Michael Pollan "Raw": A Conversation with Michael Pollan & Jack Hitt about Cooking, Eating & Writing

thanks very much for coming today it's a pleasure to introduce this second program in a series brought to you by the Frankie program in science and humanities here at Yale and hosted by the Whitney Humanities Center we had a marvelous event yesterday with a screening of the botany of desire and a panel discussion and today we're gonna go a little more intimate and focusing on Michael Pollan's current and and future work including a book to be to come out entitled cooked which now we s we could say the title I already had the pleasure of well I'll start with Jack our our interlocutor today jack hit is a New Haven resident and local journalist he was educated on the streets and alleys of Charleston South Carolina and is now although a loyal son of the south he's still here in in New England for a quite a number of years jack is a journalist author and now stage performer he has written for The New Yorker magazine New York Times magazine Harper's and Gardens and guns and many other prestigious he has recipient of a Peabody Award and is I know a great conversationalist so that's his role today he will be he will be discussing or BR the leading or helping in the conversation here with our guest from out of town former nutmeg ER and Cornwall Michael Pollan had the pleasure to introduce Michael yesterday so I'll keep it short today the author of six books including second nature botany desire in defense of food and the author of the upcoming book to be released in the next month cooked and Michael is well known for his work now on has has grown from being a gardening writer to a broader field of writer of food agricultural policy and our interaction with the environment through through through agriculture and food and without further ado please welcome our two guests thank you thank you [Applause] two really good questions America [Applause] well welcome to New Haven Connecticut Michael thank you yeah yeah and as you know I'm a professional journalist so let me start with my ambush question and I know your game of Thrones freak and probably seen a few episodes of girls but here's my question one episode of girl what's your zero of game what's your Food Channel guilty pleasure what does Michael Pollan watch on television about food yeah you know I've watched a few episodes of Top Chef and I used to like the Iron Chef when it first came on I found that kind of entertaining but I don't know if it's a guilty pleasure it's sort of more of a professional obligation just to stay up on what's going on I mean I am fascinated by the phenomenon of cooking on television which i think is a really weird and interesting thing going on I mean you have millions of Americans who spend more time watching people cook on TV than actually cook themselves which is weird when you think about it because at the end of that half hour you don't get anything to eat so you know the old days when the cook would go on television like The Today Show that always had that little note at the bottoms like for the recipe Yeah right off to you know the Today Show and get the recipe but none of these shows in with a recipe no not what ones in primetime I mean the one right in the evening the ones during the day you can still get some how to you can learn how to you know make a frittata but but at night it's it's a game show its spectacle its fire right so what like why are we doing that what's what's going on in us well I think I thought about this because you know there's lots of other things in our lives that we've outsourced without looking back you know Brett sewing your clothing changing the oil in your car there no TV shows about these things cooking is different and what I think it is is I actually think we're nostalgic for the experience which we all had as kids or most of us had as kids or at least in our generation and before of watching our mom's usually cook and and being in the kitchen and these amazing smells and this rising anticipation and all this alchemy you know what happens in the kitchen it was really fun to be a part of that and we don't get that anymore so and I think there's something really primal about cooking I mean these are the transformations of nature into culture that that really made us who we are so you're saying it's not just the it's not that we miss the cooking it's that we miss watching the cooking yeah I think that's right I mean I think that they're two they're two experiences there's cooking and there's definitely watching cooking which is something that a lot of us have grown up doing and and it was really central to our sense of our parents and you know the sensory experience of being in your home if you think back to your childhood and you know you yeah you can imagine you know you memories are playing outside and doing things but but those there's so much sensory satisfaction that happened in the kitchen right and I know that bonding and all that sort of like you know community that happened in there so we miss and that special kind of conversation that happens when people are doing stuff not just talking to each other right right it's a very natural form of conversation I think it's you know I mean you know you have teenage kids but the best the best time to talk to them is while you're doing something together rather than having a conversation you know you might be driving or you might be chopping onions or you know working in the garden but that's the easiest way of having those conversations so so many of these guys on that unbonded on the shows are men yeah right and here we are two guys talking about cooking right and not fancy cooking chopping onions cooking right yeah so how's Betty Friedan's dream come true [Laughter] well no I wouldn't say it has I mean you know the the professional cook has been male for a long time even while women were stuck with all the work of cooking for you know since since for a very long time there was this other thing getting paid to cook often got to do that I do think there is some evidence and there's some research that suggests if that men are cooking more and that the since we just don't wash the clothes that's right you don't we definitely know what but where we cook and in greater numbers and you know we're raising children I think today who actually don't and this isn't true across the society but but certainly my son and I'll bet your daughters don't think of cooking as a as a female you know job that they see male cooks in the culture being celebrated you know who are you know often incredibly macho and and and and and you know very important characters in the culture and so I think we had there is an opportunity in this to build a culture of cooking that wouldn't be as as as you know kind of isolated female work so what you're saying though so men are now in the kitchen in service to Betty well they're actually often in front of the grill outside often they're okay but they were always there yeah well yeah but even the numbers of that women are you know women are insisting that their husbands cook more and husbands are comfortable cooking on the grill right and women have also pretended they didn't know how this was done for a very long time you know I they treat grilling as this mystery that they couldn't possibly master and would you please you know take this outside and grill it and that I learned recently as a subterfuge right it's not that hard they know how to do it Judith Judith thrills when I'm away but there are other men in the kitchen besides husbands right yeah who else is in the kitchen well sons well I'm talking I'm thinking of corporations oh yeah those men yeah they're in the well yeah they're in the pantry yeah well that's right I mean you know that's those are the men that we don't think about who are cooking in there that you know it's Steve Sanger the president of General Mills and whoever is the president of Pillsbury and that's one of the ironies I mean you know we've outsourced cooking to corporations to a very large extent to give you some sense of the magnitude I'm the average American spends 27 minutes a day cooking now which has fallen steadily since and the and the let's see and mail cookies gone up a little bit but basically 57% of meals today are cooked home cooked but the definition has had to be really loosened so that was I was gonna ask you so what does it mean to cook a meal it according to General Mills right it a home-cooked meal is one that involves some assembly of ingredients so in other words merely you loft the aluminum foil no it's got a little further than that a new king of pizza is not cooking however pouring bottled salad dressing over pre-wash lettuce or assembling a sandwich is cooking scratch cooking even if you even if you got the meat or in a deli and the mayonnaise and you know and bought the roll so they you know we definitely defined cooking downward for the purposes of marketing and yeah and it's and corporations are doing most of the cooking you have any numbers unlike like real cooking like I still go if I go back to scratch cutting you know I ask there's this in the book I interviewed this marketing expert this wonderful crusty guide named Harry Balzer who's been tracking I'm sorry what is this Harry Balzer oh don't go okay I know I'm I was doing my best deadpan there I was just you know you know you wouldn't make jokes like that anyway he's been tracking America that's not a Bart Simpson joke okay keep going yeah he's been tracking cooking habits for a very long time and he's really cynical at this point and you know he'll tell you that most Americans are cheap and lazy and that's why they don't cook and so he's well I wanted to know I want to know if there was any real numbers about oh yeah real about real sandwich he said the numbers are too low to measure really yeah he don't he doesn't even ask questions do we have a sense of like how precipitous that decline was like what what was it you know in 1965 or something a home-cooked meal well first they define them a little more tightly right and they were you know 60 70 % we talking like 30 years ago or I mean the 60s is where the the Klein really begins right but it's important to understand when we talk about this decline that we think of it as a consumer driven phenomenon and that women were going back to work and there was less time all of which is true but but there is another narrative and and and this was kind of surprising to me that corporations have been trying to worm their way into the kitchen for much longer and long before women went to work right trying to convince us to eat processed foods and it really takes place after World War 2 you had all these technologies that were invented for the war up you know how to you know make milk survive for months on end and and you know field race basically and and how could we take this brilliant technology of field rations and get people to actually eat it are you saying there's like a line from from field rations to like the Swanson's potpie yeah and to the hamburger helper and and all these kind of things and so a lot of effort had gone into developing these this shelf-stable acceptable you know pseudo food for the war effort and she as in so many other things there was this effort to convert those technologies to peace on use and the industry pushed really hard to then get women to buy these products and women rejected them on mom they just didn't feel that this was cooking so when you got a cake mix for example they could not get people to use these cake mixes which were essentially just add water and they did this marketing research and they found that women felt that that was not cooking they couldn't take credit for a cake that was made from a mix and then they figured out they did a little more market research and they figured out if you didn't use a powder day which they were using and actually ask the cook to crack open an egg that would do it and then you could take credit and and and it was actually when they stopped including the powdered eggs and put in the practice which happens in the late fifties that they could sell cake me and yeah so they've been but it's it's a project and it's a supply driven project and there were there was a lot of resistance because it was felt that part of your obligation as a parent was to cook for your kids you didn't let other people do it so there's this line where we feel like we no longer are cooking and I take it that General Mills and these other companies have done great work and sort of circumscribing these o lines of that that border right they have I mean it's it's been a very sustained effort and very sophisticated and many of the products are designed to give you something to do even though they could be designed to give you nothing to do right and and but it it also I think the key breakthrough was you mentioned Betty Ford an earlier and and she is a key figure because she was you know raising the specter of renegotiating the relationships between men and women around chores and child-rearing and she was saying that this was unjust and and it needed to be chained and she was asking for a very uncomfortable conversation around kitchen tables all over America and it happened and we've all been party to those uncomfortable conversations over who's gonna do what especially when both members of the household are working and the industry saw this is a great opportunity whatever you're gonna do with you know the cleaning and the clothes and the childcare we can take care of the cooking and they they actually the industry actually adopted feminist rhetoric beginning in the in the 70s and so there's a there was a famous campaign that Kentucky Fried Chicken had where they it was on Billboard's all across America in the 70s and it was a bucket of fried chicken and over over it was a very simple headline two words women's liberation and you know everybody was happy to have that conversation diffused and they basically industry said hey we got you covered don't argue anymore and and that was a real breakthrough for for industrial cooking so since real scratch cooking is now this almost unmeasurable number according to your your consultant I don't think it's quite as bad as he says but I mean remember he's part of the food industry right right and he wants to minimize as a realistic option right so you know I was looking through some of your I was looking at your other books and I you know there's a nice sort of architour a narrative arc here right I mean botany desire looks at our interaction would the would the food when it's in the ground right when it's when we're all cool evolving right and then Omnivore's Dilemma sort of looks at it one when it's on the plate right so in a sense is this book trying to examine this non-existent space in between yeah I mean it's funny I you know I didn't I was surprised to end up working on this book because I had been looking at the food chain I mean I've been writing about the food chain for about 12 years I did a piece on genetically modified food that ended up in botany and desire and and Omnivore's Dilemma was sort of on the plate but a lot of it was about agriculture and farming and and I looked at you know conventional industrial corn farming and organic farming and local farming and so that was the beginning of the food chain right and I found that really interesting where does your food come from and then I then I wrote two books about health and nutrition I wrote in defense of food what happens to the food after you eat it and what does it do to your body and and what's why are we so you know struggling with chronic disease and obesity and but then I realized there was this missing middle link which is the food coming out of the ground how does it get transformed into meals and it turned out that those transformations and I didn't appreciate this going in had a tremendous bearing both on the farm looking back to the beginning of the food chain and on our health and let me explain how the whether you cook or not has an enormous effect on what kind of agriculture we have to the extent we're letting corporations cook for us they are gonna support huge farms producing monacle big deals would be I mean General Mills is not gonna be able to buy from a small local farm they don't know how to go about they don't want to have that many contract right they want one carrot producer they don't want 100 carrot producer Walmart is sort of trying a little bit to regionalize their sourcing and they're finding it's very difficult they don't know how to do it so if we are interested in rebuilding a more regional or local food system I think it's gonna top out pretty soon if people aren't willing to cook I just don't think you can have if all the cooking is being done by corporations and Industry all the farming will be done by comparably scaled institutions with all the problems that it's not just the bigness is bad but but bigness tends to move toward toward monoculture and that's the original sin of I think American agriculture and then on the other side there's all this fascinating research that suggests that when you outsource your cooking and you put on a lot of weight the weight corporations cook differently than humans do they use lots of salt fat and sugar why well because they like to use the cheapest possible raw ingredients and dress them up and make them palatable and those are the three you know primary colors of the food industry salt sugar they also use lots of novel chemicals to keep the food looking fresher than it really is because if you're making that pot pie you need a lot of emulsifiers to keep the oils and the water-based parts from separating and looking really nasty they so they use a lot of chemicals and individuals don't have in their pantry and so people you know that as it turns out and I was kind of surprised to learn this the most important thing about your diet is not any particular nutrients good or bad that are in it or out of it or any particular foods it's the activity if it was a human being and some of us can afford to have very well paid human beings cook for us and go out to really nice restaurants they do sorts well but for most people a healthy diet will depend on a human being cooking it presumably somebody you're living with and or you and we know that people who eat home-cooked food are have lower weight much healthier embarrassed ways and not to mention their family lives are you know healthier in the psychological you know we all grow up learning that we eat three meals a day it's what we were told right what we say all the time we need three meals a day what's the reality the reality today is there's there's something called secondary eating which the Department of Agriculture has been has begun to measure and secondary eating is eating while you're doing other things if we were eating now yeah we're doing I'm secondary and this has taken off dramatically and we now spend 78 minutes they engage in secondary eating this is while watching television this is while driving and we spend less time eating meal and I don't know what the number is for meals it's in the 50 50 minutes or something like that it's so we spend more time in secondary eating than primary eating which is what we used to call meal the problem is that that secondary eating tends to be highly processed snack food and if you look at the growth than calories over the last 30 years the obesity epidemic usually dated to 1980 so what are we eating more of well it's food produced it's processed food it's you know the calories of refined flour and refined corn and soy basically and it's secondary so as a meals have gone down secondary even gone up and on balance we're eating almost another in terms of calories almost another whole meal a day so actually it's not three a day it's almost four a day we crunch all that secondary eating in there so if we would have construct a graph that had like obesity rates on the bottom and cupholders and minivans that would just be one of these lines event like that yeah I don't know why we don't have microwaves in the glove compartment yet but it's it's common mark my words so so for this book you decided to go back into the kitchen and explore this Terra incognito that we abandoned some 30 years ago yeah it was the part of the food chain I thought I knew best you know because I I cook I've always liked to cook not not that ambitiously not with great skill but that's what we did and I thought you know as a journalist you usually want to go out and learn about stuff you don't know anything about you know the real terra incognita but it turned out that yeah this area this this link in the food chain that I thought was hidden in plain sight was a lot more interesting and complicated than I realize right so you got these phyla of cooking right so that's like fire and roasting outdoors and there's like water and cooking on a stove top and you know there's a air discuss cooking bread and then of your fourth file fermentation all right yeah and you're big you're big topic there is sauerkraut right so is that really a fourth phylum or did you feel like you had to add one more you know chapter I mean so really sauerkraut compared to bread so tell me what it what is it I mean what is fermentation why is that like a fourth order of right well the book is the book is divided into these four parts each of which corresponds to one of the classical elements so it starts with fire which is the most basic primitive oldest kind of cooking putting meat on a plane which may go back as much as two million years so before we were even Homo sapiens Homo erectus knew how to do this and it and it conferred huge advantages on that species and then water is cooking with pots everyday home cooking any kind of liquid you know stews soups phrases and combining things in pots which happens much later it's like we've only had pottery for about ten thousand years so it kind of rises through the birth of Agriculture and that makes sense because you have all these grains that you need to soften water and things like that air is baking bread in the history of you know the West is very tied up with the history of bread and earth is yeah I would argue it might be the most important not just sauerkraut that's you know the synecdoche of all of fermented food but is the one I've tried first and and earth I call it earth because the processes of cooking with microbes is similar to what goes on in the earth and some of the microbes come from the earth it's basically microbial cooking without heat and that's been a very important part of human history before refrigerating about like pickling or talking about vegetable I'm talking about making cheese but also fermenting meat products I mean weed a lot of fermented meat from when you're eating sausages and cured meats of various times there's a bacteriological train formation that's gone on and then alcohol which is also the product of fermentation and I talked about making beer a little bit um about wine and things like that these are kind of the most amazing transformations of all because they're done without heat and they're done by manipulating other creatures well I know it's like it's you know the other three are these kind of like heroic almost sort of elements you know where we can or when we're in Bavaria yes exactly right this one it feels like you know this is the downhill slide into you know something going bad Rock right this is the relative entrance right right right it's rot interrupted it's well managed rot and it's true and basically what happens to the amazing thing is I mean sauerkraut I don't know whether you like sour crab maybe you like kimchi better and I like making kimchi better than sauerkraut it's a little easier what's the difference in terms of it okay well the physics the sauerkraut is cabbage salt you're done basically you if you shred cabbage salt it put it in a crock you don't have to inoculate it it's just amazing these these microbes lactobacillus are on the leaves of the cabbage they're on your hands they're probably in the crock and they go to work digesting this food which is ironic I mean every everything that lives is colonized by a bunch of microbes waiting a person died or their virtues have just yet to be discovered that was the first miracle the only ingredient in sauerkraut is solved kimchi used a different content use that kind of normal round cabbage but true dippity traditionally using napa cabbage and you add a lot of spice you add ginger and garlic and red pepper and and it's got so many strong spices that it you can control the fermentation more easily you don't get molds we can make up our craft you're right a new sheet sauerkraut it's because these these these yeasts that are molds put down these filaments right destroy the pectin and making mushy and that happened to me kimchi that doesn't seem to happen because of all the garlic and ginger and it's made the same way you salt it and cut it up and cut it roughly so there's a lot of surface area for the microbes to work on you don't want a really sharp knife oddly enough and and then it just happened and you put it in this crock and 48 hours after you do it it starts burbling and it's just going to work and I understand how he's stumbled into making bread or fire you know whenever putting meat on fire but how do we stumble into this or do is there any sense of like when we figured out how to do this no we but we've been fermenting food for a very long time I mean you need the you need some crockery although actually don't because the first ferments were in in the earth you would just dig a hole and I saw this in China so it's in China last year and when you have excess cabbages you dig a deep hole and you bury them and cover it and they will firm that all right haggis I think the original recipe of haggis that you buried the stomach filled with all sorts of internal organs in the heath well dig it up three weeks later burying things is a way and that's one of the reasons I also call the section earth is a it's a primitive form of fermentation and they found these taro pits you know hundreds of years old that are still I mean edible you know using the word loosely this Bush that you can eat in is very nutritious but it's really old and in Iceland in Iceland they bury sharp you know they're great for native it but it's they're great delicacy that they insist that guess try and I had to try it recently and the reason they bury this particular shark is sharks don't have kidneys or so all the urea just kind of bleeds into their muscle so tasty they're not edible they're not edible until been permanent and the fermentation breaks down and and it's not wonderful hold on it's like a it's like a really strong scent of ammonia and cheesy and and you know they claim to like it and they you know don't you want to try coral it's called I think and but I noticed that every bite is followed by a hit by a shot of schnapps that doesn't say to make that guess is eaten that way also doesn't tell me people are savoring but you know one of the things every culture has a disgusting I was gonna say like so the stinky I mean we all we like the stinky cheese we you know we don't right Asians don't like a Western cheese yeah you show them a washburn cheese and Asians will in China will just run for the hills I mean they just think it's so gross yet they love stinky tofu which is really nasty and you tip you basically I'm not easy you take a block of tofu and then you rots and vegetables a mix of vegetables and just let them rock not firm it rock I mean yes there are many but till it's black and this and then you just submerge the tofu in that for weeks at any time and you take it out and you fry it or you don't fry it and you need it and the smell is just pure garbage I mean I mean literally it smells like garbage and they love it and they and they and they say that it's got a clean taste compared to cheese right because cheese has got a lot of fat so the tape lingers in your mouth right we like and they hate right so I think it's very interesting that you know one of the things culture is is drawing lines around your group and a disgusting food is a good way to draw lines around your group you know we are the people who eat this right and you're not and you don't like it we'll get to the stinky in a minute I'm also just interested in sort of what what happens when you eat why do we eat pickled foods why do we eat fermented things in other words I understand that when you meat over fire you know it breaks down you know the proteins and whatnot it or it allows you to get all the nutrients out of the meat much easier yeah and same with cooking on the stovetop and so on but what what what are we getting out of eating microbial food well we're getting a few things one is that the fermentation process itself makes the food it partially digests the food so you use less of your own energy and this is true for with all different kinds of cooking you use less than your own energy to break down the food the microbes have started the process it's partly cooked partly digested the other thing that the microbes are doing though is creating nutrients they are actually producing vitamins various kinds you know b12 is a vitamin that we that animals can't I'm sorry that we can't you get from fermentation or from animal flesh so you get b12 from that and and a range of other nutrients plus the acids that are produced the lactic acid or the acetic acid and depending on the ferment are very important nutrients so you're eating these microbes that are produced other food and that's really healthy and then there is some evidence that the microbes themselves have an effect on your internal microbiota it's called the the community that lives in your gut some of the bacteria that ferment food lactobacillus plantarum is the kind of climax after it's gone on there's a plant down and plantarum is an important bacteria that that seems to contribute to the health of the gut lining and do some very good things brother so you mentioned this little kingdom and inside of us let's let's just go right for them yeah for the gross right now I mean so describe that little kingdom how big is it what is what what what does it look like it doesn't look like much and I think that actually is one of one of the reasons that that's kept us from understand mmm-hmm it looks like I had an experience when I was doing the research for this book of I went to Iowa State and an animal scientist brought me to meet the this fistulae today ow and this is a cow that has a a hatch surgically implanted in its flank and they can open and close it and watch its digestion in real-time and the scientists you know he opened it up and this is the room and where the hay is being digester the grass and and it just this bolus of hay know you know you know pretty nasty and and he said reach your hand right here and I reached my hand in to the room and it was warm and lots of partially digested hay and you know the idea that what I was seeing was actually a very sophisticated ecological system a community with an order in a structure such that there were certain kinds of microbes around the edges and certain kinds of ones in the middle and that some microbes were feeding other microbes and some microbes were producing chemicals that were influencing the cows appetite and mood was just impossible to credit to look at this but we're discovering that that is indeed what's going on down there how many do we have a sense of but we have a babble scale a kilo of I mean I've read from one pound of kilo and how many species it's about a hundred species we thought for a while is it a couple hundred but now it looks like it's about a hundred species and they're different in all of us and you're dying we're eating again we're eating things like sauerkraut are we feeding that that because I'm on some way are we keeping it I'm maintaining it is it is it that yeah well we're giving a good food source I mean problem is one of the problems with the Western diet that we're learning is that you need to feed these microbes and they like slightly different food than you like so for example we really like sugar sweetens you know refined flour and things like that we like these easily digested or absorb things they like plants and they like fiber and we don't have generally when we process food we're removing fiber from it in one way or another so we're kind of been we've been starving the microbiota for a while in the West which has only recently been appreciated is my microbiota different from say my mother's and in terms of I mean has my diet change yeah that Kingdom in some way well it's not that's not totally understood you're the initial kind of seeding of your microbiota comes from your mother ever right if you're born by cesarean it comes differently and in fact that you know that may explain why children born by cesarean of higher rates of allergies and their immune systems don't develop quite as quite as well but that initial seeding of the microbiota happens then and then it happens from the environment in fact your microbiota will look a little like your father's - you know your - it looks very different while you're nursing and one of the really interesting wake-up calls we had to the importance of this is when we when we tried to understand milk mother's milk is when you think about it it's the only food and I use the word designed advisedly designed by natural selection right I mean it was meant to be food and so there presumably is nothing in it that doesn't have a very good purpose okay otherwise it would natural selection would discard it because milk comes in a huge metabolic cost of the mother I mean mothers will literally dissolve their flesh to make milk I mean even when they're millinery so one of the things we didn't understand was that milk is full of a complex sugar and all of those saccharide it's called that babies can't digest they don't have for it so it passes through the the small intestine unused and they're more of these oligosaccharides then then there are protein in mother's milk this make no sense until they figured out that the bacteria love these all of the factor and one bacteria in particular bifida infantis which you'll see on the side of some yogurts it's a probiotic and so that Mother's Milk is designed to guide the development of the microbiota down a very specific path because this is a very useful bacteria there's a lot of good and it keeps other bad bacteria from getting a toehold so that's a real I think we have to we have to study that example because basically it's telling you that a well-designed food a perfectly designed food should be feeding not just us but the hundred trillion also right and we need to design our food so it does the same thing you know I feel like when I hear a word like microbiota I I just I sense this slide into like some serious American quackery out there right yeah I mean but I realize that somebody's gonna be selling me something that that it's gonna sound good and you know probiotic and the metaphor that there's a trillion of these in us and we have to feed this ecosystem in order to keep ourselves healthy totally makes sense but it also totally makes sense for you know an infomercial right right so can you give me any sense of where like the science ends and the quackery and the quackery begins yeah probiotics this is probably a good place to draw the line I mean probiotics are good bacteria that are sold in pill form and that there are some real questions there's some interesting research that suggested some of them do things that they're very helpful and but they don't pick up residency you don't find them after you've eaten them they don't seem to survive in general nevertheless some of them seem to have an effect but they're being oversold they're definitely being oversold and the numbers you get when you take a probiotic supplement are so small compared to eating something like sauerkraut say where you're getting you know billions and billions of little bugs so that I think that there is quackery around probiotics we there's something there and we will design really good ones have been but we haven't done it yet it's not to dismiss them all out of hand I mean there are cases where they've been shown to work but they're definitely being oversold let's go back to the stinky for a second so we'd love it well yeah we were just deep in the stinky now when I go back to the surface of the stinky like actually eating cheese and eating things like kimchi I mean so you know you sort of you know reference that that that one's love of stinky does seem to be either culturally derived or or or geographically derived or something right I mean this every culture on the planet have this sort of cascade of stinky foods and leading all the way down to like you know Limburger cheese yeah I don't know that every culture has them every culture does has had its fermented food that's a universal and that's very interesting and it makes sense because before refrigeration that was a very good way to preserve food was to permit right it lasts a really long time and so we as the species have been eating lots of lactobacillus plantarum for millions of years and it may well be an important constituent of the human diet or should be the you know I went to a kimchi Museum in Seoul one of two in Seoul which are two of six in the country they're really serious about their kimchi and and I went in there and there were you know these diorite they're not cheese museums in France what are they're not cheesy so I know it seems funny to us it's very serious to them and they're you know dioramas of women rubbing spice and two leaves and beautiful crocks you know they buried these crocks outside for the kimchi and and different kinds of peppers and there were like one group of kidney partners after another was was was filing through and they they were these great little yellow uniforms they all have these yellow backpacks and and I asked the docent I said why you know why you bring children here and the kimchi museum and she said totally straight face children are not born like in kimchi it's so it's part of socialization and we social you know there's certain foods were socialized into and and some of these more exotic flavors you need to be socialized it's not like sugar where we have I was gonna say like you know you think of all the vocabulary we have to describe our foods right or just think even the more sort of like you know you know baroque language for describing wine yeah it's all floral this and you know aggressive you know nutmeg and whatnot but but cheese yes I mean a stinky French cheese is appeared to do that the feet of God which is to say the stinky feet of God I mean that would add it's a very interesting phrase and especially interesting when you learn a little bit about the microbiology and it turns out that the bacteria that makes a washed rind there's a you know interesting euphemism cheese smelly is very closely related to the it's brevibacterium that lives in your armpits and elsewhere on your body and gives humans there's and then so what are we smiling when we smell cheese body odor cheese makers don't like to say this but you're smelling the human body I mean it's not a body odor but these are animals smells and and that there they go really deep I mean our sense of smell is really large under employed I think in our society and and stinky cheeses you know I I found this I wrote about this nun who makes a Connecticut at a cheese that you probably couldn't find maybe even ranter I don't know or at the Abbey in Bethlehem Connecticut and she makes a washed brine cheese Sanok tear or Connecticut there and she one of the few cheese makers who was willing to talk to me about the erotic sub discussed as only a nun can do and it was very interesting conversation and and but I realize if you're in the food business it's not a way to sell food but she was really into it and then she put me on to a philosopher cheese maker in Paris named James still wagon and told me about him and he's kind of a connoisseur of this and he's written some extraordinary descriptions of Jesus and about how you know that you know we don't have a vocabulary like wine you know that's Laurel because if we did so we just say it's powerful you know delicious mmm you know we're we're I think we're repressing the vocabulary of cheese and this guy James silligan who has a website or had a website he'd seen it seems to have been taken I'm getting a sense he's not repressed he is so not repressed he's he's so extravagant in the way but I quote in the book in some way I really enjoyed his website it's called sex death and cheese and they're all the same and they're for him they're all yeah so anyway so cheese is a very interesting thing now you talk about how we discover these things I mean cheese was probably discovered when some heard her opened up the the the rumen of a one of its ruminant of an animal of a goat or a cow and discovered that of a baby and discovered that there were these clumps of milk in there because what happens is when a baby drinks milk the baby turns at Institute's in its gut in its stomach and we have acids that do this and in fact this is still how we make cheese you know rennet is from the lining the first stomach of a ruminant and it rearranges the proteins in a way that forms into a form this gel and that is superior for the the baby side gesture not totally understood why but it slows the absorption of the food and rearranges the proteins in a good way so probably we found we did you know we found sheets we didn't invent it and then figured out ways to make it or it may have been someone had just used a stomach as a carrying device for liquids and put milk in it and lo and behold it turned into cheese and the advantage of the cheese was of course it stayed fresh longer because it had these acids in it so it didn't go bad it went bad in a good way so so we don't have a very good vocabulary for cheese but but one of the things you write about in the book is that we have we almost have a kind of a surplus of vocabulary for roasting whole animals outdoor that the barbecue universe seems to have been gendered I think what you you call it barbecue Blarney yeah right this is like this enormous amount of nonsense that comes out of the mouths of these pitmasters I don't know where you I learned a lot of this from mr. right so what do you mean by barbecue Blarney what is that and and why do we talk about roasted animals differently than yeah well there's a lot of self flattery that goes on in the barbecue world and I you know I found these guys are just some of the greatest bull sitters in the world and and and you know jack comes out of this culture actually and is himself a very good pitmaster sensitised me to this and and these very fine distinctive you know [Music] there's so many ways to do barbecue you know you can do ribs you can do sausage you can do whole hog you can do shoulders and every region of the south claims that it has the the keys to the kingdom of barbecue and that there's no other way to make it so if you're with someone in Eastern North Carolina doing whole hog barbecue and that's what I study so-called you'll talk about well what about the barbecue over in Lexington you know where they knew Childers food but it's it's not barbecue and and then what about Texas yeah okay but it's not barbecue and so and there are these maps you turn me on to a map of the Carolinas and and it's the barbecue Balkans and there's a line and people know exactly where the sauce goes from tomato-based to you know yellow mustard based and there's a lot of tension along those lines and in drawing lines around acceptable and not acceptable food is a big human preoccupation and this and the southern pitmasters are very good at it so I decided that barbecue is kashrut kosher laws for goys basically and that it gives you all the pleasures of saying this is kosher this isn't kosher with pork right well so it's great since you've hung out with so many pitmasters that who is more rabbinical in their distinctions redneck barbecuers or a rabbi I would say the redneck barbecue yeah yeah the rabbi's are actually remarkably flexible you know I make an exception for bacon I mean you know you run into this you know observant Jews who will eat certain things that aren't my mother-in-law for example I remember when my my brother-in-law was dating someone since married who wasn't Jewish and went out to to dinner with my mother-in-law who keeps kosher at home and and she's asking carefully like well does that positive isn't honest does that have any any pork in it any bacon and any pancetta and he said well I'll check and well if it does I'll have the shrimp and Martha is like oh how does this working that way so anyway ya know the pitmasters are definitely more rigid about all I know but let me just add one thing the reason I realized that they've dressed this up and fetishized this and the sauce and and and the kind of wood you use and the kind of heat you use is that it's really simple right it's just time and heat and me and you can't screw it up and so there's been a real effort I think to overcomplicate barbecue that you know I mean it's like grilling it's like man grilling you know you could never figure this out I think there's a whole you know there's a whole genre of those foods right I mean I grew up with fried chicken too and everybody oh yeah right get into a fried chicken conversation it's almost you know like barbecue so I know like like like me you probably you collect savannahs of Africa metaphors I do you know from the time I was a kid I somebody is always coming forward with the new savannahs of Africa Theory you know right when did we become human was it when we stood upright was it when we you know learned how to throw a spear of some kind funeral rituals like just you know genital display one of those many many things suddenly made us human right and in your book you elaborate on the the Harvard guys Richard Wrangham Wrangham who's you know argument is is that when we learned to cook and learn and and and shortened the amount of time we spent eating we opened up this whole new moment for culture and young and growing our brains and so on so can give me the the Michael Pollan like two-minute history of mankind like you know go all the way to Homo erectus and and bring me to the microwave what's that what's that Harden well the the cookie like a few more minutes okay the cooking hypothesis we're gonna have a question yeah yeah maybe a position so this'll be our last is was put forward by an anthropologist and primatologist named Richard Wrangham at Harvard and he's trying to answer this this mystery of evolution which is at a certain point the human brain gets or the proto human brain gets really and the gut gets relatively small compared to primates of our size and it was often thought it was meat-eating that gave us this additional you know caloric bonanza that allowed us to grow these big brains and all these other things well from that but raw meat is very hard to digest actually and you do need a lot of guts to do that and and a lot of chewing and and so his hypothesis that it was that it was when we discovered how to control fire and cook meat and other things over fire that we became human and the reason is that once you cook things they're much more nutritious they you use less of your own energy to digest them they're broke partially broken down and and so what it gave our species was and also a detoxify certain food so for instance tubers which are often poisonous eaten raw potatoes and cassava and things like that if you cook them you can eat them so think about that it gives us access to a source of calories no other animal has its enormous boon to our species and when we started eating cook food he hypothesizes and it's and it's hard to prove our brains got bigger because we had all these extra calories and our guts shrank and we could reapportioned at and if you look at primates our size they have to they have very long you know digestive systems and they spend about 6 hours a day in the mere act of chewing now you're not going to have art and culture and opera if you're spending six hours a day chewing I'm racing ahead now that explains a lot about my home state but anyway so this and and you know chimps for example hunt as it turns out and like to eat meat but they only have 18 minutes in which to do everything decide gathering their food and chewing oh so they're stressed out you know middlebrow workers also so anyway so it's it should be called the chewing hypothesis from anyway it was a really important development it's funny we kind of sensed this too I mean James Boswell said in the 1800s I guess that we were the the cooking creature and Claude lévi-strauss you know pointed out that the the moving from the raw to the cooked is is the creation of culture it's where we bring our intentionality our traditions to this raw stuff of nature it turns out there are some animals who cook ferment by burying things and things like that but basically we are some chimps like you know scavenge and burnt forests right I mean there are yeah there are interesting evidence you could see why we'd be predisposed to cook food yeah because there are a lot of animals that when a forest fire comes through they go through and they really like the roasted you know chipmunk and or certain nuts for the right hook that they was today well yeah a lot of creatures will go into a burn forever and they really like that that kind of barbecue we want one last mega question and then we're gonna turn to the audience but um you know in in the in the narrative of your book you talk about the 20th century processing foods and then of course we're now transitioning into this like different era of processing entire meals right Ultra processed food right so I mean what what's the trajectory do you see I mean are we is there a way back for us to start cooking again or is there a new sort of forward where we you know don't lose what we have or I mean is there is there some way out of this kind of processed disease-ridden you know non cooking world that we've seem to create for ourselves well you know they're I think they're two paths open to us one is the food industry is optimistic that they can design healthier and healthier foods and solve a lot of our problems I'm really skeptical that they can do this for reasons having to do with their business model for reasons having to do with the fact that one of the if you think about the history of food technology we have this glorious history of cooking which has made food more nutritious easier to digest you know given us new nutrients all those kind of stuff that goes on from this discovery of fire all the way to I would date 1880 or so when we figured out how to refine white flour from that time forward our processing of food has made it less healthy it's a really interesting turn in human history and that you know we almost got too smart for our own good and we figured out ways to process food that made it superficially attractive but in fact for our health really bad I don't know if I can point to an example of food processing since 1880 that has really been a net gain to public health and you know frozen vegetables yes canning vegetables yeah this is these are these are net games but I think they coming around that same period so I think we're not gonna get out of this box which is to say the chronic disease that's becoming so epidemic in our culture unless we rebuild a culture of cooking it's not gonna be the same culture of cooking because it's gonna have to be shared it can't be a female culture of cooking I think the challenge is going to be to get our children into the kitchen to teach cooking again in schools again not gendered as home Equus but to everyone and get people to realize that what seems like drudgery is really the most wondrous alchemy and that there is pleasure to be had and interest to be had in this work and that we have to change our perception of it and and that's what I hope this book does cook is not a lecture or an argument it's really just the discovery of that this these miracles available to us this power to make alcohol what an amazing thing that you can at home make this substance that will change your experience reality that's great that's great stuff and that we've given we've deprived ourselves of some interest and pleasure by letting other people do this for us and that we need to reclaim this so that's my hope and I'm you know hopelessly optimistic you know but that's what I you know I'd like to see and there's some there's some encouraging evidence the decline I described since 1965 since 2008 home-cooking is come up a little bit it may just be a product of the economy because cooking is economical we forget but maybe it's the sign of a king fantastic can we open this up to questions we only you know we don't have a few more minutes to be here but does anyone want to approach these microphones right over here and ask a question yeah hello my name is Tiffany gouge my artist name is molasses Jones and every time I tell somebody my artist name is molasses they have a huge smile however when sweeteners are alternative sweeteners are publicized little is molasses ever mentioned among them and so I just I was hoping you could talk about the politics of sugar and sweeteners because they are naturally appealing to us as human beings so that's pretty much it and thank you for talking sharing and all of that thank you that's it's a great name well molasses is is as you as I'm sure you know is unrefined sugar I mean sugar brought to a certain point of refinement and not filtered to become you know white and and molasses actually still has some nutrients that are bleached out of sugar along the way sugar is an amazing topic and it is one of the very few tastes that we are hardwired to like and the reason for that is probably because in nature sugar was rare and and a rich source of calories and you know we we evolved under conditions of scarcity and that when you found sugar you probably found fruit and so with that sugar came this wonderful package of vitamin C and other antioxidants and and fiber or you found honey which was rare and and wonderful and a lot of effort went into securing honey but it's only in the last you know a couple hundred years that we figured out a way to rip sugar out of the context of plant of healthy plant foods and and that's why it's become such a problem one of the mysteries of artificial sweeteners that you were alluding to is that they don't seem to make a difference in people's weight when people switch from natural sugars to artificial you would think that since they're getting less calories they should lose weight and they don't seem to and it may have something to do with the way that sugar Prime's the body to expect sugar and it will find sugar somehow and it will find it other places if not in that soda and I think that's probably the full extent of my knowledge of sugar can you can can you describe the Harry Balzer diet which is mentioned a book which may be the best diet I've ever heard in my life yeah well I was talking to Harry Baals with this this marketing consultant and and I'm saying you know we're talking about the obesity epidemic and he acknowledges it's coming from a processed food and and I asked him at some point you know all right you're very cynical you think cooking's over its dead we're cheap and lazy it's never gonna happen again but can you imagine you know a change and and a way out of the obesity epidemic and he said you want to know a diet that works this is a guy who's inside the food industry you want to know the one diet that works it's really simple eat anything you want as long as you cook it yourself and there's a real interest there's a lot of wisdom in there because if you're cooking you're not gonna have french fries twice a day too much work too messy you're not gonna have dessert every night - you're gonna make kind of basic good healthy food and you're not gonna have to think about nutrients so you know keep that in mind I mean I think it was it was a real bit of wisdom from deep inside the belly of the beef love it sir you have a question request for two-minute history you mentioned all these cooking processes that have to do with chemistry and microbes but we didn't know about any of these things - the last 200 years so for the hundreds of thousands of years before that people must have thought of these transformations in different ways could you briefly describe it well yeah it's interesting I mean that's what's kind of amazing that science has come late to the party here in terms of figuring out what's going on when you're making beer or or cheese well sister Noella who I was talking about mcc's her cheese in wooden barrels with a wooden stirring stick and these sticks that were used to mix your cheese were considered magical and and they're brewing six also and that you use this and suddenly you got your fermentation going and people didn't know why but of course it was it was micro it was microbes hiding in the grooves of that wood interesting you know Health Department freaks out when they see someone trying to make cheese with wood because you can't you can't sterilize wood or it's very very difficult to sterilize it and sister knew ella was under a lot of pressure to give up her wooden barrel - which is how it's made and this cheese is made in the Oh burning and to go to stainless steel and she actually went back to school and got a degree in microbiology - so she could defend this method and she set up this really interesting experiment where she took a batch of milk divided it between the wooden and a stainless steel vessel of some kind and she deliberately inoculated them both with e-coli and she watched what happened and at the end of four hours or six hours whatever it was the stainless steel vat of milk was just had you know astronomic levels of e.coli and the wooden one had microscopic I mean I mean really really tiny no health problem levels of e.coli and the reason was that the wooden barrel had these lactobacillus that acidified the environment and killed the e.coli so you see she was using without knowing it and people in though Varon have known this you know done the same thing without knowing it she was using one microbe to combat another and the wood vessel was key and so arguably people have been practicing what I call a kind of folk microbiology which involved a lot of trial and error and probably dead people along the way but nevertheless works now just point it in your in your book you you note that the the ancient word for cook or the Greek word for cook priests and butcher are all the same and they're all related to magic right here so maybe the Three Magi were actually chef coming with like pots of sauce you know Carol yeah Catherine fermented pickle I've lived so yes yeah yes I was wondering so i I've heard it said from the raw vegan movement that our body actually rejects cooked food in a way that's similar to you know getting an outside like a cold or something their body rejects it and it takes a long more time to process i'm have you heard about that kind of the argument against cooking food er well i've heard arguments against cooking food i didn't i i'd never heard the argument that it is essentially a allergen or you know it's gonna provoke a reaction and I'm really skeptical of that theory I I don't understand biologically why that would be you know vegans are you know people who go on vegan diets often get remarkable health benefits from it some don't some have a lot of trouble with it and they suffer from deficiencies of b12 for example but raw food we have a lot of research that people don't do very well long-term people humans on raw food and that women who go on an all raw food diet more often than not stop menstruating and that it's very hard to get enough nutrients from raw food because you need such a quantity of it since there's so much water in the diet and it's very curious you know people on a raw food diet look how dependent they are on their blenders that's how they deal with the six hour chewing problem is because the blender so just to add to that I mean since we offshored a lot of our digestive tract to the pot on the stove which is your argument right I mean have we done enough of that that we can't go back well having some raw food in the diet is probably a very good thing because the food that isn't broken down easily is what feeds your microbiota so there there is a place for raw food in the diet I I think there's not a place for all rocks right and I think you know and that's my take on like all nutritional forms of nutritional extremism you know we're omnivores we can eat a lot of things it doesn't oblige us to eat anything but that radical solutions to how to feed yourself I'm just generally skeptical of so yeah some raw food for sure and you know I have friends who are vegans and and have remarkable health and lose a lot of weight and then I have others who III can think of one right now is suffering with some neurological difficulties because he had a b12 deficiency so question over here I I also have a sugar question didn't I say it was the limits of my has to do with fructose which is something that I used to hear a lot about in terms of maybe it's just the same as glucose it has the same number of calories per gram etcetera but now I'm hearing about all these links between fructose and the gut microbiota and how it's it's not exactly the same and I was wondering if anything in your course of study has illuminated anything about yeah well fructose is a kind of sugar that appears to be more problematic in terms of our metabolism it is metabolized differently it's metabolized in the liver and it has been high levels of fructose in the diet has been correlated with type 2 diabetes metabolic syndrome I'm not sure exactly about what it does in the gut though I haven't I haven't read much about that because these things tend to be absorbed you know before it gets to the to the colon but there is a there are there are several scientists who are particularly concerned about fructose and the amount of fructose in our diet has gone up a lot fructose is normally you know the fruit sugar and it wasn't a huge part of the the diet but with processed food and high fructose corn syrup which actually isn't so high in fructose it's a little higher than normal sugar but there are other forms of fructose now in the diet crystalline fructose a lot of energy drinks have have high fructose levels robert lustig has written a lot on this that would be a good place he's got an interesting new book out and and he he looks at fructose as a particular dietary evil I'm I tend to be skeptical of all efforts to brand single nutrients as the problem or the solution it's usually more complicated than that and we have this tendency in America to go nuts on a particular nutrient and I'm waiting I bet one of the six of you have a question about gluten here we go all right we're gonna we're gonna go to one o'clock so you have 15 seconds for your question shoot okay let me just don't do it then poor communities and particularly reservations lack access to healthy green food and organic is too expensive and the land natives were placed on currently are not technically good land to farm so they've turned to cheap subsidized sources of food like fried flour do you see a cheaper alternative for healthy eating for these communities in the future great question yeah really good question you know we do have food deserts in this country and it's turning out to be a little more complicated than that there are places where people eat really badly where they do have access to full-scale supermarkets and the supermarkets are full of really bad food so the the Michelle Obama approach that we can just get a good supermarket get Walmart into every neighborhood it's gonna fix things it's not I mean you need to be able to afford the food it's not just having the store there and fresh produce costs more then processed food if you have a dollar to spend in the grocery store and I've done this experiment with my students and economists have done this experiment and just say get as many calories as you can for a dollar the students will come back with chips and soda they won't come back with broccoli or carrots you can get much more in the form of processed food so the challenge is how do you make real food more affordable and that's a complicated question I mean over the last 30 years during the years of the obesity crisis fresh produce has gone up in real dollars about 40% while processed food and soda in particular has gone down about 7 7 % so the balance is getting even worse than it was a couple a couple things to to think about one is gardening gardening which can be done in a many places and does not involve a great expense or money or labor produces the healthiest most seasonal most freshest most nutritious food you can possibly have and your we're finding lots of underserved communities where community gardening an individual gardening has has enjoyed a renaissance and I was one of the most positive things Michelle Obama did was planted garden at the White House and get people rates of home gardening went up dramatically so I think underserved communities have to take seriously the idea of growing their own food and and learning how to do it and so I think that holds real possibilities ultimately we're gonna have to adjust all the incentives in the food system I mean right now we subsidize the least healthy calories in the supermarket with our agricultural subsidies that's how they're organized we don't subsidize produce we subsidize corn soy which are the building blocks of processed food so we're gonna have to address it at that level we're gonna have to create incentives for farmers to diversify and grow a lot more vegetables and but I think in in the short term when you have an emergency growing food is is a very important way to go good question over here your question 15 seconds hi a question for you Michael Pollan although if you have something to add that would be great to as a reporter um that's about food and more about your work you're a writer and a researcher and I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how you go about doing your work how you go about your writing and your research and you know for example with kimchi you can go to a museum you can read articles or books you can find a recipe and try it yourself but presumably you have to talk to people about it maybe even going to their kitchen and watch them make it oh yeah we like to watch people make food well let's talk about kimchi I mean I'll try to narrow your question is we don't have a lot of time I mean I wanted to learn about kimchi and I started I always start with books I buy books I read Sandra Cassie's book you know wild fermentation and I read other recipes and I started reading history and then I started finding oh wow there's a there's a really great artisanal Pickler in my community named Alex husband then and I went and she has a store called cultured and she's at the farmers market in Berkeley and I went and I said could I work here for a day our two days actually I ended up working there I just want to learn how you do it and I'll work for free and people are often very happy to have labor you know especially in food work and and I learned an immense amount pestering her with questions and there's some there's a way of learning that happens you know when you're doing things that you can never get from a book I mean some people you know can learn how to change a diaper from a diagram or something that I can't I really need to have somebody show me and that was definitely true for cooking - and so volunteering your services is a great way to learn how to do something and then I went looking to understand the microbiology and and I discovered there was a group of food scientists at Davis University near near me and there was a woman there who studied vegetable ferments and I started seeing her names on academic papers and I called her up and I said could I you know come interview you I want to learn about lack of bacillus plantarum so you kind of follow this daisy chain of you know one person and you and every interview you say is there anyone else I should talk to you know what I'm interested in now who else should I talk to and one person leads you to another it leads you to another and you know you're done when everybody starts repeating themselves yeah it's a little like the scientific method I find that like you read something and sort of theories begin to form in your head and then you go out in the world and that's your experiment right right this abuses you have many many things turns out to be much much more complicated so that back and forth is really yeah the doing in the reading are are in a really productive dialogue right and I think that that's really important because if you do it all from reading weirdly enough you get it wrong Sablin you are the last question my name is Miranda and I don't necessarily have a question but I have an invitation I go to a school in New Haven and it's close commonground high school and it is an urban farm and ever environment allergic Center and last year we we read your book and life in the environment class where I learned about high fructose corn syrup and how read how me is really grown and um corn and that kind of stuff and when I saw this event on Facebook and I was like oh I could come and invite him to my school because mice say you're quiet you do have a question will I come to the it is a really cool place but it's a farm and there are chickens and goats and sheep and bunnies and the best compost pile in ever and it is a really cool place and I was wondering if you could come and either this coming visit or just come and talk cuz it's real it's really interesting and you were talking about education and like learning things like by doing and that's what my school does we sounds great well I would love to come visit your school I'm leaving town for a long time this afternoon but I will find a time to come back because I come to visit Jack and come DL occasionally so next trip I would love to come so you have to give me all your information yes thank you very good thank you thank you everyone thank you Michael [Music] thank you

Channel: Yale University

Views: 39,427

Keywords: Michael Pollan (Author), Pollan, omnivore's dilemma, food, cooking, food studies

Id: PI8VVPZB2i4

Length: 81min 18sec (4878 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2014