Speaker 1:
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Dan Pashman:
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Aasif Mandvi:
I used to go to this little private school in England when I was a kid, and my mom used to make me cheese sandwiches every day.

Dan Pashman:
This is actor, comedian, and former daily show correspondent, Aasif Mandvi.

Aasif Mandvi:
And so it was like I was a proper little English kid with cheese sandwich, and I would go to school and have my lunch with my cheese sandwich. One day I stayed at a friend's house, and her mom made us peanut butter sandwiches, and I had never had peanut butter before, and this was, I was nine. Peanut butter is not something Indians know about, and I tried it. It was like the world opened up for me. I was like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing I've ever had in my life, and whether I put it in a smoothie or I just eat it on a spoon or whether it's on toast or whatever, like I've eaten peanut butter every single day since I was nine years old. It was maybe the longest relationship I've ever had in my life, is with peanut butter.

Dan Pashman:
Today on the Sporkful, I sit down with Aasif Mandvi, he was born in India, raised in England, and when he was 16 his family picked up and moved to Florida. When they arrived, he and his father had really different opinions about American food.

Aasif Mandvi:
My dad was like, "What do you mean? Like this is America. This is like what we do. We put 16 toppings on our ice cream. That's how you are an American."

Dan Pashman:
Right. I love that part in your book where you guys go out for ice cream and you order chocolate, he's like, "You think we came all the way to this country so you could only order chocolate?"

Aasif Mandvi:
Right? He's like, "It is an insult to every beggar on the streets of India to only eat chocolate ice cream."

Dan Pashman:
Coming up, Aasif talks about learning to love cereal without milk at his British boarding school, the first time he drank all American iced tea, and why he thinks of himself as a human turducken. Stick around.

Dan Pashman:
This is the Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. I know it's crazy you guys, but the new year is not so far away, which means I need your New Year's food resolutions. Record a voice memo on your cell phone, tell me your name, first name's fine, tell me where you're from and then tell me what food do you resolve to eat more of in the New Year and why. Send it to hello@sporkful.com, and you may hear yourself and our year end spectacular.

Dan Pashman:
Aasif Mandvi is best known for his time as a correspondent on the daily show. Nowadays, you can see him on the CBS show, Evil, and he also recently came out with a hit podcast called Lost at the Smithsonian. He gets up close and personal with some of the most iconic artifacts at the National Museum of American History. We hear a clip at the end of this episode. Aasif is also an actor, playwright and author of the memoir, No Lands Man, which focuses on his experience growing up between three different cultures. In the video trailer for the book, he tries to prove he's really English to fellow daily show alum, John Oliver.

John Oliver:
English? You're not English, I am English. This is not English.

Aasif Mandvi:
Okay, I was brought up in the UK. It's in my book. You know that.

John Oliver:
Really? Where were you brought up?

Aasif Mandvi:
Bradford.

John Oliver:
Bradford? Brad Ford. There's no such place.

Aasif Mandvi:
Okay. It's a city in England.

John Oliver:
No it isn't. Do you even have a British passport? Is that something you own?

Aasif Mandvi:
Yes, I brought my passport. There it is. British passport. Boom.

John Oliver:
Anyone can get one of those. You have a football on you?

Aasif Mandvi:
No because no one walks around with a football.

John Oliver:
Really? I do. There, have one like an English person would have. Do you have a steak and kidney pie?

Aasif Mandvi:
What?

John Oliver:
Do you have one?

Aasif Mandvi:
No.

John Oliver:
I do in my desk, at all times, like an English person would have in their desk at all times.

Aasif Mandvi:
Right, right.

John Oliver:
Steak kidney pie. SNK call them.

Dan Pashman:
Aasif chose not to whip out the diploma from his English boarding school as further evidence of his Britishness, but he could have. As he told me when he came into the studio, he remembers it well. The food, there wasn't something you'd forget.

Aasif Mandvi:
If no one out there has ever tried British boarding school lunches, they should. In fact, it's a business waiting to happen. Just like packaged lunches from British boarding schools. I think it could be a million dollar industry.

Dan Pashman:
What would exactly be the sales pitch on that?

Aasif Mandvi:
Are you sad and miserable and miss your parents and wonder why they hate you and why they would send you to this horrible, horrible school? Here's the meal for you.

Aasif Mandvi:
One thing I do remember very vividly was how at breakfast we would have these long tables and then there would be like a monitor or a prefect at the head of the table, and we'd have cornflakes in the morning, and so we would have one jar of milk that would have to suffice for all the people on the table. And usually what would happen is those two prefects would drink most of the milk before it even got, so if you were at the other end of the table, you often got no milk. It was many days where I would eat cornflakes with water because it was like ... Sounds like prison. And this is, again, part of our business plan here that we have to make this food, is cornflakes and water. So that was many mornings.

Dan Pashman:
Do you eat cornflakes today?

Aasif Mandvi:
With water, yeah. It's the only way I enjoy them.

Dan Pashman:
Were you, because there's so many sort of like food, we all have that sort of food nostalgia.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yes.

Dan Pashman:
But then you can also sort of get scarred to a food. So I'm curious what's your relationship to cornflakes today?

Aasif Mandvi:
As I see cornflakes, I'm like, no please.

Dan Pashman:
Right, daddy, no.

Aasif Mandvi:
No, no, I eat cornflakes now. I drown them in milk, just as like a revenge.

Dan Pashman:
Right.

Aasif Mandvi:
I'm just like, I will put as much milk on this.

Dan Pashman:
Now I've really made it.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah. And then I'm like, oh this is just like a bowl of milk now. But yeah.

Dan Pashman:
Who is the prefect now?

Aasif Mandvi:
Exactly. Yeah. I'm 40 years old, I'm the prefect. No, eat corn flakes. I have a weird nostalgia for British food anyway because I grew up there, bangers and mash sort of, you know, steak and kidney pie and black pudding and all that stuff.

Dan Pashman:
And when you were at home with your parents, what kind of food did you eat at home most of the time?

Aasif Mandvi:
So most of the time at home it was Indian food. So it was very simple, kind of like curries and doll and rice and chicken curry or lamb curry or something like that, and Rotiz. And then occasionally my mother would decide to make Western food, and we'd have hot dogs, or a burger, she'd make a burger, because that was her version of like, this is what white people eat.

Dan Pashman:
So let's talk about coming to the US.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yes.

Dan Pashman:
You were how old? Starting high school.

Aasif Mandvi:
I was 16 so I was in high school.

Dan Pashman:
Yeah.

Aasif Mandvi:
11th grade.

Dan Pashman:
And what are some of your first food memories? Meals?

Aasif Mandvi:
Of America?

Dan Pashman:
Of America, yeah.

Aasif Mandvi:
We would go to the ice cream store and growing up as a kid in England, it was like, oh, it was like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and then like you had Haagen Daz with like 80,000 flavors. And that was very impressive for me as a kid. And then there was interesting things like Coke floats and these American sort of inventions of food. The idea of iced tea was a big one. The idea that like, I remember drinking my first ice tea, it was in a can that came out of a machine and I was like, they have ice, what is this iced tea? I'd never drank tea cold ever as a Brit or as an Indian, that is not something that you do. And I remember drinking an iced tea and thinking, this is a bizarre, it's actually pretty good. It was actually good. And that was the saddest part, that it was good, because I wanted it to be horrible. I wanted it to be like disgusting and then have disdain for the whole thing.

Dan Pashman:
Why?

Aasif Mandvi:
Because I was like, because I felt superior in my sort of hot tea, I was like, tea should be hot, and you can't possibly have cold tea. What is this disgust ... Oh, that's really good. Delicious, give me another one of these.

Dan Pashman:
Right, right. Was that like a certain, like a British superiority that rubbed off on you do you think?

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Dan Pashman:
Right.

Aasif Mandvi:
I was sort of like, oh tea must be hot and I can't imagine a person would drink iced tea, disgusting. Until I drank it.

Dan Pashman:
But that's interesting because you said that you feel like even though you were ... You were born in the UK, right?

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah. Well, no, I was born in India, but then my family moved to the UK when I was a year old.

Dan Pashman:
Right, so you spent your whole-

Aasif Mandvi:
So essentially ... Yeah, my whole life.

Dan Pashman:
Yeah. So you're British, really.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah.

Dan Pashman:
But you said it you never, no matter how long you live in Britain, if you look brown, you're never going to be British according to the British.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah. I think that there was a very different experience culturally in America, where in America you have this idea that it doesn't matter where you're from, you are now American. And Americans tend to think of the rest of the world, the way New Yorkers think about the rest of America. They just don't. This was like in the 80s. This is pre 9/11. Now America thinks about the rest of the world a lot.

Dan Pashman:
Right.

Aasif Mandvi:
And how terrible the rest of the world is, and how they're all coming to get us. But back then it was like, America didn't think about the rest of the world. And in Britain, because of the years of colonialism and the history with the sub-continent and stuff, there's much more of a inmeshment with that, but you were always considered foreign. The British have a very, a tradition of like we are British, you are not, you will never be British.

Dan Pashman:
Right. But it's interesting that you would sort of have that experience in Britain and feel like you can never be British, but then come to the US and have sort of like, have an air of British superiority to you.

Aasif Mandvi:
Oh sure. Totally. I'm completely confused about my identity, as you can tell. I describe myself as a turducken, like a human turducken, which is like I'm a little Brown kid wrapped inside a British schoolboy, wrapped inside an American adult. And that's really what I am.

Dan Pashman:
Coming up my conversation with Aasif Mandvi continues. We'll hear about the special tee shirts his dad made for their family trips to IHOP, the fight they head over a big gulp. And what happened when the novelty of eating in America started to wear off. Stick around.

Speaker 5:
Hope you're hungry, because it's time for some ads.

Dan Pashman:
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Dan Pashman:
Welcome back to the Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. We recently did two episodes in Virginia that I hope you'll check out. In one, we hear the story of Jay Marion, a master forger in the Shenandoah Valley, whose business took an unexpected turn when life got in the way. In the other one, taped live in Richmond, I talk with vegan cheese maker, Josh Cadrich. He shares the story of the first time he brought his cheese to a farmer's market in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Speaker 6:
Williamsburg, very a special place. Much more conservative than Richmond. Many, many, many, many, many fewer vegans. Me and my boyfriend show up to sell them vegan cheese. And so we would have these families walking through feeling like their entire identity had been challenged, and so we would go and you'd see this little family, and a couple of them would try it, and you'd see him looking at you like, oh wow, I didn't expect that to be edible.

Dan Pashman:
Darla, do you realize you're eating gay cheese?

Speaker 6:
Dan, you have no idea.

Dan Pashman:
Those Virginia episodes are up now, check them out.

Dan Pashman:
Now, let's get back to my conversation with Aasif Mandvi. As I said, his family moved to Tampa when he was 16. He talked about that a while back in a piece on the daily show.

Aasif Mandvi:
Like so many Americans, my story began with an immigrant simple dream of a better life.

Aasif Mandvi:
So this is the house that I grew up in. This is my dad right here, and we could have gone anywhere in America, and we picked Tampa, because Tampa is the greatest city in America.

Speaker 7:
It's okay.

Aasif Mandvi:
It's okay?

Speaker 7:
It's okay.

Aasif Mandvi:
What do you mean it's okay? It's great. What do you-

Speaker 7:
It's like any other city.

Aasif Mandvi:
Well, why did you move here then?

Speaker 7:
Bigger roads, Walmart, sunshine.

Aasif Mandvi:
Big roads, Walmart, sunshine? That's why he came to Tampa?

Speaker 7:
Yeah.

Aasif Mandvi:
But my Tampa is a-

Dan Pashman:
Aasif told me there was another aspect of America that really impressed his father.

Aasif Mandvi:
I guess somebody took him out for brunch, and he fell in love with this idea of brunch. He was like, "They have this thing called brunch. It is amazing." And I think he misunderstood what it was, like he thought ... Like there's lunch, there's breakfast, and then there's brunch, which is, in his mind was like a third meal in the middle of the day. So he was like, "They have so much food that between breakfast and lunch they stop eat again. We have another meal." So the idea of like, pancakes and hash browns and all kinds of food for whatever it was, eight bucks or whatever, all you can eat. IHOP, Denny's, all stuff. He was so excited by that thing.

Dan Pashman:
Yeah. Speaking of IHOP.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah.

Dan Pashman:
I know you had, so you guys decided the first summer you went on a road trip from Florida where you were living, you were going to go up to DC to see all the national monuments.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yes.

Dan Pashman:
And your father had a bit of a plan he had worked up for how you would get a discount at IHOP.

Aasif Mandvi:
Right. We had these tee shirts that said "International House of Patel". And he would make us wear them and then we would like try to get-

Dan Pashman:
He had these made?

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah. And then we would try to get discounts at the IHOP franchises where we would go. And it never worked.

Dan Pashman:
So describe to me the scene.

Aasif Mandvi:
So we'd walk in and we'd look like-

Dan Pashman:
Who is we?

Aasif Mandvi:
Me, my father, my mother, my sister and my grandparents, who are visiting from India. And we would wear these tee shirts.

Dan Pashman:
All six of you matching tee shirts?

Aasif Mandvi:
Yes. And then we'd sit down and basically the waitress would come over and be like, oh my goodness, that's so cute, I didn't know you had IHOPs in Patel. And it was humiliating.

Dan Pashman:
Right.

Aasif Mandvi:
And it was entrepreneurial.

Dan Pashman:
It was both entrepreneurial and humiliating.

Aasif Mandvi:
Exactly right.

Dan Pashman:
What were the grandparents thinking?

Aasif Mandvi:
They thought it was insane. They thought it was like completely something that ... They just thought the whole idea of America was one of like excess. We'd go to these like grocery stores and there'd be like these giant jars of peanut butter and everything in America was bigger and looked more tasty, but then when you bit into it, it was all, it wasn't as tasty as like ... You know, like the apples were like six times larger than any apple in India that you could ever get. But then when you bit into it, it was like, there's no flavor, which is kind of a weird sort of symbolic thing. But that's, I think how they felt about it.

Dan Pashman:
Did you ever get a discount at any of those IHOPs?

Aasif Mandvi:
I don't think so.

Dan Pashman:
DO you still have the shirt?

Aasif Mandvi:
No, we burned them all. They ended up in an attic somewhere. For me, it was all about wanting to fit in, not wanting to like, you know, when you're 16 you're kind of like, oh my God, I didn't want to like, people stand out. I didn't like the fact that I came here with an English accent. I tried to lose it. I was already brown in this predominantly white high school in Tampa, Florida. But for my dad, it was like America was the greatest place. He was like, you can get two for one, everything is a bargain.

Aasif Mandvi:
For him it was like, oh I can pay 39 cents more and get a double big gulp.

Dan Pashman:
Right. When you talk in the book about having an argument with your father, and he was telling you, get the large.

Aasif Mandvi:
Get the large, and I was like, no, I just want the medium. And he was like, but it's only 39 cents more. so there's the kind of frugality that he had about things and also the wanting to indulge in sort of American consumer culture in that way.

Dan Pashman:
And what happened when you guys had that argument?

Aasif Mandvi:
I think I said something like, Americans, you got to practice moderation and restraint, Dad. I thought I made a really good point. And then he came back with like, you think Americans practice moderation and restraint? He's like, are you an idiot?

Dan Pashman:
And what are his feelings about American food excess today?

Aasif Mandvi:
Now it's all about health and stuff as you get older, and it's like he's not drinking smoothies, he's making smoothies for himself every day now. So I've gotten him into like, Dad, you really have to, you know, you've got to watch your health and all that.

Dan Pashman:
But does he still have that basic idea that like American excess is this wonderful thing to behold?

Aasif Mandvi:
I don't know. I think there's another element in the book, which I think is also sort of like the disillusionment of that American dream, of that sort of like what America is when you first get here versus what America ends up being and how that excess sort of, after a while I think you initially come here and you're like, oh my God I want to indulge in all of these things, and then over time I think he's settled down. I think he's calmed down. I think we all have.

Dan Pashman:
This was a little bit random, but I was curious to ask you about this, Spiderman two.

Aasif Mandvi:
What? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right.

Dan Pashman:
In Spiderman, two you play Mister Aziz, who owns a pizza parlor.

Aasif Mandvi:
Pizza parlor.

Dan Pashman:
And I was curious, I know that your character has a bit of a accent, different from your accent. I'm curious what your feelings were about playing that role, and any concerns you may have had about it playing into any kind of stereotypes of the Indian shop owner.

Aasif Mandvi:
Right. Well, originally, Mister Aziz was not written as a, it wasn't Mister Aziz, It was an Italian guy, and then they cast me and I thought it was kind of fun that it was like this Indian guy who owned a pizza place, and sort of had this kind of Italian sort of demeanor about him. But he had an Indian accent. So for me that was the fun in playing that role. It was like-

Dan Pashman:
It was played against type.

Aasif Mandvi:
It played against type, because normally you would see sort of a guy who is a New York Italian guy, and then I got to play him, this Indian New York guy with a pizza place. And it was great because for a long time that pizza place that's no longer there, they would give me free pizza when I went in there. So like for a few years after Spiderman two came out, like they'd be like, "Mister Aziz, how you doing? Hey, hey, hey, here's a slice for you." I'd be like, "All right, great."

Dan Pashman:
You know who would be proud of that?

Aasif Mandvi:
Yeah. My dad.

Dan Pashman:
Yes.

Aasif Mandvi:
Yes. For free, they gave you free. That's great. I'm coming. I'm coming.

Dan Pashman:
That's actor and comedian Aasif Mandvi. His memoir is No Lands Man, and his newest project is a podcast called Lost at the Smithsonian. It's a pop culture and history show that explores the little known stories behind some of the coolest stuff at the National Museum of American History. Aasif goes into the museum and finds incredible stories and insights about things like Fonzie's leather jacket and Dorothy's Ruby slippers. My personal favorite is the one about the guitar Jose Feliciano used to play his famous rendition of the National Anthem at the 1968 World Series. It was very different, and at the time very controversial.

Speaker 8:
My version was not outlandish. It was a combination of soul, gospel and because I'm Latin, I gave it a little bit of a Latin feel.

Dan Pashman:
Aasif's show is a great family friendly podcast that's perfect to listen to around the holidays. Subscribe to Lost at the Smithsonian, wherever you're listening right now.

Dan Pashman:
Next week on the show, I talked live on stage with chef Angie Mar.

Angie Mar:
I still say to this day, and my mom says this too, it's like I want to eat beef and I want to wear heels. That's it. Nothing has changed since I was five. I'm the same person, same person.

Dan Pashman:
That's next week. Remember that we need your New Year's food resolutions, you guys. Record a voice memo on your cell phone. Tell me your name, where you're from, and what food do you resolve to eat more of in the New Year and why. Send it to hello@sporkful.com, and you might hear yourself and our year end episode.

Dan Pashman:
This show is produced by me along with-

Ngofeen:
Ngofeen Mputubwele.

Dan Pashman:
And-

Perry Huggins:
Perry Huggins.

Dan Pashman:
Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Daisy Rosario. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

Randy Lucas:
and I'm Randy Lucas from Austin, Texas, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

Speaker 1:
Stitcher.