Stop Hating Processed Foods? The Case for Big Ag

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“How do we create a food system that feeds the world and keeps us healthy?”

Well, for the last few years, all we've heard is that process foods are the problem. But, I guess today, say that process foods may actually be the answer. Rather than like shunning all of this industrial process food, and saying that it's all evil, you've got to go start from scratch, throw it all out. We want to say, actually, are there policy levers to improve processed food? If there are, it seems to us in America, that's a much better way to go.

Can industrial farming save us? That's coming up later in the show.

But first, we'll learn about the hidden cookies of Italy with cookbook author Domenica Marquette.

Domenica, welcome to Milk Street. Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me. So, the first thing that struck me is that Italian cookies have a past. They have a history. They have cultural references. They're regional. Whereas American cookies tend to be something you just eat.

“They don't really have much of a story. Is that right?”

Yes, I mean, I'm sure there are American cookies that have a story, but in Italy, this is the case for the majority of cookies.

And it is one of the reasons I fell down this rabbit hole and decided to pursue the book,

because I was chasing down a cookie in Legori, a butter cookie that I really enjoyed. And being the reporter that I am, I drove up to the town, where this cookie, the kind of it's Dorilla originated. And I found out that it dated to the 15th century, and there's a festival around it in the town. There are at least eight bakeries that are devoted to producing this cookie. And then the more I looked into things, the more I learned that there are many towns across Italy.

Especially there's a swath of the north from Legoria through Piedmont and Lombardy and onto the Veneto, where there are so many towns that are associated with a cookie or cookies associated with towns. And I really wanted to find out their stories. So let's get to some of the cookies with the stories. So the eyes of St. Lucy, pretty brutal beginnings.

You want to just talk about that? Yeah, so these are cookies that are baked to celebrate the festival of Luchia. So Oki di Santa Luchia means the eyes of St. Lucy. And so her story is rather gruesome.

“She was, I think, a fourth century saint, and one of the first early Christian martyrs,”

according to some versions of her story during the Diocletian persecutions. She had her eyes gouged out as punishment for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. Another version holds that she gouged out her own eyes to avoid being distracted from her devotion to her faith by would be suitors. At any rate, the cookies are maybe the size of a quarter. They're these very small little Tarali little rings. And the cookie is a very old fashioned dough. There's no sugar in it, just olive oil, wine, flower, and aniseid.

And a little touch of cinnamon. Why would someone add wine to dough? Is this wine that's been simmered down into a thicker syrup? Or what's the point of adding wine to dough? I really love wine cookies, rather than milk, which has fat in it, wine contributes to aniseid crispiness. I'm thinking of the Chamballena Divino, which are very popular.

And they're just great crunchy cookies that are good for dipping in more wine.

But it's just, I think, probably the fact that wine is produced in these regions.

“And so if you're celebrating the harvest or whatever, you kind of use what you have on you.”

Brute ma buane, ugly but good. What are those? You know, their origins are a little bit murky. But what I love about these cookies is the interesting technique used to make them, which is you make this bilaway meringue with with egg whites and sugar. Then you transfer it to a saucepan and you cook it down until it's this gooey,

thready, sticky mixture.

And you think I've completely ruined these.

I don't know what I've done, but you press on. And what you end up with is these beautiful sort of, they're not ugly. Oh, it's going to say what? I find they're beautiful. They're white, they call Brutee. Because they're sort of bumpy, they've got bumps from the nuts, they've got cracks in them.

But they also have this lovely sheen and this kind of carapace and their crunchy on the outside. And a little bit airy and tender on the inside. And they have this lovely fragrance and spice to them. Makes them kind of be giling. I really love those. Essentially, you say this is in a renaissance spices, ancient grains, olive oil, wine, almonds.

“So what would be a good example, the Spiced Honey Doe?”

Yeah, the Pupazifrasketana definitely, an interesting cookie. This is from another town in the Castelliromani outside of Rome from Fraskati, which is better known for its wine. This is a cookie shaped as a booksum woman. But her most distinctive feature is that she's got three breasts.

So she is meant to symbolize women called Mamane, who traditionally, they would watch over babies while the mothers went to work in the vineyards, harvesting grapes in the fall. And so the three breasts are supposed to symbolize, well, obviously, two for milk and the third one was for wine because the babies were allegedly given little nips of wine with milk to keep them sleepy while their mothers worked. That has to be the best piece of quasi-roman mythology of all time. Yeah, sure. Two milk, one for wine.

But I will tell you they are not very good, and they're not really meant to be, they're actually, they give them to babies for teething. I rejiggered the recipe because I wanted to make them edible and pleasant. So it's a very basic dough with honey and place of sugar, extra virgin olive oil, all purpose flour, and then some spices.

“This is a rather indelic equation, but how do you know she has three breasts?”

Oh, yeah, the cookie has three little balls of dough, right on her chest, yes. You're right there, prominent. My mother used to cover the ones she made with a little strip of dough, so they looked like they had a little boostier on. And I have further made them a little more, I don't know, anatomical by sticking little cloves in them, so that's optional. So you had mentioned many of these little bakeries, or sometimes hundreds of years old, three or four generations or more have been making the cookies and other things there.

Is that changing now or can you still go to small towns and find those little bakeries that have been around forever? You can really still go to small towns and find these bakeries, and that was one of the things that I found so surprising. I went to Kassalim Monferato as a name of the town, and the cookies are crunchy butter cookies that are kind of you shaped. I found the bakery where the cookies were invented in the late 1800s by a man named Dominical Rossi. And the story behind these cookies is he created them one night on the fly to serve his friends who had stopped by his cafe.

And their u-shape is supposed to refer to either as an homage or a spoof of the big bushy moustaches of unberto the first, who was king of the recently unified Italy.

And when I went there, I expected to see this big kind of state of the art operation. It's this little jewel of a shop with darkwood paneling and the current owner whose grandparents bought the bakery back in 1953.

And one of them was standing over a baking sheet of these one by one, turning them into this moustache shape you by hand.

And I just couldn't believe that they were still doing this manually. So to me one of the most beautiful things about this book was I realized how much the human touch is still so important to these cookies and so much a part of the cookie baking tradition in Italy. Dominical, thank you so much. I'm craving to go back to Italy and visit some of the places you've talked about in your book. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you. That was Dominica Marquetti, author of Italian Cookies. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host Sarah Malton. Sarah is of course the star of Sarah's weeknight meals on public television, also author of Home Cooking 101. So Chris, before we take a call, I recently learned something that was fascinating.

I took a wine tasting class and the woman who ran the class had like eight different little containers with different things to smell aroma. So you could see if you found that aroma in the wines we were tasting. But she started the whole class by saying, our sense of smell is one of our strongest and best senses that we have.

“So she asked us, what is the creature on the earth that has the strongest sense of smell?”

Do you know? Is there a money prize cash prize here? Who knows? Who knows? A bottle of lemon cello just for you?

No, just joking. Well, I do know that like a bloodhound or whatever. Their sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than ours or something like that. So it's probably the wrong answer. It's going to be something like, you know, some three cell animal that lives in the ocean or something.

But I would say a dog of some kind. Dog is two, one, and you were getting there with something that lives in the ocean. Shark can smell a teaspoon of blood to miles away. And then number three, best sense of smell is us humans. And so essentially what she was saying is you could end up at the end of your life, deaf dumb and blind.

But you will still have your sense of smell.

I think the problem is in the scientists I've talked to have said that the problem is not smelling.

The problem is recognizing odors because we have so many people have a terrible time recognizing. I've had people actually with cinnamon and nutmeg on stage blindfolded with it. And they can't tell you what it is. I get that.

“And so I think humans, that's why if you do a lot of tastings over time, you get better at it because you need practice.”

I think we're terrible identifying odors, maybe we're good at sensing them. You have to connect it in your brain with what it is. The problem is as we grow, we smell way too many things, so it all gets confused. But I mean, essentially what she was saying is at least you will have that. And sometimes some of it, you know, like back to the medallence and proves, does make an impression.

And it brings back all sorts of memories in a very interesting way. I don't know, I love the whole conversation. The wine tasting itself, yeah, was interesting. But that whole thing about you'll still have your sense of smell. I thought was pretty cool.

So that's how I look forward to. I'm going to be blind. I can't hear. I can't walk. But I can still smell coffee in the morning.

Hey, that's something. That's on an upbeat note. Let's take a call. Yeah. Welcome to Mills Street, who's calling?

“This is Steven from Get a Massachusetts.”

How are you? I'm well. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah, pleasure. Pleasure.

Can we help you? So I come from Italian American family. We do the tomatoes every summer and I finally convince my dad to make our own wine. We get the wine from the same place we get the tomatoes. And there's a big debate because some of the old school guys get the grapes and crush them themselves.

But other guys get just the juice. So they crush it on site in California. Put it in six gallon food safe buckets. And then we buy the bucket. So wondering if there's actually a qualitative difference.

And is the difference related to sulfite, which I never really understood.

But think it gives me a headache. But I'm not sure exactly. I have those two related questions. Well, when you crush grape, you know, the juice sits on the skins and you get all sorts of wonderful things happening. So just the juice, depending on how they got the juice,

probably is going to give you a thinner wine with less body and interest. I would think. But it would depend on the process sulfites are just there to make sure that the wine doesn't spoil

And naturally speaking, the yeast and the wine does produce sulfur dioxide.

So there's always going to be some there.

But it's a safety issue. You don't want it to go bad. I agree with you. However, I remember years and years and years ago went to Paris and had a long lunch with a great deal of red wine. And normally more than a glass or two would give me a real headache.

And I had no bad effects whatsoever. And I found that to be true. I don't know what the answer is, but there is a difference. One of the reasons why I wanted to make our own wine is because I have the same experience when I go to Italy or Greece. Especially if you get like the house wine.

I don't know if it's less alcoholic, but it has less of that bite than the bottle of stuff. And it never seems to give me a headache. I mean, part of it could be done in Italy and Greece. So the stress is much lower, but that could be good. Something about the location.

Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can buy natural wines, right?

“You have to kind of get used to them because I think they tend to not have the depth sometimes of not natural ones.”

But it also depends how the grapes are grown and what they're putting on the fields and everything else that may also affect the chemicals used in growing the grapes. But I agree with you, I have much less of a bad effect when I'm in Europe. It's true. Well, we made it back in October. So I will admit when I sit in it, I do take a taste.

And it does taste pretty good. It tastes more similar to the kind of house, you know, Trapped to Rea stuff that I'm used to in Italy. I just want to say in support of what you're doing. This idea of connoisseurs ship around wine and spending all this money.

I mean, that's fine, but most people in the world and you're a drink relatively inexpensive wines and they're quite good. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. And the fact that you guys did it yourselves is phenomenal. So good for you. Serity of any.

No, I don't have much.

I've never made wine and, you know, maybe you need to plan a trip to Italy to go to a winery and see if you could spend like a week there and see what they do.

That's a perfect idea. I do have one one recommendation though, a neighbor of mine used to make dandelion wine. So if you ever get the urge to make dandelion wine, please don't. Because I've never had it. What's it taste like?

Oh my god. It's almost like a lacquer. It's very sweet. Yeah. And it will give you the worst hangover.

Well, tie an alcohol. I'm sure. It's just awful. Yeah. But anyway.

“Sounds like it sounds like your way ahead of it.”

Like a living cell. Yeah, like lemon cello. Could someone, okay, now I'm going to irritate everybody. Okay. Don't worry.

I'm all free. Everyone in Malfi is going to have me. I don't get lemon cello. I just don't want me to do it. You don't get any sweet.

Well, it drinks. It's a surpy sweet. It's very sweet. Yeah. I mean, do you like it?

Yeah, I gave it. I helped me out here. I like the idea of it. Me too. It does give you a good headache.

Oh, yeah. You were already on the way to a headache. Yeah. It'll get you the finish line. Hi and alcohol.

Anyway, I say go to Kianti and learn from them. That sounds perfect. Yeah.

“And how about cooking with the homemade stuff?”

Why not? I need different stuff. No. I don't see any different stuff.

Just be sure to always cook it down.

Like 80% of it. Okay. Get rid of the raw alcohol. Yeah. Just make sure you do that.

All right. Excellent. I love the show. And I listen every week. So I really appreciate taking my call.

Pleasure. Thank you. That was a fun question. Take care. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.

This is Milk Street Radio. If you have a cooking question, please ring us any time. 855-426-9843 or email us at [email protected]. Welcome to Milk Street Who's Calling. Calling Griffin.

Hi. Where are you calling from? I'm calling from Fort Myers, Florida. How can we help you? My question is about Keesh.

I can never seem to get a reliable Keesh recipe. So I was hoping if you could talk. Make sure everything from, you know, should I be using Glass Keesh pan to, you know, just cook time and stuff. Well, I'll get started. And Chris will have lots to add.

I would go with an all-butter crust. Basic pie dough with a high proportion of butter. And I would blind bake it. It had a time so that it doesn't get soggy. Make it.

Let it rest. Roll it out. Put it in the pie plate. Say a nine inch pie plate. I would go with glass.

Docket, meaning, prick it all over with a fork. Line it with pie weights. Put it in. Oh, say a three 75 degree oven. You know, for about 15 or so minutes until it's opaque.

And then take it out and let it cool somewhat. And then meanwhile beat up your eggs. I'd say about three to four eggs to want to have cups of liquid. Do a mixture of milk and heavy cream, which is a nice mix. Make sure it's well seasoned.

Also, it's a good idea to brush the bottom of the cooked crust with something to seal it a bit.

Dish on mustard, which sort of protects it from getting soggy. Add your filling, bake it at a moderate oven 350. And take it out when it's pretty firm around the edges, but a little jiggly in the middle. And then whatever else you add, make sure it's cooked like so.

Cooked bacon, cooked vegetables. Because you don't want additional water going in there. Now, let's see what Chris has to add. Oh boy, I have a few modifications. In the filling, I agree with Sarah, but it cremped fresh.

I've now used an ice cream. I use it in pancakes. I used it in cheesecake.

I would add about a third of the liquid as cremped fresh,

which gives you a tang, but also gives you a slightly lighter texture, which is really great. And bake it until the center two inches should still wobble. So you want to under bake it. And then take it out and put it on a rack and let it cool.

“One last thing you can do, if you want to be a little more adventurous”

in the way they probably do it in France, is they don't use a pie plate. They use a circular piece of metal with no bottom to it. And you can bake it that way. And you get a higher side to it and a thicker deeper filling. It's a little more authentic.

Is there anything else you have a problem with? I think it's also just the ratios. There's stuff in my putting in. Like if I'm adding cheese or ham. I do two whole eggs.

Maybe plus a yolk per cup of liquid. That's Julia Child's formula. It's pretty much true of any custard. And then as I said switch out some of the dairy for cremped fresh. I don't know if you're going to have four cups of liquid maybe.

I put in three quarters cup of cheese, something like that. Yeah, that sounds good. One thing you want to avoid in service, right? I would not put broccoli in it or anything else that had liquid in it. I keep it to cheese, bacon, things like that that are not going to mess up the custard.

Or make sure it's pre-cooked. I don't want vegetables in my cage. Well, we didn't ask Conan. I love broccoli now. Oh, Lord.

Conan, that's just fine. Just make sure that you ranch it ahead of time. Yeah, it's fine. Yes, it's fine. Just make some broccoli in service.

Sorry. That's very good. I like going to agree with Chris Brown.

Because she's always like, oh my god, broccoli again.

Probably is good for you. So you just keep doing you Conan. And it tastes good. Yeah, okay. Thanks so much, hopefully that's helpful.

Yeah, that's good. Alright, I appreciate it. Thank you. Bye bye. You're listening to Milk Street Radio, up next an ultra-processed food fight.

This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. The question of how to fix our food system is complex.

“What's the best way to provide safe healthy food for all?”

And at a good price. These are the questions. My next two guests are going to try to answer. Gabriel Rosenberg and Yann Duke of Itch are authors of the book feed the people. Why industrial food is good and how to make it even better.

Yann and Gabriel, welcome to Milk Street. Hi, Chris. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for having us. So we all agree. Modern agriculture has fed the world.

I remember back in the sixties. There were those books about by the end of the century. Millions of people would be starving. Modern agriculture actually solved that problem. Which is no small thing.

But let's get underneath that. So the first point you make is agribusiness is producing food better than what we had in the 19th century. So let's talk about that. Yeah, so absolutely. I guess we would start by saying that there are a number of incredibly important technical advances over the 19th century.

First and foremost, the ability to use synthetic fertilizers, better pesticides and herbicides, incredible improvements in seed technology.

But there are still major problems. A lot of the productivity of that system unfortunately goes to things that are not particularly good for humans or humanity or the planet writ large.

“So the big question for everyone is like, how do we take that extraordinary productivity and make sure that it goes the right things?”

Rather than to producing animal feed for factory farms, rather than producing ethanol. Why aren't we able to incentivize people to produce fresh vegetables to produce food that actually goes towards feeding people? And so what we want to do instead is shift the incentive structure overall, turning down in some senses the government incentives that we offer. And also closing a lot of regulatory loopholes that make that form of agriculture so profitable and so reliably profitable.

Given the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of money flowing in to Congress, do you actually think that that is something that could actually get passed by a Congress? Because my time in those offices years ago would, I mean, I won't mention his name, but he was a senator from one of the big ag states. And he was laughing so hard tears came down his face when I was talking about, you know, changing how modern agriculture works.

And he, you know, he just made a clear look, this is locked in, like, forget it is just not never going to happen.

So how do you get that change? Yeah, you know, so I mean, it's a great point, Chris, and I don't want to soft-pell you on any of this. But one of the things that I know about the American subsidy regime is that it has changed substantively over its rough century of existence. And different commodities have fallen in and out of that subsidy regime. And different farmers have supported and at other times turned around and opposed the subsidy regimes.

So when a senator or somebody else turns around and says, Oh, this is locked in, you can never change it. I say that that's a person who probably has a political interest in not making a stink about a real problem.

“No, I can jump in here. I think if you're looking for a particular example of very recent laws that do change how large-scale agricultural operates, you can look no further than the passage of Prop 12 in California,”

which was a ballot initiative on animal treatment, that quite radically changes the conditions under which animals are to be raised on factory farms.

If prior to the passage of Prop 12, you had asked the farm state politician, is there any way we're going to get sows out of gestation crates on factory farmers? Given that this is the status quo way we treat animals in the system, they would have say, No, there's just so much lock in and there's very little political will in Washington, or even at the state level to change these things. And yet when these questions are put in ballot initiative form two voters, as they were in California, voters overwhelmingly vote in favor of laws that, for instance, support better animal treatment.

And so clearly there is potential through different paths in very recent history for large-scale legislative change. So in addition to your argument for policy changes, it means to improve our food system, you also argue in favor of process foods. You say research has shown that many ultra-process foods, such as yogurt, whole-grained bread, are ready to eat plant-based burgers, are not linked to worse health outcomes and may be beneficial.

“So are you seriously in favor of or think ultra-process foods are okay or is this on a case-by-case basis?”

The short version of the answer is that this is on a case-by-case basis.

But what we take issue with is the term ultra-processed foods as a schema for adjudicating the healthfulness of foods. So the term UPS comes from a schema created in 2009 by a series of public health scholars in Brazil called Nova4, which are foods that are created using industrial processes or ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen. And this term has taken off and become a sort of synonym for bad or unhealthful. But it's what is processed and not how much it is processed or whether it is processed that matters the most.

So Nova4 creates this huge drag net that is designed to root out, you know, Oreos and soda and Doritos, but that has all this by-catch, such as for instance plant-based burgers and pre-prepared frozen meals and baby formula. It's quite simply a category that's too broad to be useful. Chris, can I give you a very good example of this? Okay, so I am a listener to your podcast and it couldn't have been more than a couple of weeks ago.

That I heard in episode where a caller was asking you how to improve the texture of their homemade ice cream. And what did you tell them? You said to add alcohol.

“Well, the first thing I said was use cream fresh, which is the best way. Okay, but it's so, but adding alcohol, right?”

So of course, a spirit is a Nova4 UPS, the highest level of processing. It is an ultra processed food. Now, you gave excellent advice that people should probably follow. You may not have even known that it was a UPS. What we're trying to sort of illustrate here is that UPS is a really, really big catch-all that's used as a scare-mongering term. And we're in a little bit of a moral panic around food right now. We're seeing it both from the left and the right.

If we make massive institutional changes around this overly broad category, we're going to catch not just the bad stuff that we need to discourage people for meeting,

but also the good stuff that's perfectly safe, that's perfectly nutritious. Here's why I think that sounds good, but I'm not sure if it's going to work.

“I think two things. First of all, to make money in the food business, processing is the golden key, right?”

I'd rather be selling corn flakes than corn. There's better margins, et cetera. Number two, and this seems to me the real problem we haven't talked about yet, is consumers like this stuff.

So the problem is it's not about regulating the industry as much as it is getting people to making healthier choices.

The point is the villain in this story is not the processing or the level of processing.

“The point in the story is that there are business interests who are interested in getting people eating more sugar and more fat and more red meat and more salt.”

And that's true whether we have ultra processing or not and collapsing all foods that undergo industrial processing into one category that we demonize does not actually move us forward in addressing nutritional deficiencies.

I agree with you that agribusiness has done a lot of good.

I agree with you that it needs regulation to have it focus on healthier products. I agree with that. I agree with you that not all processed foods are terrible. I agree with that too. But the current health crisis in America is almost out of control. And that is primarily because of the availability of really bad choices in your menu. However, you want to find bad choice. So what is the actual best way to get people to eat more nutritious diets? Now you note that people like fast food, they like food that's convenient and they want food that's affordable.

Our position is this that if you set yourself up by saying look folks, you've got to throw all of that stuff away and you've got to grow your own food and you've got to cook it all from scratch. That is literally the position of Wendell Berry and Michael Ballard, right? Okay. And Alice Waters, our perspective is that you're much better served by improving the average fast food meal and making it more nutritious. Rather than like shunning all of this industrial process food and saying that it's all evil, it's all bad, you've got to start from scratch, throw it all out. We want to say actually are their policy lovers to improving processed food.

It seems to us in America that's a much better way to go. That's a good point. So now companies try to remain profitable without using trans fats and most do. If you put eating into a larger life context, you know, the omnivores dilemma would be, you know, he's one of those guys, but he talks about food as being more than just eating.

“Don't you think that actually elevates the decisions about what to eat in a way that makes it slightly more possible you can inspire people to think differently about food choices or not?”

We definitely don't think that eating is just about eating. Something that ties us in with other people preparing food for other people is an active love. We recognize that. We also recognize, of course, the degree to which people are interested in doing that and have like the time and the money to do that is quite variable. We're pluralists about this. So I think that the point would be that the Wendell Berry's in the Michael Collins went too far in one direction, which is that they said that there's only one way to take pleasure and food.

At the end of the day, I think we have to take food more seriously as part of our culture, and I think your approach to some extent is top down, which is part of the solution. I don't disagree. And the bottom up is food's important. Food's important to me. It's important to my family. It's important to my community. It's important to my health. It's very important to my happiness and therefore I want to eat better. Like in Portland main in the summer, they have a great market and they have lots of farms and sure, not everybody in Portland main shops there, but it is part of the food system in Portland main.

Young Gabriel, thank you so much. I think we agreed on more things than we disagreed on, but I certainly take most of your points and thank you. Yeah, no, we really appreciate the conversation and the challenges. That was John Duke of Itch and Gabriel Rosenberg authors of feed the people while industrial food is good and how to make it even better. You know, I grew up at a small family farm, at least in summers. We raised pigs in Angus. I also milk cows and shoveled a lot of manure. Good life training.

World towns were built on family farms. Today with many farms abandoned, weeds are overtaking silos, barns are collapsing, and the lifeblood of our communities is weakening.

Yeah, industrial farming feeds the world without it millions would starve, and yes again, making process foods healthier is a worthy enterprise. Years ago, a Vermont neighbor reclaimed an old dairy farm to grow sweet potatoes. He repaired the farmhouse, the outbuildings, and most of all he helped rebuild the community. His big agnesisary are processed foods here to stay. Sure, the local farms provide the ties that bind the strong sinews of a healthy community.

You're listening to Milk Street radio coming up restaurant critics tell all.

On Christopher Kimmel, you're listening to Milk Street radio. Now it's time to hear from to food critics. We invited Elazar Sontag and Lindsey C. Green to have a go about the state of food criticism in America. Elazar is the food critic at the Washington Post and Lindsey is the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press.

“Hey Elazar. Hi, Lindsey. I'm so happy we get to talk today. I'm so excited. So let's talk about our jobs. What is the role of a critic?”

What does it look like for you? What does it mean for you?

So my job is that I'm the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press. So that's sort of a hybrid role. I'm a restaurant critic, but I also cover the dining scene overall. So I have this sort of broad preview over Detroit's food scene. I am the first black restaurant critic here in Detroit. And so it really does mean a lot to be able to say that my experiences up to this point have kind of given me an opportunity to represent our reader in a way that they've not been able to sort of see themselves before.

“But what would you say? What do you think criticism is for you?”

I mean, it's a very traditional critics role and, you know, my predecessor did it for almost 26 years. And so there are really clear notions, not just within the Washington Post, but readers in this region also have a really really particular idea of like what restaurant criticism looks like here. And part of I think how I kind of understand criticism is people understanding that I'm just one voice and giving people all of the information in the context to decide whether I'm the voice that they want to listen to.

Right, like, I'm not for everybody, but what I'm trying to do since I moved here because I'm also new to DC is I'm really writing about restaurants as a newcomer and I'm trying to offer perspective of what it's like to see DC for the first time. And of course, you know, the the big one is telling people where to eat dinner and and that has been. There's something gratifying about that always being what I come back to, you know, I might have a really big idea about the story I want to tell and it always has to simmer back down to.

“Okay, but what I tell someone to go here. When I think about recommending a restaurant so much of the conversation, especially occasion, I don't want to make it seem as though Detroiters are not going out to eat, but there is.”

The culture is just a little different and maybe unique to sort of Midwest, but a lot of our restaurants aren't open until Wednesday or Thursday, you know, there is a Sunday kind of business now. I'm wondering if that's different for you. No, I'm wondering if it's like this might be a place that people are eating in this restaurant for dinner, you know, on a Wednesday or whatever. I love that question. I mean, one of the things that I'm trying to reimagine is what can feel special.

It's not fancy. It's, you know, very casual service. It's very affordable and, you know, not but and I think that that is a special place and if it is a fine dining restaurant, I'm going to tell you it's a fine dining restaurant.

Not letting that be the only criteria for whether a meal is special.

“I think I could probably count on one hand how many fine dining restaurants there are in Detroit. So I think keeping that in mind that a restaurant can be special and not even be, you know, fine dining is a nice way to frame it.”

You know, DC is kind of on the other end of this spectrum. There's a lot of Michelin, a lot of Michelin fervor. There's a real kind of steakhouse culture here, and that's great. I really just want to start to build for people my portrait of the city. I'm going to a low key tofu house for a special occasion because that feels special to me.

If that doesn't feel special to you, that's okay. You can go to a steakhouse that I reviewed.

“That's actually a great point because I think that there's this perception that critics are supposed to be this neutral palette that is just here to tell me what's great and tell me what's not but we do have preferences.”

I think you saying that people are learning who you are and how you are and what your what your preferences. I don't know for some reason that's hating me that I don't know if I've given myself that space to say, "Hey, I prefer, you know, hearty Caribbean cuisines. You can be a plate of rice and plantains and oxal, all the time, anytime." I don't know if I've given myself the latitude to say that because I don't want to pigeonhole myself or I don't want people to think, "Well, that's her preference, so that means she's not going to like this French restaurant."

And I would be curious if our predecessors had those same hesitations. Probably not.

“Related to this is sort of the big thing that I think readers think about when they think about restaurant critics, which is anonymity.”

I think when people think of us, they think of, you know, this mysterious looming figure with a, you know, sort of a shadowy mask. Is that you? Because it's not me. It's never been me. I didn't come into this role anonymous at all, so not my experience. What has, what has that been like? Well, it's been interesting because I have found that where I thought that I would be recognized and I thought that I, you know, had this appearance and be like, "Oh, man, I'd have to figure out a way to kind of, you know, hide my big hair."

You know, I wear these big glasses and it's like, "I have all of these distinctions that I think people would say oh, there she is." You know, I have not, I just haven't. And, you know, I mentioned this at the start. My role is a hybrid role, so I have this public facing part of my job, and I'm finding that, yeah, it's shops that I've presented awards to, that I've had interviews with, that I've spent time with, and what I'm in their restaurants. It's like, "Hi, my name is Lindsay." So it's a really interesting thing that I, yeah, I don't have to be anonymous, but somehow I'm still able to fade into the background. How about you?

I mean, I ask in part because I think you've written about this, yeah, quite eloquently, and, you know, to actually give people a sense of what it's like to be you, but also how restaurants notice and don't notice different people and how standards of hospitality differ. I mean, am I projecting, meaning it feels like you've made real work of that? No, you're 100% right, yeah, it is something that I wrote about it. I was able to use, you know, Ruth Reichel's example where she would dress up and all of these costumes and these disguises and where the wigs, and it was, you know, in part to disguise herself, but also it was to say, "Yeah, how would you treat an older woman, how would you treat, you know, my mom?"

And I lived that experience and continued to live that experience without having to do all of the pump and circumstance. But it is the reality and it's the reality for a lot of our readers. I got so many readers from that story who had a similar experience, you know, in their older age. They were like, "You have no idea how much we sort of just fade into the background once we hit like 65. No one holds doors for us anymore. We just don't exist." And so it was interesting to see also just the different communities that do experiences.

You know, I'm having the experience similar to you that there are two sides to the coin. And so one is, I go to restaurants using aliases, I pay using credit cards that have alternate names.

But then we are also living in an age where the best way to really have impact is also to splash yourself across social media. And so that's a very interesting balance. I think some people, when I announced to the readers that I wasn't going to be anonymous, there were people who just thought, well that's the end of restaurant criticism at the post then. The truth is anonymity died with social media, it died with digital reservation platforms, but it's been very interesting to sort of adjust my dining experience based on knowing that the experience sometimes that I'm getting is so overblown and largely being able to see through that experience.

Right. The food can't change that much. Exactly. That was going to be my follow-up question for you. It's like, does it even work? Do you think that the pandering and the, you know, extra dish and the, you know, try this dessert? Do you, does that work? Of course not. I agree. I mean, of course not. I think we both know it that great hospitality can't really be engineered. Bad food can't be made good, but it's the job of being able to see through the feeling of self-importance, right? Right. And figure out whether it was an absence of service or a profusion of service.

“You know, what do I think the, the average is? And is it worth sending people here?”

Right. I'm also always asking myself, and I think critics have always asked themselves this, but it feels more urgent now, you know, what else can we tell people about how the broader restaurant scene is taking shape in our cities. Right. Because I think like to be very frank, you know, in 2026, if you are a restaurant critic, and you're not seriously asking yourself what distinguishes you from a food influencer, then you're not paying attention. Because there are so, so, so many places for people to get their recommendations, and so I think it's interesting to sort of think of the role as, you know, the anthropology of it, right, and sort of the capturing of the portrait of the city and restaurants being the primary subject, but not the only subject.

Yeah, I also think that our role can reshape some of that narrative. You know, I think that the narrative about Detroit and the Midwest overall is that we're meeting potato city.

And that just has not been my experience. There's, you know, amazing Chinese restaurants that are out in the suburbs, or we've got huge Bengali population or Pakistani populations.

“I mean, and I think that that just shows that every place has this depth and diversity that should be appreciated, and I think that that's what we're here for. We're here to remind people of the breadth of a place.”

Lindsey, I love talking to you so much. I wish we were over dinner right now, but it's such a pleasure to get to share this conversation. Likewise, I'm glad we were able to get together and chat about all these things. That was Elazar Sontag and Lindsey C. Green. Elazar is the food critic at the Washington Post. Lindsey is the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press. That's it for this week's show. You can find almost 300 episodes of our show at most tweet radio.com or wherever you find your podcast.

“Well, I'm on Substack. Please subscribe at Christopher Kimball dot substack dot com. You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's.”

We'll be back next week and thanks as always for listening.

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