S1E2 - Harold McGee & Flavor Illusions - MAD Talks

Is flavor real, do you think? Or is it like a sort of a personal illusion? Well, it is certainly something that happens in your brain. If you want to call something that's not tangible like that an illusion, then it would be a shared illusion. We're all experiencing something. It's not the same thing, but there's a shared element. And so we can either agree that something is really delicious, or we can have an argument about whether or not it is. Which we often do. Yes, yes, exactly. Welcome. I'm Melina Shannon-DiPietro, the Executive Director of MAD. This is our new podcast, MAD Talks. For our first season, our founder, René Redzepi, who is also the chef and owner of Restaurant Noma, sits down each week with an iconic speaker from our signature event, MAD Symposium. Together, they talk about food, creativity, and the future we hope to build. In this episode, René speaks with Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, the one book I can pretty much guarantee every chef in the world has on their shelf. Ha ha ha! Mr. McGee! Hello, René! How are you? I'm well, thanks. How about you? I'm good. We're here in freezing cold Winnigan. Harold, if you can step back a little bit, because it's almost 40 years, or is it 40 years since you did your first book on food and cooking? And it's an evergreen. It's on all shelves around the world. It's one of the indispensable 10 books you need to have if you enjoy food the slightest, and certainly if you're a professional cook. But your path was different. You didn't always end up in food. So can you tell us a little bit what happened? Why did you fall in love with food? Well, I came upon the possibility of writing a book about the science of food and cooking, basically because I couldn't get a job teaching poetry, which is what I really wanted to do. So it's a peculiar set of circumstances. I studied science as an undergraduate. I decided I loved it, but I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. So I switched and studied literature to help me understand why I was so interested in science. Then I wanted to teach poetry. I wrote a dissertation about the poet John Keats, who was very fond of foods and aromas and sensory experience. But then I couldn't get a job teaching. So I had to find something else to do. And my mentors at the university said, you know, you have the science in your background. You should do something with that. And long story short, I had friends who were very interested in food and in wine, and I hung out with them and they would ask questions. And at some point I thought, maybe there are answers to those questions. And I went to the library and and discovered the food science literature and decided, ah, okay, maybe to tide myself over, I can write a book that translates food science into a language that people who love food would understand and appreciate. I never looked back because that turned out to be such a wonderful accidental path to take that I've stayed on it. Unbelievable story. It's funny you mentioned a library because I was speaking to Kevin in the fermentation lab. And I said, Hey, I'm speaking to Harold. And he's like stops, you know, it's like, Harold is like the library of Alexandria. He has all the information in the world on food. So you today have become a library. And you started in a library. But you are the main library today for professionals. Why was flavor developed in humans, do you think? Isn't that the exact reason why we developed flavor to distinguish poisonous or not? Well, yes. And in fact, we, we really didn't develop it or it didn't develop in us. It's been present in living organisms from, you know, the, the first single cells, which needed to figure out in their environment, where is something useful to me? And what direction is it? And I'll head over there and pick it up. Or conversely, if there's something toxic, how can I avoid that? How can I detect it and avoid it, move away from it? So it's something that is very much, not just in our genes, but in the, the very beginnings of life itself. This thing about things that taste amazing. And how individual and personal is that as a spoken as a scientist? As someone who reads the scientific literature, because I myself am not a scientist, but I, but I, it seems to me that that body of knowledge is really critical for understanding who we are and, and why we are the way we are. Our reaction to flavors, positive or negative, depends largely on our experience. If we've had a good experience with that flavor before, then it's likely to produce positive emotions and liking and so on. And if we've, in the past, I've gotten sick after eating particular dishes, and it's a long time before I can even look at or think about those dishes, because our bodies are taking their cues from, from experience. And then if you haven't actually experienced that flavor before, then there's a combination of curiosity and wariness. You know, what is this? And is this good or not so good? And it's, it's interesting. Maybe I'll try another little bit. But, yeah, funny, a funny story about this thing about having bad experiences with food. I think we all have experience once in our life to eat something we love and it makes us sick. And my daughter, a few months ago, she ate almost a kilo of marzipan. And then, of course, she threw up and now she can't. She can't, I don't think she'll ever eat marzipan in her life again. But, you know, if we go back to, at a time where humans were walking the Great Plains and we were trying to figure out what's edible and not. And today we eat for pleasure, right? It's, or do we? You know, what is flavor in the modern context, do you think? I think we do eat for flavor these days, but the flavors that are available to us have been curated by other people. So if we think of ourselves in early human history, discovering what it is in nature that is edible, or discovering how we can take not so edible things and make them edible by cooking. That was a very different situation. Nowadays, all those decisions and discoveries mostly have been made for us, or at least they have been purportedly made for us. And so we're told what to like and we're, the range of possibilities for us is limited by culture. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And today, the culture of eating is particularly in the West. It's so much based on convenience. It's, you know, a lot of food that's already been pre-made or made all the way to us. And I guess it kind of trains our palate, palates to kind of figure out what's good food. And then that in itself is a problem, at least I think, to health and just the idea. I think we often joke here at the restaurant sometimes in vegetarian season, we have a dish on with carrots. And we tell, well, we might have to train people to eat carrots because, you know, we actually, do we eat fresh produce regularly enough to distinguish a good carrot to a not so good one and a truly exceptional one? But we do that with a potato chip. Instantly, we know this is a great potato chip. And this is a bad one. And so what do you think when it comes to this type of flavor? Are we going, are we exploring flavor in the right way when you look at it from your perspective, with your vast knowledge of where food has been going over the last 40, 50 years? I have to admit that I don't really think prescriptively. I just know what it is that I like to do and what it is that I like to learn about and write about and share with other people. And along those lines, it just seems to me that, you know, we we all have a limited amount of time on this planet, something that's becoming more and more front of mind as I get older. Why limit our experience unnecessarily there? There are. First of all, there's so much pleasure to be gained from the experience of eating, which is a biological necessity. Why limit ourselves to what it is that corporations want to sell us when there are so many other things to to explore? So and it does seem to me again from my experience, I can't I don't have studies to back this up. But my sense is that the more diversity we experience in our foods, the more pleasure overall we get from eating. So if we have a favorite potato chip and we know what's good and what's not so good from our perspective, and we just go for that every time, we're we're not experiencing the world. We're experiencing one product from one corporation that happens to hit our buttons. But we've got lots of other buttons and we can cultivate them and and enjoy other things. Yeah, it's funny this thing. I totally agree with you. You know, we're here limited time. Let's get the most of it. And one way is to actually eat something delicious, right? Or look at art, experience culture. But for some reason, using our senses is everything we got. That's how we make meaning and sense of the world is how we see and experience. But the sense of tasting has always been undervalued and seen as well, if you celebrate it too much, you're sort of an insensitive bourgeois. You know, whereas if you love jazz music and listen to it all the time, you're like an intellectual. And it always bothered me, you know, when when it comes down to food, because I agree with what you say. But sometimes if I tell people, people say, well, you know, come on, you don't need this. You don't need it in your life or and we always get into this discussion. Well, what's truly necessary then? Do we need a pillow to sleep? No, we don't. But we need quite a lot of things to feel alive and actually experience beauty. But now that we talk about experiencing something beautiful through deliciousness, can you name me a few times when or if you close your eyes and think back, what's the first memory that comes to you where you remember deliciousness opened up something? Flavor open up a new avenue for you. I'll tell you what mine is, if I can start it. Mine is in Macedonia, the former in the former Yugoslavia. All the grownups, they are working the fields, me and my cousin Nasuf, who also works at the restaurant today, and my brother. We are eating so many wild blueberries on the wild blueberry bushes around the fields. And that's one of my first true where I'm like, wow, you know, I was so happy. And actually, it makes me happy thinking of it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which reminds me of similar sorts of experiences when I was a little older, so maybe seven or eight years old. But as you mentioned it, the very first time I can remember paying attention to how much pleasure I was getting from the act of eating was probably having my first taste of coffee ice cream. When I was maybe three years old or so, I'm basing that on where it happened because my family moved around a lot. But I do remember it may be a combination, and I think this is common with flavor experiences, a combination of the flavor itself and the circumstances. So I remember my parents taking me in the car after dinner to get ice cream, which was, I didn't know you could do that. And I had never tasted anything like coffee ice cream, which, and you know, we think of coffee as being a flavor that you really have to get used to. Oh, yes. But this, in ice cream, it was diluted enough and sweetened enough and kind of fattened up enough that I just loved it. And so that's probably my earliest vivid memory of food of any kind. I'm writing here on my notes, coffee ice cream. Then I will know what to make for you next time you come to Noma. I will definitely try to make a coffee ice cream, although coffee has probably changed since you were three years old to today. But it's funny you mentioned coffee because I have a question on that in my notes. When we talk about flavor, and two of my things that are indispensable in my life are actually coffee and chocolate. But those are bitter flavors that somehow, I guess, signals poison historically when things are truly bitter and you reject it at first. And so one of the questions is, do we know why some of the most interesting flavors to us as adults are some of the ones we struggle with first? And how long does it even take to start a new habit or be accustomed to something new? Yeah, no, those are great questions. And I think we come up against the diversity of human beings as opposed to diversity of foodstuffs. People are different and they respond in different ways. And a story that I can tell about how I came to like something probably won't work for anybody else. Or people will have their own ways of coming to enjoy what for a child are challenging flavors like bitterness, like pungency, the pungency of chilies and that kind of thing. I think a reflection of the fact that our sensory systems, the way that we experience the physical and chemical world in a primary way, are very flexible on the one hand. And the way we respond to those inputs depends so much on our own personal experience. So is it real? Is flavor real, do you think? Or is it like a sort of a personal illusion? Or is it like real from like this is what happens in your brain? It's actually a real thing. Well, it is certainly something that happens in your brain. And people can use, you know, MRI machines to actually watch it happen in people as they eat things. But it's also you could think of it as kind of a because it's not a physical thing. It's if you want to call something that's not tangible like that an illusion, then it would be a shared illusion. We're all experiencing something up here. It's not the same thing because we're all different and we've all got different brains. But there's a shared element. And so we can either agree that something is really delicious or we can have an argument about whether or not it is. Which we often do. Yes. Yes, exactly. That's like the number one for all chefs, you know, reading the goddamn online reviews and people are telling you this was terrible, you know, and we're like, no, it's delicious. It's definitely, definitely one of those things. Yeah. Yeah. And the very fact that it's happening in our brains, you know, means that the way our brains are tuned to the experience is so important to the actual sub experience of that particular flavor. There's so much else going on and our brains are not taking account of absolutely everything that's going on. It's just not possible. We have to pick and choose what it is that we pay attention to. And different people pay different sorts of attention to particular elements of a dish. The sense of smell and tasting or flavor. Now, I think there's a lot of confusion when we look at those two things. Can you try to just break it down for us, for us mere mortals that are not a walking library? Being a library can interfere with actually enjoying food. So I'm glad not to be a library most of the time. Flavor is this wonderful combination of two very different senses that share in common. The fact that they're detecting molecules. Our eyes and our ears are detecting other aspects of the world around us. But taste and smell, we're actually detecting little bits of the world around us as directly as we possibly can. And there are two different sets of molecules. The ones that we taste on our tongue are dissolvable in water and trigger in us the sensations of sweetness and sourness and saltiness and bitterness and so on. A relatively small number of different sensations. Although these days people argue about whether, in fact, we might have more taste sensations than we give our tongue credit for. And then there are the molecules that instead of being dissolvable in water are not so dissolvable and are actually more present in the air around us than in the stuff that we put in our mouths. So these are the volatile molecules, molecules that are so chemically different from water that they tend to fly out of it rather than stay in it. And when they fly out into the air, that's when we can detect them through our noses and the sense of smell. When they fly out in the air, which is aroma, I guess. Yes, yeah, exactly. Aromas for food, smells for environmental odors. In Danish, we have two words to describe smell. One is lucht and the other one is doft. And they mean they're both smelling, but one you use for wonderful things and the other one you use for like things that smell. Yeah, yeah. You know, but I guess in English there's only one word. It's smell. It smells good or it smells bad. That's right. But we can call them odors, which are maybe not so nice, and aromas, which are much nicer. And then smells are a little more neutral. And so how does these one molecules and the other ones, the one that dissolves with water, the ones that are in the air, are they equally important? Or how does this all work, you know, when it comes down to experiencing flavor? Well, the way I like to think about it is as kind of a structure, like a building, where taste provides the foundation and aroma, smells provide the superstructure. When we eat something, we detect on our tongue the molecules that are water-soluble and give the kind of foundation, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, basic stuff. And then rising above that, in our nose, we're detecting the aroma molecules, which are much more various. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of different aroma molecules that we're capable of detecting. And so all of the diversity and variability and so on come from that aspect of flavor. So that's why I think of taste as the foundation. You want things to be balanced. You want something to be there so that your brain is paying attention to what's going on. And then aroma gives us the tremendous diversity of flavor. And aroma, you know, sticking your nose into something and taking it all in, it's not something that you see often. Can you train your nose? Can you be like a super athlete? Can you have like a super elite nose? Yes, there are such noses around. Most of them are in the perfume industry for obvious reasons. That's one of the amazing things about the human system is that if you sit down and study, which is to say to take little component aromas and train yourself, you can end up being as good a nose as almost anyone. I mean, some people clearly do have, I don't know, more receptors or more connections in the brain to make sense of the receptors. But people train to be tasters. They train to be perfumers. And that's an option that's open for anyone. Yeah, and I guess it's open for anyone to just do it when we're walking down the street, right? It's a world of scent molecules all around us. We're sort of living in a soup of scent molecules that we just, I guess, don't even experience because our noses are kind of obese. And we are not really trained to experience through our nose. Also, even saying it sounds weird. Experience life through your nose. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why I called my book Nosedive because you can take the plunge. You can just open yourself to that possibility. There are challenges. So, for example, in a city, our olfactory experience, the experience of smells, is determined by, you know, automobiles. And whichever store's door happens to be open to the street if it's a nice day. That's not the same as, you know, wandering through a meadow with hundreds of different flowers in bloom and the sun slowly drying the grass. All the things that you would find in a natural setting. So, it is something of a challenge to be, to pay attention to smells in the city. But you can go back home and open your spice cabinet and just kind of take a journey through the world by smelling the different things that have come from all over the world. When you spoke at the symposium 14 years ago, you basically told us to slap our herbs back then. And I think this message right now, which is to smell the world, is a profound thing, actually, that really can be part of just making your life better. If you can smell all the good things there is to smell. When you think back to smells, I'm trying myself to think back to a moment. And to me, I am again transported to Macedonia. If I think of the first time, close my eyes, okay, when did I smell something that really made a mark? And I'm in the courtyard in Macedonia. My aunties are hustling around the courtyard. And one of them is plucking roses to make rose cordial. And I go and I smell the roses. And I remember that vividly. And funny enough, roses today is a signature flavor at Noma through picking wild roses. So probably it informed me for the rest of my life, this experience. What about for you? Well, actually, you primed me to remember this period in my life when I had just moved from the East Coast to the Midwest when I was maybe six, seven years old. It was a new suburb that we had moved to, a new house in a new suburb. There was no lawn, no grass in front of the house. My father tried to plant seed, grass seed to make a lawn. And what came up was grass, but also corn, because it was a cornfield back in the day. And so there were kind of wild areas not far from where we were that had not yet been developed. And some of them were overgrown with just thickets of thorny things. But those thorny things included raspberries or some raspberry relative. And I'm not sure that I'd ever even tasted a store-bought raspberry at the time that I tasted these things that were growing in the wild. But I just remember the flavor of those raspberries. And in the summertime, the heat kind of cooking that patch of earth and bringing all kinds of aromas up in which were embedded the flavors of these berries. So it was kind of a total olfactory experience. I'm writing down raspberries as well next time you come to Noma. You have to come in the summer then. When you mentioned this thing, the scent that came from the caterpillar or any aroma in general, it also makes me think of something that you've also been talking about that, particularly in plants, the flavor is a defense mechanism. One of the wonderful paradoxical miracles of food, in my opinion anyway, is that the very materials that we love to use to give flavor to things. Because staple foods like grains, they have an interesting sort of flavor. But it's very straightforward, very mild. We like more sensation. We like more stimulation than that. And so we get that stimulation by using herbs and spices and flavorings and so on. Most of the stimulation is actually meant in the natural world to be repellent, to convince animals not to eat a parsley leaf or a thyme leaf or nutmeg seed. Chilli most prominently. And yet we, our species has learned to treasure these things. And in fact, they were, you know, at one point, one of some of the most valuable commodities in human society. And so what's going on there is that if you're a caterpillar and you're trying to take a bite out of a parsley leaf, you're getting a real snootful of these repellent molecules that give us parsley flavor. If you're a large animal like us and we're just adding a few leaves to a salad or infusing nutmeg into a sauce, we're getting those molecules, but we're getting them in very small measured quantities that we can detect, but that aren't affecting our physiology the way that they would affect us if we just took a handful of parsley and stuffed it in our mouths. So that's the wonderful thing is that these are molecules that are meant to repel and are meant to damage. But in the quantities that we use them in cooking, which is this wonderful practice we have of turning natural materials into something both nourishing and pleasurable, they do nothing but bring pleasure. Yeah, yeah. It made me think how other species are experiencing flavor, you know, because I know that we are the only mammal that eats chili and it doesn't give any nutritional value at all. We do it for pleasure, I guess. I don't know. Do you know if other species are experiencing flavor and deliciousness? Like how does an elephant experience grass, you know? That's a wonderful question. I've asked that, for example, people who have worked in zoos who take care of animals, you know, try to keep them happy. And I never get a straightforward answer, I guess, because it's hard to kind of put ourselves in the mind of an elephant and really know what's going on in there. And perhaps they're as different and individual as we are. Some likes one thing, another one, because it actually makes me think of my dog Ponzu, who's here daily. And she likes very different things to what Kenneth, our head chef's dogs, enjoy. And for instance, she loves dried seafood. As a funny note, dried scallops, whereas Kenneth's dog will eat raw carrots and my dog will not touch that. I wrote down here kokumi. And the reason why I wrote down kokumi is because we're talking about this thing of flavor. And basically, we're also talking about using our senses and exploring the world through using our senses. And these senses are how we smell the world, how we taste the world. And I believe if we did that more, our life would be better. And it's a very approachable way to actually get more value. But when it comes to experiencing the flavor on the tongue, it's only recently that we started, as you said, really figuring out what is it actually our tongue is experiencing. In the old days, there was like five ways of experiencing, right? And then at one point, umami entered the field. And now there's kokumi. Can you just explain to the world what is kokumi now that we might be there might be as naturalized in our vocabulary in 10 years than to what umami is? I'm still not entirely sure about kokumi. Me neither. That's why I'm asking. I was hoping I was hoping the Alexandra Library would have something. Well, I have things to say, but they're perhaps not definitive and totally clarifying. So kokumi is a sensation that was proposed as a novel addition to our possibilities of taste sensations a few decades ago. So relatively recently, umami goes back to really the turn of the 20th century. So it's been around for a while, although it took the West much longer to accept it. And this may be a similar story. I'm not sure. But kokumi, where umami comes from particular amino acids and chemical relatives thereof, um, kokumi seems to come from small chains of amino acids, molecules that help to build proteins, but are building blocks. And, uh, in small chains of those building blocks, you can end up producing sensations on the tongue that are different than just plain water. Uh, and those sensations turn out to be much more difficult to describe in, in, uh, ordinary language than sweetness and sourness and bitterness and so on. Um, and I think that's a big part of the problem is that we're, we're always looking for labels and, uh, labels are important for communicating with each other. You know, what it is that I'm experiencing because it's, it's all happening in here and we, we have to find a way to share that. But it's, it's more difficult to share what it is that that experience of these small chains of amino acids, uh, presents to us. It's often described as a feeling of, um, fullness or body or just presence. And, and, and, and not fullness as in, as in full because I've eaten too much, but like a fullness of flavor. A kind of rounding out of the, of that foundation that I was talking about before. But that's a very woo-woo kind of, uh, explanation. You know, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's pointing in the direction of, uh, an explanation, but it's not as crystal clear as, you know, what is saltiness or sourness. Yeah, no, no, no, no doubt. But I think it's something that's, that's bubbling and we'll see more of it in coming years as people figure out how to label it. And perhaps there's several types of kokumi that we need to understand, you know, or label, you know, we can better and better and more and more begin to describe these things that we experience that are just feelings and something that feels okay. But we don't have the vocabulary to actually explain it. And that's why I like certain labels, you know, because it, it gives us something to grasp. Um, so watch out, uh, for kokumi. Yeah, I, I think you're absolutely right about that because, for example, uh, in the case of umami, that sensation was first proposed around, uh, I think it was 1906 in Japan. Uh, it was not accepted in the West for many, many decades. And I can remember going to meetings in the 1970s and scientists saying there's, there's really no such thing. It's a confusion of categories and so on. Um, and then, uh, uh, receptor on the tongue for that particular molecule, monosodium glutamate, was discovered. And then Western scientists said, ah, yeah, okay, now, now we have proof. But it took all that for people then, uh, people in the West to then go back and think, what is it about Parmesan cheese that makes it so delicious? What is it about tomatoes that make them so delicious? So this kind of retrospective discovery of a very basic taste, what we now think of as one of the five or six basic tastes, took forever for us to recognize. And it may be the same thing with kokumi, that we're, we're, uh, just kind of, uh, exploring around the edges of something that has been there all along, but we haven't had a name for it. We haven't had a way of isolating it from other experiences. And, um, so I'm sure we still have plenty to learn about, uh, about the experience of flavor. Now that we're on the topic of umami, and I don't know if this makes sense for us to speak about, but I'm going to ask you anyway, because we were having a discussion here the other day. Um, there's been this discussion about umami and, um, you know, MSG made in a lab and, uh, 10, 20 years ago, you'd have people say, oh, I'm allergic to it. And of course it's proven to be complete gibberish, but umami and MSG has truly transformed food and potentially forever because it has made particularly ultra processed food, uh, so incredibly delicious and easy to be delicious and cheap to be delicious. That you could say that, you know, you know, the discovery of umami has also come with its set of problems today in the modern world. We discussed that. What do you think about that? I completely agree with what you said so far. Um, I would just add that it's a very convenient shortcut to a particular aspect of deliciousness. A solution of, uh, MSG is not delicious. So, you know, it depends so much on, uh, what else is going on in that particular food. And, uh, if a particular food is missing something, it just isn't quite delicious enough. And you can add a little bit of this powder and all of a sudden it's savory and mouthwatering and wants you to eat another. That's a benefit to whoever is making that particular product, uh, but not necessarily a benefit to the consumer. And a shortcut in a way training us to depend on a particular aspect of flavor that sure is, is delicious and has its points, but is only one small aspect of flavor. Again, going back to that, um, metaphor of the foundation of flavor. If there's not umami there, then, you know, there's a piece of the foundation missing. And, uh, it helps a lot to have that piece, uh, in place. But then there's the whole rest of the structure to, uh, to pay attention to. But, you know, people know that if you add fat, sugar, and texture, and then two umami, you're pretty, you're pretty safe. You know, most, most of the time you'll make something people like if those things are, are there in the right proportions. And, you know, I don't want to fan boy too much on you, but I need to say that so many people that study flavor, like you do, they are studying it for the reasons we just spoke about. They are hired to figure out how to make this little chip even more delicious and more craveable and more addictive. Whereas, um, I see you as a flavor artist. You're doing it for the beauty and for everything in the world to use our senses more and open us up and, and to make us understand more. And you are, to my knowledge, at least one of the very few that, that, that is continuously doing that. And I just want to say thank you here on this podcast to everyone. So, so thank you for that. And you know, no need to respond. I just want to say it. And then I want to finish off with, with a question for you, because, and I know that people that, uh, like yourselves, they, they do not like to have singular, uh, answers because that is rare. It's rare to have that. But in this next symposium, the mad symposium that's coming this May, we are tapping into, uh, the future. We're trying to instill and inspire a new sense of planning towards a longer goal, not just the here and now. And when it comes to flavor, what is the one thing? You can also say two, but what is the one thing that you'd like to change when it comes to flavor that would make, let's just say the world of a better, in a, to a better place if this thing changed? I guess what I would say is that flavor. We were just talking about how, um, the use of, uh, MSG kind of narrows our, uh, experience of flavor. You have that foundation of salt and umami and fat, and then pretty much anything goes, uh, or you don't have to even think that much about the rest of the composition because people are going to like it no matter what. And I guess I would, uh, uh, try to turn that around a little bit and say that the miracle of flavor is that it's our way of detecting and taking pleasure from the amazing diversity that exists on the planet. And not just in food, but walking through a meadow or, um, even walking through, uh, an industrial site where we're experiencing what it is that human beings can do with the natural materials that the earth has given us. I would, uh, I would, uh, just say that seeking out and, uh, appreciating, even if it's not delicious at first sniff, uh, the diversity, the, the aromatic diversity of the world. If you're a chef, somehow bringing that experience to the plate, um, and introducing people to that diversity and to the experiences that they may not have a chance to have otherwise. That to me is the, well, and the, the, the great, uh, opportunity, I would say for people in, uh, the food world to both to experience themselves that diversity and explore it and, um, maybe even contribute to it by the, the kinds of preparations they make, but then to share that with, with other people and, and, uh, expand their experience in a similar way. Amazing. Thank you so much for this conversation. And I can't wait for your book, uh, to come out shortly soon in a couple of years. Uh, we're eagerly waiting for it. Thank you so much. Thank you, René. It's been a great pleasure to get the chance to chat. Well, now you know what to serve Harold McGee and René Redzepi if they show up for dinner. Thanks for listening to MAD Talks and please come back next week for a new episode with another fascinating speaker from MAD Symposium. This podcast was produced by Sidsel Kaae Nørgaard and made by MAD. We're a global nonprofit based in Copenhagen that works with chefs, servers, and others in hospitality to help them become better leaders and take better care of our planet. To learn more about our work, follow us on socials @themadfeed, sign up for our newsletter, or check us out at madfeed.co.