Bizarre Politics (with Andrew Zimmern)

Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark next level Sunday show. I’m your host, Tim Miller. I have a great guest today, Andrew Zimmer, and he’s host of Wild Game Kitchen on Outdoor Channel. You might know what’s eating American MSNBC or bizarre foods on the travel channel. I gotta just be honest.

I am not like a food show watcher. It’s just not in my repertoire. And so if you are like me and you are concerned that this episode is not gonna be for you, I would like you to give it a chance because we discussed at the beginning a lot about addiction and life choices and, you know, how you can make improvements and midlife. And then we get into food policy and how it touches on climate and immigration. And we’re talking about the Farm Bill.

So there’s just a ton of stuff that even if you aren’t a food show person, you might be interested in, And then we do get into some fun foody recs at the very end too. So I hope you enjoy the show. This feed the next level. If you watch it on YouTube, we are joining the Bulwark main YouTube feed. So go to YouTube and subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube.

If you listen to us on a podcast or on sub stack or on your browser anywhere else, nothing changes. It’s just go and subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube. We’ll be back Wednesday with JBL and Sarah. But first, I really want you to check out this interview. With my good friend, Andrew Zimmern.

But first, my pals at acetone. Pcl. Hello, and welcome to the Borg’s next level podcast. Time, your host Tim Miller. We’ve got a great guest this Sunday.

It is Andrew Zimmer, and you might know him from Wildgame Kitchen. This season from mirroring on the outdoor channel here in a couple weeks, September twenty third. He’s got a sub stack. He’s got a website. He was the creator of bizarre Foods.

He had a show in MSNBC even. I haven’t gotten a show MBC yet. It was called What’s eating America. He’s a World Food Program Ambassador. He’s a streetwalker in Minneapolis.

Anything else you want me to shout out.

No, but I’m proudest of the last one, especially in my age that I have a viable career there. It says a lot about

Well, you know, everybody’s got a type. It is so good to have you. We’ve met only once before. Was it the Covid Bill Mar

It was the last episode of the Marshow before they shut it down for COVID. People had masks. They had every other seat in the audience. It was like a weird It

was weird.

A whole thing was weird. It was a great episode of the show. And very memorable for me because I got to meet a lot of people that I had long wanted to, you among them.

That’s sweet.

And, yeah, that’s why we’re here today.

That’s nice. And my my big memory from those after the show aired, I received a text from my old boss, writes Pribus, who said he was a big fan of yours, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual.

You know, it’s really this but this kind of proves the larger piece of my zeitgeist, which is that you know, food really connects everyone. We all do it. I’ve never left a meal with someone where I haven’t liked them less. And, I mean, that includes, you know, dictators, terrorists. I mean, real ones.

I mean, overseas, I’ve had a chance to meet with friends.

Suck ups to chief of staff, suck ups to wanna be autocrats, no matter what.

That’s right. We’re in fact autocrats. And at at one point, we had piled up the autocrats so much with these no cameras allowed. But, you know, when when you’re in nicaragua and you’re the only American show, as popular as bizarre foods was during that. It’s ever shot in nicaragua.

You know, Ortega wanted to meet and share a meal and they got me to throw out the first pitch at the Nicaraguen World series. We were down there for that. So, I mean, do

you have a good arm?

Good enough. I went into this crumbling stadium, you know, and the place is going wild because my show airs down there. They knew who I was. And it was on that trip that one of my producers said to me we’re pitching a new show. It’s called dinner with a dictator, and it’s you talking about the stuff that you really wanna talk about that we can’t talk about when we’re making bizarre foods, which is, you

know Right.

So tell me, exterminating half your citizenship to gain power. How’s that feel? You know, I mean

So that didn’t come up. All the starving people didn’t come up.

You learn very early in these dinners that you can subtly bring things. And if something is brought up, you can ask a question, but it’s bad when your helicopter the mountain top, and you have no way to leave to start asking questions that are way too personal.

Yeah. This is why I don’t get invited to a lot of dinners. I’m finding out. We’re gonna get into all this food policy stuff. There’s so much, you know, climate, Ukraine, etcetera.

I wanna ask you some cooking questions, which I know I’m sure you love. But, first, like, one of the big themes of this show has been people who like me made some, you know, some smart changes in midlife some life affirming midlife changes that have been good for them. And so maybe sharing that gives maybe a buck up or some wisdom to other people who are trying to to make changes in their life. So you’ve managed to do that twice for people who don’t know. First, you were struggling with addiction, maybe an understatement, and then moved into the restaurant biz, and then You left the restaurant biz, I went into journalism.

So, like, for folks who don’t know you that well, maybe do a short sketch of how that happened and like some lessons that you took from those changes.

Child privilege, New York City, rights schools, right connections, right, everything, developed a horrific drug and alcohol problem, managed it for a while. Until it began to manage me. It was probably managing me long before I realized it. And I became, a homeless street person a user of people and a taker

of, literally homeless.

I was living in an abandoned building on Sullivan Street, just south of Houston. A block that now is very, very fancy, right around the corner from Emilio’s Bellado. And I I think the abandoned building that we were squatting at the time, for a year, I didn’t shower. I stole every day if I needed food or or alcohol. I I stole jars of comet cleanser and ajax to sprinkle around the pile of dirty clothes and broken pieces of pillows and mattresses that I call to bed every night.

So that the rodents and rats and roaches wouldn’t crawl over me. It it would most horrible, awful moment of my life. But I tolerated that for almost a year until I decided to steal a bunch of jewelry from my godmother and

Are people in your life? Did they know where you are?

I had long since burned all those bridges. Gotcha. And it was that realization interestingly enough that made me decide to take this jewelry. I bought a couple nights in a fleabag hotel called the San Pedro that doesn’t exist. Bought a case of Papa vodka, that had just that week come to the US market and it was in plastic liter bottles.

I know the bottle.

So I went to lift it and kind of using my knees. And the guy said, looked at me, went plastic bottles. And I was like, oh my god. Like, it was a huge. So I remember that very, very vividly.

And I tried to drink myself to death and ate a lot of pills, and, I should have been dead. I mean, medically, I should be dead. And I woke up, we believe because we only have pieces to put this together from my friend’s memories. It was about forty eight, fifty six hours later I came to in this hotel room and I wasn’t dead. And I plugged the phone back into the wall and asked a friend for help.

And, it was the first time in my life. I said, I don’t know what to do. I need help. I’d never used those words before. And when I say never, I’m not exaggerating.

It’s not a cute dinner party story. I was so self centered. So egotistical, so narcissistic that I never would admit to not knowing something. I’d rather make it up and have you know I was lying then ever say, oh, no. I don’t know what that is.

Tell me. And so I wound up three days after that phone call at Hazelton. That was January twenty eighth nineteen ninety two, and I’ve been continuously sober ever since. And, about five, six years into sobriety, I realized that at the very heart of my talent meal, I was a storyteller, and that I was doing it with food. And I wanted a bigger audience.

I thought

So just backing up a second. So you become sober, and that’s when you get into the restaurant business.

Well, I’ve been in restaurants my whole life.

That’s right. You were doing restaurants, dear. And then it was in Minnesota. It was where you opened that, right, give or take.

Kind of a funny story. I was living in a halfway house. And I had to be home every night at five. So I got a job as a daytime dishwasher in a brand new French restaurant that had just opened in downtown Minneapolis across from the gleaming office building where all the ad agencies were.

Yeah.

And I thought, okay, that restaurant will be open for a while because at least lunches will be busy. Right? Yeah. Thank you enough. And one day, one of the cooks who ran the grill station, which got hammered at lunch, didn’t show up.

And they were trying to find someone to fill in, but the restaurant was only, like, two weeks old. And I’d been washing dishes and watching the food, and it was French Peacero food, and you know, wasn’t hard. So I went up to the chef, and I said, I can put out that guy’s station. And the chef was like, you know, go back to the the dish pit

Like, the halfway house dishwasher is gonna handle this. This could be a scene from the mayor.

I was like, okay. And as they got more desperate, I said, look, I wouldn’t say I could do it if couldn’t do it. I don’t wanna let you down. And something about my look persuaded him. So I put out the lunch station, and I sort of bailed them out of an bediting Kirk Fuffler too.

And, you know, and I’d worked in Michelin starred restaurants in Europe and Hong Kong at the best restaurants in America. I mean, I’d spent fourteen years working in New York City and Los Angeles in the best restaurants in America. And I had been in Europe and the far east. And so I it was it was bistro food. Grill the salmon, put the onion soup under the broiler, steak free, drop the fries, you know, grill the shrimp for the the special.

I mean, it wasn’t that difficult. Make the rat tattooie. And the owner of the restaurant afterwards, you know, crook his finger said, Can you tell me why my dishwasher just put out the best looking food I’ve ever seen in Minnesota? And I was like, well, I I said that’s a bit of a scratch. She goes, no.

I just watched my dishwasher step into the kitchen and run it, and I I sort of had to out myself. And he said, well, can you work? I said, I can’t leave before seven and I have to be home by five. I’m living in a halfway house. The dad got out of the halfway house.

He fired everybody, made me the chef, and I rehired staff from all the different treatment centers and halfway houses in the twin cities because some incredible veterinarians have some amazing substance abuse problems. And I put together basically an all star team of second chance restaurant people really talented ones. Florida, California, New York, ago.

There’s a place like this in Baltimore too. I forget the name.

And it was it was glorious. And so for many years, we’re the best restaurant in town. But same was missing inside of me. I was treating work differently than I was the rest of my life. And so my gurus in my twelve step program suggested.

I try to figure out a way to live all of my life on one page. And so that meant to me leaving And so I tried to create a TV show that would suit my talents. And so the idea was in a world where we were judging each other by, you know, who we fell in love with, the color of our skin, the language we spoke, the music we listened to, the god we prayed to, if one at all, Why don’t we focus on the things we have in common? And let’s tell that story through food, and my hook was food that other people aren’t talking about. Right?

Because at the time on food network is was, here’s how to saute a chicken breast. I wanna talk about people eating iguana or Casu Marzu, the famous, you know, maggot cheese of Sardinia. Right? I mean, long story short, they went for it. And the the rest is kind of history.

Well, it’s not history. They bought a couple shows. It didn’t do so great in the ratings. The third episode came on in a shaman that I had hired on a lunch break to perform an exorcism on me. Not that I felt I needed one, but I just thought it was interesting.

Now match match slap also tried an exorcism recently. I saw. It didn’t work for him. Don’t know. Maybe it works better for you.

Worked for me. I went on to have my best year in life ever, but I we were on a lunch break. There was three person crew, me, a videographer who did sound and our producer writer.

Mhmm.

And, the three of us would write show and edit, do everything at night in our hotel room. And, you know, because we got no money from travel channel. And I went and had exorcism, and I persuaded our videographer to film it because I thought once I heard what was gonna go on, which was just horrific. He’s gonna spit on me. He’s gonna light me on fire.

He’s gonna kill little animals by beating them against my chest. I mean, this is gonna beat me with branches. I ended up breaking out and welts all over. It was a poisonous branch. It was pretty horrific.

Went on flight three hours. Well, they cut it down and they made it a part of the show. And so the third week when our ratings were I mean, it was heading south. I got a call from the bookers at the tonight show, and they said Jay saw a clip of your show because the the talent booker saw it and they want you out in LA tomorrow night to do the the Leno show. And I said, sure.

And I went out there and Jay love me and like that classic thing with Johnny Carson in the comics. He said, we love you. Will you come back? And I said, sure. Well, The ratings the next week were through the roof, and it sort of never stopped.

So if it wasn’t for Jay Leno

That shaman, really.

But along the way, The most valuable pieces of advice I’ve ever heard came from people who helped me get my act together and helped me become a human me. I didn’t need to be rehabilitated. I needed to be habilitated. I was a fucking mess. And so this idea of being able to sit in a room and have the the confidence to look at everyone else and say, I don’t know how to do that.

Can someone show me, or can you help me? Was a new muscle that I was exercising. It took me twenty years to use it every day. I now use it every day pretty effortlessly. If I don’t know something, I’ll admit it.

That took twenty years. I’ve been sober thirty two years. So that means it wasn’t until I was fifty that I was able to look someone in the eye and say, I don’t know how to do that. Can you help me? And that’s so powerful.

I believe it’s a sign of strength, not of weakness to ask that question. It’s probably the most valuable thing I ever learned because I try to tell it to you know, young people, my son. I try to tell that to him all the time. You don’t need to pretend about something. It’s okay not to know something.

You know, everyone doesn’t know more than what they know. So I think if I had to pick one thing — Yeah.

—

that’s it. And I and I guess that’s one a. One B would be there should be someone in your life who knows everything. There should be someone. I think the secret to to sobriety to all these these different twelve step group self help.

I mean, it was so many different good things for good people to recover from all kinds of different isms, not just myisms, but, you know, the ones we all have, they all have one thing in common, and that is that sort of confessional aspect where there is someone who hears the whole story. And there’s different things that happen in different groups after that. But I believe the power is actually that we can part of mentalize our lives. And even from our loved ones, even from our kids, our spouses, our, I mean, our bosses, sometimes even our best friends, because we’re so embarrassed. Somebody is easier with a stranger.

Sure.

And I do know people who do not go to church, who walk into a Catholic church and seek confessional for this very reason because it’s easier to dump it on a stranger. Once I got into the habit of doing that, I now do it every year and it’s part of my recovery.

Yeah.

I think telling someone everything, the good, the bad, ugly and everything in between has a spiritual power that I think is impossible to claim anywhere else. So

That resonates with the other thing you said that resonates with me, and this is why, you know, people very rarely come out of the closet and also to their best friend. I came out of the closet to somebody I barely liked actually. Right? Because it’s like safer, you know, you can say it. That way.

And once I did, well, I said it was the best decision I ever made because much other good stuff in my life has come from it. You know, when you said living your life on one page, like, this is the thing when I was writing about where I went wrong and like how I got, you know, too deep with the Republican stuff and the Apple research stuff. I was thinking that I I made this change in one part of my life that was so good. And so life affirming. And I had all this stuff going right, you know, and I was no longer lying.

And I was, you know, like a lot of other traits about myself. But in my work life, I didn’t synthesize them. I kept one part of my life going the same because I was like, well, things are going fine in this. So my career, I don’t need to change this. And finally synthesizing that was so big for me.

So that really resonates with me the one page, analogy.

It’s interesting you say that because My parents divorced when I was four or five years old in nineteen sixty five into sixty six. And, my father had fallen in love with a man. And they lived together from sixty five until twenty fifteen when my father passed when they passed away. Within eight months of each other.

Wow.

And so my entire life, because my memory is limited before I was six.

Right.

I had two dads. And as I grew older, you know, I I grew up in New York. I knew exactly what was going on. It didn’t matter. My dad was my dad.

My stepdad Andre was the best parent out of all the three. You know, I’m truly. And it wasn’t until about three years before he died in his eighties. That my father, my wife was freaking out. Well, my now my ex wife, but my wife, they’re freaking out because my dad had come to visit and had told my wife that he was coming out to me.

And I looked at my wife and I was like, I’ve known my whole life that my dad is gay. What does it matter? Does it? And She’s like, this is about him. This is about him telling you the word he’s never told you his story.

And that resonated with me because I realized my dad waited until he was eighty to live his life. And he really actually never did. My I grew up in a casual full household. My step dad was very flamboyant, very who’s very Nathan Lane. My dad was, you know, fought in the Pacific for three years during the height of World War two started this big company in New York City in the fifty.

I mean, it was just this massive larger than life hero, and he was the guy that took off his wedding ring when Maine finally had their marriage equality act passed and they got married. I insisted. They weren’t going to, but I was like, look, legally, one of you is gonna get in the hospital and I can’t take care of you unless you’re married. So you’re getting married.

Right.

Right. And they were very grateful that I sort of pushed on that. But my dad would take off his wedding ring when he went shopping because he didn’t want people asking questions. That was the generation that he was in, but he needed to sit in the car with me and come out to me so that he could tell me his story, which was hysterical because on troop carriers in the nineteen forties in the Pacific, my dad would tell me you you’re down there for seventy two hours. I could’ve gotten a lot of tail, but I didn’t because I was conflicted.

And, I mean, hearing hearing this eighty three year old Jewish giant to me. This, like, what he was so hysterically. It was a part he still had one foot in the late twenties, early thirties when he grew up in one foot in twenty twelve when he was telling me this story because he wanted to make his life whole. And luckily, by the time he passed, he did. But you’re right, until we get everything on one page as human beings, we can’t be happy.

Yeah. Well, big changes for you at at fifty and him at eighty. That’s inspiring, actually. That’s a good takeaway. It’s solid that people can make positive life changes then.

We could probably do two days on that really. But, that, you know, it’s the political podcast ostensibly. So I wanna talk a little bit about that. Well, first, like, I have a couple of specific issues I wanna get into with you, but we have the farm bills coming up. This used to be, like, a totally noncontroversial.

All, like, the it’s, it’s the last thing standing that was not, you know, all wrapped up in our stupid culture war. I think that is ending. For a variety of reasons. But I wanted to ask you to send the biggest possible picture. If we made you, like, the sultan of ag policy, you know, Joe Biden just stowed upon use, the powers to put whatever you wanted into the farm bill.

Like, what what are some big picture food and ag policies that you think would make the biggest positive impact.

Well, I think there’s a handful. I mean, you know, with something that big and unwieldy, and and I’m not saying the question’s too big or or I reject it. Quite the opposite. I I I embrace it. But there’s I give a stump speech of of my own that I’ve told it South by Southwest, a bunch of other places about these sort of fourteen pillars.

It’s kind of like a moebius strip, actually. If you wanna get involved in climate crisis Bulwark, If you hop in on that issue, you will get involved with hunger and food waste. You will get involved with immigration reform. You will get involved in national security, international security, economic development. You you can’t help, but and that’s just six of the fourteen pillars.

Right? There are a lot of other ones that are that are so intertwined. And they a lot of them overlap in what we call the farm bill. It really should be the food bill. And I think that’s where I’d start.

If I was in the Oval Office and he said, you have the magic car, drive it. First thing I would do is establish a cabinet position for food. It represents over twenty eight percent depending on how you calculate it with other aspects of the hospital fatality industry ag and all the rest of that. But you’ve take our entire food system. Everything, every single piece it goes from pizza and bowling alleys, to giant farm to Frater farms, you know, that ship out of Corpus Christi, Texas.

It’s about twenty percent of GDP. That’s massive. So we have something that represents twenty percent of GDP and not a single agency with one person to report to in charge of it. I think that’s criminal negligence situation. So that’s number one.

I would put it all under one house. Right? We just have too many organizations, too many places that everything sits. So that’s number one. Second thing that I would do is I would take the farm bill and I would evaporate it.

Okay? You can’t have one giant piece of legislation that has a tiny little piece in it that gives money to family farms who are producing specialty foods, which is what the government calls foods fit for human consumption.

Yeah. Everything besides corn and sugar and wheat. Right.

In one corner, and in the other corner, has a near trillion dollars. Well, I shouldn’t say near it. It’s about eight hundred billion dollars, but that’s pretty darn close to a trillion. But eight hundred billion dollars I think is what Snap is right now. You know, Snap actually puts money into our economy.

That’s not a left or right issue. That’s just playing old, you know, American fact. It’s one of the few social programs we have paid for by taxpayers that is net positive. So I think we would need to broaden snap. And the other reason is is that the poor and the hungry keep getting poorer and hungrier.

And one of the few things that work is snap. And I would enlarge its purview, not just making it easier to join, but I would wanna make sure that You know, every year we dribble and drab, oh, you can buy potatoes and onions with it now. We should just allow people to make it buy food.

Aren’t you a little concerned about three hundred pound women buying fudge rounds with it? No. I think there’s a lot of concerns about that recently.

Well, that’s the retort. That’s very common. That’s a common retort. Well, look at who’s going to abuse it. I don’t think we have a system in America that someone isn’t trying to abuse.

I would I would argue if I was testifying in front of a congressional panel that the panel itself and in in feeling that way is doing exactly that of which they are accusing. I think the first thing we need to do is broaden the lane and then take care of those that are sort of coloring outside the lines. They’re we’re never gonna do away with bad actors with any sort of public policy program, and especially anything that involves money, which about every single one of them. But those are the first two things on day one that I would do. And I think the next thing that I would do is I would have to address the American food supply chain.

And that is something that is extremely damaged that I think we saw during times in recent past, especially during COVID, how flimsy in a sense that supply chain is

interesting. I didn’t think you’d go there. So tell me more. What what do we need to do?

It’s affected by global circumstance. Yeah. But when you shut the world down, you realized how less self sufficient we were. Right?

Well, sure. We saw this with Ukraine too.

Everywhere. We’ve seen I mean, we see it today all over. The problem that we saw during COVID was really one of preparing Right? In other words, we grow enough food to feed everyone. Right?

And I wanna get back to that, but tell me the third thing I do is make sure that we We can statistically eliminate hunger, but I wanna get distracted by that. It would only cost seventeen billion dollars a year. I guess I’m distracting myself from it. But we we famously on the cover of the New York Times, there were two incredible pictures. One was the San Antonio Food Bank where I had volunteered in the past an incredible group of human beings down there.

They showed this line snaking through. Right?

Mhmm.

On week three. And it revealed to America saying really interesting because people said, wait, that’s a volvo station wagon. Wait, that’s a BMW. Why are these people? Right?

Because the American system allowed it easier for people to get credit to get a nice car while they were struggling to put food on the table.

Right.

And did that mean that maybe those families made a choice they maybe shouldn’t have? No. Because when they’ve got that car things were fine. It just shows how fragile we are between the the yes I can afford it line and the no we’re in trouble, and we have to I know it’s a cliche decide between grandma’s medicine or food for junior and his sister. Right?

Right.

And, the other picture, which I found even more impactful because it says so much about our American farming system crisis. It was a picture of a farm in Amokalee, Florida. And I remember it because again, I had visited that farm making television. And it was a mountain of zucchini and lettuce that looked like a Minnesota snowbank, you know, in March. I mean, it was a hundred feet tall and a hundred feet wide.

Yeah. And people were staggered. How can all that zucchini lettuce just be rotting in the parking lot of this farm? And it’s because they’re the truckers couldn’t get their to get it. There weren’t enough truckers.

It just people don’t understand. You know, we make that joke about the the young girl that goes on a school trip to the supermarket. And the teacher says, oh, there’s milk. And she says, I knew it didn’t come from cows. It comes from boxes.

Right? And it amazing how many of my contemporaries neighbors, I mean, walking the dog during COVID, you know, in April twenty twenty across the street, How are you doing? You have everything and shouting questions at me because they saw me, you know, at that point every morning, I was on MSNBC, doing my sort of reportage there on the food crisis, how flimsy and how how dangerously precarious a position our food system was in. It took about three and a half, four weeks for us to reestablish supply chain routes so that what was coming out of the ground actually got to the market so that those gaping holes where — Yeah.

—

who were supposed to be bread or supposed to be zucchini, there was bread and zucchini Right? But for a long time, there wasn’t. And the fact that, you know, that was the only time that we started to see front page news about, meat factory workers, how dangerous the job is, and the presidential order that our forty fifth president put in there to make sure those people went to work and the value of food workers in general. People really didn’t understand that it was other people who put food on their plates. Now those other people, a very large percentage of them are illegal aliens.

Okay. Now we’re getting into a big area of agreement.

And So so we used to give out tens of millions of visas, specialty one short term ones, visas of all types. And the numbers would just confuse people, but just trust me, visas of all types.

Yeah.

So that we could have both permanent and temporary workers come into this country do work The vast majority of which all went back home when the season was over because they made a lot of money here. During that time that they were here, they paid taxes it’s taken out of their paycheck.

Right.

It didn’t matter if they wrote down that, you know, they were Andrew Zimmer, and and they lived in Minneapolis. Right? It’s It’s

payroll tax.

Taxes get taken out. Right? They spent money while they were here on food and lodging other things when they weren’t taken care of by the company or the people that were we’re pulling them up here. That sort of stuff leads to really dangerous working conditions. It has kept food prices artificially lows that They can maintain an artificially low standard all the way through the system.

So it it not only does it increase the need for immigration reform it also would have ultimately led to one of the biggest problems we have today in restaurant culture. And I love to dine out. I know that you’re a big fan of food and restaurants. It’s why our chicken breast meal has stayed at fourteen to eighteen dollars on restaurants all across America even in fancy tablecloth restaurants because they’re afraid to raise the prices. There’s an artificial I mean, other than the Jewish jelly where it super sized and everyone says I only eat half and I take the other half home.

You can’t raise a price on a menu in America without half of your consumer base wanting to walk out saying why’d you raise the pasta a buck?

Right. It’s like,

well, because we make it from scratch and we’re trying to take care of our employees.

I wanna pause here for a second, though, and because the connection on the economic side, the human rights side of the immigration side of this thing, right, and the fact that we should treat these people with dignity and and that we haven’t. Didn’t for a long time, and we especially don’t now. And now, you know, we’re really stuck in a very bad place with what’s happening on the border. But there’s also the economic side of this. So you’re talking about how it artificially kept prices down, and and there’s something to that.

But there also is something to the fact that it’s a big reason why like grocery prices are up right now. Like, and so and so Ron DeSantis is like a huge problem, I think, for Joe Biden. And one of the areas that I I just think that has been failure of his is being too worried about demagogic right wing attacks on immigration stuff, not you know, re incorporating some of these visa programs, some of these temporary worker programs. And so instead, now we don’t like, the best thing we could do for inflation, like, we don’t have enough workers. There’s not enough, you know, people immediately think about people picking the fruit, but it’s it’s everywhere. Everywhere there aren’t enough workers.

You couldn’t be more right. And I and I’ve said this groups, this is one of the great political failures of the last sixty years. Six zero. Democrats and Republicans have held that office for one no one has addressed immigration reform. And we need it desperately for a a gazillion reasons.

One of the many important ones, I would argue maybe top ten or twelve is food cost in America. For folks that don’t know, the number of visas has shrunk so much that crab companies on the Chesapeake Bay that used to get forty, fifty visas a year are now getting twenty. So they literally can’t produce as much crap. Now this affects tourism.

It’s so stupid. And it’s just unbelievably stupid.

It’s nuts. And in What’s eating in America, I remember looking at a woman who’d been coming to this one crab company in the Chesapeake Bay for twenty eight years. And I said, tell me what it’s done for your family, and she grabbed this. She reached by and she grabs this picture we didn’t stage it. And she holds it up, and you can see three very clean-cut successful looking kids all in their late twenties.

One’s in the military get up. She says, this is my eldest son. He’s a Colonel New Mexican Air Force. This is my second child, my other son, a lawyer, and this is my daughter. She’s in her final year of med school in Guadalajara.

She says, I put them through school and raised them as a single mother on the money I made here. And I paid taxes, and those are my kids there. And she looks right down the barrel at me and says, If more people were able to do that in Mexico, kids wouldn’t be turning to drugs and crime. The and it really is

storming the border. Right? Like, it it ties to the rush at the border.

That’s right. As traveling around the world is a globalist, and I’ve circled this planet more times than I care account. And I’ve been in every non aligned country that there is except North Korea. I’ve I’ve spent a lot of time in countries talking to a lot of important people about this issue. When people have jobs and when they have food, they don’t look elsewhere to supply those things in their life.

The more that we create disaffected people around the world, we suffer from potential international crises of a security type because we are creating the type of anger around the world that we could easily solve as a global leader. I mentioned before we can statistically eliminate hunger in America. The figure’s about seventeen billion dollars a year. Which, by the way, is a rounding error when it comes to our annual federal budget.

Yeah. Sure.

I think it’s point zero zero two seven. At least it was, like, eight nine months ago when I did the math and talked about it at a teacher’s convention in Texas. We live in a world that is so interconnected that the degree to which we help people. Right? And I saw this in Zambia just last April when I was over there with the World Food Program, you know, then there aren’t signs, you know, that says the People’s Republic of China is building this school.

Right? I want that sign to say the United States of America is building this school. When I was in high school traveling the world with my dad, he took me around the world a bunch of times. He would point out all the roads that had science say this road is being built by the United States of America. In far flung corners of the world where he would take me, and he held up his then gray colored sidy green gray colored passport and says, that’s why this is the most important passport in the world.

And now, you know, I’m not sure my blue passport carries same kind of value. We need to be doing those good works. We can start by modeling that in our own country and export that kind of wisdom out into the world.

Yeah. We could rant about this. I mean, just the idea that retrenching is gonna be the answer to this. Right? And that we’re gonna be able to somehow, like, create some alligator moat on the border and people that are having problems elsewhere aren’t gonna try to come here and figure out solutions like It’s just all nonsense, and I just I’m imploring Democrats.

I understand there’s a political fear that that the right wing will demagogue about this. Right? And that, like, you, you don’t want to be seen as too pro immigrant. Right? You might turn off somewhat blue collar voters that are appearing.

I under I I do understand that, but there is a way to say, we can have a secure system. We can have a secure border system, but we also need forty green cards for crabbers, not twenty. I mean, like, like, this is great. It gets crazy. And there’s that.

You can do that for lobster. You can do that for every industry. Right?

We could go on and on. Tim, I can’t tell you what a little bit of honesty would do. Remember, when you just talk about the the sheer amount of money in our food systems of all kinds, the hospitality industry and everywhere food touches like hotels and resorts and it everywhere that that the president of the United States doesn’t get on TV and says I’m about to announce something that some of you might may regard as controversial, but let me explain it to you because I think it’s very easily explained. If there are people in Salvador and Guatemala places that I’ve been in the last five, six years, so I’m no stranger those countries that or or to the rest of Central America quite honestly. And you say we will have less people at our borders if we put programs in place that allow more guest visas that allow more opportunity for them to get jobs here.

By the way, jobs that no one else in this country will take. We interviewed farmer after I’m talking about farmer with a capital f. We’re growing ten thousand acres of strawberries. We’re the Driscoll people.

Yeah. Right.

Trisco people say we’ve never had a person. This was an amazing thing from this woman. She said, we’ve never had a person who looked like you show up for any of our jobs that we’ve offered ever. And when she’s basically like you, she didn’t mean adorable, old bald guy with glasses. Right?

And I knew that inside. But to have the farm, she’s I’ve been with this company for twenty years. We’ve never had a we’re literally tilly lettuce under the soil because we don’t have enough people to pull it out of there. At the same time that we have twenty two percent food insecurity stats here in America, and that it that’s true for children as well. And we can’t pull the lettuce and the vegetables out of the ground.

I’m like, oh my gosh.

Well, ranting about this kind of one of the thing that the president could say on this or that any politician could say. I think about the first world problem complaint people have right now about this economy that you hear for people in your life. Oh, I go to my local restaurant and, you know, I don’t get the same service that I used to get. I I saw a tweet today. Like, the hotel, the restaurant isn’t open anymore.

You know, that we’re not getting room service anymore. Like, all these hassles, all these prices, more guest workers solve all of those problems. So we can just give you your creature comforts. Like, there’s a practical argument to that. They usually aren’t coming to rape your children.

That’s right. That they’re coming to take these jobs that are annoying you that aren’t filled. Anyway, we all agree. We’re having a heated agreement. I wanna talk about climate really quick.

Yep. My husband was, was in a fake meat business for a while. And so I have a couple questions about that. There there was a moment. Like, I felt like, a fake meat moment in twenty eighteen or nineteen or something.

Everybody’s like, this is it. This is gonna happen. The impossible burger, the beyond burger, we’re gonna get rid of the other burgers, and and all the rest runs had them. And like that moment feels very past. Now all the media coverage about the fake meat is terrible.

What happened? Is that did this meet some practical thing? Did it get wrapped up in culture war stuff? Was that not as good as it? Like, where are we going on now?

The alternative meat side of things.

I think we’ll get back there because it is the answer. We can’t feed our planet without using a little bit of everything. Wild. Farmed, and that’s that’s with meat and fish, cell based, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The largest growing sector of food in America is plant based food.

Over the last five years, it’s up forty four percent. I spent all morning today talking to six different congressional offices about this very issue. And I think the problem that you brought up about what happened you use the word media in there. Our media in twenty twenty three is now so pervasive and comes in so many forms that it can trend like that. Yeah.

And so fake be trended for several years, because it’s all everyone wanted to talk about. We were giving no pun intended fresh meat to the hungry media lion, and the media lion ran with it. Now what happened later on is we realized, okay, this doesn’t have great texture. This doesn’t have great taste. This is too expensive.

And in the case of cell based, fish, cell based poultry, all the rest of that, which by the way, is actually the answer.

You think sell based rather than plant based is the answer? You’re making that distinction?

Well, I just think long term, like, a hundred years from now, we will be actually creating cell based chicken

—

Got it.

—

where we didn’t have to kill an animal where it tastes just like chicken. And so a vegetarian unless they have digestive issues would eat that product Right? A lot of vegetarians come to vegetarianism, simply over the morality issue

of

it or how the animals are raised. I’m taking nothing away from people who just choose to only eat vegetables for other reasons

— Sure. —

because of the destructive nature internally to their system of animal proteins? Okay. No problem. We’ll have plant based stuff too. But I do think that the the fact that it takes so much energy especially water to make a lot of these products, and it can only be done in small amounts.

The excitement withered away. Josh Patrick who owns the company just, is someone who I’ve made TV with for twenty years as a friend of mine. We’ve known each other a long time. And he, famously sent some of their cell based chicken, and Jose Andreas is famously serving it in one of his restaurants. And I texted him and I said, oh my gosh.

I said, I’m gonna be in DC in a couple of months. And Jose is one of my closest friends. And I I said I’m definitely going in to try. He goes, oh my gosh, because we’re only able to give them ten, twelve portions a week. And he said, let me know the next time you’re out our way, and I’ll make sure that we I was like the fifth person in the world to eat a plant based egg.

When that first rolled out, he was the first one to do it twenty years ago. I ultimately think it will obviously be a mix of both, but I think cell based will make more people happy because if you’re like me and you’re immediate or you like that texture, you like that smell of what the maillard reaction when real protein not protein made from peas and lentils. Real protein hits the griddle and gets a char on it. You can’t replace that. So I do think that once the costs come in, and whether that’s look, the plant based people, sorry, the cell based people tell me, oh, that’s right around the corner.

Than other experts say to me we’re fifty years away. So I take all of that with a grain of salt and say, well, whenever that time comes, it’ll be okay But I I see that as further down the road, plant based stuff, and and here’s here’s something that I hope happens. I’m all for plant based editing. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a capitalist.

I believe capitalism will save us in the energy sector and the food sector. To name two. The health care sector I’m my jury is out on because I the abuse in there is just mind boggling. To me.

We’re three for three on agreement there. So, yeah, moving on. I

do see the other two sectors being corrected by capitalism because there’s too much money to be made there. And I do know because I’m intimate with the situation and congressman McGovern just introduced legislation called the Plant Act. A couple of weeks ago that is going to hopefully get USDA dollars fifty billion over the last twenty five years. Has been given by the USDA to prop up the meat industry, the real meat industry by investing in companies, loans, you know, insurance programs, all the rest of that kind of stuff. And we’ve only given fifty million to farmers who create and this is crazy.

This is a really this is already gonna be one of my, like, final questions. It’s crazy. Crazy. And, like, even the IRA, the amount of money that goes to the energy side of climate versus ag. It’s like a thousand to one, ten thousand to one.

Why?

Let’s just get people to eat more veg like, I’m all for a plant based burger, but I’m also for like grilling up a whole bunch of vegetables and putting them on a bun. It’s delicious. You know, hello, Spain and Italy. Everyone who’s making an impossible burger is racing to Portugal and asking me to help them get reservations.

Yeah. Okay. Well, final follow-up question on this, then we’ll get to rapid fire. It’s it’s a two part. One, is so are you telling me that my plant based meat food stocks are gonna turn back around because they’re really not doing that well.

And number two, I’m very skeptical. Yes. Okay. Great. Your lips to god’s ears to lose needs to pay for college.

So I’m skeptical of that. And here’s why. Maybe I’m too wrapped up in the politics. But I don’t know, man. I think that that that food is so deeply culturally hits people, like, right where you know, on on their passions.

And I think that the plant based meat and the fake meat industry were a little sanguine about that.

You’re right.

And that it’s gonna take a long time to win people that who aren’t like me who don’t feel that way about cows or whatever over.

You’re right, but you’re describing all the people you know and all the people I know.

Yeah.

All the people you hang out with and all the people that I hang out with. I know that we could get those groups together and have a great dinner party because it sounds like they really love food regardless of what kind or what type, and they understand the connection people make over a meal sitting down somewhere and just to join that time and that that stuff together. The thing is I’m here to tell you as someone who’s who’s just been down there in the trenches, whether it’s making my shows like family dinner. And I’m and I’m the way, it’s not a plug. It’s just that in the making of TV over the last twenty five years, both with bizarre foods and driven by food, my all my overseas shows, But then all my shows in small town America, like family dinner or food truck tip or all of those other shows that I made, I’ve got to spend a lot of time in small town America.

And there’s a lot of people in small town America with a grandma that made everything from scratch and they love food too. It’s just a different kind of food. And know they’ve never been to, you know, a Michelin starred sushi bar, but they love food as much as someone who only goes to Michelin starred sushi bars. Right? However, thirty five percent of America is like, I don’t care.

Just past the mustard. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s fuel. This is just what I need to keep going. No.

I don’t think when my idea of enjoying food is a bag of chips and a diet coke in the afternoon when I get home from work. Right?

Yep.

And that’s not to put them down. It’s just to say that it’s not everyone has the same romantic relationship to food that all the food magazines or the people on television like me sometimes like to although I’d like to think I’m more truthful than others.

Yeah.

A lot of times I turn on food television and people say why don’t you like that show? And it’s like because, you know, the emperor has no clothes. Not everyone has a house on nantucket and a pile of thirty lobsters and a golden retriever that’s perfectly shorn, and that’s the centerfold of all those food makers. Now I should say. All the big food magazines have stopped doing that.

But people like myself, I think we’re the first to complain and say, That centerfold is not America. That’s a tenth of one percent. If that do you know how much that house on Nantucket cost? So I I think more people than not would be eager to get a source of protein that is something that’s healthy and inexpensive and feeds their family.

That is a great place to end the extended portion of our of our podcast. We’re doing rapid fire really quick. Are you ready for rapid fire before I let you go? You’re busy. You’re busy did.

Never been so ready for anything in my whole life.

Okay. Food related amplifier. Usually, we have some politics rapid fire, but for this one, I just we did a lot of politics. So let’s just go food only. Okay.

Sure. Where do I wanna start? Okay. I assume that having a cooking show is kind of like being in politics where everybody comes out to you and wants to talk to you about that, which is fine. It is what it is.

But, I assume you get from everyone this question I’m about to get, which is I’d love to cook more. I like cooking, but I’m really busy and I got kids and I got a job or whatever. So your one sentence piece of advice on getting into cooking more for people like me who are ordering from DoorDash too often.

Click on three or four rest these that you like online or cut them out of a magazine and cook them all on Sunday and store them.

Cook them all on Sunday.

That is horrible Sunday. Right? Whatever your day is.

Storm in your fridge or in your freezer?

Your fridge. Well, freezer if you if you care to parse up When I make spaghetti sauce, I make two gallons and put

them in

eight quarts in the freezer. Smartest thing I ever did was spend a hundred and fifty dollars into the scratch and dead freezer to store myself. Cook once eat many times, but you can reduce that down to the week. Right? So if you’re gonna make salad dressing, make two or three and just put them in half court containers.

So you’re just chopping vegetables and putting homemade dressing on. I mean, stuff like that just Just cook once eat many times during the week. Your food’s gonna be great.

That’s good advice. I’m glad I asked that question. Okay. Best tasting can’t miss bizarre food. From your whole bizarre food era.

But give me don’t give me something like I’ve gotta travel to the remote village of Ecuador to try it. Like, give me something I could actually get.

Well, I was about to say tiny fried baby birds because that is my favorite. But it

sounds amazing.

I believe it’s illegal in this country. Mhmm. It shouldn’t be, but I believe I believe it is. I think the food that no one wants to try, at least in my house and I make it from scratch and love it, is blood sausage. And I make it with rice, and I stuff it into my own case, and I use the the Northern Spanish style, which means I put some sweet spices in.

There’s some nutmeg, and a little bit of clove and a lot of caramelized onion. And I serve it with sauteed apples and mustard and sweet and sour red cabbage, and it’s I’m about to get into that part of the season in about a month. And everyone at my house is devouring the first league. Like, this is the greatest combination. My and it’s so beautiful and it’s delicious.

What is this? And I’m like, it’s blood

favorite sleeper food city then. You mentioned that where if you want to go somewhere and having a culinary experience, ain’t it? You know, don’t do the obvious one.

Well, I mentioned I mentioned it before and I and I really don’t didn’t mean it as a joke. You know, Portugal is the country that’s having its moment right now. And Lisbon is one of the world’s great food capitals. It’s not as broad or as deep as some of the other food capitals, but you’ll eat as well in Lisbon as in any country on planet earth or any city on planet earth. And in America, I would probably give the nod right now into the city I’m coming from, which is Minneapolis.

Of all of that group of second and third tier cities. I mean, Portland Maine had its moment. It still does. Portland, Oregon still does. Four or five years ago, I said it was Birmingham.

It’s now Minneapolis. People are actually coming here for a weekend and part of the reason is the credible restaurants and food scene that has sprung up here.

K. Finally, it’s New Orleans. I just moved here in April. So I have a three parter for you. Your favorite Criole occasion dish.

I wanna start cooking creole occasion food. So what is one dish that you would start cooking if you were me? That that isn’t too challenging. And, you know, a favorite New Orleans restaurant or thought about our culinary culture here.

Well, let me start out by rejecting the question.

Please. God, that’s of course you’re right.

New Orleans is the only only. And anyone who’s listed this who wants to fight me have at it, I’ll meet you in the backyard. Is the only city in the world when I say the name New Orleans and you hear it, you can actually taste it in your mouth. And it doesn’t matter if you visited there once or you live there. It is the only city in the world.

You can smell the root.

And you can smell it.

You could taste the chilies. I’m, like, just talking to you now. I’m smelling. Mhmm. There is more good food in that city.

I mean, I mean, what? There’s a hundred thousand people live there. It’s sixty million people go through there a year. The restaurant seen there for a small city is is the most vibrant. That exist because they’re feeding out of towners and they’re Yeah.

Yeah. There’s great Indian and Chinese restaurants there, and I’m not trying to just vote, but they have their food. Right? And it’s morphed. So there is New Orleans Italian food, which is different than Italian food anywhere else.

So good.

It’s its own thing. I mean, just go to two jocks and tell me differently. I happen to love the classic old sort of diner style Cajun Creal hybrid restaurant that’s best represented by a restaurant about twenty minutes out of town. I think it’s in technically in Metairie. Called RNOs.

And this is gonna kill me because now people are gonna flock there. I’ll never be able to get in. But RNOs may be one of those restaurants where I happily have my last meal.

I’m now I’m going there on Sunday. So I’ll tell him you sent me.

I feel like it’s on on Saturday night live. This restaurant has everything. Vassy waitresses, long table sharing with other people. Every dish on the menu tastes great. Seafood like you’ve never had it before.

You don’t know why other places charge so much when for, like, twenty five dollars, which is very little for this. You get a platter either fried steamed or grilled of ten different types of seafood and remoulade and mustard sauce on the side and a lady who says who just doesn’t ask just puts another sweet tea down on the table next to you and also puts the check down and say we’re too busy for you to have dessert. I mean, you have to love the and then when you pay, she brings you like a hand pie, which was what you wanted anyway to walk out

the door with.

The Rnos is a mind boggling. And in terms of cooking out of it, I think one of the greatest chefs of his or any other and an incredible entrepreneur and owns some of my favorite restaurants in town is a gentleman named Donald Link, l I n k. He has Pachey seafood grill. He is herb St. He has a lot of very well known

herb St. It’s unbelievable.

A really good friend of my spent a lot of time eating there with his family. I’ve gone up to Raine, Louisiana. He’s he’s cajun by birth. So I’ve gone up and and picked rice this family, gone fraud, gigging with his family, cooked with all his brothers. So get any book of his and start because it’s great.

And one of the best dishes that I think is available in the in the cajun creole repertoire is signed. It’s a little more cajun than creole. And it’s really you could do it with any seafood, but it’s blank in sauce pecans. And sauce pecans, you start with a little flour and oil to make a light rue throw in some peppers and onions and garlic. And you can make it spicy or not spicy, but it should be a little bit spicy Ron DeSantis stock.

And you cook it down and you smother a sauteed or grilled piece of fish or crab or frog or or even chicken. Yeah. But that’s kind of boring in it. And that’s a sort of classic and simple and a weeknight dinner in any house in Cajun Country. And if you do it with crawfish and put it over dirty rice, you have something that says quintessentially, Louisiana is anything else.

There’s nothing I would rather do than eat in the city of New Orleans.

Man, I’m getting hungry. I was planning on getting sushi tonight, but now I might have to drive up to Metairie. I don’t know. I’m gonna send you a selfie for Metairie whenever I’m there next.

I’ll I’ll tell you right now whenever you go to R and O’s and I, you know, full confessional, it’s not like we don’t know each other. You will text me, and it will be three words. You undersold it.

I would hope that that is true, and I will be sending that to you soon. I’ve I’ve gone a little bit over.

Food, not politics. I am I’m literally the pope of food. Of course I’m right.

Of course you’re right. Of course you’re right. I wanna, I wanna taste it to believe it, if you will.

I

wanted to give you a chance to rant about politics. Look, we gotta do this again maybe next year or something in and one themed one. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Hope to see you next time you’re through town and, and vice versa.

I hope take it easy my friend.

Alright, please. Let’s see everybody.