Amanda Mull: There's nothing better with a pizza than Diet Coke in my opinion.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: I will drink that in that scenario until the day I die. You can take it from my cold dead hands.

[LAUGHING]

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. And today we're presenting a rapid fire roundtable discussion of flamin’ hot news in the world of food. Some of it's substantive. Some is silly. I think it's all pretty surprising. And based on a poll I conducted on Instagram last night, we're calling this format: A Salad Spinner. 

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT]

Dan Pashman: I’ll have you know that Sporkful engineer Jared O’Connell recorded his own salad spinner in his own home for that sound effect. Bespoke sound effects here on The Sporkful. Do you see the lengths we go to for your enjoyment? By they way, if you followed me on Instagram, you would have been able to vote in that poll. You would've been able to help, and have creative input in our show and in turn, the name of this segment, so please do that. Follow me @TheSporkful. Anyway, joining me to talk about these spicy morsels are two very special guests. The first is Amanda Mull, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers health and American consumerism. As you can imagine, that means she covers a lot of food stories. Hey, Amanda! 

Amanda Mull: Hi, Dan!

Dan Pashman: And coming to us live from Chicago, we have Dennis Lee, a staff writer at The Takeout and creator of the substack Food Is Stupid. Hey, Dennis. 

Dennis Lee: Good morning.

Dan Pashman: Real quick, I would like to just share with listeners a little bit about each of your respective lines of work. Dennis, what is Food Is Stupid? 

Dennis Lee: Food Is Stupid is my personal substack. I'll do, like, cooking experiments on it. People like it when I do things like deep fry entire fresh truffles and then dip them into ketchup because why not?

[LAUGHING]

Dennis Lee: Like I entertain my most childish impulses that way and I'll do things like that.

Dan Pashman: Got it. And Amanda, what have been some of your favorite food stories to cover in recent years? 

Amanda Mull: God, there's so many.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: I wrote something a while back about why or why not people should eat three meals a day and that was sort of like a mid pandemic thing about like how people's eating habits had changed as their scheduling circumstances had changed. I've written some fun stuff about how breakfast is a false concept and you should eat whatever you want in the morning. 

Dan Pashman: But I think that both of you are people who are not afraid to question conventional wisdom around food. Is that fair to say?

Dennis Lee: Absolutely.

Amanda Mull: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Pashman: Okay, whether it means deep frying truffles or explaining why you can eat anything you want for breakfast and might not actually need three meals a day, you know, there are no sacred cows in this group. So that's why I think that you're both perfect folks to help us kick off this salad spinner concept. Now, I've asked each of you to bring two stories to share. So let's talk about those first and then later we can do a lightning round. I got something I want to talk about, but let's go ahead and jump in.

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT]

Dan Pashman: So Amanda, let's start with you. You recently wrote a story about Instant Pot. The extremely popular, very successful Instant Pot. What's going on with Instant Pot?

Amanda Mull: Well, Instant Pot went bankrupt. Or to be more accurate, Instant Brands went bankrupt. Its most popular, most famous product is the Instant Pot, as you would guess from the name. The private equity company that owns the brand has said that their debts are unsustainable and they're not selling enough Instant Pots. 

Dan Pashman: And to remind people, there was a period a few years ago where it's like, were you even alive if you didn't have an Instant Pot? What's an Instant Pot? 

Amanda Mull: The Instant Pot is an electric countertop multi-cooker. The most popular function that it does is pressure cook, which can be a little bit intimidating to do on the stove, if you're not real good at it. So what they did is sort of take the stovetop pressure cooker, turn it into an appliance that you plug into a wall that is a little bit more predictable, a little bit less cantankerous ...

Dan Pashman: A little bit less likely to have the top blow off. 

Amanda Mull: Yes, it doesn't explode as often.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: That's a good selling point. [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: Right, right. Absolutely. So, and you know, pressure cooking at home is something that is popular in other parts of the world, but in the United States, it has never really taken off. So this provided people with a way to do something that they had not done before.

Dan Pashman: I mean, I remember when it — literally, there were whole cookbooks just about what to do with your Instant Pot. What happened? 

Amanda Mull: Well, everybody who wanted an Instant Pot bought one. 

[LAUGHING]

Dennis Lee: I got one too and I was not really prepared to figure out how to use it. And it's ...

Dan Pashman: So what we'll come back to you Amanda, but Dennis, tell us about your experience with an Instant Pot.

Dennis Lee: Okay. So my fiancee got it for me for Christmas, I think. And then I realized suddenly I had no idea what I was doing with it. Pressure cooking is like a specific type of cooking. It's not just like ... 

Dan Pashman: Right. Like the recipes are written specifically for a pressure cooker. 

Dennis Lee: Right. 

Dan Pashman: You need to use it differently.

Dennis Lee: Right, exactly. And so I improvise a lot when I'm cooking and it's one of those things you can't just put in something for a few minutes and then check and then do it again or like keep cooking.

Dan Pashman: Right, you kind of got to go in with a plan.

Dennis Lee: Right, and you have to have at least like the ballpark amount of time to put something in. So if you put something in for too long, it turns into baby food. And if you put it in for too little, there's like a buildup time that it takes to get back to temperature. So it's not like you can just, you know, pop something back in the oven. You have to get this thing to come back up to temp.

Dan Pashman: Amanda, what about you? What's been your experience with the Instant Pot? 

Amanda Mull: I have an Instant Pot. I don't think I've ever used it. [LAUGHS] You know, I cook, I cook for one person, sometimes two people. So it's not really the gadget for me. The big selling point is you can just sort of set it and forget it.

Dan Pashman: Which was the crock pot promise for, you know, pre-Instant Pot. 

Amanda Mull: Right, right. 

Dan Pashman: At peak Instant Pot, my mom bought me an Instant Pot as a gift and it is still in the box in the garage. I never took it out. Yeah, for me, I just feel like, first of all, you kind of hit on this, Dennis, like I'm kind of a tinkerer in the kitchen. I don't like the idea of putting everything — like, set it and forget it [Dennis Lee: Right.] is not appealing to me. 

Dennis Lee: Oh. 

Dan Pashman: I want to be able to — like, what's the opposite of that? I want to set it and then check on it obsessively. So one problem was that everyone who wanted one got one, so they weren't selling any more new ones. It sounds like another problem might have been that some of the people who got them, like the three of us, never used them or didn't use them very much after all.

Amanda Mull: Right. They sort of hit market saturation very quickly because that's what happens with a viral product. Like a lot of people who are at all interested in the value proposition, go ahead and buy one. And what they made was a very, very durable, physical product that does a physical thing. So you don't have the sort of natural upgrade cycle that you do with, like, an iPhone or something like that. The larger problem I think though, is not with the device itself, but with what happened to it on like a corporate level, which happens to all kinds of products. Which is that a private equity company said, this is selling, people like this. Why don't we see if we can spin off more gadgets? So there was like an Instant Stand Mixer and an Instant Air Purifier. And all of these things that didn't make any sense, didn't have any connection to the Instant Pot. And in order to do this, they loaded the company with debt and they sort of ignored the fact that like they had a pretty good idea that that appealed to some people in order to try to spread like the halo of that Instant Pot love to all of these other random products. 

Dan Pashman: Interesting. So they basically — they were trying to transition from a product to a brand.

Amanda Mull: Yes. 

Dan Pashman: And in doing that, they weren't able to come up with any other products under this new brand that anybody wanted. 

Amanda Mull: Right. It's so hard to come up with just one good idea in retail and they had like a pretty good idea. And I think that they didn't understand why that idea was good or that they needed white space. 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] 

Amanda Mull: Like how are they going to try to outperform KitchenAid for the stand mixer market? It costs the same. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Amanda Mull: It's not prettier. So like, what are you doing there? What's the idea? They didn't appear to have a second good idea.

Dan Pashman: So what's going to happen to Instant Pot? Are they — bankruptcy doesn't always mean the end. What's next for this product? 

Amanda Mull: The company is continuing to operate and intends to continue to operate and they are going to get their debt restructured and hopefully offload some of the money that they spent trying to make a worse expensive stand mixer. 

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: And hopefully spend their money more wisely in the future. So I think that, like, the Instant Pot is going to keep trucking along, but I think, hopefully, some people in some executive suites in this private equity company learned a lesson or two. 

Dan Pashman: All right. So let's see what story we have up next time to spin the salad spinner. 

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT] 

Dan Pashman: Dennis, your turn.

Dennis Lee: Okay.

Dan Pashman: You recently wrote and talked about the Thai Burger King cheeseburger. First of all, what is the Thai Burger King cheeseburger? 

Dennis Lee: Okay, this is one of my favorite things in terms of fast food news. I — what happened was in Thailand, Burger King released this novel sandwich. These companies come out with these, like, stunty sandwiches and stuff all the time, but this one ...

Dan Pashman: Sure, we all remember the Double Down. 

Dennis Lee: Right, the Double Down, which I actually got to go to KFC's headquarters to to preview it. And …

Dan Pashman: Wow, you're like David Pogue is to the iPhone [DENNIS LEE LAUGHS] as you are to ... [LAUGHS] fast food stunt foods.  [LAUGHS] 

Dennis Lee: Dude, my body ... I feel like my body has just been sacrificed in all the wrong ways. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dennis Lee: Like I'm — oh, man. But in Thailand, this is incredible. They took a sandwich — so it's a bun with 20 slices of processed cheese. There's nothing else in it. No condiments …

Dan Pashman: So it's a cheeseburger without the burger. 

Dennis Lee: Without anything. It's just cheese. So, it's not even a burger. 

Dan Pashman: No ketchup, no mustard, no pickle, no nothing. 

Dennis Lee: Yeah, nothing on it. So it's just a stack of 20 slices of cheese. And I didn't believe that it was real. So obviously, you know, you go digging around Twitter, on Reddit, on Facebook, just to see if there's some documentation of it. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Dennis Lee: And I started seeing pictures of it. And just imagine you guys biting into a stack of American cheese, 20 slices tall. I don't think the human brain can comprehend [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] that experience until you actually try it. So I tried it. 

Dan Pashman: Wait, you went to Thailand? 

Dennis Lee: No, I went to Burger King in my neighborhood. And so there's one Burger King in my — in Chicago that's like got higher ratings than the other one, cause you know ... 

Dan Pashman: Okay. [LAUGHS] Right.

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] I can attest that this one is the best one I've ever been to. It's always super clean. The employees are super nice. And I went to the counter and I didn't know how to approach this, but I was like, “Hey man, so I got like a real weird request for you. Can you make me a Whopper with nothing in it, but 20 slices of cheese?” And then like ... 

[LAUGHING]

Dennis Lee: And you know, this kid, his face — there were gears going in the back of his head.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] I think I might have to call the manager.

Dennis Lee: Yeah. Right. So he was standing there thinking about it. 

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: How do I put this in the computer? 

Dan Pashman: Right, right, right. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dennis Lee: So I ended up explaining to him, like I saw it on the internet. And the kid looked at me for a second, started smiling, and as soon as he started smiling, I knew I had something. And he ... 

Dan Pashman: Right ... 

Dennis Lee: He gave me the, you know, hold on one second finger up in the air. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Dennis Lee: And then went to the back, and chatted with the line cook in the back, and I hear this real animated back and forth, and I hear Spanish. And my Spanish is pretty good, but it's real loud in there. And all I heard was veinte, like 20.

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: A relevant question you should be asking in that moment.

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Dennis Lee: Right. So he comes up to the front and he goes, “Yeah, we can do that for you.” And so ... 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] 

Dennis Lee: It was incredible to watch. Just like, she's got this huge chunk of American cheese and she's just slapping it on this, uh, Whopper bun. When we brought it home, we tried it. This is me and my fiance and this is for my newsletter. I have never seen anything like it. It was hilarious. Like this thing was just melt — like a melted mound of plastic. 

[LAUGHING]

Dennis Lee: It was shiny. It like reflected in your face. Like you could probably ... 

[LAUGHING] 

Dennis Lee: You could probably see a reflection in it. And we both took bites of it right in the middle where the pile of cheese was the tallest. And the thing it fused together from kind of like the residual heat of the toasted bun. And the one thing I didn't think about before I bit it was the amount of salt in American cheese. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Dennis Lee: And my mouth started burning, like right away. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] 

Dennis Lee: My eyes just started bulging out of my skull and I was like, oh my God. I finished the mouthful and just couldn't do another one. And I'm like ... 

Dan Pashman: Huh.

Dennis Lee: You know, Burger King’s selling this to all of Thailand?

Dan Pashman: Question, Dennis. You said that the cheese had kind of all melted and congealed into one hunk. One of the things that I've gleaned from seeing it online is that it seems like different versions have different levels of meltiness. 

Dennis Lee: Yeah. So I think since, you know, there weren't any other orders going on, the employee was able to put the cheese on right after the bun was toasted. So the bun was still hot. 

Dan Pashman: American cheese, generally speaking, has been engineered for maximum meltability. I mean, it is the first cheese I want on my burger and probably one of our country's greatest contributions to world culture. 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: But still, as much as I love cheese and I love American cheese, I don't know that I want nothing but 20 slices of it.

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] 

Amanda Mull: I'm just imagining someone like taking a block of like deli American cheese that hasn't been sliced yet and just like biting into it, like an apple. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: I can tell you that according to The New York Times, this cheeseburger, which is called "The Real Cheeseburger" [DENNIS LEE LAUGHS] was originally described as a limited time offer and was only going to be on the menu for a little while. But I was — I guess, popular enough that that time was extended. 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] That’s not right. That's not right at all. 

[LAUGHING]

Amanda Mull: What are we doing to the people of Thailand?

Dan Pashman: Right. 

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: Amanda, would you try this? Like if you were in Thailand, you had all the glories of Thai cuisine available to you, would you give up one of those meals to try this?

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] 

Amanda Mull: I don't know. I — you know, something inside of me, like as a journalist is like, yeah, try the stupid thing. 

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: Eat the stupid thing so you can tell the internet what it's about.

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: So maybe? Very, very, very much maybe. 

[LAUGHING]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: All right, well, listen, coming up, Amanda and Dennis dish out more food news, 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 and as I mentioned, if you follow me on Instagram, you get behind the scenes content, you get food rants and opinions, you get to find out what I'm cooking and what I'm eating and where I'm going, and you sometimes get to vote in polls that determine the fate of this very podcast. So do it. Follow me on Instagram, @TheSporkful. I recently posted a video from the Sfoglini factory, got to watch the castcatelli getting produced there. I shared my thoughts on why a club sandwich must be a double decker. There's a lot more there. Follow me, I’m @TheSporkful. And another great way to keep in touch: subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll send you one email every wee that includes what the whole Sporkful team is reading and eating. Plus, being on our mailing list automatically enters you into all of our prize giveaways. So sign up now at sporkful.com/newsletter to sign up now. Thanks. 

Dan Pashman: All right, back to the show. And I'm here today with Amanda Mull, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Dennis Lee, staff writer at The Takeout, for something we're calling The Salad Spinner. Time to spin it again. 

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT] 

Dan Pashman: All right, Amanda, it's landed on you. I understand you brought another story for us. This one about artificial sweeteners. 

Amanda Mull: Yes. Aspartame, a key ingredient in Diet Coke and many, many other drinks and food products is in the news right now. The WHO recently announced that it has changed the categorization of aspartame to possibly carcinogenic, which sounds terrifying. But what that means is like a little bit less terrifying. But I think it's really interesting that over time, there has been this like ongoing sort of panic about fake sweeteners and about aspartame in particular that has never really sort of panned out. But this change in designation by the WHO has given the debate a little bit of new life for really no reason when you look at the particulars.

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: So I got a few questions. First of all, what does it mean to say that it's possibly a carcinogen? I mean, that feels very mushy.

Amanda Mull: Right. It absolutely is very mushy. What it means is basically nothing. There's a group within the WHO that looks at the potential to cause cancer of lots of things in daily life, and it has four categorizations. It starts with cancerous, which means they're pretty sure that it will increase your risk of some type of cancer. There is probably carcinogenic, which means they are fairly sure that this thing or substance or whatever may increase your risk of cancer to some extent. Then there's possibly carcinogenic, which is what we're dealing with right now, which means they don't really know. They cannot say that it does. They cannot rule out that it does. And then there's uncategorized, which is basically who knows?

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Amanda Mull: We'll deal with this later. It is really, really hard to parse out causation. So you get lots of sort of correlative things. 

Dan Pashman: Right. Cause over the course of days and weeks and months and years, we eat so many different things and we breathe in so many different things and we touch so many different things. And so if you end up getting cancer, it's very hard to isolate one thing and be like, that thing gave you cancer.

Amanda Mull: Right. And what these categorizations don't deal with at all, which a lot of people don't realize, is they don't deal at all with the level of risk they're flagging. So if the WHO thinks that aspartame, for instance, could potentially cause a one or two percent increase in risk for a very survivable, sort of relatively mild type of cancer, then it goes in the same category as the level of surety that something else, a pesticide or something, might cause a tenfold increase in risk for a very deadly cancer. You're not looking at scale of risk at all. You're looking at how sure the WHO feels about the evidence that they have. So in this case, they're not making any particular statement about how dangerous aspartame is. And they're not making any particular statement about how sure they are that aspartame might be dangerous in some capacity at all.

Dan Pashman: And was there some new study or new information that came out that led to this change in designation? 

Amanda Mull: As far as I know, not really. There's been lots and lots of studies about this over the years. Aspartame has been around for decades. It's not really clear why the WHO chose to do this right now. 

Dan Pashman: So there's been a lot of studies on aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. And generally speaking, what have they found? 

Amanda Mull: They have found that in order to put yourself at any type of increased health risk that we can identify, that somebody would have to drink between 12 and 36 servings of diet soda per day for an extended period of time. 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: That's my frustration with so much health news and reporting, which is, you know, they do a study and they say, well, this or that increases this or that risk. But in order to do that, they had to give the people in the study so much more of the thing than any normal person would ever have. 

Amanda Mull: And a lot of times it's not even done in people. It's done in rodents. 

Dan Pashman: When a group like the World Health Organization makes an announcement like this and it captures a bunch of headlines that just say aspartame, possibly carcinogenic, are they doing more, more harm or more good when they put something like this?

Amanda Mull: Yeah, I think ultimately this ends up being harmful. Especially, if it's like something that an organization or a public health body does repeatedly. In communicating this stuff to the public — and the media is absolutely complicit in this, because if the story is about something being dangerous or helpful, click, like crazy. So you have to be really careful about how you communicate this information to the public. And I think that like a lot of public health people, a lot of health reporters have begged the WHO over the years to change how they communicate this stuff on cancer specifically. Because if you get a respected world health body going, this is possibly carcinogenic. And then it doesn't get taken off the market. It doesn't get removed from food or from our daily lives because there's no reason for it to be removed. People will read that headline or read like a couple of lines about that press release and go, there is some sort of conspiracy to harm everybody's health. And the WHO has, I think, a really important responsibility to like speak in plain language to people.

Dan Pashman: Agreed. Let's spin the Salad Spinner! 

[SALAD SPINNER SOUND EFFECT] 

Dan Pashman: All right, Dennis, you're up. What do you got for us?

Dennis Lee: Okay. So, you guys know the phrase or term "Taco Tuesday", right? 

Dan Pashman: Of course. It's Tuesday when you eat tacos.

Dennis Lee: Yes, exactly. So, have you guys ever been to Taco John's? It's a fast food chain that's sort of similar to Taco Bell.

Dan Pashman: No, I haven’t been there.

Dennis Lee: They used to own a trademark for "Taco Tuesday", which I thought was pretty messed up. But they're small. They're not a very big company and people have been mad at them for years for owning the term "Taco Tuesday". They had a trademark. And so Taco Bell has been in a feud with them for years to get it away from them and Taco Bell just swung their legal fund bat at them and were just like, you know what, we got the money. We will crush you. So "Taco Tuesday" has now been released as I guess into the public domain for now.

Dan Pashman: Right. So that's my question. Is it that Taco Bell now owns the trademark on Taco Tuesday or nobody owns it? 

Dennis Lee: I think nobody owns it right now. 

Dan Pashman: Right. I'm looking here. Yeah. Right.“Taco John's has announced that it's ending its fight in defending the phrase 'Taco Tuesday' and will abandon the trademark.” So that means that nobody will own it. Taco Bell claims the phrase should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat, and celebrate tacos. 

Dennis Lee: Yeah, and so I have mixed feelings about this whole thing because Taco Bell — they're huge. They're just punching down and that's just like — that doesn't make me feel good watching that happen. It's just like, at this point, being mean in my mind and just being like, well, oh, well, we got all this money, so we'll be jerks and kind of like take it away from you, but we'll call it for the name of the greater good. But really I think they were just flexing. And what's a sort of a shame is Taco Bell is like one of my favorite fast food restaurants on the face of this planet. I may or may not have ordered it at 10 o'clock last night. 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Dennis Lee: And ... [LAUGHS] so I don't like seeing people being mean to each other. And I think essentially this was just like a mean way to take away something that, you know, a smaller fast food chain had. 

Dan Pashman: A funny postscript to this story. Taco John's owned — until it abandoned it, owned the right to use the "Taco Tuesday" name in commerce in every state except New Jersey, where it is still owned by Gregory's restaurant and bar in Summers Point, New Jersey. 

Dennis Lee: Oh.

[LAUGHING]

Amanda Mull: Good for them!

Dan Pashman: And apparently Gregory is not given up his trademark quite yet. So Taco Bell may soon be running Taco Tuesday promotions everywhere but New Jersey. [LAUGHS] 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: All right, as if the salad spinner was not already whirring away quickly enough, we're about to speed it up for the lightning round. 

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT] 

Dan Pashman: All right, I got one that I want to throw at both of you and get your takes. So Aubrey Plaza recently appeared in an ad for milk. It was like a satirical ad for a fake product called wood milk, as if like you were going to milk a tree and milk was going to come out of it. And it was sort of making fun of almond milk, soy milk, oat milk, all of the milks being sold out there that don't actually come from cows. And now, according to Insider, social media users are slamming celebrities like Aubrey Plaza and Emma Roberts for participating in what some are calling cow milk propaganda [DENNIS LEE LAUGHS] after starring in recent campaigns led by the same milk industry front group that created the "Got Milk?" ads and turned milk mustaches into a cultural phenomenon. So, Amanda, you first. What's your take on this ad campaign? 

Amanda Mull: I think all advertising is propaganda. Nobody should be looking to advertising for like objective information about it. 

Dan Pashman: Right, right. [LAUGHS] 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: But I think there's other grounds on which to criticize this ad campaign, which is that it's corny. It's not very inventive. It seems a little bit defensive. They can do better. Aubrey Plaza can do better.

Dan Pashman: Okay, Dennis, what's your take?

Dennis Lee: I agree. I think they were just trying to — the "Got Milk?" people — I think they were just trying to be pretty edgy and irreverent and try to match the tone of things that they saw that they thought were irreverent. Maybe I'm jaded, but I would have just ignored the whole thing. But people were real mad at Aubrey Plaza for participating in it.

Amanda Mull: I agree with Dennis that this seems like not something worth getting mad about. It was an ad that I don't think a lot of people would have seen otherwise. I think it's always a good policy before you get mad, before you post ask, "Am I just giving this more oxygen? Is this thing that I'm mad at [DENNIS LEE LAUGHS] will it go away faster if I just [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] do something else with my time?". And usually the answer is yes. 

MUSIC

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT] 

Dan Pashman: Dennis, we're going to keep romping through the world of weird and wacky quick hit food stories. Subway's new deli slicers have been in the news. What's going on with that?

Dennis Lee: So Subway is making a big deal of now instead of getting pre sliced meat like they used to, they all have deli slicers on site now and they're using that as kind of a selling point. We're getting fresher, you know, like our food doesn't suck or as much. You can tell how I feel about this. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Dennis Lee: But it's really making me wonder whether or not for you guys if that Is a selling point. Is that really going to make my sandwich better? And I went to go try some of the new ones, you know, after they started slicing them and I could not tell the difference.

Dan Pashman: Amanda, what are your thoughts? 

Amanda Mull: This immediately reminds me of the salt grinder trend [DENNIS LEE LAUGHS] where, like, we figured out as a people that it's good to grind pepper fresh, that you lose something once you grind it and it sits around. And like that chemical process just does not happen the same way with salt. There's no such thing as fresh salt.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Amanda Mull: So I — in my mind, my immediate instinct is that like, there is no freshness difference between when the stuff is sliced, like it's aging the same way, no matter what. Maybe there's like an oxidation concern or something like that? But if you're like stacking it in a, you know, stack of deli meat and sealing it and transporting it, which I'm sure is what Subway was doing in order to make that stuff last as long as possible, I just don't think that there's a difference. It's like grinding salt fresh, who cares? It's a marketing thing.

Dennis Lee: Right. And there's one thing that I wanted to add real quick about it is that a lot of the spots that you can get food poisoning from, from like a grocery store, is from the deli slicer. So I'm basically just waiting for the time you hear of a Listeria outbreak [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] and then they trace it back to Subway. Just cause it's hard to clean those things. I used to have to operate one for my restaurant job. And I mean, there's lots of nooks and crannies that you just like — your your towel will barely get into.

Dan Pashman: I will say, I mean, I'll take your word for it, Dennis, that in the case of Subway you couldn't tell the difference. But I do think that speaking more generally, it should be better. Because when you have one whole hunk of meat, less of it is exposed to the air. And as it's exposed to the air, the more it's going to dry out. Now, of course, I'm sure that Subway's deli meats have plenty of things in them that prevent them from drying out. In general, though, it is a difference. It's a famous story in the Pashman family house. We were invited to a family of friends house for Thanksgiving one year, and the person at this other house, she cooked the turkey like that morning of Thanksgiving and they carved the entire — we arrived and the turkey was carved and we didn't eat for like two more hours. 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: And the turkey was just sitting out carved. And I've never encountered a drier turkey in my life. 

Dennis Lee: [LAUGHS] 

Amanda Mull: Yeah, that seems like a terrible idea.

Dan Pashman: So, we did not go back to that family's house for Thanksgiving. And to this day, probably, we are now probably 35 years since that happened and my mom will still be like, just don't carve that turkey too early. You remember what happened! [LAUGHING]

Dennis Lee: Do they know how you feel about that day? Did you bring it up ever in conversation?

Dan Pashman: No. No, we just stopped talking to them. 

Dennis Lee: Like, all together? That's cold. That's cold. 

Dan Pashman: No, no, not all together, but like, we didn't go back for Thanksgiving, I'll tell you that. You know, that's for sure. And if you — I promise you, if I got my mom on the phone right now and said their name, that would be the first thing she would say.

[LAUGHING] 

Amanda Mull: You never want your food to become family lore in that way.

[LAUGHING] 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: All right, one more before we wrap up. One more spin of the salad spinner. 

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT] 

Dan Pashman: Amanda. You're up. 

Amanda Mull: Okay, so there was this story in Grub Street recently that was about how all of these powerful women in politics and Hollywood had decided, sort of independently of each other, but all at the same time sort of decided that it would be nice to make jam. Some of them are doing it as a job, some of them are doing it as just like a side hustle or a hobby, but there is a lot of jam being made by people who like worked in the White House or who were in movies or worked in high powered PR jobs.

Dennis Lee: Huh. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, what's the Diane Keaton movie where she moves to Vermont? 

Amanda Mull: Oh, yeah. It's like a Nancy Meyers movie.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, Baby Boom. 

Amanda Mull: Oh, yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Diane Keaton stars as like a high powered corporate executive and then a 14-month-old baby is — when a distant relative dies, a 14-month-old baby is left to her and she ends up moving to Vermont and making jam and then using her business acumen to turn that into a massive business success. 

Dennis Lee: That's how Smuckers was born. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: So, but like, are we supposed to be excited about all this jam, Amanda? 

Amanda Mull: You know, it's very expensive jam. So if you're the type of person who like goes to specialty shops and buys expensive jam, you now have an expensive jam that you can serve to guests with like a fun little anecdote about it. You know, I think it is more just a sort of meant to be commentary on how unfulfilling it is to work in politics, primarily.

[LAUGHING] 

[SALAD SPINNER EFFECT]

Dan Pashman: All right, real quick, final bonus addition to the lightning round. Krispy Kreme has released a candy surprise donut filled with Mini M&M's. What's your take, Amanda? 

Amanda Mull: Awful. Too much sugar. I don't like sweets that much. This makes me feel like I'm going to have heartburn just thinking about it.

Dan Pashman: Okay. [LAUGHS] 

Amanda Mull: I need more moderation.

Dan Pashman: All right, Dennis?

Dennis Lee: I saw a picture of this thing. I get a lot of PR emails and I am perplexed as to how they stuffed this thing with the M&M's. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHING] Because it's like — it looks like a Boston cream donut or like one of those filled donuts, but it's got nothing but loose M&M's on the inside.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Dennis Lee: Like how do you do that? And no, I won't be eating one, but I bet the fun thing is if you pick one up, it'll rattle.

[LAUGHING]

Amanda Mull: I wonder if it has like a weight to it.

Dennis Lee: Yeah, probably.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, I bet it does. It probably sags in the middle. I will say, as someone who frequently orders Dairy Queen blizzards or friendlies frenzies or whatever the variation on those ice cream and candy desserts, I will often get vanilla with extra, extra, extra, extra, extra M&M's. 

Dennis Lee: Huh. 

Dan Pashman: I tell them, look money is no object. [AMANDA MULL LAUGHS] I want 50% M&M's. So this in theory sounds great to me except for the fact that it's mini M& M's, which are an absolute disgrace. 

Dennis Lee: What? 

Dan Pashman: Too much hard candy shell in relation to chocolatey interior.

Dennis Lee: Oh no. 

Dan Pashman: Only the canonical original size of M&M's is acceptable, so I will not be trying this treat from Krispy Kreme. Thank you very much.

Dennis Lee: I'll fight you on the M&M, mini M&M thing. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Dennis Lee: That ...

Dan Pashman: It's just candy shell. There's not enough chocolate in relation, ratios are off. 

Dennis Lee: But the chocolate sucks. 

Dan Pashman: I mean, so does the candy shell probably. I'm mostly eating mass produced chocolates for texture. 

Dennis Lee: Ah. 

Dan Pashman: Not for chocolate quality. I want to be able to pierce through that candy shell with my teeth and land on dense milk chocolate. I want to have that textural contrast. And in the Mini M&M's, you do not have textural contrast. You pretty much only get candy shell.

Dennis Lee: I disagree, but we'll have to have this as a whole episode. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: All right. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: All right. Dennis Lee from The Takeout and the sub stack newsletter, Food is Stupid. That's at foodisstupid.substack.com. And Amanda Mull from The Atlantic. You can follow her @Amanda Mull on social media. Thank you very much to both of you. 

Dennis Lee: Thanks for having me.

Amanda Mull: Thank you so much.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, I visit my town’s Pickle Festival and dig into the story of the Pickle King of Greenlawn. While you’re waiting for that one, check out last week’s show with queer indigenous poet Tommy Pico, who is creating his own food culture. That’s out now.