photo by Dave Cooper
Guest #109.1: Adam Gopnik
Occupation: staff writer, New Yorker, author of really smart books, most recently The Table Comes First, lecturer, big brain in regular sized body
Sent thank-you: email
Guest #109.2: Matt Galloway
Occupation: host, CBC’s Metro Morning
Contributed: lemon curd pie (seriously delicious), Josef Chromy 2009 Pinot Noir
Sent thank-you: email
Guest #109.3: Mark Medley
Occupation: books editor, National Post, Swedish Chef advocate
Contributed: E. Guigal 2007 Cotes Du Rhone, Fuller’s 2011 Vintage Ale
Sent thank-you: email
Guest #109.4: Christine Loureiro
Occupation: deputy Life editor, Toronto Star
Contributed: Chambolle-Musigny 2007 Burgundy
Sent thank-you: email
Guest #109.5: Sheila Kay
Occupation: deputy director of publicity, Random House
Contributed: Toasted Head 2010 Chardonnay, Louis Jadot 2010 Beaujolais
Sent thank-you: email
MEATLITISM
MEDLEY
So, I was wondering, as I read the book, have you gotten any backlash yet for your stance on meat eating?
GOPNIK
I’ve been so busy promoting it. I hate that word.
MEDLEY
It’s fair.
GOPNIK
But, whatever it is you do when you do these things, that I haven’t really been in place long enough to find out what people hate. But I suspect that there probably will be. But, as I thought I made plain in the book, I take the arguments for ethical vegetarianism very seriously. If my kids came to me and said, ‘Dad, we’ve decided that we don’t want to eat any more meat, I’d go along with that fine. But what I don’t think makes a lot of sense is talking about the thing in the context of some absolute theory of — sorry, I’m talked out a bit and I’m going to put this badly — of right and wrong. In other words, you can make just as strong a case that being a carnivore is part of the natural cycle of food as not being a carnivore. Now, the counterargument is always that feeding animals takes an enormous amount of the agriculture of the planet to do. And that’s true. But it’s also a choice. That’s always going to be true. You’re always going to be making irrational choices about how you use the abundance of the planet to feed yourself. You can’t attempt to rationalize that because it doesn’t lend itself to rationalization.
GALLOWAY
But you answer it well with the Fergus Henderson talk, in talking to him about eating everything. Don’t be shy and I had been vegetarian for a long time before I started eating meat again. And that was kind of the point. If you’re going to eat meat, a) eat good meat, and b) …
GOPNIK
Eat the whole beast, right?
GALLOWAY
Eat as much as you can.
MEDLEY
Unfortunately, that’s point one percent of the population. Not everybody …
MINTZ
But that point is often the people who are proselytizing, right?
MEDLEY
That’s true.
MINTZ
The food writers, ‘those people’, are the people who go to nice restaurants and they go to nice butchers and they get ethically raised meat. So I do feel comfortable being a proponent of meat.
GALLOWAY
Or you understand that there’s … again, I take my kids to the butcher shop and they see, here comes the goat or here comes the lamb. But they understand that that’s kind of the whole point. If they’re going to eat meat, and they ask questions all time about, where does this come from? Is it right that we’re eating this? You explain it and they get it. As a five year-old and an eight year-old they get it. So yes, it’s that point one percent. But you can expand that pretty quickly.
MINTZ
Well you can. It’s a question of whether or not we do. In the states it’s different. In our public education system it’s not represented at all. Or, it actually is starting to be. I’m starting to learn that.
MEDLEY
Not when I was growing up.
MINTZ
No, not when I was growing up at all. We got an afternoon of nutrition versus, my niece now, who I communicate with better after I listened to a talk you gave about communicating with your son over the acronym LOL. It actually helped me a lot in dealing with my niece. I text with my niece because that’s her preferred mode of communication. I believe you’ve got to meet people on their level. Anyway, she’s taking a cooking class now. She’s 15 and she’s loving it and what they’re doing is far and beyond what we did 20 years ago. And these guys I had over for dinner on Friday, they’re engineers and work for Foodshare. So they do these things where they teach teachers how to grow food, who then do classes on growing food. They’re building these filing cabinets that grow sunflower sprouts and teaching 12 year-olds how to work these. And they want to implement that all through Ontario. They have this whole plan about teaching kids how to grow stuff and actually sell it, figure out how to make a profit, to work economics into the education. Which is to illustrate, they’re starting to finally push it. But it’s not on the table. So most people don’t have a parent who takes them …
GALLOWAY
No. But if you do … we ate my daughter’s rainbow char that she planted. She planted it early in the season and last night was the night that we went out in the dark, with a flashlight, to harvest the chard. It was incredible.
Fixin's for a cassoulet: lamb sausage, braised pork belly, confit duck, white beans, tomatoes, garlic and onion.
LOUREIRO
I don’t know if it’s economic or cultural. But I feel like I have such a different experience. When we ate meat as a — I have a Portuguese immigrant family — because my grandparents went to a farm and bought a pig and killed it. Or they bought rabbits and bought chickens and kept them in the backyard and butchered them themselves and made dinners and froze the soup or froze the stock. And that was it. To go to a grocery store was a luxury. But to have supermarket ground beef, as a teenager, was an accomplishment. That’s what other people did. And then to come back around to a place where it’s ‘eat meat when it’s good meat’ or just eat good food, whether that’s meat or vegetables or things that are seasonal, is entirely what we were doing when I was five years old. But a completely different mindset. We’ve gone around to the whole tour of Loblaws and Metro and the farmer’s market and then realizing that what you eat, what you consume, is what you put out. But where that came from, the first five to twelve years of my life, you had fish, you knew who caught it. You had meat, you knew who butchered it. It wasn’t because it was en vogue or a luxury. It was because that’s what you had.
FOOD SNOBBERY: YES, IT’S A CLASS ISSUE
MEDLEY
Speaking of cheap and fast and easy ... When I was reading your book, not that you didn’t touch on it enough, but I was interested in your take on it. Fast food’s place in American culture. Because, I mean, that seems to be the table that most people sit at when they’re eating.
GOPNIK
It’s sort of like the Inuit’s in winter. I recognize that. But it’s not something I have a lot of expertise about.
MEDLEY
You don’t go to Burger King often?
GOPNIK
It’s actually very funny because I’m a terrible food snob. In the states I took the kids to watch the ingredients coming into McDonald’s once, where they roll the canisters in.
LOUREIRO
That’ll do it.
GOPNIK
And it did.
MINTZ
How old were they when they did that?
GALLOWAY
That’s a great idea.
MINTZ
Luca was seven. So the baby was two.
MEDLEY
And did it do it? Did it accomplish … ?
GOPNIK
Oh, totally. They never …
MINTZ
What time of day?
GOPNIK
There was a McDonald’s on 3rd avenue and 84th street. It was probably 11 in the morning or earlier. It was probably 8:30 in the morning. Because we used to go out together for breakfast.
I didn’t want this book to be encyclopedic in any way. That’s the thing about being an essayist. You have the freedom and limitations of your own idiosyncrasies. It’s a big issue. But it’s not one that I feel … my favourite comment was, I asked Alice Waters once, what would you do if your daughter invited you to McDonald’s. ‘I would tell her, she’s free to do that if she wishes. But I would prefer not to be involved in that kind of activity.’ And that sort of sums up my feelings about it.
MINTZ
But she’s an active, political figure.
GOPNIK
Alice is. Yes. Absolutely.
GALLOWAY
Do you worry though, even if you’re not active in that, that it … I mean, people talk a lot about hierarchy in food and the stratification between what people can eat, what people will eat, why people gravitate to those sorts of things. And if you say, ‘That’s not an activity that I want to participate in’, that that dismisses 99 percent for lack of a better term, that large swath who rely on that, who eat in their cars, who eat at their desks when they’re at work, etc.
GOPNIK
Y’know, if you’ll forgive me the arrogance, I’m not responsible. I’m not a journalist in that sense.
GALLOWAY
But for somebody who loves food, who wants people to talk about sitting around the table, eating, and not just your own table, but how people eat and the power of food, what food can do to create …
GOPNIK
Here’s the problem. If you lecture people, ‘Don’t go to McDonald’s’, it seems snobbish and exterior. It’s not one of the things I’m compelled to do. I recognize that, for enormous numbers of people, that’s the best decision they can make, for themselves and for their kids. It’s the most economical, it’s the most available decision they can make. And far be it for me to ever criticize that. So telling people that that’s a bad decision, in a way strikes me as being deeply unempathetic with the actual situations that people find themselves in. I’m not putting this very well. But I just feel, writing for me isn’t about balance or comprehensiveness. It’s about obsessivness. I know that sounds terribly … arrogant. But I’ll live with it. I can’t deal with everything that’s out there.
GALLOWAY
Outside of your writing, as a human being, do you … not, appreciate why people would …
GOPNIK
I understand …
GALLOWAY
… or recognize …
GOPNIK
It’s one reason, Matt, why there’s a minimal evangelizing about the virtues of the family table in the book. It’s asserted. It’s not evangelized. Because I recognize, for most people, it’s terribly difficult to do. If you have two people working two jobs, it’s really hard to do. God forbid I would lecture people about it.
GALLOWAY
And there are people who do. The Michael Pollens of the world.
GOPNIK
Exactly. And I don’t like that.
GALLOWAY
That’s fine.
MINTZ
Stephen Colbert concluded his interview with Pollen by saying, ‘Michael, it’s always a treat to have you come and lecture me.’
GOPNIK
I don’t want to lecture people about the right way to eat because I don’t think there is a right way to eat. But as a citizen I think that stuff is awful and I wish we could get rid of it. But as a human being I recognize that people don’t have a lot of choices very often. So trying to bully them is not a productive … and I also recognize that there is no right way to eat. That’s a fundamental truth and I hope that’s one of the truths that’s present in the book. And that is that tastes change all the time. The one thing we can say for certain is, whatever we think is the right way to eat today will not be the right way to eat 50 years from now. Unless history is stopped completely, we know that for certain, that our tastes will have changed as radically 50 years from now, as they have in the previous 50 years. That doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. And forgive me, Matt, but you’ve pressed the … I talked about Francis Coppola’s internal monologue … You could walk away at this point. It doesn’t mean that those things are meaningless. On the contrary, they’re hugely meaningful. But they’re meaningful, essentially, as symbolic assertions, of the values we hold. This is a fantastic dinner, right? The food was great. But more than that, it was the pleasure of these people around here. And it wasn’t because we were having french food, or more important because we were having cassoulet. It was because Corey took that trouble to soak his beans and to make his duck confit. That’s a symbolic expression of Corey’s commitment to the significance of food. And it could have been a number of other dishes too.
MINTZ
There were a few other things on the list.
GOPNIK
That’s why we’re moved by it. It’s not because it’s the right way to eat. It’s because we understand that’s a symbolic statement of the value that food had to him and also the value that our company had. And that will never change. No matter what it is that you’re putting on the table.
GALLOWAY
I’m almost surprised by the fact … I said, on the air, foolishly, once, that I’d never take my kids to McDonald’s. They’d never been to McDonald’s before. The rage that I got back, saying, ‘How dare you say that? I go to McDonald’s and it doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate food as much as you do that you cook in your fancy …’ They thing I live in Rosedale. It was amazing the anger and the passion that people had in responding to that. I just thought, my kids have never been to McDonals’s. They could care less.
GOPNIK
They have something better to eat.
MINTZ
I had never been to McDonald’s. And I was raised by a single dad. We lived in an apartment but we never went to McDonald’s.
MEDLEY
You’ve been though.
GALLOWAY
I never had any sense that they would feel as defensive, and it’s not about class, but that’s how we choose to …
MINTZ
First of all, it’s very much about class.
GALLOWAY
Well it is and it isn’t. But my comment was not about class. My comment was just about food. We were talking about the garden and cooking and somehow it ended up talking about McDonald’s.
GOPNIK
Class is a mutable subject in our society, right? My grandfather was a butcher. Bless his memory, he was illiterate. So it wasn’t as though he had hoity-toity taste. That was the background I grew up against. I don’t ever want to be in the position, and this is something I feel very strongly about, because I have enough historical consciousness to know, that one of the features of food is that our tastes change all the time. So I never want to be in the position of being dictatorial about the right way to eat or the wrong way to eat. Instead I want to try to analyze why do we take pleasure in eating like this or any other kind of eating. And if somebody finds that pleasure in McDonald’s, I think it’s bad for their health and it’s bad for the planet and I would never take my kids there. But I would never want to be in the position of being anybody’s taste dictator. And I wouldn’t want to be in the position of being anybody’s taste dictator when it came to poetry or writing. I have my own values and I believe in those values. They’re not things I hold trivially. But I hope I have enough detachment to know that they’re the typical values of people of my class and taste and kind and they’re going to change as does the values of every other class.
Part A: Gladwell & The Inner Monologue
Date of publication: Saturday, December 10th, 2011
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