Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Michael Pollan

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Author, journalist, and professor Michael Pollan talks about the influence Julia Child had on his mother’s kitchen and the nature of kitchens in America today, and shares his unexpected favorite dish growing up. Michael Pollan is a renowned advocate for responsible farming, gardening, and slow, local eating. Pollan has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987 and is the author of several successful books. Pollan writes about “the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds.” In 2003, Pollan was appointed Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In 2017, he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard. In 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In his Netflix documentary series Cooked, Pollan explores how cooking transforms food and shapes the world. Michael Pollan was born into a Jewish family in Long Island in 1955. He is the oldest of four children and brother to three little sisters. His father, Stephen Pollan, was a financial consultant, and his mother, Korky, was a New York Magazine columnist, style editor at Gourmet magazine, and an avid home cook. Pollan has a son, Isaac, and lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer. Find the episode transcript here: https://www.audible.com/ymk/episode14 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No one has seen a watermelon seed in years, but in those days they had plenty of seeds, and the ones you didn't swallow you'd spit out. I just kind of kicked it into the dirt in this spot and returned three or four months later to find a vine cradling this watermelon. It was like the size of maybe a football. It was absolutely thrilling and shocking. And I made the connection, I had made this happen. And I promptly broke off the vine

and carried it running and screaming to show my mother in the house. I proceeded to trip and the watermelon squirted out of my arms and just splatted. That was a kind of formative moment for me. I don't run with produce anymore. Welcome to Your Momma's Kitchen, the podcast where we explore how the food and culinary traditions of our youth

shape who we become as adults. I'm Michele Norris. Our guest today is Michael Pollan, author, journalist, lecture, and gatekeeper for good eating. His books include The Omnivores Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and this is your mind on plants. Michael has spent a lifetime looking at the places where nature and culture intersect in the grocery store and our gardens and industrial farms in restaurants and school lunch kitchens and at our dinner table. As you can guess, he's a clean eater, not much meat, not much dairy, sugar or fried food. So I was a little bit surprised that when he went down memory lane to his mama's kitchen,

his version of childhood comfort food was chicken ala keyev. Yes, chicken ala keyev. If you've never had this dish before, it's just as frilly and fru-fru and complicated as it sounds. Those who have had it, or even those adventurous enough to have made it, can appreciate the intricate, almost excruciating process it takes

to bring this entree to life. This dish combines staples of classic American home cooking, like chicken, butter, and breadcrums to create something elegant and elevated and deep-fried. It was a thing in the 1970s, and while not as popular now, it's rolled up in nostalgia. Usually you'd find chicken Kiev being served on fancy China, an apache restaurant, but Michael was lucky enough to have it served up for a weeknight dinner growing up on Long Island. We learned a lot about Michael by learning about the sunny yellow kitchen that was the center of his life, the garden out back where he first put his hands into

the soil, and the places that influenced the food guru who has changed the way Americans think about food and the places where it's grown, processed, packaged, and served up. We're serving up his story next. Michael Pollan, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for making time for us. Oh, thank you, Michelle. I have always wanted to talk to you, Thanks so much for making time for us. Oh, thank you, Michelle.

I have always wanted to talk to you. I'd have never had a chance to. I know. I'm kind of surprised our paths have not crossed, but this was such a wonderful concept. We think so too. And in its podcast that begins with a very simple question, tell me about your mama's kitchen.

What was it like? Take me back there. Close your eyes. Paying a picture for me. I mean, I've thought about it a lot and I've written about it. My mom was and is a wonderful cook and takes food very seriously. And, since I was a little kid, I have clear memories of her watching Julia Child on TV, which she was appointment television for her. And we were the lucky beneficiaries of that interest because she would, you know,

there were just the four of us kids. My father was seldom at the dinner table, long story, but basically he had a long commute and usually had leftovers later, often after we went to sleep. So it was really the four kids and her, but she wanted a cook serious things. So we would have Julia Childs

Boothberg and Yon on the Thursday, which we didn't fully appreciate. That's amazing. It was amazing, but she was hardcore. So we had family dinner every night, except on the weekends. They would often go out Friday or Saturday and we would get to have TV dinners, which was a great treat. We love TV dinners. And then Saturday night, we'd often order in. But during the week, six o'clock on the dot, we would be home for dinner. And she had a kind of rotation of dishes that she would prepare. We could kind of assume on Tuesday it would be pasta. On Thursday it would be beef. Wednesday would often be chicken,

but a variety of different chicken dishes. I loved her cooking, and I think my sisters did too, although eventually two of them became vegetarians, which complicated the whole picture. Was this when they were in Stirlen House in high school? Oh, yeah, pretty early. They must have been 12 or 13. My mother was very accommodating, though.

She would make something different for them. But before that, we all both figuratively and literally aid from the same pot. And that, I think, is just such a wonderful tradition, because it does a lot. It's metaphorical, as well as literal. It gets everybody on the same page psychologically, I think, when we share food. She would also let us help in the kitchen, or sometimes requires, too.

I mean, there were jobs. You had to set the table, clean up after, or you could help in the preparation. And I loved helping in the preparation. I just thoroughly enjoyed all the processes of transformation that happened in a kitchen. And these miracles of transubstantiation that happened, you know, from raw pieces of, you know, meat, and a few vegetables suddenly emerging as something quite wonderful and magical. I want to get back to the family meal in just a bit, but I want to learn a little bit more about the space where your mother made this magic. What did her kitchen look like?

What kind of stove did she have? Did you have a kitchen renovation when you were young or was it a fancy kitchen? When I was six, we moved into a new house in a development in the suburbs. This is suburban New York on Long Island in the town of Woodbury. So everything was brand new at that time. There was a new stove. I remember the appliances were yellow, which is a very popular 60s color for appliances. You don't see it very much anymore.

I think the fridge was yellow, but the stove and range are, remember, being yellow. It was very modern feeling. My mother was very up on Dizahin and still is. And so there was a kitchen table, a kind of a breakfast table that was near the phone, which was on the wall. And this table was kind of some sort of plastic or resin, and it was white, and that's where we would have breakfast, or if we were home for lunch. The sink faced the front of the house, which was very shaded and wooded. There was a double-trunk oak tree that you could see outside this window. But we ate in the dining room, and that was a separate room, and there was a swinging

door that opened onto the dining room. And we ate at this big Nakashima table. Nakashima is a famous furniture designer from the 60s and we had this beautiful piece of walnut table where we ate. Now your mother was a working woman. She edited the best bet section of New York magazine. Yeah, for 17 years, I still meet people who remember the best bet's column and she was really an institution in New York when she was running that. And she edited Gourmet magazine also. So she was working and still making time to make dinner. Do you marvel at that now?

Absolutely. Her energy is extraordinary. I mean, she made Passover for 25 people. She didn't make every dish we chipped in, but she made the brisket, she made the chicken and she made the motsable soup over the course of two weeks. Very stressful, but she got it done and it was all delicious, although not all to her standard. She's highly self-critical over cooking and she's still chewing over why the gravy on

the brisket was as thin as it was and how she could course correct for next year. Was the gravy actually thinner than she wanted to be or is that part of the performance of cooking? Oh, no, no, no, everyone loved it. The grandkids, she's got 11 grandchildren. They all took home as much as they could for leftovers. No, it's purely her. She has a platonic ideal of that sauce, the relationship of the meat and the sauce and the continuity between the two. And it was broken. She has some theories as to why. And we did quite an autopsy over it actually in discussion. Hot-topsies. Yes. So.

It would after action report, you know, exactly, for instance, after we've... Exactly. And I think we figured out the problem. But, you know, she makes extensive notes from one holiday to the next. Exactly how long she cooked the turkey for Thanksgiving at what temperature. When did she take it out? She has this kind of playbook for these big meals. She has a playbook. Say more about that. Is it electronic or is it actual? No, it's all in her handwriting.

And after a big meal. And a treasure. Yeah, she would sit down and make notes, what worked, what didn't work, where the potatoes on a crispy enough, if they weren't, why not? She holds herself to a very high standard. When I ask about your kitchen, I feel like I should not just ask about the space where the cooking was done, but maybe look through the kitchen window and imagine the garden just outside, because you were very influenced by the garden and you had something, I guess

you called it the farm. That was in back of the house. I was one of the producers supplying food to this kitchen on the order of like three strawberries at a time, nothing major. But yes, I, from a very young age, started gardening. I love gardening. I had a grandfather, my mother's father, who was a Russian immigrant, could not read, was totally uneducated. And he started out selling produce on a street corner in Hempstead, New York. He would sell baked potatoes and then more produce. And then he gradually had a market selling produce.

And then he was a distributor and he got some contracts with the military during World War II. And he was supplying with the military during World War II, and he was supplying to the military bases on Long Island. When the farmers started selling out, he started buying their land and started doing real estate. He built strip malls. It was generally involved in dispoiling the Long Island landscape. After supporting its farmers for as long as they could hold out. I had kind of tense relations with him.

He thought I was kind of a hippie. I wore my hair along and I had a leather bracelet that I wore that just drove him absolutely crazy. He was very conservative man. But we could connect in the garden and he had a beautiful big garden, much bigger than it needed to be. It was just him and my grandmother, but he grew like a truck farmer's amount of produce, which he would load into his Lincoln in the trunk and give it out to his tenants as he drove around Long

Island. My happiest moments at my grandparents' house was in the garden, and especially around harvest. I still find it's thrilling to find a ripe red tomato under that canopy of leaves or or pull a carrot out of the earth. It still amazes me. And I learned that from him. I mean, I garden it in a different way. He, there was no pesticide. He didn't love.

I mean, he has, Scott's miracle grow and all their allied products. So he wasn't an organic roar, but his produce was beautiful. He would also always grow the variety you could get in the supermarket where I tend to grow the variety you can't get in the supermarket. So he to grow the variety You can't get in the supermarket

So he would have big beef steak tomatoes and glow big plants and it looked just like a really good produce section So yeah, my interest in food goes back to that. I mean it really goes back the first encounter I had with growing food Was when I was four years old and this is when we lived in a house on the south shore of Long Island in a neighborhood of just kind of very tiny row houses. It was a working class neighborhood, and there was a hedge behind our house, and the property line was behind that, a couple feet. And I loved watermelon, and I spit out some watermelon seeds and kind of buried them to see if anything would happen.

Completely forgot about them. This happened. You were four when you did this? Yeah. Four. I'd heard the story about seeds turned into things and that watermelon, you know, there was always, remember, when you ate watermelon as a kid and you swallowed the seeds, there was this kind of concern.

It might start growing in your stomach. We have to pause for a minute because watermelon's actually had seeds back then because it's right. No one has seen watermelon seed in years. Good point. We have to pause for a minute because watermelons actually had seeds back then because I'm just right. I don't want to see no watermelons. Seed in years. Good point. But in those days, they had plenty of seeds and the ones you didn't swallow, you'd spit out. And I just kind of kicked it into the dirt in this spot and returned three or four months later to find a vine cradling this watermelon. It wasn't huge. It was like the size of maybe a football. And it was absolutely thrilling and shocking. And I made the connection. I had made

this happen. And I promptly like broke off the vine and carried it running and screaming to show my mother in the house. But between the door to the house and the hedge where I was was a concrete patio where I proceeded to trip and the watermelon squirted out of my arms and just splatted. That was a kind of formative moment for me. I don't run with produce anymore. But it was, you know, it was, that's where I had my proof that, yes, you could really put seeds in the ground and get something you wanted. And isn't this miraculous? some big sophisticated dishes at a time, when a lot of women were looking to get out of the kitchen, why do you think she did that?

I mean, my mother, you know, became a career woman and she always had aspirations. She'd been in college, she was very serious student of literature and a big, big reader. I don't know that she saw cooking as oppressive as some women did or came to. That would be a really interesting question to ask her. For her, it was a

creative outlet. And I think for a lot of women then, the women who were watching Julia Child, they were cooking... That was a real thing. It was a huge thing at the time. It was like appointment viewing. Yeah, and I remember I would watch it with her sometimes. I mean, I thought it was kind of hilarious. And Julia Child, you know, she had that crazy voice and she made an intimidating cuisine unantimidating. I mean, because she was a bit goofy, but it was serious French cooking. Translating that from what she saw on TV or read in the books, the cookbooks to our table was a process that was very creative for her. Did she send you to school with a bag lunch? Not always. Weirdly, I really liked the food at school. What she send you to school with a bag lunch? Not always.

Weirdly, I really liked the food at school. What school did you go to? I went to a public school and and. What's good food? Was it really good food? I'm dubious, but at the time, I liked it. I liked, I mean, I didn't like the hamburgers. They had strange materials oozing out of them,

exuding, but I love the pasta and spaghetti and pizza and sloppy joes and Salisbury steak, which is a very dubious product. My sisters and I had certain favorites at school. And we would ask my mother to simulate the school food. And she would. She took that as a challenge, a kin to, you know, making a Julia child recipe, and she would make us Salisbury steak or chicken fried steak with something that they had. And she was game, and we would tell her, ah, it's not quite as good as Walt Whitman. That was the school we went to. And she just rolled with that, not quite as good as the school lunch. You have to understand,

my mother was what we would call quite permissive. There was very little we could do that she had a problem with. We had an unusual degree of freedom. There's a lot of things that happen in the kitchen that have nothing to do with food that also shape us. Was there anything that happened in your kitchen that you look back and see shaped you in an interesting way that had nothing to do with food and the subject of your life's work now.

I mean, there was a lot of talk in the kitchen when my mother was cooking. I loved hanging around in the kitchen when she was cooking. I particularly loved it when her mother came over and they would cook together and make strutal and things like that. My mother's mother cooked a completely different cuisine that my mother had grown up. One of the peculiarities, I think, of American culture compared to other cultures is we don't eat the way our parents fed us, and they fed us

in a way their parents didn't feed them. I mean, that every generation, the food changes. And in my case, it was an immigrant generation to a first full American generation to me. And foodways in America are very fungible. I mean, they're changing every generation. We don't eat the way people did 20, 30, 40 years ago. And that's a positive end and negative.

It's a negative in the sense that we don't have a stabilizing food culture. People in Italy have been eating the same way for many, many generations, ditto in France. And yes, junk food finds its way in and fast food, but what is considered a proper meal hasn't changed. Whereas my mother grew up eating parts of cows that I would never consider eating. They ate udders. You know, that was considered a delicacy. They didn't have a lot of money. And sweet breads and all sorts of weird glands and... Tongue.

Yeah, tongue, my dad loved tongue. And I don't eat all those foods I'm describing that my mother cooked with the exception of pasta. I don't make beef stews. I don't make fried chicken. But there was the continuity when my grandmother Mary came and she and my mother would often, you know, hang out in the kitchen or cook in the kitchen. And I love listening to conversations. The other set of memories I have about the kitchen is,

as I mentioned, my dad was missing from most of our family dinners because he worked in Manhattan. You know, this like, I don't know, hour and a half, two hour commute. That's a long time. Very long time. And he would get up very early to leave. And the only time I could have with him during the week, and I love being with him, was while he was having breakfast. So I would actually drag myself out of bed at like six or six thirty or whatever time it was, and sit down and have coffee with him. And so as a result, I started drinking coffee at a very young age and I've had a lifelong relationship with coffee.

I don't know how old I was eight or ten, but. And he let you drink coffee with him at eight or ten. Did you tell you I had a very permissive balance? Nodes of sugar at it. Yeah, definitely loads of sugar and milk. And because you know, kids don't like the taste of coffee. They have to, they have to domesticate it. But anyway, that was precious time to be in that kitchen.

With my dad, my sisters wouldn't be up late. My mother wouldn't be in the kitchen yet. And that was our, you know, our one-on-one time. I mean, we had some of the weekends too, but that was key time growing up. Did your dad ever cook? Because you've written that men need to get back in the kitchen. Yes, they sure do, and he was not a good model in this regard.

He would grill, you know, the classic male. Yes, where fire is involved. But he was terrible at it. I mean, he would, yeah, he would burn things, and my mother never knew that whether there be food on the table when he was grilling. He just wasn't very good at it. I mean, I learned a little bit about it, and I love grilling, and I would help him to the extent I could.

So we spent summers on Martha's Vineyard when I was young. They built a house there in 1965, and we'd go to the beach every day as a family with friends. And at least once a week, he would schlep a grill down there to make a hot meal on the beach. This was so much trouble because then you had to bring the bag of brachets. You had all the hot dogs and the hamburgers. My mother would make coleslaw. And we would have a cook out at like noon on the beach. It was like, I can't imagine ever doing that. And he would cook with my help there. Little Habachi Grill.

It was a big grill. Oh, really? It wasn't, it was like a big grill. Oh, no, no, no. It wasn't a real grill. It was like, it wasn't, I mean, we didn't have those kettle grills then. It was rectangular, but it was pretty big.

And yeah, it just seemed like an awful lot of trouble when a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would have done the trick. You're listening to the audible original, your mom is kitchen. Like what you're hearing, the next episode is available now, exclusively from Audible. You can listen to new episodes on Audible

two weeks before you can hear them anywhere else. What is it that you've cooked that you think perhaps delights? You're how many kids do you have? Just one. Just one, your son, right? Yes, Isaac. So what have you made for your son, Isaac, that delights him the same way a dish from your mom delighted you? So my son is a big meat eater.

And when I was writing Cooked, which is my book about cooking, I really got into Southern Barbecue. And I spent time in North Carolina, and I print this myself to pit masters. And I started cooking that way at home. And in fact, we have a fire pit in our garden in the front of our house.

And once a year, so we would do a whole pig, I'd get often my students, I would have a group of students and we'd invite them all over. And it was a 24 hour cook because you started it around dinner time and then someone had to watch it all night. We took turns watching it and my son would participate because he wanted to cook very slowly at a very low temperature, but obviously not too low. And Isaac loved that meat and it was pretty extraordinary. And he would help out.

And then there's the process of getting the meat off the animal and shredding it and mixing in the the apple cider vinegar and whatever else you were putting in it. I would say that was his favorite meal that we ever cooked. It was very special occasion. Then there was the kind of miniaturized version of that that I learned how to do, which was a slow cooked pork shoulder that I would cover in sugar and salt and then cook very slowly on the grill and then shred it. Sort of like the mama fuku recipe. Yes, and in fact, I did work from that recipe sometimes. I love that recipe.

When did you start cooking more for yourself? Was it somewhere along the line when you began writing more about food and agriculture? And when you did start cooking, how much of your mother's hand was in that? After college, I lived in the department where I was growing some pot on a hundred and ten street in Manhattan. We would get Ravioli from a store in New York, called Reffettos that has just, has always had for the last 60 years the best Ravioli

spinach and cheese. And then my idea of a fancy meal if I had friends over would be to melt some butter and then put some sage leaves in it and then serve that over that Ravioli. And that was it. I was pretty simple. When Judith and I started living together, we, you know, she brought her recipes. I had some, I had learned from my mom and we would, we started cooking regularly. You know, in New York, in your early apartments, you don't really have a very good kitchen. You don't even have a kitchen.

I mean, in my apartment 110th Street, there were these louver doors that I would open and there would be this two burner range and a little refrigerator and it was not easy to cook. There was no counter space, for example. You had to use the dining table as a place to chop stuff. I think it's really, we got serious about cooking when we got this house in Connecticut.

This was in the early 80s. And there weren't a lot of good restaurants around, or there were all too far away. And there we got much more serious about cooking and started looking at cookbooks and figuring out what we like to eat. And I then put in a big garden, and we would eat from the garden all the time.

And how much of your mother's hand was in that when you started doing the serious cooking? Well, the fact I was doing serious cooking at all is all her hand. I mean, you know, that I took it seriously and had a little bit of technique I learned from her. So it definitely had an influence. As I said, I don't know that I was making the same dishes, but she wasn't either. She had moved on too. I mean, she, you know, she had started after trips to Italy, you know, the focus on French cuisine gave way to

Italian. As it did in the whole culture at a certain point, right? It used to be in Manhattan, if you were a person in a certain class, and you wanted to go out for a nice meal, it was always French. 60s and into the 70s, and then suddenly it was Italian. Right, Northern Italian in particular. Yeah, Northern Italian exactly. So you've done research, you've traveled the world. You can learn a little bit about a culture, if you look at where people cook. And it's not always in a kitchen.

Sometimes it's over, it's a pot over a flame. It's, as you say, a pig in the ground, in the backyard with coals on top. What do we learn about America by looking at our kitchens and the way we cook, and particularly looking backwards over our shoulder and the kitchens that we grew up in. How has it shaped a generation of people? I think the kitchen in America is going unused to a tremendous extent,

that these have become rooms of display, you know, with the fancy stoves and the fridges, and they are approaching, you know, this professional level with all the, and I'm speaking of pretty affluent kitchens obviously, but with all the fancy gear, yet they're used less and less. And we are not cooking at home very much.

There was an uptick during COVID, but I think we've fallen back on habits of ordering in, going out. The family meal is an endangered institution. You know, I've written about this because it concerns me. We learn very important things at that table. You know, I don't exaggerate when I say that the family dinner and that table is a nursery of democracy because it is at that table that the family comes together, which

otherwise is quite centrifugal, right? Everybody's in their own room on their own screens now. They don't watch TV together anymore. So it's at that table that we learn how to share, talk about the news of the day. I have vivid memories of when my dad was at the table talking about the Vietnam War and what was going on. And we learn to take turns. We learn how to argue without fighting. There'd be penalties. If you said something awful at the table to your sister,

you'd be exiled. So I just think they're so important. They teach people about a lot more than eating, but they also teach people about eating. What is real food, as opposed to all this other stuff that now represents about 60% or 65% of the American diet, ultra-process foods of one kind or another? I understand why we stopped cooking. The fact that as women went back to work, the old system was untenable, but there was

another solution. And that, of course, was a renegotiation of responsibility in the household between men and women. And that conversation, which started in the 70s, and I remember it, and there was a source of some tension in our house, was aborted by the fast food industry, who saw an opportunity that they could relieve the tension of men and women arguing about responsibility. And the best symbol of this I know of was a billboard

that Kentucky Fried Chicken ran around the country in the 1970s. And all it was was a bucket of fried chicken and the headline, Women's Liberation. So the food industry aligned themselves with the aspirations of women as the solution to this problem. There was another solution, but it didn't lend itself to capitalism quite as well.

And that other solution, of course, was sharing the work when it becomes much less oppressive. And more fun. I mean, my wife and I cook together, and we figure out the beginning of the meal who's going to make what, and we stand around the same table, and that's when we review, you know, what happened in our day and our plans for the weekend or whatever else it is. And that is like our catch-up time, and it's precious. precious. We have a habit here.

We try to give our listeners a recipe in every episode. And Michael wanted to share the fancy, laborious, homemade chicken dish that his mom quirky made for special weeknight dinners. The dish that she taught me to make that became my signature dish was chicken ala key of. Which just sounds fancy. I know, it just sounds like it should be served

on a beautiful china platter. And it was, and this was something we would have like birthdays. And I would ask for it on my birthday, but I would cook it, I mean, with her. And it was a very elaborate process because you started with chicken breasts that you had a pound until they were about a quarter inch

even between layers of wax paper. And did you have that metal made in that little wooden mallet that you would use or was a metal? You had the mallet, yeah. And you had to do that. But if you hit it too hard, you'd have holes. And then for reasons you'll see in a minute,

that was a disaster because you had a created tight seal. And then you would take this piece of paper that was really chicken breast. In advance, you'd made these little bars of butter that had herbs and garlic in it, and that you'd refrigerated after you've made them. And you would roll one of these and tuck in the ends very carefully and then roll the whole thing in which looked like a devil dog or something, which was a popular snack at the time. And you'd roll that in flour and then roll that in egg and then roll that in breadcrumbs and then you would deep-fat fry it.

And we had a frialator, a plug-in frialator. Oh my goodness, a frialator. I haven't heard that word in so long. I know. I don't think they have them anymore. They're probably fire hazards, I think. Maybe they were banned. I don't know.

And then you would fry it. And it would get this beautiful golden color. And you'd watch very carefully because something could go wrong. And what that wrong was was the leaking of the melting butter inside. So you had to handle it very gently with a slotted spoon. And when it worked, you would take it out and put it on some paper tallings to get some of the fat off. And then you would slice into it.

And this aroma of garlic and herbs would wafed up and then this pool of butter would surround this thing on your plate. It was the most magical thing. I just loved it. I loved everything about it. The mechanics, the taste, the process. And she taught me that out of Julia Child.

And I have not made it. And I think I made it for my wife and son once. I don't eat chicken anymore, I don't eat butter anymore. It's just like so far beyond how I eat now, but at the time there was no hire. And my parents once took me to Russian tea room and I got to have their version and it was no better. No better than your moms. No, my mom's was the best. It'd be great if one day we could share a meal together.

That would be great, Michelle. I would enjoy that. It'd be great if one day we could share a meal together. That would be great, Michelle. I would enjoy that. Thanks so much for your time. Oh, my pleasure. You know, Michael's right. The kitchen is a magnet. It holds people together. It's where we catch up on Monday and updates. It's where we argue. And yes, it is. As he says, a nursery for democracy, I love that line. Because we stay at the table with people we don't agree with.

We learn how to listen to other people. We learn how to give and take. And what we take away from all those experiences, if we're lucky, stays inside us for a lifetime. Thanks for listening to your mom's kitchen. I'm Michele Norris. Come back next week. Hmm.

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