Quirky Food Hour! Vegetable Orchestra, Jell-O Art, Adult Baby Food [Corrected]

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So, go subscribe at Christopherkimble.substack.com, one more time, Christopherkimble.substack.com. I'm Christopherkimble and this is a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Today, we're re-releasing a selection of our, well, corkiest interviews. Think, food's made of carrots, baby food for adults, and a competition over jello molds. Their ones was a large, orange aspect, who's sagging was really quite drastic.

The diners all giggled as it juggled and jiggled, but that aspect proved rather elastic. Throughout the years, we've heard some of the strangest stories in all food.

Up first, Susanna Gartmire and Yurgen Barlicovic are two members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra.

Instead of flute's violence and drums, they prefer carrots, leeks, and tomatoes. This song is from the orchestra's album on your noise. Susanna and Yurgen, welcome to Milk Street. Hello, hello Chris. So, let's start the beginning.

“Could you explain the basic concept of what is a vegetable orchestra?”

Well, we restrict ourselves to playing music on instruments, built out of vegetables, and we do that since 26 years. Our concert date looks quite different to other orchestras or bands. In the morning, we get our vegetables, and then it takes a few hours to build all the instruments, because our aim is to build as much instruments of fresh vegetables as we can.

Afterwards, we have to do a soundtrack, and the soundtrack is also something that takes quite a long time, because we attend people on stage. Then we have our concert in the evening, and after the concert, we serve soup, but we don't serve the soup of the instruments. We cook soup during the whole process, during the day with fresh vegetables.

And the audience comes on stage, or just to the stage, and we serve the soup and talk with them,

and that's always a nice ending.

So, I read that you've created over 150 different types of instruments.

“So, just explain the league violin to people, because I think people have a hard time understanding that concept.”

Well, it might have happened that you have a suck full of leek, and they will wrap against each other, and they will make some squeaking sounds. But if you put a little bit of water on the leek, you can really play a very nice squeaking sound. It can get melody like a little bit.

You write or someone said, if we need a pumpkin that has to sound just right, they'll go back to the store room 20 times until they find the right one. So, part of the process is selecting just the right vegetable. Just the right leeks, just the right pumpkin, to get the sound you want. Yes, sure.

I mean, the pumpkin, for example, the best it sounds when it already starts to rot inside, a little bit, because then it has a little bit of a hole, and it has a perfect sound body for the bass sound. So, how do you, I looked at your website in Q&A section,

“and one of the questions was how long is it to prepare a vegetable instrument?”

You noted that it took zero minutes to prepare the tomato. What do you do with the tomato?

The tomato was our first instrument,

and there is one composition that is called automata. And we put two tomatoes together, how do you say that? We clap, like we clap our hands, but we have tomatoes in our eyes.

Nice piece.

So, are these mostly percussion-like sounds,

in other words, if you made a flute out of a carrot, for example, or a carrot-silophone, or a radish-based flute?

“Could you actually create individual notes that could be part of a composition?”

Well, relatively. You know, we can play very short melodies and things like that, and we can tune them. We can tune carrots, cellophones, for instance, pretty exactly.

It doesn't mean that they will sound like that when our later, because one of the problems with carrots is that they dry out, you know, while they dry out, they change the pitches. But when you build a carrot flute, for instance, you can play it more or less like a flute or a recorder,

and also other instruments have the possibility to play.

Little melodies and little tones.

We did this piece. It's half of the people are playing flute, and the other people are playing instruments that we call frogs. The sound the frogs make. Are the croaking of frogs?

Croaking. Yeah. So, it really depends on the vegetables that we have, which one happens to work best for the croaking sound. For example, it can be parsley,

rub together, it can make a very special sound, also quite deep. And this, like a frog. Would you say that what you do is inspired by any particular period of Austrian art or musical genre?

Yes, for sure. On one hand, most of the people in the orchestra, in one or the other way, come from artistic fields that dealt with avant-garde's approaches and approaches how experimental music is made,

and the history of experimental music.

“So, I think most of us would agree that one approach is”

concrete because that is something that's very obvious in our way that we just use more or less the idea of everyday sounds in our day, everyday objects, like vegetables and just to try to build music out of that. That's for sure one approach.

And I think another approach simply due to the fact that we just started around, in the end of the '90s, and in the end of the '90s, an abstract electronic music became very popular because laptops were affordable

and a lot of people started to produce very strange digital and electronic sounds. And that is also something that inspired us to try that, but not with digital means, but by organic means. And also since we're in Austria and living in Vienna,

all of us, we have this very big orchestral tradition here. And that's actually how we started. It was like a comment on a classical orchestra to come on stage with vegetables, and then it developed from there.

Do you ever sit there during our performance and think to yourself,

“I've always people who came here and paid to listen to us play vegetables?”

Is it just a wonderful feeling once in a while to think you live in a world where you can have a vegetable orchestra? Is it just something you do?

In my case, I'm always extremely happy

because I see that a lot of different people come to our concerts, young, old, and also a lot of people who have very different musical taste. Yes, there's a very nice moment that happens at very many concerts.

People can't imagine how it is because they read vegetable orchestra, sometimes they even think it's a comedy show. They come there with the wish to be entertained and to laugh.

They start to laugh when we play because it's going to be funny and then they realize, oh, it's not funny. They really mean it's serious. And that's a very nice moment

when people start to listen and also start to take it serious as music. Susanna, young, this was fabulous. I need to attend one of your concerts. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for having us. That's great. That was Susanna Gartmayer, and you're going to be on a co-vitch

Coming up a tour

through history's greatest food failures.

I'm Christopher Kimball, and you're listening to a special episode of Mystery Radio. Right now, we're revisiting my interview with Dr. Samuel West.

He's a psychologist and also curator of the Museum of Failure. Dr. West, welcome back to Milk Street. Thank you very much. You're on a few years ago

to discuss the disgusting food museum. Now we're talking about the Museum of Failure, which I think is equally interesting. So before we get to some food examples, I love products to fail

because of a complete lack of cultural understanding. Yeah.

“And I think the Harley Davidson Cologne,”

the Hot Road Cologne, who could possibly sit in a conference room and go the one thing that Harley Davidson stands for is Cologne. I mean, it's smelling good.

So that didn't go over to all. Well, that was an example of Hubris, corporate Hubris, and where Harley Davidson with their massive brand recognition said,

"Hey, let's start making all kinds of post- *** items." And the Cologne was one of those just slapped their logo on something. They had Barbie doll clothing. They had Christmas decorations.

They had all kinds of official Harley merch. And what happened was it alienated the bad boy, free rider, like aesthetic. Sure. So they made a lot of money on those merch

enterprises for sure, but they were short-lived. Well, it's totally into medical to the whole notion of running Harley. Exactly.

Okay, let's get to food. So there's some great examples of big companies trying to increase market share, by, of course, coming up with new products. One example is the McDonald's Arch to Lux Hamburger.

Yeah.

“So what problem was that product actually trying to solve?”

Well, McDonald's was struggling with their image of being only for kids, because they made a big deal out of, celebrate your birthday McDonald's. There's the Ronald McDonald clown,

and there's a happy meal and everything. So McDonald's, like, we got to attract some adults. So they launched the McDonald's Arch to Lux, which was a burger for adults. It starts with a full quarter pound of beef.

With fresh toppings, our chef sauce, on a bakery soft roll. McDonald's Arch to us. If it were any more grown-up, we'd need to check your ID.

It's McDonald's with a grown-up taste. When I see it today, I'm like, "Okay, there's nothing that's spectacular about the burger. It's just it was bigger and more expensive than their other burgers." And that was one of the defining characteristics

that it was a luxury burger that was more expensive. The problem was two-fold. One was that people associated McDonald's with cheap food. And going to McDonald's, by a luxury burger, just didn't strike anybody's interest.

That's one problem. The other problem was the advertising campaign, which was awful. Yeah, you see images of kids tasting this arch to Lux, which looks like a beautiful burger, by the way.

And they take it and they bite it and they go, "Yeah, go, yeah." And they start to make vomit faces and stuff, and they're like, "This is an adult but it's not a kid's burger." And there's something about seeing kids not like the burger, like, "Well, I don't want to try it either."

I mean, yeah, and they spent $300 million.

$300 million are market research. In 30 years ago. Crystal Pepsi, I don't even remember Crystal Pepsi. What? How old are you? Old enough to remember Crystal Pepsi.

Yeah. So what was the concept of Crystal Pepsi? Why was it intriguing? So, today it's sugar that's the bad guy. At the time there in the '90s, back then it was artificial colors that was the bad guy.

So anything that was clear, anything that was without added colors was considered pure and healthy. So Pepsi launched Crystal Pepsi, which is a clear soda. It looks like water and tastes like cola.

“Great idea at the time because that's what was in that was in fashion.”

And what happened was they launched it and it turned out pretty good. People actually thought it was interesting. Let me stop you. You wrote in the Super Bowl commercial

they sold afterwards $474 million.

That's good. So the launch, and this is really interesting. Some of these products have brilliant launches, but then die a horrible death. But it started that well, right?

So the short version of that story is that they initially did very well, but then people lost interest and actually Crystal Pepsi doesn't taste that great. That's one version of the story. The other one is far more interesting,

And Coke is like, "Oh, we want part of this action too."

So they created a Kamakaze product.

“Now, a Kamakaze product is a product that's created”

and launched to kill the competitor's product. So Coca-Cola launched Tab Clear. So Tab was their worst, like their trash brand. So they took that created Tab Clear, did a heavy launch and put it right beside Crystal Pepsi in every supermarket.

They went all out. And Tab Clear was intentionally horrible. So, so Han's Kamakaze. Yeah, so people would, like, "Oh, wow." In the Super Bowl, they got to look at this.

There's some clear sodas.

This is awesome. They'd buy the Pepsi and the Tab. They'd say, "Tabgo, yuck." And say, "Clear is a brilliant for me." Is it brilliant?

Not that brilliant. I mean, New Coke was idiotic. But Tab Clear's brilliant. Was absolutely brilliant, absolutely. Tab Clear, a new diet cola with a totally mysterious flavor.

More than just a clear cola. Tab Clear, taste and decide. So, here's one that I guess may not be true. But you mentioned, I just got to mention this one. Colgate beef lasagna.

Oh.

“Now, I think Colgate said they never have any record of doing this.”

But anyway, I just had to mention it. Alright, so I have some updates on this. Okay. So, the Colgate beef lasagna, I found it when we did the research for the museum in 2016-17. And I was like, "This is fascinating, but I couldn't find anything online."

And it was just too good of a, I mean, this is too interesting to not include it in the museum failure. And then it's in the museum and then we got a whole bunch of publicity and then Colgate. Their lawyers contacted me and said, "We have no recollection of a Colgate beef lasagna." And then a year ago, some investigative journalist contacted me and was doing a story on this. And, you know, Doug much deeper than I did and found that Colgate did indeed have kitchen on trays in the 19.

Now, I can't remember if it was 50s or 60s. But they actually tried and launched a series of kitchen on trays and it wasn't beef lasagna. It was crab meat and dehydrated chicken. Oh, my God. Even worse.

Yeah. So when Colgate saying when their lawyers, we have no recollection of a Colgate beef lasagna, he's right. But you didn't say anything about crab meat and speaking of really dumb extensions. Gerber singles for grownups. Gerber that the baby food, a big respected brand and they decided that maybe more than just babies would like to eat food out of a jar. So, tiny little portions.

They had a series of dinners for one in a jar. It's in like the same size or slightly larger than the baby food jars. But it's the same jars. They had beef or gone, they had mashed fish dish and it was baby food, but catered to adults.

“And the thing about it is the idea of it is just crazy, right?”

But then of also like the name of it. Like singles, like you're a single person. You're so not only are you single, you can't find a partner, but you also like to eat your dinner from jar. Sometimes, and I think recent years, I love the fact. People think that technology will sell a product when it actually makes the whole experience much more expensive and incredibly stupid and much worse.

A great example is the Juicero. Oh, yeah. 2016. So this device was a pretty big tabletop device. It's really heavy.

So what it is, you buy exclusively via subscription. You buy diced fruits and vegetables and different mixes, right? So it looks like a blood bag at the hospital. It's a bag. It does.

Yeah, so you get this scent home and inside the bag that's the chopped fruit, right, or vegetables. And then you take it and you put it into the machine and it scans the barcode and it's connected to Wi-Fi. And it won't press it if the best before it has passed.

And then what it does, and this is amazing, it's so powerful.

So it presses the juice and the minerals and vitamins and all the goodness out of the fruits and vegetables. Into your glass that's underneath the device. What is this?

I don't, I'm sorry, I don't know what that word means. It's a juicero. Okay, to find it for me. Juicero, the best juicero ever. What comes out of the juicero is so fresh that it shouldn't even be called juice.

“It should just be called, I don't know, squashed produce because that's what it is.”

Our founder Doug is straight up made of juice. Literally there's juice in my veins.

And that sounds amazing and people bought it.

There's a lot of people who bought it, so it was quite popular. And 700 bucks is quite a lot of money. And then you're still had to pay like $8 to $15 for each glass of juice, each packet. Until somebody on YouTube showed that you could just press the juice with your hand. I love that. Whoops, oops.

So finally, life-saver holes. I mean, I just like, I wish I had been in that meeting. People go like, well, they're these holes. What if we sold the holes? You know, it's like, the whole point of the life-saver

is sort of that mouth feel, right? With the circle, the life-saver shape. And the hole is just a little piece of candy. Yeah, it's just like you can buy donut holes at the donut shop. They thought, like, we'll do life-saver holes.

Hey, look who's making waves. Life-saver's holes. The huge taste of life-saver's candy in tiny, delicious little bites. Life-saver's holes can't get what you've been missing. And it wasn't a failure, sort of a marketing or a concept-wise,

but the plastic packaging itself. You couldn't store and dispense these life-saver holes in any feasible way. I think that might be just an excuse because it might have been a bad idea from this dark. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you had a pez dispenser, right?

Yeah. I mean, pez is a great example of the most horrific candy in the world. But the dispenser makes it cool. It was created to help people stop smoking. What?

Yeah, the original, the whole thing about the package is kind of like a cigarette. And the feeder thing, it only later did they make it into children. Like Mickey Mouse heads and whatever.

“Originally, it was like, you want to stop smoking and you have to fidget with something.”

So you open the pez and you get one of those and you don't have to smoke. Well, there's another category. Products that failed at one thing that became super successful. They failed at others by putting in Mickey Mouse head on top of it.

Dr. West, it's always a pleasure.

I love the museum of failure. I just love failure. But these are just wonderful examples. Thank you. Thank you.

That was Dr. Samuel West, curator of the museum of failure. The museum has been on tour since 2017 in various cities around the world. It's currently on display in Paris. You know, I love failure, especially when the people who failed, persevered and then went on to great success.

People such as Elvis who was told to go back to truck driving after singing Blue Moon of Kentucky at the Grand Old Opera. Henry Ford, who's first to automobile companies failed. And Oprah Winfrey, who was fired from an early job as a television news anchor.

So it makes me think that failure is essential for success.

“And I think this is especially true in the kitchen.”

Up next another quirky food moment. We meet the winner of the best jiggle award. I'm Christopher Kimball, and this is a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Our quirky food hour wouldn't be complete without this next story. Emily Wallace and Kate Medley are the creators behind a jello mold exhibit.

They affectionately dubbed O moldy night. Kate and Emily, welcome to Milk Street. We're glad to be here. Yeah, thanks so much. So both of you have worked now on this whole issue of

Jello on a history of gelatin. Maybe we could go back to the beginning. So gelatin was made from calves feed among other things. And it wasn't until about the mid-19th century that a real gelatin product was invented.

But they were still using the boiling the calf-sweet method well into the 1800s, right? That's our understanding. That it was sort of born out of this tradition of decadence and royalty because it did demand such time and expense.

And then it wasn't until the late 1800s and early 1900s

cough syrup maker named Pearl B. Wait

who made a mixture of gelatin and sugar and named that jello. So then what happens? So now we have Jello. It comes in a box. What did Americans do with that?

“I mean, I think a little bit of everything.”

In the cell, I think our experience was that congealed salads saw a huge rise as that, as a salad, as a vegetable dish. Can you explain that? Because I've seen the same thing in church

suppers and Vermont for years. How did Jello with celery and it or whatever it's got? How did that become a salad? You'd have to ask my mother or many, many mothers and grandmothers in the cell.

But growing up in Mississippi, I can count the times on one hand in the 80s. We had a green salad to proceed a fancy meal.

It was almost always a congealed salad.

And the one that my mother would always make was orange, and had canned mandarin argers in it and marshmallow isn't it? Yeah, but my mom still makes a mandarin orange salad, as what she calls it. Oh, moldy night, the Jello exhibition.

How it got started and talk about some of the sample molds. Yeah, just about a year ago,

“with another friend and colleague Kate Alaya,”

we put together an exhibit that was a pop-up art show of about 40 entries of molded foods. Some of them were very appealing, as you really want to eat them. Some of them were a little bit less appealing.

Just talk about the visuals here. Where were the ones you guys really liked a lot? Usually. When I loved a name and sort of visually it was called Bojello,

which it took its cue from a southern fried chicken chain,

Bojangles, and featured as the base sweet tea, and then fried chicken tenders inside, and then had piping of Bojangles mashed potatoes around the edge. This pretty inspired.

Do some of these really taste great, too? Yeah, I mean, they can't Iran the gamut. Some of them tasted terrible, but a lot of them tasted great. What was your favorite couple of your favorites?

I mean, the yellow gin fizz was awesome. The Lady Edison pork jelly, which visually somewhat resembled a brain. It was definitely a crowd favorite taste-wise. Yes, there was one that was shaped like a boot.

It was all made out of the crushed pineapple, and sort of other fruits, and it really sort of hardened back to what I grew up with.

“So what were one or two of the ones that looked better than they tasted?”

I have to go on the record and say this. I'm just kidding. Bojello was beautiful. I mean, it was one of my favorite molds, but it required a lot of gelatin

to make the chicken tenders stay upright, and though. So I had that sort of nasty bitter flavor. Yeah, and also a chicken tender, and a congealed salad is not that great.

As it turns out. Yeah. Who would fire? Right. All right.

So where are we headed with Jello these days? Our gelatin sails falling, or is the south still making lots of Jello salads and Vermont churches? It's a great question.

When we put together this art show, we didn't know if a dozen people would show up or 25. We were surprised to have about 500 people show up, which, you know, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, "Jello, come back."

So anything else you love, or interesting entries in the exhibit? There was one particularly interesting entry from a woman named Ginger Wag, who is a performance artist based in Carber and North Carolina.

And so she was the mold, and she draped her body in sheets of fruit leather, apple flavor, ifment research. And she stood on that pedestal all night, encouraging people to pull the sheets of fruit leather

off her body and taste them. I will say from an official capacity, we were lucky our very newly elected mayor of Durham, Steve Schul, agreed to be one of the judges for the event.

And it was so funny the night before Kate received a couple of emails from him where he had stayed up late writing lyrics about Jello. Did you have any of the lyrics? I brought one.

Okay. So this is from Mayor Steve Schul, who was one of three judges for what we called the shimmies. There once was a large orange aspect, who's sagging was really quite drastic.

The diners all giggled as it juggled and jiggled, but that aspect proved rather elastic.

of an elected official though, right?

It could be worse.

“It was like one of the first things he did in office.”

So these were the shimmie awards in what were the different categories and what one? The best in show was called the Crown Molding. We had the best jiggle. The judges went around and kind of poked each mold.

It was called the back that aspect award. And that went to Debbie Moose,

who created what she called the wobbly white house.

It was a very unstable white house made of gelatin. We had the "My Jelly of Americans" choice award. And that went to a musician, a folklorist, Sarah Bell, who recreated affiliate drowning out of aspect. Wow.

It was crazy ahead of all these delicate herbs and flowers around it. Really stunning. I mean, I saw a woman cry by it. Not kidding.

No, no, no, no, no, no. One of the people who came to the awards was actually crying next to us. She teared up, saw what happened.

“So this is like the world's nightmare buffet, right?”

Because once you start cutting into these things, things got messy pretty quickly. I mean, it probably was kind of a mess by the time the night was over. They had to have the carpets professionally. Yes, and next time is going to say.

We haven't been invited back yet, but we're holding out, too. Well, are the shimmies now going to be an annual event? I think it's fabulous. There's been a lot of requests for that. There seems to be a lot of interest in seeing the shimmies go down again.

But I will say part of the magic of this whole event,

“Chris, was conjuring it up and not really knowing what to expect from.”

And all these people really taking a chance on this pretty wacky concept and really over-delivering it every turn was pretty magical. Okay, and Emily, thank you. Oh, moldy night, the Jello exhibition was a huge success. And one person actually cried. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us.

That was Emily Wallace, and came to the layhouse of the Jello exhibit. Oh, moldy night in Durham, North Carolina. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode. To hear more than 300 episodes of our show, please go to milkstreetradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

And please be sure to come back on Friday, May 8th for this week's brand new episode. You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimmel's Milkstreet on Instagram at 177 Milkstreet.

We'll be back later this week with more food stories and thanks as always for listening.

Christopher Kimmel's Milkstreet radio is produced by Milkstreet in association with GPH. Co-founder Melissa Baldino, executive producer, Annie Sensibal. Senior editor, Melissa Allison. Senior producer, Sarah Clap. Producer, Caroline Davis, assistant producer, Maddie Adosco. Additional editing by Sydney Lewis.

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