457: Fresh Food TV with Matt Goulding

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Walk into a market and everywhere you look is an episode. And I think there's a version of this where everything from a sesame seed to a watermelon has something really special to say about us. And that's kind of the point of this. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbar.

0:59Matt Golding is in the studio and we have a great chat about his new series on Apple TV Plus, Omnivore. I've known Matt for years and really love his writing, which comes to life in a series of memorable books as well as in the online magazine he co-founded, Roads and Kingdoms. On this episode, we talk about Spain, Italy, Japan, and how we covered each country with memorable prose. And we discuss his extremely cool collaboration with Rene Rezepi. Omnivore is food TV at its most visually stunning, and we talk about the process of getting the show made. It's so fun having Matt into the studio, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:45Matt Golding, welcome to This Is Taste. It's so great to see you, man. dude it's honestly so happy so happy to be here i was uh like i told you before i was thinking about us in or doing an interview back in 2016 it's crazy that we go back that far and i want to get right into your books before we get to omnivore which is on apple plus now i fucking i love this show um i've i've screened like six episodes um and binged them everyone should i'm gonna link to my interview with renee zeppi who's your co-creator uh terrific conversation i have with Rene, but first for you, when you're writing your books, you're writing, you wrote a book about Japan, a book about Italy and a book about Spain.

2:24And you, these books that you did with Echo, to me are some of the most important books in publishing because they were breaking form. When you're writing these books, tell me, what were you thinking? What were you thinking about the process? And did you know that you were actually doing something really remarkably original? Oh man, I honestly, I really, really appreciate you saying that, man. That means a lot coming from you. I knew it was, I knew that we were in some nether region of the publishing world largely because they couldn't even really figure out where it was going to live on the bookshelves in a certain way they're like is this travel is this food is this this is this that so that part was cool I mean for me at least maybe not for the publisher um but in my mind what it was honestly the way that it started was I was traveling through Japan I was on my honeymoon a long extended 90 day honeymoon in Japan basically and was like trying to find resources is like trying to find that thing that I, the stuff that I love to read before I go somewhere, which honestly was this mixture and is this mixture of literature as well as some information to kind of guide me in the right direction.

3:28And I was like, there wasn't much there in the Japan space, certainly not outside of Tokyo or Kyoto. And I was like, what if we found something that kind of took both of those, above all heavy on the literature, But like all pointed in the direction of giving people context for what this food culture means and allowing them to, as Tony would say, stumble into their own experiences, but armed with this information that gives them a sense of what is what on the ground. Yeah. And you mentioned Anthony Bourdain, Tony Bourdain, who was your business partner at Roads and Kingdoms. And I will leave the story of Roads and Kingdoms for another conversation.

4:08You and I will catch up again because I just love seeing you and you just aren't in New York a lot. But I hear a lot of rice noodle fish in Omnivore. And I have to say, I'm going to talk about the show now. The writing is incredible. Like it's Renee reading these lines that you've written and Ben has written and others have written. And you're telling the story of food, but it has real narrative poetry to it. When you and Renee were in that room deciding to do a show and Ben, what's going through your mind? And what are you thinking you need to bring to the food world that isn't there? The thing is, you know, Renee called kind of at the end of 2019.

4:45It has been about a year and some change since Tony had died. And it was kind of for me personally, like, where do we go from here? You know, what do I want to do? What do I want to be a part of? But also kind of that bigger picture of like, where do we go with the food? You know, like I when I started my career in the early 2000s, you know, I was like writing recipes and doing small little restaurant reviews for New York Mag. Like that was what food writing was kind of about. And then suddenly there was like chef profiles and, you know, the end of that first decade. And then there was bigger long form pieces.

5:22And then there was the books. And like the things that we could do with food, as you very well know, because you do those things and you are part of that change, continue to expand ever outwards. and I think obviously working with the guy who was so responsible for that expansion and that evolution was the great privilege of my life but also thinking after his passing what's what is next like what's that new frontier how much farther can we push food as a lens or as a jumping off point for hopefully just entertaining and meaningful storytelling and then Rene calls and the truth is like I was a little bit in this mode where like I'd worked with Tony and I'd worked with Jose Andres for many years as well you know two people who had inspired me so much but I was also thinking yeah maybe I should just kind of go do my own thing and then Rene calls and it was like oh you that guy that guy who all of these figures these in your orbit revolved around in a way just at least in the fine dining restaurant scene and Jose is of course our chef but there's no place like Noma and there's no guy like Rene.

6:30No, that's exactly right. And I think the piece that was so immediately exciting to me was this guy represents all these incredible layers of complexity and sophistication and interesting conversations around food, but also above all in the natural world, time and place. That was always the ethos of Noma. And for me, Rene has always been Attenborough-esque in how he thinks about food, how he talks about food. And so the idea of kind of trying to aim for a planet Earth-like series, at least in terms of its scope, with Rene as a partner was amazing. And so that was a jumping off point where it was like, okay, now how do we build this?

7:16Did Rene have that reference? Rene had that reference. I remember talking with Ben Liebman early on when he also mentioned it. And I was like thinking, okay, cool. And I just spent a couple months kind of on my own playing with that idea. Like what does it actually mean? You know, how does that actually get executed? And, you know, I think it was clear to us all, like it has to be through ingredients. You know, we built this around eight ingredients. Every ingredient is a different journey into the heart of the human experience. it's really remarkable how these eight ingredients in your first season um are shot and and told in such different ways you have different directors on and some of the episodes um you're on set um in you know japan in spain uh in new york in i mean you could say all the other places but sure matt how are you producing the show which ultimately will be written because the show is a narrative show where Renee is in the studio reading lines that are beautifully written.

8:20How are you actually shooting the show? Because I think that's a big part of it. No, it's a great question because, you know, I think typically in a documentary form, like you would build an outline, you would have the locations, you'd have a general sense of the kind of story you wanted. You send out a field producer and the field producer starts providing you with options. In this case, we approached it much more almost like a scripted show. Like I sat down for months, like probably about nine months and wrote all eight scripts. You know, real, not necessarily shooting scripts in the classic like scripted sense, but long scripts that could essentially serve as that.

8:59Dude, this is your writing. This is it. My instinct was like, Matt Golden wrote this. This is, I mean, I only know, you know, I only know how to write the way that I write and trying to find that voice but also bring it into this new format was super exciting but also crazy challenging because you're trying to imagine how to pull all these pieces together because what we knew right away, and this is a credit to Rene, Rene was not going to be a guy. He wasn't going to be a host. He wasn't going to be on camera a bunch. Three minutes, he said. It was like the max he would be on camera for each hour.

9:34Yeah, he wanted that as like a contractual limitation to his presence on camera. And I think in general, you know, the understanding with Apple and to their credit, like they saw this right away. It was like, let's find the right moments when something from Renee's life inspires a deeper reflection on the ingredient. But really, the ingredients are the stars and the people around those ingredients are the stars of the show, not Renee. But I think that was kind of a wild jumping off point because you're thinking, all right, there are a million stories about rice and salt and corn and tuna. And how do you choose all of those?

10:12And ultimately, the way that I wanted to do it, you know, and the way that we talked about internally was the idea of a concept album. Every song has its own cadence, its own rhythm, its own lyrics, but it's all tied to some larger meaning, some larger project that has a narrative arc of its own. And that's hard to do because it means you're kind of reinventing things time and time again. But the opposite of that, which is just a kind of a plug and chug formula, just was not the show we wanted to make. And it would have been a show that would have been derivative. Apple probably wouldn't have bought it.

10:48You might have ended up on one of the other places. For sure. And ultimately, those come and go. And I feel the way you wrote the show and shot it, there's a timelessness there. And more about the production, because now it's kind of like an onion. It's unpeeling a little bit. Like you're telling me you wrote the eight episodes and you scripted them. So you're going on set to shoot these and you're basically doing coverage for the VO that you wrote. In many cases, that's really how it worked. And I think some of the episodes were kind of more tightly wound in terms of the scripting. And they really were kind of going through scene by scene, getting coverage, getting pickups, thinking about that.

11:28But always leaving space for the reality is that these are real humans living their real lives. And we're not going to tell them what to do or what to say. They're going to do what they do and they're going to say what they say. But in many cases, these are people who I've already reported on or people that Rene knows from his life or stories that I've kind of had in my back pocket that we can build a foundation on. And then, of course, you want to leave room for a director to come in and add her or his spin to this. And so there's a bit of a balancing act there to be sure. But then ultimately that was the job, was like trying to find a version of each one of these stories that made the viewing experience confident and sort of well-defined enough that you didn't spend your time thinking, well, why didn't we go here?

12:17Why aren't they taking me to Italy instead of Spain? Why are we just in one village for pig? Why is this tuna going from here to there? Like we wanted it to be almost self-evident when you watch it. Like this is the one story that they really wanted to tell. You make choices about who you're casting, but you're not necessarily telling the like birth to death story of a community or a chef or whatever. You're basically covering your broad voiceover scripts with some of the most evocative photography that I've seen. And a couple of scenes come to mind. One is just the way you showed a pig slaughter.

12:52And I was talking to Rene about this, but I'd like to get your sense of how you went into the slaughterhouse in Spain and you were, you know, really pushing the envelope for a U.S. audience at least. How did you think about the slaughterhouse? Well, I should say that I first came upon that slaughterhouse, that factory where those jamones and all the other, you know, cured products are produced, which is called Fermin in La Alberca in central Spain. in 2010 with Jose Andres. He took me and a group of chefs over there to kind of experience what's called la montanera, the fattening of the pigs on sort of the acorn season in the winter, and then the slaughtering and the processing of that.

13:33And it was a remarkable experience. And being there with, it was like Ken Oranger and Chris Cosentino and Ming Tsai. Fun hang right there. Super fun hang. But what I was struck by was the level of respect and admiration these chefs had for how this process was really going down. And on top of all that, there was this incredible story of just this pig that lives in the village off the generosity of the villagers and develops a sense of relationship. It's like a mascot of the town. It really is very much. His name is Anton. It's always called Anton year after year. And it just felt like this is a story one day that I would love to come back and tell.

14:12And I did tell a version of it in Great Ball of Pig, the Spain book I wrote. But being able to do a visual version of that was really special. And so we get to that central scene. And of course, there's been a lot of debate beforehand between Rene, myself, the director, a woman named Isabel Coichette, an incredible director who's actually my neighbor in Barcelona. how much do we show you know because this is largely a celebration in ways for an episode that otherwise could be very dark episodes about animals that we eat tend to be rather dark and we try to find a different way into it yeah we talk about factory farms a lot here in the states and of course it's a horror show like you can't really even start talking about it without having to like take your mind somewhere else i mean and listen we i think we all have an understanding that the animals we eat for the large part are terribly mistreated.

15:04We wanted to show you the other side of that coin. Like what happens when you don't do that? Or what happens when there's an entire culture built around a better version of that relationship? And so, you know, I think for our taste, like we would have showed even more because we felt like we had earned that moment in a certain way by spending that time, by building up to it, by wanting to make this point that, you know, sometimes you can't look away or sometimes you shouldn't look away. Let's put it that way. You know, if we want the privilege of being able to eat, you know, the amount of meat that we eat in 2024, we should also maybe be familiar with where it comes from.

15:45Of course, you've got those scenes of the of the of the hams hanging for me. that does you a great service, of course. Talk about the most natural shot you could ever give, which is these cool Spanish guys throwing salt on the legs of ham. I mean, it's beautiful work. I mean, you're in this cathedral of fermentation and artistry. For me, jamón ibérico de bellota, like the acorn-fed ham that's aged for four or five years, is really one of the greatest expressions of human innovation, period. Full stop. So let's dig into tuna. I asked Rene about how Japan changed the way tuna, which was previously considered a trash fist up until 1970s, became prized in Japan.

16:29So how do you, Matt, tell the story of this trajectory in this kind of short episode? It's a lot to unpack. You do such a great job doing that. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. I mean, I think tuna was the episode that we used to really sell the idea internally to ourselves and then to Apple. because I think it was an adventure. It was kind of a thread that I had in my mind for a while about this idea of following, quote unquote, a single tuna from the wild tuna hunt in southern Spain that began 3 ,000 years ago with the Phoenicians to the auction floor of Toyosu Market and then back out into the world where bluefin has become one of the most prized of all luxury ingredients.

17:13I think like having that sort of nose to tail start to finish type of journey that through line gives you a certain pace a certain velocity you know. There's like a little bit of a cliffhanger because you're like enter dot dot dot. That's right. And then there's a beautiful montage of like archival airline footage from Japan. And yeah, I think it's genuinely shocking or super interesting information to find out that a single executive possessed by the idea of getting fresh tuna from Nova Scotia to Tokyo before it spoiled was the one who pushed and pushed and pushed over years of innovation to find a way to get it into the belly of a 747.

17:54And he did. And that changed the tuna economy entirely. And it also changed the fate of this species, right? an apex predator suddenly went from being a relatively undervalued, it's called a trash fish. I mean, there are photos of mass graves of bluefin tuna in the United States in the 1940s and 50s. Cat food factories are largely where bluefin tuna ended up back then to where it was in the early 2000s, a species pushed to the brink of extinction because that's how powerful the force of the human appetite is. And so really, like, it's about how much our taste can change the world, the physical, natural world around us, and how food has always been kind of the leading engine of globalization.

18:44I think the flip side of that and what we try to get home in this episode is that there's a very fine line between a vicious cycle and a virtuous cycle. We almost eat out of extinction in a matter of a few decades. the stakeholders in the tuna trade get together and they make a few smart tweaks to the quota system and the overall sort of vigilance on the species and suddenly things are incredibly more sustainable. Doesn't mean they're perfect, doesn't mean there's not still work to be done, but that was seriously a few twists of the wrist, so to speak, that has turned it back from the brink. Yeah, it's amazing that you kind of lay it out as these foodways that have been around for 3 ,000 years can be changed in like a presidential cycle.

19:33Like it's like four years and it could be extinct. I mean, that's incredible to think about that. That's how fast it happens, right? And that's how powerful our vote is, so to speak. Because when we eat, that's what we're doing, right? I mean, we don't think of it like that, but we want to remind people that we make a, you know, maybe we make a dozen food choices a day and most of them are made kind of by routine or by necessity or whatever those things may be. But what if a few of those choices were made with just a little bit more awareness or a little bit more thoughtfulness? Like what is the trickle down effect of that awareness?

20:09It's a little bit of like a butterfly effect as well. I think so. You know, a little bit of chance, a little bit of purpose, and you can definitely change a species to good or for the bad. Well, I think, you know, we're in a situation where the problems that we're up against as a species and starting in the food world are so great that we need both a top-down approach and a bottom-up. We need leaders at the top of the sort of the political systems of the world making smart changes and doing the things that it takes to actually, you know, have wholesale large-scale change. But we also need people at the bottom, so to speak, the consumers to be aware enough that they're pushing for those changes.

20:51Right. And that they're making those changes themselves. And I think that to me is also essentially a representation of our challenge with climate change. You know, there's no silver bullet. We need all of these things to happen at once. salt it's like a big topic in cookbook publishing and food media and in our world that we live in you know it's also like really hard to write about it and talk about it because um there is a lot of there are like no real rules with salt and there's salt is foundational in cooking but you can't say like x is the best salt because that just is impossible so when you're thinking about building and writing an episode about salt.

21:31Matt, how do you tackle this idea that there really is no wrong when talking about salt, really? I mean, you're excellently observed, I think, without a doubt, when you think about the culinary aspects of salt, you know, I think that we wanted to put aside sort of tasting notes to a certain extent, you know, we wanted to look at this as the history of salt is the history of us in a way that was kind of the the subtitle to this to the episode and every one of these episodes has a subtitle that we use internally to kind of keep the north star in focus and so we wanted to find those individual building blocks and think about how did salt how did taxation of salt by the chinese government establish the imperial army and the building of the great wall sort of like one of the first examples of food building economic and political structures?

22:21You know, how does salt affect our biology? How does salt really, truly seep into every facet of our lives? And then go out and try to build scene by scene examples of that. And so we start in Djibouti, in Lake Assal, one of the lowest points on the planet. And it's really, it could be shot at any moment over the last 2000 years, because it's a camel caravan where the salt harvester is still bringing giant blocks of salt out of the desert on the back of camels. And that wasn't made for us. That wasn't a recreation. That was shot by a guy who still does this week after week today. One of the last, to be sure.

23:03But I think that that was probably the most sort of planet Earth, or for me personally, Baraka, which is a film that was a huge inspiration for this series. Yeah, it was brought up by Rene as well. Yeah, Baraka was a huge, huge one. It's not well known, but I think visually in the pacing of it and the storytelling of it. But, you know, we wanted to follow those building blocks and feel like we were kind of building up to something larger, which was essentially a recipe for our own humanity, which, you know, is sort of the implicit concept album, if you will, for season one. I love that you say season one, which makes me think there's hope for season two.

23:44And I suggest that you listen to my talk with Renee. I go long with Renee about the coffee episode, so I don't want to repeat that. But it's like my favorite episode and you really do a service. Absolutely. Amazing. I've never seen a washing station portrayed in that way on like a mass scale. I've seen like YouTube, of course, but the fact that it's on Apple TV and I think the fact that you trace, you know, a cherry harvest to a hauling station to a green coffee roaster in America to the barista. And then you just ultimately realize how much of that coffee is actually thrown away. It's it's insane.

24:20Right. Really. It's when it's insane. Like, but coffee should be so much more expensive. It should be. It really should be. I mean, the the subtitle of coffee for us internally was coffee is a miracle. Like it is an actual expression, this incredible expression of who we are, because we're talking about a wild berry, a wild cherry on a tree in a cloud forest in Ethiopia that, you know, without our intervention or without sort of our sort of quote unquote discovery of it, it's just that, right? It's nothing more. And someone comes along and, you know, mythically, it's the great goat herder Kaldi who discovers that his goat is, you know, his flock of goats have been eating these berries and are suddenly possessed of an incredible energy and throws them into the fire and roasts these things and out comes coffee.

25:09However, it came about the fact of the matter is that we took something like that, transformed it into this elixir and then found a way to bring this elixir all across the world. And what it takes to actually do that is to me, one of the things that most makes us human, it's complex collaboration over incredible distances. And we do that in the case of coffee, oftentimes with 40 or 50 individuals, each of them an expert in a tiny little link of the chain. And then yet it gets to us and we're like, yeah, a buck for coffee? That feels like a lot. Or we, you know, I think we sometimes, you know, we make fun or sort of are derogatory towards high-end coffee places because they're maybe precious or twee or they're this or They're too earnest.

25:59But the fact of the matter is that kind of coffee, specialty coffee, if you will, is a very different sort of social force than commodity coffee, you know, which comes out from the dregs of colonization, is taxing both to the labor force, to the earth itself, you know, has these hidden costs that we as a consumer don't see or don't think about. And I think that's true with all ingredients, right? The true cost of food is never what it actually says at the supermarket. Yeah, well said, Matt. Thank you for reiterating a big theme on our show, and listeners will know that. And really, whenever you slap commodity in front of a product, you know there's trouble.

26:41And when you're selling coffee by weight and not by farm or by origin, you know you're in trouble. So once again, listener, if you like a coffee and you see that there's a farm, something mentioned on the bag, yeah, it might cost a little more because there's actually people there. I think here's the piece of context. Look, I know everyone's trying to do their best, right? And it's not trying to be an elitist argument where it says everyone should have enough money in their lives to spend it on expensive coffee or heritage pork or whatever. You know, the voice and I think the overall tone of the series is not meant to be dogmatic or preachy.

27:24It's really supposed to be this is how the food world works. And it's wondrous and amazing and also harrowing and challenging. But the fact of the matter is that in 2024, this generation, we've never spent less on food. We as Americans spend about 12 percent of our overall income. You're like copying my line. I've used that so many times. Have you? I mean, it is. I use this line a lot. So they know this and you're doing the work to be saying that because it's actually at the key of so many of our problems. The absolute heart of it comes down to we went from being a culture or a species that all of our resources were spent, so to speak, on food to being one where we expect none of them to be.

28:09And there has to be somewhere in between where the price that we're willing to pay and the cost that is being passed on to us has to be commensurate to the effort, not just for the individual workers, but what the resources extracted from the earth, the health, so to speak, of the entire food chain. And until we can solve those problems, it's really hard to imagine now we solve any other problems. Yeah, it's just to normalize paying more for food and agree it's a privileged position to be able to buy Iberico hams and spend$25 on a bag of coffee. So recognizing that fully, but to normalize, like say in Korea, which I've studied, it's like 35 % of income goes towards food.

28:53And I'm sure there's other examples. I'm sure Spain is higher as well. Yeah, exactly. I think Spain is somewhere, it's right in between at about 20. But that 8%, you know, depending on which study you're looking at, that difference, though, actually is a huge difference in the welfare of the people in the system itself and, of course, the land that's providing these resources. And so, you know, we're not talking about dramatically shifting every one of your eating patterns. I think it's just, again, recognizing that if a few of those decisions that you make, a few of those things can be just a little bit better.