Dan Pashman: Are we in the salad spinner, or do we spin the salad spinner? Still a lot of kinks to work out in this format, I think.

Amanda Mull: Yeah, a little bit of logistics to, to determine ...

Dan Pashman: Yeah. [LAUGHS]

Doug Mack: Is it like a tilt a whirl?

Amanda Mull: I think I like the idea of "in the spinner."

Doug Mack: Absolutely. It sounds more chaotic and therefore more fun.

Dan Pashman: All right. All right, this sounds good.

MUSIC

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. Today, we're bringing you another edition of our rapid fire roundtable discussion of the latest food news, from significant to silly, surprising to strange. Yes, it's time to crank up ... the Salad Spinner.

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER]

Dan Pashman: Joining me in the spinner are two very special guests. First, right here in studio, we have returning guest Amanda Mull, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers health and American consumerism. Hey, Amanda.

Amanda Mull: Hi.

Dan Pashman: And joining us from Minneapolis, or to be more precise, St. Paul, we have Doug Mack, a travel and food writer who's the author of The Not Quite States of America, and creator of the newsletter Snack Stack, in which he digs into the cultural history of snacks around the world. Hello, Doug!

Doug Mack: Hello!

Dan Pashman: So I've asked each of you to bring some stories to share to sort of throw into the salad spinner and spin with us. Then later we're going to do a lightning round, but I promise at the end I won't tell either of you to pack up your knives and go. You ready?

Amanda Mull: Yeah.

Doug Mack: Yes!

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER] 

Dan Pashman: All right, Amanda, why don’t you get us started? You wrote a story about Bass Pro Shops, the chain retailer that sells fishing and hunting equipment, along with outdoor gear. Now when I read your story about Bass Pro Shops, it actually made me think about grocery stores these days. But before you get into that, just tell us about the Bass Pro Shop you visited for your story. 

Amanda Mull: Yes. A couple of weeks ago I was in Memphis for a friend's bachelor party. And one of the big things to do in Memphis is to go to a Bass Pro Shop that is housed in a former basketball arena in a pyramid, and it was glorious. Everybody should go to the pyramid Bass Pro.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Doug Mack: I will second that. It's amazing.

Dan Pashman: Oh, you've been to this one too, Doug.

Doug Mack: Yeah, about a year ago. It's unlike anything I've experienced in my entire life.

Amanda Mull: It really is incredible.

Dan Pashman: It's a store. Just so we're clear, right? It's a store.

Amanda Mull: Well, it's a store and so much more than that. In this particular Bass Pro, there is a hotel. There is a bar. There is an outdoor terrace at which on one of the two visits that I did during this tour trip to Memphis, they had a DJ night. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: They have, like, a stream running through the store, you said.

Amanda Mull: Yes, it, and it has, like, several huge lake sturgeon in it.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: They have several live crocodiles. They have ducks.

Dan Pashman: Okay, right.

Amanda Mull: They have all kinds of stuff to look at. It is just — it is set up to look sort of like an outdoor wonderland of its own, which is where the sort of like Disney theme park thing comes in.

Dan Pashman: Right. But in a way this is kind of a throwback to retail stores of like when I was a little kid, like it was an event to go to FAO Schwartz in New York City. And there were toys, not only to see the toys, but you could play with the toys! And there things to climb on. It was an outing to go to the store

Dan Pashman: But so Amanda, you didn't just wander through the Bass Pro Shops on your bachelor party weekend. You saw a retail trend that you thought was worth writing about.  

Amanda Mull: Right. I write a lot about retail and the sort of in person brick and mortar retail story of the past five to ten years, and especially the past couple of years, has been largely one of like doom and gloom. Stores are closing, things are downsizing, people want to shop online, things like that. Not all of that is quite true. There's a lot of oversimplification of how people feel about stores. But it is true that a lot of stuff has closed and that stores in a lot of cases are just like a much drearier experience than, like, when we were kids and there was no online shopping,

Amanda Mull: So I went in this store and, like, the first thing was that it was just absolutely bustling. People were excited to be there, everybody was walking around with armfuls of stuff. The store was really just beautifully set up, lots of attention to detail lots of attention to merchandising. And it was just nice to be in a spot where it felt so lively and felt so much like you could actually buy something there that ended up being fun.

Dan Pashman: And a big part of your sort of takeaway is that shopping habits have not moved online as fast and as wholeheartedly as people have been predicting for years and years that they would.

Amanda Mull: Right. Eighty to eighty five percent of purchases made in America are still made at brick and mortar retail stores. There's just a lot of things that don't sell well online that people sort of are sick of trying to buy online now that they've had that experience.

Amanda Mull: And I think that retailers are starting to realize that there's still people who want to, like, go out and do things. Especially post pandemic, people want to go outside. Like, life online is, like, not all it's cracked up to be. And I think that retailers are starting to realize that, like, oh, we, we might have swung too hard toward on online sales and left some stuff out of like an experience that people still fundamentally prefer for most of their purchases.

Dan Pashman: And allowed their stores to become, in a lot of cases, frankly, dilapidated.

Amanda Mull: Yes.

Dan Pashman: I mean, a lot of these big box stores — I went into one just the other day that I won't name, but there were boxes of shipments of supplies half open, strewn about the store. I mean, like, I was like, "Are you guys even open?". The reason I bring all this up — people are probably at this point like, is this a food podcast? I was curious because I feel like supermarkets are one of the few areas where I haven't seen this decline in the first place. I still love going to the supermarket. Most supermarkets are very nice. And certainly, like, in the suburbs where I live, like I've seen a lot of money poured into them in recent years to rehab them. They weren't so bad before. And now they're gleaming and beautiful and so, what's the difference, Amanda? Why wasn't there the same decline with supermarkets?

Amanda Mull: Well, I think there's probably a couple of reasons. I think part of this we have to credit to the very early dot com bust of Webvan. One of the buzziest early internet commerce platforms was something that delivered groceries. And it failed so spectacularly that it is still a cautionary tale in sort of VC Silicon Valley circles.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: Grocery businesses looked around and said, okay, people want to buy stuff online. Sure. But like they seem not to want to buy groceries online that bad. So they didn't have like the same internal budgetary push and pull of like, how much do we invest on our websites, how much do we invest on moving everything into warehouses. And I think that that really benefited supermarkets in that they instead put that money into keeping stores looking nice, into making sure that they're staffed, into expanding sort of prepared foods and deli options, which are super, super popular and like a really growing part of the grocery business.

Amanda Mull: And I think that not having that like sort of constant tug of the internet over the past 20 years has been really, really good for them. And of course, now we see more sort of like instant grocery delivery startups. A lot of those have failed because, again, grocery delivery online — very hard to do. You know, food is just a sensitive thing. People want to see their food. People want to go and pick out their foods for the week and be like surprised and delighted by new stuff that they might have not seen before or heard of before. And I think food does really well in that environment. So grocery stores just like missed a lot of the bad trends in retail.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: And it really benefited the in store experience.

Dan Pashman: Right. Doug where are you on all this? Are you a big grocery delivery person? 

Doug Mack: I have to go to the store, myself. I want to see everything. I want to lightly squeeze the produce. I want to have the sensation of being with the food while I’m buying it. I also kind of like doing some impulse purchases. Like, I want to be in the store and see the cookies and go like, "Yeah, I think I want some cookies. What cookies do I want today?". I don't want somebody else making that decision at all. I want to be impulsive and go, "Do I want the Oreos? Do I want the, you know, the homemade chocolate chip cookies from the store? What do I want?"

Dan Pashman: I'm gonna ask each of you — Doug, you first. I just made you the CEO of a major national grocery store chain. You already have nice stores, but someone brings Amanda's article to you and says, "Look what Bass Pro Shops is doing. They're making experiences.". Tell me one feature that you would add to your supermarket to enliven and enrich the food shopping experience.

Doug Mack: I’m gonna add more free samples. In any category, there's going to be one free sample at any time. Like orange juice, there are like, what, a thousand varieties of orange juice? At any given time, you can go into the store and sample one kind of orange juice. You know, same is true for everything. Just more free samples.

Dan Pashman: I like that. Amanda?

Amanda Mull: I think free samples are great. Also, something that I really appreciate about Publix, which is the grocery store that I grew up with, is there was a lot of like demos in stores.

Dan Pashman: Ohh.

Amanda Mull: So it took the free sample thing one step further and like have little recipe cards that you could take home and buy everything in the recipe. The people who worked those stations were always so nice. The food was always good. It's nice to have a little snack. And then maybe you, you know, pick up everything you need for that recipe because it's all merchandised right there. I think that giving people these, like, experiential options is, you know, a real, a real, plus of in person retail. And who doesn’t love food experiences?

Dan Pashman: All right, well, if they ever put the three of us in charge of a store, I think it's gonna be really successful.

Amanda Mull: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: In the meantime, let's take another spin of the salad spinner.

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER]

Dan Pashman: Doug, you recently wrote a story in your newsletter, Snack Stack, and you broke a big story here. There's this old story about Van Halen and their contract rider, which is the thing that, you know, many artists will have like this thing in their contract, like the venue must provide X, Y, Z. And it often revolves around the food. But Van Halen had a very specific thing in their rider. This was the story that I always heard. What was the story, Doug?

Doug Mack: Van Halen had a line item in their contract rider, which was, "We want a bowl of M & M's backstage with all of the brown ones pulled out." And this became sort of rock mythology in the '80s. There was an incident at a university in Pueblo, Colorado where they didn't, they got the M & M's. The caterer didn't take out the brown M & M's and the band kind of trashed the joint — at least according to the people at the venue.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] Right.

Doug Mack: And so it really does seem they were just being obnoxious rock and rollers. And then in 1997, David Lee Roth, who had been the lead singer of Van Halen, writes a memoir. And in it, he says, actually, you know what, you guys have it all wrong. We weren't just being, you know, brash, egotistical rock stars with that, trying to, you know, show off, you know, our very fussy demands. There was some genius behind it because we were actually testing the venues to make sure that they had read every line item of the contract rider. Van Halen had all these pyrotechnics, they had giant amps, they had all this stuff, and if you get their wiring wrong, if you don't have enough, you know, structural integrity in the stage, whatever, things can go downhill really fast.

Dan Pashman: Like, they could get hurt. It could be dangerous.

Doug Mack: You can get hurt, right.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Doug Mack: And so this is their check to make sure that the venue is reading every single line.

Dan Pashman: Right. Like if they get the brown M & M's thing right, then they probably won't screw up the fireworks. 

Doug Mack: Exactly, and so that editing of the original story of like, oh, they're just brash rock stars, becomes its own mythology. You know, I found it in all these different, like, self help books, and business books, and magazine articles, and all this stuff, because people are like, aha, you know, this is actually very clever. So I started to write a story about contract riders. And of course, I'll have to, you know, have in my opening paragraph something about Van Halen. So I just, you know, went into the newspaper databases to find out some old stories. And within — it was like five minutes, I realized that this whole revision, David Lee Roth's thing was completely false. Like it couldn't possibly be true.

[LAUGHING]

Doug Mack: And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that, you know, their rider had more than 50 pages. This is this long, detailed document. And again, a lot of this is about, you know, wiring and things like that. The caterer and the electrician are two very different people.

[LAUGHING]

Doug Mack: And they're not going over the same pages of this long contract. Like, they're just not. That's not happening. The other thing that kind of was more damning is that ... [LAUGHING] This had become a meme by 1980, like, every single venue knew that Van Halen wanted the brown M & M's removed. Van Halen's coming to town, and we gotta get the M & M's and take out the brown ones. These venues could take out the brown ones and then go like, Hey, Van Halen, like, we read your rider. This could be just a way for the venues to sort of slack off and not read the rest of it, because they'd already did the famous thing. So there's no way that it would be effective, right? If your test is, we want to make sure that they've read every line item, you can't just rely on this thing that is the most famous part of your test to the point that every single person at every single venue knows about it.

Dan Pashman: Right, so how did it feel, Doug, to debunk this piece of rock and roll lore?

Doug Mack: I mean, it's one of those things where it was like, am I crazy? Like, am I imagining this?

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Doug Mack: Because I had read this sort of revised version, the David Lee Roth version, so many times. But the more I thought about it, I was like, no, this can't be true. It can't be. [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: It's incredible how easily we were all persuaded to believe for years, by David Lee Roth, that actually Van Halen in the '70s were sort of like detail oriented business geniuses ...

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Doug Mack: Right.

Amanda Mull: And not just fussy rock stars. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: I know, that's the real takeaway, is how gullible are we?

Amanda Mull: Yeah, we were just like, oh, okay, that's brilliant.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, wow.

Doug Mack: Yeah. Sure, reliable narrator. That makes sense.

Amanda Mull: Right.

Dan Pashman: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Amanda Mull: Historically.

Dan Pashman: Sign up for the David Lee Roth Masterclass in Business Administration.

Amanda Mull: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: Yes.

Dan Pashman: But thinking about this story, Doug, threw me down a rabbit hole that I’ve been down a few times over the years. But reading different performers contract riders is a lot of fun, and I have here in my hand ... [PAGES FLIPPING] ... a copy of Taylor Swift’s contract rider. This is from 2008. And her contract rider's probably changed and evolved since then. She was 18 or 19 at the time of this. But, it's a whole quart of chocolate milk. That's a lot of chocolate milk. I love that she's got a bottle of Welch's grape juice. And then, salsa, shredded cheddar cheese, and Tostitos. It looks like she's making nachos.

Doug Mack: Oh, that's nachos. Absolutely.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Amanda Mull: Yeah, she's making nachos.

Dan Pashman: Right ...

Amanda Mull: Respect.

Dan Pashman: But then, she's also got a one pint Ben Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, one pint Ben Jerry's chocolate brownie frozen yogurt. So props for Ben and Jerry's. I love Ben and Jerry's, this is why I would struggle to make a contract rider. You want to be very specific because you want to get what you want. On the other hand, if every tour stop I had was serving me the exact same flavor of Ben Jerry's, I would get tired of it. I'm more likely to be like, one pint of Ben Jerry's, surprise me. But then like, what if it's one you don't like?

Doug Mack: If it were me I would go for one — like, one pint specific flavor of Ben Jerry's or whatever, and one pint, like, local specialty dealer's choice, so that it does get, you know, mixed up a little bit from city to city.

Amanda Mull: Yeah, but you always have old reliable there in case they choose poorly.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: That makes sense. That's a good strategy.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, Amanda and Doug dish out more food news, and then we turn up the heat for our lightning round. That's after the break. Stick around.

MUSIC

 

+++BREAK+++

 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. In last week’s show, I talked with Curtis Chin, a documentary filmmaker who grew up working at his family’s Chinese restaurant in Detroit. The restaurant served everyone, from the city’s Mayor — who was a regular — to business executives, to the sex workers who came in from the red light district. Curtis got a real education about his community, and his city, while bussing tables there.   

CLIP (CURTIS CHIN): A lot of parents will tell their kids not to talk to strangers, right? My parents actually gave us the exact opposite instruction. They said, "Talk to strangers." And so anytime my dad met somebody that had an interesting job, he'd like call all six of us to run over [LAUGHS] and, like, barrage these people with questions like, well, what do you do for a living? How did you get your job? You know what I mean? How much money do you make?

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): [LAUGHS]

CLIP (CURTIS CHIN): And because of that, you know, I loved meeting people. And so, I feel like that is something that I take with me.

Dan Pashman: Curtis’s memoir is called Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. It’s a great book, and we had a really nice conversation. I hope you'll check it out. That episode is up now, check it out. 

Dan Pashman: And Now let's climb back into the salad spinner with Amanda Mull, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Doug Mack, a travel and food writer and author of The Not Quite States of America. Hello again, Amanda.

Amanda Mull: Hello.

Dan Pashman: And Doug.

Doug Mack: Hello.

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER]

Dan Pashman: Now let's talk a little bit more about some of the stories that you've both been working on recently. Amanda, you wrote about all of the brand collabs have been happening, especially in the worlds of fashion and food. It feels like everyone's doing these collabs. Le Creuset and Warner Brothers teamed up for a Harry Potter themed set of spellcasting spatulas. Barbie did a special sundae with Coldstone. Hidden Valley, an ice cream company and Van Leeuwen teamed up to make ranch ice cream. Some brand a while back sent me mustard ice cream.

Amanda Mull: Hmm.

Dan Pashman: Why is this happening? [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: Well, I think a lot of it goes back to sort of like the internet attention economy. Advertising is in flux as an industry and how to get consumer attention is sort of up in the air. But a relatively cheap way to get some attention and to get attention in a format that consumers perceive as like more reliable and more interesting and they're more willing to interact with than just traditional advertising is what's called earned media. And in order to do that you come up with sort of a story about something novel about something special, limited edition or gimmicky in some way that is going to prompt people who write on the internet to write a post about what you're doing and then people on social media talk about it.

Amanda Mull: And collabs are great for this because you can release, like, sort of an unlimited number of them per year. Basically, putting two familiar words together and that just sort of prompts people to riff on the internet, if it's done well. And then it — there's a sense of scarcity about it, so people go out and buy.

Dan Pashman: And if it creates all the buzz they want it to create, they basically get a lot of free advertising out of it. But you're a little concerned that maybe these things are — that people are getting carried away.

Amanda Mull: Yeah. There's an opportunity to do something interesting there and like brands are willing to put budget behind it because it is an opportunity for them to get attention in a way that is, like, organic and more meaningful to a lot of people who are out there making purchase decisions.

Amanda Mull: But I think that, that sort of, like, good idea has then been taken to its logical extreme, where it's like, where can we insert ourselves in situations where it's just nonsensical and tapping into sort of, like, revulsion or silliness in, like, a sort of cynical way? And I think that we're to that point in a lot of respects.

Amanda Mull: One that I came across when writing that article that I thought was just, like, really ridiculous was, a Kraft  Real Mayo x Juicy Couture collab, where Juicy Couture made bedazzled jumpsuits with, like, the Kraft Mayo, branding on them. And this got written up in so many places all over the place. It just strikes me as so cynical and so, like, past the point of being defensible in a lot of these situations. The thing that ultimately, like, sort of broke my brain [LAUGHS] and meant that I — eventually, I ended up writing this was Blue Bottle Coffee made a line — a couple sneaker designs with New Balance. And they were just New Balances with the Blue Bottle logo on the back.

[LAUGHING]

Amanda Mull: And I'm like, why does this exist? Why are there so many blog posts about this? Why are people talking about it? Why do I have to look at it on social media? Why? Why are we all being subjected to this? [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: How much was that Mayo jacket on second hand? Wait, how much is it selling for?

Amanda Mull: Not much.

Dan Pashman: I want to look up online. Let's see how much. All right, I'm looking at the Juicy Couture [LAUGHS] x Craft Mayo jackets. These Juicy Couture jackets, it says "Mayo Couture, Juicy Couture x Craft Mayo". And it has — looks like a terrier holding a craft flag up. But they look really soft. Do you see how soft they look?

Amanda Mull: Juicy Couture does make really soft velour stuff. I will give them that. Sometimes you do gotta hand it to them. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Well, it's $46 on here, and I mean ... See? They got me, Amanda. I kinda want it.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: I kinda want this jacket.

Amanda Mull: You're, like, one of the only people alive who would have, like, a reason to have it, though. Like, you host a food podcast about, quirky, weird, interesting food stuff.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Amanda Mull: Like, you're the person that garment was made for, believe it or not. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: I guess.

Amanda Mull: Everybody else should abstain.

Dan Pashman: I feel like I'm going to get myself a mayo jacket ...

Amanda Mull: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: And I'm going to get some Blue Bottle Coffee New Balances, and I'm just going to walk ...

Doug Mack: You need a whole outfit.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Amanda Mull: Yeah.

Doug Mack: You need a tie.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: Yeah.

Doug Mack: A hat.

Amanda Mull: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: I'll walk around my tub of ranch dressing ice cream. [LAUGHING]

Amanda Mull: And you'll be the weirdest hypebeast ever.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Alright, let's give this salad spinner another whirl.

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER]

Dan Pashman: Doug, you recently wrote a story about a food that is a staple in many households. I can't say it's a staple in mine, maybe more of a special occasion food, but not one that I realized had such a riveting backstory. You wrote all about pizza rolls.

Doug Mack: Yeah, I think this is just a perfect example of how even the most mundane thing has an interesting story, you know, if you go looking for a few minutes. And in this case, the pizza roll story is really a sort of an intersection of different cultural trends in the post war era, kind of all coming together in this one product, which, you know, I think is almost like a decoder ring for American culture in the '50s and '60s.

Doug Mack: So the original pizza rolls are created by a guy named Jeno Paulucci, who was an entrepreneur, originally from northern Minnesota. Born in the 1920s. In the 1940s. He gets a job as a traveling salesman. He's going around the region for a food wholesaler. And this is the time when Chinese food is getting really popular around the country and he's eating quite a bit of it in his travels. And he notices that there's not a lot of it available in like a pre-packaged format in a can or a frozen meal kind of thing at the grocery store.

Doug Mack: He sort of creates that product. He works with his mom. They develop some recipes and his mom is an immigrant from Northern Italy, so she adds her Italian seasonings to the chow mein and chop suey recipes. And this brand blows up, becomes a big deal nationally. By the 1950s, his company is a hit.

Doug Mack: So they're selling across the country. There are ads in Life Magazine. You know, it's a big national, national brand. So he's got, you know, chop suey, chow mein, frozen egg rolls. And he's looking at what's my next product, right? What's my next business idea? And he's at the production plant, and he's looking at this machine that makes the egg rolls, and he sees the egg roll wrappers, and he's like, well, we could put anything in there, right? And so he has one of his employees, this woman named Beatrice Ojakangas — she starts experimenting with different fillings. He's like, just test different things, give me whatever you got. She comes up with 50 different ideas. [LAUGHS] So really, I mean, credit to her for coming up with all these different things.

Dan Pashman: Right. She's the one who did the heavy lifting here.

Doug Mack: Absolutely. Yeah, Beatrice does not get enough credit here. But you know, she tried cheeseburgers, she tried Rubin sandwich. She tried pizza, and that was the one that everyone liked the most. So basically, pizza fillings inside an egg roll wrapper. And again, Italian food, frozen pizza, also having a cultural moment during this time. Frozen pizza is just starting to become a thing.

Doug Mack: So pizza rolls hit the market in 1968. And they are a giant hit right away. And, you know, now I think of them as like, a thing that you throw in the oven real quick to have a quick snack when you're desperate — no shade.

[LAUGHING]

Doug Mack: But that's how I think of them, right?

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Doug Mack: But they were originally marketed as something that you would present to your guests when you're entertaining, right? You're having a dinner party, you're gonna have this exotic thing, it's an egg roll, or is it pizza? It's, like, not necessarily elegant, but it's convenient, it's classy. And, you know, I think we've lost a lot of that backstory. People don't necessarily know those roots. They're just, you know, shoving these things in their face. Again, no shade. I do, I love pizza rolls.

Dan Pashman: And then, as you write, Doug, in 1985, Jeno sold his company to Pillsbury for 135 million dollars. Pillsbury turned Jeno’s Pizza rolls into a brand that’s now a household name, Totino’s Pizza Rolls. So that is Jeno’s legacy. And I actually feel that of all the foods in the frozen food aisle, pizza rolls are my special occasion food. If there’s company coming over, we’re going to pull out all the stops. I’m going with pizza rolls and pigs in a blanket. [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: Oh yeah.

Doug Mack: Oh yeah.

Dan Pashman: Because there is something about the pizza roll that just feels special. It feels glamorous, to me at least.

Amanda Mull: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: I don't know, Amanda, what's your take on pizza rolls?

Amanda Mull: Well, first of all, they're great. I highly endorsed pizza rolls.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: But second, it's interesting how over the course of history, the perception of these types of foods sort of goes back and forth between extremes.

Doug Mack: Hmm.

Amanda Mull: There was a period there when these were considered like extremely like fancy, high class, impressive things to eat and to serve. And there's also this period of belief that these things are, like, safer and better for you. Because they are made industrially, they are made indoors, they are made ...

Dan Pashman: In the pristine factory ...

Amanda Mull: Yes.

Dan Pashman: With people wearing hairnets and all that.

Amanda Mull: Right.

Dan Pashman: And then it swung to the opposite extreme of like gross, processed, frozen foods ...

Amanda Mull: Cheap.

Dan Pashman: Cheap. Are you saying you feel like it's swinging back?

Amanda Mull: Well, I think this pendulum swings back and forth for like various reasons, like, every 15 or 20 years. On TikTok, there is this sort of belief that seems to exist among a lot of people on the internet that it is like somehow unhygienic to prepare food with your bare hands even if you've washed them. A lot of people on TikTok then started wearing gloves to handle food in their recipe videos, because if you don't, people, like, get upset about it and tell you it's unhygienic. And that sort of suggests to me that, like, we're sort of once again becoming more interested in, like, the technological interventions in food. 

Dan Pashman: So maybe the zeitgeist might veer back towards more industrially produced foods that have been untouched by human hands.

Amanda Mull: Yeah, at least for, like, a little while. People get sort of curious about these things in waves and it seems like Gen Z is sort of curious about these things right now. 

Dan Pashman: I think that also sort of mirroring that trend is kind of quick advancements in technology. You know, just there's an app for that. I think that that's sort of part of that mentality is also, you know, that technology is the solution to problems, not the cause of them.

Amanda Mull: Right, right. We go back and forth, trend wise, as to whether or not technology is the solution of or cause of problems. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Right, right.

Doug Mack: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Is it possible it's some of both?

Amanda Mull: It’s possible it's some of both. 

[LAUGHING] 

MUSIC

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER] 

Dan Pashman: All right, so let's move on to the lightning round. The salad spinner is about to start spinning faster.

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER SPINNING FASTER ]

Dan Pashman: Can you take it?

Amanda Mull: Let's go.

Dan Pashman: Don't get dizzy.

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: All right. Here's a story I want to talk about. I want get both of your takes on. So last year, a group of twenty somethings living in a hacker house, which is one of these sort of, like, young computer programmer types — you know, to save money on rent, they all live twenty people in a house and spend all day looking at computers and typing in ones and zeros, I guess. I don't know. I sound like an old man.

Dan Pashman: But anyway, 27-somethings are living in a hacker house and one of them this guy — what was his name — named Meron, he often cooked steaks for the rest of the people in the house. And they decided that they were going to create a fake steakhouse online called "Meron's Steakhouse", and they created a website for it and an address in Google and they put in a bunch of reviews, very positive reviews.

Dan Pashman: And people fell for it. People wanted to get in so badly, but then the website and voicemail said there are no reservations for months, which only made people want to get in even more. So a few weeks ago, Meron's came to life for one night. They rented out a space, they cooked steak, which is kind of funny, but I'm more interested in, like, what this says about restaurant culture. Doug, you first. What does the fact that all this happened tell you about restaurant and food culture?

Doug Mack: Yeah. I mean, to me, it's kind of the same old story, right? Like, people want to go where the hype is. And you see that in restaurants. You want to go the place that is generating excitement, whatever that may be. So you know, to me this kind of feels a lot like the same old story of there's excitement around a particular thing. And in this case, [LAUGHS] the thing was really non-existent, which adds, you know, obviously a layer of humor. You know, it's just human nature to want to do what other people are doing and to be excited about the things that are exciting other people.

Dan Pashman: Right. Amanda, thoughts?

Amanda Mull: First, I think it's just really admirable commitment to the bit from ... 

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: From these, like, what, essentially kids. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Amanda Mull: They're like, you know, 20, 21-year-olds, to actually decide to open a steakhouse for one night and see it all the way through. I thought that was really fantastic. 

Dan Pashman: They went out to other steakhouses to research [Amanda Mull: Yeah.] and they asked the servers a bunch of questions like, tell us how this steakhouse thing works, you know? 

Amanda Mull: Yeah, yeah.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] All so they do it for one night.

Amanda Mull: It's really funny. The only thing there was at first was a location on Google Maps that somebody put there as a joke on their friend. And that is like the most 20-year-old thing to do imaginable, I think. And there's nothing more interesting in the world than something you have no information on and that seems hidden from you. And I think that New Yorkers in particular — like, everybody is subject to this, but New Yorkers are so caught in a hype cycle for everything. And so, the city runs so heavily on this sort of cycle of things you can't have and then maybe you can try to get them, that, like, I think that this is probably like the perfect spot to just catfish a bunch of people [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] into going to your joke for dinner.

[SALAD SPINNER STINGER] 

Dan Pashman: Another headline we gotta touch on. Cher is launching a gelato company, called Cherlato. Last time you were on Amanda, we talked about celebrity preserves, all these celebrity jams and jellies. If Cher wants to launch a gelato company, it really doesn't bother me. I don't care one way or the other. I'm not any more interested in trying the gelato because Cher's name is attached to it, though. And I guess, maybe I just sound naive, but I am shocked at what a difference it still makes when you're trying to get anything off the ground, if you can attach a celebrity's name to it. You go to any big box store and, like, half of the products have some C level celebrities face on them. And I guess I'm just surprised it continues to matter so much to people.

Amanda Mull: Yeah. Well, I think it goes back to that, what we were talking about, about earned media. You know, the food world is so crowded. There are so many new products, so many upstarts, so many people vying for shelf space. And I think that attaching yourself to a celebrity is a way to convince a certain subset of media to write about you. It gives a certain subset of potential buyers to latch on and be like, well, like, Cher is ... and this is interesting.

Doug Mack: I feel like though that there's probably a difference between the products that are just sort of endorsed by a celebrity, but just like a random product and they slap a picture on them. And the ones where it's just sort of like a one off thing, like this almost seems like something where, you know, she was like, I've always liked ice cream or gelato — excuse me. Or, you know, she had this passing idea and someone was like, we have the resources to make it work. The other one I think of is apparently Eminem has a storefront in Detroit called Mom's Spaghetti. 

Amanda Mull: [LAUGHS] 

Doug Mack: After the line in the song, "lose yourself". He sells, like, takeout spaghetti. And it's just like a one takeout window. And again, I'm sure that someone was like, wouldn't it be funny if ..., and then they made it happen. In both that the Cher ice cream truck and this, you know, Eminem spaghetti, those both just kind of feel, like, kind of one off goofs, right? Where they're not necessarily trying to make money. I'm sure they don't object to it, but it's not necessarily — it's like, it really is about the novelty and about this person just sort of like having a weird sense of humor or something.

Dan Pashman: I feel like Mom's Spaghetti, that's like — that's more like a bit that feeds off of his actual work. To me, like, that's fun and clever. I don't know that Cher is doing this because she's so deeply passionate about gelato. Like, does she have any song lyrics about gelato? I don't know. I know pretty much all the words to "If I Could Turn Back Time", and I don't think there's a gelato reference in there.

Doug Mack: Well, there's turning. You have to turn the gelato.

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: I think that people are sort of like at least a little bit anesthetized to that whole concept, which is why you get more and more of these situations where there's, like, a real insistence that actually Cher cares deeply about gelato. And she found — apparently the gelato makers that she's partnered with are from Auckland, New Zealand, and that she was on tour and she had this, like, religious experience with their gelato, and just had to bring it to the United States because she loved it so much. It might be true. Like Cher might have just like really loved this gelato, but also that story is, like, part of the marketing because it gets past the objections of people who are like, she doesn't care. This is just a gambit.

Dan Pashman: Right, right. I guess. I don't know. 

Amanda Mull: Everything just gets a little bit more extreme as we get used to more and more of these tricks. [LAUGHS] It was strange to me that it took this long for her to find, like, Transcendent Gelato, because Cher has surely been all over Italy.

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Amanda Mull: [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Yeah. And the best gelato is in New Zealand?

Amanda Mull: Yeah. I don't know.

Dan Pashman: I'm skeptical. 

Amanda Mull: Well, this perversely enough actually makes me want to try it, because I'm like, is it better than what I had in Sicily? Let's find out.

Dan Pashman: So they got you.

Amanda Mull: They got me. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: All right, so Amanda, you go eat some of Cher's gelato. I'm gonna get one of these mayo jackets.

Amanda Mull: Great, great. Good luck. Godspeed.

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: All right. Well, we survived the salad spinner. I hope you're not too dizzy, but that was a ton of fun. Thanks to both of you. Doug Mack is the author of The Not Quite States of America and his sub stack newsletter is Snackstack. That's at snackstack.net. Thank you, Doug.

Doug Mack: Thanks for having me.

Dan Pashman: And Amanda Mull from The Atlantic. You can follow her on Twitter, or X, as the kids call it now, @Amanda Mull. Thank you, Amanda.

Amanda Mull: Thank you so much for having me. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Next week’s show, I’m talking with Yewande Komolafe, recipe developer and cooking writer at the New York Times, about her new cookbook My Everyday Lagos. It’s based on her childhood spent in Nigeria. When I first spoke with Yewande back in 2018, she told us about her struggle navigating the U.S. immigration system, and her time living as an undocumented immigrant. She also talked about wanting to write a cookbook about Nigerian food. Now, the book is here and we have an update on her immigration story. All that is next week. 

Dan Pashman: And meanwhile, make sure you check out last week's show with Curtis Chin. His family owned a Chinese restaurant in Detroit for generations. Curtis had to navigate life there in '80s, when the crack epidemic was at its peak, and when anti-Asian violence was on the rise. He also had to figure out how to behave around his family, while coming to understand that he was gay. That episode is up now, check it out.