StarTalk Radio - Food, Science, and Culture, with Anthony Bourdain

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

Our Season 10 Premiere features Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview with Anthony Bourdain, recorded before his death in 2018. With co-host Sasheer Zamata, food scientist Guy Crosby, Natalia Reagan, hot sauce guru Noah Chaimberg, and “SciBabe” Yvette d'Entremont.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/food-science-and-culture-with-anthony-bourdain/Photo Credit: Brandon Royal Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Hello, StarTalk family. The episode you're about to watch was recorded shortly before the tragic passing of celebrated writer and TV host Anthony Bourdain. We're thankful for the opportunity to share Anthony's unique perspective in the universe on food, culture, and life. On behalf of all of us at StarTalk, thanks for watching. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight we're discussing the science of food. And we're featuring my interview with chef, writer, and TV host, Anthony Bourdain. So let's do this.

So, meet my comedic co-host for this evening, Sasheer Zameda. Sasheer! Excellent. You're tweeting at The Sheer Truth? So, meet my comedic co-host for this evening, Sashir Zameda. Sashir! Excellent. You're tweeting at The Sheer Truth. Yes, I tweet at The Sheer Truth. Brilliant Twitter handle. Love it. And I've got with us a real live food scientist, Guy Crosby.

Guy, welcome to Starts Off. Thank you, Neil. Thank you. You're also known as the Cooking Science Guy. You're adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard University School of Public Health. Correct. It's up in Boston, sure. And former science editor for America's Test Kitchen.

That's right. Very good, because we're featuring my interview with chef and renowned foodie Anthony Bourdain. And you know he's host of CNN's Parts Unknown. And what they do is they send him to all corners of the earth and he explores food in the context of their culture. Brilliant concept, which he executes beautifully. And so I wanted to know, did he have any early experiences with math or science that might sort of help to guide him or tune him on this path? So let's check it out. Algebra, strangely enough, was the best I ever did at any math subject. I could somehow picture that.

But science, you know, I like dissecting frogs. I mean, who doesn't? Well, it served me well later as a chef. You know where all the leg muscles are. I do. Little did your biology teacher know that this was for later eating. Yes. So tell me how you came to think about food and culture. The fact that the very phrase, it's a matter of taste, means I might like something that you don't and vice versa. So what does it even mean for you to have a show to talk about what's good and what

isn't? Well, it is completely subjective. I mean, they say that all food tastes are acquired or learned, that they are not... I mean, babies will eat rotten food if their mothers say this is good. I think bitter babies, at least in this country, react to negatively. Hence, no vegetables. Yeah. I never evaluate food on the show anymore. I don't use adjectives anymore. I never say, well, I have no toast, you know, background notes of minerality. Does this help anyone in any way?

I say, wow, this is really good. And then say, sure, about that. But it's entirely subjective. I know that some people have a genetic inability to taste certain flavors or experience them differently. I have a chef friend who did a lot of experiments with that. One out of a small group of people will not detect certain flavors at all. Well, if they become a colony, they could end up creating dishes

that would be offensive to those who taste that, who have the capacity to taste it, and they don't, and therefore it's just fine to them. Yeah. For example, I think one of the things that's prevented the Philippines from taking their rightful place as a major world cuisine beloved by everybody on every corner, I think that's because, my guess, they like an element of bitterness. And in fact, in the Philippines, they will use bile to add that, to add that very important note to some of their traditional dishes. And that's a taste that Americans, I think, instinctively recoil from in a way that they just simply do not. That's a treasured component. That's a treasured component.

We have textural predilections and aversions that seem innate or at least are so deep in our culture. America, we love anything crispy. You know, anything covered in batter and crispy, we're going to love. It's better. We don't even need anything inside the batter. We'll eat the batter. But when you get into that chewy, rubbery, gelatinous, you know, boiled chicken skin, fish skin, abalone, a lot of things that they really love in, you know, tendon in China and Japan. Tendon. Tendon's great.

It's fantastic. But look at you. I mean, that's most Americans go, oh, dude, no. So, Guy, look at you. I mean, that's most Americans go, oh, dude, no. So Guy, explain to me. Explain to me. How is it that somebody could find something to be a delicacy and I would just find it to be nasty? What is the science behind that, other than just possibly missing

the same taste, you know, not having corresponding taste buds? Because that can't be, that can't explain everything. Right. So what's going on there? Well, so we can break this question down into two parts, right? There are foods that people like and dislike, and then there are foods that just plain disgust people. So the foods that we learn to like and dislike, that really has to do with sort of genetic inheritance. It has to do with the maternal diet. It has to do with, you know,. It has to do with the maternal diet. It has to do with, you know, what children ate as they grew up and their culture that they grew up in. You know, like comfort foods.

People have comfort foods they like. Is there anybody in the world who doesn't like ice cream? I don't really like ice cream. Maybe one or two. You don't like ice cream? I don't like cold things. What the hell? What?

Do I have to go? Security. Do I have to leave? We'll get back to you in a minute. Go. So, what I was going to say, but now there are foods that people dislike, like oysters, right? Oysters are because they're slimy. Some people just don't like to eat anything that's live and kicking. So, it reminds me of a little poem that Roy Blunt wrote.

He says, I prefer my oysters fried. That way I know my oysters died. Oh, okay. That's a know my oysters died. Oh, okay. That's a fast poem right there. Yes. But then you get into the foods that disgust people, right? And that generally is out of fear. People have fear of being harmed, and that's what makes them.

So it's psychological, not scientific, not physiological. Well, they've done animal studies where they fed animals things that make them sick, and the animals will never eat that food again, whatever. So, you know, I think the example there is like durian fruit. If you're familiar with that, people in Southeast Asia, they love that stuff. It's the king of fruit. But in the Western world, the aroma just is revolting to people. It smells a combination of, I'll say it nicely, pig excrement mixed with turpentine and spoiling onions.

Dang. Not a please. Well, she'll eat it as long as it's not cold. Heat it up, it's fine. So what part of liking food then is not subjective? So anything we taste, because what we taste, the receptors for our taste are built into our genes, right? So these evolve through history as a means of survival. So we like sweet things because it's a source of energy. We don't like bitter things, as Anthony was saying, because a lot of toxic materials are very, very bitter. So that's pretty objective, is that it's built into the brain. But flavor, that's created in your mind.

So that's very, very subjective. Wait, wait. So just here. Do you think there are any foods that are just objectively gross? Candy corn. I don't think anyone likes candy corn. When they put it in your trick or treat. You get so upset.

No, no. It's like, this is the worst one. Yeah, I throw it back. I'd rather have bile. Just kidding. So, Guy, you said we have, what are the tastes that we all have? So you get the sense from your mouth that's taste, from your nose, smell. It goes into your brain and your brain then takes those two, puts them together and creates the image of flavor.

We don't taste anything that's actual flavor. Your flavor is created in your mind. Oh, so it could be in the future when we start tickling the neurons of your brain. We can make you taste anything We want you it's very possible. Yeah, so does everyone have the same number of taste receptors? This would be a chemical intersection of your good question olfactory glands and the molecule I presume right? No, they don't there's a big genetic difference really between yes, what people can taste there are things people who call super tasters They are extremely sensitive to do I bet the countries that have nasty food Really? Between, yes, what people can taste. There are things people call super tasters. They are extremely sensitive to bitter. So I bet the countries that have nasty food, they have very few taste buds.

Well, I don't know about that, but you can easily tell by just sticking your tongue out. You can say here on this show, this is a late night show, you can just say. And looking in the mirror. All those bumps on your tongues, those are your taste buds. And people that are super tasters have lots more of them. I don't know, you may be a taster or a non-taster. So if you have more of them, so more is better? More is better.

Well, not necessarily, though. More is more, whether or not it's better. Super tasters, though, are very, very picky eaters. They don't like a lot of things. They don't like a lot of vegetables, for example. So they tend to have higher incidence of colon cough. So now they have a physiological excuse. Yep.

For not eating vegetables. To reject the vegetables. Yep, I'm afraid so. Okay, you shouldn't do that. It's like, oh, just my taste buds. You have my taste buds. Physiologically, I would be there with you, but no. My doctor said I just have too many taste buds.

So this is fascinating because there's science infusing what we experience at least three times a day. So I wanted to ask Anthony's thoughts about the role of science in the kitchen. Okay. Is it just for the artist or is there room for the science geek such as yourself? Let's check it out. You know, when you scramble an egg, I forget what it's called, a coagulation of proteins. I'm not sure about the specific processes. But we're all, you know, caramelization.

You know, why does your steak get brown as you cook it and develop the sugars on the outside? All of these things are essential scientific techniques or processes. There's a science reason for it. Every cook understands instinctively. They may not be able to name what's happening, but they understand very, very, very well when, you know, the effect you want, how to get there,

when it's going wrong, when it's going right. So even something as simple as scrambling an egg is essentially a scientific manipulation of an ingredient by exposing it to both heat and movement and incorporating air. You're making it behave, an egg behave, in the desired way.

It reminds me, this is an obscure analogy, but it reminds me of when medicine became modern. It did so because, in part, it looked to see what sort of folk remedies existed around the world and cultures. Oh, you chew on this bark and that gets rid of your headache. Well, what got rid of your headache? So you find out what's in the bark. And there's this molecule that becomes what we today call aspirin. And so you extract the active ingredient. Right. And then you can exploit that to great gain.

And so it seems to me, if you knew exactly the moment and why a sautéed onion becomes sweet, you can possibly hone in on that and exploit that fact with other foods. And that's what chefs are doing, some chefs are doing every day. I have friends who are rotting all varieties of things in some dark corner of their cellar, experimenting, talking to microbiologists from major universities, talking to them late at night, working with them in kitchens, discussing the wonders of fermentation. What can you ferment? What's going on in miso? How can I apply that to something else? I love miso.

I love miso. So much of food is not about freshness. It's what's called that sweet spot, the precise moment in its decay where it is best, sushi being the best example. Anyone who comes and tells you that, you know, oh, I went to a sushi bar last night. It was the best. The fish was so fresh. I have no understanding at all of sushi. Sushi is not about freshness at all.

First of all, even the best places deliberately cure their fish by freezing it, sometimes out of necessity to kill the critters, others because it makes it better. But it's almost never about the freshest fish. Fresh fish is right out of the water, is still in rigor, and it's often rubbery and unpleasant and without much flavor, which is why in Iceland they rot it sometimes because you get more fun. You're looking for the perfect point in the decay of the fish.

Same with meat. Almost everything we eat and like, cheese, meat, fish, they're all aged. Just wine. So it's really about decay and rot cheerful is that Tennis just I never knew So God scientifically, what's what's going on when food decays just straighten us out about that and

Simultaneously tell us why for some mysterious reason that tastes better. All right. Well, what happens is the animal's natural enzymes actually break down the proteins. And what that's doing is that's creating a lot of things called peptides and amino acids that are loaded with umami flavor. So not only does it make it more tender, but it actually adds a lot of this umami flavor to things like aged beef or anchovies or these things that have gone through that kind of aged processing. And cheese as well. Cheese as

well, yes. So is this just trial and error where you do it until you do it a little too much, then you die? A little not enough, it doesn't taste good. So how do you guarantee hitting that sweet spot or is it just trial and error? Hopefully it's more than better than trial and error. And that's where I think science does come into it, that maybe, you know, the way you design your experiments, where you don't go beyond the sweet spot and end up dying, you know, you need to set it up and be able to tell when things are just about right.

And that's how you design the experiments to give you that information. Yeah, I'm really bad at that. That's where science helps. You're bad at what? Figuring out like when things are not bad anymore. Yeah okay. When things have gone past the sweet spot. So do you like stinky cheese? I mean I'm bad at like smelling generally. Are you the first to smell? Let me smell that milk to see if it's bad. Yeah, I'll smell the milk and I'll be like, it's probably fine. And then it's not. Oh, okay. So you're very sensitive to it then.

No, no. I mean, you smell milk and you say it might be bad, but then you drink it and it's okay. Well, I guess I'm just like, the expiration date's made up. It's probably fine. They're trying to get more of my money. So I'm going to drink this milk until I'm done with it. I'm not testing that hypothesis. Let me presume they're all lying to me and let my milk go past its expiration date and then drink it then.

Well, I don't let it. I'm a busy woman. I just haven't gotten around to drinking a full gallon of milk yet. So what's the difference between fermentation, which we all know and love, it's responsible for most of the alcohol we drink, and something just rotting? Yeah, okay. Or is it the same thing? Well, in some ways it is similar.

The fermentation's created by bacteria called lactobacillus bacteria that form lactic acid. It lowers the pH, and that stops all other bacteria, especially the harmful ones that might spoil the food and make you sick from growing. Oh. So we're not sensitive. So the good bacteria wins out over the bad bacteria. And we're not, you know, lactobacillic bacteria don't make us sick, all right? But the bad ones are. Oh, so you can err on the too much side, and you might not like it, but it's not going to kill you.

Correct. So I wanted to ask Anthony about food in space. Mm. And you know he's thought about this, because he thinks about food everywhere, including space. So let's check it out. I did an episode of Top Chef at NASA headquarters, and we were talking about food in space.

And, of course, your entire taste perception, I was told I was talking to I think Chuck Yeager. The Chuck Yeager. Yes. And talking about what you crave you know when you've been away from you know your favorite restaurants for or any restaurants for a considerable amount of time and he talked about how your your ability to perceive flavors changes at altitude. People experience this in planes, of course. Plane food is altered so that it makes up for the effects of altitude. But astronauts get it really bad, and the stuff they crave more than anything,

so Mr. Yeager told me, is hot sauce. Like, you know, Tabasco or anything spicy, because up there everything tastes bland. So you're telling me those bulky areas in their spacesuits, Like, you know, Tabasco or anything spicy because up there everything tastes bland. So you're telling me those bulky areas in their spacesuits, they're smuggling bottles of hot sauce on the way up. The astronauts I've spoken to, they say this without hesitation, that they eagerly want spicy foods and they find themselves visiting other national modules of the space station where their food tends to be spicier than their American food. Yeah. So that would be tough for me. Bland food for nine months. Yeah. I went, I trained in jujitsu and I foolishly decided I was going to compete a few times. And in the run-up to the competition I had to cut weight to make my weight category which meant doing without salt at all For a little retain the water. Yeah

It's horrible it's it is horrible No matter how much I eat. I mean I boil a whole chicken loaded with herb and pepper and and I mean, I'd boil a whole chicken loaded with herb and pepper and everything I could, but never satisfied. And I would just get crazier and crazier from the lack of salt to the point that I found myself sitting on the subway in the summer looking at a particularly sweaty homeless dude and thinking, oh, I'd like to lick his neck. Just one lick. That is fascinatingly gross. So physiologically, the body knows what it needs. Is that what this comes down to?

It does, yes, in this case. He needs it that badly. Well, salt has a very, very important role, among other things. But one of the most important things is it maintains the fluid level in the body So she's trying to disrupt well Yeah, if you went the other way and had too much salt you have too much fluid And that's when you get high blood pressure But if you have almost no salt you have you know and no fluid you have a real strong craving because you want to

Re-establish that balance of getting just the right amount enough... Enough to lick the neck of a homeless person in the street. Well, I'm not sure he'd go that far, but yeah, it shows you what an extreme... He had the thought. Yes, he did. So the body's trying to take care of itself. Yes, it is. In spite of whatever your stupid-ass behavior might be doing with it. Yes.

Yes, okay. Just getting your buy-in on that. Well, up next... We'll feel the burn as we explore the science of spicy food when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to Star Talk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview with celebrity foodie Anthony Bourdain. His food and travel show, Parts Unknown, has taken him on culinary adventures across the globe. And I asked him about the connection between geography and spicy food.

Check it out. Why do some regions of the world eat spicy foods and others not? And why does it seem that spicy foods correspond with latitude on Earth? The farther away from the equator you get, the less spicy the food becomes. Yeah. Places where food used to rot, people would use spice to cover up the funk of food that was not meat, protein, fish that was not particularly fresh.

And also spices preserve food. I think when you look at the spicy food belt, you know, you see people who had to. I mean, this is the story of food. It explains a lot about, you know, if you're in a country where there's a lot of dried legumes, a country where there's a lot of dried legumes. Often it was a siege culture. People who had to wall themselves up, surrounded by enemies,

and wait for the enemies to die of starvation because they had plenty of lentils. That's an oversimplification. But true. Why do people eat really, really rotten food sometimes? You know, why do they like harkarl, a rotten shark, in Iceland, which is literally rotted to the point of putrefaction.

Their flavor spectrum up there was very narrow. I think they just got, their palates got bored. They needed, you know, they didn't have access to much in the way of spices, so they just started rotting stuff. But I think the spice question is simple. No refrigeration and hot temperatures.

So Guy, how does spice preserve food? What's going on? Well, so all these, the foods start to rot because one reason, the bacteria start to attack them and eat up the proteins and make all these smelly things. But spices are really, really good. Some of them, about a dozen of them, are really good antibacterial agents. Things like oregano and thyme, they have really strong activity against bacteria, so they will kill off and preserve the food for a longer period of time.

Plus, they will mask any sort of off flavors that might develop in the meantime. So, yes. My favorite spice is scary spice. Then baby, posh, ginger, sporty. I forgot all about that. How could you forget? Oh, man.

I was like, wait, how old are you? Excuse me. We're on television right now. So, Anthony Bourdain, he's tried every spicy food on earth. And then I told him about the spiciest food that I ever experienced. Let's check it out. I ate at an authentic Szechuan restaurant in San Francisco recently. And I was waiting for the next dish to be some reprieve from the previous dish.

And that did not happen. Every single dish was hotter than the previous one. Even in Chengdu, the major city in Sichuan province, where I've been a few times, you'll see locals at their favorite Sichuan hot pot place literally doubled over, holding their stomachs,

mopping their necks, faces beet red. It can be excruciatingly painful, and this is an interesting scientific phenomenon that's always intrigued me. A lot of people suggest that their favorite Sichuan hot pot, that they secretly lace it with opium. Because what happens is they eat this scorchingly hot food, very uncomfortable to eat, but intensely pleasurable. And the next day they wake up with a craving and I find this as well when I'm eating really really really spicy food and

some have suggested that this is due to there's this flood of endorphins that your brain releases when experiencing really painful Painfully hot food. And I guess that happens while you're eating it. And the next morning, it's not there. And you feel this sudden withdrawal. You feel the absence. The absence of that endorphin rush that you had the night before.

And this immediately compels you to get more. I've had this experience after tattoos as well. I've had a lot of people who've gotten tattooed and like me say that right afterwards they always want another, which seems counterintuitive. This is good because I don't have any, so maybe if I should stay that way, I'd be good. Maybe if I should stay that way, I'd be good. So this interesting, this endorphin rush from spicy food. So, you know, we sent out Natalia Reagan, one of our StarTalk science correspondents. So let's see what she got for us.

Hey, Neil. I'm with hot sauce guru Noah Chamberg here at the Heat'n'Nest. It is a hot sauce shop here in Brooklyn, and we are going to try some of the hottest hot sauces out there in the world and hopefully understand why people like the pleasure of painfully spicy food. What do you have for me, Noah? So we're going to start off with a Bajan style sauce here. And in Barbados, they always put mustard in the hot sauce. Okay, let's see. Oh, I like that.

It's nice. Got a little sweetness to it. Yeah. Yeah. Nice kick, too. It does. And the interesting thing, the reason why we feel the spice is that chili peppers have capsaicin, which is a compound that actually was produced by plants to keep mammals from eating them.

Because mammals actually grind the seeds, and so it's not great for dispersing chili peppers. But birds swallow the seeds, and they are great at dispersing seeds because they can fly and they can eliminate them wherever they may go. So next up we have, from a small farm in Japan, this sauce is made with golden habaneros and a bit of dried mango. That's sweet and a nice kick in the butt right afterwards. I'm going to need some milk. And the reason why I take a sip of milk is actually the fat in the casein in the milk binds the capsaicin and washes it away, which is exactly what I need right now. The other thing that works well is alcohol, but it can't be something weak. It has to be strong alcohol.

So no beer, you've got to have a shot of something. Oh, good. So the last sauce for today. That is very red. It is. This sauce is made with Carolina Reaper, which since 2013 has been in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's hottest pepper. Okay, why just since 2000? Like, what was it before 2013?

It actually didn't exist before then, so the Carolina Reaper is a hybrid pepper. Here we go. It's nice knowing you, Neil. Yeah, so people are always looking for something hotter and hotter because of that pleasure that we get from the pain of hot sauce. Oh, God! Son of a motherless goat that's hot! Mmm. There you have it, Neil. This awful, searing, life-altering pain I'm feeling is a result of hybridization.

Methodically crossbreeding two types of peppers for this ultimate pain. Thanks, science! Well, up next, we'll be taking your questions on the science of food when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with chef, author, world traveler Anthony Bourdain. And we're talking about the science of food. Check it out. There's a branch of the culinary universe that seems to focus on molecular gastronomy.

Am I correct in characterizing that as how can I bring as much science as I possibly can to the protein molecules and the freezing and the cooking times? Does this subtract the experience from you or add to it? It depends. I know a few chefs who are really, really great at this, and they're like scientists. I was just talking to Wiley Dufresne, one of the real masters of this area of cooking, and he says, look, in my restaurant, we ask questions.

We're asking questions about food and the dining experience. They're not necessarily looking to dazzle or to challenge their diners. They're asking questions like, can I deep fry mayonnaise? Answer, yes. Also- I'm sorry. I would have never in my whole life. That is a not that I'm sorry. I would have never in my whole life. That is a not that I'm sorry. I would never thought that. But once he figured out how to deep fry mayonnaise, he figured out how he could fry other sauces, how to cause them to stay essentially solid. Solid and not explode when you throw in the hot fat. Ferran

Adria, Wiley Dufresne, and a very few other chefs make this experience intensely pleasurable and exciting and fun. Many other imitators, it is a long painful slog through one of their meals, where it's a science class for its own sake. You know, look, I can, look what I can do. Joining us now for a conversation on the intersection of food and science is chemical scientist Yvette D'Entremont, and you're known simply as Sci-Babe. Sci-Babe, indeed. And so you got a reputation online for doing what?

Debunking bad science with a combination of good science and dick jokes. But as it relates to food? Yes, yes. A lot of... Because it's bad science, but it's especially bad science related to food. Oh my God, yes. So do chefs, do you think they would make better food if they had a firm understanding of the chemistry of foods? I think it can help,

but I've seen somebody try to make mashed potatoes using amylase to break down. They're like, look, I can make the creamiest mashed potatoes you've ever made, you've ever seen. Instead, they made sugary goop because when you break down starch, you get sugar. Sometimes you just have to add some butter and cream to your potatoes. So, Guy, you have some science food demo you can share with us. Yeah, we do. I just happen to have some liquid nitrogen.

Wow. Right, never leave home without it. Yes. And, of course, you need some goggles. Yes, for sure. And... You're the only one with goggles? We don't get goggles?

Yeah, we're going to do some reverse cooking, huh? You're the only one with goggles? We don't get goggles? Yeah, we're going to do some reverse cooking, huh? Yeah, there we go. Okay. All right, what do you have for us? Well, I happen to have right here some ice cream mix, too. Oh, so that's ice cream mix? It looks like blueberry ice cream. So we're going to drop some in.

This is like casting a spell. Would these be StarTalk dots? And look at them. They're forming, and we'll get a few in here. So why don't you have a chant? Yeah, boil, boil, now it's hot. Toil and trouble, toil and trouble. Go ahead.

You're doing a great job. Have you ever heard the vegetarian witches? No. Eye of potato, head of lettuce. I think you've probably got enough in here, huh? Just full of dad jokes. All right, man. Let's see what we've got.

Let's put in a little... I'm just curious. Ooh, that's nice and cold. Yeah, isn't it, though? Now, do you do this at home? Every day. It's all right. It's all right. And the whole point of this liquid nitrogen is it freezes the thing so fast

that the crystals are extremely small, so they have a really super smooth texture. So you get only big crystals when it freezes slowly? Slowly, yeah. And that makes it very grainy, so you don't want that. There's still smoke coming off of it. Yeah, it may be very cold, so be careful. I love the show. Well, our StarTalk fans had their own questions about the science of food.

And which means right now it's time for Cosmic Queries. And so we took your questions of trying to separate food myth from food science. So bring it on, Sashir. Okay. Drew G. from Instagram says, is there definitive evidence that certified organic foods are actually healthier? At this point in time, there is no evidence to suggest that organic foods are healthier than conventionally grown produce. And the other thing is organic uses pesticides too.

A lot of people think they're pesticide free.. Notice it doesn't say pesticide-free on the label. It says organic. So they're just different farming techniques. But you're a scientist. What do you know? Science. Guy, you want to add to that? Yes, there is generally, though, you'll find that one area that it does show some improvement in organic

is the chemical pesticide residues because they don't allow real chemical ones in organic. So you mean artificial chemicals as opposed to natural chemicals? Right. Actually, there are some synthetic pesticides allowed in organic farming, and not all synthetics are necessarily more toxic than the naturally occurring ones. There are a lot of crossover between, you know, what's more toxic, what's less toxic, and natural doesn't mean better for you. I've heard a rumor that polio is natural. I'm just saying natural does not mean good for you.

Up next, Anthony Bourdain describes his culinary adventures in Antarctica when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with food and travel show host Anthony Bourdain. And he recently visited an unlikely spot for food lovers, Antarctica. And I asked him about that experience. Check it out. It's another planet. It feels like another planet.

On one hand, everyone should go and see it. On the other hand, it kind of defeats a purpose. It is the last un-effed-up place on Earth. It's pristine. Every drop of urine goes into bottles, then into 55-gallon drums, and shipped back to America or elsewhere with every little bit of waste. It is the most incredible spot, a place of pure science and pure learning where people are incrementally seeking answers to questions they might never answer in their life.

They're just looking to move things forward. So we met with the guys with a super telescope, part of an array, I guess, that goes around the entire globe. It's looking at the sun, some people collecting neutrinos, which I don't really fully understand. No, I don't understand at all, but they sound really cool. So what do they eat? They got to ship in the steaks and the vegetables. Everything comes in mostly by ship, but some stuff by plane. Everything is essentially

processed, frozen. Frozen, really? Yeah. And, you know, one of the refrains when you arrive from the people who spent months there is, do you have any freshies?

It's like the living dead. Do you have brains? They're like, do you have any freshies? So there's a real premium on the rare arrival of lettuce or avocados or anything fresh. But they do a lot with a little. And so was that your first sort of baptism into a community of scientists? Yes, for sure. I found it interesting when going out to visit the penguin colonies, though.

We were on a helicopter out to the site, and a bunch of fresh-faced, very enthusiastic kids had come down to help out. An intern, I guess, would go out and hug the penguin day. They were all excited that they'd go out and get to tag penguins and, you know, hold one. You know, penguins are cute. You know, you... In all the movies. Yeah. Well, they didn't tell them that, you know, when you pick up a penguin, they spray you with, you know, a horrifying array of, you know, wet diarrhea.

They all came back rather downcast looking and smelling a bit ripe. So Guy, he says Antarctica is like another planet. Of course, he's right. It's the closest thing on Earth we have to Mars, where it's cold and dry. And how would your cooking advice differ for people living on another planet?

Well, it's kind of like being in an airplane in a way, right? It's cold, it's dry, and you've got maybe different pressure, different atmosphere. So probably the food's going to be bland there unless they really spice it up, add a lot of seasoning to it. Right. So this experience he had in Antarctica gave him a unique perspective on climate change. Let's check it out. The climate change discussion is no more acutely felt, at least in people's minds, or observed in Antarctica, where they're really looking at it and talk about it a lot. being deleted from government computers, that if they find themselves on a blacklist of people who might possibly be interested in the subject, that they could find themselves suddenly not needed.

These are not good times for science or scientists, and they felt very much under threat down there and for good reason, particularly when you're pursuing subjects that aren't going to have a useful monetary application anytime soon. Tough argument to make in this political climate. But I see it. Look, I see it everywhere. The fishing industry is everywhere affected. The Caribbean, where I've seen in my own lifetime, you know, not just whole reefs, all the reefs

bleached and lifeless now. I mean, I'm seeing the physical changes, but the people who really seem to feel it most and notice it are farmers, fishermen, they're feeling it. So this would affect cuisine directly? Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt about it. You know, some species are thriving, others disappearing. You know, that changes what we eat. We, you know, chefs and cooks and, you know, anybody who needs to feed their family responds to what's available. That's always been the engine of cooking. So, Yvette, you worked as a chemist in the agricultural industry.

So, describe to me your firsthand experience between food and environment. Well, I worked researching pesticides to make sure that they were safe for crop application and, of course, for humans. But this also gave me a really good perspective on how deeply connected what we do with agriculture is to the environment. Because every time that you use more land to grow crops, you're using less land for wildlife. So we need to, we're seeing technologies being deployed to try to fight this more and more as we move forward. So Guy, what's the first consequence in the chef's kitchen?

Well, of course, you're going to have higher CO2 and temperatures. So that's going to change your seasonal availability. And, of course, costs will go up, and nutritional quality tends to go down. So, yeah, so those would be some of the issues. But on the other hand, you do have some advantages. For example, the higher temperatures. Some places will improve.

Some things will. Like, for example, you know, grapes really like the heat stress to create really good wine. So you might even find that wine even in England might actually become pretty good. Did you just have, did you put the word wine and England in the same sentence? I did, yes. I grew up in England.

So what you're saying is all the other foodstuffs will be crap, but we'll have really good wine. be crap, but we'll have really good wine. Well, coming up in the Science of Food, Anthony Bourdain and I discuss meat grown in the laboratory when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk. We're talking about the science of food and the culture of food.

And I asked food and travel host Anthony Bourdain what he's learned from sharing meals at so many different tables around the world. Check it out. I guess it became fairly quickly apparent that food was intensely personal, that it was a reflection of a place, of a culture, of a history, often a very painful history. Maybe the most important example in the trajectory of my show was Beirut in 2006 when we were doing what was ostensibly still a food and travel show. We'd finished

shooting another sort of upbeat, snarky, maybe, restaurant scene. And the crew joined me in my room for beers in the mini bar. And we're looking lazily out the window, and rockets and gunships attack the airport, blowing into smithereens. Our local crew disappears from the border and we found ourselves in a war, blockaded, unable to leave and trapped in Beirut for the next week or so waiting to be evacuated.

By the US military? Yeah, the Marine Corps, the Navy and Marines took us off the beach in an LCU. It was dramatic. In an LCU filled with wailing, crying refugees. And just looking out at the water as we pulled away from the beach, it just struck me as obscene to contemplate ever doing a upbeat food show in a world that allows things like this to happen regularly. So this was a pivot point for you. Absolutely. Everything changed. Everything changed at that moment, and I started looking around. And I was determined, you know, if I'm sitting in the hills of Laos,

I would ask the obvious question when my host is missing a limb. Where'd you lose a limb? And we're eating, true, but chances are he's going to tell me, well, I wasn't alive for the secret war here, but your military was kind enough to leave behind a few million tons of unexploded ordnance that I happened to step on one of those. I think people open up to me and tell me about their lives because I'm asking simple questions. and tell me about their lives because I'm asking simple questions. We're just eating.

So, Cecile, why do you think sharing a meal seems to open people up culturally? I think food does have kind of an emotional tie. You're already in a vulnerable state because you're hungry, so you're fulfilling something. And it's just nice to be in a communal space where you're sharing this moment together. We're eating good food together. I mean, hopefully good food. And enjoying something. So it's, you know, you're prone to talking. And you can actually be able to share more information that way than just like, I don't know, setting up a meeting or something.

Right, right. Let's take a meeting. It's very different over food, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. So Yvette, you keep up with techie trends in food. So what about lab-grown meat? What is the potential for that?

There is a large impact on the environment from this sector of agriculture. And if this can reduce our impact on the environment while still giving me something yummy, shove it in my face hole, okay? But Guy, is this, how realistic is lab-grown meat as a replacement for somebody's ribeye? Well, there's a lot of new companies working feverishly right now to try to get this done through cell culture.

And it's estimated, you know, the typical processed type of meat, you know, like ground hamburger or sausage, maybe five years away before it's actually on the market. Because that one texture is not so much the issue. Right. Because it's already ground up. Yeah, it's not a structured meat like a whole big steak or something.

Which would be maybe ten years away before they're able to bring that up. Well, I asked chef and author Anthony Bourdain what he thinks about lab-grown meat. Let's check it out. I think laboratory-grown meat, the thought horrifies me as a chef, as a cook, as somebody who's passionate. You still get to cook it.

You just don't have to kill the animal. Yeah, but I mean, we're talking meat-like, aren't we? I mean, so much of meat is textural. It is the interconnected viscera and muscle and, you know, fat. And, you know, what makes meat interesting is the degree of exercise, its diet, how the, you know, what you prize in beef is the marbling, the ripple of fat through lean that comes from movement. Presumably your laboratory-grown meat will not have moved at any point. But I suspect—

It's out at pasture now. It's that cube. Given the way the world is going, we might well have to eat laboratory-grown meat soon, if not our neighbors. I think the first round of it will be ground meat. It might replace hamburger meat, which you're not in search of the marbling and the textures. Well, not as much as the T-bone or the ribeye. Well, not as much. Right, right. That's all I'm saying. It might be its first foray, But that could completely transform your world.

Yes. And look, a lot of the world. Not your world. Not only your world. The world. Look, there are a lot of hungry people in this world for whom a single chicken is a life or death thing. They need protein. And I guess laboratory-grown meat would be a solution.

But we've given up on something really fundamental that goes, when we move to laboratory-grown meat, when any culture does, it's a surrender. We're shutting ourselves off to something that goes back to the beginning of human civilization. In fact, it's likely it was the beginning of human civilization, the fire and a hunk of meat. You know, it was the first time people probably cooperated. You know, I'll kill the animal, you drag it back to the fire, you build the fire, and then we're all sitting around figuring out how we're going to divide up this thing. That's kind of the beginning of any kind of organized society, according to some scientists.

The idea that food goes back, capturing the culture of a place capturing a time I respect that however just because something happened long ago and you respect it because it's old doesn't mean something can't happen that's new and then you respect it because it's new. You can create something new that a thousand years they'll look back and say way back in the early 21st century this new product emerged. It is cultural. It's traceable that far back and it emerged at a time when there were food shortages,

when not all the world had access to proteins, not all the world had access to vitamin enrichment, people were dying, climates were changing. It may be that we're living at the cusp of a food revolution, where we no longer look towards the cultures disparate around the world that produce one kind of food or another. Maybe the very culture we're after is the culture of the Petri dish. Maybe that's the culture.

We should ask, how should we manage our food? What should we do about the shortages today, especially in a growing population. So I see the future of food as we're gonna look back. We're gonna look back to the early 21st century. We're gonna say, wow, we invented whole new cuisines that could feed the world. That is a cosmic perspective. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.