Why don’t we eat people?

25:09They had gotten... Obvious question about the sourcing. Yes. Are these ethically sourced mummies? These were not ethically sourced mummies. These were deeply unethically sourced mummies. They were robbing mummies from Egyptian graves. Hmm. This suggests that this would be a very valuable product because there's a finite supply of mummies? So it is a valuable product, and it quickly becomes a problem, which is that they exhaust the finite supply. Did they call it peak mummy? No, they just pretended like they had more mummies and started finding other recently dead people. That sounds, I don't want to go on a limb, that sounds bad.

25:50It was bad. So they had recipes to speed up the mummification process of corpses. There's a, I don't know how to pronounce this, there's a 17th century book called London Pharmacopoeiae, which includes a recipe describing how to do this. I've read about it in Schutt's book, but the recipe recommends that, quote, a mummy be made of the cadaver of a redheaded man, age 24, who'd been hanged. The corpse is to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours, after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of myrrh and aloes. This was soaked in the spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, and again, smoked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry.

26:31Was there a sense about why these people were being hanged? Or was the idea that we're hanging so many people, we can just grab some of the ones that happen to have red hair? My guess is the latter, although I'm also not sure how you get from there's something special about an Egyptian mummy to whatever is special about an Egyptian mummy is also special about a red-haired person, except for maybe red-haired people were rare. But in a non-taboo sense, that's the big... That seems like a big distinction, right? What do you mean? Are we killing people so we can eat them, or are we doing weird things to corpses?

27:08Yeah, and I have to say, in my whatever, like, internal kind of taboo radar I have inside of me, killing people so you can eat them feels, like, way worse than doing weird things to corpses. Like, if they were hanging... I mean, as someone who does not want to be killed so he can be eaten, I absolutely agree with that. And I'll say on your podcast right now, So, you know, hundreds of years from now, if something happens to what remains of my corpse, it doesn't seem like that big a deal. It seems completely fine. Yeah, so I don't know. Completely fine. You're on the record, PJ. It seems mostly completely fine.

27:44They're going to have to bury you in an unmarked location. They can just throw me in the ocean.

27:52Okay, so remembering Otto's question, why can't we eat people? I think what's nice about the carob story is it's kind of like the fact that we have this taboo against cannibals. We would have the taboo anyway. I feel very confident about that. But the language we have for it, like the fact that we call cannibals cannibals, and the mental image that's in Hannah's mind and in my mind of the, like, explorer and the steamy cauldron with the islanders going around him. Like, that comes from this historical moment. Like, there was a reason to have political propaganda in 1493, well after Columbus sort of completed his mission of taking over this land and wiping out lots of people.

28:30We're left with this little artifact. And I just find that interesting. Anyway, that is our first story. Before we go to the next story, I just want to say that one aspect of cannibalism I'm not going to spend very much time on this week is survival cannibalism. That's when people eat people because they're forced to by extreme circumstance. In America, we have the Donner Party, who in the 1800s took what they were told was a shortcut on the Oregon Trail. Then were stuck camping through a very harsh winter. They ate some of their dead. In Uruguay in the 1970s, there was very famously that rugby team whose plane crashed in the mountains.

29:04Those survivors ate some of their dead as well. Obviously, those are vivid examples of cannibalism. For me, what I find most interesting is that in cases like the rugby team, we'll say that they get a pass, but then we will also mark them for what they were forced to do. Like, it's almost like we've decided that they are in a different category now. The only reason I'm not spending much time on survival cannibalism is I think it's sort of the exception to Otto's question. Like, as far as I can tell, the rule goes, if you're starving and people are dead, you can eat people. It's just that that fact will now dominate your Wikipedia page for the rest of time.

29:43So cannibalism is, might be acceptable under certain circumstances, but it's still going to be infamous. Yes, exactly. And like, it's sort of weird because those people have survived terrible things. And it's like, I mean, I understand why they are infamous for the way they survived. But like, yeah, it's just a mark that I don't think they ever get to get around. And we'll use cannibalism to judge the terribleness of the thing they survived. Right. How bad was it up there? It was so bad they had to eat people. Yeah. And you almost, like, it was funny, I was reading, I was trying to decide whether to include the Donner Party story in this, and I read a lot about the Donner Party story.

30:21And it's like, there's a lot of story there besides that fact. But I also understand, my brain does it too. My brain is just like, Donner Party, eating people. That's it. Yeah, and maybe it's that little kid part of your brain, right, that's like fascinated by this thing that we don't do. So of course, anytime there's a story about someone doing the thing, that's much more interesting than just like someone went into the snow and died. Yeah, it's also interesting in the story because like there's even this much time later when you read an account of it, the writing will be one way where it's like, you know, they've read this book and the book suggested a shortcut and the shortcut sent to the wrong place.

30:58And it's sort of one level of detail. And then once it gets into the cannibalism sections, it gets so much more detailed and so much more like, at the time this person claims that they didn't do it, but later we found out they did do it. But it almost takes on the feeling of gossip where how the information got out becomes very important. And you just realize like, oh, we are fascinated by this. But PJ, in the interest of listener service, you explained in some detail how to make Mumia. Yes. Do you have a Donner Party recipe too? Oh my God. It doesn't seem like... Honestly, here's what I will say about the Donner Party.

31:33The most fascinating thing about the Donner Party story is not about the preparation of humans. It's that, and I didn't know this, the reason they got lost is that there was all these people who were going out west and there was like a cottage industry of people who were selling them guidebooks and there was this guy who was essentially a huckster who wrote a guidebook that's like, so you're going out west? Here's how to do it. And what the other guys won't tell you is I've found a secret shortcut. Oh, it's like maps to the stars' houses. Yes, except for this map to the stars' house was a bad map that he had not actually tried himself.

32:05After publicizing the book, he tried it once, just like on a horse by himself. And so no one in a wagon had tried to do what he said was easy to do. And the whole time they're proceeding on this shortcut that they've read about in his book, and they're realizing how bad it is, he had gone out ahead as like promotion and, like, nailed to the trees, notes encouraging people to keep following his path. And so things are getting worse and worse, and they're beginning to understand the size of their predicament. And then they're finding these, like, cheerful notes, being like, keep on going. That's the best part of the Daughter of Hardy story.

32:39It's just the grimness of having received bad advice from someone promoting their book, which feels like a very modern problem. The survivors immediately went on goodreads.com. One star. Do not recommend. I mean, I like the idea that Hannah's kid asks, why can't we eat people? And that your answer would include at least one recipe. Yes, at least one recipe. There will actually be another recipe before the end of this. Spoiler. Okay. So, I'm not talking about survival cannibalism, except for that. The other sort of cannibalism, the thing that I noticed reading more about cannibalism and reading these books by experts about cannibalism, is that I have noticed a trend among the academics, which is that they don't like talking about murderous cannibalism, like Jeffrey Dahmer-style cannibalism.

33:29In the Bill Shutt book I read, he goes out of his way to say he is not going to talk about, like, your Ed Gynes, like your serial killers who ate people. He has a passing reference to the one German guy who consensually ate a person. The famous German guy. Who I have questions for you about. But he almost doesn't want to count them in his cannibalism ethnography. Why? Because they're outliers? They're too unusual? Well, here's what's interesting. He says it would be disrespectful to the victims, but to me, I'm like, but that's the taboo, isn't it? Like, that's where you're like, even in walking up to the electric fence, I'm going to step away from the electric fence.

34:04Like, I don't want to think about the part of this that is sort of at the core of it. Right. Okay, so I want to talk about the German cannibal. That's actually the second story I want to tell you, which I'm going to call the trial. I feel like I should say, if kids were listening to this episode, this would be a good part to skip. This is not stuff I would have wanted in my 13-year-old brain. But to me, kind of the most interesting murderous cannibal story, when it comes to just thinking about the cannibalism rule and why we have it, is the story of the German cannibal, Armin Meives. He was a German computer repair technician.

34:38He went on a cannibalism message board called The Cannibal Cafe and said he was looking for a man who wanted to be killed and consumed. A few people responded to the ad. He actually meets some of them who all eventually back out, and he lets them back out. But then there's one man who says he wants to go through with it, and so Maivez kills him and eats him. And they film the whole thing, including the part where the guy seems to be agreeing to everything that's going to happen. So he's caught. It goes to trial in Germany. He was found guilty of Germany's version of manslaughter and gets a sentence of about eight years.

35:10According to reports at the time, Germans were shocked by the sentence. They thought it was way too light. It also probably didn't help that Maives was saying that he still had fantasies of reoffending once he got out of jail. And so the prosecutors call for a retrial. And they get the court to, like, really pay attention to the tape. And interestingly, in Germany, the way German law defines murder, one of the things that can make a killing a murder is that the killer was looking for sexual gratification. And so they push that idea here. They're like, if you look at the video, clearly this is about sexual gratification.

35:43The video had been included in the first trial. But this time, the court looks at it and they say, yes, this is Germany's version of murder. He's getting a life sentence. But I think you could look at this and you could say what you're actually seeing is a country trying to decide, like, what are the limits of things we'll allow consenting adults to do to each other? And realize, like, oh, we definitely still have a cannibalism tab. Although there's a way of thinking about that case in a consent-based framework, right? You can think about that and say like, well, this other person, it wasn't truly informed consent.

36:14That's not something one can consent to if one is in one's right mind. Therefore, that consent is not valid. Therefore, we're going to prosecute it as murder. That's separate from the question of did he do something extra wrong beyond committing murder if we think it was murder, right? Like, would the sentence be the same if he had met up with this guy, made this agreement to kill him and eat him, and killed him, and then not eaten him? Do you think it would have been the same? Yeah. To me, that's the crime, right? Is the actual killing. Right. And what happens later, you know, we have laws about desecrating a corpse or something, and there are those other laws.

36:54But, you know, mainly to the extent which it's outrageous, the murder is the outrage, even though the other part, the cannibal part, is what makes us all think about it and the reason we know about it. Right. Yeah. But it's not obvious to me that that revulsion that most of us have at the idea of cannibalism, it's not obvious to me that that's wrong, right? Like, that might be a moral intuition we should learn from and respect. And one way to respect a moral intuition is to have laws against it. So, okay. So on the one hand, it's like you're saying once you're dead, if some future society eats your corpse, it's like not the biggest deal in the world.

37:35But you're also saying that like, if we have a feeling, like a moral intuition that cannibalism is wrong, we should probably follow that feeling and create laws around it. Like where you're both sides in cannibalism. I am a little bit because I'm having a double reaction to the existence of a taboo, right? And so my first reaction is to be like, oh, there's a taboo here where we're being guided by something besides our rational sense of consent and not harming people, right? Part of this reaction is like a little bit superstitious, right? So my first reaction is to kind of like try to identify the superstition.

38:10But my second reaction is to be like, well, there is something to be said for superstition in that sense. There is something to be said for taboo. And when I think about it, just because I acknowledge that it is a taboo doesn't mean I want to get rid of that taboo or get rid of all taboos. And I think the reason I like thinking about cannibalism as a taboo, even though maybe it's silly, is because it's the one where I'm actually most convinced that it might be like natural. I think Columbus informed the language we use for cannibalism and the cartoon images in our head we use for cannibalism. But I think it's a rule that as many different human societies as it could flourish and as many ways they could construct themselves, most of them, if they wrote down their taboos, which they wouldn't, but if they did, cannibalism was one of them.

38:57So I think I just like thinking about it because it almost feels hardwired, but then you can also see where it's culturally transmitted. Yeah, and this is a heuristic that can lead you astray, right? Like, you can say, like, I've grown up in a world where, you know, slavery is considered okay, and I'm looking at other societies, and it seems like there's slavery all over the world, and there's a long history of slavery, so this must be a natural feeling, right? Right. Like that's a that's a way of thinking that can lead you astray. But obviously, the point is there's no way to be sure. Right. This is what philosophers talk about.

39:30This is right. The idea of like which of these things that seem really obvious to me are actually kind of wrong. And there's no way to be sure that the things that feel obvious to you are not, in fact, wrong. I feel pretty sure about camels. A lot of people have felt pretty sure about a lot of things over the years.

39:52After the break, a mystery in Papua New Guinea that might make us question some of the things we're pretty sure we're pretty sure about. The story of the 4A.

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42:11Welcome back to the show. We've reached our third and final story here, the funeral. Calva, I'm just going to read you my not short introduction to this one. I'm ready to hear it. Okay. On the island of Papua New Guinea, there's a small group of people called the Foray. The Foray are a group in the tens of thousands who for years had been almost entirely uncontacted by outsiders. They live in the remote eastern highlands, picture a dense landscape of green hills. The 4A have few encounters with the Western world. There's a run-in with an Australian gold prospector in the 1930s. In the 40s, apparently one World War II fighter plane crashes near them, which must have been an insane experience.

42:54But they're mainly left alone until the 1950s, when anthropologists start to really get curious about how the 4A live. And as the anthropologists arrive with their questions, they learn the 4A have one of their own. The 4A tell the anthropologists that their people are dying in large numbers, and in this very scary way. There's a mysterious phenomenon called kuru. The fore eye think it's a curse. The anthropologists think it's a disease. The Western media outlets hear about it, and they start calling it laughing sickness. Kuru mostly affects children and women. Something like only 2 % of cases were found in adult males.

43:31When you get kuru, the first stage is that you begin to walk in a wobbly way. You struggle to pronounce some familiar words. It sounds to me a little bit like being too drunk at a wedding. The next phase is where it begins to get scary. You shake, you shiver, you have goosebumps, and you start to laugh. Not because anything's funny. These are spasms. Huge, uncontrollable bouts of laughter that come out of nowhere and which you cannot stop. At this point, you know you have Kuru, and you know that that means you're going to die. How much time you have left ranges. Some people live with the disease for two months.

44:07some people as long as three years. But no one recovers. Everyone arrives at the final stage. In the final stage, you struggle even to sit up. You may not be able to talk. You're conscious, but you don't seem to be present. One of the last things you lose is your ability to swallow. Food, water. This is the point where if you're 4A, the people who love you will smother you to death, out of mercy, so that you don't starve. But if Kuru was a disease, it didn't function like any disease anyone had ever seen. It didn't seem to be contagious. You could sit with a person dying of kuru and not catch it yourself.

44:44But when the foray moved in with other groups living near them, sometimes kuru came with them. In the 50s, Westerners were guessing that kuru might be genetic. If so, it was a recent mutation, because the foray told them this phenomenon was relatively new. It may have only been happening since the 1910s. There'd been one explanation that had been sort of a rumor that no one seemed to want to commit to writing. In the late 60s, two papers are published hypothesizing that the 4A may be contracting Kuru through cannibalism. The 4A ate their dead. Not always, not all the time. But in the same way that you tell your partner whether you want to be buried or cremated, in 4A society, you would tell your partner if you wanted to be buried, left out in the forest, or consumed by your family.

45:28This is from a paper by an anthropologist named Jerome T. Whitfield about what happened to a 4A person who chose to be consumed. Quote, The head of the deceased was placed over a fire to burn off the hair, and then it was defleshed with a bamboo knife. A hole was made in the top of the skull using a stone, and the brain was gradually removed by one of the older women, whose hand would be wrapped in ferns. The tissue was then mixed with ferns and placed in bamboo tubes, normally two or three, and cooked. End quote. For the 4A who were eaten, the head and the brains were typically reserved for women, but women would sometimes bring their children to the funerary rite and share food with them.

46:08There's something beautiful about that. That's what surprises me. It's really, you know, you compare it to other rites on the one hand to eating the placenta, which is a tradition that some people are reviving, or even to something like a wake, where if you've never been to an open casket wake, it's a little bit strange. But yes, this seems like an incredibly respectful way of honoring a body, right? It's not treating a body as meat. No, and it's funny. My assumption is that any society that's practicing cannibalism, it's because of a lack of respect for the body. But this seems like it comes from a place of utmost respect for a body.

46:51And from the 4A's perspective, if you love someone, first of all, it would be better to be consumed by the people who love you than by worms and maggots, which is like, what's going to happen if you're in the ground or left out. But also they felt that by consuming the person, they might be consuming like not parts like body parts, but like aspects of the person's personality might transfer them or their soul might be protected in some way. Like it feels like they have a sense of protecting life and it's causing them to do this thing that in our culture is associated with, you know, a deep disrespect for life.

47:28Yeah, I mean, you know, at the base of the cannibalism taboo is this idea that as human beings, we don't look at each other as food. And this, in a way, honors that, right? This isn't like, oh, this person died, they're going to be delicious, right? This is like, yeah, we don't look at each other as food, and we're going to do this ritualistic thing to honor the life, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So what's interesting about where this 4A story ends is these anthropologists generally knew there was some debate, but the sort of weight of evidence was on the side of the idea that the 4A were eating their dead.

48:05Because they knew that, what they were able to figure out is that when they ate their dead, sometimes what was happening is they were spreading kuru. It's a prion disease, which was a relatively not understood kind of disease, but it's like an infection of brain protein. And so when they ate brain tissue from a dead foray, they were getting this disease. The strange thing about Kuru is it doesn't show up right away. You can carry it for something like as long as 40 years before the time bomb explodes. And so it wasn't person dies, we hold a funeral for them. The next week, everyone's ill. It was like person dies, we hold a funeral for them.

48:43Maybe many years later, someone's ill. But the actual ending of the story was the foray decided to change the rules around cannibalism. But it wasn't because cannibalism was wrong or gross. It was just like, we're dying from it. You know, there is this idea that a lot of food taboos traditionally, you think of kosher and halal systems, had to do partly with health and had to do partly with safety and ways of consuming meat that wouldn't put you at risk. And so it's not surprising to learn that there might be some element of that in the taboo against human cannibalism. This would be interesting if the cannibalism taboo, which we assume is about protecting others, might turn out to be also about protecting ourselves.

49:26But hypothetically, what if there was a safe way for us to consume people? This is something that had come up in conversation with Hannah, too. Synthetically created human meat. Would you eat lab-grown human meat? I can tell you what I want to say I would do. And I can tell you what I know is real. Like, I want to say, like, of course I tried. I'm a curious person. I wanted to have every single experience. I'm afraid of nothing, blah, blah, somebody took me on a date once to this restaurant in Toronto, where you could eat just like the brains of animals. And I threw up right away. And there was nothing about the food that was bad.

50:04It's just like the idea that I was eating a brain and people have brains, and you're not supposed to eat brains, because people have brains, like, caused me to have a physical reaction where I vomit it. So I don't think I would eat. Would you eat human-grown lab meat? Lab-grown human meat. Human-grown lab meat would be a scientist who was murdered in his lab while working late one night. I think I would eat lab-grown human meat. I mean, it doesn't seem like we're necessarily too far away from a time when you can grow all different kinds of flesh in a lab. Yeah. And so in that sense, what it would mean for it to be quote-unquote human, I guess would have something to do with the DNA and I don't know, but it gets a little abstract.

50:46But what about the argument that you've made, which is that if you create that world in which we can eat synthetic human meat and have like PJ sandwiches or whatever, you are reducing, you're lowering the strength of this natural taboo against the sacredness of our bodies and then like perhaps creating a society that you don't want to live in. Yeah, and I mean, you know, that's part of what modernization is, right? It's like various taboos get considered superstitious and they kind of fall away. And then the question is, can we hold the line against other kinds of behavior we think is bad, even as these taboos get weakened?

51:20Sometimes we need to develop new taboos or new rules, right? You're living in a world where, like, sex leads to pregnancy, and then all these birth control technologies come in, and then you've got to re-figure out your rules and your taboos around sex, which we're, you know, still in the process of doing. In this case, would it be possible to still respect people's bodies and not eat people's bodies, even if we're eating lab-grown meat that sort of tastes the way someone's body would taste. I suspect, maybe this is a cop-out. Can I give you a cop-out answer? Yeah, yeah. So one cop-out answer is, maybe we didn't evolve to find the taste of humans that delicious, and so that when we're comparing different kinds of lab meat, we're going to be drawn to things that are a little bit more like the kinds of things that humans have traditionally eaten?

52:10I will tell you, unfortunately, so these people... Is this going to be a version of the New Yorker cartoon, where the doctor says to the pig, it's your ribs, I'm afraid they're delicious. Basically, yeah, yeah. The anthropologist who wrote this paper on the fore, the part that I found kind of most like, oh, shit. Can I read you one more quote from the paper? Mm-hmm. So the way they talk about the type of cannibalism that the fore practice as endocannibalism, endocannibalism is you're eating members of your group. Exocannibalism is eating members of the out group. Um, so, so they're explaining like why they did it.

52:48Later works have explained the role of endocannibalism in the epidemiology of Kuru and emphasized that the body was eaten out of love, like grief love, as well as for gastronomic appreciation, which was not the intended purpose of the practice, but its result. Hmm. What does that mean? The intended purpose of the practice? It means that while they were eating their dead to communicate all these things about life and love and grief, the side effect was that they were discovering that people are actually really tasty. Oh. But it's hard to separate tastiness from the stories we tell us, right? Just like the label on a bottle of wine is going to affect the way it tastes to people.

53:31Right. Right. If you have this, all this buildup and all this ritual and all this symbolic meaning, maybe the human body starts to taste delicious the same way a communion wafer might taste delicious to a believer. I also think that, you know, there's reason to imagine that we might have evolved not to find humans tasty in general. Right, right, right. I like the idea that you'd respond to this kid with this question the way we often respond to kids, which is by telling them something that's sort of mainly true. True but incomplete. Yes. I think true but incomplete is, like, the way out of answering this without having to, like, horrify him with a bunch of stories about, like, German cannibals.

54:15Even, like, I think he should have an uncomplicated version of celebrating what he probably knows as Indigenous Peoples Day. Like, I think the right answer for Otto is you shouldn't eat people because it could make you really sick. Yes.

54:33That's Kel Fasane, a taboo critic, but sometimes a taboo supporter. He writes about all sorts of things at The New Yorker. This week, as we were wrapping the episode, I briefly spoke with Hannah, Otto's mom. She said in the couple months since we first spoke, Otto keeps changing the way four-year-olds do. She says these days they play a game where when he goes to bed, he's allowed to ask his parents a certain amount of questions before he falls asleep. This week she said Otto has not been wondering about cannibalism. His mind had moved on to another question, which, frankly, I don't have the answer to.

55:05What are rocks made out of? Maybe that's next week on Search Engine. After the break, the most anxiety-inducing command in the English language.

55:33The Limo Emu

55:49fascinating it's accompanied by his natural ally doug uh limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us cut the camera they see us only pay for what you need at liberty mutual.com liberty liberty liberty liberty savings vary underwritten by liberty mutual insurance company affiliates excludes massachusetts your sausage mcbuffin with egg didn't change your receipt the sausage mcbuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Prices and participation may vary.

56:30Check, check, check. Oh, there we go. Now we're live. Hot, hot, hot. Hello, hello, hello. Okay. Welcome back to the show. I'm here in the studio with Search Engine producer Garrett Graham. It's great to be here. and we're here because it's time for us to do recommendations I feel like this week we have like it's a little bit of a show and tell I feel like we're making like one of those like TV morning shows because there's on the studio table here there's two plates with little paper towel napkins and silver on them because we both brought food recommendations for each other just like what podcast are we making now we're just keeping with the organization of the episode we're just throwing a second dessert on It's like when you're about to leave the restaurant and they're like, the kitchen's friendly with you, and they're like, we brought you one more thing.

57:19Precisely. Who goes first? Why don't we, let's go pastry first. So I brought some pastries. I do want to set them up briefly, though, which is that a couple of weeks ago you plugged a sandwich shop. A sandwich and pastry shop. I plugged a local Brooklyn sandwich and pastry shop where I approved both the way they ran their business and the quality of their food. And I was like, is it okay that this is such a New York-specific recommendation? We decided that it was okay. We're doubling down a little bit. But also, we're doubling down specifically because my competitive juices started flowing a little bit.

57:49You were really hyping up sea and soil. You were wearing some sea and soil paraphernalia around the office. I had a hat. Yes. I am in love with a pastry shop in my neighborhood. So I brought some pastries. You brought pastries? For us to sample. Oh, these are gorgeous. Okay, so there are three options you get to pick. I brought a ham and cheese croissant. Okay. Which they sneak a little stone ground mustard inside of. Wow. A sesame kunaman. I have never been confident saying that word. I'm not going to start now. I'm not confident enough to correct you. A kunaman, kunaman. And then I brought a sunchoke mushroom cheesy danish.

58:26Oh, wow. Which is a bit of a curveball, I got to be honest. A savory pastry. A savory pastry. So you get to draft first. I'm going to try the savory pastry. Savory pastry. Okay, here we go. So where are these pastries from? So these pastries are from a bakery in my neighborhood. It's called Otway. You've been talking about Otway a lot. Like, a lot. It's O-T-W-A-Y. And also, there was a listener who joined in and was like, you have to try Otway. Which at that point, I was like, okay, clearly something's going on with this pastry place. It's magnificent. I feel like I'm in a weird position now, though, where, like, if I don't like this pastry, I'm just...

58:59You can't tell me. We'll also be just like crapping on some pastry shop on an international podcast for no reason. Pressure's kind of on for you and for Otway. There's this quote. I'm not sure it's true, but somebody told me that the philosopher Zizek said the most anxiety-producing command that you can get in the English language is enjoy, which is how I feel holding this pastry. Huh.

59:23It's really good. It's like flaky. Oh, man. Hold on. That's amazing It's almost like eating like a croissant pizza Wow Okay I would recommend Otway I think if you're visiting Is it Manhattan? It's in Brooklyn It's in Brooklyn In the like Clinton Hill Bed-Stuy kind of area Is this eventually just going to be a podcast Where we review pastries in Brooklyn? Yes that's season two Is there a business model for that? We'll have to hear from our listeners Also we should establish That while the podcast industry is doing very poorly this is not a paid segment. We're not, the way we're running this podcast is not by shaking down coffee shops and doors and paid streets.

1:00:06This is just, this is a passion project. This is a passion project. Okay, this is my recommendation which is not local to Brooklyn which might be a relief for some listeners. So my friend Chris Crawford runs this company called Tart Vinegar. It's like she makes her own vinegar in a very, very, very small factory in Brooklyn. What's this vinegar? This one is salad and soup vinegar. And the thing she started doing recently, which is really helpful, is like, because like I always, basically this holiday season, I just buy everybody Chris's vinegar. But everybody appreciates it and then sometimes they don't know what to do with it.

1:00:40And with this, now she has recipes on the side. But do you just want to try straight vinegar? Sure. Okay, here's a spoonful of vinegar. Vinegar and pastries, classic Thanksgiving fare. Yes. What do you think? Oh, it's really nice. If you hadn't told me it was vinegar, I don't think I would have said vinegar. What would you have thought? It just tastes like kind of a tasty drink. Yeah, I actually drink this. I'll like mix this with seltzer and just like drink it at my home. I think there are people who believe there are health benefits. I just like it. I just like their vinegars. Right. Okay, so my recommendation is tart vinegar, which you can get on the internet.

1:01:12Your recommendation is Otway Bakery. Neither of these companies have paid us to endorse their products. I'll pay them to endorse their products. I pay them every morning when I get a coffee or a pastry. You pay for pastries. I pay for vinegar.

1:01:29Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vood and Shruti Penamaneni, and is produced by me, Garrett Graham, and Noah John. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarian. Fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Special thanks this week to David Cho. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leo Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

1:02:05Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA, and our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, as we said at the top, if you would like to become a paid subscriber, head over to pjvote.com. There's a link in the show notes. Or the other way you can help our show is to head over to Apple Podcasts and rate and review. Okay, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. We're off next week, but we will see you back here on December 1st.