Food, Science, and Culture with Anthony Bourdain [Extended Cut]

0:00On this episode of StarTalk, we have a one-on-one interview between me and chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain. I had the privilege of sitting down with Anthony before his untimely death in 2018 to talk about Antarctica, food, culture, and so much more. You can hear pieces of this conversation in a different episode from our archives, but never before have we released that conversation in its entirety. Until now, check it out. Welcome to StarTalk. your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

0:49So, Anthony, thanks for coming back to StarTalk. You were one of our earliest guests like five years ago. Yes. Thanks for helping us out back then. Happy to do it. So tell me how you came to think about food and culture. Most people think of food as simply sustenance. And we don't even spend any, generally, any thought at all that what we're eating is a function of our own culture. It's just the food that's on the table. And so for you to rise up above that, see the world, and say this food is that culture, that food is that culture, when did that begin? I think that was a process. I mean, I started out making a show about food in places around the world, but it was essentially one scene after another of me shoving food in my face.

1:39I guess it became fairly quickly apparent that food was intensely personal, that it was a reflection of a place, of a culture, of a history, often a very painful history, you know, of war, migration, intermarriage, the clash of cultures, also a very personal expression. I noticed as well that people were very proud of their food, often people very different than me, often people who had no particular reason culturally or politically to like Americans. Yet, at the table, given the opportunity to feed me and the fact that I received that food gratefully and with an open mind, I noticed that people opened up to me and told me other things about their lives.

2:34So, you know, we all have food, and it's the consequence of whatever, but generally we don't think about it. And so what happens when you're in a place where there's more going on than just what came out of the kitchen? Well, I think the most extreme and maybe the most important example in the trajectory of my show was Beirut in 2006, when we were doing what was ostensibly still a food and travel show. we'd finished shooting very travelogue yeah well we'd finished shooting another you know sort of upbeat snarky maybe restaurant scene and the crew joined me in my room for beers in the mini bar and we're looking lazily out the window and you know rockets and gunships attacked the airport blowing into smithereens our local crew disappears from the border, and we found ourselves in a war, blockaded, unable to leave, and trapped in Beirut for the next week or so, waiting to be evacuated.

3:43By the U.S. military? Yeah, the Marine Corps, the Navy and Marines took us off the beach in LCUs. Dramatic. In an LCU filled with wailing, crying, refugees, most Lebanese who had left the country during the Civil War and only just returned to rebuild, to rebuild. And now their hopes and dreams smashed again. And just looking out at the water as we pulled away from the beach and thinking, do we have a show? Because we really just sort of filmed ourselves sweating it out, you know, in quarantine while neighborhoods were vaporized around us. It just struck me as obscene to contemplate ever doing a upbeat food show in a world that allows things like this to happen regularly.

4:38So this is a pivot point for you. Everything changed. Everything changed at that moment. And I started looking around and I was determined, you know, if I'm sitting in the hills of Laos, you know, I'm going to ask the obvious question when my host is missing a limb. where'd you lose a limb? And we're eating, true, but chances are he's going to tell me, well, I wasn't alive for the secret war here, but your military was kind enough to leave behind a few million tons of unexploded ordnance, and I happened to step on one of those. CNN, fortunately, has allowed me to wander completely away from the table, and so we've done shows in places like Congo where there was never any expectation of much in the way of food scenes.

5:28I went there entirely because I was obsessed with the history of the Belgian Congo and later. You're sure CNN just didn't need another correspondent? I have the luxury of not being a reporter. I joke that it's a stealth food show because I think people open up to me tell me about their lives often in places where they have to be careful about what they say. And I think they do that, or I've noticed that they do that because I'm asking simple questions. We're just eating. We're just eating. I'm not pressing them for what do you think of your government or your government's policy on this or that.

6:10I'm asking them simple things. What do you like to eat? What makes you happy? What would you like for your children? And asking those simple questions, I often get very, very complicated, very revealing answers. Tell me about Antarctica. What's going on there? Oh, man. What are you up to? I got people in Antarctica. I was so fortunate to spend time there. I had the most incredible time. It's another planet. It feels like another planet. On one hand, everyone should go and see it. On the other hand, it kind of defeats a purpose. It is the last un-effed up place on earth. It's pristine. Every drop of urine goes into bottles, then into 55-gallon drums, and shipped back to America or elsewhere with every little bit of waste not allowed to bring.

7:08The people down there, we stayed at McMurdo Station, the former military base, now the National Science NSF. Yeah, National Science Foundation, Research Center. We were guests of the NSF, and very grateful ones at that. It's very difficult to get to do, even people who work there, it's very difficult to do what we did. Just to be clear, at least in my field, it's a ripe place for research. It is. Because first, the sky conditions are spectacular when they're clear, and though you are on level ground, it's actually very high elevation relative to sea level. And so for telescopes, you're above a lot of the muck and mire that can interfere with your observations.

7:52And there are also interesting air circulation patterns for balloons where you can ascend detectors to measure the cosmic microwave background, for example. It's incredible because you have all these people working at McMurdo Base. And, like, the dishwashers are all, like, you know, former professors of Russian lit or, you know, smart, smart, curious outcasts from all over the world who've come to work in maintenance and physical jobs so that they could be in Antarctica living under incredibly difficult conditions. But you'll see astrophysicists sitting at the table talking to guys who work in a waste disposal, engaged in a conversation about neutrinos.

8:37They do science lectures every Sunday that the whole base, everyone goes to. It is the most incredible spot, a place of pure science and pure learning where people are incrementally seeking answers to questions they might never answer in their life. They're just looking to move things forward. So we met with the guys with a super telescope, part of an array, I guess, that goes around the entire globe. It's looking at the sun, some people collecting neutrinos, which I don't really fully understand. No, I don't understand at all, but they sound really cool. Oh, just a quick thing. Because in Antarctica, you get 24 hours of sunlight for six months.

9:20Oh, yeah. You continuously monitor the sun. Yeah. It doesn't set for you, and you have to wait. Oh, my gosh. Did something happen to the sun in the last 12 hours? You will know. So, under those cases. People who love it down there, who've been going for 26 seasons to 30 seasons. So, what do they eat? They got to ship in the steaks and the vegetables? Everything comes in mostly by ship, but some stuff by plane. There's a cafeteria, both at McMurdo and at the South Pole, where everything is essentially processed, frozen. Frozen, really? Yeah. And, you know, one of the refrains when you arrive from the people who spent months there is, do you have any freshies?

10:06It's like the living dead. They're like, do you have brains? They're like, do you have any freshies? You could sell an avocado down there, a fresh avocado, for some big bucks. Along with, I asked everybody, what do you want the most? What do you miss the most? And they said, if I could just pet a puppy for a minute, I'd give you my month's drinking allowance. Pet a puppy. You just hold a puppy for a little bit because there are no dogs, no pets, of course, are allowed there because they might bring, you know, some kind of bacteria or viruses that would affect the penguins and the seals. Oh, right, right.

10:39You don't want to mix the flock with the flock. No foreign species or anything like that. So there's a real premium on the rare arrival of, you know, lettuce or avocados or anything fresh. But they do a lot with a little. Mm-hmm. And so that was, was that your first sort of baptism into a community of scientists? Yes, for sure. The things people were looking at were really interesting. I mean, penguin, I've been studying penguin populations for decades, living with one particular group. So do they eat penguins? No. I mean, why not? Is it a bird? Amundsen and Scott did. It was not their first choice.

11:22Okay. I mean, it has been done, but they do not. You don't even, you're not supposed to pick up rocks, interfere with the terrain or what life there is there in any way. And they don't, there's not a single cigarette butt on McMurdo base on the ground. I mean, everything is separated, very strict living conditions. I found it interesting when going out to visit the penguin colonies, though, we were on a helicopter out to the site. and a bunch of fresh-faced, very enthusiastic kids who'd come down to help out. In turn, I guess, it was go out and hug the penguin day. They were all excited that they'd go out and get to tag penguins and hold one.

12:08Penguins are cute. In all the movies? Yeah. Well, they didn't tell them that when you pick up a penguin, they spray you with a horrifying array of wet diarrhea. They all came back rather downcast looking and smelling a bit ripe.

12:44Hello, I'm Finky Broke-Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

13:02In your world travels, have you seen any consequences or concerns that local populations have about the effect of climate change on their crops, their foodstuffs, their supply chain? Many places. First, I want to mention that the climate change discussion is no more acutely felt, at least in people's minds or observed in Antarctica, where they're really looking at it and talk about it a lot. But of course, it's perilous now to talk about it because everyone is fully aware that their data is being deleted from government computers, that if they find themselves on a blacklist of people who might possibly be interested in the subject, that they could find themselves suddenly not needed.

13:45these are not good times for science or scientists, and they felt very much under threat down there and for good reason, particularly when you're pursuing subjects that aren't going to have a useful monetary application anytime soon. Tough argument to make in this political climate. But I see it, look, I see it everywhere. Madagascar, where timbering and the smoke of burning fires is causing huge, huge, huge problems, completely changing the landscape. The fishing industry is everywhere affected. The Caribbean, where I've seen in my own lifetime, you know, not just whole reefs, all the reefs bleached and lifeless now.

14:42I mean, I'm seeing the physical changes, but the people who really seem to feel it most and notice it are farmers, fishermen. They're feeling it. So this would affect cuisine directly? Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Yeah. The fish populations are changing, disappearing. The whole relationship between species seems to be altering in small ways. Some species are thriving, others disappearing. That changes what we eat. Chefs and cooks and anybody who needs to feed their family responds to what's available. Well, that's always been the engine of cooking. Your experience in Antarctica, that's the closest thing we have on Earth to the surface of Mars.

15:40Yes. In fact, I went to the Dry Valleys, which are an incredible area of Antarctica where there's no snow and no ice. And it looks like Mars. And they, in fact, test the Mars rover there. I stayed in a tent out there for a while. And there was even a beach. So does this make you more or less interested in possibly being on a mission to Mars? I don't know if I have the time. How busy guy? The travel time to Mars is what? Nine months on a good orbit trajectory. That's a long trip. So you need a good movie account on the internet. And I did an episode of Top Chef at NASA headquarters once. And we were talking about food in space.

16:27And, of course, your entire taste perception, I was told, I was talking to, I think, Chuck Yeager, actually. The Chuck Yeager. Yes. And talking about what you crave, you know, when you've been away from, you know, your favorite restaurants or any restaurants for a considerable amount of time. And he talked about how your ability to perceive flavors changes at altitude. People experience this in planes, of course. Plane food is altered so that it makes up for the effects of altitude. But astronauts get it really bad, and the stuff they crave more than anything. So Mr. Yeager told me is hot sauce, like Tabasco or anything spicy, because up there everything tastes bland.

17:12So you're telling me those bulky areas in their spacesuits, they're smuggling bottles of hot sauce on the way up. to bring to their food. The astronauts I've spoken to, they say this without hesitation, that they eagerly want spicy foods. Yeah. And they find themselves visiting other national modules of the space station where their food tends to be spicier than their American food. Yeah, so that would be tough for me, bland food for nine months. Yeah. I went, I trained in jiu-jitsu, and I foolishly decided I was going to compete a few times. And in the run-up to the competition, I had to cut weight to make my weight category, which meant doing without salt at all for a week.

17:59So you don't retain the water. It's horrible. It is horrible. No matter how much I eat, I'd boil a whole chicken loaded with herb and pepper and everything I could. but never satisfied. And I would just get crazier and crazier from the lack of salt to the point that I found myself sitting on the subway in the summer looking at a particularly sweaty homeless dude and thinking, oh, I'd like to lick his neck. Just one lick.

18:35That is fascinatingly gross. But a measure of how desperate I was. So we won't put you on the Mars. On the Mars trip. Yeah, Mars, yeah, too much. We'll keep you here. So for those who do take these missions, is there some food category around the world where you would highly recommend that's what they should take with them? Yeah, for sure. If you ranked it, give me the top five cuisines or national dishes. Well, Trinidad, food from Trinidad that would go over real well. That would go far. That's nice and spicy, some good scotch. That'll get to be halfway to Mars. Yeah. You know, Thai food, good nuclear hot Thai food would be a good choice.

19:21Chengdu, the Sichuan, the real Sichuan food. Now, I don't know. A big wok filled with boiling oil laced with Sichuan peppers and the long chili pods. I don't know how that would behave without gravity. probably not the best thing in a gravity-free environment, scalding oil, beating up and floating around freely. And there is the, that tends to inspire some digestive anomalies, but that would satisfy, I assure you. So I ate at an authentic Szechuan restaurant in San Francisco recently. And I was waiting for the next dish to be some reprieve from the previous dish. Yeah. And that did not happen.

20:09Yeah. Every single dish was hotter than the previous one. Even in Chengdu, the major city in Sichuan province, where I've been a few times, you'll see locals at their favorite Sichuan hot pot place literally doubled over, holding their stomachs, mopping their necks, faces beet red. It can be excruciatingly painful. And this is an interesting scientific phenomenon that's always intrigued me. A lot of people suggest that their favorite Sichuan hot pot has, that they secretly lace it with opium. Because what happens is they eat this scorchingly hot food, very uncomfortable to eat, but intensely pleasurable.

20:54And the next day they wake up with a craving. And I find this as well when I'm eating really, really, really spicy food. And some have suggested that this is due to this flood of endorphins that your brain releases when experiencing really painfully hot food. And I guess that happens while you're eating it. And the next morning, it's not there. You feel this sudden withdrawal. You feel the absence. The absence of that endorphin rush that you had the night before, and this immediately compels you to get more. I've had this experience after tattoos as well. I've had a lot of people who've gotten tattooed, and like me, say that right afterwards they always want another, which seems counterintuitive.

21:46This is good, because I don't have any, so maybe if I should stay that way. So I'd be interested in knowing the science on that, if this is... Yeah, yeah, we'll get to the bottom of that one. It's a real craving, no matter how scorching the experience, you wake up the next day, I want more. Your modern professional life is so committed to food and culture, yet there's a branch of the culinary universe that seems to focus on molecular? Molecular gastronomy, yes. Yeah, am I correct in characterizing that as how can I bring as much science as I possibly can to the protein molecules and the freezing and the cooking times?

22:35Does this subtract the experience from you or add to it? It depends. I know a few chefs who are really, really great at this, and they're like scientists. I was just talking to Wiley Dufresne, one of the real masters of this area of cooking. And he says, look, in my restaurant, we ask questions. We're asking questions about food and the dining experience. They're not necessarily looking to dazzle or to challenge their diners. They're asking questions like, can I deep fry mayonnaise? Answer, yes. Yes. Also, I'm sorry, I would have never in my whole life, that is a not, I'm sorry, I would have never thought that.

23:22Once he figured out how to deep fry mayonnaise, he figured out how he could fry other sauces, how to cause them to stay essentially solid. Solid and not explode when you throw into hot fat. Theron Adria, Wiley Dufresne, and a very few other chefs make this experience intensely pleasurable and exciting and fun. Many other imitators, it is a long, painful slog through one of their meals where it's a science class for its own sake. You know, look what I can do. Oh, okay. So you're comfortable thinking, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you're comfortable thinking of it as there is this virtual country called science.

24:17And here's food that natives of that country might eat because they're simply curious about the chemistry of what they dine upon. And that would be their story relative to some invading army or some food shortage or something else. They're asking themselves constantly, what's possible? What can we do with that mayonnaise? Somebody figured out you could put ice cream batter in mixed with liquid nitrogen and have instant ice cream. Yes. And that was one of my early thoughts. I just didn't have access to liquid nitrogen at the time. Or expand foie gras into, I don't know how it's done, but into a fluffy sponge-like texture.

25:04I've seen so many amazing, amazing things done. Meat glue, which they're even asking me to explain. They can really make food behave in ways that you wouldn't think it would or maybe even should. to delicious effect. Who would have thought that they would behave would ever appear in a sentence on food? Well, you know, what is it? You know, when you scramble an egg, I forget what it's called, the coagulation of proteins? I'm not sure about the specific processes, but we're all caramelization. Why does your steak get brown as you cook it and develop the sugars on the outside? All of these things are essential scientific techniques or processes.

25:58There's a science reason for it. Every cook understands instinctively. They may not be able to name what's happening, but they understand very, very, very well when, you know, the effect you want, how to get there, when it's going wrong, when it's going right. So even something as simple as scrambling an egg is essentially a scientific manipulation of an ingredient. by exposing it to both heat and movement and incorporating air, you're making it behave and egg behave in the desired way. It reminds me, this is an obscure analogy, but it reminds me of when medicine became modern. It did so because, in part, it looked to see what sort of folk remedies existed around the world in cultures.

26:46Oh, you chew on this bark, and that gets rid of your headache. Well, what got rid of your headache? So you find out what's in the bark. Right. And there's this molecule that becomes what we today call aspirin. And so you extract the active ingredient. Right. And then you can exploit that to great gain. And so it seems to me if you knew exactly the moment and why a sauteed onion becomes sweet, you can possibly hone in on that and exploit that fact with other foods. And that's what chefs are doing, some chefs are doing every day. I have friends who are rotting all varieties of things in some dark corner of their cellar, experimenting, talking to microbiologists from major universities, talking to them late at night, working with them in kitchens, discussing the wonders of fermentation.

27:40What can you ferment? What's going on in miso? How can I apply that to something else? I love miso. I love miso. So much of food is not about freshness. It's what's called that sweet spot, the precise moment in its decay where it is best, sushi being the best example. Anyone who comes and tells you that, you know, oh, I went to a sushi bar last night. It was the best. The fish was so fresh. I have no understanding at all of sushi. Sushi is not about freshness at all. First of all, even the best places deliberately cure their fish by freezing it, sometimes out of necessity to kill the critters, others because it makes it better.

28:25But it's almost never about the freshest fish. Fresh fish is right out of the water, it's still in rigor, and it's rubbery, often most fish are rubbery and unpleasant and without much flavor, which is why in Iceland they rot it sometimes because you get more fun. You're looking for the perfect point in the decay of the fish. Same with meat. Almost everything we eat and like cheese, meat, fish they're all aged. Just wine. So it's really about decay and rot and death. As cheerful as that sounds. Damn, this, I never knew, thank you. I mean, fresh tuna right out of the water. No self-respecting Japanese wants that.

29:17They want it just right after more days than you probably want to know.

29:48Well, you talk about bark. And, you know, I was in a jungle in Peru, and I tried ayahuasca with the shaman there, the also known as, I guess it's like a yahe, they also call it. It's a psychedelic jungle root used as a curative in traditional medicine. How do you ingest it?

30:14The doctor, so to speak, brews a liquid out of it. Just one particular root often mixed with others and administers it, often drinking, almost always, in my experience, drinking it himself. and you're supposed to get in touch with your spirit animal and it's supposed to cure any variety of ills, both psychological and physical. And so, you know, I have friends who claim it's solved a lot of personal problems for them after repeated controlled use in groups. Emphasis on controlled use. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I believe it's a legal form of therapy in some states. I know there are organized groups who do it.