215: Marissa Mullen

24:03Yeah, you know, like the grill. Grill night. Yeah, grill night. I think I call it the hot grill summer plate. You did do that, and I thought that was wonderful. Let's never let that go. Yeah, no. Trademark. No, I'm kidding. Trademark it, yeah. But yeah, I think the meat is good because, you know, it's very complementary flavors to cheese. They're both salty. They're both fatty. You know, I love like a nice prosciutto with a Parmesan Reggiano or with a burrata. So you kind of want to think about the intensity of the meat when you're thinking of meat and cheese pairings. But it's always a nice kind of complementary to the cheese.

24:35And then step three is produce. And this is where we kind of fill in the fresh notes and the fresh flavors, but also briny elements like cornichons and olives. I always feel brine is over freshness because you're obviously it's sitting out for hours sometimes. That's the thing. Yeah. I mean, if you're not serving your cheese plate right away. But the thing is, like something like a cucumber, I feel like cucumbers are pretty slept on on cheese plates because they're a nice in-between refreshing palate cleanser. I can hear like three quarters of our listeners gagging. Probably. Because raw cucumbers are polarizing.

25:06I love raw cucumbers. I've showed my cards and I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum, but I fully agree. What about zucchini versus cucumbers? Raw zucchini, you cannot do. I agree fully. So that's what some of those people. Oh, people think about that with cucumbers? People will actually put zucchini into a raw format and it's like, yeah. I mean, I've had that on a crudidae platter, I'm sure. Yeah. But thinking about flavor-wise, like a raw zucchini doesn't have as much water in it. So it's like, at least with the cucumber, it is that in-between refreshing palate-loving bite. But again, you know, if you want to go in the briny world, cornichons are great.

25:41They have that really tart sharpness to them, which again is complementary to a lot of cheeses. And with produce, I always like to say paint with your produce. This is where the color comes in with the cheese plate. And like the Salami River, I make produce ponds. So we can make little ponds of produce around the plate. Is that trademark? That's not yet. Get there. No, the produce ponds are really fun. I love that. Yeah. So then after that, we go into our crunch. So crunch is super important because that's your vehicle for the cheese. So that can be a cracker. It could be bread. Specific crackers, I love.

26:15Flatbread crackers. fruit and nut crackers are great um and then you can also do nuts on the plate for a little texture element and i always like to do a crunch plate on the side of my cheese plates that it's like easy to refill um smart and it takes up less real estate on the plate so you can fill it up with more color i love that so the back to the cracker question okay this is really really interesting and challenging because you've got like a company like cars which sells like five different types of crackers that are so different. Yeah, totally. Do you have a preference, if you're just looking at the Cars box, of like the best type of cracker to use?

26:50Yeah, I mean, I personally like less flavor. So like the water crackers. The water. Just because there's so much flavor on the board already. And the thing is, with like a fruit and nut crisp, there's already fruit and there's already nuts on the plate. So it kind of ties into that. But if you have like a garlicky Parmesan cracker that you're trying to pair with like, you know strawberry it might be a little conflicting or like an everything bagel seasoning it might be yeah and like people are at an event and you're like literally don't have time and even you don't even care you're just like picking the first thing that hits your finger yeah exactly so i'd say like the more tame the cracker flavor the better my favorite crackers right now are rustic bakery they're um based in sonoma and they they have like a tiny little bit of sweetness to them but they're one of my favorite there i love that baker i've bought those crackers at whole foods a lot.

27:39Yeah, they're pretty much a lot. Can it ever be too salty? Can a cracker ever be too salty for a cheese plate? I think yes, because cheese itself is already pretty salty, depending on, I mean, if you're using like a Parmesan or sharp cheddar or Gruyere, it has a lot of salt in it already. But you could do a salty cheese with like a fresh mozzarella. See, that's cool. So I think consider the cheese on your plate. And if your cheese is really high in salt, than go with a more, you know, less salty cracker, but just kind of play around with the intensities on the plate. Can you ever do the cheese crisps for cheese plates?

28:14Yeah, you could. I think cheese crisps would actually be really good with like maybe a fresh goat cheese. Something very like fresh and a little more mild. Yeah. Yeah, that's been aged. So then after that, you get to step five, which is dips. And this is where we really pack in the flavor and pack in the pairing. So like meat and cheese, how they're very similar and complementary in flavor, this we go to polar opposite sweet end so we have fig jam we have raspberry jam you have honeycomb and this is where you can really play with different flavor notes on the plate um with produce like with fresh fruit they're not overpoweringly sweet it's more of a texture element so it's something that's juicy or something that is a little jammy whereas like uh something like a honeycomb is so sweet that it really balances out those two intensities from the other end and then the last step which is my favorite part is the garnish and this is the finishing touches that make that cheese plate stand out.

29:07And this is where I like to garnish my cheese plate with edible flowers or herbs. And with herbs too, this can be a polarizing conversation because some people are like, why are you just throwing rosemary on a cheese plate? And it's just for decor. But I think you can be smart about the herbs that you put on your plate. Like if you're using feta, you can garnish with parsley. If you're doing mozzarella, you can garnish with basil. To be clear, you need to be able to use the thing you're garnishing with right mostly but sometimes you know in the winter i will garnish with some sprigs of rosemary and no one's sitting there gnawing on rosemary but i get it i thought you were gonna say you garnish with like a peanut butter cup like that no i stay away from candy yeah the candy garnish is not great now i have to ask you or make it's more of an observation marissa this is cooking like i have to be clear here and our listeners the way you talk about it it's not just some like thing a curated thing like it's actual cooking thank you for saying that because i feel like i'm constantly trying to figure out what i'm doing you're doing a hell of a great job and but like thinking about flavor but like the composition the way i mean it's harder than some cooking some sauteed stove top cooking is like dumping heat yeah you know basically but you're talking about you have to be at your highest level of representation because obviously that's everything but like you have to actually think about flavor so i respect it thank you yeah Yeah.

30:25And I think this book really showcases that a lot more than the first one. And it just showcases my growth to, you know, someone who came from the music industry and stepped into the world of cheese. I had so much imposter syndrome and never felt really legitimate. And I think I took the last few years to learn so much. And, you know, this book really, it talks about the pairings in depth, like I just mentioned, and talks about different types of cheeses you can find that are similar. So for example, like I do my favorite Brie style cheeses And I recommend some local cheeses or American made cheeses that I love.

30:59But, yeah, I think with the trend that happened on social media in the past few years and like the the boom of the charcuterie board, as we see on TikTok, the it almost lost the legitimacy because people started throwing like marshmallows on a plate and, you know, anything they wanted on a board and called it charcuterie, which is not charcuterie. It was like a grazing board. Exactly. They call them like a grazing board. And to be clear, what you're doing here is not a grazing board. It's not a Pinterest grazing board. It's actually like a pretty high level culinary endeavor, which is a cheese plate.

31:31Yeah, cheese plate. That's why I call them cheese plates. That's why I never call them charcuterie boards because a lot of them don't have meat. And if it doesn't have charcuterie on it, it should not be a charcuterie board. I love that. It's a good, I feel like you should go up against a couple like the big charcuterie board TikTokers and like a debate, like a friendly debate. Friendly debate, yeah. I think it'd be fun. Marissa, I always like to tap in with like New Yorkers who are out and about. You're active and you're cool. So where are you eating out right now? Where are some restaurants, bars that you love that, you know, we have a lot of our listeners are visiting the city this spring and summer.

32:00Where should we be going? Yeah. So like I said, I live in Greenpoint and I don't really leave my neighborhood much because it's the best place ever. It's the only way to live in New York when you believe that your neighborhood is the best neighborhood. Exactly. Yeah. I actually went to L.A. for two months this year to try to skip winter. And I was just like, this isn't Greenpoint. Echo Park is not Greenpoint? Yeah. So speaking of Greenpoint, I love Sama Street. It's one of my all-time favorite restaurants in New York. Very underrated. People don't really know about it. Definitely not. It's the first time I've heard of it.

32:30I worked in that neighborhood for two and a half years. You've never heard of Sama Street? No. It has a five-star rating on Google. I know. It is the most amazing Asian fusion and beautiful cocktails. Amazing staff. It's a hole in the wall on Manhattan Ave. Is it near Franklin, the corner? It's kind of north of Greenpoint Ave. So go up there. I highly recommend it. If we're going into Williamsburg territory, I love Laser Wolf. They've been awesome, one of my favorites. It really is. The solid team there, the way they put it together as a dining experience. The spread that you get in the beginning, it's so beautiful.

33:05Yeah, it's so nice. Yeah. I also love, I mean, there's just so many new restaurants that have been popping up in my neighborhood, which is great. I just tried Verge Sushi the other day, which is brand new. the first like kind of high quality sushi place in Greenpoint which is great there's so many amazing Japanese restaurants that are popping up Rule of Thirds is amazing beautiful place Chez Matant I love Dion D, Oshimoko you are like that's my old office right there the big chocolate factory yeah love it so you travel for cheese you've hinted that you've done these solo road trips but I feel like you've got a future of maybe more travel for cheese?

33:45I feel like you've got to get out in the world. Now that we're post-COVID, you're going on tour soon. Where would you want to travel for cheese and how do you travel for cheese? Yeah. So I actually did a impromptu European trip last summer with my friends and I called it Cheese Pray Love. And this was something that was not planned. So good. I joined multiple friends on their own respective trips and then made it all about cheese, which you're welcome, friends. This was a fun thing. It was a bit of a Trojan horse situation. Yeah, yeah. So I started in Italy, and we were in Lake Como, Rome, Tuscany, and Sardinia.

34:22And my two friends had this trip to do Lake Como, Rome, and Tuscany. And I was like, guys, do you mind if we just do a little pit stop in Sardinia? And they're like, what? That's an island. Like, where are we going? And I have these friends who I made through the world of Instagram, Central Fromagi. And they are an over 100-year-old cheese company in Sardinia. and they make the most amazing pecorino, sheep's milk cheese. And they have this, they have one that they sell in the States, a few, but the Molaterno al Tartufo. It's a truffle pecorino. One of my favorite cheeses, I've used it for a ton of my in-person workshops and they invited me to come see the farm there.

34:57So I made us all hop on a plane and do a pit stop and Sardinia is the most magical place I've ever been. It's, I feel like it's great when you go to a place and you don't hear anyone speaking English And you're like, yeah, we made it to the Italian vacation spot. But the beaches are like the Caribbean. And this dairy farm was just so much fun. And it kind of spurred this idea of, you know, I documented all of this on Instagram. And I called it Cheese Prey Love. I made hats. I made merch. So great. So you had like a merch, like for your crew, you had hats? Literally. So for my friends that I saw, and then I put them on my merch store.

35:31So then other people bought these hats. I did a limited run of like 30 of them. So fun. But I started making these Instagram reels. And I went to Italy and then I went to France to see another friend and then Portugal with two other friends. And every city I went to, I made it my mission to find like the best cheese. Like, you know, in Lyon, we went to the farmer's markets and those are just insane. I love the farmer's markets there. Oh, my God. And like the food halls there. Next level. Yeah, next level. And my friend Charlotte, who lives in Lyon, she's France. She was like so gung ho with the cheese spray love thing.

36:01She's like, all right, I get off the plane and she has like seven cheeses laid out for me to try. She's so great. Charlotte, you're the best friend. Yeah, shout out Charlotte. had you yeah but yeah on instagram people were so excited about it and everyone was asking me questions on where to go and what to do and i started um writing these travel blogs on my website and i got so many questions from people asking if i would ever like lead a tour and a cheese travel tour and that's something that i'm thinking about um more in depth because i feel like it would be so much fun to bring people along on this journey and actually have maybe more of a structured trip to do versus me just watch this space everyone watch this space it's gonna it's mercy you're on to something i think everyone wants to have a reason to travel yeah but with some downtime as you mentioned you go to the beach but also eat some great cheese exactly i mean what sounds better you mentioned ann sax will be in your acknowledgments and i wanted to ask you how important ann um is to you and who she is because i think uh it'd be it's a great reason to talk about Anne.

37:00Yeah, Anne was, she passed away, sadly, a few years ago. And she was the first person to really bring a lot of awareness and attention to American cheesemakers. Her shop, Saxley Cheese, which still is in New York today, featured all of these different cheesemakers that probably couldn't get their cheese into a Whole Foods or into a big space. And she always really pioneered the movement for artisanal cheesemaking. Because when you think about cheese here, we think about European cheese, you know, Brie, Gruyere, all the protected cheeses of Europe and the governments make that possible for them.

37:36You know, they support cheesemakers because of the traditions and the history. And here it's not really like that. So I think Anne really did a great job being at the forefront of that. And personally for me, I mean, as I mentioned before, how leaving the music industry, I did feel imposter syndrome stepping into cheese. Anne welcomed me with open arms. She was the kindest, most knowledgeable person. Definitely the stories I've heard about Anne. I was able to interview her a few times and meet her and her husband. Because it could be really easy to be like snobby towards an interloper. Oh, for sure.

38:10Especially I was 27, just like an Instagram girl. Eventually, as I broke into the cheese world, I ended up being the resident cheese contributor at Food 52, which was amazing. and I did an article all about cheddar and I asked Anne I was like listen Anne you are the queen of cheese can I interview you for this and she gave me all the information I needed and more and then we hosted a in person or it wasn't in person it was a virtual cheese class together where we featured artisanal cheeses and then we did a cheese plate building lesson where everyone can order a box from Saksha Beast Cheese but it was just a huge loss to the community and you know She it's every day she'll be missed.

38:50So in my book, I do give a shout out to her and to the Anne Saxby Legacy Fund, which raises funds for people to go work on sustainable farms and learn about dairy farming throughout upstate New York, mostly, which is great. Yeah. Let me close by asking you if you could have a restaurant name a menu item after you, what would that menu item be? It's funny because I've been listening to the Taste podcast and I was preparing for the cookbook question, but we switched it up. We're pivoting the cookbook question. You've acknowledged it. I've gotten some feedback from some dedicated listeners, and they've said, maybe move on from that question.

39:29Wow. Well, I love this question. We're going to ask you that question, by the way, at the end, but I want to give you this answer. I would like to have a combo meal, if that's allowed, at Bernie's in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and it will be the mozzarella sticks and a martini combo because my initials Marissa Mullen, mozzarella sticks, martini, Marissa Mullen. And it could be the Marissa Mullen combo meal. I think that is, it needs to get on. And like, let's make that happen. Double M. I love that. The alliteration and everything. All right. We will ask you the question, if you could write a cookbook or a food culture book without the burden of time, meaning you have no deadline or the burden of budget, meaning you have all the money in the world.

40:11Marissa, what would that book be? Yeah. So I was thinking long and hard about this um i think it would be a series of photos so like mainly a photo driven book that is a bird's eye view of different tables of how people entertain for appetizers so how what they put out what they how do they design their tables all over the world like when the appetizer of the party like when you walk into a house it's like what you see as like appetizer course and you'll see the florals you'll see even if there's no florals it could be there will be one with like a frat house and it's a bowl of chips but have it be like a bird's eye view of all these different types of spreads from all around the world and then maybe another step further is that we can sort it by color it's gotta happen for a fine art book or just like yeah like a coffee table book coffee table book yeah let's do it let's get it done marissa mullen thank you for joining the taste podcast thank you so much

41:16daisy aliotta welcome to taste podcast thank you for having me or thank you for letting me invite myself on it was a great exchange we had on twitter yeah a healthy exchange of ideas i think is what the world needs now okay let's go into dirt because it's a must read i'll link to in the show notes please subscribe to the newsletter and um daisy what is dirt in the sense of covering the topics we cover on taste, which is like food and food culture? We've described it a few different ways. I will say like digital culture broadly, which touches so many different things. We definitely have a bent towards entertainment, but entertainment means a lot online.

41:54So pretty much any area of culture you can imagine, we're trying to cover it through the lens of how it manifests itself digitally. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, if this would help somebody who's unfamiliar grasp it a little better, we've been called like the child of Vice and the New Yorker. And we've also been called the village voice for the Internet. Interesting. I like the village voice comparison the best out of those. Yeah. Well, I guess it's a super big compliment. I hope you take that as that. When you work on something every day and you wake up thinking about it and you go to bed thinking about it like I do because it's what, you know, being a startup founder is, it's hard to see the forest for the trees.

42:35So and similar to like when people would ask me when I was freelancing, what do you write about or like what's the thread that runs through all of your work? It's so much easier to have an outsider identify that. So I'm just happy to be perceived. Now, I have some specific food-related questions because there's – especially as food is articulated online. First is NFTs. First question is, are NFTs dead? And second, it seemed like 12 to 20 months ago, this like idea of the restaurant NFT, like pay X for Y and receive a meal plus something else was maybe viable. So those are like a two-part question.

43:19Yeah, I think it's important to make a distinction between the blockchain and then like NFTs and cryptocurrency. Definitely trying to make a distinction with that question. NFTs particularly. Oh, yeah. I didn't think it was a loaded question at all. But the way that I think about the blockchain is as an architecture and cryptocurrency is like real estate. So you have the environment that the financial speculation can form a layer over. But that environment exists as interlocking relationships no matter what, whether it's financialized or not. And I think there's a lot of potential there. NFTs are like a receipt that correlate with.

44:00Yeah. Poorly designed usually. Yeah. A very poorly designed receipt. They correlate with transactions on the blockchain. So I think fundamentally people have seen it as an opportunity to re-architect relationships. For me and DIRT, our experiment is around could you use Web3, the blockchain, and the fundamentals of it to re-architect the relationship between the subscriber and the publication and improve on the digital media environment of the last 10 years? So like equity for founders and writers, changing the model, moving away from like the ad-back, like CPM-based advertising model and doing something slightly different?

44:41Yeah, or even something as simple as like not getting logged out of the paywall every two months and having to put your credentials back in. Yeah, annoying as fuck, as we all know. Bringing everyone into the ecosystem as a streamlined identity that could be their identity in the community as well, that would externalize a lot of the stuff that they care about as a consumer without requiring them to give up the privacy of their actual demographic data, which is something that the blockchain enables. So I think I spent a lot of time thinking about how this could change the experience and improve it for the reader.

45:15How could it improve the experience of being a media company for other publishers? And how could it improve ultimately the experience of the advertiser, which nobody likes to talk or think about, but I think advertising will always exist in some form. So is there a better way to do it than what we have now, which is a pretty low bar, so I would say yes. Okay. And then, you know, to your point about, OK, restaurants doing NFTs. So, you know, if you think about the blockchain as more of the relationship layer, it makes sense that anyone who sort of operated on a membership or loyalty model in the past might want to play in that pool.

45:57And I think maybe there's more natural corollaries for stuff that already sort of exists as a social club. Yeah. And restaurants are that now. Yeah. With reservations being at the hardest they've ever been, most difficult to book tables, and also with reservations being a real clear form of cultural currency for diners, comparing it to a social club is sound. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I think maybe restaurant groups that have already done a lot of custom technology on the back end to understand who their customer is maybe don't need that blockchain opportunity. But with a larger restaurant group, especially something that's global, it could create an interesting opportunity to create interoperable rewards for somebody who comes in with a singular identity and then moves between different properties around the world.

46:52Yeah. So I definitely see a value in that. But it's not my industry, so I can't speak to it. No, but you do cover within the pages of Dirt plenty of food topics. And I'll get to the mukbang conversation because I think that's cool. But like, what about Fly Fish Club? Like that was like Tom Colicchio's backed. Maybe I'm misspeaking. I don't know if it's Tom Colicchio, but it was. Yeah, I honestly don't know much about it. I think what I will say is NFT or not, whether you want to call it an NFT or a digital collectible, in order to be viable, it really can't exist as a gimmick that's layered over something that's not going to be a viable business anyway.

47:34Dirt, for example, needs to succeed and stand on its own two feet as a media company, an intellectual property company, whatever you want to call it. And so if you have a restaurant that doesn't serve good food, it doesn't create a good experience, having an NFT isn't going to change that. If you have a restaurant that is delivering on everything that a restaurant should be and you want to add a digital collectibles into the mix i think that's cool go for it but um i think the conversation initially and given especially what was happening in the nft market at the time which was projects that were primarily based on financial speculation and not utility um it was i think easier to dismiss it as a gimmick but if the restaurant shows that it has longevity and a real community and a real um purpose as hospitality entity then great no it feels like window dressing a little bit and i agree like you have to be like obviously dope with the food and have a core like competency about uh like cooking food not creating a token um but let's get back to the mukbang article you wrote in your publication or you didn't write but it was published um about this idea of the a-list mukbang which you know and you kind of like marinated on the idea no pun intended about um hot ones and how we like as a culture are watching people eat food in different ways online um and it's interesting you you've pulled up some cool threads there yeah that was an article written by terry nguyen who's our senior writer her and i talked about it ahead of time um she was pulling at this thread of hot ones and chicken shop date yep as yeah the latest iterations of something that i started observing i think it kind of goes back to like that obama buzzfeed interview or you know obama on between two ferns which was this idea of at the time it was like millennials as the primary content consumer you know we want to see politicians and celebrities in these dressed down environments And I think the assumption at the time was like the less formal the environment, the more honesty you're getting.

49:45And now with TikTok and influencers and all of the externalized lifestyle, for lack of a better word, that social media provides, you can no longer assume that a less formal environment is a one-to-one with having an honest conversation. Yeah, because we've gotten really good at doing less formal. Exactly. And in fact, like a lot of the lack of formality is manufactured. Yeah. People have started to reverse engineer things that feel authentic and that becomes a format in and of itself. And so what she was saying through the piece is like, here's a little bit of a last bastion of honesty, authenticity, the ability to throw somebody who's been media trained out the wazoo off of their equilibrium.

50:35And it's giving them really hot sauce or eating wings with them. So food, she kind of poses food as like this sort of last intermediary that can force, if not true intimacy, at least a level of honesty that you wouldn't be getting otherwise. Yeah. And I think that's exactly why we are drawn to food stories as a culture. It's a universal idea. It's a concept that we all can recognize. And I think food content, be it mukbang, which there's amazing mukbangs on YouTube, which is just like literally folks eating a lot of food and sharing thoughts. But also like real like verite style like food documentary.

51:15People fucking love that shit because it feels as real as it could possibly get. It's not like red carpet celebrity stuff. When you say verite, do you mean like chef's table? Actually, I don't think of that as verite. I think it's like. That's actually that manufactured. But if you go back to when it came out, it felt ultra authentic. It did. You're right. I remember just having my mind blown by the Francis Malman episode. And now I think in retrospect, it feels too polished. But it's polished because of what that format became. I think, you know, especially like Jiro Dreams of Sushi was like the first version, right?

51:56Exactly. Same creators. It didn't feel polished. It felt like privileged view. But with the repetition of that format, now we see it as artifice. Yeah. Which is very interesting. Actually, I think that links in with the death of podcasts. Yeah, we'll get to that. We're going to talk about. Spoiler. I mean, do you agree? I totally agree. I think back then it was a form of food media that was refreshing. And I think that the way they shot it obviously made a lot of – it like smoothed it out in a way, but it still wasn't overly stylized. I think also seeing like Maul Menin is like the many women in his life wasn't interesting.

52:33It wasn't at that point like we weren't seeing a lot of that on television. It was mostly studio stand and stir. So I think like documentary style food programming is cool. I think people are off that now, especially since the end of Bourdain. It seems like we kind of as a culture want to go back to the stand and stir. Can we talk about that for a second? I actually, Bourdain popped into my mind as you were talking. Yeah. I always get emotional thinking and talking about him. Yeah. I've been thinking about him a lot lately. I don't know why. Actually, I think there's a lot of I've seen some tweets off and on pictures of him, people talking about him as a source of like positive masculinity.

53:09And I think just today, like somebody was like listing off all of these masculinity influencers and saying, OK, we agree. All these people are horrible. Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan. Oh, you're going to say Harry Styles. He's OK. We'll leave him. OK, good. Harry's catching some strays no um you know and then it's like okay we agree these aren't the right masculinity influencers or whatever so like who is and like if I could quote tweet that I would say Anthony Bourdain but of course he's he's not alive anymore so I actually think that this is his entry into the public consciousness actually mirrors what we just talked about which is like something that starts off authentic and becomes artifice which is Kitchen Confidential was not a dude bro chef memoir in the artificial sense because it was the first.

53:58So it was the authentic memoir. And now, of course, when you read a chef memoir, you're reading it through the evolution of that medium, not the individual's voice. Yeah, there was something so special about him. I don't know. What do you think it was? I agree it's a symbol of masculinity. I think that's a really uh interesting point to look to him uh and a very complicated human being with lots of reporting on why his background is maybe not what we all assume um but as a media uh that show you know obviously changed the game for everyone i mean it was it was a style of it was like a it was food media with point of view i mean it was it was clearly done every episode especially later seasons had a visual reference that was either an old film or an old, you know, camera piece of equipment.

54:48So that like innovated the way I think we think about food television. And Chef's Table is similar. I think the way that they were using certain equipment and the way that they presented the stories of these singular chefs was definitely new. But now, again, I still think we're moving away from it. Also, the issue of the fact that like being a chef actually is not that singular, being part of a kitchen as part of being a part of like a really big team. True. And the bear, you know, I think really threw a wrench in that perception. Oh, amazing show. I've actually been listening to the podcast. Yeah.

55:23So the podcast is not dead. You've been listening to the podcast. It's dead. It's dead. No, I've been listening to the bear soundtrack. Yeah. Lots of Wilco. It's great. Counting Crows. I have the music taste of a divorced dad. Nice. Let's talk a little bit about the metaverse, which is, I think, a topic that many are interested in seeing play out, obviously with Meta's investment in it, blah, blah, blah, but also the way food and cooking can potentially play out in this metaverse that we are kind of obsessed with right now still. Yeah, I think the number one misconception about the metaverse and I think people who have talked about the metaverse have fueled this misconception is like it's not a place.

56:17I think I'm probably paraphrasing a lot of other people by saying this, but like the metaverse is more of like the tipping point where – and I don't know if you know who David Rudnick is. really smart designer and thinker, but I went to a talk by him last week and he was talking about this idea of primacy, like, which is, you know, the prevailing view and entering a generation where we flipped from people having physical primacy reflected online to a generation that will like see the digital image as the prime image. Yeah. And then the physical sort of secondary. That's what I think about when I think about the metaverse.

57:00I think about like flipping. I think it's a big a big part of it is that tipping point. But something I think a lot about with dirt and I think will be true for a long time because we do have control over these things is thinking about it as delivering a digital experience that can enrich your life offline. and then maybe ultimately delivering offline experiences that can enrich your life online. And I think that that could be true for food as well. Like the kind of sexiness and weird sort of red herring of trying to talk about like smell-o-vision or like food that you can't really taste. it's stupid and it takes you further away from what's actually valuable in exploring a new technology, which is what are the things that we know to be true?

57:57And how can I take things that I know to be true and use this technology to enhance them? So for example, for me, what's a thing that I know to be true? I know to be true that people feel a very emotional connection to magazines. People – there's a lot of people live today who felt a very emotional connection to Rolling Stone and Vogue and that print product, including myself. And that connection can morph into the connection that a new generation might feel with brands and publications and, I guess, intellectual property that they first encounter online. it doesn't matter that they're not going to touch it in print because it's about what magazines offered which was like a dream of lifestyle and the opportunity to inhabit somebody else's taste and point of view so i think that's true for food as well if you think about it the metaverse is another venue opportunity to take this shifting primacy and say um what is the digital experience that you could have with food that would enhance your offline experience of food and vice versa.

59:07And I think about cooking instruction. I think about the way – I think the way the metaverse plays into my theory, pet theory, is that it's a new way to learn to cook in the physical world by learning or observing or feeling a cooking demonstration or going to a restaurant in the metaverse and being able to travel. Say you're grounded in North America, being able to travel to Hawaii, which is also in North America, going to like you know asia and and experiencing a night market through the metaverse and actually learning to cook something from that night market i feel like that to me is a huge application because to your point which is great the metaverse is is about making a link between offline or online and offline yeah um maybe like another thing that would be really cool is memory like the opportunity to go into a restaurant that doesn't exist anymore it's kind of like a a melancholy thought, but I was thinking about what I was going to say on this podcast.

1:00:06If I got stuck and I started thinking about, for some reason, it popped into my head, the restaurant that's described in Jonathan Franzen's books, The Corrections, and how badly I want to eat there. So, you know, maybe it's the opportunity to eat in restaurants that have only been described in books or only exist in films and, you know, have some experience of it. you know what I guess doesn't include the food unless you're bringing that yourself BYOB to the metaverse it's interesting to also just think about cookbooks because when you talk about a connection to a brand or an author the way that cookbooks are maybe articulated in the metaverse it seems like it could be a cool opportunity in the future for what we do here but Penguin Random House to explore like a metaverse version what would you what would I I don't know what the object would be called.

1:00:57Yeah, I don't use a lot of cookbooks, to be honest. But it's definitely an object that resonates with me because I have a very clear picture in my mind of my mom's really thick, like, red Betty Crocker cookbook. And she has this, like, leather paperweight that she holds it open with. So obviously that object is very meaningful to me, even though it sort of exists as like an ur object and not something that I've ever actually used. But you're right. Cookbooks are very emotional. And like there's nothing that says just because we have TikTok now or YouTube cooking shows that we have to lose the way people felt towards Julia Child.

1:01:42But I would agree that we have lost some of it. And I think that's the influence of very flattened media distribution. I think that's the influence of creating for the algorithm and not creating for the human. But like I said before, we have control over things and not everything is perpetual growth. We can go back. We can revisit things that were meaningful through new technologies. At least I kind of have to believe that. Or I think it's easy to fall into, I mean, not just political, but cultural doomerism. Yeah, it feels like doomsday if you're not like thinking optimistically like that. Yeah.

1:02:22About this new frontier that we are all. Right, like we're all going to drink Soylent and sit in the metaverse with our, you know, five like replicant husbands. I mean, it will happen in some world. It's already happening for some people. But whether it'll be the dominant cultural experience, I think is an open question. Have you experienced post-food, post-post-cooking in your research, in your world, in your reporting? Post-cooking. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think post-anything is interesting. I wrote a piece about being post-lifestyle like five years ago. And what it was really about was like we're beyond this belief that social media can offer like genuine aspiration to the point where you could respond to an image with the sort of feeling of the sublime, the desire to inhabit it.

1:03:22So I think we like for the reasons I listed out before, we've moved out of the authenticity of food photography. Oh, absolutely. We've moved like we're post seeing a food picture on Instagram and feeling that like moment of, you know, I could see myself in that image because everything is so commercialized that like the commercialism just sort of comes down like a sheet and prevents you from inhabiting it. But but I say that. But like when I see posts by my friend Alicia Kennedy, like I get excited. I feel like I could maybe be in her kitchen. And I think it's because I know her to be an authentic person, an authentic voice.

1:03:59um post food i don't know i mean people have the human need for sustenance yeah some people have prioritized eating as an experience in an art form other people have prioritized it as fuel and like my big picture political desire would be for everyone to have the resources to have the leisure to pursue food as an activity if they want to i think that a lot of times when we talk about soylent and food as fuel it's often in i hate using the term late capitalism i've sort of banned it from the newsletter recently but like um it's in the context of somebody who's in a very late capitalist environment where the fuel is to work harder or produce more yeah um so i I think like leisurely food, if you enjoy it, if you're somebody that enjoys it, not everyone does, can be a little bit of a rebellion against that.

1:05:02All right. So we have to talk about post podcast because and we joke, this was not even on my list of topics because we don't talk about meta topics like podcasting. But I'm like opening my my dirty mail. I'm always hitting that open and I'm reading death of the podcast in the subject line. It's a story by Terry Wynn that appeared in Dirt Today. I'm excited to talk to the founder of Dirt who thinks podcasts are dying. Well, I would say given our experience today, the death of the podcast is greatly exaggerated. The headline is a little bit of a clickbait. I'm glad you admit that. It's a good headline.

1:05:41But Terry also established really early on that she's talking about death in a very Freudian sense, which is a transformation. Podcasts are in a period of transformation. And what's being transformed is not the ability to continue and create and distribute a podcast as it's been distributed. But it's a shifting site of cultural capital, I guess, where, you know, she brings up the fact that like podcasts did not replace radio. Radio still exists. It's the dominant audio forum in a lot of parts of the world and a lot of parts of America. podcasts did create a certain typology for this american life listener who became the stand-in for a certain type of hipster i guess consumer and that stand-in um was a stand-in that i think a lot of brands found to be useful and and probably cultural critics found to be useful for a really long time and now the prototypical podcast listener is probably listening to podcasts in a lot more of an informal and ambient way.

1:06:51And this goes back to the authenticity thing, which is like, okay, you know, it's like, this American life is now chef's table, right? And the podcast that you listen to, that's just two friends riffing is mukbang. Yes. Great call. And I agree with Terry Foley. I think it was a great piece. I'll link to the show notes. It's definitely not death of podcasts is death of the dumb money era of podcasts and the highly produced podcasts and giving thousands to millions of dollars to make these very short series of podcasts. I think there's definitely an exhaustion there. And what we're seeing in the industry, and I think if you've made it this far in the show, you're definitely down with what we're doing here, which is talking to people about a variety of topics in an authentic way in a chat format.

1:07:37And we're not that produced, though. Clayton, shout out to our editor. He makes it sound great. But we try to make it feel real. And I think to me, that's what I like in podcasts. So I thought Terry's points were great, actually. I thought that it was a clickbait. Yeah, well, it made you click. It made me click. I'll have to check the open rate on that. It's probably up in the 50s. You're crushing it, Daisy. Let me close by asking you this. If you could have a restaurant name a menu item after you, what would that menu item be and what style of restaurant would it be at? Oh, OK. I think, you know how they have like the celebrity McDonald's meals now where it's like the whole package of things?

1:08:14So like Travis Scott, right? Yeah, exactly. So I think it would be like not one item, but like maybe the progression of the meal. I think it would be starting with a Campari soda and then, yeah, some sort of starter, maybe like a Caesar salad, small Caesar salad. Yeah. And then going into a squid ink pasta with like a spicy sausage adjacent sauce. Yeah, yeah. And then finishing with an espresso. Love that. Yeah. Yeah. That's like pretty close to my perfect meal, but it's only my perfect meal if I'm having it with like the right companion. I love that sentiment. Of course. Yeah. How sweet. Is there a name for it?

1:09:04Yeah. The Daisy. The Daisy. Great. Daisy Alioto, thank you for joining the Taste Podcast. Thank you for having me.

1:09:14The Taste Podcast is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.