The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.64 We divorced flavour from nutrition, and it's making us fatter

Episode Date: December 5, 2015

I recently read The Dorito Effect. It's one of the best I've read in the ag/food politics genre. It's about what happened when food scientists figured out how to manufacture thousands of flavours at the same time that the flavour and nutrition of real food began a steep decline. It turns out that the flavour and nutrition of food are intimately linked, and that when we figured out how to divorce the two, the consequences were, and continue to be, pretty negative. In this episode I interview the author of The Dorito Effect, Mark Shatzker. It's a good one. 

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant Podcast and blog wonders what good farming looks like and aims to help farmers and gardeners share insights with each other. At theruminant.ca, you'll find show notes for each episode of the podcast as well as the odd essay, book review, and photo-based blog post. You can email me, editor at theruminant.ca, I'm at ruminantblog on Twitter, or search The Ruminant on Facebook. Okay, on with the show.

All right, so today you're going to hear from this guy. My name is Mark Schatzker. I'm a writer. I live in Toronto. My first book was about steak. It was called Steak, One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef. And my most recent book is called The Dorito Effect, The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor. So a funny thing about The Dorito Effect is that I almost didn't read it. When I first saw the title, it seemed a bit too buzzwordy. And I figured this was another book in a long line that wrings its hands about our terrible food system, but doesn't offer much insider depth.

But then I was on a plane with nothing else to read, so I opened it up. And I'm so glad I did. Folks, I've read a lot of books on food science and food politics and food security in the last 10 years, and this was one of my favorites. So I costed its author, Mark Schatzker, for an interview, and he said yes, and we got on the phone and got down to business. Now, the format of this episode is going to be a little bit different than you're used to. Normally, it's just a full recorded conversation with someone that I phoned. But in this case, my feed for the interview was terrible. I was caught while I was on the road in a place where there was really terrible options for interviewing Mark. I had to be outside while it was raining

and while there were other people around to make all sorts of undesirable noises. So for this interview, I'll be featuring Mark's responses, but I'll be weaving them into a narrative that I'll create right now while I'm editing. But just to give you a taste of what you're missing, how it would have sounded if I just played the whole interview, here is about a minute of the very first part of my conversation with Mark. So the book starts by identifying an epidemic that all of us are familiar with, and that's the epidemic of obesity, primarily in North America. primarily in North America.

And so it focuses on two related phenomena that took on force through the 20th and into the 21st century. One was how the regular food that we produce became progressively blander. And the other is how food scientists discovered how to isolate and imitate the flavor compounds that are found in nature. Is that okay so far? Is that a fair answer? Yeah, that's it. I mean, very simply, whole foods are getting blander, and flavor technology is getting more and more powerful. And if you kind of take those two phenomena together, we essentially, through the 20th century and into the 21st, Mark, you argue that we divorced food from flavor.

Is that right? Okay. Yes, and more importantly, nutrition from flavor. In nature, they hold hands, and we manage to separate them. And we manage to make food taste great that nutritionally does not deserve to taste great. So next I asked Mark to explain how flavor works, essentially what happens when we put food in our mouths. Yeah, so flavor is essentially chemical sensing.

It's your body sensing chemicals in real time. And you do this with two things. You do it with your tongue, which senses the basic tastes, salt, sweet, bitter, umami, and sour. for sniffing, but the nose plays a massive role in eating. The aroma of the food that you're chewing goes up through that hole in the back of your nose and enters your nasal cavity where it pings smell receptors that send data to your brain. And that's where the character of food comes from. That's why when you have a cold, all the food you eat tastes bland because you're not smelling it as you eat it. It's interesting. We often ignore flavor in our kind of public discussion of food.

But when you look at the human genome, which is basically the chapter to make you, or sorry, genome, which is, you know, basically the chapter to make you, or sorry, the manual to make you, the thickest chapter is actually on making your mouth and nose. It's a thicker chapter than your eyeballs, than, you know, your muscles, you know, like your leg muscles or something, or your brain. So from an evolutionary point of view, it must be doing something really important. Otherwise, it wouldn't be there. Okay, so flavor is really, really important. And I already had a rough sense of the interplay between your nose and your tongue as you take in food. But I asked Mark to give me an example and to talk about what happens when I pop a grape in my mouth. Absolutely. So when you pop a grape in your mouth and you begin to chew it,

Absolutely. So when you pop a grape in your mouth and you begin to chew it, various compounds in the grape, acids in the grape will ping your sour receptors. Sugars in the grape will ping the sweet receptors on your tongue. Some of the tannins and things like that in the grape skin will ping your bitter receptors. So that sends three kind of taste signals to your brain through your tongue. Meanwhile, all sorts of aromatic compounds are wafted up from the grape. They drift up into the back of your throat and into that little passageway connecting your nose to your throat, and they enter your nasal cavity. And and there these aromatic compounds kind of get snared by there's about 400 different kinds of smell receptors and this creates a a signal that your smell receptors send to your olfactory bulb which is in your brain and these two signals one

from your tongue one from your nose are combined in the brain and perceived as flavor. That's when you go, ah, that tastes like a grape. Now, there's other things, too. There's the crunchiness of it. There's the fact that you're sensing liquid. The temperature will play a role. But this is really the important information. This is what lets your body identify and go, that's a grape.

But most importantly, your brain instantly goes, ooh, I like this or oh, I don't like it. Once you swallow it, your body begins processing this food called the grape. And there's lots of stuff in that food. There's various vitamins and minerals. There's fiber. There are phytonutrients like anthocyanins, tannins, things that we sometimes hear about. There's water, there's sugar, there's energy. But here's the interesting thing. This is the interesting dilemma we face as creatures that we face now, but we really face in a serious way when

we were, you know, living in the forest and so forth. We have diverse nutritional needs. There's not one thing we need. We don't just need calories. We need vitamins. We need minerals. We need amino acids. We have complex nutritional needs. Here's the dilemma the body faces. It's really hard to sense nutrients. We can sense sugar. We're pretty good at sensing sugar, which is a source of energy. Vitamins don't have a flavor. We're pretty good at sensing sugar, which is a source of energy. Vitamins don't have a flavor. Minerals do not have a flavor.

They're very stable, which makes it very difficult for your body to sense them in real time. But what we are good at sensing are unstable or volatile chemicals. And these are the ones that our body's good at sensing. So what the body does is it sort of records this sensory information as you're eating the grape. Then later you digest it and your body goes, okay, here are the nutrients we got. And then it matches them up. Now this doesn't happen, this isn't happening so much right now. This happens a lot while you're a child. You're even influenced by the flavors when you're in the womb that your mother's eating. So we have the palate, which is basically whether you like food or dislike food, is based on your entire history of eating food.

And we develop preferences or dislikes of flavors based on what are the post-ingestive consequences, which is to say, does it have stuff your body likes or does it not have stuff your body likes? Or does it make you sick? You know, we can get an aversion. If you eat a bad raw oyster, it might be years before you're ever able to put an oyster in your mouth because you form an aversion. Your body says, I don't want that. Last time I ate something like that, it almost killed me. Okay, so there's a really intimate relationship between flavor and nutrition. So then I asked Mark, why? Evolutionarily speaking, why did that relationship develop? Or why did it become so important for our species and for other species? It's not even just that there's poisons out there. There definitely are, but it's also that no single food meets our nutritional needs. You can get everything

in abundance except one amino acid that's essential, and if you don't get it, you're going to die. Same thing with vitamin C. You could get everything you need, but if you didn't get vitamin C, you would get scurvy, and eventually you would die. So it was really important that we had some kind of a system that helped us navigate our way through this food environment and eat the foods that we needed. And like you said, it makes complete sense that we would have this because otherwise, how could our species have survived? And it's the same for all animals. If you look at a deer in the forest, they don't know what protein is. They don't know what protein is. They don't know what vitamins are. They have no clue what their amino acid requirements are.

But they do have this system where they eat what they like, and what they like changes depending on what their body's needs are. And it works really well. Of course it does, because otherwise deer would have gone extinct. So at this point in the interview, I took a step away from the science of nutrition because it was time to talk about things that happened in the food industry through the 20th century and into the 21st that started to threaten to mess up this very intimate relationship between flavor and nutrition. this very intimate relationship between flavor and nutrition. I asked Mark how food scientists managed to do that. Well, for the most, for a good chunk of the 20th century, they weren't able to do anything.

Science really had no clue where flavor came from. Scientists had a pretty good understanding of some of the big, you know, macronutrients. They knew sugar was sweet, for example. They knew there was vitamin C in oranges. They knew what carbohydrates were. But they really didn't know much about flavor. We had a few simple artificial flavors back then. We had a powder called vanillin, which tastes a lot like vanilla, but it's like a cheap and simple vanilla.

It's not as complex and amazing as real vanilla. There was a very simple grape flavoring and you'd have like a banana flavoring that really was sort of vaguely banana-like. And these were chemicals that people sort of stumbled upon and said, oh my gosh, this kind of tastes like banana. But we really had no idea what was going on inside a banana or an apple or a piece of chicken. This all changed in 1955 when the first commercial gas chromatograph went on sale. And the gas chromatograph was an amazing new technology that could measure the compounds inside food that existed in tiny, tiny amounts, parts per million, sometimes even parts per billion. Finally, we could isolate these flavor compounds and then using another technology called mass

spectrometry, we could figure out what they were. So very quickly, we started to develop a library, you might say, or a dictionary of the flavor chemicals that humans love. Well it wasn't long before we figured out what made a grape taste like a grape or an orange tastes like an orange. Then we said, hey, why don't we make this? And that's exactly what we started to do. And in the 1960s, it was a boom time. And it's continuing today of figuring out and then cranking out flavor chemicals, the flavors that nature uses to make food delicious. We mastered that. We started doing it. Okay, so starting in around the mid-20th century,

food scientists realized some great advances that allow them to start to mimic or manipulate flavor, but I still wanted to know why. So I asked Mark, why were food scientists so interested in pursuing these ends? Well, the most important thing to realize about flavor is flavor chemicals are really potent. Like I said, they're measured in parts per million. You don't need much to have a massive effect. So they're cheap. effect. So they're cheap. You can, you know, just a thimble full of flavorings can flavor palates and palates of, you know, soft drinks or yogurt or potato chips. It was a way to make food taste more delicious that was extremely cheap, and most importantly, that people loved.

At this point, I remembered something else Mark mentions in his book, something most of you are already pretty familiar with. And that's that the great advances in yields brought by green revolution fertilization and breeding technologies in the 20th century came at the price of producing blander food. Yeah, so what's interesting about the, I don't want to say the evolution, but the development of synthetic flavor, is that at the very same time, there was this other massive flavor trend happening, which is that everything was getting blander. All of our whole foods, best examples are strawberries and tomatoes and chicken. They taste like cardboard. We know this.

I mean, everybody, if you mention the word tomato, everybody, even people who aren't particularly interested in food, it's just this universal like, oh, tomatoes, they all taste like cardboard. You just can't get a good tomato. There's a very good reason for that because we have been intensely breeding our fruits and vegetables and even our animals to produce more food. So when you look at the yields of things like strawberries and tomatoes, they're way higher now than they used to be. Unfortunately, we've paid for this in terms of quality. We have a lot more food now. It's just not as good. It's not as good in two ways. The first way is that the nutrients are becoming more diluted. There are less nutrients in modern produce than there used to be.

But an even bigger problem, in my view, is that they don't taste as good because you're not inclined to eat any of them if they're bland or you're going to dump ranch dressing all over it or sugar, barbecue sauce or something. So food has gotten blander at the same time that flavor technology has gotten more powerful. Okay, so at this point, it's time to bring some of these elements together. Advances in the 20th century allowed us to produce calories very, very cheaply, but at the expense of flavor and ultimately nutrition. Meanwhile, the food industry figures out ways to mimic some of the flavor that we've lost or even enhance it, which taken together allows food companies to effectively trick us

into eating lots and lots of food that is not very good for us or certainly not nutritious. I asked Mark if I had that right. It's exactly correct. And I called the book The Dorito Effect because the Dorito perfectly encapsulates this trend. The very first Doritos were just salted tortilla chips. They didn't sell. No one got it. People in California and Texas, they knew, you know Hispanic cultural influence, and people knew you could dip these things in dip or guacamole, salsa. No one else really got it. It wasn't until they added the flavorings. They made the first flavored Doritos tasted like taco, and that was the game changer. That's what made people go, oh my God, I can't stop eating these. They're amazing. It had nothing to do with salt, sugar, or fat, which we're always talking about. It had everything to do with the flavor chemicals. These were chemicals, like I said, measured in parts per million that made these tortilla chips irresistible.

Okay, so at this point, it was time to shift gears again, because Mark devotes a large amount of his book to some of the absolutely fascinating science that has been done to explore the relationship between flavor and nutrition, and also to explore the complexity of the relationships among various species that eat or are eaten by each other. relationships among various species that eat or are eaten by each other. And so I just wanted to ask him to talk about some of those experiments because it was so cool. The book goes into way more detail, but we talked about some of this science. And the first thing I asked him to do was to talk a little bit about some work that was done with wasps to ascertain how they found some of their prey when they were out looking for it. And by prey, I mean certain grubs or other insects that were in the middle of, say, a cotton field. Yeah, so this all happened in the early 80s. This was kind of the post-pesticide era.

People had realized at this point that pesticides came with challenges, toxicity, toxicity, tolerance, that sort of thing. And there was a desire to develop new forms of treating agricultural pests that did not have the downsides of pesticides. So one of them was this idea of using parasitic wasps, which is to say, these are small wasps, not like the ones that you see, you know, floating, you know, floating your lemonade on a summer day. These are wasps, not like the ones that you see floating your lemonade on a summer day. These are wasps that find these caterpillars that eat things like cotton plants or corn plants, and they lay eggs in them, and then their eggs hatch, and the maggots eat their way through the caterpillar and become wasps again and go do it all over the place.

The thought was, well, if we can just basically fog a field with these wasps, yeah, it's game over for the caterpillars. There's no chemicals. Life is great. So they started to breed these wasps and grow them, and they would drop them out of planes and paper bags, and everything went perfectly. The paper bag would hit the ground, it would explode, these wasps would take off. But somehow the caterpillars were not dying, and they couldn't figure out why. So two fascinating scientists, Jim Tomlinson and Joe Lewis, set out to figure out why. So the first thing they did is they put a wasp inside kind of a, I guess you might say a cage. It was a wind tunnel because they had to control various things. And they wanted to see what happened.

And interestingly, nothing happened. And they thought the wasp was finding the caterpillar based on smell. So they thought, we'll just stick it in there. It's going to find a caterpillar and it's going to insert its stinger. Nothing happened. And then they thought, well, maybe that makes sense, actually, because if the wasp finds a caterpillar through smell, it makes sense for the caterpillar not to have a smell. So then they started to look at the plant. They found that the wasp was oddly interested in the plant. In fact, the wasp would start to do more if they put it in with a plant and not even a caterpillar. But the

thing that really got things going was if the caterpillar started eating the plant. And what they eventually realized is that the plant was talking to the wasp. What it would do is send out a chemical signal that says, I'm being eaten by a caterpillar. And the wasp would pick this up. It would even send out another signal, a wound signal, that would direct the wasp right to the caterpillar. Because, you know, a corn plant plant or cotton plant can be quite tall so it turns out the wasp was finding the caterpillar based on smell but not because of how the caterpillar smelled but because of how the plant smelled they found that there was what they call chemical signaling taking place aroma compounds were being used as information

for a plant to say to a wasp, come get this predator that's eating me, and it worked perfectly. The reason it turned out that these wasps being dropped out of planes could not find the caterpillars is because they were being raised on different food, and they had kind of the wrong flavor memory. So they had an inability to find these caterpillars when they got in the field because of the way they were raised. You might say it's almost like being raised on Chinese food and then dropped into a McDonald's and you just sort of think, where am I? What is this stuff? That's what happened to these wasps. The reason this is so interesting is two things. The first is the idea that flavor is in fact information. And the second is that

it is what triggers a behavior. In the case of the wasp, it's inserting its stinger and laying eggs. But in our case, and in lots of cases with insects and animals, it is the impulse, It is the impulse. It's the trigger to eat. Isn't that cool? I thought that was effing cool. Anyway, I wanted to get Mark to share at least one more example. So next I asked him to talk about sheep and some work that was done with sheep to try and figure out how they regulate their own nutrition. And it is equally fascinating. Yeah, let's talk about sheep. This is a great experiment done by a guy at Utah State named Fred Provenza, who has had an

absolutely fascinating career studying the way animals eat. So in one particular study, he made a bunch of sheep deficient in phosphorus. Now phosphorus is an essential mineral. If you don't get your phosphorus, your whole body starts to break down in any number of ways. It's very, very important. Well, after a certain period of time, the sheep started becoming phosphorus deficient. They would start eating soil and pawing at the ground and doing all sorts of weird things, drinking urine and stuff. And at this point, Provenza gave them a choice of feeds. One of them was maple flavored and one of them was coconut flavored. But he did something really interesting. After they ate the maple flavored feed, he'd stick a tube down their throat and

drench their stomachs with water. But after he gave them the coconut flavored feed, he stuck a tube down their throats and drenched their stomachs with phosphorus. It sounds really weird, but he did it for a reason. He wanted to set up an association between the flavor of the feed and the nutritional result. And he wanted to be sure they weren't tasting the water or the phosphorus. What he found over time was that the sheep that were deficient in phosphorus developed a liking for the coconut because their brain said, oh, every time I taste coconut, I get phosphorus and I really need this stuff. So by the end of the experiment, these sheep liked coconut. They thought it tasted good and their liking for it went up as their phosphorus deficiency

got worse. Now you might think well hold on a sec coconut's delicious maybe these sheep are just born coconut lovers great question well Fred Provenza controlled for that variable because over in another pen he did exactly the same thing but this time when he gave them the coconut-flavored feed, he drenched their stomachs with water and he paired the phosphorus with the maple. And in that pen, the sheep loved the maple flavor. So in each case, we see that a needed nutrient is paired with the flavor associated with it. So what this shows is that is a an association between a flavor and its post ingestive consequence, which is basically to say, your body connects the dots between the way food tastes and what it does to your body. So I could have gone on and on with

Mark regarding the science that he covers in his book, but you're gonna have to read the book to to to get at that. And I really recommend that you do because it was so, so interesting. Study after study that he covers that are just fascinating in what it reveals about the relationship between flavor and nutrition and interspecies relationships and all kinds of stuff. So check that out. But at this point, I wanted to move on and start to bring all of these different elements together. And so next I asked Mark about one of the main focuses of his book, which was the relationship between what he calls the Dorito

effect and obesity. Well, very simply, our body develops likings for flavors based on the nutrients that they bring us. We then take these flavors. We divorce them from nutrients. When you create a synthetic flavor in a lab, you're not creating nutrients. You're just creating a flavor. And then we put those wherever we want. the case of the Dorito, we gave a salted piece of deep fried carbohydrate the same tangy notes of a taco, something that has meat in it, which has protein, but also onion, a little bit of vegetable. I'm not going to say a taco is a superfood, but there's more going on

nutritionally in a taco than there is in a Dorito, in a tortilla chip. So we gave a tortilla chip the sheen of nutrition. It had the ability to tell a thrilling nutritional story, but nutritionally it did not back it up. Another great example of this is tomatoes. Another great example of this is tomatoes. There was a study in the journal Science a few years ago that found that the flavors in tomatoes that we love are all linked to essential nutrients in a tomato. Well, this is great news for tomatoes. It shows us that our flavor system works so well in a natural context that a delicious

tomato is literally better for you. This all goes awry when you knock off those flavors in the lab, crank them out in a factory and put them in, let's say, a ketchup-flavored potato chip or a frozen pizza, because then you put it in your mouth and your brain lights up and goes, yes, this has what I need. But what are you putting in your stomach? You're putting in a massive hit of calories. You're not putting in a tomato, which is relatively low in calories and has all sorts of good stuff in it. We just keep telling our brains a thrilling nutritional story. But the nutritional consequence is calories, calories, calories, calories. It's always

calories. So we have created food that is delicious, but it's not good for us, very simply. Livestock is a really interesting area to look at. We've gotten pretty good at getting our animals to put on weight quickly. If you go back 100 years and you read the farming manuals, you realize that chickens had to be let out in the yard, pigs had to be given green feed because we didn't have any idea what nutrients, the essential nutrients were. We knew you could give them carbs, you can give them barley or corn, this will get them to put on fat, but that wasn't all you could give them. Well, eventually, there's two things that made the modern confinement livestock feeding possible. One of them was that we developed really cheap, our efficiencies in growing grain got a lot

better so grain got cheaper. But the other thing is that we began adding nutrients to that feed, the essential nutrients of thiamine, riboflavin, all the stuff that pigs and chickens and cows needed. But here's the other interesting thing, we flavor that food. So we wean pigs very early. And one way we get piglets onto commercial feed is by putting what they call palatins in them. These are things like sweeteners and butterscotch and vanilla flavors that make it taste like mother's milk. We put exactly the same thing in animal feed that we put in human feed. Now, the whole reason we put in animal feed is because we want them to eat it. We want them to, you know, weight gain is money.

The faster it happens, the better. But that's what we do to human food. We incentivize it. We literally put chemicals in there, and I'm not saying they're toxic chemicals, like they're going to give you cancer. They just make the food more appealing. So look at the soft drink section in any supermarket. I mean, it's like a whole aisle, right?

There's just shelves and shelves and shelves of them. If you take out the flavorings, all you have are shelves and shelves of carbonated sugar water. How much of that stuff would we drink without the flavorings? I don't think we drink much at all. I've tasted it. I did an experiment at home where I put 12 teaspoons of sugar into a can of club soda. It's just not that good. But when you add the flavorings and you make it taste like Coca-Cola or 7-Up, then our brain suddenly goes, oh, that's delicious because it's pushing those

pleasure buttons. Cola is interesting because cola is mainly citrus flavoring. Well, citrus is hugely healthy. If you eat oranges or grapefruits, there's just so much going on in those fruits that are good for you. But cola, as we all know, is not. It's just sugar. There is a term that Mark uses in his book to describe the relationship between what you're tasting and what's happening once you start to digest that food. And it's called post-ingestive feedback. And so to this point, one thing that was still confusing me is why there wasn't any post-ingestive feedback in terms of just over-consuming calories. In other words, if our bodies have evolved to be able to

have the digestive system communicate with the brain and associate certain flavors and otherwise foods we're putting in our mouth with with what's what effect those foods are happening in our digestive system why doesn't that happen for calories? Why isn't there the same effect happening to prevent me from gorging on calories, which is what I do all the time? Well, I mean, over consumption of calories, here's the thing. The way modern food is so tricky is that it tricks your body in a weird way. It ends up giving us a lot of calories. We are wired to some degree to like calories. It's only in modern times that we've made calories a poison, and that takes a long time. So you're not going to reject potato chips or

soft drinks the way your body's going to reject a rotten oyster. If you eat a rotten oyster, you get violently ill, and then your body says, I don't want to eat these. And you shudder every time you smell one or you see someone pop open a fresh oyster. But what we've created with modern food is quite different. Calories don't make you sick the way a rotten oyster does. So it's not going to extinguish that flavor preference. You haven't got what you needed, but you also haven't been, your body's not's not being told you know this is terrible for you because you're still kind of getting something you want on some level I would think of it this way too in in the environment we evolved in nature only

strawberries tasted like strawberries there was not this imitation strawberry that had lots and lots of calories so we we created a very modern trick, a kind of a trick that did not exist previously. So it's just not something we were built to handle. I think the other thing is that eventually, to some degree, we do realize these foods aren't meeting our needs and we tire of them. And that's why the food industry is constantly innovating. That's why every year there are competitions to create new flavors of potato chips, some new sandwich or burger at this or that fast food restaurant because so much of our food is just not satisfying to us. It's interesting to me that when you go to countries like Japan and Italy that take their food more seriously, they're not constantly questing after the hot new food. They love their traditional cuisine, and it is nourishing and satisfying, and our food is not. At this point, my time with Mark was running low, so I had to wrap things up. But of course, I had one more

question for him. What is the solution to this problem? Well, two things. First of all, let's just start caring about flavor. Let's stop obsessing over carbs or protein or whatever nutrient of the month is in style, and let's just care about the way food tastes. So be aware of where flavor comes from. Look at the packaging and look for two words, artificial flavor or natural flavor. They're the same thing. There's no reason to think natural flavor or even organic natural flavor is good for you. It's a chemical designed to make you want to eat more, to make

you think something is delicious. But the other thing is let's start caring with the flavor of our whole foods. Don't buy tomatoes that cost 99 cents a pound. Consider paying more for better tomatoes that are grown from, you know, from better seeds, better varieties, and by better farmers. This stuff is going in your body. I think if people bought real food that tasted great, there wouldn't be this food problem because we'd be eating food that is healthy and that is satisfying and that we love. Mark Shasker, you have written one of my favorite books on food and agriculture of the last 15 years, and I've read quite a few, and I'm really thankful you joined us today. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. It's been great.

That was pretty good, hey? I really enjoyed interviewing Mark because he's so dang articulate and thoughtful. Anyway, I really recommend you check out the chorito effect i uh i just enjoyed it so much i was on a plane ride from toronto to vancouver i think but if we and i just devoured it uh in the one plane ride it's a really good book so what did you think of that format do you want to know the truth i was kind of glad that my interview conditions were so poor when i interviewed mark because i've been actually meaning meaning to try out that format for a while and the truth is I haven't done it yet just because it's very time consuming so every single time I come to edit an episode I just never feel like

putting that amount of time in so this time I was forced to and I don't know I kind of like it I'd be curious to know what you think and you could email me editor at the ruminant.ca if you want to advocate for that kind of post-production narrative weaving that i did which is common to a lot of other podcasts or maybe you didn't like it let me know anyway lots more good content to come in the coming weeks folks as usual i would love to hear from you if you want to share an insight that you made in your farming operation what was the best insight that you made this past year on your farm i'd love to know about it editor at the ruminant.ca is where you can email me perhaps you could record a smartphone audio memo and then just email it over and either i can use it as is or i can call you back and we could talk a little more about your insight.

All right. I'll leave the rest for Vanessa. Talk to you next week. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be. I'm