonna have this access to this very specific variety of bok choy or cabbage. But I think just being in California, just—it's a really wide palette of stuff that I could kind of experiment with.”

Jenny Dorsey, Chef, Writer, Executive Director of Studio ATAO
“I think representation is always going to be important. Of course, it's important that if you're a new reader to Bon App or Food & Wine, and you're flipping through the pages, and you see a face that looks like yours, of course, that's always going to be good. But I think what, when I say optically, we are doing that.”

Preeti Mistry, Chef, Author of The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook
“But now I feel there's a lot of people all over the country and the world that sort of have a different understanding of what is possible with Indian food. And it can be in a lot of different lanes. And you can have a butter chicken calzone and Indian tomato achar on avocado toast or whatever. And those kinds of things were just really bizarre a decade ago. And so, now I also just feel like, ‘Well, why should I just keep making that same stuff? I'm ready to do something different.’”

Karon Liu, Food Writer at The Toronto Star
“I think that being a millennial and having a lot more people in my cohort, becoming chefs and opening the restaurants now and being more authoritative in their jobs, that's kind of really helped shift the definition of what authenticity means in cuisines.”