Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: DNA Demystified & Why Food Culture is So Popular

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Starting point is 00:00:17 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, why do so many of us have trouble remembering where we put our keys or our wallet? And what's a good way to find them? Then DNA, what it is, what it does, and how it catches criminals.

Starting point is 00:00:46 It's a very powerful tool. I think we're only starting to do this, but if I did something 20 years ago criminally and I left DNA there, I would be really frightened because the knock is going to come on my door any day now. Also, why can teenagers sleep till noon? But that gets harder as you get older. And we've created a fascinating and somewhat bizarre culture around food. Why do we have a culture of particularly young people spending their discretionary income and time on things like avocado toast or $25 bowls of ramen or taking pictures of their food? This is a topic that I have become obsessed with. All this today on Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:01:31 People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

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Starting point is 00:02:42 Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. It came as great comfort to me to learn that the average person spends about 10 minutes a day looking for things they've lost or misplaced. At the top of the list are keys and wallets. I've certainly spent a lot of my life looking for my keys and wallet. Also on the list, people spend a lot of time looking for where they left their car, their shoes, their cell phone, their glasses, and the remote control. The reason

Starting point is 00:03:21 we misplace things is that we usually aren't paying attention. We're focused on the next task we have to do. So, for example, you might be hungry and headed for the kitchen to get something to eat when you put your keys down somewhere along the way. But you're focused on getting something to eat, and you don't really remember putting your keys down. Then, when you're no longer hungry, you're in a different state of mind, and you forgot where you put them. That's why retracing your steps is a good idea, but also retracing your feelings, if you can. What you were thinking or feeling at the time,

Starting point is 00:03:57 that can help take you back physically and mentally and help you find them. And that is something you should know. What do you really know about your DNA? On TV, DNA left at the scene of the crime often solves the crime. Plus, you can get those DNA test kits to find out your heritage and who your ancestors are and what diseases you might be prone to. But then DNA also has something to do with your eye color and your hair color and how tall you are. So what exactly is DNA?

Starting point is 00:04:35 And why is it important to understand it? Here with some answers and insight into the topic is Alan McEwen. He's an educator and scientist and a real expert in the subject of DNA, having studied it for several years. He's author of a book called DNA Demystified. Hey, Alan, welcome. Well, thanks very much for having me. So in basic simple terms, what is my DNA? DNA is the molecule of life. Every living thing carries its genetic information in this molecule called DNA. I've worked with it for now 50 years, ever since I first learned about it and became fascinated with it. So I like to share what I've learned or some of what I've learned over the years with people who share fascination

Starting point is 00:05:21 but don't necessarily have a lot of technical background. What is so fascinating about it? If it's just a molecule, what specifically makes it so fascinating? Oh, there's so many things that DNA does that no other molecule does. I mean, you know, we're surrounded by molecules, you know, the Earth, the whole planet, but the thing about DNA is that it is the only one that stores genetic information and passes that information from one generation to the next. And that's true whether we're talking about humans or trees or bacteria. Every living thing uses the same molecule, DNA,

Starting point is 00:06:00 slightly different form, of course, in each species and each individual, but it's the same molecule that carries our genetic information into the future, and it connects us with our ancestors from the past, going through us as individual bottleneck and on to our descendants into the future. So when you say it carries our genetic information, what is our genetic information? What does that mean? Everything that you are or everything that a plant is or some other animal is a composition of cells. And within each of these cells is DNA. The DNA carries information in the form of recipes that tells the cell how to make particular proteins.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And it is the presence or absence of these proteins, many of which are enzymes, that make us look the way we look, act the way we act. It gives fur on mammals, it gives fins on fish, and it gives bacteria, for example, pathogenic bacteria, the ability to fight the antibiotics that we develop to fight off those pathogens. So it's an information source, much like a recipe book. So if you look at, say, my DNA, is all of the whatever it is in DNA, is all of it traceable back to somebody else? Or are there things in my DNA that are just me, they just showed up with me and have nothing to do with my ancestors? We get all of our genetic information from our mothers and our fathers in equal dose,

Starting point is 00:07:38 right? 50% from each, almost exactly 50% from each mother and father. Any genetic information has to come through that source, with the rare exception of spontaneous mutations that may occur within us individually. So almost all of our traits, whether they're physical, like our eye color, hair color, blood type, whatever, come from our parents. And sometimes we see behavioral traits, and this is a little bit more controversial because it's not as well explained or explored, but certain behavioral traits also come through our parents and tracing back perhaps to our grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. But we can't explain fully exactly how all of

Starting point is 00:08:26 these behavioral traits work, because behavioral traits are usually complex. They involve not just one little piece of DNA, but many different pieces of DNA working in concert together. So maybe I'm mistaken, but doesn't it seem that sometimes someone will get some sort of disease or affliction or condition that is, quote, genetic, that isn't in their past? Their parents didn't have it, their grandparents didn't have it, but now they have it. Does that ever happen? Yeah, that does happen. And one of the cases is when there is a spontaneous mutation, as I say, and I was just talking to one of my colleagues is when there is a spontaneous mutation, as I say, and I was just talking to one of my colleagues about this happening in her family, that there's no record

Starting point is 00:09:11 of this gene appearing in their parents or grandparents or anywhere, but it is there. And with modern molecular genetic technologies, we can actually extract the DNA from a sample of cells from all of the different people involved, from the parents and sometimes nowadays from the grandparents, and find that, no, the gene, altered gene that caused the susceptibility to the disease first appeared in this one person. It did not come from either parent. Now, as I say, that is quite rare. That's a spontaneous mutation, and that's quite rare. That's a spontaneous mutation, and that's quite rare. Most of the time, when we go back, we find that the gene is actually present

Starting point is 00:09:51 in one or sometimes both parents, but it's not expressed, right? So it's lying dormant. If you remember high school biology and you learned about Gregor Mendel, he would have called these recessive genes. And since we have these genes that where it passes on things that are harmful diseases, whatever, are we near the point, at the point, or will we ever be at the point where we can go in and manipulate those genes and basically cure that illness? Absolutely, and that's a very hot area of research right now. Things like sickle cell anemia, which is prevalent in African populations, is a very nasty condition.

Starting point is 00:10:35 It is genetic. We've understood the genetics or the DNA side of it for some time, but we didn't really understand how to repair it. Now, in the last couple of years, we've had several different cases where scientists have been using a new technique called genome engineering to modify the DNA to eliminate the bad part of the DNA in the gene that gives rise to sickle cell anemia. And some of those tests, clinical tests, are underway right now. And I just saw the other day that there's some very promising news. But as a scientist, I'll wait until the final results are published and peer-reviewed

Starting point is 00:11:17 journal articles before I pass judgment. But I think there's grounds for optimism that some of these genetic diseases or susceptibilities to genetic diseases can now be repaired. So we hear talk of DNA in popular culture on TV shows and in the movies. They use DNA to catch the criminal. And lately we've heard about actually cold cases being solved by somebody finding DNA through one of these home testing kits through their database. And so what is that all about? Well, it's just one of the many applications of DNA and DNA information, and that's why I spent a fair amount of time discussing this, the forensic use. I mean, we've heard of the CODIS databases used by FBI to try to identify criminals from having left a sample of their DNA, whether it's blood or skin

Starting point is 00:12:13 or semen or something at a crime scene, and trying to identify the perpetrator based on a DNA analysis of that material. Now, that itself doesn't really help a lot if the criminal who left that DNA there has no criminal record, if they haven't any reason to have their DNA already entered in the CODIS database, the police are stymied. I mean, they have the DNA of the suspect, but no way to identify the person associated with that DNA. So bring that in forward to combine with genetic genealogy, which is a different type of DNA test offered by companies like Ancestry.com or 23andMe that are designed mainly to help people build their family trees. And that type of test, compared to the type of test that the FBI uses, police force uses to make their CODIS database, those tests are not compatible.

Starting point is 00:13:11 You can't directly compare a finding in the CODIS database with a finding in one of the genealogy databases because they're different types. They look at different parts of the DNA. So more recently, people have started saying, okay, well, maybe we can find a way to convert the information in the genealogy databases to make them more comparable to the entries in the CODIS database, the law enforcement database, and then building a family tree and getting a list of suspects that seem to fit, and then going back to traditional police work, following these suspects around to get a sample of DNA from their discarded coffee cup or cigarette butt or something, and then testing that using the CODIS type of test, comparing that with what they have in their crime scene analysis to finally

Starting point is 00:14:06 capture these cold case criminals. So a fascinating area and a lot of work going on on that right now. And that will result, you suspect, in lots of cold cases being solved? Oh, absolutely. And it already is. A number of cold cases, and there are even TV shows on this now, becoming very popular, explaining how some of these cold case suspects have been apprehended. There's already at least one conviction that I'm aware of, an old cold case out of Washington state. There are several now

Starting point is 00:14:37 in court sessions, ongoing trials, and a number of others where the suspect has been apprehended after years of having been cold. So it's a very powerful tool. I think we're only starting to do this, but if I did something 20 years ago criminally and I left DNA there, I would be really frightened because the knock is going to come on my door any day now. Well, that's got to be a little unnerving. But I want to ask you how foolproof that is in just a second. I want to remind people that I'm talking to Alan McEwen, and the name of his book is DNA Demystified. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning,

Starting point is 00:15:34 a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Starting point is 00:16:25 Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes.

Starting point is 00:17:02 Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Alan, the assumption is, and the way it's portrayed in TV and in the courts when you read about it, is that if I have your DNA at the scene, you're the suspect, there's no question.

Starting point is 00:17:39 This is 100% foolproof that this, it couldn't have been anybody else, or the chances of it being somebody else is one in 86 billion, and so it had to be you. Is that true? It's true to the point of saying, yes, if I'm the suspect, I will say, yes, that is my DNA that you found at the crime scene. But that doesn't mean that I'm the person that pulled the trigger. And it also doesn't mean that I deposited my DNA there. And so, you know, I discussed a number of cases where people have shown that there was a secondary transfer. That is, I may have shaken hands with somebody who then, you know, afterwards went straight to the crime scene and wiped their hands on the counter and left my DNA on the counter when I was never in that room to begin with. Talk about these home testing kits. I've had some experience with them, and they are different. I mean, Ancestry seems to be very

Starting point is 00:18:36 focused on, you know, your ancestors. 23andMe also has that medical component that Ancestry does not. There's probably others. What's your sense of all these things? Well, I call them the big four. There's the big four companies that do the direct-to-consumer testing. As you mentioned, Ancestry is primarily concerned with those who want to build a family tree. They're very good at it. They have the largest database. They will connect you if you donate your DNA to them. They will connect you to other people who share fragments of your DNA and indicate, well, just how closely related are you? Are you a first cousin? Are you a sixth cousin? You know, a great-grandparent, unlikely nowadays.

Starting point is 00:19:20 But, you know, so that's what Ancestry does really well. 23andMe, as you say, their focus is more on the health and medical, but they also do the ancestral stuff as well. FTDNA, Family Tree DNA, is another one that focuses on the ancestral genealogy. And MyHeritage is the fourth one to round out what I call the big four. They're all reputable companies. In my mind, they do a good job. Their tests are accurate. They're inexpensive, usually less than $100 for a standard SNP test

Starting point is 00:19:53 for these types of family or basic health and medical. And I recommend to people that they choose one of those sites depending on what the individual is trying to achieve. If they are going to go for family history and tree building, probably Ancestry would be my choice, unless there's some special reason to go with one of the others. If it's a health or medical, most people aim for 23andMe. Are there places, because I've heard there are places,

Starting point is 00:20:26 are there places where if you're willing to spend more money that the tests are more involved? And if they're more involved, what else do you get that you don't get from those four? There are several different types of DNA tests. The standard ones that we've just been discussing is the SNP test or SNP test. And it takes a sample of your DNA. It doesn't analyze the entire genome or the entire complement of your DNA, but it looks only at individual bases that are known to vary from one person to another. And of the three billion DNA bases in the standard human genome, one in a thousand or about 3 million of these are known to vary. And the SNP SNP test,

Starting point is 00:21:16 they will look at a sample of these 600,000 to 700,000. So it's just a snapshot sampling of some of the bases that you have in your DNA. Now, these are inexpensive. As I say, they're less than $100 nowadays, and they're very useful for what they do, but there are limitations. So some people want to get a more elaborate test that are more expensive. These could be as simple as a Y chromosome test. FT-DNA offers a Y chromosome for people who are interested in following their

Starting point is 00:21:46 father's and paternal grandfather's line back into history. They're more expensive. It looks at the Y chromosome exclusively, and it is a bigger test. It's more elaborate, more expensive, and so on. And then finally, there's the whole genome test, which is much more expensive, although the price is coming down dramatically. That gives you the entire read of 3.1 billion bases. And quite honestly, I recommend we leave that to nerds like me, because there's really very little usage for the general public or even most specialists to get the whole genome analysis. I know there are people who are very concerned about genetically modified foods, basically messing with the DNA of foods. And the concern is, I guess, that they're not safe,

Starting point is 00:22:33 that they're not healthy. What do you think? Well, that's, you know, we humans have been messing with the DNA of our food crops and foods for thousands of years. And, you know, corn itself is the best example. I mean, the traditional natural version of corn called teosinte was genetically modified by our Native Americans for thousands of years to give us what we now eat every day as corn, what we call corn. And this is true for virtually all of the crops that we grow. None of the foods that we eat or that we buy from a grocery store are genetically the same as our ancestors ate 10,000 years ago. So we've modified the DNA of those crops for thousands of years. Many of the crops that we eat today didn't even exist 10,000 years ago.

Starting point is 00:23:24 So DNA modifications have been going on for a long time. If you're talking about genetic engineering of crops, which is a controversial area that dreaded so-called GMOs, then the analyses of scientists who looked into the safety and efficacy of genetic engineering of foods and crops, led by the National Academy of Sciences here in the U.S. and conducted like every second year going back to the mid-1980s, every single one of those studies has stated that we can't find any difference in the risks associated with genetic engineering of crops and foods compared with the risks of doing traditional breeding with of crops and foods compared with the risks of doing traditional breeding with those crops and foods. That is, the risks that we see, it's not that genetic

Starting point is 00:24:11 engineering is not at all risky, but that the risks we see are the same risks that we see with doing traditional breeding. So, you know, we've been eating GMO foods and crops now since the mid-1990s, and there's still not a single documented case of harm to anyone anywhere in the world from eating GMO crops and foods. And when food is altered, can you give me some examples of how that's happened specifically? Well, one of the most popular ones is, let's go back to corn. We're all familiar with corn. Corn that is grown by our farmers in the Midwest can get attacked by caterpillars, a number of different types of insects. And so farmers traditionally had to use a lot of pesticides to control those insects if they wanted to get a good crop at the end of the season. Genetic engineering comes along and puts a single naturally occurring

Starting point is 00:25:06 gene from a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis into the corn genome. That is, it adds a piece of DNA from the bacterium into the corn DNA. And the corn cells are able to read that new gene, even though it came from a bacterium, and produce a protein that is toxic to insects, but not toxic to animals, including humans. And as a result of that, the amount of pesticide sprayed on our corn crops has dropped to near zero, and it really effectively controls the predation by these caterpillar-type insects in our corn crop. And what's the future of DNA? I mean, is it, it is what it is, and this is the end of the road, we know what we know,

Starting point is 00:25:53 and that's it? Or is there some big, fascinating future that you see? The future is endlessly fascinating. For all of the different applications, I mean, the forensic use, you know, we discussed a bit earlier, there's, you know, solving cold case crimes I think is going to be immense. Appealing to people for medical and health conditions. So many of those, we've just started scratching the surface. At the moment, our technology allows us to transfer one or two genes or modify one or two genes at a time. And that's very limiting because many of our most important diseases and health conditions,

Starting point is 00:26:34 cancer and whatnot, Alzheimer's, multiple genes are involved. And at the moment, we really don't have a good handle on understanding how all of those genes work together to give rise to the condition that we're concerned with. So a huge amount of work going on there. Looking at the Human Genome Project and the massive amounts of data, we're doing the data mining thing, the bioinformatics, and trying to put together the many little pieces of DNA spread all over our different chromosomes that work together to give a final phenotype or outcome or disease susceptibility. A lot of work being done there and a lot of work to be done there.

Starting point is 00:27:11 So, you know, very exciting on the medical side. And on the food side, we still have a billion people on this planet that go to bed hungry every night, and some of them are in danger of starving to death. Well, you know, we only have so many resources to grow crops on this planet. We're destroying most of them, like in the Amazon rainforest, and the other places we want to preserve as much as possible to produce food to feed all of these people. And in the last 30 years, we scientists have done a tremendous job at increasing the food supply using some of these technologies of genetic modification in crops and foods to produce more food to feed more people. So proportionally, we have fewer starving people

Starting point is 00:27:52 on the planet than we've ever had, but there's still a large absolute number of people that we want to be able to feed and let them live their lives. So opportunities abound there as well. So we're just scratching the surface well I think anybody who's had one of those DNA tests and seen the results gets a sense of the power of all of this and how interesting and how informative it really is my guest has been Alan McEwen he is an educator a scientist and an expert in DNA his book is called DNA demified, and you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Alan.

Starting point is 00:28:28 Well, thank you very much, Mike. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing

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Starting point is 00:29:20 Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. When you think about it, we have a real food culture in our society, and I think in many other places around the world as well. And what I mean by that is we really identify

Starting point is 00:29:55 with the food we eat and where we eat it, and also the food we don't eat. I mean, people will wait in long lines to get into some restaurants just to pay really high prices for food you could probably cook at home. And people take photos of their food and post it on social media. They brag that they're vegan or vegetarian or paleo in order to identify not only the foods they eat, but the foods they don't eat. It's this whole love affair with food, but it's not just the food.

Starting point is 00:30:30 It's the whole culture around it. And someone who has lived in and researched that culture and is a real expert on it is Eve Turow-Paul. She's author of a book called Hungry. Hi, Eve. Hi, thanks for having me. So explain how you got really into and really obsessed with this whole idea of food culture. I am a millennial.

Starting point is 00:30:54 I'm going to start there. I graduated in 2009 at the peak of the recession. And about a year after, I found myself living in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the U, getting my master's degree in writing, which is not a lucrative task, and began to notice that I myself was spending my discretionary time and income on food, and that those around me were doing the same. And it set off this exploration that I'm now a decade into of looking at really foodie culture. And why is it at the rise of the digital age, around the same time that we were introduced to things like the iPhone and texting and email and 24-7 notifications, why do we have a culture of particularly young people spending their discretionary income and time on things like avocado toast or $25 bowls of ramen or taking pictures of their food.

Starting point is 00:31:49 This is a topic that I have become obsessed with. I am endlessly learning through this exploration. Well, this really interests me because it's always interested me how people are identified with the food they eat. You know, oh, I'm a vegan. I'm a vegetarian. I'm a paleo, whatever it is. Or, oh, I don't drink coffee. There is some sort of identity thing about food.

Starting point is 00:32:18 And I've always wondered why people take pictures of their food and send it, because it never looks that good in the picture anyway. And this whole idea of people will spend all this money on food because of where it came from, or, you know, if you made it at home, it'd probably taste just as good, but and cost a 10th of what it costs you at the restaurant, that we're just all wrapped up in this. Right. And so this really, exactly what you're expressing was my own frustration and curiosity as well. And so for the last 10 years, what I've been looking at is, well, what's the why behind these trends? What are the emotional drivers? And the first step for me in developing an answer for that was examining what is it that

Starting point is 00:33:02 we all need to feel well, just from the basics of human well-being. And it turns out that if you look at the number of dominant philosophies coming from psychologists and neurobiologists and religious leaders, all the theories kind of fall into this bucket of three different things that each of us need in order to find well-being. The first is a sense of control and safety. The second is a sense of belonging and community. And the third is purpose, that we can make an impact, that our lives have meaning. And so those things that you're talking about, such as identifying yourself by what you don't eat on its surface can seem silly. But when you dig down deep underneath it, I've at least been able to identify that a lot of these behaviors are driven by things like

Starting point is 00:33:52 loneliness and the disintegration of our communities, our traditional religious communities or neighborhood communities, and the need for us to find other ways of affiliating with a group. And the same thing can be said for food photos. We're not eating a lot of our meals with other people, yet that is a central part of well-being. You know, human beings traditionally have eaten with others. Now that we are alone and we have social media, a lot of people feel that they need to, A, perform in order to get the validations that they're seeking from other people.

Starting point is 00:34:27 But also, if you're making this wonderful meal, some people just want to share it, right? They want to be like, hey, look what I did. You know, if you can't have people come over for dinner with people's lives and how busy folks are these days, the fact that people are moving away from family. The role of food on social media is a social currency, but also a way to facilitate connection. It is weird, in a sense, that food used to be, well, you ate because it was your fuel. And yeah, it was nice to eat something that was good. And you'd occasionally go out to a restaurant and splurge. But now it's become all consuming. It's like, it's become a much bigger part of our life. Exactly. Yes. And so this is a lot of what I think about is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which, you know, starts with at the bottom,

Starting point is 00:35:24 we need food to survive, which is what you're, you know, you're saying it's kind of like a basic need. And over the last decade, especially food has imbued itself into every other part of Maslow's hierarchy. So people are using food as a conduit to finding belonging to building their self esteem, to building up their ability to explore all of their potential as a human being by, you know, making sourdough and posting it online and getting comments and input from other parts of a community, be it on Reddit or on Instagram, or people are saying, oh my gosh, I need to, you know, define my days by something, I'm going to start a garden. And that garden is going to give me a sense of meaning and purpose through this time of chaos. And I can see that

Starting point is 00:36:11 my efforts are fruitful, both literally and figuratively. You remember when Popeyes came out with that chicken sandwich a while ago, and people were waiting in big lines and fights were breaking out and people were getting hurt. Yes, yes. And it seems like that would never happen 10, 20 years ago. I mean, there's something about that that's, I don't know what it is. It's frightening for one thing that people would be that obsessed. I've never had the sandwich, but it must be really good.

Starting point is 00:36:45 So, okay, but what you're talking about here, right, is this massive cultural shift. And it's not just happening in the US, it's happening all over the world. And I've gone, I spent last, not last summer, summer before in Asia, doing research on this in Korea and China and Hong Kong, and I was in Europe and lots and lots and lots of Skype interviews with folks in South America and on the continent of Africa as well. I mean, this is just universal, especially in urban centers. And what I have found is that this obsession with food and this new role that food has in our society is because we are using food as a coping mechanism for the digital age. Now, I have spent a lot of time talking to really smart people who do tons we are experiencing alarmingly high rates of anxiety,

Starting point is 00:37:47 stress, depression, and loneliness that is directly tied to the introduction of these technologies into our lives. And so we have a global culture right now that is suffering in so many different ways. And people are using food as a coping mechanism, as an antidote. It is something that is accessible to all of us. It is easily photographed. You participate in it at least three times a day. And it has become really this ongoing form of management with the current age that we live in. And I can guarantee you that the passion about the Popeye's chicken sandwich was not really about the chicken sandwich. It's about something larger than that. To me, it's like, well, if you're going to spend your,

Starting point is 00:38:36 what limited time we have and what limited money most people have on a food experience, then there's a good reason for it. And a lot of the time it comes back to loneliness or a desire for validation that we're not getting in our current environment or an overwhelm with the world that's fueled by things like email and 24-7 news notifications. And if you want, I can go through kind of the list of maladies that the digital age is inflicting on us. But at the end of the day, food, food is medicine and both for our mental health and our physical health. And it's not just about the food. I mean, for example, there are restaurants where, you know, they don't take reservations and you go and they say, well, you know, it's a two hour wait or even it's an hour wait for a table.

Starting point is 00:39:30 A lot of people don't want to wait an hour to eat dinner, but plenty of people do and they'll wait. And then, you know, six months later, you go back to that restaurant. It's out of business because as hot as it was, somehow now it's not the hot place to go anymore. There is also something to be said about the restaurant becoming the entertainment. And over the last 10 years, it's really shifted from like, you know, going out to eat as a small part of your evening's plans as you were going home from a concert or going to a concert or going to the theater, what have you. Now, the eating experience is the entertainment. It is the show. It's the entire evening. And I think for a lot of people, that two hour wait time is actually like the their hangout time. It's their core social time. And I found it extremely interesting as well to observe that those people who are willing to wait in those lines, by and large, it's young people in urban areas.

Starting point is 00:40:28 Like when I was in Shanghai, I saw this crazy line of people outside a milk tea store. Now, you can get milk tea in a gazillion different places in Shanghai. But everyone wanted to be at this one store. I was watching as everyone, after they got the milk tea, the first thing they did was take their phones out and take a picture of it. But in the meantime, as they were waiting in line, they were just hanging out with their friends. And there were not a lot of people on their phones.

Starting point is 00:40:56 They were spending genuine time with other people. This is really big in Silicon Valley, where people don't generally take a break to enjoy a meal during the week, but on weekends will line up for two to three hours at a brunch spot with their friends. And there's there. I'm forgetting who said it, but someone said brunch is the new millennial church. And I think that there is something to that. And part of the church service is the two-hour wait. Well, and you know, it's interesting, I think, and people have had the experience of they'll go to their favorite restaurant because they like the restaurant and it's not just the food, it's the experience of being in the restaurant

Starting point is 00:41:37 and proof of that is that when you could go get takeout from that place, it's somehow nowhere near as appealing. Right, because every single restaurant experience, I think that's a great restaurant experience, it's escapist. It is taking you away into another world. You know, every single night, I don't know if you've ever worked in a restaurant, but I have, it's like putting on a theater production. You set the stage, you set the amb ambience you invite the audience in for that time to tell a story through the food and through the decor and i think people are craving that they want a

Starting point is 00:42:13 sensory experience and something else that i've spent a lot of time looking at as well as what's the impact of tech on us from the perspective of our physicality uh the inputs to our senses i've heard from a lot of people who say, the inputs to our senses. I've heard from a lot of people who say, oh gosh, you young people are just overstimulated. And the reality is that we're vastly understimulated because we're really only using our eyeballs and the very tips of our fingers for most of the day. But we evolved for a world in which we are guided by our sense of smell and taste and touch and removing ourselves from our desks and from our phones and immersing ourselves in an experience that is so sensory rich as a restaurant is something that each of us does require in order to feel connected to our own bodies and to the earth. And it is pleasurable on all of these different levels. When I think of the people in the food culture that you're talking about, it isn't this big interest in cooking the food,

Starting point is 00:43:19 it's just in eating the food and eating it in places where you're seen and where you're with friends and all that. And although it is a food culture, it isn't that people are dying to like learn to cook. In fact, I've heard that, you know, more people watch cooking shows on TV than actually cook. And, and that people just aren't that into cooking. In fact, I remember interviewing a cookbook author who said that, you know, for people who write cookbooks now, you have to be very specific. Like when you would say in a recipe in the past, you know, butter the bottom of the pan. Well, they found that when you told people that they didn't know how to cook, they would actually turn the pan over and butter the very outside bottom of the pan and put it on the fire. And that caused problems because that's not what butter the bottom of the pan means. Okay, I hadn't heard that story before. That's an amazing anecdote that I'm probably going to reuse at some point. I will say that food literacy among youth

Starting point is 00:44:26 is on the rise. So Generation Z, which is those who were born between 1996 and 2010, so they're in high school and college right now, they're far more food literate than my generation was at their age, or Gen Xers, and even baby boomers, in large part because of food media. But food media, you're right. It came when it first kind of hit the zeitgeist. There were far more people watching it for the pleasure of watching it rather than to actually learn how to cook. And this really was one of my other big questions that led me down this road of research is like, why am I watching Rachel Ray cook something on television that I myself am not going to cook? Like, what is pleasurable about watching this? Because I knew that it was pleasurable.

Starting point is 00:45:17 And what I ended up learning about is how looking at pictures of food or even reading words associated with food, it still stimulates your olfactory and gustatory cortexes. You are still getting a sensory experience from watching that. There is something just very satisfying about food TV or food porn, right? Food porn are those pictures or gifs of the gooey chocolate cake or grilled cheese or brisket. And there is a worldwide trend of watching people eat. For the research for this book project, I went to Korea and shadowed a woman who broadcasts herself eating dinner every single night for something called mukbang,

Starting point is 00:46:03 which is extremely popular in Korea. And mukbang means eating broadcast. And this woman, she broadcasts herself eating dinner every night. She has about 200 people who watch her every single evening. By the end of the night, there's about 1000 views on her videos, but some of her videos have over a million views. And it's just her eating like a copious amount of food. And when I was there in Korea, I was able to talk with her through a translator, but about the impact of loneliness in Korea, the loneliness epidemic in particular in Korean culture

Starting point is 00:46:38 and how that's driving this desire to watch other people eat. In Korea, sometimes actually for like, if people are really into mukbang, the mukbang broadcast jockey will say, this is what I'm making tomorrow night. Some people will then go out, buy the same thing, prop the phone up on their countertop and eat, you know, quote unquote, with the broadcast jockey. Yeah, well, it does seem that the technology is kind of the ribbon that wraps this whole package of food culture, because without it, you couldn't take pictures and post them of the meal you're eating or the restaurant you're eating at and let everybody know that you are indeed part of the food culture, that that's a big driver of a lot of it.

Starting point is 00:47:27 Yeah, without a doubt. I think part of the reason why I am so interested in investigating this, though, is how I'm constantly asking myself the question of how can I help myself and others find well-being through food culture, so that maybe if you're not participating in these things and you can find a community or you can find a sense of purpose by becoming more involved in these areas of food culture, be it learning to bake, or going to dinner with friends that are hosting a dinner party. You know, how can I and others help people find well being in this digital age, because I don't think that email or smartphones or social media are going away anytime soon. So it's like, how do we find ways of coping with this, of mitigating

Starting point is 00:48:11 the impacts of this anxiety, of the stress, of the loneliness? And I think one of the most beautiful ways of doing it is through food and food culture. And it does seem as if technology, the smartphone, is really kind of the string that holds this culture together. You know, it's the smartphone that allows you to take pictures of your food and post it to the world to show what you're eating or what restaurant you're at. And technology seems to really drive this. And it really is fascinating. Eve Turo-Paul has been my guest, and the name of her book is Hungry. You'll find a link to her book in the show notes. Thank you, Eve. Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

Starting point is 00:48:53 I really appreciate the time and your interest. When you're younger, like a teenager, you could probably sleep until noon with no problem. But as you get older, you may have noticed that that gets harder. It turns out that as we age, it's not so much that we need less sleep. It's just harder to get enough sleep. And that can lead to health problems, according to research. This decline starts as young as in your 30s, and the resulting sleep deprivation can lead to things like memory loss, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, stroke, obesity, heart disease,

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Starting point is 00:50:10 So you can help spread the word about this podcast by just telling one person and suggesting they listen. It would be greatly appreciated. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

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