Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Mark Bittman

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Award-winning food writer and journalist Mark Bittman walks us through the evolution of his relationship with all things culinary, beginning with his upbringing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Bittman describes how he first started using cookbooks, the impact of global politics on his perspective, and how his mother and grandmother influenced his cooking habits.Mark Bittman is a food writer and journalist who has authored thirty books on a variety of topics. His work discusses the pleasures of food, how to prepare it, and its impact on our bodies and on the world at large. Bittman is also known for his many appearances on the Today show and for his New York Times column “The Minimalist,” which ran for 13 years. He is the editor in chief of food publication The Bittman Project.Find the episode transcript here: https://www.audible.com/ymk/episode29 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. From fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions. At Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities.

Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure it's on the road to success. Enterprise Mobility, moving you were more likely to say I'm going to grow up to be an astronaut than you were to say I'm going to grow up to be a food writer. Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how the kitchens we grew up in as kids shape who we become as adults. I'm Mich Michelle Norris. How did the man who was introduced thousands to the wonders of cooking learn to cook himself,

to create and write about recipes that enrich the lives of his readers? In this episode, we fire up a conversation with award-winning food writer and journalist, Mark Bittman. He walks us through the evolution of his relationship with all things culinary. From a childhood spent taking his mother's cooking for granted, eating cheese burgers and vanilla ice cream, to his early years as a parent, taking ownership of food preparation for his family. It's possible you've benefited from Mark's work. Maybe

you own one of his many cookbooks. I myself have several on my shelf. Maybe you've watched him whip up a meal on the Today Show, or you've read his New York Times column, The Minimalist, during its 13-year run. Well, today you get to hear all about the cookbooks that got him started and when and how he realized that he had something special going on in the kitchen. What started as a hobby turned into a passion that would fuel his professional career.

Mark's story is about much more than food, though. He came up in the 60s and 70s, a time when many things were in flux around the world. Revolution was in the air, counterculture was the culture on many college campuses. Bittman explains how he developed his strong political views early on, but struggled to incorporate them into his writing, how early odd jobs opened his eyes to New York's rich variety of international cuisines, and why his grandmother's recipe for something called potato nick is the comfort food that makes him feel like home.

All that's coming up. Mark Bittman, let's jump into this. I am so glad that you are with us. You feel like you are a part of my kitchen because your cookbooks, I have a wall of cookbooks and there are several entries from you. How to cook everything, how to cook everything vegetarian, how to cook everything fast. The book you did that encourages us to eat vegan before 6 p.m., we've burned through

all of those books. And so thank you very much for being with us. Always happy to talk with you. You're someone who has helped America figure out how to eat and how to eat well at a time where we approach food in a different way. But I would like you to go back down memory lane and tell us a little bit about your relationship with food starting in the kitchen. And why don't we begin with that kitchen that you grew up in?

Where did you grow up? Tell me a little bit about the house you grew up in. And then I want you to walk me past the foyer, past the dining room, into the kitchen and describe that space where your mom and dad held court. I grew up in an apartment in Syveson Town, which was at the time, world's biggest middle class, should be said almost exclusively white housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an entire neighborhood called the Gas House District had been raised to the ground in order to build this thing, primarily for World War II veterans and their families.

So everybody's parents were the same age. Every kid was the same age. It was like a imported family kind of thing. Everybody moved at the same time. So there were some quite unusual features about that neighborhood. The kitchen was right off the front door to the left and it was, I don't know, six by eight maybe, sort of a typical New York kitchen crammed with cabinets, not a lot of room for more than one person. My mother was a responsible cook, I think an obligatory cook, as were many, if not most women of that generation, and maybe somewhat resentful about it, but she would never talk about that.

But very dutiful and she did it every meal and the food was as real as she knew how to make it and as good as she knew how to make it. It wasn't great, but and I used to make fun of my mother in interviews like this. Then I came to realize she did all that work. She and she taught me how to cook even though she didn't teach me how to cook well. She taught me to put food on the table all the time. Your mom's name is Gert, dad was Murray, right? And your mom cooked, you said she was a dutiful cook. Dutiful is such an interesting word, because it's kind of loaded in some ways.

Did she do things in the kitchen, as you remember, to take the edge off the duty or the burden of cooking? Do you remember, did she have a radio? Did she have something that brought sunshine into the kitchen that made that space feel like it was less obligatory and more of her own, her sort of secret garden that she could create that would turn that space into just something that didn't feel like drudgery. You know, honestly, not.

Mealtime was not a particularly happy time for us. My mother did not appear to like to eat until she got older. I would say when she was in her 50s she started to develop a sort of more of an appetite but by then she was done cooking for her children so there could have been something there. But I think you know so much of this is about women's roles and I mean in the world but in the United States in particular in the mid 20th century in particular, my mother was not what came to be called the women's liberer. She didn't want to have any truck with that.

But I think that she was well aware of the fact that there were expectations of her that were beyond her control or seemed to her to be beyond her control, that there were roles that women of her age were only beginning to be really questioned. We're talking about the 50s and 60s here, and she was not among the questioners.

I think she was a pre-questioner or a contemplator but more of a simmerer or a seather. You know, she was, I think she was resentful. I think she carried anger around it. I don't think she liked that she was expected to do all of the cleaning, which she was, and all of the cooking, which she was. And by the time my sister and I were old enough

to start doing chores, she had a job. She worked nine to four thirty. I mean, not what's considered totally full time, but effectively full time. And then she came home and made dinner and then she cleaned up after dinner. And I mean, I kind of do that, but I do it mostly in the comfort of my home and mostly willingly. And anytime I don't want to do it, I don't, but that wasn't an option for her. And I think it robbed her of whatever joy she might have had in cooking it.

But at the same time, she wasn't openly angry. She was just sort of quiet, had a resentful air about her. And it's not that she never enjoyed cooking, but I think when you're doing something, and especially when we were little, when she was cooking breakfast and lunch and cleaning the house and then dinner, et cetera, et cetera. And when you're doing that six days a week, seven days a week, I mean,

you're the equivalent of a servant. So you may love the other people, but you're an unpaid worker in a way. And many people have outgrown that or changed that. But that sort of relationship exists. The generation that you're talking about is post-war years. And there were a lot of magazines that were suddenly targeted at women. And mainstream magazines that weren't targeted at women often had stories that, or advertisements,

that were targeted at women. And the idea around expectations, you used that word, the expectation, was that there was gonna be a certain kind of perfection in the kitchen. And so there was this, for many women, I think a fear of failure, a fear of not living up to that American idea

that was portrayed in Look Magazine and Life Magazine. And so that was always kind of hanging over women of that generation. Right. You said at some point though, you realized that your mom, even though she may not have been the world's best cook, taught you how to cook or taught you at least the routine

of cooking when and how did you realize that? She taught me that cooking was important, I guess. And by example, completely by example. She never, I was a boy. So you were more likely to say I'm going to grow up to be an astronaut than you were to say I'm going to grow up to be a food writer. I think I just took it for granted. You're at home, someone's going to cook. I did take it for granted. You're at home, someone's gonna cook. I did take that for granted. So there were the college years where I lived in a dorm, I ate cheeseburgers, vanilla ice cream and Coke. I mean, you can get anything you wanted,

that's what I wanted. You know, I also slept till two in the afternoon and took a lot of drugs. It was not a happy time. The second year I got my own apartment and I started cooking. And I just thought, well, I have an apartment, obviously I need to be able to cook. I didn't really know how to cook anything.

I knew how to cook a hamburger and I knew how to make sandwiches and I knew how to make scrambled eggs. Very rudimentary stuff that I had sort of done for myself growing up. But the year after that, I wound up living with three women who were all great cooks. And there was really no room for me in the kitchen. But I kind of elbowed my way in and started making desserts, which was actually the first ambitious thing I did. And then I just started cooking from cookbooks and cooking as many interesting things as I could find.

Soon after that, I started feeling like, yeah, this is just a seamless part of life. This is just something you do five or six in the afternoon and the evening, you settle down and you start cooking dinner. And that just never stopped. So how does the person who is known for creating so many well-loved, well-used cookbooks come to cookbooks yourself? How did you find those cookbooks that you were foraging through? Well when I moved in with Karen and Anne and Ellie they had Settlement Cookbook, New York Times, Craig Claiborne's first

New York Times Cookbook. And cookbooks by this woman, Paula Peck, who was a devotee or a student of James Beards. Those are the cookbooks that were there. Fortunately, they were all, I mean, Paula Peck and Settlement were especially reliable. New York Times Cookbook was good because it was so eclectic and non-personal in a way.

Like just was all over the place. You didn't know what you were gonna find. And then the following year, I was living by myself again. I just started buying cookbooks that appealed to me. And I had become fascinated by Indian food. The first, I still have it. The first cookbook I bought was this little tiny paperback called House of India Cookbook.

I bought Joy of Cooking because everybody who cooked said you ought to buy Joy of Cooking. I bought James Beard because people said you ought to buy James Beard. I bought Julia Child because that was the thing. And I was off and running. I mean, really, if I had those six or eight cookbooks I just mentioned now would kind of be enough. And so were you cooking because you loved the food or because it was the science of it, the process of it,

the cookbooks themselves were beckoning you in some way? Well, I loved the food for sure. It became the thing that I cared about learning how to do. And I got good at it. And then I started writing about it. And then, so there was reason to do it more. You know, the stupid pun is they fed each other, but the writing impelled me, compelled me to cook better. And the better I cook, the better, more interesting my writing was, I think.

So I was, I look at stuff I wrote then, now, and it's corny, but it wasn't corny then. It was innovative then. By this time in your life, you had held several jobs. You were a cab driver, you were a gopher for an electrician. Sounds like an interesting line of work there. A substitute teacher, a traveling salesman, and a trucker. You were a trucker for a while. So how did the things that you learned during all those other jobs work their way into who

you became as a cook? The traveling salesman thing was in Connecticut. So I have as thorough knowledge of the food of Connecticut, Southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Westchester as anyone has. But that wasn't that interesting a food scene. But it was helpful when I later became a restaurant reviewer and sort of had an inside knowledge of where might be good. So I was a cab driver in New York. It was something I always wanted to do. I became a cab driver in New York. It was something I always wanted to do. I became a cab driver in New York in September, October of 69. I was 19. I was a junior in college.

There's two things you can do when you're a cab driver in New York anyway. You can cruise, just drive up and down a way for someone to hail you, or you can sit at cab stands, and both have advantages. We don't have to get into the techniques of driving a cab, I don't think. But if you sit at cab stands, you talk to other cab drivers, which is one of the advantages there. And the other cab drivers were from all over the world, all over the country and all over the world. And they were every age, they were 18 and 19 year olds like me, and they were 70 year olds who'd been driving cabs for 50 years. And everybody knew the best place to eat for them. So people would say, well, next time you're in Brooklyn, you got to check out this place.

Next time you're in the Bronx, you got to check out this place. Next time you're in Harlem, you got to check out this place. If you want to try Indian food, go to this place. And so I just had this running list of, organized by borough, of restaurants that I was supposed to knock off. And if someone, you know, cab drivers in those days were notoriously white cab drivers, didn't go to Harlem, they didn't go to the Bronx, they wanted to stay in Midtown. It was the 70s. Everybody was afraid of everybody else. For whatever reason, I wasn't like that.

So if guys said to me, next time you're in the Bronx, go to this place, and it was a Puerto Rican restaurant, I'd go to the Bronx and go to the Puerto Rican restaurant. They say go to this ribs joint in Harlem. I go to the ribs joint in Harlem. I wasn't being particularly brave. It just was my nature to think that was fine. So I had a running list, borough by borough, of restaurants I was supposed to go to per the other cab drivers. Needless to say, they were all cheap, they were all fast, they were all greasy spoons, more or less. There was nothing fancy on there. But I suddenly, at 19 and then 20, I was out three, four nights a week, winding up at some place or another where I'd had some food that no one I knew ever heard of.

And this was the time of the great student rebellions. This was the time of the so-called counterculture. This was the time where smoking pot was so cool that if you smoked pot, you didn't need any other justification for being a cool person, etc. etc. And here was this thing that suddenly I had that I didn't have in common with other people, that I could become good at and understand by myself. And that was an amazing thing to me and it's probably the first time in my life that it happened to me. And it wasn't, you know, it didn't feel like fate or it was thrust upon me or anything like that. It just felt like the way it was. It wasn't going to be

a subject in school because that's not who I was. It wasn't going to be the roots of World War II or the history of Reconstruction. Or it wasn't... I'm saying these things because they're all things that I'm kind of interested in now, but they were not going to be the things that turned into my life's work. And this, for whatever reason, was. My son and I like that. And we're always looking at trying to get the best seats because if you're watching

tennis, you've got to figure out how you're not in the direct sun at certain times or you want to get the best angle so you can see whether a ball actually was in the line or just over the line. And so we're always trying to game the system to get the best tickets. And in order to do that, you often have to move fast. A lot of planning goes into this. When you want the best, you have to act quickly or someone else might get it instead. It's like if you're hiring for your business, you want to find the most talented people

for your open roles before the competition scoops them up. So what's the best way to do that? ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter finds qualified candidates fast. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash YMK. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology takes center stage to identify top talent for your roles.

Immediately after you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology starts showing you qualified people for it. Amp up your hiring performance with ZipRecruiter and find the best fast. See why four out of five employers hiring performance with ZipRecruiter and find the best fast. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter.com slash YMK. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash YMK.

ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. From fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions. At Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities. Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure it's on the road to success. Enterprise

Mobility, moving you moves the world. So how as a 19 year old did you wind up living with three women? Because that was probably a little unusual for a 19 year old also. One was becoming my girlfriend. The option was I was living at my parents' house. It was clear that it was preferable to live with them and they weren't against it. So that's how that happened. And that was really life-changing,

not only from the cooking perspective, but because by then it was the spring of 1970 and Nixon was bombing Cambodia, the world was on fire, they were shooting students at Kent State and Jackson State. I mean, all of that stuff about the so-called 60s, because by this time it was 1970, was kind of at its peak right then. So it was an exciting time and really at that time food was not, it sounds bigger than it was because that's what we're talking about. But really the big stuff felt like

we really thought we were on the verge of making the revolution. I mean we really thought that we were going to make big change in this country and in this world. And you know that's an adolescent, I now think that's a kind of adolescent thing to think, but I'm not ashamed. We thought that we did good work. We did interesting stuff. I think we supported the right people. We allied with the right people. We, I think we took the right side. I still think that. So, you know, that was, it took 30 or more years of food writing for me to be able to figure out how to work those politics into my career.

And that only happened really when I was 60. So that was a really happy thing for me to be able to say, how do I bring these left politics that I've carried since I was 20 or really 16 or whatever, but these politics that have always felt like such an important part of my life, how can I bring that into my career? And it's not, I always thought it was worthwhile to teach people how to cook and to show people that cooking was useful and important. And I used to say, if I could teach Americans how to eat rice and beans once a week,

that is those Americans who don't, that my career would be have been a successful thing. But when in 2007 or 2006, so I was in my mid-50s, late 50s, I started to write about the politics of food and nutrition and environment and climate change and so on. That was a huge, huge thing for me. And to be able to do that for the New York Times, no less, not my own blog, that was really important to me. That was kind of full circle. That revolution, that revolutionary thought, those revolutionary ideas played out in small ways in people's lives also, and some of the decisions that they made. And it sounds like that happened in your own partnership.

Your wife was going to medical school and you made a decision that you were going to hold down the kitchen when your daughter came along, Kate came along. Was that part of your revolutionary thinking or was that just more pragmatic? Somebody's got to cook. So it might as well be me. By 1969, 1970, if you wanted to justify yourself as a progressive and you were a male and you thought, oh yeah, somebody's got to cook and it's going to be the woman in this house, then you were booted out or you were not taken seriously.

It was a bit hypocritical then for you to hold these ideas, but then... Continues to be hypocritical, I think. That part was easy and I don't... I mean, it happened that cooking became my hobby and then my career and Karen was eventually squeezed out of the kitchen, I think, or felt to some extent. I think every woman I've lived with since then has felt like the difficult part about me in the kitchen is not getting me in, but getting me out. Not that there are so many complaints about that. But that was a bit over the top, let's say, or unusual.

It wasn't just that I saw that it was my responsibility as a good partner to share in those kinds of things, cooking and cleaning and childcare. It wasn't just cooking, but it was cooking I was passionate about. You said that cooking at home right now is the most radical thing that people can do. As someone who had radical ideas throughout your life, it's interesting that now you're saying that cooking is the most radical thing that people can or maybe should do. Can you explain that? I'm sure I have said that. I've said a lot of things. I don't know that I would say that right now that the most radical thing you can do is cooking. Now when young people ask me what I think they should do, I say, go to Nebraska and

run for Congress. That's what I think people should do. But sure, cook at the same time. So I did write this thing once called Cooking Sol everything. And I think I was in, and it was in that vegan before six period when I really thought, I do think that cooking can have a big impact on who you are, what you do, and also on the world. But I've come to recognize since then that not everybody wants to cook, not everybody can cook, not everybody has the means or the time to cook. For a minority of the population, it could be a big minority, but for a minority of the population, I think cooking is and can be really important and really rewarding and

really gratifying and a gift for a lot of the other part of the population. Having said all of that, I really do think that we need to find the means to get food to people who don't, can't cook, who don't have kitchens, who don't have families, who don't even have apartments, who don't have money, who don't have time, etc. Those people need to be fed and they need to be fed not crumbs that are swept off the table, not the food that's left over from what the rest of us eat, but they need to be fed good food in a dignified way,

in a way that everybody respects and recognizes is legitimate. We are, I have thoughts about that, many thoughts about that, but we are really far from seeing that happen for the most part. When you go about your cooking, and I would love to see your kitchen, When you go about your cooking, and I would love to see your kitchen, I can imagine it, but I imagine it's organized. And I imagine you're semi-particular about the things that you use, the implements, the pans, the way it's organized. But as you go about your life and your cooking and your writing, but mainly when you're cooking, is there something that you do, some pan you reach for, some way you clean something, some

way you chop something, where every time you do it, you think, oh my God, I'm doing what my mom used to do. I'm doing what my mother used to do. She's inside me because of all those meals I saw her make. Is there one thing and what is that one thing? I have really reinvented. There are things that I do in the kitchen that I think, oh, I remember when I started to do this, this way. But my mother did not have anything approaching a chef's

knife. My mother didn't have a cutting board. My mother used a kind of funny electric frying pan, which I think might be fun to have, but I don't have room for it. There are things I do in the kitchen that remind me of other people, but not so much my mother. But she lives inside you in the routine. Yeah, for sure. We always love to leave our listeners with a recipe that means something special to our guests. And you talk about something called potato Nick. The name is interesting. You're going to have to explain that. And tell us what it is and why it's special to you.

It was my grandmother who did the sort of things you went crazy about. And she would do, she would roast a chicken with garlic and paprika. She made amazing cookies. The one recipe in my whole life that I've never shared with anyone outside of my family is called made amazing cookies. The one recipe in my whole life that I've never shared with anyone outside of my family is called Mama's Cookies. And for some reason, we still refuse to share it. But the thing that my grandmother, she treated all holidays the same. It didn't matter if it was a Jewish holiday

or American holiday or whatever. If it was a holiday, she made the same food. Thanksgiving, she made a turkey. Every other time she'd make a chicken. But all the side dishes were the same. And one of those side dishes was what she called the potato nick. And I've since found out other Eastern Europeans call it the same thing. And it's basically a giant latke, a giant potato pancake. So you take a recipe for potato pancakes and instead of making individual potato pancakes, you make a pie.

You make one giant potato pie. So it's potato, onion, breadcrumbs or matzo meal, egg. The potatoes are shredded, right? Shredded potatoes. So my grandmother did them on a box grater, and the joke was always that the blood from her knuckles was added extra flavor. But that was always the joke. I have the advantage of a food processor.

And my grandmother did it in a cast iron skillet. If you have a nonstick skillet, it's like the easiest thing in the world. And there's a very cool technique that my grandmother did, which was you slide the thing out onto a plate, and then you put another plate over it, and then you turn the two plates over, and you slide the uncooked part, the uncooked side back into the pan,

which as a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or whatever, I thought that was pure genius. And it got a nice little crisp on it on both sides. Yeah. But with a nonstick skillet, the tricks are minimized. And with a skillet, the tricks are minimized. And with a food processor, the work is minimized. And yeah, my grandmother never thought that my cooking was particularly interesting or good, but she did say that my potato nick was credible.

I mean, she didn't use that. I think she said, that's pretty good, you know, not bad kind of thing. That's high praise though. Yeah, it was well. Yeah. My mother, you know, I gave the impression that my mother was grumpy, but she came, I Not bad kind of thing. That's high praise though. Yeah, it was well. My mother, you know, I gave the impression that my mother was grumpy, but she came, I think she came by it legitimately. So is potato nick on your holiday table?

Is that something you serve up for? Yeah, I make it. I mean, it's my partner runs a thing called Glenwood Center for Regional Food and Farming and the center is on a farm. So I live on a farm. I'm not a farmer. Sometimes people think I'm a farmer.

I'm the farthest thing from a farmer. But we really try to eat seasonally, almost exclusively, as much as we can. And I've come to think of, from November on, I've come to think of it as peeling season, because every vegetable you do, you have to peel. I mean, unless you're lucky enough to get greens. So once peeling season comes, I start making not only I make many kind of vegetable pies, which is what potato Nick is.

So you can mix those potatoes with sweet potatoes or carrots or beets or and all of which you can cook individually in the same way pretty much. I mean some adjustments need to be made. I can't go into details on that but you can make a vegetable pie out of almost any vegetable. And then the other thing I make is mash. I mean what northern Europeans sort of called mash which is mashed anything. But it's all about peeling. You wind up spending 20 minutes every night peeling stuff. Last question about the potato, Nick.

Would she serve those with applesauce and sour cream? I think applesauce was a concession. Sour cream was a staple for my mother's family, my father's family, both of them, and probably a billion other, or a million other Eastern European Jewish families. Sour cream was, I think, an important protein source because it kept for a long time and you could serve it with almost anything. My father's line when he was yelling at us to finish dinner was, when I was growing up, we had a boiled potato for dinner with sour cream if we were lucky. So

sour cream was like a daily kind of luxury. And believe me, potato Nick is 10 times better with sour cream than applesauce. I'm with my grandmother on that. But you have to serve applesauce as a concession to people who think that that's important. And you're obviously not one of those people. This has been fun. Thank you so much, Mark. Yeah, it was fun. It was not what I expected it to be, but it was really fun. Thank you for that. I don't know what you expected it to be, but it was delightful. I enjoyed it. I hope you did too.

I enjoyed it too. Thank you. There's something oddly comforting about knowing that the highest praise a cook as widely celebrated as Mark Bittman could get from his grandmama is pretty good or not bad. Hearing him talk through his journey, it's clear how influential all the women in his life were to his development in the kitchen. The three women he lived with as a young adult gifted him access to his first cookbooks. And while his mom and his grandmother had different skill levels, together they taught

him that cooking consistently is a form of love, and it was a way to remain connected to the food of his Ukrainian heritage. So much of Mark's story doesn't happen, though, without his own willingness to explore. By taking the road less traveled, literally as a cab driver, to expand his palette, he's a true testament to the power of curiosity. I can't wait to try my hand at Mark's grandmother's potato nick. If you'd like to find out how to make it, head on over to my Instagram page at michelle underscore underscore norris.

That's two underscores. Or go to our website, yourmamaskitchen.com. You will find all the recipes from all the previous episodes there. And before we go, we want to remind you that we want to hear from you. We want to hear about your Mama's Kitchens, thoughts on some of the stories you've heard on this podcast. Maybe you want to share what tastes like home to you. We want to hear all of that. Make sure to send us a voice memo at ymk at highergroundproductions.com and your story and your voice might be featured in a future episode. That's it for today. Goodbye, everybody.

Please come back next week because you know us. We're always serving up something interesting. Until then, be bountiful. ["The Bound to Fall"] This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original produced by Higher Ground Studios. Senior Producer Natalie Wren, Producer Sonia Tunn. Additional Production Support by Misha Jones.

Sound Design and Engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryan Kozlowski. Higher Ground Audio's Editorial Assistant is Camilla Thurdekus. Executive Producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fearman, and me, Michelle Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Nick D'Angelo and Anne Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Baer and Say What Media. Talent Booker, Angela Peluso. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza.

And that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. and we'll see you next time. Thank you. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. From fleet management to flexible truck rentals

to technology solutions. At Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities. Because if your business is on the road, we wanna make sure it's on the road to success. Enterprise Mobility, moving you moves the world.