A Hot Dog Is a Sandwich - Is The Ocean A Soup? ft. Hank Green

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Today, we're joined by science communicator, author, Crash Course co-creator, and vlogbrother Hank Green to discuss: Is The Ocean A Soup? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is Mythical. Jacques Cousteau once said, the sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. But does that mean that man's only hope technically lies in a giant bowl of soup? What the heck are we talking about today? This is A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. Ketchup is a smoothie.

Yeah, I put ice in my cereal, so what? That makes no sense. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. What? Welcome to our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, the show we break down the world's biggest food debates. I'm your host, Josh Ayer.

And I'm your host, Nicole Handizadeh. And today we are joined by science communicator, book writer, YouTube crash course co-creator, vlog brother, and the guy that all of TikTok turns to for answers, Hank Green. Hello! Hey, welcome to the show. Hello, Hank. Thank you for coming.

Absolutely. Thank you for coming. Thanks you for coming on my podcast. Yes. Yeah, you're officially a co-owner of the podcast now. That happened. It was part of the terms. So, you know, the reason that we wanted to have you on here is we've had Is the Ocean

of Soup on our list for so long. Since the beginning. Since the beginning. And there was pushback from both of us at different times, anytime we'd actually meant to schedule it, primarily for the reason of, it's too dumb. It's too dumb. Not dumb.

We treat all these questions with a certain amount of seriousness. Sure, we always do, yeah. But ever since we asked the question of when you eat a hot dog, does it technically become a hot dog inside your own intestines? We were like, maybe let's dial it back on the bigger things. But Hank, we saw your TikTok where someone asked you the question, is the ocean a soup? And you had a very, what I think is a profound answer. I mean, most of your answers to anything at least seem very profound to me. And so we wanted to have you on to discuss it, to flesh it out. I mean, can you kind of paraphrase your views on it?

Yeah, I mean, I think I like ultimately and this gets to kind of the root of what you do here. And I don't want to like say, all right, we've done, we finished. But but that, you know, all language is created by us. And every, you know, in some way, every word means a slightly different thing to every person. And who gets to decide what a word means is, of course, us. But also, we get to disagree about that. So, in addition to us, it's me, and it's you, and it's you. So, if you want the ocean to be a soup, then it's a soup, man. You did it. You could just do that in your own brain. You could make that decision.

soup man you did it you could just do that in your own brain you could make that decision uh but of course uh that that's that's that's my way of being like oh god please don't don't involve me in these conversations anymore and yet i have decided that i do want to come on the podcast and talk uh in a in a deeper way about whether or not the ocean is a soup and also if if that makes me a soup like what what? Soup is a strange idea straight up. But like if the ocean is a soup, then I'm definitely a soup. Just in a big, a big skin bag. I think more of like a tartar with like the raw meat. If we're going in the culinary classification,

we were actually very worried that you wouldn't want to talk about this primarily because the TikTok answer, it was a bit of like, it was somewhat of a punt. It was a very like linguistically, philosophically, you know, ethical sort of punt. It was like, look, we all collectively decide as a society what words mean. But it also isn't that simple, right? Like there are a couple of different theories in linguistics on when a word sort of becomes actualized. There's like the populist idea that once something becomes popular enough, and this is what, you know, Merriam-Webster is like very active on Twitter.

Sort of deciding. In absolute delight. Yeah. That, you know, what was the irregardless was a big one that people were, you know, sort of mad about that Merriam-Webster officially recognizes irregardless as a proper word. And then you get a bunch of old school copy editors and English teachers being like, there have to be rules in a society.

We need gatekeepers. Weirdly, I was in the conversation about this this very morning where there was a person who I don't know, but their tweet went through a couple of cycles and arrived at my eyes. And they had been criticized for using snuck instead of sneaked um because sneaked is the create word like you know the past tense of

peak is not puck um and and this is like you can look all over the place and this doesn't this hasn't happened to very many other words uh but snuck just sort of snuck in which is lovely and but but also i think for good reason because Snuck is so much better than Sneaked. Yeah. Yeah, sounds so much better. So they had been basically criticized for using Snuck because that's the more uneducated past tense of Sneak. And the person was like, oh, gosh, what do I do when I'm getting emails like this? The answer is, of course, ignore them and then declare yourself to be 100% Team Snook, which I am.

Yeah, I think I'm willing to put all my support behind Snook. Yeah. Well, this happened with my grandma, who is 99 years old. She's almost getting the centenarian. But she is also from South Africa and she also you know South Africa obviously very politically divided and you know especially you know also between the Dutch and the British and so she was in the era

where it was like you spoke the Queen's English if you wanted to be in a certain echelon society you had to speak the Queen's and so I used the term dove as the past tense of dive and she was like well it's dived what are you talking and I was like Granny that sounds straight up ignorant

You saying dived like that I don't Know if you know I say dived you say dived Yeah I dived into this I dove into it Hank what do you say I also dove I have dove into Oh no The British aristocratic grandmother Raised you my mom

Sheila and my dad Morris Morris, I guess. I don't know. I say dived. But that's one of those things that it's like the spelling of judgment. Whether you add an E after the G, it's very much a British Commonwealth American split. Interesting. To which there's no right answer. One might look intuitive to you, but not to another person who grew up with another set of rules.

Now, how does this apply to the ocean is soup because we're talking about who whether or not okay because the the the general sort of claim that hank made of you know who decides if the ocean is soup it's you if the ocean is soup to you it is but i think that there may be we need to reach some sort of consensus, some sort of societal consensus to decide. Right. And I'm like, so, so the soup, I think one of the main things about it is, is it is nutritive. And I feel like if I, if I drink ocean, it is definitely not nutritious. It is not like, I'm not going from like, okay, I, I have a, I have a physiological need that must be satisfied.

Ocean is in a very deep way not going to do that. Not only is it not going to provide me calories. I'm sorry, I'm coming down hard and early. Not only is it not going to provide me calories, it will make me sick. Like it will dehydrate me. You can't drink ocean because there's so much salt in it that it sucks the water out of your cells. And then you need to go and, you know, if you ever dove into the ocean. Dived.

And swim around for long enough, you know, you need to get on shore and have a drink. Have a pina colada. So what you're saying is the ocean is a condensed soup. The way that campbell sells condensed chicken soup so the ocean is both condensed and dilute soup so one you need to you need to dilute the salt but you need to condense the the nutrition well it depends on what part of the ocean there's definitely calories in the ocean like there's there's fish that's a thing that comes that is often in soup.

But there's also like algae that maybe, I don't know if we can get any of the chlorophyll out of that and make that into energy for ourselves. But there's all kinds of things. I mean, we certainly can. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's tons of vegetables in the ocean. Lots of vegetables.

I mean, people eat tons of kelp. You have kombu. I mean, you have so many different seaweeds that people have been eating for generations that do provide a lot of vegetables. I mean, people eat tons of kelp. You have kombu. I mean, you have so many different seaweeds that people have been eating for generations that do provide a lot of nutrients. You can't just list one seaweed. I mean, we got spirulina. What's that? Ogo from Hawaii.

That's my favorite seaweed. That's a good one. You got sea grapes. You got sea fennel. Literally, you just put... So this is a big thing in the aquatic foraging movement that ended up in fine dining restaurants where they would put the word sea in front of like a normal land vegetable and then assume that we would know what it means.

So there was a, do you remember sea grapes? I love sea grapes. Sea beans. I'm very passionate about it. Sea lettuce. These were all things that ended up on menus and it was just like a green, crunchy, salty thing. You guys remember menus?

I do. I didn't realize restaurants are all just doing qr codes on your phone yeah they are which is my first restaurant experience back in society was um at a bj's brew house with my with my 99 year old grandmother fully vaccinated first time leaving you know the home in in a year and she wanted pizza so we took her to the bj's brew house and then when she asked for the menu and they said, oh, hello, 99-year-old woman, this is a QR code. I was like, no, society has already changed so much since we went into quarantine. Blown right past us all.

Okay. But if we're talking about taking the general proportions of the ocean and then compressing that into one microcosm, you know, one tiny microcosmic bowl of soup, then you'd be right. And that it would be both condensed, too salty to eat, but also nutritionally dilute. But if you took the right slice of ocean, if you just simply dipped a pitcher, this is the lengths that we are going to. If you dipped a pitcher and you got a couple little like mud crabs, these things do not all live in the same tertiary level of the ocean, but got some nice kelp you got some nice little mud crabs yeah you got a stock

got a sardine yeah you got a little seahorse you know you could in theory take that i love seahorse soup that's one of my favorite i really wish i could go back go back to the old days when i could go to the restaurant and get seahorse soup the The worst thing is that if any show were to create it, it would be GMM. That would be... I'm so grateful every day that they have not asked me to procure a seahorse. Can you eat a seahorse? Hardline.

I almost want to cut this in the podcast, so Rhett and Link, don't eventually hear that. But if you took the right proportion of ocean and you were to boil that... Go ahead. I've googled, can you eat a seahorse? But if you took the right proportion of ocean and you were to boil that. Go ahead. Okay. I've Googled.

Can you eat a seahorse? No. And you know how Google like now is making it so you don't have to click a link. It just like appears like a box. And it says that it says, unfortunately, seahorses are edible. And I'm like, who decided that it was unfortunate? I mean, unfortunate for the seahorse certainly i suppose yeah like uh but but fortunate for for the for the et the person doing the eating

um but i guess i guess probably that that they uh have put pressure on them through the harvest of seahorses so that makes sense maybe be maybe be cautious about future seahorse consumption. Yeah, I'm not doing that. To be clear, this is a thought exercise. I don't intend to eat seahorses. Yeah, no, I sure don't. I already made a video of eating octopus and everyone who watched my octopus teacher really did not seem to enjoy that. And I apologize.

It happens. It's okay. It's a more sustainable seafood. Anyways, point is you could, in theory, take that perfect slice of ocean and then boil that down. You could even potentially desalinate it a little bit. We've all had soup bases that are too salty, right? Sure. And I always run it through my pocket desalination plant.

And I keep it in my home. That's fair. But I mean, literally, so the way that bouillon is created, right? Chicken bouillon, if you ever use that in your home. Yeah. That's there. But I mean, literally, so the way that bouillon is created, right? Chicken bouillon, if you ever use that in your home, it is literally stock that has been

just dehydrated until it's a powder. So this would take a certain amount of culinary skill for the home chef to do, but you could boil

that slice of ocean down until you created a sort of bouillon, right, that you could, in theory, take to space, I'm just saying,

and then take some of that out. I mean, ultimately, to me, it only has to have a little bit of nutrition and it has to not be poisonous that's yeah that's a soup like but if you have to take so much if you have to do so many steps to get it to that point then it wasn't a soup to begin with you made the soup yeah at what point did i create the soup so the thing is is, well, because, okay, it has to, so now I'm like backing up and I'm saying, okay, I think a soup can be so salty that it dehydrates me.

That's okay. Like, I'm sure that there are soups like that, that are, yeah. So it's very salty soup. If I, so the ocean is not a soup because if you just like took the ocean, there's just way too much water and not enough food but if i if i like dip a spoon and in that spoon there is a sardine yeah and then i eat that at that point i feel like it's soup because it's it's nutritious it's salty and it's wet and that's just a wet sardine no this is a wet sardine you guys are not accounting

you let me tell you let me stop you guys right here you are not accounting for how horrible we treat the ocean it is full of trash where did we get no it is full of trash pollution denial i'm saying the the human species uh-, we pollute the ocean. There's so much oil in the ocean. There's so much trash in the ocean. There's so much sewage in the ocean. If you had a bowl of ocean soup, you would die. No.

You would have to go to the doctor. And you just like get a mouthful and you swallow it. I feel like you would have to go to the doctor if you ate a bowl of soup from the ocean the ocean is the ocean is so big look there's a saying in environmental uh work dilution is the solution to pollution um you can't you can't get rid of pollution but and look there's always been uh stuff like there's always like in certain parts of the ocean, you can't drink it. Like you can't go down to a hydrothermal vent and like take that. And that's that's going to be that's going to be poison. Nasty, nasty hot soup.

That's just a nice pre-warm. But but, you know, all of the fishes and whales are drinking the ocean and they're OK. I mean, drinking, drinking. They don't have to drink, really. But the ocean is is in and around them, and they're okay. I'm not worried about the poison. I'm worried about the salt. But there are soups out there that are so salty that I would compare them to the saltiness of the ocean.

But I do like that's just a wet sardine. I think there's a case to be made that that's just a wet sardine. Thank you. Do you think you're more likely to dip a spoon into the ocean and pull up a sardine or dip a spoon into the ocean and just hit a BP oil spill? Honestly, which one is more likely? Neither. It's a wet cigarette. Yeah, that is much more likely. It's a Yoohoo bottle. It's a drinking Yoohoo bottle. Growing up in the American public education system, I was raised to believe that the ocean is 90% the six-pack rings. The rings that the six packs of soda come in. It is 90% dolphins stuck in those.

And now also turtles with the straws in their noses. Those are the only creatures in the ocean, as far as I'm concerned, based on the YouTube content that I consume. But to go to the wet sardine, I think people are talking about the wrong food when it comes to the ocean. Because I personally don't believe it's soup. If you have to take so many steps to it to make it an edible soup, I agree with the fact that if you get one sardine in that, that is just a very weak sardine filled broth. But still, it doesn't have to be a

good soup. It just has to be a soup. I would argue that the ocean is a giant jar of pickles. Because if you think about the salinity of the ocean if you put cucumbers into just straight up seawater they would lacto ferment and they would become delicious jewish half sour pickles oh my gosh the ocean is a giant thing and also if you eat certain certain seaweeds if you eat i mean certain sea creatures think about oysters right yeah oysters have such natural salinity to them because they're swimming in pickle brine well yeah so i think that the ocean is the ocean is certainly has pickles in it the ocean has definitely brined some things but not all of the things and so like uh now now i get

to be myself and tell you that that lots of organisms in the ocean pump salt out of themselves so that they are not as salty as the solution that they are in and the whole point of pickling is that you have salt and vinegar and you like get it to seep into the pickle but that doesn't happen to all living organisms in the ocean though some it does that's actually because i mean i was wondering about that because certain shellfish taste really sweet, like certain bivalves. I mean, clams are incredibly sweet, whereas oysters, they're natural. I guess they're what we would call their liquor in the culinary world. Is that just seawater?

I mean, what are they? That's a great question. I don't know. Uncle Hank, how do oysters work? Boy, I don't know what a liquor is. So it's a term for when you crack open a fresh oyster. I don't know if you're a fresh oyster guy. But if you crack open a fresh oyster, there's just a residual pool of liquid that is sort of surrounding the oyster flesh. And that's referred to as like the oyster liquor.

And it's like very prized because it kind of has that seawater quality. But I don't know if it's the oyster, you know, just its natural juices and secretions. I think oysters open when they are doing their like stuff um and so that would that would i imagine but i don't know it may be that that like there's space inside of it that is just like the seawater gets in there or it may be that they are processing seawater and that the liquor is a some kind of excretion from from the oyster i don't know yeah google.com is saying it's the natural juice that you find inside of raw oystersion from the oyster. I don't know. Yeah, google.com is saying it's the natural juice that you find inside of raw oysters.

So whatever that means. Oyster juice. Oyster juice. That's what that is. Okay, so we talk about the evolution of words and that certainly happens in the culinary world all the time. I mean, obviously we named our podcast after the sort of granddaddy of all of these debates, right?

Is a hot dog a sandwich? And that is something we have decided we will never talk about. Nope. I don't want to. It is merely the muse, the namesake of our podcast. But we're not ready to get into that. I don't think we ever will. But one thing that people do often say to us is a hot dog is not a sandwich.

It is a taco. And it got me researching the word sandwich in taco because everyone knows the foundational myth of the sandwich, right? The Earl of Sandwich was playing a poker game. This is in the mid-17th century, I believe. Didn't want to get his cards dirty, and he was like, ah, bread has been around for 4,000 years. Meat has been around for 10,000 years. Never before now has a person thought to put them together

except I, the Earl of Sandwich. And so thus the sandwich was created. But before the term sandwich, people were obviously putting meat. They would have been fools. They discovered the heliocentric model, but they couldn't discover bread, meat,

bread. And so once a term gets created, ditto with tortillas been around for 10,000 years. The term taco only dates back to the mid-1800s, but certainly they were describing a concept before then. And it was the Earl of Taco? That is exactly what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is, you know, words,

the concepts have existed forever, but the words are very new. So ditto even for soup. The term soup is constantly changing. The original etymology of soup. The term soup is constantly changing. The original etymology of soup, it comes from Old Germanic. It's specifically referred to a dish of broth poured onto bread to rehydrate it on old bread. I didn't know that.

Yeah, which I think is really interesting. So even the original definition of soup has changed, which is why I argue that soup does not exist. I argue that soup does not exist. Much in the way that there is no such thing as a fish because it is a sort of broad, meaningless category that we have only used to like ascribe to things that kind of live in the ocean and don't give like live birth. That is to me what soup is. It just doesn't exist. It's just wet food. But then some wet foods are called sauces.

Some wet foods are called stews. And there's no defining characteristic. So part of me doesn't even want to entertain the is ocean a soup then what's the point of the podcast i don't know anymore man i'm just having a good time all right first of all some some fish do give live birth which continues to confuse our whole situation including uh seahorses really but seahorses yeah but the males give life birth which is even weirder as a feminist that's hot that seahorse really gets my juices flowing the uh yeah but but so ultimately it comes down to the to the utility of a word I think that you can't say that soup doesn't exist Because I need a word for my wet foods

Why? Why do you need a word for your wet foods? Because I can't go into a restaurant And have the section of the menu with soups on it Say wet foods Why come? Why come, Hank? Why come you can't say that you can just point to it on the qr code all of the it's not that i have to say it out loud it's that it's that the chefs of the world need a good attention they need a good brand

for that category of food and just like salad you, like apparently a potato salad is a salad for some reason. Like, no, it's not. It's mayonnaise and potatoes. Just like that's more a soup than a salad. Yeah, depends where you get it from. But no, I totally agree. Well, talking about the soup, the soup breakdown of menus,

a thing I'm all sort of fascinated with is at especially a lot of Chinese restaurants, there is a section of soups that will be, you know, if it's an American Chinese restaurant, hot and sour, egg drop, sizzling rice, corn. And then you will go to the noodle section and a lot of those noodles are also coming in soup. Right, right.

And curry is also often soup. Like in the curry section, you're like, oh, that's a curry soup to me, American. I would agree but yeah again these are these these cultural lines where everything's very blurry on what a soup is and if we want to create what is it like the kantian world state you know i don't even know what i read that i heard that in one uh you know like if we want to all come together we need to create a one defining you know sort of modality for soup and i don't think we have the ability

to do that right but i also don't know that we i also don't need that we all we do need to come together in one world that in which all we're all like everybody agrees that because part of the part of the joy and the beauty of being a human is this diversity where like suddenly you're like well i don't know is is that curry a soup uh like it's like if Like, if it was on the menu at an American, like, steakhouse, they probably would call that a soup. But, like, we are so diverse as a species that, like, hey, like, we have such cultural diversity that it's not going to, like, that word isn't going to apply in the same place every place.

Which brings me back to fish. Yes. To put this in, like uh for people who aren't aware of the there is no such thing as a fish uh argument um we are more closely related to some fish than other fish are to other fish so the the sort of like common ancestor of all fish also includes cats. Wow. So either I'm a fish or taxonomically some fish are not fish. But we also look and we say, okay, fish are a certain thing.

They look a certain way. They behave a certain way. And just because taxonomically there isn't a way that we can sort of define fish. And by the way, we can do this of define fish and the ways and by the way we can do this with like birds for example like birds are a thing birds are all commonly related to it's like they they all share a have a shared ancestor whereas like the so it's it's not always

this way but but we still need the word fish like we still need to we still need a name for that thing that looks like a fish. Even if they aren't closely related to each other, they just like converged upon the right shape to be a good water animal boy. It's like you sort of have to make concessions for the convenience and communicability of it in a sense. You have to make certain like scientific concessions. This happens a lot with the concept of red meat versus white meat. You know, when the pork board had the single greatest,

most manipulative advertising campaign of all time. In the 1980s, the pork, the other white meat campaign that, you know, it got people to believe that pork is quote unquote white meat. They literally bred pigs to be leaner, to have less red flesh,

to look white. But I mean, the split between white and red meat was typically to describe, you know, nutritional value levels of saturated fat. White meat has always had a connotation of being healthier. And so for people to, you know, now think that pork is quote unquote white meat, which is, I mean, almost entirely limited to like poultry and birds. It was a great way to sort of trick people because it physically looked lighter and they were like well that can't be red meat because it's quite grayish pink it must be good for me must be yeah but it's like no the you're

misunderstanding the point of the taxonomy yes to describe levels saturated fat etc right so it's a way that like the you know the literalism was taken over the side of utility. Right, right. So you take a word that has a utility, and you want to associate with that utility. And that's the very specific goal, is to associate with a particular utility, even though it actually doesn't apply to that thing. And at that point, it's a trick of advertising and of marketing. But this can also just happen. That is a thing that was kind of done intentionally,

but it's also a thing that could just happen. And especially when you have a word, I've lost my train of thought. Oh, dang it. Welcome to the podcast. A hot dog is a tangent. So I think we can all, I don't mean to speak for the group but i think i think what i

have noticed in summation of the argument of you know is the ocean of soup is that the ocean as it stands right now uh is is not a soup you would maybe need to transmute it using some sort of culinary skill to get it to be an appropriate soup there is the chance that you could get a bite at that point you're making a soup and like you can't make a soup out of a soup i guess you're right true yeah i mean actually you add the right amount of water to condense cream and mushrooms i was just about to say yeah all right okay hank so you you are i i use the term the patron saint of sagacity on tiktok and people have been coming to you for answers for so long uh we have discussed many other questions on the show i i want to do a quick lightning round just to get your initial thoughts

on some things we've discussed in the past do you feel prepared for that i do all right cool so uh i mentioned many of them are soup related one is cereal soup no okay are pop tarts ravioli definitely not it's correct on that uh if you eat a hot dog as it travels through you and your intestines does a part of you actually become a hot dog think about it like i'm the bun yeah yeah you're the bun i mean well i mean we also call bunless hot dogs hot dogs yes that's correct you just eat a hot dog solo i eat hot dogs at the back well then am i not am i not just a hot dog all the time then? Well, I mean, I think it depends on...

You tell me. So actually there are legal requirements for... So a hot dog has to be at least 50% plus meat and no more than 30% fat to satisfy the FDA requirements for a hot dog. So it depends on the contents traveling through your intestines at the time. Interesting. So if you've eaten a balanced breakfast of oats, et cetera, that's filler. And Hank, you're trying to cheapen your intestines to sell to consumers. I'm definitely not a hot dog.

I'm not a hot dog. I'm not a hot dog. I'm a hot dog. A part of me is a hot dog. Okay. I mean, a lot of this comes down to how you view yourself. You know? I do like when things are actually legally defined.

My favorite one, Mendeleev, the man who made the periodic table, you may remember him from chemistry class, also worked for the Russian government, and he legally defined what vodka is. So vodka is always the exact same thing. Now, there are people who will tell you that they can taste the difference between different vodkas, but they are the same they are 60 water 40 ethanol that's what vodka is interesting but also vodka is like the uh i didn't know that about mendeleev that's really

fascinating but vodka is um everyone thinks it's made from potatoes but a vast majority of the world's vodkas it's made from just grains yeah you don't so there's like very few legal protections just outside of mendeleev well it's yeah i mean it's just that he defined it that way and so it just sort of like stuck and so that like you can make ethanol out of a number of you can make it from potatoes you can make it from grains interesting but uh it's it's sort of wherever the ethanol comes from. Now, there will be very, very small impurities that are probably different from potato vodka versus grain vodka, but I cannot imagine a person who could taste them. But maybe that person exists.

I have lied to a Russian waiter at a fancy restaurant and said that I could taste the difference between their vodka flight, but I was just having a really great time. I was playing into it. I was like, oh, my God. I can taste the terroir of Poland. Yeah, go to Kaczka in Portland. Unreal restaurant. Cool.

That sounds good. Okay, I have one more I have a few more questions for you. If you stack one lasagna on top of another lasagna does it become one lasagna? Yes. That's a good one. Are Cheetos chips? No. Is tomato really a fruit yes tomatoes absolutely a fruit

i don't like that both i think both botanically which is definitely but also in terms of how i consume them they are fruits in terms of how you consume yeah i feel like you're making fruit sandwiches what well i was gonna say i could put a pineapple on a sandwich. That's delicious. I just realized after I said that, I ate a banana sandwich this morning. So I'm like, okay, dummy, let's back that one up real fast. All right, is Kit Kat technically lasagna? No.

Is cheesecake a pie? Yes. Are muffins unfrosted cupcakes? Yes. I love that yourosted cupcakes? Yes. I love that. I love that you look like a kid in the spelling bee who was like reciting, you know, trying to like mouth out the words he's not allowed to write in. Prestidigit. P-R-E-S-T-I-G-T.

Hank, I feel not only great about is the ocean a soup, but also about a lot of our previous discussions. Me too. Not that we needed your validation. Well, the only one I feel that I'm sort of moving back on is cereal being of soup, but also about a lot of our previous discussions. Not that we needed your validation. Well, the only one I feel that I'm sort of moving back on is cereal being a soup. And now I'm sort of more on the table of potentially cereal being a soup. Oh, soup. This is where we ended up too.

That was a long and emotional one for us. We both cried after. Yeah. All right, Nicole and Hank, we've heard what you and I have to say. now it's time to find out what other wacky ideas are rattling out there in the twitterverse it's time for a segment we call opinions are like casseroles we gotta standardize if it's a song if it's just just us saying- It's sing-songy. We're going sing-songy for now? It's sing-songy. It's sing-songy.

Okay, but not a song. All right. First up, Nicole, you want to rock it? Sure. Card underscore tag says, cream cheese is great on pizza with ground beef. The cream cheese will melt, but retain its form. Little pockets of melty cream cheese make for an interesting textural experience. Okay.

Take it away, Hank. I'm sorry i got distracted and i got confused i was like i heard the beginning and i thought that i would understand what was going on but then i then i like lost my train of thought in the middle and i felt like a spell had been cast on me i i appear that's what my voice does on people it's not the first time it would appear they're making dolloped pockets of cream cheese on their pizza. Yeah. With ground beef.

Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Any cheese belongs on pizza. Like the first time I had a barbecue pizza, it was like cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce. I was like, this is an insane idea. And I had it and I was like, well, turns out cheese on bread is good. So, yeah, I think you, I think think dollop so one of my favorite uh pizza toppings in the world is goat cheese and this seems very similar to that i actually think cream cheese might have an advantage to goat cheese in certain in certain forms only because goat cheese

when you bake it it gets it gets chalky on the top on the top yeah it kind of it loses that moisture and there's so much acid in goat cheese that it kind of almost curdles and gets chalky and you lose that creaminess. So if you're going to bake it on top, if hot cheese is important to you, cream cheese is a great way to go. And you get more flavor than ricotta. Yeah.

To me, this is a beautiful, like very American innovation on pizza. Yeah, I put cream cheese in my Italian-esque recipes a lot. I kind of throw a dollop in my pasta sauces and it helps with the texture 100%. The first time I realized that the line between cream sauce and tomato sauce didn't have to be a

hard line was like I'm free! And this happened to me in Italy. I was in Italy and I got like this amazing lasagna that was creamy tomato-y sauce and I was just like,

what are we doing in America? And this was the 90s. So we have learned since then. The less libertine 90s. All right, at jbush53, my grandmother in Southern Alabama would serve us a dish called pear salad. It was a canned pear half

with a dollop of mayo sprinkled with cheddar cheese on a leaf of iceberg lettuce because it dish called pear salad. It was a canned pear half with a dollop of mayo sprinkled with cheddar cheese on a leaf of iceberg lettuce because it's still a salad. Hank, you were talking about the salad term earlier. I'm curious. I don't. So first of all, I don't think that's a salad. Second, it sounds.

Look, I don't know. It sounds like a food that you eat when necessary. It sounds like, you know, there are rations. We don't know exactly what foods are going to arrive at the house. And so we will put canned pear on iceberg lettuce. Yeah, it's like the food that launched a holiday for like, you know, a major religion. It's like, look, times were hard. This is all we had.

This is what we made. Now we make it every year. I just don't get it. I just don't get it, guys. I don't understand this. I think so. Part of this. I mean, my dad sort of grew up in that like baby boomer post-war, like a space race era where they were so fascinated by modern food production technology. And so there was this huge fascination with commercial canned items. There's a huge fascination with preserved mayonnaise that was shelf stable. And so that's how all this stuff ended up in these recipes where you're like

a canned pear half covered in mayonnaise that I bought at the grocery store. And now I'm starting to enter the workforce. There's a sort of fascination with all these foods. Also ditto with tropical fruits because of American neocolononialism into hawaii and guam and puerto rico so that's why we see all these weird quote-unquote banana and pineapple recipes and so this i don't know if it would taste good but it's kind of a cool slice of history for sure canned pears i feel like do have an advantage which is that they last for more than 12 hours between being not ripe and being too ripe. I've given up on pears.

I've given up on fresh pears. I love fresh pears. They're so good. They're worth it if you can make it happen. You just have to pay a lot of attention. I've been burned too many times. How do you ripen a pear appropriately? I just buy them and then I touch it and I go, okay, I can eat it now.

It's very simple for me. I love a good pear. If you push at the top next to the stem so you don't bruise it and then you're like, ah, that's not quite hard. I just kind of cradle it and I slightly see how much give there is.

Get the suppleness of it. Canned pears remind me of hospital food. Oh, definitely. Or like cafeteria lunch. Yeah. Well, they remind me of a very fancy pear preparation

that I love and you hate though. Poached pears? The poached pear. I hate poached pears me of a very fancy pear preparation that I love and you hate, though. Poached pears? The poached pears. I hate poached pears. That's very close to a canned pear, but you'll pay $18 for it at a restaurant.

Yeah, I like poached pears. I like hot fruit, like a banana's foster. Oh, my God. Yes. I love hot fruit, but poached pears just taste like

wine, wine-soaked flesh. Yeah. I don't like it. No, I can't. I. No, I can't. I can't. I can't.

Luke of the Tori says sous vide heaters are great at keeping the bathtub a comfortable temperature. This is some big brain stuff. Hank, are you familiar with the sous vide movement? Yeah. You like seal up a meat in a bag and then you heat it up. And that way the water never touches it but it still gets cooked i guess yeah so so the the i guess supposed proprietary technology of the immersion

circulator is the name of the actual tool and some people are very pedantic about not calling it a sous vide cooker someone slid in my dms the other day and they were so mad that i said sous vide cooker instead of immersion circulator interesting but anyways uh all it does it's a stick that you put into a a water bath and it circulates the water at a controlled temperature and so that's the big thing it circulates the water so it heats evenly but a lot of people have found out that if you kind of just like heat anything to a consistent temperature it's gonna keep that food at that temperature so if you just find the right setting like between the three and the four on your stove and you basically got a sous vide cooker without any of the mess so i think this

person's kind of uh taking the piss a little bit and being like sous vide is great for keeping the bathtub at a nice temp could it would it that's a lot of there's a lot of water in a bathtub would it be able to i guess it it might so like you got your heat loss because the water is you know warmer than the environment so you got your heat loss to the water is, you know, warmer than the environment. So you got your heat loss to the air and the tub and et cetera. And so like once the water is at a temperature, it's easier to keep it at the temperature. So you just have to fight against the heat loss. You don't have to heat it up. Yeah.

But it seems like that would be hard just because there is quite a lot of heat loss. And also- The sheer volume. Yeah, there's a lot of water to to try and keep it the right temperature but i don't know it would definitely help we actually did something at mythical before before my time where they tried to cook something sous vide in a kiddie pool interesting and i believe they had about eight sous vide eight immersion circulators strapped around the side yeah but still you're fighting a big i mean we've we've tried and failed at a

couple uh big construction things. That is not our strong suit. We tried to turn a whole gutted car into a pizza oven, and that did not turn out well. Oh, good times. I mean, it was a very fun episode. We just made a bad pizza.

I still ate it. Oh, I like this one. At Our La Durelle, our whole lives are just looking for ways to justify our consumption of dips and sauces. I mean, I think sauces are deeply underrated. Even at their current level of like, I think they're more highly rated than they once were. You know how everybody hates Arby's? My dad loves Arby's.

My dad's favorite restaurant. I'm familiar with the general concept. It's cool to hate Arby's my dad's favorite restaurant it's like with the general it's cool it's cool to hate Arby's but it is don't tell Morris don't tell my dad um but so there was an Arby's in my wife's hometown that uh in Connecticut and and I like if all arby's were like this i think everything would turn around for them where there was a sauce bar so arby's right now has more sauces than the average restaurant they have a horseradish sauce which is called horsey sauce and they have arby's sauce which is like a weird not very good barbecue sauce um like uh and then they have ketchup and mustard and and so that's like more than you'd usually get um more than necessary really no i disagree i like all of them i get all of the

sauces i have so much horsey sauce at my house guys i mean more than like a restaurant is required to serve they don't have to give you right more than they do and more than is required yes but but at this one in connecticut they there was a sauce bar and it was like with pumps and you could like choose and you could mix and i'm like this is the this is the revolution we need because like look there's only so many ways i can enjoy a roast beef sandwich but if i have a lot of different sauces to choose from i can like mix it up every time. I can be a connoisseur. This can be like wine tasting. So anyway, what was the question? That was it, man.

I mean, we have no less than like 35 hot sauces in our, but I mean, not like scorch your butt off hot sauces, but I mean like- Yeah, just different flavors. And you mix those with different mayonnaises and vinaigrettes. And, you know, people say that, you know, the arts are what gives life context and makes it worth living. To me, like, you know, the meat, the grains,

the vegetables are what gives your body nutrition. It is the sauces that make the food worth eating. Some people like their foods a little saucier than others though. Have you ever hung out with somebody that just drenches their Subway and like sauce or like when they go to sushi, they just dip it in like spicy mayo, ponzu, eel sauce, and a bunch of other sauces. You're just like, what are you doing?

It's like when I was a kid and I got all of the sodas in one cup. I think there's a fine line when people are just like, there's too much sauce. And then there's some people that's like not enough sauce. I think we all fit in that category of perfect amount of sauce. I don't know. I can go overboard. My favorite genre of food... My favorite genre of food are wet sandwiches. Salads! Well, wet salads when I'm

trying to eat healthy, but a French dip... Oh my god, Philips. I was just going to say Philips. They physically drop the sandwich in the broth and then lift it out and it sops and you eat it with your hand. You can get it double dipped! Yeah, you can get it double dipped and then lift it out and it sops. You can get it double-dipped. Yeah. You can get it double-dipped and then you just get it.

It's a sandwich or soup is where we get the mind. At that point, you could potentially put a straw in it and suck it up. You could. I am 100% on that. Gabriel Iglesias has that whole bit about Chico's Tacos where he said, it was the first taco that I could drink. And if you look at it, it is three taquitos floating in a quart of sauce.

It's like, that is a soup, sir. That is a soup, which is also the ocean. Man, this podcast makes me very hungry. I'm also getting hungry. I'm about to point. What's your favorite? What's your favorite sauce? Spicy mayo is my favorite sauce. Any sort of hot sauce plus mayonnaise is my favorite sauce. All purpose sauce. Yeah. Favorite sauce. I mean, hot sauce plus mayonnaise is my favorite sauce. All-purpose sauce. Yeah. Favorite sauce.

I mean, I have long been a ranch dressing fan. I grew up eating it, putting it on pizza, on chicken. I would put it on spaghetti and lasagna. But that said, I think I'm now a sauce-free agent. Where, you know, I think, you know, actually there's a Vietnamese condiment called a nuk trum, that's like a prepared fish sauce. It's fish sauce, lime, garlic, chilies, and sugar. And to me, that's probably number one on my death chart.

What about you? I'm between just melted butter because, I don't know what we did when we made butter, but it's amazing. And I think, but ultimately really barbecue sauce. I have a theory that ketchup is technically a barbecue sauce. All right, on that note, thank you for listening to a hot dog as a sandwich.

To enjoy more, you got to start talking so no one can respond. To enjoy more Hank Green, you can tag him in TikToks and follow him on YouTube by subscribing to the Vlogbrothers channel. You should also read his New York Times bestselling-selling books an absolutely remarkable thing or the sequel a beautifully foolish endeavor hank where else can the listeners check you out i think that's i think that's good i have a podcast called sci-show tangents which is very fun and weird where it's

a it's a it's a science podcast that is not dissimilar from this where we uh hit each other with science facts and then we just make jokes about it. That's my new commute home podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too. If you want to hear more from us here in the Mythical Kitchen, we've got new episodes for you every Wednesday. If you want to be featured on Opinions Like Casseroles, you can hit us up on Twitter at MythicalChef

or nhandizadeh with the hashtag OpinionCasserole. And, of course, if you want to share pics of your dishes, hit us up on Instagram at Mythical Kitchen. See you next time. Hank, thanks again for subbing. Thanks, Hank. I had so much fun. Thank you, Josh jars thank you nicole this was so cool you