Bonus: Erin Lyall on Eating With Soldiers

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1:41In your experience of being in the front line, of being with the soldiers, I'd like to ask you what they feel about eating. How do they express a need for good food or food? How do they want to be fed? Well, food is comfort, obviously, but food is survival primarily. So in most military situations, no matter which military we're with, the priority is hearty food that's portable, right? So if you're embedded with the American military, it'll be MREs, meals ready to eat, which are those little cardboard boxes full of little pouches and you sort of add hot water and it heats up some sort of chicken casserole or whatever.

2:25But each of those packs has like 2 ,000 calories. I mean, if you only add one of those a day, you'd be totally fine. I haven't actually seen many of the militaries that I've been with recently eating things like that. It's always been, in Ukraine, I see a lot of these open face sandwich type things. They'll do rye bread with pork fat, with a boiled egg, with salmon, with a pickle, with sausages, mostly cured. The Ukrainians do a lot of preserved things, lots of pickled things, lots of condensed jammy things that they'll smear on bread. And then in the Middle East, a lot of it is sort of catch as catch can.

3:08But there are moments in my experience where there will be a big delivery of something and then they'll set out a feast for the army. So I had like an amazing experience with the Kurdish Peshmerga on a mountaintop overlooking Mosul where they were in a tent and we walked in and it was laid out with just platters of rice and meat and bread and little salads and picky things. And, you know, people would just rip up bread and grab a hunk of meat with the bread. And, you know, amazing. But the logistics of military feeding is mind boggling. I mean, it's quite an endeavor. and you know we we never expect to be fed in any of these situations we're always carrying in our own stuff how do you get i mean just energy bars and nuts and you know whatever sort of bare bones calories we can keep in our bag so that at minimum we don't have to we don't have to ask to take food away from the people who need it to fight but but is that your responsibility as a producer to make sure that there's food sure how do you do it we just load up uh we load up before we head out i mean as simple as that and then i mean in a place like ukraine there are supermarkets functioning all over the place and very beautiful clean well stocked uh gas stations so you know it's just a constant make sure we have it make sure we have it and you know you do you end up doing a lot of pre-eating like i'm not hungry but i'll eat because i never know when my next meal comes and then at the end of the day you're like oh man i I just ate five giant meals because I was pre-eating, and then somebody served me something, and I overdid it.

4:42When you come home, if you've been in this situation of danger, fear of lack of food, of isolation, does it take an adjustment to? It actually took me a while in my career to figure out the right way to decompress from these things. Because even in America, when I was a young producer, I was covering school shootings. And when you're young and covering school shootings like Virginia Tech, you know, those students who were killed in Virginia Tech were two years younger than me at the time. So that was really traumatic. And I used to go home after those trips and just crawl into bed and lie there for a couple days and then emerge.

5:22And actually, it wasn't serving me. And I was really not treating the trauma in any real way. And what I've actually learned is, as soon as I come out of a war zone i like pack my life full so as soon as i come home i'll throw a dinner party that night or the next night or i'll immediately book some exercise classes or spend some real time with my kids or you know just make a bunch of plans and dive right back in into sort of the warmth of everybody around me do you sleep well i do yeah yeah those yeah i mean I mean, I'm lucky I don't have to live in a war zone. Yeah. I get to leave a war zone.

6:06So I think the job has given me actually an amazing amount of perspective and gratitude. So I know how lucky I am that I can sleep without a siren and have running water in my house and a hot shower. Where would you like to go next? If you do not like to go, there could be a war. But is there a war, a conflict that is going on now that particularly intrigues you? I think, I mean, I'll be going back to Ukraine probably very soon. The Iran conflict is interesting. We're trying to figure out how to cover it because it's impossible to get there. So we're trying to figure out interesting ways to cover it.

6:53The Ebola outbreak is happening in Africa. We have a team going. But they're very different calculations for me because I've got small children and really don't want to get Ebola. They are six and eight. Yeah. Two daughters. What's the longest you've been away? When you go on a trip, do you have to stay? The longest since having children is about, I think, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was the longest. I think that was about three and a half weeks. Yeah. But I try to keep it to two weeks max. When you go on vacation, where do you go? I spend a lot of time in France. I love France. I go to Osgore these days.

7:32It's near Biritz, just go to the Biritz. And it's amazing. It also has a saltwater lake in the middle of town, and so they've got oyster shacks all around it. So you go and eat platters of oysters and rosé, and oh, it's the best. Yeah. Love it. And Italy. And Italy. I spend a lot of time in Liguria as well. So, I mean, sort of Mediterranean is the best place. You should write a cookbook, you know. I was thinking that, or a memoir of some of these stories. Yeah, Food Under Fire, the Cookbook. Yeah, Food Under Fire. It's interesting because people love food. People are endlessly curious about how other people eat.

8:09Yeah. So it's, yeah.

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9:03Just go online or in-store, discover, and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories. And you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small brands at walmart.com today. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.