Something You Should Know
The Surprising Toll of Life’s Daily Hassles & What Exactly is American Cuisine?
Mon, 16 Dec 2024
How often do you clean your cellphone? Chances are you don’t do it often unless the screen starts to get a little gross. This episode begins with some interesting intel that will have you cleaning your phone much more often than you likely do now. https://www.statefoodsafety.com/Resources/Resources/the-dirty-cell-phone-25-127-bacteria-per-square-inch# We all face big challenges in life. Yet, when it comes to the things that really take a toll and wear us down, it’s the little hassles and frustrations that do the most damage. Your ability to handle the little things life throws at you is what determines the quality of your life, according to my guest Dr. Samantha Boardman, a clinical instructor in psychiatry and attending psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is founder of https://www.PositivePrescription.com and author of the book Everyday Vitality: Turning Stress into Strength (https://amzn.to/3szCZHB). Listen as she offers some extremely practical strategies to navigate the daily troubles we all face without letting them take such a big toll on you. Before you ever walk into an Italian, Mexican or Japanese, you already have a pretty good idea of what will be on the menu. Yet, when it comes to American food, is there such a thing as American cuisine? What do people in other countries think of when they think of American food? That’s what Paul Freedman decided to explore. And what he found is fascinating. Paul is a history professor at Yale University and author of the book American Cuisine: And How it Got This Way (https://amzn.to/3JjoO03). Listen as he reveals some of the history and stories that shaped what Americans eat today. Is being happy good for your health? The answer is yes, but not necessarily in the way you think. Listen as I explain what researchers found that will really make you want to be happy and stay happy. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/happiness-stress-heart-disease PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. AURA: Save on the perfect gift by visiting https://AuraFrames.com to get $35-off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout! SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: It's your last chance to snag Dell Technologies’ lowest prices of the year before the holidays! If you've been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Shop now at https://Dell.com/deals PROGRESSIVE: The Name Your Price tool from Progressive can help you save on car insurance! You just tell Progressive what you want to pay and get options within your budget. Try it today at https://Progressive.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Today on Something You Should Know, what's the dirtiest thing you come into contact with every day? I'm sure it's close to you right now. Then, the importance of coping well with the little hassles in life.
It was, I think, Muhammad Ali who had said, it's not the mountains that wear us out, it's the pebbles in our shoe. And there's a lot of evidence that having many hassles in your everyday life really can take an even bigger toll on our health than major life events.
Also, can being happy improve your health? Sort of. And what is American cuisine? It's kind of hard to define.
However... There are some things that Americans like that few other people do, like peanut butter or maple syrup. You know, this is not a popular item in the rest of the world.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I'm not a real big germaphobe, but when I first came across this first story I'm about to tell you about, I just, I ran to a sink and washed my hands. You know, even though we're becoming more conscious of germs and the need to clean and disinfect things, one thing many of us are not especially careful about is our cell phones.
Various studies have been published with headlines like, Your cell phone has more germs on it than a toilet seat. Which is likely true. But of course, not all germs are harmful. Still, when you think about it, your phone has a lot of opportunity to pick up germs and bacteria because...
You take it everywhere, you put it down in all kinds of places on all kinds of surfaces, so it's exposed to a lot of germs that can hitch a ride. There was a video put out a while ago that showed that, for example, a toilet seat has about 1,200 bacteria per square inch, a kitchen counter has about 1,700, a checkout screen at a supermarket has 4,500 bacteria per square inch,
A doorknob has about 8,600 and a cell phone has about 25,000. So it's really important to clean your phone and clean it often. There are products specifically designed for this job, or you can just use a gentle cloth with a mixture of 60% water and 40% isopropyl alcohol.
But you should not use conventional household spray cleaners because they're too harsh for the screen, or paper towels because they can be too rough and scratch the screen. And that is something you should know. Just the fact that you are alive and listening to this means you are well aware of how life can wear you down.
Yeah, there are those big events that come along and hit you hard, but what I'm talking about today are the little things, the daily hassles, those things that happen that shouldn't happen, but they happen anyway. And they're irritating, and they take up your time, and they create frustration and anxiety and... And you know what I mean.
Most of us likely don't have much of a strategy to deal with these inevitable, seemingly minor events. So meet Dr. Sarah Boardman. Sarah is a clinical instructor in psychiatry and attending psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. She's founder of PositivePrescription.com and author of the book, Everyday Vitality, Turning Stress into Strength. Hi, Sarah. Welcome.
Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Why should we worry about and talk about the seemingly small hassles that we all face every day? I mean, it's part of life. We deal with them as best we can. So as a psychiatrist, what do you see as the problem with all these hassles?
You know, it was, I think Muhammad Ali who had said, it's not the mountains that wear us out. It's the pebbles in our shoe. And it's, there's a lot of evidence to support, you know, the idea that having many hassles in your everyday life really can add up.
And not only like in the moment, it affects you psychologically and physically, but they also stay with you and they accumulate and they add up over time and they can take an even bigger toll on our health than major life events.
well, who hasn't woken up in the morning, and it's a great day, and then life starts happening, and then this happens, and then this goes wrong, and the car won't start, and by noon, that great day sucks.
And I think some people, by temperament, they're maybe born that way. They're more maybe Teflon than they are Velcro. And for some of us, I'd say certainly myself, I tend to be a little bit more Velcro. And that stuff really sticks with me. I think most react by then... assuming that this is going to be a horrible day.
And as these accumulate over the course of the day that you sort of just double down and we end up like our coping strategies are often the exact opposite of the thing that would make us feel strong. It's when we sort of think, I deserve to order a fried egg and cheese right now for lunch or spend the afternoon or the evenings eating watching TV until late at night.
And we end up with what they call a guilty couch potato syndrome. And we end up sort of choosing activities that are further depleting and that make us feel even worse.
Well, and you say that the antidote for this is vitality, which seems to be the thing that all these little hassles suck away from you. So what do you mean by that? And what do you mean by vitality? What is it?
Well, vitality is that positive feeling of aliveness and energy that I think is at the very heart of wellbeing. And it's something that we don't really talk about enough. It's a physical and psychological experience.
And why I think it's so important is because it helps us manage everyday hassles and just those annoying irritations, those micro stressors that are embodied in the fabric of everyday life.
Yeah. Well, don't you think, though, that how you perceive your day is a lot of that is in your head, that if you're one of those people who just complains and complains about every little thing that happens and you see your day through that very negative lens, well, then that's your day. Somebody else could be having the same day and think it's a great day.
It really depends on, don't you think, on how you perceive it.
Well, 100%. And I think our expectations shape so much of what we experience. When we are sort of overwhelmed and we're feeling that accumulation of hassles, and the hassles themselves aren't really problematic. It's how we perceive them. Is this really going to pummel me? Are these pebbles in my shoe really adding up? And what we need to counter them is uplifts. And uplifts, I mean...
being sort of experiences that create positive emotion. And there's a lot of uplift imposters. And I think that are ultimately vampires of vitality. And that is, you know, when we reach for our phones and we fall into that hole, or when we end up canceling our plans or doing the sort of those unhealthier behaviors, but really uplifts, they don't happen in your head.
They're really embodied actions and what we do. And I think we create these uplifts that buffer these hassles and
it's in our having positive interactions and communications with other people when we feel like we're connecting well with others and it could be with our loved ones with a stranger it could be an uber driver it just is having some kind of connections and i think those fortify us the second thing that really helps uh
I think us manage those hassles by creating uplifts is when we feel like we're contributing to something beyond ourselves, that we're sort of doing something somehow for someone else. And it's not that you have to go away and join the Peace Corps, but just in some small ways that you're doing things for others and that your day feels purposeful.
And then in the third way is that when you feel like you're challenging yourself in a You're learning something. You are stretching yourself in some way that sort of thinks like, wow, I have some form of self-efficacy in me. These are really actions that we can take.
They don't cost anything, but we really need to prioritize them and be deliberate about creating uplifts, I think, in our everyday lives to manage these hassles and so that they don't take such a toll on us.
Well, it's interesting as we discuss this and zero in on it, I don't think people necessarily realize the toll that these hassles take because by their nature they're small and any one of them is probably not the end of the world and we deal with them individually and we don't realize the cumulative effect of these everyday hassles.
you know, I think it was Chekhov who said, any idiot can handle a crisis. It's a day-to-day living that wears us out. And I think it's, you know, it depends on the, you know, for one person, you know, on that day, it might be like two things that go wrong or five things. And we're not, I don't think we're accountants. We're not keeping score.
But what often happens is, you know, we just end up with this overall feeling of unhappiness, of just irritation or aggravation. And that that really does shape how we're approaching everything else and how other hassles are affecting us.
And so you're suggesting that we create these uplifts in life to counteract and to fend off the wear and tear of all the hassles of everyday life by doing specifically by doing things like what?
Yeah. No. So here's like a really concrete example of that. And it would be, first of all, it's not doing the things that are depleting a vitality and engaging in those vampires of vitality, which is, okay, I'm just going to cancel my plan, stay home, get lost in a social media rant or something like that. But what can make me feel good? A classic uplift would be
I'm going to go for a walk outside. I'm going to leave my phone at home. And I'm going to look around me. And I'm not going to have earphones in or earbuds in. Look deliberately for something that delights you in some way. And what's interesting is you start looking for something that will delight you. You end up building that delight muscle.
There's a wonderful book called The Book of Delights that I love a lot, written by a philosopher at the University of Chicago. And it really talks about how when we're sort of priming ourselves for this and you can be doing this and you need to do it all the more when you're having a tough day. And I think you need to really override your inclination to go down that rabbit hole and feel worse.
And there's a lot of evidence. One way to do that would be to use what psychologists call self distancing when you. think to yourself, well, what would I advise a friend in this moment to do? Or sometimes I ask my patients to be on you. What would be the opposite of the thing you feel like doing right now? And even think of somebody you admire, what would they do in this moment?
Because it can help lift us out of ourselves. And I think so much of psychology and psychiatry, we assume it's happening in people's heads, but actually how we feel really depends on sort of how we're interacting with the world and activities, actions that we take can really shape how we feel.
So I want to get a better sense of the timing of all this, just because it's my personality that if I have some hassle going on, if I just discovered, for example, that my credit card was billed for something it shouldn't have been billed on, it's hard for me to get up and go for a walk because I want to go solve that problem first. Then I maybe could go for a walk. What's the timing of this?
Do you fix the problem and then go for a walk? Do you go for a walk and fix the problem while you're walking? Or do you just push everything aside, go for a walk and come back? What's your sense of that?
We know from, you know, there's so much evidence that points to maybe on that walk, distancing yourself from some of those hassles might help you find some clarity to help you actually solve them.
And I think that game of walk-a-mole that we're playing all the time, you know, that actually when you sort of pause the game and you walk away from it, you might be a little bit more effective when you return. I mean, I think there's loads of evidence showing that most people have even bigger breakthrough moments, physicists, artists, looking at, you know, across different disciplines.
It's, you know, we often hear about those in the shower moments, like that's when somebody like thinks, you know, oh, wait a minute, I've just solved that problem. But there's really evidence showing that that is the case.
So it's often when we're not thinking about the thing we need to be thinking about that we, I think, clear our minds and we're able to, I think, be more effective in the way we solve those problems and deal with those hassles.
Yeah, well, that truly is my experience, that if I sit here and try to hammer out a solution, it's a lot harder and probably a worse solution than if I go take a shower and then things just pop into my head. Psychiatrist Dr. Sarah Boardman is my guest. The name of her book is Everyday Vitality, Turning Stress into Strength.
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So, Sarah, it's interesting to think about it as we were discussing how one of the best ways to deal with or solve a problem is to get away from it, to not try to solve it, to think about something else, that it is in the getting away from it that the clarity comes.
Yeah, no, that clarity and that perspective.
And I think when you're often like even using your body in some way, or you're doing something where your mind is occupied by something other than that thing you need to solve, it's even when you have some kind of hobby or something that you, you know, are engaged in, even if you're reading a work of fiction, or you, you know, we're just going, you know, to work on some, I have one patient who does puzzles, like she does puzzling, you know, when she's stressed out, and,
It is this. And she was reluctant like you. She was like, oh, I just want to get that stuff done and then I can get to that stuff. And she's found it's been really helpful to even take those breaks, distract herself and then come back to what's bugging her.
100%.
And rumination is, you know, truly an on-ramp to depression and anxiety. And rumination is, you know, that experience when you're just going over and over and over again, the same issue in your head. It's like that ticker tape running on the bottom of the screen, except it's on your, you you know, worried about something that you should have done or that is going to happen in the future.
And, you know, there's research out there that shows how much behavior activation therapy works. And when you're, you know, because it's one thing to have an insight in your mind even or have a greater understanding about why you do what you do. But if you're not acting on it, like you're still kind of in the same place.
It also seems to me that when you're handling those day-to-day hassles, what you're saying to yourself, particularly about yourself, can have a real impact on how you view the problem, how you solve the problem. And trying to be conscious not to beat yourself up in your own head is probably a real helpful strategy.
Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And it goes, it sort of dovetails with what we were speaking about earlier, too, with self distancing. Another technique that I found is helpful is when you ask your, you know, you remove yourself from the situation in your mind by thinking, like, what would a fly on the wall observing this situation? Like, what would they be? How would they be describing this?
And that can also interrupt some of that really negative self talk that can be so paralyzing. Another strategy could be, if my future self were looking back at this moment, what would my future self advise me to do? And what would they say about this? Again, to sort of interrupt that rumination when you're just stewing in it.
Other research shows that with with rumination, one of the best ways to disrupt it is to go for a walk in nature. And even a short walk seems to, I think, just shift perspective and actually get us out of our own heads.
And sometimes I think when we're out of our own heads, we you know, that's where we have this this perspective and sense of clarity and that we're able to make better choices and even maybe solve some problems as well.
So far we've talked mostly about dealing with trouble, with hassles, with problems of everyday life and strategies to do that. But you had mentioned in the beginning of this conversation about vitality, about living life with, I guess, like a sparkle. So let's talk about that.
One thing that I think we know how important it is to eat well and to sleep well and to exercise and those sort of lifestyle interventions. But one thing we don't, I think, maybe speak enough about is how having close friends in relationships is really the secret sauce of mental health. But how do we work at those relationships?
Because we often see people who are high achievers and we think, oh, aren't they great? They're heroes. They've done this all on their own. And we don't recognize that huge network of people behind them who have helped them achieve and get to this place.
What are some of the other science-backed strategies that people could possibly use to live their life, to have that vitality that you're talking about that we haven't talked about so far?
One of the best strategies that we have for not only managing hassles and stress in daily life, but also for just feeling good and strong is doing something for somebody else. I think that it's really an undervalued wellspring of vitality in our lives.
And the next thing is really when we do feel challenged, when we're engaging in something that is really stretching us in some way, which might be the opposite of the thing that we want to do. But looking at studies, it shows that people are less burned out at work when they have hobbies outside of work that they do. And the thing about having a hobby is it's something that you do that you don't.
need to excel in. It's something you do just for the love of the game and something that's just fun. And even making peace with being sort of mediocre at something and just doing it because it's joyful and it's really fun. And, you know, when we do something, there's so much research out there, too, showing that when we do something, instead of trying to... If we have a goal...
if we're instead of trying to make it something that we're taking away something like people who want to lose weight or stop smoking, the goals that seem to be the most productive are the ones that we do with somebody else and it's fun and that engage our strengths. And that to me is really important for vitality because in psychiatry, I spend a lot of time kind of trying to focus on what,
makes people less miserable. And then I ended up studying positive psychology and I got a master's in positive psychology, looking at actually what makes people thrive and what is, you know, what gives them a sense of purpose and even what helps them find wellness within illness or strength within their everyday stress.
And consistently, like reliably across the board, it's where they experience uplifts, where they feel connected with others, where they feel challenged and where they feel like they're contributing to something beyond themselves.
So often, though, it seems that doing those things, doing something for somebody else or trying to develop relationships, those are all the things you don't want to do when things aren't going well. It's like you said earlier, it's exactly the opposite of what you should be doing is what you feel like doing.
No, it's really interesting in how our brains are, you know, that we do the opposite all the time and how our expectations are so different. Like, here's an interesting example, like with gratitude, that people just oftentimes, they just don't express it or they just think it's going to be really awkward if they say something to somebody or like, oh, that person already knows that.
Or, gee, I can't even find the words to say it. Correctly, maybe like if I write a note, it'll be awkward and strange and they'll think that I don't you know, I'm not articulate enough in some way, but how we so underestimate the benefit, like how good that person is going to feel when they receive that. And also how good it's going to make us feel having written it.
Another example of where we sort of get it grossly wrong is we assume that we're going to be that we're happier when we're just sort of by ourselves and that we don't really want to have a conversation with anybody. And that, you know, being like that, we choose solitude. so often over connection and that we think that connection is going to drain us or that we don't really feel like it.
And studies show that people in general feel so much better having had a brief conversation with somebody that that, again, sort of lifts us out of ourselves. Our distorted sort of expectations of how something will make us feel and then the reality of that, I think, creates this opportunity squandered.
You know, that's so true. And you know, the perfect example is the thank you note. Nobody sends thank you notes. And one of the reasons is that it's like overstating it. It's like, you know, I'm grateful, but I don't want to sound like too gushy. And yet the person who gets the thank you note is like, oh, my God, that's great. That's great. Thanks for sending the thank you note.
It makes them feel wonderful. But people don't send them because they don't want to seem like they're too gushy.
Yes. And it's just this missed opportunity there to make that the recipient is going to feel so good. And they don't care that it's like a 10-page letter, just a nice note saying why it was meaningful. And also sometimes I think we talk a lot about gratitude and people make gratitude lists, but they're usually very self-oriented. When we're expressing gratitude, it's about other people.
saying, thank you so much for that thing. Like, you know, the way you do that, really, I admire. Don't make gratitude about you. And, you know, one way that I think that can really help people maybe feel a little bit, you know, more comfortable writing gratitude letters or just thank you letters as well is make it easy on yourself. Buy some stamps.
have some stationery sitting there so you don't have to think of all these different little moving parts that you need to do to get that gratitude letter in the mail. And I have to say, whenever I receive one, I have a gratitude wall that I put it up on because it's so valuable. It's really gold when someone does that and it's really generous.
Well, you know what stands out to me in what you're saying is that, and this kind of ties a bow around all we've been talking about, is you really have to be intentional because it's so easy for life and the little hassles of life to knock you around, push you down, if you let it.
And if you're a little more intentional about keeping those things in perspective, handling them in a way where you don't get... absorbed by them, and just doing the things that you're talking about that help you keep the right attitude as you work through the day makes a big difference. I've been speaking with Dr. Sarah Boardman.
She's a clinical instructor in psychiatry and attending psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. She's founder of PositivePrescription.com, and she is author of the book, Everyday Vitality, Turning Stress into Strength. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Sarah. This is fun. Good conversation. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
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When you walk into an Italian restaurant, you pretty much know what's going to be on the menu. Same thing with an Indian restaurant or a Chinese or Thai or Japanese restaurant. We have a sense of what the foods from those cultures and countries are. And we have those kinds of restaurants all over the U.S.
But if you go to other countries, do you see a lot of restaurants that call themselves American restaurants? And if you did find one, would you be able to predict what would be on the menu? Is there an American cuisine? What is American food? Well, that's what Paul Friedman set out to discover. Paul is a history professor at Yale University.
He's author of a book called Ten Restaurants That Changed America, and his more recent book is called American Cuisine. Hi, Paul. Welcome to Something You Should Know. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for having me.
When you go to other countries, I haven't really thought about this and I don't do that much international travel, but do you see countries that have, quote, American restaurants?
Not really. I have a friend actually from Barcelona and his ambition is to open an American restaurant in Barcelona. But it really would be the first apart from, you know, fast food that's identified with America. And if you ask most foreigners, they think American food is just fast food, or maybe American food is just variety of foods.
So yeah, that's the reason that I became interested in this subject, just to find out, you know, what is American food? And even is there such a thing? Is there such a thing? Well, I believe there is. I think there are three aspects to it. They're not like typical dishes in the sense that As you said, if you go into an Italian restaurant, you know there's going to be pasta.
But the three elements I would identify are regional foods, kind of like a vestige of what used to be a more vigorous sense that, you know, you've got certain kinds of dishes in New England, certain kinds of dishes in the South, certain kinds of dishes in the Northwest. The second element is kind of what killed regionalism, and that is Modern food.
Modern meaning processed, industrial, standardized. And then the third element is variety. And by variety, it means, you know, like the Tropicana orange juice comes in eight different kinds. Or, you know, the yogurt comes in 30 different kinds or the ice cream is in 28 flavors.
And another aspect of variety is that Americans have for much longer than the rest of the world liked so-called ethnic restaurants, liked the food of foreigners and of immigrants.
There are foods that I can think of that to me signify American food, you know, meatloaf, chocolate pudding. I mean, it just, there's something very American about it, that there is something that is American food.
I think that there are some foods people would say are, I mean, what about apple pie or what about pot roast? But in fact, you know, if you ask people, when was the last time you actually made pot roast or When was the last time you actually saw it on a menu and ordered it? I think you'd find that it was decades. And even apple pie is not, you know, there are diners that don't have apple pie.
So a lot of these things are kind of homogenized and they're not necessarily identified with the region. There are things like pizza that have become Americanized, donuts. You know, pretty standard items, but not necessarily American in the sense of being rooted in a particular place.
But are there foods that are rooted in America just because the ingredients are very American? I mean, there is a phrase about American as apple pie. Did apple pie start here?
No, that's the thing. I mean, apple pie is a version of an English apple tart. There are some things that Americans like that few other people do, like peanut butter or maple syrup. I have a friend in France who, and here you'd have to include Canadians. She had a lot of Canadian professional friends. And I remember her telling me they always bring that horrible maple syrup of yours.
You know, this is not a popular item in the rest of the world. But American ingredients, a lot of American cuisine was based on corn, which grew better in much of New England than did wheat. So, you know, that's an ingredient. Or liquor made out of apples. Applejack was an old kind of standby. And some of these things continue to have some influence.
Hot sauce, you know, which originates from the Southwest, that's something that Americans like a lot. Even if the basic food is bland, we like a lot of different kinds of flavorings to top it off with.
Do Americans, and I guess people in general, you typically eat as adults what you grew up eating, what you ate as a kid?
Yes. Yes. Particularly because we like sugar and we liked it as kids. There's some tastes that we develop. Most kids don't like the combination of spicy and sweet, like barbecue sauce. I think you've got to become a teenager before that kicks in.
That's interesting. I never thought, because I have kids that like barbecue sauce and liked it from a fairly young age. That's
I think it could also be that your kids are a little more sophisticated. And in fact, I've got to say, kids have become more sophisticated. The kind of kid who would only eat at McDonald's for his or her first 18 years still exists. But I just had a dinner party yesterday and a friend has two kids, 10 and 13, and the 10-year-old actually made a kind of bread.
that is typical of the colonial era, you know, just like, because he wanted something to do while the adults were cooking. So that certainly wouldn't have happened when I was growing up.
When you look back at what Americans were eating in the 50s or the 60s, it seems very meat and potatoes, that there wasn't a lot of adventurous eating going on.
Things changed in the 1970s, I would say, or that, you know, if I had to pick a turning point. The rediscovery of actual flavor in primary foods like seasonal, local, what we now all kind of take for granted, begins in California, not only with Alice Waters and her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, but that would be the most famous example.
And at the same time in the 1970s, although certain kinds of Immigrant food like Chinese and Italian had been popular for a long time. You see an explosion of other kinds of options. Thai food really becomes a big item in the 70s. Indian food. Mexican food becomes available in places like New York that had never had it. So in 1979, I started teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
And at that time, the food was not only meat and potatoes, but pretty bland. And it became spicier and more varied. The spicier I remember being impressed by. And not just Thai food or Mexican food, but items like blackened redfish or buffalo chicken wings. These things have a lot of spice. And so things did change. And I would pick the 1970s as the beginning of the shift.
And they changed in the 1970s because why? What happened? What caused the change?
Some of it is just the arrival of lots of immigrants. So in 1965, Congress voted to repeal the racist and restrictive laws about immigration that had cut immigration from all but Northern Europe since the 1920s. And then by the 1970s, you really started to get the arrival of large numbers of people, especially from Asia.
But more than just the availability of more kinds of cuisines, I think it has to do with the kind of individualism and rejection of mass culture. So instead of everybody, you know, watching the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday evening and
the security of knowing that if you were having Yankee pot roast and potatoes, your neighbors were having Yankee pot roast and potatoes, probably a kind of limited dossier of dishes. People started to want to shape themselves, to make themselves a kind of different story from that of other people. And that individualism, remember the 1970s at the time was dubbed the me decade. And so the me part
means nonconformity or finding your own path.
I remember it. And you can look back and see, because people post ads, old print ads on Facebook and stuff of food from the 50s and the 60s, you know, jello molds and fondue. And my recollection is a lot of that stuff, TV dinners, was all horrible.
It was just horrible. Well, you know, people actually cooked in those days. You may not like what they cooked, but compare it to now where more money is spent on meals taken outside of the home than in the home. Another thing is that certain kinds of products, particularly meat, is now inferior to what was available in the 1950s. Fish as well, partly because of overfishing.
partly because of breeding meat to have low fat, hence not very much flavor or kind of more industrialized product. So the chicken of the 1950s was better than most, except the kind of high-end chickens available now. But having said all that, yeah, the food was pretty dreadful. And you have the sense that people forgot what basic things were supposed to taste like.
They certainly forgot what fruit was supposed to taste like,
what produce generally and um special effects we're supposed to make up for that special effects like you know putting it in jello or adding ketchup uh or you know some kind of weird new processed thing like you know whipped cheese or cheese from a a dispenser or flavor straws you know with chocolate flavor built into the straw even though these things are horrible um
I don't know, people sort of fell for them.
Is there anything, like when you think of Italian food, you think of pasta, and it's all over the world, and you think of Japanese food, you think, I don't know, rice. But is there anything that Americans have exported to the world that is truly American? I'm thinking something like breakfast cereal or something.
I think the world has rejected a lot of our exports. like breakfast cereal. So in Britain, they eat American breakfast cereal, but a few other countries have embraced this. Sometimes countries embrace things just, you know, like Tang, this artificial orange beverage made from a powder, was a big item in the 60s because the astronauts drank Tang and it was promoted on that basis.
Apparently, it's very big in Taiwan still, but certainly it's not big in the United States. I think the US is more a kind of transit point. So we didn't invent pizza, but we exported it to the world, not Italy. We didn't invent sushi, but the fact, you know, I do a lot of work as a medieval historian, which is my day job in Barcelona.
So I remember when sushi arrived in Barcelona and it didn't arrive directly from Japan. It arrived, you know, around the same time that tacos did. So these things are like it gets the American seal of approval as a hit.
It's interesting that you say that a lot of things like breakfast cereal have not caught on in the rest of the world and yet our exports of fast food have. There's McDonald's everywhere. There's Kentucky Fried Chicken everywhere. That worked. That's right.
Maybe it's perceived as tastier. Some of these, there's more local adaptations. So, you know, you can get beer with a McDonald's hamburger in much of Europe. It's the same thing with music, I'd say, or probably with movies as well. There's certain kinds that really export well. And in fact, many movies are made that are not so popular in the US, but become wildly popular in Europe.
And then there's some things you can't explain. You know, sure, soccer is more popular than it used to be. But, you know, it still is the leading game of the world by far, except in the United States.
You mentioned a few minutes ago pot roast. And I remember my mother used to make pot roast. We used to have it all the time. And so did everybody I knew. But if you wanted pot roast today, I don't know anybody that has. I don't know anybody that eats it.
Or where you'd find it if you decided you had a lust for it. You know, what restaurant, even a so-called, it'd have to be a very serious comfort food restaurant to feature it. Yeah, I think some of it is that it is, it's not that it's a trouble to make. But you've got to know something about cooking. You've got to be willing to use the oven.
Every Thanksgiving, there's some kind of feature I know on NPR about, you know, we're here for you if you're having trouble putting together your Thanksgiving meal. And the reason people are having trouble putting it together is, first of all, they don't cook all that much. And they particularly don't cook old-fashioned dishes that require lots of time in the oven.
So a lot of these things that require roasting or baking are just things that people gave up. If they cook at home, they're grilling, they're frying, they're pressure cooking or, you know, slow cooking. But, you know, if you asked people when was the last time you actually put something in the oven at 350 degrees, there'd be a lot of people who hadn't done it in months.
I find that sad.
I do, too. Definitely.
I have such fond memories of my mother and my grandmother cooking in the kitchen and I cook. And, you know, there have been lots of people who have tried to push that and reinforce that, you know, the galloping gourmet. And then more lately, you know, Chris Kimball at Cooks Illustrated and Milk Street has really tried to.
push the idea that cooking isn't as hard as you think, you can do it quickly, and it can really taste good. But it doesn't seem to really catch on.
It would seem logical that they would have learned that if you cook at home, you have more control over what you're eating. Both quantity, since restaurant portion size is huge, amount of salt, amount of fat. Restaurants, as Anthony Bourdain pointed out in Kitchen Confidential, the reason you like restaurant food is because we don't show any restraint about salt or butter or other fats.
So if people are so concerned with their health,
uh you would think they would cook at home more but that's just logical and not the way you know psychology is not all logic and i've heard things like you know more people watch cooking shows than actually cook and that a lot of cookbooks and cooking instruction has had to get so simplified because like it used to say you know
butter the bottom of the pan and people were turning the pan over and buttering the bottom of the pan and putting it on the fire and it would light on fire. And all of that is so strange to me.
To me too. I think some of it is the perception that we don't have time. And some of it is the way we live so that it is not hard to cook. What's a little hard is to have the right food without shopping every day.
If you lived in Paris and, you know, on your way home from the metro are all sorts of food vendors and you can just decide what's in the market or what the butcher recommends and then make it, that's different from the way most of us don't live very close to where we buy food. And so we shop once a week. And if you do that, then you're going to have to freeze some stuff.
You're going to have to plan things. You're going to have to use some processed ingredients. So that some of this is just a question of shopping more than of actual cooking. But it's also something where people perceive cooking as more difficult. And then who are you cooking for? I think we all lament the fact that families don't eat together as much as they used to.
You know, the teenagers get their own meal and then the parents kind of graze on Other stuff and there's, you know, maybe a big deal is made of having dinner together on Sunday night or one time a week. So that also discourages things like pot roast for sure.
I wonder why cooking shows on TV are so popular and yet cooking is not so popular or not as popular as it used to be. Because you would think that if you're watching this food be prepared on television and it looks so good and, you know, the people taste it and say, oh, it's wonderful, that that would inspire people to want to say, I'm going to make that.
Or it's just entertainment. You know, the key moment of cooking shows is success was not so much the foundation of the food network and, you know, making it 24 seven, but getting away from the instruction model or let's say segmenting the instruction model off into videos, uh, and making the actual programming entertainment.
So, uh, the thing about that is that then it was watched by men and by kids who were not necessarily interested in how to. but simply kind of, you know, they're watching it like they might be watching wrestling or sports.
Do we know, and since you're an historian, was American cuisine, has it stayed more or less the same over the time America's been here, or did people in the 1800s eat vastly different food than we eat today?
I'd say vastly different. And that surprised me. Partly because there was more game available. There were more species of fish available. People liked organ meat. The fancy restaurants of the 19th century feature things like pig's feet with sauce poulet or calf's head with brain sauce. And, you know, this isn't poor people's food. These are restaurants like Delmonico's.
the fanciest restaurant in New York and probably in the United States. So some of it is the tastes have changed. Some of it is that species have declined. So there are all sorts of different kinds of wild ducks available on 19th century menus. There are, you know, pigeons, passenger pigeons. There's buffalo meat. All these either became extinct or endangered.
The most popular dishes of the 19th century in the United States are oysters, which we certainly still have, although they've become very expensive. Terrapin, which is a small turtle, now semi-endangered, and obviously people are not, this doesn't whet the appetite of the average person. So yeah, the food is radically different.
Well, this has been fun to take a look at what American food is, how people around the world perceive it, and how it's evolved over time. Paul Friedman's been my guest. He's a professor at Yale University. He's author of a couple of books. His most recent one is called American Cuisine, and you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Paul. Okay, thanks so much for having me.
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