McDonald’s Broke My Heart | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

my parents didn't take us to fast food places when I was little they thought they were an abomination in any case we didn't have a McDonald's back then in our little town so it wasn't like I was confronted by the fact of french fries they were some dimly understood concept something that people out there somewhere did to a potato that somehow implicated the French [Music] then one day after track practice 13 years old I went to my first McDonald's have you ever seen a puppy encounter snow for the first time he burrows his nose into it with this look of perplexity and sheer Delight because he can't understand where this white thing came from that is both fluffy and cold it was like that for me a slice of potato crispy on the outside yet somehow pillowy soft on the inside right then and there I gave my heart to McDonald's and then McDonald's broke it [Applause] [Music] is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood this week I'm on a mission to understand why McDonald's betrayed me so many years ago foreign [Music] begins in a non-descript Office Park in Foster City California just south of San Francisco a place called Matson maybe the top food research and development house in the country the Los Alamos of Food Science I came here to walk back the cat as they say in the intelligence business to figure out what happened on July 23 1990 the day McDonald's changed the recipe of their Fries Forever and turned their backs on everything I once held dear [Music] I'll go get another like Seymour and then I'm just going to take the temperature down of the Tallow I said to Matson make me some fries the old way let's do a taste test modern fries versus original McDonald's fries so we did we ate them sat there in the Matson conference room in a blissful food coma teaser I'm going back to the first one I have to say these are excellent those are King fries then we thought let's call in some people too young to have ever tasted the old kind just to make sure we weren't all dreaming that this wasn't some middle-aged fantasy about how everything was better in the good old days do we have a millennial we can grab right away maybe Jack quick before the fries get cold yeah we had the batches of fries in identical baskets identified only by number 6 37 128 and 75. we lined up the Millennials start here go down the line I want to know which one you like the best Millennial french fries yeah this is french fry eating contest we have three just for the record we have three Millennials here that's correct 23 28 25 years of age the food scientists of the future they sample all three options they all reach the same conclusion I like this one you like the first seven yeah yeah okay who's next I also choose 637 I think I like I'm kind of torn between 128 and 637. um but I think I like uh maybe 637 slightly better 6 37 6 37. [Music] I've had the great opportunity to make a lot of money and do something with it to help people there was a Time in America a generation ago when a man called Phil sokoloff was a household name dad was just very intense and he was a lovely person but very intense that's Karen javich Phil sokoloff's daughter it's hard to explain it you have to experience it I mean the man that bought his business from him okay my dad would talk a lot he this guy would sit with my dad for hours and this was an accountant he knew so many people around Oman he came to me he said your father is the most intense person I have ever met started a business making corner bead which is the metal bracing that you use when you install drywall he noticed that it was really expensive decided he could make it cheaper and he just found this niche that you know just happened to make a lot of money and he was very driven and he knew he'd make a lot of money but once he made his money and then he sort of got tired of the business and he knew he wanted to try and do something to help people then sokolov had a heart attack he was 43 years old and he was in good shape the only thing he did wrong was he didn't eat right and he had a high cholesterol when you say he didn't eat well What were what was he like before the yeah he's he was thin he always said he ate too much chili he ate too much meat too many fats and the high cholesterol though also is genetic he had heart problems in his family he was really shaken by this by this heart attack yeah oh this totally devastated him never ever expected this to happen and when you're 43 you know you think you're going to live forever and this really changed his life totally sokolov's doctors tell him his diet and his high cholesterol levels put him at risk for more heart attacks so he decides to do something about it not just for himself but for everyone he starts a crusade he wants to save America from saturated fat the alleged culprit in high cholesterol sokoloff pays to have cholesterol tests for thousands of Nebraskans he goes to Capitol Hill and does the same thing for ten thousand people who work there including 70 Senators he starts campaigns to get low-fat milk and school lunches he buys full page ads in the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times And The Washington Post with huge scary headlines one year he buys a 2.5 million dollar ad during the Super Bowl he takes over a billboard in Times Square to say cut fat intake and live longer [Music] this campaign that he was involved in he spent on an enormous amount of his own money on this yeah he really did I'm not sure how much whether it was 14 15 million I can't remember wow yeah which 30 years ago is a lot of money a lot of money it still is I remember my aunt telling me he's spending all of your inheritance [Music] sokoloff was on Phil Donahue the Nightly News for most of us cholesterol is a private Affair but an Omaha man has made it a public Crusade and he is spending a personal Fortune going after what he thinks are The Fountains of fat in America The Fountains of fat sokolov goes to the source he finds a way to personally Lobby the CEOs of big food companies Kellogg Ralston Purina Pillsbury how on Earth he got through no one seems to know when he called up some of these Executives at big food companies what was he saying to them I mean was he Charming them was he brow beating them was he I'm just curious about what kind of conversations were going on yeah I think it was that he was eventually brow beating them I hate to say that I mean I think he was Charming at first but then he got down to business like you know you need to take this product out of your cereal or I'm gonna you know come forth with the with the big ad you know and he did it and he got them to take the product out they were I'm sure very surprised they called him you know David and Goliath he's he's a little David taking on these big food companies he loved that that they said that about him then it happens and maybe it was inevitable Phil sokolov goes after McDonald's the biggest prize of them all a full-page newspaper ad that Iran in many parts of the country yesterday is giving new meaning to the term Big Mac attack they've been cooking their fries in beef Tallow animal fat sokolov decides they have to stop the ad is headlined the poisoning of America and it accuses McDonald's of selling burgers and fries that are loaded with fat McDonald's denies the charges in the ad which it calls Reckless misleading and intended to scare rather than inform sokolov is all over the media the lone guy from Omaha up against the mightiest fast food company in history it's riveting live TV Phil sokoloff is the man who placed the ad he's a Nebraska businessman and the president of his group which he calls the national heart Savers Association here he is on Good Morning America also with us is Dick Starman his senior vice president of McDonald's gentlemen good morning to both of you good morning and we're really on the same site we just go about it there we're on the same site and exactly I don't want people to eat your hamburgers they're too fat but we want people to eat lean broken concerned about dieting good healthy foods America is watching and mighty McDonald's and the Giant Killer from Omaha are going at it tooth in male sokolov shouts that's not true your fries are cooked in animal fat the McDonald's guy gets flustered tries to say something sokolov doesn't let him finish vegetable and they are 90 to 95 beef towels we do have it now yes you're feeding the people it's in all of our recipes they just took out chicken skin out of their Chicken McNugget three weeks ago tell them about Egg McMuffins tell them about your beef Tello and your French fries tell them about yourself and on it goes McDonald's calls in lawyers they send threatening letters to newspapers warning them not to run any more of sokoloff's ads but that just winds up suckle off even more he loves a good fight so he runs another round of ads and finally McDonald's surrenders July 23 1990. they quietly announce no more beef tala just recently I got in contact with dick Starman the McDonald's executive who went toe-to-toe with Bill sokoloff on network TV I wanted to know what happened inside McDonald's headquarters after sokolov came at them did they have a picture of him with a bullseye on it how was it that a company making mass-produced milkshakes hamburgers and deep fried potatoes was somehow sensitive to the charge that they were making unhealthy food that kind of thing he didn't want to talk maybe it's still a sore point after all these years all we know is McDonald's gave in they folded and once they folded everyone else did too Wendy's announced they were going with 100 corn oil Burger King said they would switch to cottonseed and soybean I look at my dad as being a powerful man and it was like whenever I was with him was like I knew nothing bad would happen to me he was just like kept me safe you know I think girls tend to think that about their dads anyway but he was he was powerful because this has consequences for all of us I feel I have to go back to the beginning it all starts with a man named Ray Kroc he made his living selling the five spindle multi-mixer milkshake machine out of Chicago and in 1954 he began hearing about a hamburger stand in San Bernardino California this particular restaurant he was told had no fewer than eight of his machines in operation meaning that it could make 40 milkshakes simultaneously he couldn't believe that he flew from Chicago to Los Angeles and drove to San Bernardino 60 miles away and sat in his car and just watched one happy customer after another drive up he goes up to a blonde and a yellow convertible and says how often do you come here and she says anytime I'm in the neighborhood he realizes people are addicted the next morning he goes back and sits inside the kitchen watching every move everyone there makes the griddle man the food preparer everything done with military precision and suddenly he has this vision of restaurants just like this all around the world so he asks the two brothers who own the place if he could buy their franchise rights they said yes their names of course dick and Mac McDonald now why is Ray Kroc so smitten with McDonald's not because of the burger the burger is fine but it's not any different from Burgers anywhere else it's because of the fries raycroc can't believe how good they are golden brown crispy on the outside light and fluffy on the inside let me quote to you from Croc's autobiography The crucial Passage to most people a French-fried potato is a pretty uninspiring object it's fodder something to kill time chewing between bites of hamburger and swallows of milkshake that's your ordinary french fry the McDonald's french fry was in an entirely different League they lavished attention on it I didn't know it then but one day I would too the French fry would become almost sacrosanct to me its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously the McDonald's Brothers used top quality eight ounce Idaho russets peeled soaked in cold water then deep fried in something Croc would come to call Formula 47 which was a special beef Tallow mix Formula 47 was what's called A Hard fat butter is a hard fat lard which is pork fat is a hard fat s are saturated fats from time immemorial practically every culture in the world has used hard fats for baking and cooking for good reason heart fats are stable they don't undergo strange chemical changes when they're heated and they're thick and creamy not oily and fluid which makes a big difference [Music] you put butter on a slice of bread it stays nice and thick on the surface you put vegetable oil on bread and the next thing you know your nice firm slices turn to mush when Nabisco took saturated fat out of the creamy middle of the Oreo cookie the r d was like the Apollo space program the greatest Minds in food engineering had to sit down and try and figure out how to keep the white part from turning into a slippery oily mess when Ray Kroc said that the French fry was sacrosanct to him what he meant was that every element of its preparation was chosen for a reason chosen because it made for the optimal french fry experience [Music] Croc has a line in his autobiography where he talks about how the McDonald's Brothers taught him never to cook french fries in fat that had been previously used to cook anything else like fried chicken any restaurant will deny it he writes but almost all of them do it The Croc he listened and right from the beginning he put his foot down there would be no cross-contamination of the McDonald's cooking oil that's someone who truly cares about French fries that's the Legacy he created under the golden arches and then all of a sudden this random guy from Omaha puts a gun to McDonald's head and says change or else [Music] challenge was to find a way to replace a hard fat with a liquid fat and liquid fats are less than ideal in a deep fryer that's problem number one the first replacement oil McDonald's experiments with is a cottonseed and corn oil blend but that turns out to be really high in something called trans fat and it's not long before everyone realizes that trans fats are way way way worse for you than animal fats not even close so in 2002 McDonald's changes the oils again cutting the trans fat in half six years later they have to switch yet again this time to get rid of all the trans fat then there's a problem that vegetable oils aren't nearly as stable as hard fats all kinds of nasty things happen when you heat them up the deep fryer suddenly becomes a kind of witch's cauldron spewing dangerous elements there's a big cloud of electrons there and it can react with the oxygen that might be present in the oil or above the surface Gerald McNeil he's Global vice president for fats oil and nutrition for Lotus Kirkland a big multinational it's part of big cooking oil and I will start degrading the oil very rapidly and and certainly the breakdown products have a lot of aldehydes as a byproduct and aldehydes they attack the proteins and DNA you know in our bodies you don't really want to know what the current thinking is on aldehydes trust me but in case you do it's a l d e h y d e s Google that and the word scary so while the big companies that are touting polyunsaturated oils and saying they're healthy well as soon as you put them in a fryer it's the last thing you want to eat crazy stories went around the industry as the fast food chains struggle to figure out how to make these vegetable oil mixes work turns out that after a lot of frying a kind of paint would form in the fryer and what happens is it breaks down in the fryer and then you know fumes come out and it goes all around the restaurant let's say in McDonald's and the surface of the furniture is sticky because the stuff that they call a Mist you know comes out because of breakdown products the Mist gets on everything including the uniforms of the fry station workers which creates a nightmare when the overalls have to be laundered and when they they went into the truck you know to go off to be cleaned sometimes just by piling the coats on top of each other those coats would spontaneously combust and go on fire because the breakdown products from the oil were highly flammable they would spontaneously combust the point is that this is not some trivial matter it's not if you order a fried egg in a restaurant you don't stipulate the medium in which you would like the egg to be cooked it doesn't matter that much a fried egg is a fried egg think for a moment about what a french fry is you start with a potato and a potato is basically starch and water maybe eighty percent water you plunge the potato into a vat of cooking oil and the Heat of the oil turns the water inside the potato into steam that steam is the key to the fry first it makes the hard starch of the potato swell and soften which is why the interior of a fry is so fluffy and Light at the same time the steam rising from inside the fry keeps the cooking oil on the surface of the fry instead of seeping into the middle that's why a fry is brown and crisp on the outside with rosin once wrote a great book called The Primal cheeseburger where she calls the French fry the quote near perfect enactment of the enriching of a starch food with oil or fat and she's absolutely right you can add fat to potatoes without deep frying that's called mashed potatoes but at the end of the day mashed potatoes are just mush they don't have that crucial contrast between the Fluffy and the crispy the point is that the oil in which you deep fry the French fry is not incidental to the creation of the French fry a french fry is by definition a potato derivative in which the water has been replaced with fat the fat is as much a constituent of the French fry as the potato so when you change the oil in a french fry from hard to liquid fat from saturated to unsaturated you change the French fry in 1990 McDonald's started serving us a different product that's why I had to go to the food scientists at Matson so we're here in here and fry some french fries and so we have a standard when you walk into Matson you think you're at an accounting firm there's a lot of beige Carpeting and a big Bland conference room then you go down the corridor and you see lots of people in white coats you turn a corner and start to smell all kinds of strange things all of a sudden you're in a big kitchen with lots of little beakers and weapons great appliances on the day I was there they were testing some plant-based milk prototypes they had them all out on the counter in little cups I got to sample them there was one in particular with a nut flavor that was kind of fantastic and then beef Tallow Matson agreed to Stage a taste test for me they would get a batch of frozen fries from the same suppliers that the fast food chains use and they would cook them in vegetable oil just how they cooked them in a McDonald's they would also do a pre-1990 french fry cooked in something as close as they confined to formula 47. so I would get a chance to compare the Contemporary french fry with something no McDonald's customer has tasted in a generation so we have a standard Food Service to Bay fryer do you know what temperature we're frying at by the way 360 350. and what we've done in advance of you coming here is we filled the bins with oil or Tallow that's Barb Stuckey co-president of Matson I met her years ago when Matson was running a contest to create the world's healthiest cookie short blonde hair high energy if she were a basketball player they would say she's got a motor where did you get your your towel and how did you choose your talent very good question we're going to taste some because we chose it because of the flavor we wanted to kind of go back in time with you so we tried to find Nutella that we thought had the beefiest flavor which would be probably the closest thing to what McDonald's started with so um I sent Paulo to the local Mexican market right up the street and we found a Tallow there that has a really nice rich beefy flavor Paolo is Palo Beltran who's going to be one of our fry chefs along with another Matson specialist Kathy Westfall the fourth person in the room is Justin shimek who runs the company along with Stucky we've gone old school with our Channel very old school exactly the plan is to use pre-frozen russet Burbank potatoes they're a little lower in water content than other Potato varieties 77 to 80 water which is a defense against sogginess three batches one batch fried twice in vegetable oils just like the fries you get in McDonald's today the second batch a mix fried once in vegetable oil then a second time in beef tallow and the third batch old school fried both times in beef Tallow the fries I tasted at 13. the ones that blew my mind the first fry was three minutes the first fire was three minutes yeah it's hard to describe what the maths nights are like in one sense they're Foodies although that word suggests a kind of sybaritic slightly decadent approach to food smacking their lips and tucking into something fantastic and telling you about that time they had barbecue in Kazakhstan that was out of this world that's not how the Matt's Knights talk about food they're dispassionate objective oddly specific when Stucky Schmick and I were treated back to the conference room to wait for the French fry samples to be cooked Stuckey started talking about a restaurant she'd just eaten at so I had a tomato soup last night that had Rosemary in it and the Rosemary was so high it tasted like a Christmas tree soup I couldn't eat it and all I could think was if we were in the lab at the bench top all of my colleagues would have caught this that the Rosemary is too high wait did you were you who you who are you having dinner with your friends yeah did any of them have the tomato soup yes I don't think so the Rosemary was so high that it tasted like a Christmas tree like a Christmas tree that's so great we weren't sitting for more than a few minutes when the door to the conference room opened all right wow look at this here we are this is Major excitement the Matson chefs had the batches in identical metal mesh baskets each was identified only by number 75 128 637 the taste test was blinded we had no idea which fry was which okay all right I'm gonna start with so 6 37. oh as a sensory professional we're not supposed to give anything away or say anything I have a hard time doing this that's him I'm sorry that's amazing professional how is that not great the baskets of fries were on the conference table in front of me everyone else had gathered around these were people who make and consume some of the world's most exotic prepared foods for a living you'd think they would be jaded but they weren't they were on it and me my head was spinning I was in heaven it was all I could do to keep the rigorous objectivity necessary for a valid blind taste test what are you tasting with the first one 637 texture on 637 is shatteringly crisp amazing perfect French fry texture it's loud yeah chew it as crunchy crisp but there is no hole in the middle and it's it's nice and fluffy in the middle they're like perfect French fries and they have a lot of flavor all right 75 how do you feel it's 75 number two nobody was interested in 75. they were oily not crispy almost sodden Bland just meth next one the surface is really porous there's a lot of oil squirts out when you bite into it three batches of fries prepared according to the same exacting specifications but two were entirely forgotten and we didn't have to be told what kind they were they were what the fast food world has been passing off as a french fry for the past quarter century but the third batch 637 to die for that was the old school fry the kind of french fry that doesn't exist anymore we have a big win for Tallow that's what we're saying there's so much going on here also look at the color difference yeah those look like fries my heart is Philip sadness again to think about how many how many millions and millions and millions of people around the world have never tasted that thank you that's when we brought in the Millennials as a second opinion but also as an act of Mercy because they had no idea that this is what a french fry could be like and it seemed unbearably cruel to deny them that privilege when a mound of 637 was just sitting there on the table can we agree that those are the best fries we tasted all afternoon yeah it would be great yeah I'm gonna have more [Music] hate Phil sokoloff I've thought a lot about this in the intervening years and I've come to realize that I don't hate him for killing formula 47. he could have bought a yacht and a big house in a gated community in Florida and play golf and you know how I feel about golf instead he took on McDonald's in an attempt to make the world a healthier better place my hat is off to him it's really McDonald's that I blame they were custodians of a french fry Legacy the fry was sacrosanct their own founder said so and what did they do they rolled over sold out their own Heritage as if how a french fry tastes was suddenly a secondary consideration that's crazy the only reason there was an argument about fries in the first place is that millions of people thought they were delicious so what do we do we made them not delicious wait a minute I'm not done it's worse than that the original fries were sold in just one size 2.4 ounces you don't need any more fries than that but nowadays what's the large serving of fries at McDonald's 5.9 ounces more than twice as big as it used to be so we've gone from the McDonald's Brothers original product which gave us a modest amount of something Sublime to a large amount of something that tastes like cardboard I remember going to McDonald's and having some french fries and going oh these don't taste as good because my dad had them changed the way they were made but uh I think that's absolutely incredible that he did that you know he was really he was made to do something huge and you know he did he was amazing yeah yeah what did he say we use you said that he you know he got McDonald's to change the way they made fries and the fries didn't taste as good what did he say when you said that to him did you ever say that to him yeah he just laughed he agreed he laughed I mean he did have a good sense [Music] I'm not surprised Phil sokoloff wasn't interested in the sensual aspects of the French fry of course not he was a zealot a man shaken by his brush with death he nibbled on vegetables and maybe an occasional turkey sandwich he saw his job as getting all of us to think about the nutritional consequences of what we put in our mouths and for that I think we are in his debt but McDonald's should have stood up and pointed out what is lost when we Define food so narrowly the world's oblique place when there's no room for pleasure you know what one of the mats and Millennials said after she had tasted a Tallow fry for the first time thank you thank you for the delicious fries foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista Stephanie Daniel and siomara Martinez white our editor is Julia Barton flan Williams is our engineer original music by Luis Guerra special thanks to Andrew Stelzer who came with me to Matson and as always to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at panoply I'm Malcolm Gladwell while I still have you I want to remind you that revisionist history has a website where we provide links to books and articles and videos or relevance to the episodes please check it out at revisionist history.com for this episode though I want to give a special shout out to two people whose work helped me a lot one is Gary taubs who has been writing really provocatively about what we eat and what it does to us for a very long time his most recent book which I loved is the case against sugar the other is Nina Thai Schultz whose fantastic book The Big Fat Surprise why butter meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet was of enormous help to me in researching this episode thank you Nina thank you Gary and to all those of you listening I recommend those two authors to you wholeheartedly

Channel: Malcolm Gladwell

Views: 12,476

Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell, Podcast, Malcolm Gladwell Podcast, Revisionist History, Revisionist History Podcast, Pushkin Industries, Social Psychology, McDonalds French Fries, Fast Food French Fries, McDonalds French Fry Recipe, Beef Tallow French Fries

Id: HVpJAJjDI8U

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023