In Conversation With Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist

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1:57Ruthie's Table Four, brought to you by Sky and Montclair.

2:09This is so weird. I'm supposed to ask the questions. Okay, actually, why don't we switch last minute? I have to say hello. I'm Ruthie. and I should stay from the very beginning, from the start, but I feel a little bit threatened sitting next to Zannie because, not because of, you know, she's the editor of the great magazine, of all she's done in journalism, her brilliant interviews, but I found out actually from her the other day that she'd been to cookery school. And I just don't think that's fair. I didn't go to journalism school to become a great editor, and you went to cookery school. But having said that, you are a great cook, and I know that food is important to you, and The Economist has probably done more or as much as all of us in the food world in terms of our concerns for food poverty, sustainability, politics, how we move forward in deliveries and eating at home and the future of restaurants.

3:18The Economist explores the world through words, and we explore the world through ingredients. We have a common purpose, and on the podcast, we really use food to look at memories, and so I'd like to talk to you about that today, son. Thank you. Starting with your father, who actually told you to go to the hospital. You insisted that I go to cookery school. Yeah. And why do you think that was? So I, after I left school, I took a year off and I wanted to travel around the world and I wanted to go by myself. And my dad was always very encouraging in everything, but he is, several of you here know him.

4:00He's extremely old fashioned and he felt that it was very important that a young woman going around the world needed to find a way to earn a living. And he had a very clear idea of how one earned a living. You had to learn to cook and you had to learn to type. So I was sent off. I did a four-week typing course in London to become what in those days was a temporary secretary. And I did the test. You had to do 60 words a minute for five minutes with no more than five mistakes. And after about 100 tests, I got that. And then he sent me off to cookery school, to a place in Wiltshire, where I learned things like how to make choux pastry and all kinds of...

4:34Actually, what was useful? I'd grown up. Food was really important at home. And my mum is a fantastic cook, so I've grown up loving cooking. But what I learned from that month was actually just some kind of useful... I learned how to make a souffle. I learned how to make choux pastry. I learned how to make some English classics. And then when I was at Oxford, I used to earn money by cooking dinner parties for friends of mine who wanted to kind of sit around, usually men, and have a pompous dinner party. And so I would cook the food. As a job? As a job. I mean, they paid me to do it. And then I set up a little business making cookies and flapjacks and refreshments during the college productions of plays.

5:17And I made a lot of money doing it, which paid for all of my holidays in the summer. It was never anything like yours. Don't worry. No, no, no. I didn't go to cookery school, so I learned to make a shoe pastry by following Julia Child, if anybody is a fan of her books. But I think... So do you think he was right then? Would you tell that to one of your children? No, I wouldn't tell them to go and learn to Tite Booker School. But I think the instinct was right, which was have a skill that you can use to earn some money. If you're going to go off by yourself. And it was, whatever, 1985. He was incredibly supportive.

5:55And he just said, but you need to earn some money. And it was quite a big deal. He agreed to pay for my ticket, which was not a small thing to do. Where were you going? I bought one of those. You used to be able to buy those round-the-world tickets. And I went from London to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong to Perth, from Perth to Sydney, from Sydney to New Zealand, from New Zealand to LA, and from LA back to London. It took seven months. And I worked in Sydney. I worked as a housekeeper for some rich old lady. And I had to make her a soft-boiled egg every morning, and that was it. Did you learn that at cookery school?

6:28I did. It's hard to make a good soft-boiled egg. I love a soft-boiled egg. I had a soft-boiled egg this morning. What's your technique? Do you put it in cold water and heat it up or boiling water and put it down? I put it in boiled water and leave it in. There you go. See, we knew everything about this woman. She's now taught us how to boil an egg. There are many ways, but getting it soft. And then you have to have it with, which I had this morning for breakfast. I haven't had this in a while. You have it with soldiers with Marmite on. With Marmite. So good. I want to do a project. When I first came to London, I went to art school.

7:01And I want to do a project of finding Americans and giving them Marmite and taking a photograph of them to see their reaction. Because it's something for, I think it is a very British. It's a totally British phrase. But I grew up with Marmite. Tell us more about what you grew up with. Because your mother was German. My mother's German and my father's English. And I grew up on a farm in the countryside in Shopsha. And so... What kind of farm was it? A mixed farm. We had, over the sort of course of my childhood, we had cattle, we had sheep, we had pigs, We had cereals, pretty much everything. And so we had our own meat.

7:38I mean, it was killed at the abattoir, but then we used to get whole lambs and whole pigs. We used to have a pig that we fed outside, and then poor old pig would see the end of its days and it would arrive a little later. We had a big vegetable garden, lots of fruit trees. And so the whole... Do you remember what they grew in the vegetable garden? All the kinds of things you would expect. red cabbage, potato we had celeriac, I remember that swede, lots of beans, French beans runner beans, the whole my kind of late summer as a child was really very much about going and being sent off to pick beans and my mum would make, she would freeze everything she had three freezers, still has, three freezers and enough kind of bottling space, I mean we could have survived you know, an absolute siege for months and months And the whole, the kind of, the tenor of the seasons were very clear there because you were always doing something, making chutney, making jam.

8:35And she's a fantastic, fabulous cook, still is. But she was very German. She grew up in, was born in what is now East Prussia. Was East Prussia, was now Poland, in the Far East. And grew up on the south of Germany on Lake Constance. And as a result, the kind of cuisine from my grandmother, who I spent a lot of time with as a child, and my mother was a sort of Central European cuisine. So all of the stuff that I really associate with being a child, it was, you know, Hörnigsberger Klopse, which is like meatballs with caper sauce. Schnitzel, of course. Lots of sauerkraut. Lots of sausage. Bauernessen, which is kind of boiled potatoes sliced up with bits of bacon and then egg all over it.

9:19I mean, real kind of Central European comfort food. In Shropshire, it was a sort of strange juxtaposition. because she brought the food with it she kept the food and she brought the traditions and and it was a very there were a lot of kind of food related traditions in our house I mean not just holidays but Christmas we was completely choreographed we ate exactly the same thing Christmas Eve we had exactly the same Christmas day Sundays we would have boiled eggs we'd have my mother would bring out a different set of china for Sundays every Sunday we'd have Sunday lunch was a big part of my childhood.

9:51So it was a kind of choreography of food. What was the conversation around the table apart from the food? Did you have three siblings? Yeah, I have three younger sisters. And when I was younger, the conversations at kind of lunch, and lunch was the big meal of the day, was always whether my dad was in a good mood or not. It was a big question. My father would come in from being out farming, and was he in a good mood or was he in a bad mood? And if he was in a bad mood, it kind dominated the whole table. We were all quaking. And then as we grew older, we would have huge debates. And I famously would have huge arguments.

10:26But they were sort of, I guess, wonky policy debates. As a sort of teenager, I took it upon myself to say that I thought agricultural subsidies were a really bad idea. He did not think this was terribly sensible. But he would listen? He listened. We're quite similar. And so we would sort of talk loudly at each other for a while. Were you always more of the adventurous side to him? Was he more conservative? No, he was very adventurous. He was... I mean, where I grew up, my family or my dad's family has lived for hundreds of years, and he always knew that he was going to go back and farm that. But he went off as a young man and was in the army and then lived abroad for a while and absolutely loved that, but always felt this kind of admirable sense of duty.

11:16that he was going to come back to the farm. And he did. And that's been his life's work. And he, even now, we're trying to persuade him that pushing 87, maybe he should perhaps scale back a bit. But he's absolutely not. And he was the sort of dominant person in the household. And my mum is, and she sort of held the whole thing together. She was an incredible, is an incredible cook. And it was a lot of life in the countryside. So I look back now and it's very simple. It was very simple, but it was great. I had horses. I used to be outside all the time. We didn't... Lots of things. I had pasta for the first time.

11:57I was quite old when I had... Oh, yeah. Fresh pasta, not until I was a teenager. It was very... But did they travel? Would they take you on holidays to Europe? Yeah. We went on... I went to Germany every year, because my grandmother lived there. And when I was between the ages of seven and 11, four times, I spent between Christmas and Easter living with my grandmother and going to the local school in Germany. And my grandmother was also a fantastic cook, but she went through the Second World War. She lived through some quite tough times. So she was both extremely opinionated, quite frugal, and very dominant.

12:39But she loved good food. She absolutely loved it. So she would wake up in the morning very early and go to the bakery that opened at, I think, like 7 or something. In a small village? It was a sort of satellite village of a town. I mean, I took my family there for my mum's 70th, and they said, why are you so excited about this place? It looks suburban. But to me, it was a sort of satellite town. But she went to the baker, and she would get fresh rolls, and we'd have fresh, delicious. And German bread is really, really, really good. German rolls are delicious, with amazingly good butter and jam.

13:16And then, you know, then she'd make me a packed lunch for school, and then I'd come back in the evening, and there'd be some incredible meal. And I remember I put on so much weight the first time I went to Germany. I kind of came back, you know, waddling into, see, my mother said, oh, you have had a good time. I went, yeah, well, I have. But it was that sort of mixture of... So I did spend quite a lot of time abroad. and I, you know, going from my primary school in Shropshire, which had, I think, 60 students. It was very small. And being, I mean, you couldn't do this nowadays, take a kid out of primary school for three months and just go to a different country.

13:52But then it was fine. And so I had this sort of interestingly bifurcated time. You know, I was one bit very rural in Shropshire, one bit in Germany, which I suspect kind of was quite formative in who I became. Did you know that you wanted to be a journalist? Did you know that the issues when you were on your travels, when you were going to that round of world ticket, did that ground you in the idea of communicating that through words? I didn't... I think I knew that I wanted to live and work abroad before I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I think when I was very young, like a bajillion people of my age, I wanted to be an air stewardess, flight attendant as they're called now, because that seemed to be the way to travel.

14:42I knew I wanted to spend a lot of time traveling. And then I really got... I did quite a lot of student journalism as an undergraduate. And that's when I got the kind of... Yeah. That's when I got the kind of... I thought this is what I really... What I like doing. And then the sort of real aha moment was actually when I was at graduate school in the US after the Berlin Wall came down. And I went with a small group of students from Harvard to work for the finance ministry in Poland. And that's when I saw, you know, I saw what happened when you have economic reform, when you free prices, when you free up an economy.

15:17And I suddenly thought, that's actually, I really want to understand how economies function. I want to understand how, what happens when you bring, you know, you move from communism to capitalism, when you bring freedom to a country. And that was the kind of life-changing moment. And you were working for the finance ministry. I worked for the Ministry of Finance. Inside looking out. And then you wanted to be more of the outside looking and progressing. I went from there. Then I worked in Ukraine for a bit. Then I worked for the IMF, which was the International Monetary Fund, the kind of macroeconomic policeman.

15:52And then I realized that I wasn't actually cut out for big bureaucracies. And so So then I became a journalist and joined The Economist. I was with Ruth this morning, Ruth Port, is she here? And we were talking so much about food in the digital age. And so for me, as just in a personal way, I think it's at the end, will we still be going to restaurants? Will we still be going? We don't know if we'll be going to work, whether we go to the theater. Theater will come to us, movies will come to us. But I was wondering how you feel in terms of your work at the doing what you do and food and meeting people.

16:26How does it work in the world of journalism? I think food is... For me, food is actually about connection with people. We've talked about my family. It was about connection then. It was all of us together. With my kids, we were... We didn't always manage it every single night, but it was a really big deal that we would have dinner together. And we still... And my kids love cooking, and we love nothing more than to actually all get together and cook. And I now don't cook during the week that much. because I'm either not at home or I get home late. But for me, it's very relaxing. But I would never, ever, ever cook just for myself.

17:03Have you never cooked a meal for yourself? I haven't. I don't know. Never cook a meal for myself. I mean, I'll maybe an omelette if I'm starving. Do you go to a restaurant by yourself? Yeah. If I'm traveling, I will go to a restaurant by myself, and I'll sit and have a nice something to eat and a glass of wine, and I love that. And I love it with a book, and I love it if nobody comes to talk to me, and it's fantastic. Okay. Note to self. We won't talk to you. But do you read? So you take, but you do take a book. You read while you... I do take a book, because if you don't take a book, people come and talk to you.

17:28Oh, okay. It's really important. You have to have a book. But food is about being together, right, with people. And so when I'm traveling, and now I get to travel with my amazing colleagues in lots of different countries, I get to see incredibly interesting people, I've learned that food, in almost every place I go to, food is an extremely important way that the people you are talking to show you their country. But in China, I have an annual trip to China, and I come back unable to eat another kind of Chinese meal, because I have huge lunches and huge dinners. And you have those tables, those Chinese tables, and you sit there for hours and hours, and it's all very formal.

18:12And some of it's delicious, some of it's less so, but it's an incredibly important part. In Japan, which I don't know very well, but But again, immensely important around, and the rituals around food. It's the rituals, isn't it? Oh my God. I once, most embarrassing, you would never do this. I put my chopsticks into the rice. Oh. Absolutely. You only do that when someone's died, apparently. It was a complete sort of faux pas. Yeah, absolutely don't do that. But in most, almost everywhere, you get a sense of a place when you go out, when you are with people, when you go out to dinner. I would never...

18:47Would you interview, do you ever do interviews with food? Yeah. I mean, not like you. I mean, not kind of... No, but I mean, sitting there and eating. Yes, absolutely. I often will have lots of people... You learn about somebody. I always think that a friend of mine said that he likes to interview candidates for a job over food. Because what's like dating? You know, if you go on a date and go to a restaurant, you see, do they talk to the waiter? Do they share their food? Do they eat in a certain way? Do you find that... Yeah, you get an insight into what people are like. And it's not, you know, I don't give two hoots about how people hold their fork or anything like that.

19:20It's not that. You definitely get an insight into what a person is like. And what have you found? Have you ever thought this person could be good and then been with them in a restaurant and thought, no? Yeah, it's more that I've, when I've, people I've been, less than people I've been interviewing for jobs and more people I've been trying to get to know. And the relationship changes with someone who, I don't know, whether it's someone important or not important that you're trying to get to know better, you really get to know them much better over a meeting. Being on the other side, I always think it's interesting that people do very private things in a very public space.

20:01Why do people announce they're having an affair in a restaurant or people get fired in a restaurant? No, people cry. I've often called up, I once called up a restaurant and said, would you go bring a glass of champagne to my friends? It's their anniversary. And they said, we can't because she hasn't stopped crying. And so I think we had somebody who once wanted to propose to their girlfriend. And he said, would you write a cake and write, will you marry me on the cake? And then we did. We made a beautiful cake. And halfway through, he came up and said, cancel the cake. So we always wonder what happened in that first thing.

20:37Oh, my God. So, but Carrie, yeah, so you do go to restaurants. I do. I love going to restaurants. I go out a lot. But I also really like, particularly with my family, you know, cooking at home. That's my sense of relaxation. It's what we do at weekends. It's what we do when the kind of family's together. There's something sort of, just as I would never cook just for myself, there's something that the whole kind of process of cooking together, putting bad music on, chatting. Bad music on, yeah. We have playlists of bad music that we listen to when we're cooking. And then having a big meal all around it, bringing friends.

21:16It's absolutely my complete favorite. So I don't have to worry too much about bringing food to people. You think people will still come? I think people will still. In fact, I think in the world that Ruth and others are creating, in the AI world, I'm convinced that there will be things. We will all still want to do things with other humans. There may be intelligent AIs that can do everything better than us, including perhaps cooking, but I will still want to have food that you've cooked. And if you, I think we're looking at a clock, which is saying we need to stop, and maybe now, but if you were on Ruthie's table four, which we're going to do and have more time together, we always end with a question.

21:59If you, you know, food, eating, it's hunger, and it is a performance, and it's a connection, it is also comfort. And so I hope you don't need comfort very often, but if you do think about comfort, eating for comfort, is there a food that you would go for? I think of food that reminds me of home, which is the kind of food I've just been talking about. I wouldn't go and cook it, but I like nothing more than going home and having something that my mum has cooked. so or going to what would that be can you choose one I think Koenigsberger Klopse are right up there meatball can you say that slowly delicious what's it called Koenigsberger Klopse but you know what your brand Zeno is pretty damn good thank you I think that I don't feel threatened anymore she could go to cookery school I'm not going to journalism school but I've loved every minute of being with you and thank you so much thank you Thank you.

23:30business. That's genius. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem. When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously. Walmart has thousands of small brands, and they're all in one place. Just 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. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We all seem to be in a rush these days, from work to driving our kids around.

24:16But when you're behind the wheel, please do not speed. A few minutes saved by going faster is never worth the risk. So follow the speed limit, enjoy the drive. Maybe bring some snacks for the kids and know that along the way, you're getting quality time with your family. Paid for by NHTSA. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.