Where Food Meets Politics… Jacinda Ardern, Andrew Jarecki, Erin Lyall, Hilton Als, Annie Leibovitz, Kamala Harris

0:00Jacinda Ardern:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Getting to a great idea is hard in college. Nonsensical essays, cringe-inducing presentations, and seemingly unsolvable problem sets. But then, the first thought becomes a final thesis. Jumbled slides transform into a polished keynote, and that midterm assignment gets a lot less mid. Because the road to great ideas is littered with bad ones. You just have to keep going until something clicks. Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash college.

0:39I always thought we judge a culture by the way we feed the poor, the sick, and our children. In this special compilation episode of Ruthie's Table 4, we're talking about food and politics. in conversation with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, CBS conflict producer Erin Lyle, writer and critic Hilton Ahles, photographer Annie Leibovitz, and Kamala Harris. Just take me to your life as the Prime Minister. That is a big deal.

1:16Jacinda Ardern:It was relatively unexpected. I was the deputy leader in 2017 when New Zealand had an election, and my boss decided that he was unlikely to win, and so he, seven weeks out from the election. Who was your boss? Andrew Little was his name. Was he Labour? He was. He was an ex-trade union lawyer and president of one of our bigger trade unions. A great guy, but was struggling in the polls. So he came to work one day and then just quit and nominated me to be the leader. and so I suddenly found myself campaigning unexpectedly to be Prime Minister. How much time was there between being made leader and having to run for election?

1:53Jacinda Ardern:About roughly seven weeks. Oh, so soon. That's very short. That's very short. Very short. Yeah. I mean, we already had the billboards up with his name on them. Have you met Kamala? I have a couple of times. Not since she had the same experience. Same experience. So, you know, there are parallels being thrust into the situation. Yes, it was a real situation. And then, of course, New Zealand has an MMP system, so it means you don't always know who's going to be able to form government. So we then, after the election, went into negotiations for a couple of weeks. During those negotiations was when I found out I was pregnant.

2:34Jacinda Ardern:and then three-ish days later the small party who was making a decision over who they would form a government with chose us and I became prime minister. Governed for five years until I... Now we know that. I do have to say, you know, I said in my introduction how you are heroic and the world was watching you. Thankfully I didn't know that at the time, which is quite helpful, I think. You didn't know that? No, not really. I remember snippets during COVID. I remember the UK media covering our COVID response. And, you know, at times thinking, you know, everyone's just doing the best they can. And yet I remember thinking, how could things that are meant to be based on science, how do they become political?

3:23Jacinda Ardern:I feel the same way about climate change. You know, these issues where actually we have an evidence base around the problem that exists and sure, you know, there might be different interpretations around what the best thing is to do. But so often now politics creeps into things where I just don't think it belongs. You know, and it was nothing's ever universal. But in New Zealand, some of those values of actually we're an island nation where we expect people to do their bit to look after one another. That mentality really shone through. How did you meet? Well, my father very proudly, I remember him arriving and announcing very proudly to everyone, don't worry, I have bought the bread maker.

4:04Isn't it amazing how bread was such a huge thing? Bread became such a thing. Fascinating. Fascinating.

4:10Jacinda Ardern:I remember, of course, we had, just like everyone else, we had flour, worries about flour and yeast shortages. And I remember walking home after we'd made an announcement and just saying to everyone, look, supermarket's going to stay open. You don't need to hoard. And it's going to be okay. I was walking home from Parliament towards Premier House and as I was walking over the overbridge, there was this couple and they flipped open the boot of their car and pulled out a big five-kg bag of flour and they turned and they saw me and immediately said, look, it was the only thing, it was the only size we could get, you know, they were full of apologies.

4:46Jacinda Ardern:I was like, it's fine, it's fine. But it almost felt illicit, you know, to have a large quantity. But so we had the bread maker. Yeah. And of course, my mum bought everything out of her store cupboard. And then we would just do what others did. And we just cooked at home. Yeah. One of the great concerns of COVID, many, many concerns, was poverty. Yeah. The effect of, which was, you know, awakening for many, many people, that children who didn't go to school didn't have lunch. Yeah. How many families depended on the school lunch? Yeah. Very often it was their only meal of the day. Yes. Did you approach that?

5:27Jacinda Ardern:We were mindful of that. I remember when we were planning for having to be in lockdown, thinking about what about our rough sleeping community? How do we house them? What about those who experience family violence because the stress of these circumstances will exacerbate it? And for some children, their relief from family violence is school. and what about of course those on on low incomes and so we thought about all of that we increased rates about in our benefit system we were providing essentially forms of care packaging for families both of essentials but also of school educational equipment so that schooling could continue at home we used two of our tv channels to run education shows in english and a Maori.

6:17Jacinda Ardern:I remember that constantly being on my mind. I was the minister for child poverty reduction, so kids were always in the front of my mind. And so we did what we could, but it was tough. At one point, my daughter, who was 14, Jeremy, was reading a book by a guy who had been wrongfully convicted in Alabama and had been in the system for like 30 years. And then we decided to take a road trip and we went to Montgomery, Alabama to sort of see what we could see. And we met a man there who was an older man. I guess he was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama appointed by George Wallace.

6:54I asked him questions about the prison system. And he very pointedly at some point said to me, well, if you come back and volunteer, you know, you'll be able to see what you can see. And I said, well, if I come back, what will I see? And he said, well, if you come back to Alabama, I'll take you on the death row at Holman prison and you'll see it's a slave ship. And that stayed with me. And I went back to New York and got together with Charlotte Kaufman, who I made the film with. And I said, I think we need to go back and see what we can see. And then when we went back, we were really prevented from seeing very much in the prisons, but we discovered that there was this network of people inside the prisons who had access to contraband cell phones yeah and that becomes a big part of what the film is now we let the now the men in the film can tell their story and yeah that i'd never seen you know before i'd never been able to hear directly from people who are currently incarcerated you know not people who are saying well back in the day i was in prison or whatever but people are saying this is what's happening to me right now including people speaking to people who are in solitary confinement right now but you know food is very important in the film because the whole reason that the chaplain gets to go into the prisons and bring his sort of religious observances there and the reason they get such a big audience and that people in the prison really want to see him is that he goes in and brings food.

8:31And the food in the Alabama state prison system is so bad that they literally, we have images of meat and other food that they've delivered to the prison for serving to the men that literally have the legend outside not fit for human consumption. And so when the chaplain comes in, he's got a kitchen in Montgomery, he's got a whole bunch of volunteers, and they make food for 1 ,200 people. And then they load it up in trucks. By the way, he doesn't get paid to do this. This is just part of his ministry. And they bring the food and they bring them things that they otherwise would never have and things that are luxuries, you know, like little Debbie's, which is kind of like a Southern, you know, packaged food.

9:19Or he says, you know, I bring them ho-ho. But they also bring them roast chicken or fried chicken. And they also bring them biscuits. and they also bring them mashed potatoes. And you can see in the film that they're serving him a piece of roast chicken. And the guy we're talking to says, you know, they should show you the meat that we get. It doesn't look anything like this. And also how food is used as an incentive to acquiesce or taking it away to make them feel punished. In the prison, because it's an economy of deprivation, food is so much more important right for us we're gonna go and have dinner tonight and we're gonna be deciding how many pieces of focaccia we're gonna have for these guys the prison is trying to manipulate them which they often are they'll very often just cut off the food supply and they have such complete control over these men's lives that they'll put people um in a position where they're getting very few calories to begin with you know they're living on a diet that consists a lot of Rice Krispie treats that they're getting out of the commissary or ramen.

10:30And I think you have a population that's sort of unhealthy and not able to become healthier because they can't get access. And that's one of the reasons why you see people who have been in prison for 20 years have a lot of trouble staying alive as long as other people do because they've spent years being malnourished. You sort of started by talking about how very often you go to a war zone and life is going on. But that must change from when you get then to the actual, to the front line. Absolutely. And it gets harder the closer you get, obviously, to get fresh produce and varied products. But somehow they're all doing it.

11:14one of our most one of my most amazing experiences in life like i mean at work for sure but in life as well was um when harrison harrison had been taken over by the russians in the early days of the invasion where is harrison it's it's southern southern yeah and um it's sort of right on the way to crimea and and that's why i think the russians took it because they had crimea and so they came and um and it was liberated the ukrainians liberated the city i mean on the other side of the river in that part of harrison the russians are still there to this day but but the ukrainians took back the the main city so we were in kiev and we wanted to get to harrison obviously because the pictures were amazing people were dancing in the streets and singing so we started driving and um then we passed through checkpoints to get closer and closer and finally we get to the final checkpoint outside of Harrison and they said sorry we're closed the president is coming tomorrow so we're not letting anyone else in you can come back tomorrow morning when Zelensky arrives we said okay and at this point we had driven for hours and I was not going to drive back to our hotel in Odessa which was again hours away so I said all right team let's let's go to the nearest village let's shoot a story see what we can find and maybe we can find a guest house.

12:31So we go to this village and we see this little old man and he approaches us and he starts crying and he basically tells us a story of how the Russians had taken over his mother's home and they were living there, the soldiers, and they were trashing the place. I mean, it was turning into a pigsty and finally he said he had had enough and so he went to the house and said, guys, you've got to get out of here. This is so disrespectful. Please leave my mother's house. and they said okay old man here's a shovel why don't you dig your grave so so they made him dig his grave for two nights he didn't tell his wife about this he just went they went they were like you're coming back or we're gonna find you so he went back and he finished digging his grave and he shows us this I mean it was like a perfectly rectangular grave and finally he says okay I'm done and he fully expected you know to get shot and thrown in the grave and they were kind of drunk and laughed at him and said, whatever, nice, get out of here.

13:26So he left. So he tells us this story. He shows us the grave. He shows us the trashed house. And it was sort of an amazing story. And then I said to him, listen, we're a team of seven because we had some drivers, everything involved. Is there a place around here we could spend the night? Like we have our own food. We have a generator. We have a Starlink. We just need a place to crash. Is there a guest house? and he said well you're staying at my house like of course you know we have food we have a place for you to sleep and we even have lady wine for you it's a lady wine what is lady wine he said well we have hard wine for the men and like a softer wine for the ladies okay that sounds amazing so he brings us back to his house which is essentially a junkyard he's got all these cars on blocks and seven dogs and sort of you know a little shack there and he brings us in and his wife is turning one room into a bedroom for seven people, and she has taken everything in her kitchen and cooked it and put it on this little rickety table.

14:28And we sat around this table, you know, all seven, nine of us, however many we were, eating like just a plain pasta topped with a sort of spicy tomato-pepper mixture and bread with salo, which is the pork fat that they eat. garlic. I don't know. You have some bread. And of course, lady wine, which we drank. So tell me about lady wine. It tastes like wine. I mean, it's homemade. Everything they were serving us was basic. They had moonshine, vodka. They had homemade lady wine and a harder wine. So it's, I guess it's just the level of fermentation. So it tasted like wine, but maybe slightly fizzy.

15:09Amazing. In a big jug. I think the men also ended up drinking it as we made our way through the uh through the supplies but but you know it's those kind of moments yeah um where you just go oh my god you know humanity is an amazing thing sometimes right and and for them as well because they they could unload the trauma of of occupation right they finally had people sitting around their table going like tell us everything and so for them it was our poor fixer was going a mile a minute back and forth in english and ukrainian but um it was pretty special. It's an interesting story. So when I was 16, I went to purchase, SUNY Purchase, which was a big arts school.

15:51And the story was that my mother took me, one of my sisters, her husband drove us. And I remember we got into the room, I put the suitcase on the bed, and she opened the suitcase. And she started to unpack the suitcase to put things in drawers. And I took her hand and I said, Ma. And she realized she had to stop. Let go. It was profound. And she had to stop and let me suffer or have joy or whatever. But she couldn't buffer the world anymore. Anyway, I missed her so terribly. I got strep throat there and fell apart and went back home. Good. And she never questioned that. And then when she was moving to Atlanta, her sisters moved down there, she said, you can only stay in New York if you go to school.

16:53Yeah. It was one of the few demands she's ever made, and that's when I went to school. And you applied to Columbia. You went to Columbia. Yes, yes, and then met some amazing people. I did. And you were thrust into the world of sort of downtown and Fennett Village. Yes, yes. met some incredible people were restaurants a feature of what you did well there was no money yeah so what did you do well you go to parties and you eat you went to people yeah um but um now i get the two the two there was a place that was delicious on fourth street and second avenue that was ukrainian not vaselka but the other place so you get a big chunk of halibut bread and pea soup and then if you had a little bit more money you could go up to B &H Dairy which was the kosher restaurant and you could have pancakes or latkes so it was a big Eastern European Jewish community where you could eat substantially for very little money and were you mostly solitary and also people kind of would leave apartments in a month if they didn't like the people.

18:01It was a very wild place. It was a kind of lawless place. New York at that time. What year was that? So let's say I left Brooklyn in the early 80s. And it was pretty lawless for a long time. I guess coming out of the 70s, coming out of Vietnam, coming out of... Yes. When was the AIDS era? So 82 to 95. That was a long time ago. Yeah, and you've written a lot about that. Yes, I have. Talk about that for me. Well, it was just devastating in terms of it's hard, Ruthie, to get younger people to understand that it was like kind of science fiction. That, you know, you'd be chatting with someone one day and then they would be gone.

18:45And the sad things for some people were that families abandoned them. Hospitals didn't know what to do with the bodies. They would dump them in garbage bags. And it was a horrifying period. but I think a lot of I think it sped up intimacy it sped up intimacy it taught you that the value of friendship was something to value you know and not to take for granted ever I saw recently I saw on television Chorus Line you know you just look at something like that and you think I bet every one of those beautiful dancers died I think there may be I guess because they had the 50th anniversary, and I think that only two are alive.

19:32Yeah, yeah. Of the men, yeah. I think the first year I was away from home, I ate cornflakes and ice cream. I mean, I didn't really, you know. But you went to the Art Institute. Yeah. Presumably you had an apartment, or you lived in residence? No, I had, well, I lived the first semester with my older sister who was in Berkeley, and then moved into the city into an apartment, and then shared an apartment on Telegraph Hill. What year was that? It was 1969, 1970. Yeah, in 1969 I came here because a lot of my friends were leaving for the draft, you know, because of the war. There's a picture upstairs I'll show you of a demonstration outside the embassy.

20:16But they were heady times. You know, I do want to say it was interesting coming into London, and I was in Spain just, you know, opening a show there of fashion work at the Mop Foundation there in Corona. And just leaving the United States and coming into London, it just felt so normal. Yeah. I thought we could talk about that. I know in your perception it may not be, but compared to America right now, it's just you don't realize the tension and the impression the oppression in the air I think that's what I ask everyone is how do we oppose I know what we used to oppose you demonstrate, you don't pay your taxes you chain yourself to the White House and then you think how do we do that now but I think I don't know every day we're thinking about it and acting on it I think it is important to talk about it and to take steps and to be, you know, as we just saw in the White House the other day in the Oval Office with an ABC journalist being spoken to in a way or a Bloomberg journalist being called picky.

21:30You know, why didn't people walk, you know, why didn't everyone just walk out of that room and say, this cannot be done. You cannot do this, you know. Move forward. Which is why, you know, the women's book, you know, right now. Let's talk about that. Coming out with this. I feel so responsible to it. I wish I was. The people who should be talking are really the people who wrote the essays. You know, Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem and Shimamanda Adichie. You know, the essays are amazing. They are. They really, really are. And it was interesting with Gloria because I really went to her right away when I thought about doing the second volume.

22:13you know um and um you know she she wrote something that was you know nice to begin with and i i i you know i i called her back up and i said gloria no you need to tell us where we are what's going on are we gone backwards you know is since we lost road versus weight or what is going yeah you know like where you know and she put it yeah into perspective so well i mean She grew up in the 50s, and she said, we're not going backwards. I love Chimamanda saying these women in the new book. You could have done those photographs 25 years ago. Why? These women are, she said, fearlessly competent. It's true.

23:06I mean, that was the word I was using, was I felt a confidence in who we are as women today. I just feel right now we're all carrying an incredible amount of distrust. Yeah. And we have to work on the relationships of trust and also understand that the nature of the relationship of trust is that it's reciprocal. You give and you receive trust. trust and I think that's some of the deep and important work that we all have to do. We were talking about Denmark you know we were talking about the happiness factor and the study it was it was actually a conversation about a woman who left her a Danish woman who came to New York and left her baby outside the cafe and she could see the pram and she was arrested because of you want to protect a baby being left outside but from her town in Denmark she described that that's kind of what you do.

24:05You trust somebody not to take your baby, but you also trust education to provide good school lunches. You trust an immigrant coming to your country to be housed. You have a health care system. And do you think that trust has, in our country, in the United States, have you finding that people not only not trust their neighbor not to have a gun or to be there for them if they have an accident, but to trust government to take care of them? Yes, but I think that it's not a new phenomena

24:44for populations of people, and I'll speak for the American people, to have a healthy level of skepticism about whether the government is working in a way that works for them, the people to be frustrated with the bureaucracy of government with the um with the politics that's not new but i do think that in particular since the pandemic we've seen it increase at a pretty significant level i actually think that part of the challenge we have is we are not talking enough about the trauma that so many people experienced because of the pandemic people lost family members to covid they lost their livelihood they lost some people lost their homes small business owners lost their businesses our children lost significant phases of not only their education but socialization and it was as though the the rug got pulled out from under people and and whereas you thought that there were some basic things about the system however you define it that would always exist the pandemic upended it all and I think left people with a greater level of skepticism and skepticism I think is a symptom of distrust and so some people then say well how is it that more people aren't taking to the street about what we're seeing happen in the last nine months.

26:26I mean, I think that there are many people who are feeling like, yeah, we know that the system doesn't always work for us, so why is anybody surprised now? And so if we're going to deal with the reality of where we are beyond that one election, I think this is part of the work we have to do, which is to encourage these difficult conversations about issues like trust. Yeah. And to address issues like trauma, to address, of course, issues that are about whether government is actually working for the people. And do we need to reexamine, especially in the aftermath that there will be of this current administration, and while then we are looking at a big pile of debris, maybe it's not about rebuilding.

27:21Oh, I see. Maybe it's transformative and it's not. Because I actually, I write about this in the book. I think that when that day comes, we cannot afford and let us make sure we do not think about what to do in a way that is burdened by some nostalgia. Yeah, yeah. To recreate a system that was flawed. And instead, let's have some honest conversations about what was not working and then see the opportunity we might have to actually and sadly start from scratch with some stuff.

28:01Ruthie's Table Four is now a book. Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Kamala Harris, David Beckham, Tina Fey, Elton John, and many more. It's full of stories, beautifully designed in a celebration of the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever you buy your books.

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