(Earth Eats theme music, composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey)

KAYTE YOUNG: From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats.

BLUE DELLIQUANTI: And there's also kind of this vague apocalyptic narrative included in it. More than once I've heard people say, "Oh well, we'll all be eating this someday."

KAYTE YOUNG: On today's show we talk with Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho, authors of Meal a graphic novel about food, culture, love and entomophagy. And we explore research on food pairing and flavor networks with Dr. Yong-Yeol Ahn, he goes by YY. He's a professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University and co-creator of a fascinating map of flavor networks. We have a food poem from Yalie Kamara, plus recipes from Jackie Bea Howard and Susan Mintert. That's all coming up, stay with us.
RENEE REED: Earth Eats is produced from the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. We wish to acknowledge and honor the indigenous communities native to this region and recognize that Indiana University Bloomington is built on indigenous homelands and resources.  We recognize the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land.

KAYTE YOUNG: Renee Reed couldn't be here today, so I'll be the voice of Earth Eats news this week. After a majority senate vote Tom Vilsack is now reprising the role of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Harvest Public Media's Seth Bodine reports that Vilsack has a new challenge as he enters the position.

SETH BODINE: Vilsack said a news conference that one of his biggest priorities is responding to the pandemic. One focus point is rural healthcare.

TOM VILSACK: There is a lack of health insurance, higher levels of uninsured populations in rural places and a lack of access to facilities. And that's why it's incredibly important for the Department of Agriculture to do what it can to expand access to facilities.

SETH BODINE: Vilsack says the USDA is investing in programs like the distance learning in telemedicine program to support rural areas. He announced $42 million dollars is being added to that program, about half of that is CARES money. USDA estimates that will improve health care and education for 5 million rural residents. Seth Bodine, Harvest Public Media.

KAYTE YOUNG: Kroger food stores announced last month that it will close two Seattle stores in response to the city's new hazard pay mandate for grocery workers. The legislation which passed unanimously, requires large grocery chains to pay an additional $4 per hour for at least the next four months. Kroger also decided just weeks earlier to close two stores in Long Beach California for the same reason. Although all four stores were described by the company as quote "underperforming".

Major grocery chains have seen increased sales and record profits as a result of the pandemic. A recent report from The Brookings Institute found that Kroger's profits were up 90% for the first two quarters of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. According to the Washington Post, Kroger says it is spent an extra 1.5 billion dollars for worker compensation and additional safety measures during the pandemic. Most of its stores have not paid an additional hazard pay since May. Additionally the grocery giant argues that it would not be able to afford the increased labor cost at those stores due to the small profit margins that most grocery stores operate on.

Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union called Kroger's decision to close the stores quote "cold hearted". He and others accused the company of trying to intimidate other cities and elected officials that may be considering mandating hazard pay. Teresa Mosqueda the Seattle City council member who sponsored the bill said on Twitter that the closures were quote "harmful to public health and retaliatory."

Thanks to Toby Foster and Harvest Public Media's Seth Bodine for those reports. For Earth Eats news, I'm Kayte Young.

(Music)

My strongest food memories come from tasting fruit, in particular red and black raspberries from my grandmother's garden. For poet Yalie Kamara one fruit stands out in her memory, one that connects her to the homeland of her family. Here's Yalie with a poem about malombo fruit.

YALIE KAMARA: My name is Yalie Kamara. Eating Malombo Fruit in Freetown 1989.
In Sierra Leone, the saba senegalensis is called the malombo fruit.

My Uncle Sonny cupped the 
malombo fruit in his palms. 
Between his ebony hands, it 
looked like a tired orange that had 
rolled on the dirt road for one 
thousand years. He must have 
noticed me trying to peel the fruit, 
which is the first mistake anyone 
makes when they have never 
eaten it before. He squeezed it 
until a little bit of it shot out of 
itself, like a pulpy lava bullet onto 
my grandmother's floor. I loosened 
a slippery knot of its tangy flesh 
and placed it in my mouth.
Sweet and sour, it slid across my 
tongue like a marble in a pinball 
machine. Malombo fruit tasted like 
the flavor before English, before 
any new language pressed its 
weight onto my tongue and made 
an accent of my body. A stranger 
to fruit with pits, that which I could 
not chew, I pushed to the back of 
my throat.
The pit swam leisurely in my 
throat like a tourist. My uncle 
laughed at my silent mouth and 
bulging eyes--he told me not to 
worry. Told me that before I had 
the chance to die or become a 
giant malombo fruit pit it would 
pass through me.
On an early morning phone call 
from Oakland, my sister still says 
that this is her story, that her throat 
was where the pit lodged itself, 
and that Uncle Sonny had not
laughed and Grandmother's floor 
was the dirt outside. That it never 
happened to me, though I know it 
so well, the breathlessness of a 
thing being wedged in a place it 
does not belong. We cannot 
agree: the moment must be hers 
or mine. When we ask our mother 
who this keepsake belonged to, 
she split the ghost fruit between 
us.
We tussle over a pit. We'd both 
rather choke than have no story at 
all.
KAYTE YOUNG: That was poet Yalie Kamara reading Eating Malombo Fruit in Freetown 1989, from her chapbook When the Living Sing published by Ledge Mule Press in 2017. Find links to more of Yalie's work on our website EarthEats.org.
(Music)
Next we have a fascinating story from back when Alex Chambers was a producer on the show and when Maddie Chera and Leigh Bush were still at the IU Food Institute interviewing scholars for Earth Eats.
KAYTE YOUNG: Hey Alex.
ALEX CHAMBERS: So I've got a story for you. It's about food and flavors and how to put those together.
KAYTE YOUNG: So food pairings?
ALEX CHAMBERS: Yeah and it's also about data, how we collect data about what we like to eat. It's kind of a cautionary tale.
KAYTE YOUNG: So you're saying it's a food pairing parable?
ALEX CHAMBERS: You could say that. It starts with an image.
KAYTE YOUNG: Let's have it.
ALEX CHAMBERS: So I've got this graphic in front of me, and it looks a little like the map of your airline's flight routes in the back of the inflight magazine. But instead of the big hubs being Atlanta and Chicago, they're roast beef, black tea, and beer. And there's no Pacific Northwest or Florida, instead of regions of the country there are fruits, vegetables, alcoholic beverages, spices, meats. It's kind of beautiful. Each category of food has a different color and there are these circles of different sizes that show how popular are each ingredient is and they're connected by lines of different thicknesses. Those lines are the key, what the graphic is about.
But before I get to that I want to say that the researchers who created this graphic used it to give us new insights into how global cuisines relate to each other and don't relate. Insights that have been written out in the Washington Post and Scientific American and even NPR, and which may not be accurate at all. So how did all this get started?
YONG-YEOL AHN: I was just sitting in the same office with one of my colleagues, and he's really interested in food.
ALEX CHAMBERS: This is YY Ahn, one of the researchers.
YONG-YEOL AHN: I'm an assistant professor at the department of informatics
ALEX CHAMBERS: At Indiana University. He spoke with Earth Eats producers Leigh Bush-
LEIGH BUSH: I'm Leigh. 
ALEX CHAMBERS: and Maddie Chera
MADDIE CHERA:  And I'm Maddie.
ALEX CHAMBERS: Last December. So, his officemate
YONG-YEOL AHN: Went to some seminar by colleagues, physicist colleague, and this colleague studies like food science in like physics way.
ALEX CHAMBERS: And he comes back to the office after the seminar and start telling YY about the food pairing hypothesis.
YONG-YEOL AHN: The idea is basically okay if you have two food in regions that share some flavor compounds, if you mix them they'll taste better.
ALEX CHAMBERS: The idea has gotten a lot of traction lately. Chefs are using it to come up with new dishes and there's even a website FoodPairing.com, where if you subscribe you can use their scientific method to identify which foods and drinks go well together.
YONG-YEOL AHN: My friend, my officemate, when he heard about that idea he immediately realized that it's about networks because they're talking about ingredients sharing compounds. So you're making connections between ingredients. So that's essentially network.
LEIGH BUSH: Whoa, so that's how your flavor network project was born, basically?  
YONG-YEOL AHN: Yeah, so right after the seminar he apparently rushed to the library, sit there for a week, typed a whole book, that lists flavor compounds and ingredients.
ALEX CHAMBERS: And that's what the graphic is all about. Each of the ingredients is represented by a circle. The size of the circle shows how common the ingredient is. Ingredients are linked up with other ingredients by lines of different thicknesses that show how many flavor compounds does ingredients share.  You might not be surprised the beef and pork share a lot of flavor compounds but it's interesting to note that garlic which is super popular hardly shares flavors with any other ingredients, whereas beer while not popular is ingredient seems to be at the center of everything, flavor wise. Anyway YY and Sebastian didn't want to just stop at this beautiful rendition of the flavor network, they wanted what's the flavor pairing hypothesis itself. Do dishes taste better when their ingredients are flavored compounds?
YONG-YEOL AHN: People made this nice dishes and nice combinations, new combinations of food using this food pairing hypothesis, but nobody really has systematically studied that.
ALEX CHAMBERS: To answer you need to know what people actually cook.
YONG-YEOL AHN: I was kind of chatting in the office, and I thought that maybe you can use recipes to kind of test the hypothesis.
ALEX CHAMBERS: And even though immediately after Sebastian heard about the flavor hypothesis.
YONG-YEOL AHN: He apparently rush to the library typed the whole book.
ALEX CHAMBERS: It's not like they were going to type out thousands of cookbooks worth of recipes. They got their data of the way most of us do when we need to look something up, they went online.
YONG-YEOL AHN: We used to recipe database which kind of are in English and fairly large. These are epicurious.com
LEIGH BUSH: One of my favorites (all chuckle)
YONG-YEOL AHN: allrecipes.com. But then these are all American websites. So I choose one Korean recipe website called maniepam.com
LEIGH BUSH: And how many recipes did that end up being?
YONG-YEOL AHN: It's about 56,000 recipes total.
ALEX CHAMBERS: And they grouped the recipes into geographically distinct cuisines - North American, Western European, Southern European, Latin American, and East Asian based on how they were tagged on the website.
MADDIE CHERA: So what were some of the things that came out of this project, what did you find? YONG-YEOL AHN: Well I think the most interesting thing was there is a huge variance across culture. So the initial idea was can we check, can we test this hypothesis of food pairing?
LEIGH BUSH: That flavor compounds make ingredient combinations that will appear more frequently in recipes because they share similar flavors.
ALEX CHAMBERS: Right so, they crunched some numbers.
(Sound of crunching)
KAYTE YOUNG: Wow Alex is that actually the sound of numbers being crunched?
ALEX CHAMBERS: No that's chips. I figured they've got to munch on something while they do their math.
KAYTE YOUNG: Oh. Well what did they find? Did the theory hold?
YONG-YEOL AHN: It seems to hold in North American and Western European website recipes.
MADDIE CHERA: Interesting.
ALEX CHAMBERS: Get ready for it.
YONG-YEOL AHN: But they don't really hold for like east Asian recipes.
ALEX CHAMBERS: In other words in North America in Western European recipes the more flavor compounds are shared by two ingredients the more likely they appear together in recipes. But in East Asian cuisine the more flavor compounds two ingredients share the less likely they're used together.
This is the part where I started to get excited. Data science was revealing something about cultural practice that we hadn't been able to see because it needed to be quantified first. And I'm not the only one who found this exciting, this is the result that made its way into the magazines and newspapers including the MIT Technology Review which says that these recipe networks give the lie to the idea that ingredients that share flavors taste better together.
(Trumpets swelling)
But do they? It turns out after all that fanfare that's not quite what the report says. I'll explain after the break.
(Music)
So we left off with the conclusion that different cuisines approach taste in really different ways. Some like to overlap and blend flavors, while others like to contrast them. If you care about making things taste good, this is worth knowing. But if you're really curious you start to look at what the ingredients are, and things suddenly get a lot murkier. The thing is these conclusions are based on the prevalence of 6 characteristic ingredients in each of the cuisines. In East Asian it's soy sauce, scallion, sesame oil, rice, ginger, and soybean. Not too surprising right? Now listen to the six most authentic North American ingredients, butter, egg, wheat, milk, vanilla, cane molasses. Think about the North American list. Of all the possibilities doesn't seem strange that vanilla is in the top six? What do you use vanilla for especially in combination with eggs, flour, milk and something called "cane molasses"? Baked goods, dessert. 

And dessert got me thinking about data. The date of that YY in Sebastian used to suggest that baked goods are the most popular part of the North American diet, the thing North Americans eat more than anything else. But as much as we like our cakes that kind of didn't seem right so I asked Maddie Chera, one of the food anthropologists who interviewed YY, why there might be so many recipes for baked goods. She said the websites don't necessarily reflect what we actually cook.
MADDIE CHERA: I know I don't bake cakes even once a month as much as I enjoy cakes. However I think that when I do bake a cake, partially because baking is so precise I usually tend to use a recipe. And I think also that there's an entertainment value in recipes for things like baked goods and desserts. So it's maybe not as fun to read about I think vegan nutloaf which should be a pretty complex thing to make and not many people know about it but probably you're only looking up recipe for that if you're actually going to make it.
ALEX CHAMBERS: Whereas...
MADDIE CHERA: People enjoy reading or looking at recipes for sort of fun celebratory foods like cakes, cookies, other desserts even if they're not going to actually make them. So there might be more of those recipes out there and it's not necessarily a reflection of how frequently they're consumed in a diet.
ALEX CHAMBERS: And if the websites don't reflect what we eat then YY's data sets might not be saying what we think they're saying. And what we want them to be saying like that these two cuisines are different; one matches flavors and one contrasts them. The data might not be telling us that, which was a bummer because I liked the idea of East Asian Cuisine was doing something different with flavor than North American. But if the proof wasn't in the online pudding recipe, maybe I could find someone who tasted the pudding. Luckily I had a food anthropologist on hand.
MADDIE CHERA: I think that even if the data is imperfect there might be some truth there, based on my ethnographic experience which was in Southern India. And from what I know from reading and observing and talking to people there, there is a high value placed on having lots of different contrasting flavors within a meal and even within a dish.
ALEX CHAMBERS: Which in Southern India at least has to do with the influence of the Ayurvedic tradition where there are six different flavors and...
MADDIE CHERA: If it's present in the dish or the meal, it creates a sense of balance.
ALEX CHAMBERS: There's a reason why YY's point about cuisines was so exciting. It felt right. And Maddie Chera's on-the-ground research says it might hold water after all.
Trying to figure this story out reminded me that the information we collect about people is never neutral. It's always from a perspective and it doesn't necessarily reflect what people are actually doing because it doesn't capture everything about their lives. Which is why if you're into crunching numbers it can be good to have an anthropologist around.
MADDIE CHERA: Just talking to people, getting life histories, interviewing them, spending a lot of time with a certain cultural community and really learning more about their daily practices and what kind of flavors they put together.
ALEX CHAMBERS: To help figure out how people might be making the data and using it in their daily lives. To check your bird's eye view.
(Music)
For YY though, I might be missing the point. The goal of the study wasn't to prove something beyond a doubt. We would need a better understanding of people's actual practices to do that.
YONG-YEOL AHN: Yeah so I didn't really think the unfortunate meaning of this research is we have data, and we can use data sets to study cuisines and food culture, and I think that's a big milestone that we can pass. So it's not like really showing like really showing a really strong result, it's more like maybe this is possible, and why don't you come over and have fun and enjoy looking into this amazing dataset about food culture?
ALEX CHAMBERS: So come on over, we've got the flavor network on our website. Like I said, it's kind of beautiful.
KAYTE YOUNG: That story comes to us from producer Alex Chambers. We have links to his latest project, The Age of Humans at EarthEats.org. Next up we have a recipe from Jackie Bea Howard. She used to work here at the radio station. She's an accomplished chef and she shared a number of great ideas with us.
Today's recipe is a warm slaw featuring brussels sprouts, roasted butternut squash, and spicy bratwurst. The butternuts been cubed, seasoned and roasted. She's using it for some other dishes besides the slaw. The grilled brats were left over from a cookout and stashed in the freezer till she came up with an idea for them, because that's Jackie works; she uses what she has and preps one ingredient to use in several dishes. The butternut has cooled, the brats are thawed and now she's getting the brussels sprouts ready. She's cutting them in half and then using the slicer blade on her food processor.
[TO JACKIE] It's amazing how great those smell just cutting them in half.
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: Right, right? I am a big fan of cabbage, and some people don't like brussels sprouts, but I really really I think they're so delicious, just try them. Not like your mom pulled out of the freezer, real brussels sprouts, take them, cut them, roast them, sauté them, just caramelize them. But just roast them with that sweetness to it... you'll never go back.
KAYTE YOUNG: I really like them with mustard.
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: Yes, yes, that's why this going to have a mustard vinaigrette. It's a really great flavor combo. Alright so cut those in half and now we'll run them through the processor.
(Sound of machine whirring)
I'm putting together the slaw; I've got the brussels sprouts through the processor and I'm gonna do mustard vinaigrette. You can use any mustard.
KAYTE YOUNG: You're putting in about four tablespoons, five now?
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: Yeah I'm gonna do five. And I'm gonna add vinegar and honey to it for now and then I'm gonna put I'm going to saute brussels sprouts with a little bit of oil. I'm going to add this to it, I'm going to taste it once I put some stuff together and make sure it's got the flavor I want to it. I can always add
I add the five tablespoons of mustard. We're gonna do probably a tablespoon of honey and I just did about a tablespoon of red wine vinegar. I'm going to do this to taste as well, and I want it to be slightly on the thicker side because the brussels sprouts are gonna give off a bit of liquid when they cook. Plus I'm adding oil.
Pan is hot, and I'm gonna do some olive oil on there. And so that's why I didn't put any olive oil into my dressing cause I'm putting it on the pan to sauté my brussels sprouts. If I were going to do that the dressing for... if we were gonna do the brussels sprouts cold, as a cold salad, I would put the olive oil into my vinaigrette.
(Sound of sizzling)
Add that to the pan. I'm gonna throw about a teaspoon of salt. I'm going to do cracked black pepper for this, 6-8 cranks. The brussels sprouts smell delicious. They smell warm, it has that... like it fills your senses. It's not bright like basil that's when it smells really bright and fresh. And the brussels sprouts so warm and toasty. I'm not gonna sauté them up too much because I want to still keep this fresh and hearty and keep some texture to it.
KAYTE YOUNG: You want a little bit of crunch in there.
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: Yes, yes. So this has just been... I don't know what the minute probably two tops. I'm going to add my dressing, that mustard dressing. I'm gonna toss that around. And now that this is getting wet, I don't want to cook it much more because that wet dressing is going to pull out more moisture from my brussels sprouts.
So I'm actually turning the heat off now and I'm going to add my brats. And I'm going to add the red onion. I didn't sauté the red onion with the brussels sprout because I want the red onion to get warm and break down just a little bit, but I want to keep it kind of fresh and bright and that's what's going to help it taste more fresh when I eat it later.
I'm going to taste it as it is now before I add my butternut squash. Once I put that butternut squash in and it's soft, I don't want to mix it much more after that. So I'm gonna taste it now, then I will put in the cherries and the butternut squash. Give it a light toss and then it can be put in containers for the week. So even just being there for just like 30 seconds the brats already have their flavor on the brussels sprouts as well. Those extra seasonings really compliment the mustard, and that mustard is not nearly as tiny now.
KAYTE YOUNG: Jackie decided to add a little bit more vinegar to balance out the sweetness of the butternut and cut the fattiness of the brats.
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: I'm gonna taste it again. Yeah that's what I like. I like it tangy. If you taste it and it tasted fine don't add extra vinegar to it, but I like it a little tangy. So I'm gonna get the butternut squash, about a cup for so into this slaw mix. Stir that around.
KAYTE YOUNG: They're holding their shape pretty good though.
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: They are, they are which is really nice and that's what's so crucial about letting them cool before adding them to this, is it does help them retain their shape once you add them. But now I'm adding it to something warm so it's going to start to break down the more I mix it.
KAYTE YOUNG: [NARRATING] The last thing to go into this warm slaw is the fresh pitted sweet cherries, then it's time to taste.
[TO JACKIE] So I've gotta get something of everything in every bite. The brussels sprouts are cooked perfectly like they're just not soggy or anything. They're nice and crisp but they're not raw. It's just right. It's got a really nice crunch to it. Yeah that's gonna be satisfying dinner.
JACKIE BEA HOWARD: I like that it's filling but light.
KAYTE YOUNG: The last step for Jackie is to package it up into meal sized containers to enjoy throughout the week. As always you can find the recipe at EarthEats.org.
(Music)
Have you ever tried to craft a honey drop cake with bee larvae? What about a simple mealworm curry? Entomophagy or the practice of consuming insects for food has been all over the food media world for years. Often you hear it talked about as a sustainable solution for the world growing demand for protein. Our next guests have a different approach to the topic. Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho are the authors of the young adult graphic novel called Meal. Here's Blue with a summary of the story.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: The basic plot of Meal is that it follows a young woman named Yarrow who has moved to a new town in the hopes of getting a job at a new restaurant that is getting a lot of buzz for specializing insect cuisine. And so the book is about her journey to try and get this job while she is making new friends and contacts in her new home.
My name is Blue Delliquanti, I am a comics writer and illustrator. I am the co-creator of the graphic novel Meal as well as the online comic Ocean Star and a few other things.
KAYTE YOUNG: Blue is the artist and primary author of the story. Soleil Ho is a food writer and the restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. She was also a co-host of the podcast Racist Sandwich and currently co-hosts the podcast Extra Spicy with Justin Phillips. Soleil played a consulting role for the story of someone with professional restaurant experience.
SOLEIL HO: I feel it was small details that were really important, like how many chairs will fit in a restaurant? How much is turnover? Kind of practical things. Like what do you call a chef when you're working with them? That sort of stuff.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: Lots of things that help make the place feel authentic to the experience of running restaurant and joining like the community of a restaurant's staff. In a way because Soleil has practical like hands-on knowledge and experience of how that works because of what she's done. SOLEIL HO: And I think one of my favorite things that I added on, just to toot my own horn a bit, but there's a scene at the beginning where Yarrow first enters the restaurant where Gonzalo brings up, he gets a phone call from the food media essentially, the local alt weekly. And they ask about the restaurant's success. And so the part that we kind of added was just the way the reporter asked questions about the restaurant to sort of sensationalize it. And so that was a really nice undertone there that set the scene for all these other things that happened in the book.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: And the other thing that I should add is that Soleil also contributed an essay to be a bookend for the graphic novel that I think is like a super important part. Because she's talking about she has interviewed people she knows like friends and contacts in the restaurant industry and people who practice entomophagy and do it in their restaurants. And I felt like that was really important because it helps establish that even though the narrative of Meal is fictional a lot of these concepts are grounded in something real and something that people are experiencing and starting to share more in mainstream American culture. It helps anchor these fun fictional details in something that is real, and that people have experience in.
KAYTE YOUNG: And Soleil was there something in particular that excited you about the project?
SOLEIL HO: At the time I think even currently, I'm so excited about food comics and just the new wave of food comics ever since cooking popped up. There's just so much out there that renders food and drink in really interesting and challenging ways, and it's help expand my idea of food writing. And so having a chance to work on something like that was so cool I couldn't pass it up.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: It's a genre of comics that has really grown and matured a lot in the last 10 years especially. There's so many amazing ways that cartoonists have figured out how to render food and art and in comics and also be able to communicate recipes and the history of food. It's really a great way to communicate a lot of unusual or esoteric or just like really interesting food concepts.
SOLEIL HO: And when you get to edible insects, making them look, I feel like illustration makes it look cuter than photography for a lot of people.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: (Laughs) That's true.
KAYTE YOUNG: Do either of you have entomophagy in your own food traditions?
SOLEIL HO: In Vietnam, because my mom's Vietnamese, there are some folks who make food with feed worm in them. So they incorporate dried feedworms into the broth to add like a certain element, a certain je n'sai quois to bu'uh, that's pretty interesting.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: I'm Italian American and the only thing that came to my mind is the, there is an insect called cochineal that for a long time was a red dye, a food-safe red dye that you can find in a whole bunch of things. And for the most part it’s been phased out for artificial red dye in food. I think one of the only exceptions is an Italian liquor called Campari. Yeah, that's the only thing I can think of Italian wise that comes to mind for me.
SOLEIL HO: Well there is the maggot cheese blue.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: Oh I forgot about the maggot cheese, do tell, do tell.
SOLEIL HO: That's your people, (both laugh) I can't remember the name of the island. But there is a place in Italy where they have traditionally eaten a type of cheese called casu marzu. And it is allowed to be inoculated or I guess you just an incubator essentially for to use wasp larvae. And so when the larvae hatch they consumed the cheese, and digest it, and so people, it becomes this really interesting creamy musky flavor. And people just eat it with bread, and delicious wine. And yeah, they eat the cheese like larvae and all.
KAYTE YOUNG: Are the larvae still alive in the cheese, or at some point do they not make it?
SOLEIL HO: Oh yeah, they're still alive.
KAYTE YOUNG: Okay. So we if we could talk a little bit more about the topic of entomophagy. So it's become a pretty hot topic in the food world. Especially, what I'm thinking about is a solution for meeting the protein needs in a more environmentally sound manner in the future. But you make the point in the story, and in Soleil's essay too at the end about how eating insects isn't some new fad or a solution for the future but something that's a part of many culture's cuisines and has been. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
SOLEIL HO: What is interesting to me is always the, especially in food media cause that's my world, the temptation to talk about the future of food. And just think with wide eyed excitement about what's coming, and what food might look like as we rapidly approach our Star Trekish future. Especially in the bay area there's a lot of ideas that fly around.
One thing I found really interesting about that though is that a lot of entrepreneurs who are jumping on the edible insect bandwagon in the past six years are of Western origin, and by that I mean people from the First World-ish developed countries, people from Europe or from North America that doesn't include Mexico because I think a lot of people who are north of the border are the ones who are better situated to start these tech-ish insect startups.
There's a lot of rhetoric about what insects can do for you, for your nutrition, for your lifestyle, and not a lot of that same slow food language that we also have been really excited about in the Bay Area and in the U.S., and across the world. About thinking about the origin of your food, thinking about whole foods, that doesn't really apply to insects for some reason. Because so much thought is being put into the marketing of them rather than sourcing for instance, or just their place in like a well-balanced diet rather than just a snack food. It's just so complicated and so rich, and that's what got me really excited about it.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: And there's also this kind of this vague apocalyptic narrative included in it. More than once I heard people saying, "Oh we'll all be eating this someday" Like the idea of that when the bottom falls out of our current food way that insects will be the perhaps not desired but necessary replacement. S
OLEIL HO: The experience of entomophagy and edible insects is so diverse and varied because most people in the world eat them. And that means there's a huge multiplicity of just ways that people go about that. And so in this town called Kushiara in Japan, they raised wasps in boxes in their backyard. It's mainly older folks and they capture a tiny maybe baseball-sized nest in the spring and over the summer and fall they feed them, just chicken, like raw chicken, just throw it into the box for the larvae to eat. Yeah it's really interesting. And the adults eat like sugar water, like honey water and bring meat to the larvae.
And so it's a kind of funny thing when you think about people trying to sell insects as a protein replacement, because they are just feeding them things like the protein that you ostensibly would be replacing with them. And so it's less about that shift in lifestyle and more just about we are cultivating these things because we enjoy the flavor, because we like them. And that's so different from what we normally hear.
You have to make the nests big because there's a contest at the beginning of November every year to see who has made the biggest hornet's nest or wasp’s nest. And so you've gotta make them big, you gotta make them swole.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: Soleil was describing this to me about like whose gonna get biggest hive.
SOLEIL HO: They ranged from a 1 kilo to 7.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: They're like gargantuan looking. They're just really really big. And yeah just talk about it all of these like older retirees who would be winning and everyone else grumbling like, "Oh, well they can stay home all day and feed them chicken and squid." It just feels like totally normal in a very charming small-town way and I really love how completely outside of a North American experience but still extremely relatable. I love that story.
SOLEIL HO: Those sorts of narratives are what are competing against the future narratives.
KAYTE YOUNG: Soleil I wanted to ask you if there are a lot of restaurants in the Bay area that are offering dishes made with mealworms, with ants, and grasshoppers or tarantula, and do you expect to be sampling those dishes and reviewing those restaurants?
SOLEIL HO: Oh man, I actually just met one of the founders of Tiny Farm which is a cricket and mealworm company out in Oakland. And he said that they weren't too many out here, but he was willing to come with me to sample whatever we could. So yeah I would be really excited to try restaurant insects in the Bay Area, but I haven't yet.
KAYTE YOUNG: Okay. Do you also expect to be taking on the topic cultural appropriation in the restaurant world in this new position?
SOLEIL HO: Maybe. It's the sort of thing that will be more implicit then explicit just because I think the conversations about cultural appropriate are so damaged. I don't think people really understand how to talk about it. And so I think going about in the more subtle away would probably make more sense. KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah. So what do you mean by the conversations are so damaged? I mean some people haven't even had the conversations yet.
SOLEIL HO: Right, I mean that's the thing right? I think there's a knee jerk reaction where cultural appropriation means you can't eat food that doesn't belong to your culture. I think that has just triggered so quickly that reaction that I don't know if using that phrase makes sense anymore. Because I think people bring a lot of baggage to that conversation. When really what you should be talking about is the racial wealth gap and about unequal business opportunities and cultural ownership and intellectual property rights and that sort of thing. There are so much more deep ways to be having the conversation whereas cultural appropriation is just kind of, it's a flashpoint.
I think especially with me I think there are people who have encountered my work who haven't really read it. They think I'm just gonna be marking down all of the white owned taco places, but it's a lot more complicated than that. And I'm hoping to reintroduce that level of nuance and complication. KAYTE YOUNG: Well thank you both so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: Yeah, our pleasure, thank you.
SOLEIL HO: Bye
KAYTE YOUNG: Bye
BLUE DELLIQUANTI: Bye
KAYTE YOUNG: Blue Delliquanti and Soleil are the authors of Meal published by Iron Circus Comics. We have links to their work and a list of some of their favorite food comics on our website at EarthEats.org.
I have to say I wasn't that thrilled about entomophagy when I first picked up the book but by the end I was genuinely wishing I could try some of the dishes described in the story. They sounded so appealing. I hope you have a chance to check out the book.
(Cheerful guitar music)
And before we go we have one more fun recipe for you today. Susan Mintert of the Indiana Home Cooks podcast makes a caramel corn using a paper grocery bag in the microwave oven. You start with popped popcorn in a bag...
(Sound of popcorn popping)
And then you make the caramel sauce. Here's Susan and her daughter Christine.
SUSAN MINTERT: So what we have in here is a cup of brown sugar. We've got a 1/2 cup of unsalted butter. A quarter cup of corn syrup and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt so that's all we need for now. We've also measured out a 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and put it aside because we will add it a little later. We're going to start though this mixture in the microwave oven and we're going to give it 2 minutes to start.
(Sound of microwave beeping)
Okay so our mixture has cooked for two minutes. Our butter is melted and bubbly when we're going to give this a stir. And by the way I just use a large measuring cup I have a 4-cup measuring cup.
CHRISTINE MINTERT: Pyrex
SUSAN MINTERT: Pyrex measuring cup, and this is just the perfect size for this recipe. And then I have a trivet standing by here too because I don't like to put that hot Pyrex measuring cup on my counter so it's on the trivet. Now that we've got that stirred so this is going to go in for 2 more minutes and then the very last thing will be the baking soda.
Yeah we've got about one more minute in the microwave for our caramel. And yeah it has bubbled up almost to the top of this 4-cup measuring cup. So this is just the right size. And I when it's done we'll pull it out and we'll add our soda and give it a final stir.
CHRISTINE MINTERT: Wow, that cup is the exact right size (chuckles).
SUSAN MINTERT: If you've got one a little bigger it wouldn't hurt.
(Sound of microwave beeping)
Alright it's all done, and we will carefully bring it out. So we're going to put in our soda, give it one more stir, and it's going to foam up. Just incorporate that thoroughly, Christine, scraping around the sides there and then give it a real good mix in. It looks lovely.
So now we're going to come back over here to where our popcorn is in the bag and... [to Christine] could you hold that?
CHRISTINE MINTERT: Yup.
SUSAN MINTERT: And we're going to pour the caramel right onto the caramel into the bag. So stand clear. To make sure we're clear just sure we get as much of it as we can on the corn. There we have it, okay! Set that aside.
And now we're going to just fold half of this... this part is pretty noisy. So what we do at this point is we fold and seal the bag closed so fold it down about three times and crease it so that it stays securely closed. And then just hold it firmly and you shake the bag vigorously.
(Sound of popcorn shaking)
You can shake it from side to side, turn it over, shake it some more. You're trying to distribute the caramel throughout the popped corn. So after about 30 seconds of vigorous shaking, we make sure the bag is tightly sealed and then we put it in the microwave oven. And it's a series of four cooking segments, each followed by more shaking, until...
Alright and then I just take a little, my offset spatula, or just any kind of spatula and you can spread it out and let it cool. And as soon as it's cool enough to eat, you can start eating it. So there it is. It's still quite warm you can feel the heat coming off of it, but in just a few minutes it's gonna be cooled and crispy and it's just got a really lovely coating on it and it's delicious.
KAYTE YOUNG: Susan Mintert is host of the Indiana Home Cooks Podcast. The complete recipe for caramel corn in a bag is at IndianaHomeCooks.com and at EarthEats.org.
(Music)
That's it for our show. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
RENEE REED: Get freshest the food news each week, subscribe to the Earth Eats Digest. It's a weekly note packed with food notes and recipes, right in your inbox. Go to EarthEats.org to sign up. 
The Earth Eats team includes Eobon Binder, Spencer Bowman, Mark Chilla, Toby Foster, Abraham Hill, Payton Knobeloch, Josephine McRobbie, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed.  
KAYTE YOUNG: Special thanks this week Yalie Kamara, Alex Chambers, Maddie Chera, Leigh Bush, YY Ahn, Soleil Ho, Blue Deliquanti, Jackie Bea Howard, Susan Mintert, and her daughter Christine.
RENEE REED: Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from the artist at Universal Productions Music. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our executive producer is John Bailey.