This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player or iTunes/Podcasts app. (And please subscribe!)
A turducken (below) is a deboned chicken stuffed, Russian nesting doll-style, inside a deboned duck that's packed within a whole turkey.
Actor, playwright, and author Aasif Mandvi (top) grew up between three different cultures: Indian, British, and American.
What could Aasif and a turducken possibly have in common?
This week on The Sporkful, the Daily Show correspondent and author of the memoir "No Land's Man" admits it isn't easy to make sense of so many dueling identities:
"I'm completely confused about my identity, as you can tell. I describe myself as a...human turducken," he says. "I'm a little brown kid, wrapped inside a British schoolboy, wrapped inside an American adult."
Aasif was born in India but mostly raised in England. And he has vivid memories of steak & kidney pie (below), austere breakfasts at his British boarding school, and his mother's Gujarati home cooking.
But when he was 16, Aasif's family left England and moved to Florida.
His father embraced everything about eating in America -- from brunch to supermarkets to Big Gulps, but Aasif had reservations.
"Everything in America was bigger and looked more tasty," he says. "The apples were six times larger than any apple in India, but then when you bit into it there was no flavor."
Listen in to the full episode to hear about the special T-shirts Aasif's father made for their family trips to IHOP, why Aasif wanted to hate iced tea (but couldn't), and what happened when the novelty of American food excess started to wear off.
This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player or iTunes/Podcasts app. (And please subscribe!)
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Interstitial music in this episode by Black Label Music:
- "Call" by Nona Marie Invie
- "Hip Hop Slidester" by Steve Pierson
- "New Old" by James Thomas Bates
Photos: Adam Cantor (courtesy of Chronicle Books); FlickrCC/Esther Lin; FlickrCC/Mike Mozart; FlickrCC/Ian
