The Health of the Food Industry

Food unites humanity, but the food industry can be a divisive place to work. We look at Asheville as a microcosm of the issues plaguing U.S. food and restaurant workers -- and of how we can come together to help solve those issues.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
I mean like the early two hundreds, we were like
the hippie capital of the world. I think Rolling Soon
called us the freak capital of the world. And uh,
I think we've lost a little bit of the freak sadly. Yeah, hello,
and welcome to Savor. I'm any Rees and I'm Lauren
vocal Baum. On our recent trip to Asheville, we heard

(00:28):
so much enthusiasm and love for the city from the
people who we spoke with, and we felt it too.
It was pretty infectious. These episodes, by the way, are
in no way sponsored or paid for by the City
of Asheville or its Tourism board. Part of our mission
here on Savor is to travel to interesting places and
share with y'all what makes those places interesting and what
we might learn from the lives and lifestyles of the

(00:50):
people who live there. If it sounded advertorial at times,
that's because we found a lot there to be praised.
But of course not everything we heard was all mac
and cheese and frothy beer. Asheville, as a city that's
booming because of its restaurants and breweries, is sort of
a microcosm for everything the American food and beverage industry
is dealing with in general, good and bad. In this episode,

(01:13):
we wanted to discuss some of those issues and as
part of that, what it means to be counterculture? Yeah,
what does that mean? That quote at the top was
from beer historian and Fitt and Glenn. While Ashwell might
have lost some of its freak, it has not lost
the reputation for it. We talked about that a little

(01:34):
inner overview of Ashville episode, how we, along with superproducer Dylan,
had these preconceptions of Asheville as a crunchy hippie haven, which,
to be fair, they embrace that drum circle that y'all
blessedly did not make me go to shows up in
a lot of their marketing. You're just lucky. We had
a very limited window for that. Pinball museum pinball over

(01:58):
drum circles any day. I agree. I wish we could
have done both, but hey, both are percussive. That's true.
I had considered that we didn't make it to the
drum circle, but we saw plenty of evidence of this
hippie ish nous I mean, my goodness, are Airbnb. We
haven't shared this detail with y'all yet. I think we

(02:18):
mentioned that, like zen Rock gardens that had but it
also had this mixed media mural above the car port,
which was like front and center when you came up
the driveway of the eyes of Buddha, sometimes called the
Wisdom Eyes or the Omnipresent Eyes. These are big and
colorful and apparently found on every Buddhist temple and Nepal,
and also on this car poard. Yeah, every lift driver

(02:38):
that picked us up asked if this it was some
kind of retreat or something. Here's and fittn again. You know.
I do have numerous hippie friends who are well educated,
interesting people who have gone into farming or distilleries or breweries,
things that used to be um much more blue collar

(03:00):
type of careers. Warren Wilson College, which is in Swanna, Noah,
is kind of a hipp behave in college. It's one
of those work study colleges, and often students will go
there and they'll learn a trade there such as plumbing
or cultivation, and then they'll stay in the area. So

(03:22):
there is definitely a little of that um kind of
crunchy hippie esthetic, which is fun. The legacy of Ashville's
crunchy nature got its start in the nineteen sixties makes
sense to me when else. Here's the local historian Kevin Fraser.
In the late sixties and early seventies, we had folks

(03:42):
moving to Asheville out of places like northern California, you know,
so called flower children, hippie movement and all that, and
they were on to Anashville a couple of reasons. One, frankly,
was cheap to be here, and so for young folks
looking for a place to be and maybe they're artists,
or maybe they were interested farming or whatever, they were
interested in this sort of jobbed and worked well for them.

(04:04):
What A Fitton and Kevin are talking about here is
the counterculture movement that came up in the nineteen sixties
of mostly white people from mostly middle class backgrounds who
have access to education and money, and who used that
to promote these anti capitalist, anti industrial, pro environment, pro
mindful living ideas and ideals. And we did hear time

(04:26):
and time again from the folks who we were interviewing
that a big reason they moved there was because of
that vibe and because it's the sort of vibe that
they wanted to bring up their children in. And the
vibe definitely shaped the food and drink scene in the city.
To make this unique, creative, artistic, healthy, crunchy food scene,
it's weirdness depends on Ashvillians being willing to participate in it,

(04:51):
to care about who you're supporting, whether your money is
going to people who support your causes, both in word
and indeed. And there's a whole sense of community around it.
And this lends itself to an awareness of social issues
that cannot be separated from the food we eat and
the drinks we drink. So we wanted to talk about
those today, issues of opportunity and access faced by women,

(05:14):
people of color, immigrants, and folks with lower incomes. One
of these issues is a lack of people of color,
especially in positions of power in the food and beverage industry.
We talked about this a lot in our old episode
on tipping, gratuity and restaurants, because the American gratuity system
is based in post emancipation racism and classism. To hear

(05:37):
all about that, check out the episode. It's from December
of TV and it's called the Not So Gratuitous Tipping Episode.
But okay, a quick yet pertinent takeaway from that, There
is a four dollar per hour wage gap between white
workers and workers of color in the restaurant industry at large,
due to the types of jobs that each tend to get,
workers of color are more likely to be in lower

(05:58):
level positions at lower cost to restaurants, and racial discrimination
and tipping only exacerbates this inequality, and in Asheville, representation
of people of color is perhaps particularly stark. As we
mentioned in our beer episode. As of seen, the city
was eighty two white. This is unusual for a southern city,
if not necessarily an apple Achian city. Kevin discussed some

(06:21):
of the history behind this, so you know, inherently Asheville
has a smaller African American population, even going back to
mid nineteenth century history, and part of that had to
do that there was not significant plantation agriculture in western
mark Clina just because the landscape, unlike the eastern partner Makolina,
where they had these gigantic farms. But that does not

(06:43):
mean there was not slavery in western carth Carolina. That
becomes a real misunderstanding, and I think sometimes people want
to sort of skip them be like, oh, yeah, we
somehow we're better than that. No. No, as a region,
we had not been better than that, and there were worst,
but the number was smaller, and that has definitely been
part of that inheritance. That said, though, as a Civil
War we were a very popular city for freedmen to

(07:06):
relocate to. They were drawn to Asheville looking for new opportunities.
But one of the challenges that we're very concerned about
is some of our key areas that have begun to
see more recent revitalization or new development are adjacent to
historically African American neighborhoods, and so the gentrification that wraps

(07:27):
around that is very much a concerning thing for us
in Ashville, because we don't want success to come create
failure for somebody else, not of their own doing either.
That's a lot of the conversation today about how do
we balance those things in Ashville. I think it's something
in meeting things around town we are talking about how

(07:48):
do we as a city make sure that it is
clear that we are welcoming so for anybody to find
what they're looking for in Asheville. But I think the
mentally cities that aren't welcoming will become irrelevant. This particular
question of how welcoming Southern and Appalachian cities are too

(08:09):
black and African Americans lies in parallel to the inclusion
of other people of color, of folks of all sorts
of descents, whether their families have been here for generations
or whether they are recent immigrants to the United States.
We spoke with Merwan or Ronnie, the CEO and chef
of the Chaipani Restaurant group and a first generation immigrant
from India. Mirwan was quick to express the stark difference

(08:32):
between the history and experience of folks like himself in
contrast to that of black people in America and the South.
He said that comparing the two directly is unconscionable, and
I was actually really afraid I'd ruin the interview for
a minute by asking him about his experience as a
generalized person of color, but it turned out okay. Um
and beyond or building on that difference that he talked about,

(08:53):
he did say that he sees a shift taking place
all across the South. Mari Juan describes himself as a
storyteller just as much as a restaurateur, and in his experience,
Ashville embraces stories what is really interesting to me um
and and and a reflection of this conversation has been

(09:16):
happening in this series that I'm being called Brown the South.
A seperate series is that the South is changing dramatically
and quickly. There's myself, There's Asha Gomez, Vision Part Mini,
Johan Chit, Kumar Farhan Sam. I mean, I'm naming Indian chefs,
the chefs of Indian origin that have their restaurants, and
they're doing amazing things in the South. Not in San Francisco,

(09:37):
not in l A, not in d C, not in
New York, but in small towns in the South. Nashville, Asheville, Birmingham, Oxford, Mississippi. UM,
you know, the fact that we're not just doing well's succeeding,
but flourishing and being acknowledged. What we're doing, to me
is indicative that even what we think of as the
South is changing. It's not all happening at the same time,

(10:00):
and it's not happening everywhere. But for me, even a
town like Asheville is a little bit of a blueprint
for what I'm calling the new South is going to
look like. Um, immigrants are coming here. Um, there's economic
opportunities that it's affordable housing, is affordable labor, costs are affordable.
You know, Lexington, Kentucky is jokingly referred to as Mexington

(10:21):
Kentucky because it's the large Latino population that's starting to
come to the South. And I think it's awesome and
amazing and probably scary for some people, but you know,
it's a change. So my daughter, you know, she looks
just like me. She's been here since she was two
years old. And as far as she's concerned that if

(10:41):
you would ask her where you're from, she will say
from this out And I think twenty years from now,
it won't be so unusual for someone that looks like
me or some variation of black or brown to say
I'm from the South, and it could be completely natural
and normal. But whether we're personally individual really welcoming is
only one part here. There's another piece to this conversation

(11:04):
that often gets left out. Food writer Mackenzie Lunsford has
covered the Asheville food scene for thirteen years, so she's
witnessed the transformation of the city and the social issues
that have dogged it. We have a lot of issues
um with people finding good employees, which is of course

(11:25):
not not limited to Asheville. Everyone's having a hard time
finding good health and uh yeah, wage issues, things like
that are the types of things that I write about
a lot. Um. We have a we have a very thriving,
very involved latin X community, and they are making themselves
very present, uh in in a very very good, active,

(11:49):
strong way when people are making space for them, like
people are. Yes, there are ice rates here in Asheville.
Uh A couple of months ago, and I mean even
undocumented latin X folks came out to pack groceries for
the people who were hiding in their homes and members
other members of the community came and helped them um

(12:12):
at a place called Beloved House, which has dedicated itself
as a sanctuary. It has been disturbing to this this
community to see those those raids go on. And obviously,
h the immigrant population has a huge hand in the
food that we eat, from the fields to the table. Yeah. Yeah,

(12:34):
thank you for speaking to it, because it is such
a I think people just don't think about it. I
think you're right. I think people don't think about it,
and and it you may hear that I am getting
a little bit angry over it too. I Mean, look,
I understand laws, and I understand that we have a
need to uphold laws, but we also need to take

(12:55):
a gentle and open minded look at how important am
I grants are to our society as a whole. And
then little pockets within our society like the restaurant business,
the you know, the look around the skyline of Asheville.
Their hotels being built everywhere, and they're being built on
the backs of immigrants, are being cleaned by immigrants, They're

(13:17):
being you know, run by immigrants. I mean they make
the world go round. And especially a tourist based economy
like Asheville, it's you know, important sector of our society.
It's the agricultural side of things. Um. We are a
huge apple growing region, especially in Hendersonville outside of Asheville

(13:40):
a little bit, and we had farmers whose apples were
falling off their trees and rotting in the fields because
they went once Immigration laws have have been titans, you know,
in work visas. They're a little bit harder to secure
and there is a fear element. And I had farmers
who were saying, I have products just dying and there's

(14:01):
no one to pick up. What do you think that
turns into? I mean, do you think that we're all
just going to have to get used to paying an
actual fair price for tomatoes. That's another part of the conversation, right,
I mean, we are so dependent on cheap labor. The
society is so dependent on cheap labor. The South was

(14:23):
built on slave labor, you know, and sometimes I feel
like we've barely gotten away from that. Let me share
a couple more facts from our tipping episode, which is
still probably the most angry I've gotten recording episode of
Chefs in America are men, and men also hold about

(14:44):
sevent of management positions in the restaurant industry. This means
that men hold more of the guaranteed minimum wage and
higher paid positions as compared to women and especially women
of color. Kenzie came up through the restaurant industry from dishwashing,
through line cook, through chef and restaurant owner before settling
completely into journalism, so she was able to speak to

(15:06):
these issues from multiple facets women in the restaurant business.
I mean, we do have Asheville has a top female chef.
I mean you've heard about like Lee Katie Button over
curte As. She gets quite a lot of attention um
for our city, and rightly so. She's talented, and those
restaurants are very good. Um, but I struggle to think

(15:31):
of women in the restaurant industry when somebody asked me,
for example, I'm judging a competition soon, and I'm often
the only woman at these tables, you know, And and
the organizer asked me if I could recommend some women
in the restaurant industry, and I thought of a few,
but they are fairly few and far between now and now.
Do I think that's a local thing, No, I don't.

(15:53):
And I have noticed a lot more women in the
kitchen since my time in the kitchen. My time in
the kitchen, I was paid less than than others, and
I'm certain of that. And it was not a problem
for me at all, because I was one of those
people who was a little bit I don't know, assertive,

(16:18):
which I think you have to be if you're going,
I mean, if you're going to be in the food
industry at all, probably, but especially as a woman. One
more fact for you. The restaurant industry has the highest
rates of reported sexual harassment in the country. Survey restaurant workers,
both male and female, said that they had experienced sexual

(16:40):
behavior in the restaurant industry that's scary or unwanted, and
since of servers or women, they bear the brunt of this.
It wasn't an issue for me, but I know that
other women in the restaurant industry have faced issues of
sexual harassment. I mean, it's not limited to the kitchen um.

(17:01):
It's probably worse in the front of the house, because
you have people who come into eat and spend money
and then they I've had a lot of conversations about
this with local restaurant people, and yeah, people come in
to eat and they feel as though they own a
piece of you for a little while, and sometimes they
act accordingly. And I know that that Curs which we're

(17:25):
just talking about, has ejected a customer for touching staff members,
which is great. Yeah, and and they don't stand for
that crap. I mean, they they're very very forward thinking
over there. At Curte, they have a HR department. They
have systems in place so that people can report things

(17:46):
when they happen anonymously without fearing for their jobs. But
not many restaurants have those sort of structures in place.
And we live in a town full of very small
independent restaurants without HR departments. So you know, for all
your own conclusions. It is. It's part of a national
and probably global culture that is changing, but way more slowly.

(18:11):
Certainly the mentality has changed. It's such an ingrained culture,
kind of unfortunate or totally unfortunately. Rather that I'll go
full speed ahead. That sucks, that's not great. Yeah, I
mean that. Having been said that, I do have to
add that you know that this does seem like a
respectful space, Asheville is very progressive, and so that that

(18:35):
works out in our favor. I mean, again, I'm not
saying that that eliminates sexual harassment, but I would say
that in general, the chefs and restaurant people who I
know are a fairly enlightened bunch. It's kind of hard
going into interviews sometimes as an entertainment podcaster, or it's

(18:56):
easy in some ways because you're excited about the work
that people are doing and they get to share what
they're excited about. But and I think I speak for
the whole team here, we worry sometimes that we're only
getting the bright side of the story. And I mean,
we're not Barbara Walters. You know. We do try to
ask meaningful questions, but sometimes you only have thirty minutes
with someone sometimes you only have ten. We were lucky

(19:18):
on this trip to have time and to have people
who are part of this community because they are reflexive
and open and working in this industry is rough. We
need to talk about mental health in the food industry,
and we'll get into that after a quick break for
word from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes,

(19:46):
thank you. So the sort of things Mackenzie was describing,
It was wonderful to hear and see and feel that
sort of care and respect being spoken to. But it's
bitter sweet that as pleasant as it was here, it
was still a pleasant surprise. The restaurant industry is hard
on folks. This is something I've seen personally growing up.

(20:07):
My father worked as a chef for most of my
childhood and young adulthood, and it's something that was really
made public back in June when Anthony Bourdain committed suicide. Yeah, so,
mental health and substance abuse. It's an ongoing discussion within
the food industry, and this is something Mackenzie has written
about as well. The restaurant industry itself does kind of

(20:29):
lend itself to a culture where you're taking advantage of
the mind altering substances around you more often. UM. I
think that one of the chefs in that article that
I wrote about substance abuse UM after in the wake
of Anthony boarding suicide, one of the chefs mentioned that

(20:51):
most people who work regular schedules, when they get off work,
there are a lot of things open. There are churches,
there are you know, there are grocery stores, there are
lots of wholesome places to go. Um. But when you
get off of work at midnight, there are only a
few places that are open, and they are not churches. So,
you know, when you get off at midnight and you're
wound up because you've been you know, cooking for hundreds

(21:15):
of tourists, you're you're probably going to go get a
pint of beer and follow that with more so and
then heavy drinking lends itself to anxiety, which lends itself
to more drinking. So you get in this kind of
catch twin too. I mean, the restaurant business is intense
and it'll drive anybody to drink, I mean, trust me, yeah.

(21:39):
And it's and it's also part of the you know,
like you want to try everything, and and it's it's
almost rude to turn down your your colleagues to to
say to say like oh no, you know, like I'm
not going to try this product that you just made,
that you've been caring about for the past a few
months or a few years given. I also think that,
like I was saying, alcohol can lead to anxiety, there's

(22:01):
a lot of mental health issues that spring up when
you're living a very opposite life from most people. When
you're working on weekends and you're working on holidays, and
you're working at night, and that sort of thing um
that can lend itself to depression as well. So there
are a lot of things involved in the restaurant industry that,
when when combined, create fertile ground for substance abuse, mental

(22:22):
health issues. That sort of thing. These kinds of mental health,
substance abuse issues, sexual harassment, deep serious topics are are
kind of on the table right now and our culture
in general, and they're difficult to ignore. And I think
a lot of a lot of chefs and restaurant owners
are looking at internally and some of them are setting
up systems. I mean, I mentioned Katie Button from Courtey

(22:46):
has a program where they do pay for their employees
to go get counseling um several times. And uh, they
also pay for partner of any kind, you know, a
roommate to go with them as well. So that's a
really great way to address us, a step step in
the right direction. And also there are I see a

(23:10):
lot of restaurants trying to act more like the legit
businesses that they are, and it's less of a pirate
ship culture these days and more of this is a
business and we are professionals. And I think that may
go hand in hand with the rise of celebrity chefs,
kind of validating in a way restaurant business as a

(23:32):
profession and people are taking a look at how they're
running things and kind of shaping up a little bit.
We certainly hope so we do. And we've seen folks
around the world banned together in these conversations, especially in
the wake of Bourdain's death. To learn more get help,
A great resource is Chefs with Issues dot com. There
may even be a support group in your area. There's

(23:53):
one here in Atlanta that I'm hoping we'll get to
speak with soon. In the meanwhile, let's expand our view
from the food industry. It's off to the larger issue
of nutrition and food security. Ashville is also trying to
find ways to deal with hunger in the region. According
to the U S Department of Agriculture, eleven point eight
percent of American households where food insecure as of seventeen.

(24:17):
This means that those households lacked access to enough food
to provide an active, healthy life for all of its
households members, and this can be due to a number
of factors, from poverty and job security to whether or
not you have easy access to a grocery store or
some other outlet that sells fresh proteins and fresh vegetables.
North Carolina was one of the eleven states that came

(24:38):
in worse than the national average at fourteen point four
percent food and security. It's a national problem, but something
that local people are coming together to solve. Here's Sue
helm and Asheville food critic um. One thing that people
may be very surprised about is that Ashville is in
the middle of a part of the country that has
one of the worst rates of hunger, especially the food insecurity.

(25:01):
People who don't know where their next nutritious meal is
coming from. That's a big issue in North Carolina, Western
North Carolina and so there's a lot of charities that
try to distribute food. There's man of Food Bank. There's
a Welcome Table which is run by the Haywood Congregation
and they feed about a thousand people a week a
free meal, and all of the restaurants participate in Welcome Table,

(25:23):
So like literally the best restaurants in town will be
cooking a meal at the Haywood Congregation for all of
the people to enjoy. And also there's a great one
called Food Connection that's run by a local organization called
Dig Local and they are dig Local as an app
and you use it to find out what's happening every
day in Nashville. But they have a charity called Food Connection,

(25:46):
and what they do is they work with caterers and restaurants.
When they have leftover food at the end of the
night that's still hot and still good, they wrap it up,
call a taxi, and the taxi brings it to a shelter.
We've talked about this spirit of collaboration in Asheville and
that extends out to helping folks. Jail Radigan, CEO of
French Broad Chocolate, shared her experience with this. One of

(26:09):
my favorite examples of collaboration in the restaurant industry. Is
an organization that serves meals to people who need to
eat every week. Um. It happens at a church. It's
called the Welcome Table, and everybody's welcome, no questions asked.
There's no religious agenda. Um. But it's a project that

(26:32):
is filled with community and love and dignity. Rather than
being set up as like a soup kitchen line, people
sit down at a table and they're served a meal
by volunteers and they get to enjoy food and each
other's company. Um. And there was a local restaurant in

(26:53):
town that established an initiative for the local restaurants to
participate in that project. So a lot of us. I
don't even know how many it is, how many restaurants
are participating. But um, we either partner with another restaurant
or a restaurant handles it themselves and we feed you know,
five hundred people in a day. Um. And it's not

(27:14):
anyone's pet project. It's it's a collaboration and it wouldn't
be successful without everybody's contribution and participation. Ashville is looking
into other creative ideas to combat hunger as well. Stu
told us about one such venture championed by farmer Sunil Patel.
He has a company called Patchwork Urban Farms and he
works with people who have large front or back or

(27:36):
side lawns that live in the urban area and he
will calm and assess your property for farming, and then
his people will calm until the soil plants. The plants
harvest the plants, give you a portion of the produce,
give a large portion of it too, free to neighborhoods
that have limited access to fresh food, and then sell

(27:57):
the rest to restaurants. And this relates to something else
that Asheville is working on sustainability. We'll get into that
after one more quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you. Sustainability

(28:19):
and reducing food waste the whole head detailed movement. It's
a movement taking place on a national level as well.
But Stu put it this way, it's a trend and
a belief and an ideology that has become so ingrained
in the ashvill food scene. That's just part of our
scene now. It's so much part of the scene that
there is a whole company devoted to helping restaurants legally

(28:42):
ferment and pickle things that would otherwise go to waste.
But it's also so much part of the scene that,
according to Jamie Eager, a fourth generation farmer over at
Hickory Nut Gap Farm, that it's in some ways circled
around to being problematic. Again, take for example, the trend
of serving weird parts are not going to waste. Yeah,
but it's funny because some chefs want to feature a

(29:05):
local item and so they'll they want to do like
an appetizer like piggy ears or something like that, which
is great, but it's also like, wait, you can't just
buy piggy ears like that. We also have other items,
Like there's sort of this whole movement towards using the
whole animal, which is great, but it's like, all of
a sudden, piggy ears become the most valuable piece on

(29:26):
the animal, and you're like, this is we still have
to move the whole pork chop and everything else too.
So that was a funny moment when we were like
that guy, it just all he wants is piggy ears, Like, Okay,
what do you do about that? Which I guess brings
us to a pressing question our original question from the
top of this episode. Can weirdness last in a town

(29:49):
based on supporting local, on being conscious on staying weird
Once you start marketing that, once tourists come in and
the population starts expanding, is it sustainable or does it
just become a market employed for big business. Here in
our home base of Atlanta, it's on our minds a lot.
The folks we spoke with in Nashville noted the change
that's happening, but they were pretty hopeful about it. Here's

(30:10):
Whattt Murphy and Chris Bower from at a Rhyme Distillery.
I think that there's been good and bad with the changes,
and there's been a lot of like blooming entrepreneurship that
wouldn't be allowed in a place that wasn't flourishing. And
a lot of people get to follow their dreams here
and do really cool stuff because we do have a
lot of growth here. And yeah, I think that, uh,

(30:34):
you know, life is about adapting to change, and I've
seen it go a lot worse in other places than
it has in Nashville. Again, I think it's because of
the people here that have sort of helped guide and
build the city and the surround the counties. Jamie talked

(30:54):
about those opportunities to guide and build and not just
your business, but the industry as a whole. You know,
when we first started, we were thinking about grass fed
beef and how we can do a good job praising
these cattle and focusing on better systems for cattle and
hogs and raising hogs outside and developing those systems. But
what's exciting to me is that we can not only

(31:18):
you know, have a neat little story here at the farm,
but also because we've done the hard work of marketing
and branding and sales which drives business um, that we've
been able to really think about how do we change
agriculture and the and the way people think about food

(31:38):
in a much more comprehensive manner. How do we change
farming and how do we rethink how farmers produced Because
like feed lots and all the big agriculture stuff came
about just because of the business opportunity that was there
and somebody started figuring it out, and and so now people,
you know, there's a whole another generation of people asking

(31:59):
questions of out, how does this get done? How do
we sort of understand the impact of our eating When
I eat a steak or something, hamburger or something, what
what does that look like all the way through back
to the farm, back to the environment. And that's Those
are not questions that people have historically pushed on, and
so now it's like, well, let's let's get that all

(32:21):
that consideration, which is a big thing. We all eat
and drink, We're all connected in that way. It's a
shared experience, and there are human stories behind these experiences.
It's good to remind ourselves of that. I think the
better the food industry is for those working within it
and for the planet, the better for all of us

(32:41):
as consumers. We can push for change. Here's Jamie again,
there's more to sort of just an item on the shelf,
you know, like there's a story back there, there's a
people back there, and we all impact each other. And
the sort of old paradigm of regulating the correct behavior

(33:02):
is ineffective and obsolete to some degree, and so we've
got to find a way to build accountability and integrity
and all the things that we want with food, with products,
all that kind of stuff. Consumers from driving that at
the end of the day, all day long, and that matter,
and so they're buying choices matter. We can't take the

(33:23):
humanity out of food. It's part of our history and
a part of our future. We'll leave the last word
from our one. I find that the history of food
is inseparable from the history of humanity. I mean, almost
everything we've done as a species are you know, settling
down into small societies instead of being nomadic and moving
away from hunter gatherer into more of an agricultural lifestyle.

(33:47):
Our settlements and the banks of rivers or shores or
near mountains or valleys. Our civilizations are wars, are explorations,
Columbus sailing to find you know, the America's it's all
been driven by food, by looking for it, by you know,
finding new sources for it, by finding new experiences and
flavors and food, and and along with that sort of religion,

(34:09):
you know, which the two ago so intertwined that you know,
you can't separate the two. When you study food, and
when you study instory food, you realizing your study the
history of who humans are and how we got to
where we got today, and even now. I mean, I
believe that food is culturally shaping us. I mean, I
think you know, whether it's Instagram or social media, or

(34:31):
delivery services or relates and technology, it's still always seems
to find a way to center around food. So yeah,
that that would be my takeaway thought ours too, Yeah,
that's a pretty good takeaway thought. And speaking of thoughts,

(34:55):
if you'd like to get in touch with us, we
would love to hear from you. Our email address is
hello at favor pod dot com. We're also on social media.
You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at
savor pod. We really do hope to hear from you.
Thank you to all of our guests today and to
Landi's Taylor and the whole team over at explore Asheville
dot com for helping us find them, and our co

(35:16):
executive producer Christopher Hasciotis for helping us find them. Thanks
as always to super producer Dylan for making our jobs
easy and our other co executive producer, Julie Douglas for
all of her good advice. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
your way.