661: Ruby Tandoh Knows Why We All Eat This Way

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0:31you know there's something really freeing about allowing other influences in and accepting that you are part of this kind of at this point a global network of taste and you're plugged into it you're swayed by it i kind of like it i find it freeing even though of course it is also overwhelming. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Ruby Tando is a writer and baker based in London. A finalist on season four of The Great British Bake Off, she's written several smart and singular books, including the fantastic new book, All Consuming, Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. It's an incredible exploration of taste as a social construct that traces the historic and cultural context behind contemporary food culture. Today on the show, we go deep on Ruby's research and reporting process, plus her take on where we're at in food culture today. Also on the show, Eliza and I talk about some exciting fall cookbooks. I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:37Ruby Tando, this is Taste. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk about your new book, All Consuming. I devoured it for lack of a less punny term. I think it's like such a fun and special food book. And I'm really excited to talk about it with you. But before we get into the book, I want to just give a little bit of insight into who you are and how your brain works on food. And I'm wondering if you could share with me an early food memory that you have. I mean, one thing that I remember very clearly is I would get sent out to the shops like as a kid.

2:09Maybe I was kind of 8, 9, 10. there were just a couple of places around the corner to pick up snacks a weekend and you know what usually what my parents had in mind would be you know can you pick up like a cake from the bakery or something something we could all share but I would get waylaid in the store and I always wanted to get the kind of like grabbiest weirdest novelty thing and it would exasperate my parents because they were like can't you just get something normal and I was like how can I not get like a marshmallow tea cake with jam in it how can I not get this thing that's screaming out to me and I think that kind of magpie eye for kind of fun novelty food products like really set the tone for my kind of approach to actual food writing later on yeah I think um it is so funny to think about like what jumps out to you on the shelf do you remember if it would be the packaging or like the name of the snack or was it just kind of the overall experience that would hook you I think it was just like this kind of really fundamental excitement like you know if I was foraging and if I saw a rare berry in some kind of beautiful jewel color I'd be kind of drawn to it and that's how I feel when I see this stuff on the shelves like I'm a marketer's dream I am that person I'm like easily guided by the packaging and by the honestly it's just a sense of novelty and often is a sense of rarity because these things will bill themselves as limited edition or seasonal.

3:43And, you know, to a certain extent, that is the main kind of seasonal eating that I do is what's in for Halloween, what's in for Christmas and so on. Since you've been here in New York, have you been foraging at the bodegas for any new to you snacks? Well, you know, I actually went to Trader Joe's for the first time like two days ago. That was my kind of like big like store forage rummage and I just couldn't believe it like maybe everyone else is used to this by now but I was like I've never seen so many useless contrived kind of noun mash snacks in my entire life like sunflower seeds chocolate peanut butter rice crispy squares and stuff like that I was just kind of blown away by the silliness of it all and I kind of loved it everything was pumpkin spice i i mean it's so unnecessary and it's so delightful yeah and also the fact that it's all the house brand of snack at trader joe's there's a lot of like online discourse about how the co-packer that makes something that they sell is like actually the same version as something else but they have the trader joe's name on it which i think is so interesting i actually don't there's not a trader joe's by me here in new york so i feel like whenever I go in, I also have a similar experience of like everything bagel, pita chips.

5:01Like what is that? Yes. Yeah, definitely. I hadn't really thought about it in those times. But yeah, the Trader Joe's kind of branding on it does make it feel like unless you live in a Trader Joe's, like everything is a novelty, even if it is just simply, I don't know, a Kit Kat or like Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, essentially. This is such a good conversation to kind of dovetail into all-consuming the book, which to me is really about exploring taste as a social concept. And I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about how you began kind of thinking about this idea and developing it. So when I first started writing the book, it was completely different in kind of shape and approach.

5:39And I had this kind of grandiose idea that I wanted to like a whole theory of appetite in kind of really wide ranging terms. So I wanted to look at like the evolutionary basis of appetite, biological, you name it. And then there came a point kind of two and a half, three years into the process where I realized that I didn't know what I was doing and nor was I interested in this. And the book didn't really come into focus until I kind of looked at the world around me, the actual immediate cues, whether that was like the recipes I was being presented with on Instagram or just the messages I was getting from marketing, advertising, you name it.

6:21And that social element, as you say, that cultural element through the media, that was what grabbed my attention. That felt exciting to me. And that is where the book came alive, rather than looking at it in terms of either an intensely personal perspective or as this kind of inbuilt biological thing. yeah and I think the idea of like a social taste that's being informed by economics and technology and labor and all of these kinds of other factors that come into play as well yeah absolutely it's I mean I find it really refreshing because I like I grew up with like Nigel Slater's writing let's say and that is so intensely personal and it's so intimate it's this kind of communion between one man and the food in front of him.

7:11And I definitely like ran with that approach for a lot of my food writing kind of career. I really loved the emotional closeness of it all. But, you know, there's something really freeing about allowing other influences in and accepting that you are part of this kind of, at this point, a global network of taste and you're plugged into it, you're swayed by it. I kind of like it. I find it freeing, even though, of course, it is also overwhelming. Yeah, I think it can feel both freeing and also terrifying to be the marketer's dream and realize how susceptible you actually are to things. Yes, definitely.

7:49I think it's interesting to me because you're writing about virality and trends and obviously a book is a long process. So I think you could run the risk of writing about something as if it's so important. And then by the time the book comes out, like something else is actually that new thing. Is that something that you kind of wrestled with at all when you were working on it? Definitely. Like I was really worried about that. You know, like something like Dubai chocolate, you know, here today, gone tomorrow. And so much, I think, of my thinking and just food writing in general, food media, kind of gets deep into like this trend cycle that's so quick and so kind of, you know, it's just ephemeral really.

8:34And we risk getting bogged down in that. so what I wanted to do was rather than looking at the specific things and like hyper focusing on them to understand the systems that underpin them why are these trends coming in the first place what are the media pathways that they follow what are the economic pathways and so on you know what laid the groundwork for something like bubble tea or something like that rather than just looking at as a trend or something. Yeah, I want to talk about bubble tea or boba because that is the image you have on the cover of the book. Why is that the cover that you landed on?

9:13And why did you want to write about bubble tea and boba in the book? I think bubble tea and boba is just such a

9:24wonderful encapsulation of so many of the ways that kind of our taste spreads right now. and I think especially from my perspective as someone in the UK we barely had it kind of 15 years ago we didn't have any standalone stores we had like a couple of like hole-in-the-wall places but that really was the extent of it and now it is everywhere and that kind of 15-year turnaround is so incredibly short for not just like it's not just a product like to buy chocolate that you can stock in a store it's an entire um network an entire like logistical system of like bubble tea stores everywhere and it really exposes so many of the way that taste spreads because it was about an economic moment in britain um it was about universities opening up to students from mainland china it was about property becoming more expensive and you know sit-down restaurants becoming disincentivized and kind of franchises and really small businesses becoming kind of the only viable way to enter the restaurant scene and all of these things came together in like the early 2010s at the same time as Instagram launched in the UK and so it was this perfect storm of factors economic social demographic and cultural and bubble tea kind of just exploded out of that And that really is, you know, what so much of the book is about.

10:54Why do tastes spread this way? And it's so rarely just a grassroots kind of gravitating towards what tastes good is always something bigger. yeah I agree and I think in the book you've been right about the way that kind of bubble tea was adapted for UK US kind of like outside of Asia the fact that the cups traditionally would be like clear or transparent so people could see the boba inside but I was in Taiwan in January you write about this like every single boba cup is opaque because like everybody knows what's inside yeah already yeah that was you know such a um eye-opener for me to like learn that but yeah it's um you know really indicative of you know exactly what is the locus of hype with this drink and you know in places where everyone knows what boba is it's the brand itself is the the shop where you've got it from and in places where people are still kind of trying to understand boba it is just seeing those little black dots through the cup or whatever yeah what's your boba order there is a shop in london that does like a kind of black tea infused with buckwheat which is like hands down my favorite thing in the world but i often have it as the milk tea version and just with boba and sometimes like the cream top if i'm if i'm feeling fancy the cream top to me is such an interesting phenomenon because I think that it is not really that prominent here in New York compared to other cities that I go to.

12:26And it's kind of, this is like the New Yorker in me is that I'm surprised that like we're late to the game in some kind of way, but I feel like you don't see it as often here. Really? Okay. We have it a lot in London. But I mean, I feel like the cream top is, if not originated from, then certainly popularized by a kind of second wave of bubble tea shops that are definitely open in the UK at the moment. So our first wave was just kind of cheap and cheerful, like the kind of stuff that a kid might get after school. It wasn't particularly like highbrow. And now just like coffee, almost, we've had this second wave of craft bubble tea, things where people are advertising it as real tea, real milk, and so on.

13:10And the cream top seems to have like ridden that wave. Yeah, the single origin tea in boba, I think has become like a really interesting focus especially the UK obviously being such a big tea drinking place it makes a lot of sense to me definitely although at the same time I think whilst the UK is a real tea drinking place like I don't even think that tea really kind of established that desire in the UK for this I think it was the fact that we had had places like Starbucks like that's what primed us for this that customizable drink thing is, you know, how we learned to work boba. But, you know, tea remains in the UK for most people, one thing, and that is English breakfast tea.

13:54And anything else is kind of just doesn't even register to us as that. Hi there, it's Matt, co-host of the show. We are currently running a This Is Taste listener survey, and we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a guest request? A restaurant you wish we'd visit to talk about on Three Things? What about a lesser-known cookbook author who deserves a spot in our studio chair. You can let us know by clicking the link in our show notes to complete the survey. It will only take a couple minutes, I swear, and will help us continue to make the best show possible. That's the This Is Taste listener survey, link in our show notes.

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15:55Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I want to talk about some of the other topics or chapters of the book. I think boba, obviously, it stands out as like such a huge food trend. I'm curious if when you were kind of thinking about what the book would consist of, if there were any things you came across in your research that maybe surprised you in terms of how much you wanted to include it. I think that one thing that came up was the topic of trad wives and Nara Smith. And I was initially really reluctant to include that because I thought, firstly, it's just kind of depressing to me.

16:37But also, you know, there's so much discourse around it and I didn't want to get dragged into something moralistic. or as you said earlier, kind of do this extensive commentary on something that might turn out to be just kind of a flash in the pan. But as I was kind of looking into Nara Smith and looking into like the historical precedents for someone like this, you know, I found that the history of, you know, well, how do we intertwine the domestic and the caregiving roles in the house with the processes of actually feeding and cooking food, you know, is obviously so rich and it's so interesting.

17:17And, you know, once you move beyond the kind of outrage cycle, when it comes to someone like Nara, who is really performing domesticity in a way that kind of can feel a little regressive, you realize that she's doing something quite uncommon for here and now, which is, yeah, like interweaving this kind of deep process, very scientific, very like food nerd stuff with the kind of trad wife thing and this kind of feeding the family way of cooking. And these things exist almost in separate universes. It's crazy to me how many cookbooks I have and yet how few of them mention feeding people. It's like you create the food, but there's no reference to feeding people, whether that's like, you know, children or kind of extended family or friends or whatever.

18:09and she is kind of at the middle of that and you know in a really knotty way in a really gendered way in a way that I think is revealing about a lot of our kind of neuroses as a society but yeah I find her fascinating you look back in time and you see this history of kind of especially black women and queer women as well kind of trying to explore what this can look like what feeding can look like yeah in the nara smith chapter you write about i'm not sure if it's jet magazine or it's ebony yeah the sister magazine to jet yeah writing about um black women being able to move from cooking for you know often white families and other people's houses to being able to move into their own houses and cook for their own families and that was a kind of shift on the like larger kind of feminist movement of women like going into the office like it was almost like more liberation to be able to move from working in someone else's home to be cooking for your own family and the kinds of recipes that were being shared around that I thought that was really fascinating thank you yeah I mean I was that that was one of the joys of researching the book was getting to go into the archives in the libraries and find old magazines like this and there's one particular issue of Ebony from I believe 1948 although I'm so bad with dates But certainly shortly after it started, after the war, when, you know, domesticity was beginning to be reconfigured and a kind of black middle class was being kind of created in the States.

19:41And there's this feature that's like all about, you know, what would happen now for us if we could cook for our children, if our husbands could come home to a hot meal. and next to that feature there was like this wonderful photo spread of dorothy dandridge with her kids baking on a sunday and you know it's this moment of like great hope of yeah you know what happens when a black woman can maintain her own kitchen but then you know the context that this is set against is to be honest at that time a huge number of people were still working in white households in domestic work. So, you know, the magazine is the place where these dreams are held.

20:24That was a really like potent idea for me. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's so clear to me that you love history and research reading this book. And there were so many of my favorite moments that were kind of like reframing something we think of as contemporary in a historical context. Like you have a chapter about wellness drinks and CBD sodas and functional beverages. And then the fact that, you know, Coca-Cola original formula was cocaine so that you could get through the day. And that was like the original health drink. Like bring back the cocaine, Coca-Cola maybe. I mean, yeah, I found that, you know, obviously it's, I didn't want to fall into the kind of time is a flat circle thing, obviously.

21:06But there are so many through lines and I found these really useful for understanding where we're at in food culture. just like Pepsi started out as like a gut health beverage and like boy do we understand that today like we are living in the age of like Olipop and Poppy and all of these gut health things and you know another example of this in the book actually was Keith Lee you know most powerful restaurant influencer in America today and he's just a normal guy he doesn't have any particular of food training he just likes going around in his car and you know saying what he can about these places and I had been trying to understand that rise and so I'd been looking at other restaurant influencers on Instagram and TikTok and I found I wasn't getting to the bottom of why this had happened it just wasn't clicking for me and it didn't click until I went back in time and I looked at restaurant influences from literally like a century ago from like the 1930s going through to 1960s and it was people like Duncan Hines and Victor Hugo Green and both of those just like Keith Lee were normal guys who were writing these restaurant guides for you know different reasons and for different audiences but they were by far the most powerful drivers of people to restaurants to certain establishments at that point.

22:33And this was before we kind of settled on the Craig Claiborne or Ruth Reichel model of kind of quote unquote serious criticism. So to see that kind of come around, to leapfrog a couple of generations and come around again, I found fascinating. Yeah, I really enjoyed that chapter as well. I think that more people maybe can like look to the past. I feel like there's a lot of like old man yelling at a cloud, right, about that kind of thing. And you also kind of, you know, give a lot of credit to the kinds of restaurants that he's supporting and the way that he's, you know, changing these people's lives in some ways by like covering them, eating their food in his car and then sending hundreds, I don't know, thousands of people to go eat there.

23:16Definitely. I think there's a question for all critics and I don't think there's a right answer to this, but it's just a different methodology of who do you serve do you serve the newspaper that you write for do you serve consumers do you serve restaurants and the differences in allegiance there like really tell you something and I think one thing that is useful for Keith Lee and for people like him is that they don't serve a masthead they don't have to sell a paper although obviously they of personal brands to kind of uphold. And so in his case, he doesn't even see himself as a consumer champion.

23:53I think particularly he sees himself as someone who wants to support restaurants. And that really seems to guide everything that he does. He's a very fair man. And I think he's a very honest man. Yeah. Does he ever do like a real criticism? I feel like he mostly posts things that he is really excited about. He does sometimes criticize things, but you never get the sense that he takes real pleasure in doing so. So, you know, obviously his praise wouldn't really mean much if we didn't also know he was capable of critique. So it definitely is there, but you don't get the massive pan. You don't get the kind of big extraordinary, like, I'm going to drop a really terrible review tomorrow kind of thing.

24:34I feel like even in like the mainstream newspapers today, at least here in the US, we don't really get that very often anymore. But when it does happen it's kind of delightedly circled and passed around by people and discussed yeah i feel like the pandemic kind of took away that particular thing maybe it's gone before then but certainly in the uk that was the moment at which i think critics were like oh we actually can't get away with kind of dunking on an already fragile industry anymore yeah i agree and i think there's also been a kind of larger cultural like every time a musician gets critiqued by pitchfork or whoever They go on Twitter and talk about who people who don't make music shouldn't be able to critique it.

25:14Yeah, I think that's rubbish. Yeah. I mean, I think like also, you know, I certainly don't want like people who work at restaurants to lose their jobs, but also the cost of going to a restaurant and seeking it out and commuting there and getting the reservation. Like there's so much work that's put on the consumer compared to listening to an album, for example, that I do think sometimes you want to know, like, is this going to be worth it to me or not? Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, this idea that a critic also has to be a creator of that medium, I think is absurd. You know, when you go to a restaurant, you are not going to do a kind of management consultancy job on how the restaurant is run.

25:53You know, maybe that would require someone in the industry. But, you know, yeah, these are completely different things. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about ice cream and the ice cream chapter of the book, because I think to me that's really talking about how kind of advancements in technology made these kind of boom times with chocolate, I think, in like the 30s and then ice cream later on. Can you maybe speak to kind of how you saw that playing out in the category and where you think we're at in terms of ice cream developments today? yeah I mean I found this so interesting so kind of when you look back at the history of chocolate you find that so many of the chocolate bars that we know today were invented in kind of a 10 15 20 year span like in the 30s I think the aero was invented then I think maybe it was Kit Kat you know I'm really bad with details but in any case like go into a corner shop now a bodega now and you will see all of these things that like more or less haven't changed for a hundred years and I kind of was looking into ice cream as well especially kind of commercial kind of they call it impulse ice cream in the lingo in the industry which is just like anything that you can unwrap on the spot and just like eat then and there and the contents of a freezer cabinet really hasn't changed since the 1980s and what I noticed was you kind of have in the UK, these are the really popular ones anyway, the Cornetto invented in 1976.

27:23And then you've got the Magnum in 1990, 91. And that 15 year span produced the technology and the marketing that popularized so much of what we see today. And since then, we've just been riffing on different flavors of the same kind of formats, whether that's a twister, whether it's like a Mars bar ice cream, you name it. And I wanted to know what creates these boom times in any kind of products like this. How can it be the case that you have kind of this like Cambrian explosion of chocolate or ice cream or whatever? And, you know, the answer obviously comes down to like very complex things. But, you know, in the case of ice cream, it was honestly like the merging of multinational corporations it was you know that big and that kind of austere but that was what laid the groundwork for all of this there were various innovations that were happening in technology in different countries various kind of post-colonial as well ingredient pathways whether that was palm oil or coconut oil all of these things came together at the same time and you get this boom period and I think right now if there was a parallel today I would say that it is wellness drinks is one of the categories and also like crisps or chips I think I call them here definitely it's the number of flavors that you can get I think especially actually if I go to a kind of Chinese or Japanese or Korean supermarket like that is where the innovation is happening is in East Asia.

29:01The turtle chips that have like five layers with puffed air between them. They are innovating that, you know, this is like fantastic stuff. There's so much creativity to the extent that I would actually say that maybe even more than in restaurants right now, kind of retail is where like the huge amount of innovation is happening in food. I totally agree. I think the Cornetto, I believe, element that I really liked was how the, so, okay, the ice cream works because there's a thin layer of chocolate in the cone that It keeps it from getting soggy. And I believe the technology came from spraying finish on cars, right?

29:36Yeah, yeah. They used the same paint sprayers that they were using to spray, yeah, like to paint cars, essentially. I love that. I thought whoever came up with that in the factory that day must have felt like a genius that you get that thin layer of chocolate in between it. And also you were writing about how early ice cream bars were often like fruit flavored, kind of maybe they looked cool. They were for kids and then people wanted to figure out how to make ice cream for adults. I think as an adult today, it's really funny to think about like needing to sell ice cream to adults. But I think it was this kind of earlier era of consumer culture where adults kind of needed to be marketed to like the little treat economy maybe hadn't taken off in the same kind of way.

30:18Definitely. I mean, they called it at Walls at Unilever Project Renaissance, which I find like so delightful. It was this huge push from them to kind of get adults eating ice cream in this way. And, you know, that's why we are kind of still living with the benefits of that now. But yeah, it's weird. We live in the treat economy now where adults are, you know, including myself, I have to say, constantly infantilizing ourselves by being like, I need a little treat, please. And I think also tastes have become more childlike almost in some ways. at least here in New York, a lot of nice restaurants will have like kids menu food basically on the menu today or like la boo-boos as a concept have trickled down into the snacks.

31:03So maybe that's more of a stretch. But I think that like now people kind of want to regress a little bit. Yeah, it seems that way. I mean, I mean, some things about this I think are quite good. I think there's a reclaiming of the idea of fun in food. Well, actually, I say a reclaiming, but maybe it's kind of the first time that we have really, really done this, is sign up to the idea that food can be not just a kind of cultural signifier, not just nourishment, but actually just something that is kind of silly and kind of fun. I guess speaking of silly and fun, I'm wondering if you could explain the appeal of a Wimpy's to me, because this was a section of the book that felt very foreign.

31:44yeah wimpy i mean this is i think so wimpy in the uk is a really redundant kind of fast food chain and it at its height had kind of hundreds and hundreds of branches and now has like 50 and it's kind of a burger bar it's kind of a diner but it has like the mannerisms of a like British calf like they'll serve you like a teapot and tea and cup and saucer you get like full cutlery with a burger and it's just this wonderful place full of mistranslations of kind of American food and so it feels so out of touch it feels so old-fashioned but the fact is it is the place that introduced British people to burgers we did not have them before Wimpy opened in 1954 that was like the origin event and you know within the course of kind of 10 years and wimpy bringing this this idea of fast food it was everywhere and teenagers in the uk suddenly became fascinated with americana and with burgers and with kind of the other weird creations that wimpy developed and I like that what's the hot dog called oh god it's called a bendy in a bun and it's a hot dog where you kind of do these deep lacerations along one side so that you can bend it into a circle and then you deep fry it you put it in a round burger bun and like what goes in the middle that is a fantastic question and people don't think about this but you have to then put a slice of tomato in the middle to bulk it out which is like obviously just like so not what anyone needs is is a terrible idea but it's persisted on the menu for all of kind of what 70 years now um but yeah I find that place fascinating I think I'm very very interested in general in mistranslations of things as foods move across borders and across continents I I love that food has become more global but I'm also really interested in those points of slippage and confusion that happen when that is taking place.

33:58Yeah, I think it's so interesting. And I think also you write about the fact that Wimpy was actually an Indiana-based American fast food chain, but I've never heard of it. I don't know if it exists here anymore. I think it's kind of adopted the British accent over the years and become British. Yeah, I mean, it had almost no success in Indiana and in the Midwest. It was just like kind of a tiny little chain. And then they just bought the rights to name, I guess it was affordable too because it wasn't particularly successful. And then it died to death over here, but it lived on in the UK. I mean, the name is also like, it's not a very sexy name.