The Stupid Little Yogurt Question

23:03To be completely honest, I wish I was spending this time to figure out what I want to spend it about. Like, I'm really bad at just finding specific questions or specific things that I'm interested about. So I have some, like, general themes. So I love design. I love architecture, art. But I just haven't been able to come up with a specific question. Anouk doesn't know what she wants her final project to be. But in what I'm learning is, like, kind of classic Anouk fashion, she was like, I'd rather just be using this time to figure out what I actually am interested in. And so, like, again, a clay pot of yogurt, not something that was immediately attention-grabbing for her.

23:37Right. Okay, so where do you go from there when you realize your two principles are like, have other designs? Well, it's funny because this is something that like occasionally comes up for us on our show. Some weeks we spend our time thinking about small and unserious questions. Yeah. Like we might be trying to track down a Russian rapper and meanwhile the economy is crashing and the president's trying to like dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or something. It's like, wait, how sad are the monkeys in the zoo again? And that was coming to mind as I was hearing them talk about their serious research interests bumping up against this silly yogurt question.

24:12But this is in some ways the entire point of David's class. He's trying to teach them the disciplined form of curiosity. Yeah, he's trying to say maybe it's a more valuable skill, or at least it's the skill that this class is trying to teach you, that you should be able to chase down answers to questions that you don't care about. And you might learn in the process that somebody used to say to me about exercising, my friend Lillia was like, action precedes motivation. Like, start doing it and you might discover something. So you're now on board. You're like, let's force these children to talk yoga.

24:46I've kind of been like Connozant's Demand-pilled, where I'm like, let's just see if this is possible.

24:57We're going to take a short break. And then, this week, search engine's Garrett Graham will embed with his pair of teenage detectives as they complete a very involved homework assignment, as accusations are hurled, as a beloved international yogurt brand becomes somewhat unsettled. All that after this publicité.

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28:07Welcome back to the show. Chapter 4, Looking for Treasure.

28:15So, PJ, a couple of months have passed since my first visit to the French school, and we're about to hop on a call to start our investigation for real. And the first thing— Has the curiosity at this point, is it inside you? Like, are you like—it's not—I feel like it hasn't yet bitten you. No. The thing that I think is propelling me and motivating me at this point is the fact that I'm getting to, like, investigate this alongside two high schoolers who seem bored by it. Like, the fun part for me is not, can I answer this question? It's— Can you make them care about it? Can I get these students interested in this question?

28:46Okay. So, I get on a Zoom with Romy and Anouk. Can you both tell me what you had for breakfast this morning so I can check your levels? I had cereal for breakfast. I had a child's breakfast. I had carrot cake and chocolate cake for breakfast. You had two types of cake for breakfast. That's inspirational, I have to admit. It's funny. Everybody we ever interview, we ask what they had for breakfast. And then with an adult, we usually follow that up by saying, can you say your name and what you do for a living? But for high school students who don't yet do anything for a living, I had a different introductory question that I thought might tell me something about them.

29:20So when you guys were both younger, I'm curious, what did you want to be when you grew up? Like the earliest answer you can remember for yourself for that question. What did you guys want to be? I think I wanted to be like either a doctor or a scientist. I think I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was really obsessed with history and I was a super curious kid and I really wanted, like I loved treasure hunts, stuff like that. For example, I love thrifting and I think it's the same feeling in a way. It's like you're trying to find this treasure. That feeling that Anouk's teacher is trying to inspire in her, like curiosity about the small things, she says it's a feeling she often has, just rarely about school.

30:02So I don't really like school because it just takes away like free time from me. Like I would much rather just spend my entire days like drawing and playing music, stuff like that. So I usually find school pretty boring. Yeah, there are some classes that I do like enjoy. I really like to learn. I think kind of the stress of it sometimes takes away from that. Well, sometimes, a lot of the times takes away from like the kind of pleasure you get from learning or like the drive that you have. Because I think I'm a very driven person when it comes to that and if the things I care about. but some of the classes I just cannot, I couldn't care less.

30:41And that's a little bit how these two students were feeling in their class about curiosity with that exceptionally eager teacher, David Freeman. Like some of the early assignments to them just felt pretty dull. We had this assignment that was like this research project about your building that you live in. Yeah, and it was still not really clear what the whole thing was about and everybody's still a little bit confused. And then came that day that Mr. Freeman showed up with his pot of yogurt. And you know what happens from there. I mean, I feel like when we came in, we were like, oh, come on, like not another stupid project.

31:13And this time it's about yogurt too? Like the most stupid one in our opinion, like just about a pot of yogurt. But then two weeks later, he said, I contacted this podcast team. Then I think that made it more exciting, at least for me, because it made it feel more real. David told his class that he had two spots available to be a part of the project, and Romy and Anouk decided to go for it. Just had to send him an email with all our arguments to how we would make the best students for the assignment. But I feel like I just have this thing of fear of missing out. Also, I had seen that Maya Hawk was on the podcast.

31:49I think Anouk and I are the only people who applied. We're not the best. We're just the, yeah. You're the only. I mean, I think that's what it was. So that all brings us to today on this Zoom call, talking about how we want to tackle this yogurt question. Yeah. And we decided to start someplace easy, La Fermiere's website.

32:11Chapter 5, Red Flags. The website, it's very artfully designed, very sleek-looking photos of their yogurt, and we just navigate over to the FAQ page. Okay. Should I just read it? Yeah, go for it. Where, helpfully, maybe a little anticlimactically, one of the questions there is our question. Why are you using terracotta in glass pots? And the company's answer? We believe that our all-natural yogurt deserves an all-natural packaging. Terracotta is a natural material that has been a useful tool in the kitchen for centuries. Pots, plates, platters, etc. And it still is today. Already, from the first sentence on, they're trying to use the packaging as a way to say that their yogurts are great, because they're calling it an all-natural packaging for all-natural yogurts.

33:00And those are very broad words, like what does all-natural really mean? So, finding the American website lacking in detail, we head over to the French website to see if it had any other information we could use.

33:15P.J., I'm just going to translate this for you. And you've been taking French classes. I have been taking French classes. The translation is roughly, these packages remain among the most ecological because they are inert, meaning they do not deteriorate the materials they come into contact with in a way that could cause damage to the environment. Unlike plastic, for example, which when decomposed produces byproducts that are potentially dangerous for the environment and health. And so when the students read the company's appeal to sustainability on this website, it was like they were just naturally wired to think that this company was trying to pull a fast one on them.

33:48I mean, certain brands have a whole page on their website where they can actually detail to you what exactly they're doing to be sustainable. You know, if you look at La Fermière, there's only like two sentences. Is this really giving me a full explanation as to why? Not really. It was like, oh, it's because we're eco-friendly. I just had the biggest eyebrow raise ever. Like, really? I don't know. Big question mark. That's what it feels like. Big question mark. Oh, so now it's like now they're curious because now they're a little paranoid. This is the first time that I start to see the flicker of real curiosity in their eyes.

34:29It's like, this company is lying to us. Oh, you're saying that these youngsters have a more suspicious relationship to capitalism than us oldsters? Well, it's funny. I wasn't quite sure if it was their generation or if it was their, like, Frenchness. But they are naturally far more skeptical of corporations than I think I was, at least in high school. Yeah. But Romy told me this story that helped me understand where this generation is coming from. Like, really how the media they've experienced has shaped their worldview. If you've ever watched Nickelodeon in your lifetime, you know that there are a plethora of ads.

35:01And they're all so colorful and bright and they have this really obnoxious music. I feel like I always embraced them as a kid. I don't ever have a memory of not. But I don't know. It's interesting. You kind of grow older and you start to be a little skeptical. I think that also kind of just comes with being a teenager. I'm not going to lie. And then I think also in quarantine, we were all on our phones. And so you actually learn a lot. Like, you know, people always like, oh, yeah, you just sit in bed and do nothing. But like, you actually learn a lot on a deep dive on some sort of TikTok or Google.

35:36Like, you kind of learn about fast fashion, what that does to the environment. And you start learning about the detriments of what companies do. I think it was specifically with fashion. I think it really was a turning point for me. You learn about how horrible, you know, the working conditions are. They're barely paid. how much they produce and how much people are buying just to wear the shirt once and never again. To me, it was interesting. I've heard parents talk about how much screen time their teenagers were getting during the pandemic, but I'd never actually heard anybody wonder about what specific rabbit holes they were going down while looking at their screens.

36:14Yeah. And for Romeo and Anouk, it seemed to be this kind of anti-consumerist rabbit hole. I know that when a brand says that they're doing something fully for their customers and fully for the environment, it's usually hiding something and it's usually they're doing it for their own profit because that's just how everything works. And we wouldn't be facing climate change and we wouldn't be having those issues if every company's first motive was to make Earth and the people happy. I know that in our world, most things are for profit and have to be for profit. Yeah, because if it was actually the best way to make yogurt more sustainable, why are there only two other brands here and there that do it?

36:55Yeah, I was thinking, I feel like maybe ceramics is better for the environment. Like it doesn't, like if you discard it in nature, it's not going to like last as long, whatever, than plastic. But it's also a lot heavier. So when for transportation, that means you can't transport as much of it. It's like more soon too. So the students, what they seem to think was going on here was that the company knows sustainability is important to high-end consumers. So if a product looks sustainable and can be marketed as sustainable, who cares if the thing is actually sustainable? Like what's important is what the consumer thinks because what the consumer thinks will determine how much they can sell it for.

37:32Yeah, and like, you know, there's plenty of evidence in our culture for this idea that oftentimes labeling something as ethical is a thin marketing technique. And La Fermiere's CEO probably goes to bed every night not wondering if a crack team of high school skeptics is going to descend on his terracotta plan. or her terracotta plant. Well, to be clear, there's no evidence, at least online at this point, that anything actually fishy was going on. This was just some teenage theorizing at this point. But we decided to reach out to the company to see if anyone there was down to talk to us about their clay pots.

38:05Like a bunch of French kids think you're lying. I didn't go, that was not my email to the company. And to be clear, we were going in skeptical, but also with an open mind. Chapter 6. The Yogurt Executive. Can you hear yourself when you talk? Um, no. I can't hear anything. I can't hear anybody. I can hear Anouk. Oh my God, I can hear myself. Hey peoples. I can hear myself talk. Can you guys hear yourself? Yeah, yeah. Is that normal? So I meet up with the students and their teacher David at Search Engine HQ. It's all very exciting. An executive at La Fermiere has very generously agreed to talk to us.

38:40Okay, so hi. Could you say maybe your name and what you do? Yeah, of course. So my name is Charlotte Marchand, and I've been with La Fermière for five years now. I'm the head of sales and marketing. So as the head of sales and marketing in the U.S., Charlotte would be the first one to admit, like, she's not a sustainability expert, but she does know the company and its products very well. And so Romy asked her. Can you just tell me the story of the ceramic pots and kind of how they came about and what they mean to the company in general? In around 1995, this was the appearance of the terracotta pot, actually, because at the beginning they were using a paper cup.

39:21But very soon after the creation of the company, a former owner wanted to give to the consumer an elevated experience. But also he wanted something new in the market, something no one did before. So he wanted the perfect packaging for this, and the perfect packaging for this was ceramic pots. So basically, La Fermiere yogurt for many decades had come in wax-coated paper pots. And then in the 90s, Charlotte tells us that the company decided to switch to the terracotta pot, both because they wanted to stand out to their customers, but also because they were thinking about the environment. For us, it's very important to propose one of the most sustainable packaging for our product.

40:03I don't know if you know, but our ceramic pot is made of 95 % of clay, which is a natural material, and then 5 % of non-toxic clay. So there is like a minimal environmental impact because it's made from natural materials. And as soon as Charlotte is starting to like sing the praises of this terracotta pot for all of its ecological virtues, I can see the students kind of like squirming in their chairs. It's just making them more suspicious. They sort of get this wry smile on their face. You know, because Charlotte is more or less repeating what we found on the website. She keeps saying, high quality ingredients, high quality packaging.

40:38High quality ingredients, high quality packaging, which is like a good slogan, but doesn't necessarily offer much of a window into how the company is actually thinking about the environmental trade-offs. And she's wandering into a room full of teenage sharpshooters. So Romy tries to press Charlotte on the topic. So one thing we've learned actually from, you know, our research is that it's really hard to measure sustainability and how something actually impacts the environment because there are just so many factors involved. How did La Famille decide that ceramics were the most sustainable option?

41:09So I would not say we will say it's the most sustainable option. I would say it's one of the most sustainable options and one of the best options we could have today. I totally agree with you. It's more complex than that because there are multiple factors and I will not be able to answer you properly as I'm not a sustainability expert, you know. But for sure, when you take the mix of the consumer experience, the fact there is no impact on the environment, if you just throw away your pots, it will not damage the environment. So that means there is no pollution on the air again, no pollution on the ocean, no pollution for animals, etc.

41:46And Charlotte's like, look, terracotta, not the villain here. The villain here is the other kinds of packaging and the word that nobody's saying is like, plastic's the obvious villain here. Like, terracotta is obviously better for the environment than plastic. But this corporate cheer and insistence is not totally playing with the teenage skeptics. No, it is not. And they're also asking these kinds of serious hardball questions. Like, they're teenagers, but they just seem very well-versed in what I would think of as, like, adult corporate consultant lingo. Can you just describe what you want consumers to think about when they think of the brand La Fiamme?

42:22Like, what does your brand identity really look like? So for us, it's like indulgent and natural. So we want people to have a treat, but a treat with like something that's not harmful to the health, you know. You said you had five ingredients. What are they? It was almost like the students had decided to go full prosecutor here. So we have milk, cream, culture, of course, and the yogurt, vanilla bean, for example, and cane sugar. So that's the only ingredient we have. So here in the U.S., we are manufacturing our product upstate New York. So we get our milk and cream upstate New York, like, very, very close to our production facility.

43:00This is actually surprising to me. Like, I'd assumed that the French yogurt came from France, but the ingredients are actually arriving from in-state in New York, which did seem maybe more environmentally sound, although not something La Fermière is particularly bragging about. We started to wrap up the conversation, and we say our awkward goodbyes. We thank Charlotte for her time. Les filles, quelque chose à ajouter en français?

43:25Charlotte, thank you so much for your time. This is really helpful. We appreciate it. We'll talk soon. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye now. Bye. Thank you. Romy and Anouk, coming off of that call, are just like positively elated. Like, I think, one, I just think they're excited to be in the same podcast studio that Maya Hawk was once inside of. Well, yeah. But I also think that, like, they just played hardball with the company executive and they kind of won. Yeah. An adult flinch. Yeah. There's no thing that makes a teenager happier than, like, an adult flinch. It's not like we got any answers. Like, it's not like we're actually that much closer to the real answer to our question here, which is, like, is terracotta more sustainable than plastic?

44:05But Romy and Anouk at this point are just increasingly skeptical that the answers the company is giving us are anything more than just marketing speak. Like, for premium brands now, it's kind of a given that if they're going to price it so much higher, they're going to have to do something about climate change because it's, like, such a big concern. All brands now. Yeah. Even, like, food, makeup, clothing. Anything has to have a claim that, oh, we're doing this to protect the planet. Or ethical, whether it be ethics or sustainability. They're good at, like, making it show, even though it's not really true.

44:37If they were skeptical just reading La Fermiere's website, Romian and Uke were much more skeptical having just spoken to a person at the company. But also, like, we're two 11th graders and a podcast producer who majored in literature. Yes. We don't actually know what we're talking about. Well, what we're told about literature and liberal arts in general is that it's not about what it teaches you, it's about how it teaches you how to think. Well, it taught me to think that we needed to talk to an expert here. And after a break, that's exactly what we're going to do.

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47:59Hey, PJ. Yes. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. Chapter 7, A Surprising Answer. So, May of that year, nearing the end of 11th grade for Romy and Anouk, I went back to the lyse for a second time. And you know that feeling when the end of the school year is around the corner? You can just kind of feel it. Everything's a little looser. Memorial Day is around the corner. Romy is actually busy the day that I show up. She had an exam that not even Search Engine could get her out of. But I do meet up with Anouk. Basically, I have this week of school, next week of school, and then two days. And after that, it's just a full week of studying, then a French final, and then another week of studying, then another French exam, and then I'm done.

48:39That sounds like a lot of studying and a lot of exams. The reason Anouk and I were meeting up in the middle of exam season was, of course, we still had some more yogurt homework to do. We knew La Fermiere was saying that terracotta was a sustainable selling point for their brand, but now we wanted to talk to a scientist who could help us understand whether or not that was actually true. And so after doing some research, we landed on who we thought might be the right expert.

49:03Could you maybe say your name and what you do? Sure. I'm Shelley Miller. I'm a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. Okay, great. And how should we refer to you? Do you prefer maybe Dr. Miller or Shelley? Oh, Shelley is totally fine. All right, perfect. Shelly's work is fascinating. She does something called life cycle analysis, which means that she studies the environmental impact of products from the moment the materials are extracted from the ground to when they are manufactured, to when they're transported, to when eventually they're disposed or recycled.

49:34And so Anouk explains the class that she's taking and the question that came out of it to Shelly. So Connaissance du Monde is this course we have at our school that is part of this international baccalauréat, which is this international exam that we take, France. And since we're all French, yogurt and this French brand of yogurt called La Fermière is an important part of our daily life, especially we go to the cafeteria and there's this yogurt and we're all wondering like why is it in clay pots instead of plastic pots like all the others. And so we started asking some other questions especially related to sustainability on just maybe trying to find why that was.

50:10Yeah so first off I'll just say this is such a great question. Things like this are a great way of starting to think about sustainability questions and analysis and, you know, really getting into the details of, all right, when we're trying to figure out environmental impacts of something, how do we even start going about doing that, knowing that there's lots of different environmental impacts and, you know, lots of different trade-offs to consider. So, you know, for someone like me who really studies these things in a very systematic way, the first thing we do is try to figure out, well, what environmental impacts are we talking about?

50:43The first thing that she says is that to answer a question like this, you need to know what your priorities are. Because she says that there's really no human activity that is good for the environment. Podcasting. Besides podcasting, she said. We only generate hot air. That's warming the climate, Peter. That's not good. What this means is that this is a conversation about trade-offs. Yeah. Because different things are bad for the environment in different ways. And so we asked her to kind of compare our two materials here, terracotta and plastic. Yeah. She started with plastic. And right off the bat, she's like, plastic has terrible for the environment.

51:18Plastic causes environmental impacts throughout its entire life cycle. So plastics are made from natural gas byproducts. Making and manufacturing plastic has environmental impacts and air quality and also climate change emissions. And then there's plastics afterlife, like it clogs landfills, turtles choke on it, microplastics, et cetera, et cetera. And so we know for a fact that plastics cause environmental impact. And sometimes other materials are even worse. And this is where Shelley started to really surprise me. I think us actually, like, yes, plastic sucks. Yes. But remember, everything's a trade-off here.

51:58And so like, how does plastic compare to everything else out there? We need to take a broader look of saying, all right, well, if not plastics, then what? And are those materials actually better than plastic? Yeah. So for example, how do you go about weighing plastic against another material? Like how does that work from a professional standpoint? Yeah. So what we do is we really look at the entire supply chain of a material. And so when it comes to plastic, one of the things that, you know, plastic is really good technically because it has some pretty fantastic technical characteristics that other materials don't have.

52:37Shelley says, for instance, you can use a pretty small amount of plastic to perform the same function as much heavier materials like metal or glass or terracotta. Yeah, it's super interesting. That's exactly where we started to see kind of the fault in the image of La Fermière, where we started thinking, OK, it's so much heavier that during transportation it probably emits a lot more CO2. And so we're really wondering, where does this idea that plastic is bad or is worse maybe than glass or terracotta, where do you think that comes from? You know, so I will say that there are social scientists who can answer this question far better than I can as far as the psychology of perception and how people understand and perceive risk and impact.

53:19I think one of the things that is largely driving the conversation with plastic is that we can really see the impact of plastic in a way that we can't see the environmental impact of other materials. And so if we are able to take a picture of a beach that's strewn in microplastics, if we can take a picture of an animal that's entangled in some sort of plastic, or we see the carcass of a dead seabird whose stomach is filled with plastic, those are all heart-wrenching images. And not only that, we can make the direct connection between what we see in those environmental damaging photographs and our lifestyles.

54:00we can see our own little consumption in those environmental impacts. Just to say, Shelley is, of course, focusing on just the environmental impact here. Like, obviously, there's a whole other conversation to be had about the possible health impacts of plastics or microplastics that we're just not going to get into today. But when it comes to sustainability, Shelley thinks that plastics reputation as public enemy number one kind of just boils down to how visible its environmental impacts are. Whereas with other materials like glass, metal, terracotta, a lot of these things require a ton of energy to produce and to transport, and much more than plastic.

54:38But their impacts are just more abstract and less visual. It's really hard to capture climate change in a picture. We have many, many photos of a polar bear on an ice shelf, but that doesn't give us the same connection as the stuff we see in our recycling bin every day. Wow, I actually never thought of that, honestly. It kind of goes back to this idea that if you see a yogurt in a clay pot and a yogurt in a plastic pot, you're going to think, oh, yeah, plastic is bad. While clay has this idea of like, oh, it's natural. Yeah, it's probably better for the environment. Yeah, so consumers often think that plastic has the greatest environmental impact of any other material.

55:16It turns out that particularly if we're looking at a climate perspective on the amount of carbon emissions that materials have, Plastic generally has a lower carbon footprint than other packaging materials. And so you, as a very well-informed, conscientious consumer, you're at the grocery store, you have a choice between a yogurt that comes in a plastic container and a yogurt that comes in a terracotta container. Which would you feel better about picking up on a random Tuesday? So I would say that if we're just talking about yogurt, it would be buying yogurt in bulk that you're going to eat in a plastic container.

56:03And so that both reduces the total amount of plastic per serving of yogurt and has a lower packaging impact. Interesting. Yeah. But it's tricky if you're trying to say that your product is valuable and like considered in a delicacy, bulk plastic container is kind of working against your messaging. It doesn't scream up market. Yeah. But it just turns out that if you get into the nitty gritty of the environmental trade-offs here, like the thing that doesn't look environmentally friendly, it doesn't have the aesthetic of environmentalism, oftentimes can be more environmentally friendly. But, this is an important but, Shelly goes on to say that this whole conversation we're having about packaging kind of misses the point entirely.

56:52When we think about things that have the greatest environmental impact, we often focus on packaging. And so that's the stuff we throw out at the end of the day. And we tend to say, oh, look at all this packaging and that's the biggest environmental impact that I have because I have to throw out all this packaging. What people don't realize is it's the thing inside the package that has a much greater environmental impact than the package itself. Certainly in the case of food, the food that we're eating has a much greater environmental impact than the packaging it comes in. She says plastic's typically less than 10 % of the total environmental impact of the food product that you're consuming.

57:30The food itself, far more important to whether or not you're actually making a sustainable decision. What's the carbon footprint of yogurt? This is a good question, and this invites a whole lot of other questions on the other side of it. But what she's saying is that packaging's kind of a red herring. And also, like, La Fermiere's marketing's kind of encouraging you to follow that red herring. Like, they're not saying, look how sustainable our yogurt is. They're saying, look how sustainable our packaging is. Which is another reason for me to at least believe that this is primarily a marketing decision.

57:58You're with the teenagers in this way. I'm with the teenagers. And also, the funny thing is that La Fermiere's yogurt, which is the thing actually driving whether or not it's a more sustainable option than its competitors, seems to be pretty environmentally friendly. And there's a couple reasons for that. One is that the company operates on a kind of make it where you sell it principle, meaning the company's two biggest markets, France and the U.S. The dairy is produced and processed locally in both of those countries. So you're not adding a bunch of transport miles inside that part of the supply chain, which is going to lower the carbon footprint that's mostly invisible to the consumer.

58:32But also, at least in France, where this data is public, La Fermiere is sourcing its dairy from small local farms with an average of only 35 cows. And farms like these, if they're using certain agricultural practices, they could be better for the environment than large-scale dairy farms. Although, what I've always been told is that if you wanted to put a huge dent in climate change, just like our reliance on cows as a food input because of the methane they produce is hugely bad for the environment. And so the fact that they're using cows at all is kind of a problem. Although it's a yogurt company, they're going to use cows.

59:07Yeah, you could eat non-dairy yogurt. And this is kind of the quality of this kind of sustainability conversation. It's a hall of mirrors. There's like being human is bad for the environment and all sorts of decisions we make inside of being human are also bad for the environment. So like, yes, you could say I no longer eat full dairy yogurt. I eat oat milk yogurt or whatever else is out there. And that would be better for the environment. And you wouldn't have to have this conversation at all. But this is the conversation we've chosen. But this is the thing I hadn't understood when the teacher David first posed the question.

59:36Like he wasn't just asking about the packaging. He was asking about all the difficult ethical choices involved. Right. which is actually something that teenagers like thinking through. And I think as Romy and Anuq grasped that, this question had become their question too. Thank you so much for your time again. Honestly, you have no idea how far this has taken us from just a stupid little yogurt question. So thank you so much for your help. No, it is an absolutely fantastic question. And you guys are asking exactly the right questions. Okay, skeleton crew. Hi. Hello. Sorry. All right. So, I'm going to ask for about 10 minutes of your attention.

1:00:16Again, here's the teacher, David Freeman. We have something of an answer to the grain yogurt question of 2024. Romy and Anouk are going to tell you a little bit about what we've been up to. You guys want to come up front and, yes? Oh, applause. We were in the same classroom Shruti and I visited months prior. Romy and Anouk seemed, and I'd never actually seen the side of them, a little nervous to speak in front of the class. So, and now we are back to the last CDM class of the year ever. No, well, not ever. There's going to be classes next year. And so, yeah, I think this has confirmed a lot of our initial theories.

1:00:55So on how it could... It's a brand thing. It's a brand thing. It's a brand DNA thing and also a marketing decision over sustainably, maybe. And, yeah. And Romy and Anouk just walked the class through the steps of their reporting, everything we had done along the way. So, Mr. Freeman brought us this question back in, like, November, December. They talked about all the people we interviewed. The head of sales and marketing at FMI. They broke down all the complicated conclusions we had drawn. But she also mentioned a very important point, which was that what's inside the packaging matters much more than the packaging itself.

1:01:26And, of course, they shared their marketing advice for La Fermiere. I feel like they're kind of missing the point in a way because they're really advertising the sustainable aspect of their pots when really they should be doing the same thing but for the yogurt. Because we just, not proved, but we're able to question the fact that clay pots are not maybe sustainable. But we all know that locally produced food, which is what they do, is good for the environment. So if they wanted to kind of pitch this climate aspect of it, they should probably focus on the yogurt. Anybody else have any follow-up questions just while we're here?

1:01:59This is your last chance to interrogate a dairy product. Good? Cool. All right, excellent.

1:02:11And with that, homework assignment complete. The stupid little yogurt question was officially done.

1:02:23Chapter 8. Graduation. So I should say, as sometimes happens on the show, months passed while we slowly worked on the story, and months in the life of an adult, not such a big deal, but for these teenagers, it meant that we would meet up occasionally as their life was speeding up pretty quickly, in this case towards graduation and the life that followed after. Romy did end up finishing her big research project on morphine addiction. She's about to head to the Lund School of Economics in the fall. Anouk's finishing up high school in Paris and is going to head to a French university in the fall.

1:02:58It's very difficult to open. Yeah, it is. But the last time we got together in person in New York, I brought in a couple pots of La Fermiere for them to taste. I mean, orange blossom. Does that mean orange? I think there's a kind of honey that's orange blossom. Oh, shit. Yeah, there's no orange on it. Still, if this was American, it would be like yellow orange. Yeah, so we just opened the yogurt. There is indeed yogurt in there. This is the final step in the investigation. Do you guys have anything else to say about yogurt? Nope, just enjoy it. Pretty good. Yeah. It's actually good. It's good.

1:03:30I agree, unfortunately. What do you mean, unfortunately? I don't know. I want it to be more, like, not, like, completely convinced. I didn't want to be convinced by it, but, like... It's not amazing. Yeah. I mean, the texture is amazing. Yeah, I don't think I... The flavor's really good. I mean, I'm not a big yogurt person, so maybe that's just me. But for a yogurt enthusiast, it would probably be good.

1:03:56Garrett Graham. He's Search Engine's senior producer. Big thanks this week to David Freeman and the Lycée Francais de New York for inviting us into their classroom.

1:04:29merchant. Our intern is Oscar Noxon. If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some additional audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can learn more about Incognito Mode at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary show. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

1:05:06We'll see you next week.

1:05:28During that conversation, we're like, well, I wonder if it's the same with AI, right? Are we using a lot of power in AI that's not giving us a great benefit? And that's really what sort of kicked off a series of research efforts around this, trying to understand how do we make things more energy efficient? So this was the 21st century equivalent of Newton's apple falling from a tree. Join me, Chris Hadfield, on the On Energy podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.