Chatter Marks EP 130 Cold War cakes with Julia O’Malley

Julia O’Malley is a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she’s been researching and re-creating Cold War cakes. During the Cold War era—roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early 1990s—cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something anyone could make at home. Julia says that those boxed mixes, and the recipes people built around them in the ‘70s and ‘80s, are more than just dessert. They’re cultural artifacts that reveal how women navigated creativity, expectation, and changing ideas about domestic life. They reflect a moment when women were entering the national conversation from within domestic space. Experimenting, adapting, and reshaping expectations. That shift raised a question inside the kitchen itself: What happens when packaged ingredients, appliances, and new food technologies promise women time—time to work, to control their finances, and to claim a larger role in public life?

In Alaska, where fresh ingredients were often scarce and communities had long relied on shelf-stable foods, brought in through supply chains and institutional systems, cake mixes made a lot of sense. For generations, Alaskans have adapted to what’s available—working with canned goods, powdered ingredients, and foods designed to travel long distances before reaching the table. A box of cake mix fit easily into that reality. Julia has been tracing these stories through old cookbooks and community recipes, even digging into ones from boomtown Fairbanks in 1909, to understand how something as ordinary as cake can tell us about women’s lives, shifting ideas of feminism, and the creativity that unfolded in Cold War kitchens. Because food, Julia says, is always a story. It’s one of history, origin, climate, and longing. And in the Cold War kitchen, when the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered in the background of daily life, even something as simple as baking a cake could feel like a small act of reassurance.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
So, like, if you look at all of our sort of relationship to technology, which is like

(00:15):
both fascination, maybe even fetish, and also fear and technology itself, might be kind
of a little bit outside of our control as soon as it becomes, you know, part of the
arsenal of another, of a warring, you know, like of a power that is opposed to us.
It becomes outside of our control.

(00:37):
So if you think about all that, and then we return to the kitchen, and we've got these
cake mix cakes, you know, there is this ambivalence for women who are like, well, you know, on
one hand I could make this from scratch, but on the other hand, the world is demanding
more of me also, right?

(00:57):
Because women are starting to tiptoe into the workforce, so can I bake this beautiful
cake and also use the time saved, you know, to do something else?
So it's just cake actually, it speaks into, I mean, a lot of things, like that's just
one of them.
But one of the other papers that I was reading was looking at, you know, just cake as, you

(01:26):
know, part, kind of in miniature, this kind of technology that people felt simultaneously
fascinated by and also a little bit scared of.
That was Julia O'Malley.
She's a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she's been researching and recreating Cold

(01:50):
War cakes.
During the Cold War era, roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early
1990s, cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something
anyone could make at home.

(02:12):
Julia says that those box mixes and the recipes people built around them in the 70s and the
80s are more than just dessert.
They're cultural artifacts that reveal how women navigated creativity, expectations,
and changing ideas around domestic life.

(02:32):
They reflect a moment when women were entering the national conversation from within domestic
space, experimenting, adapting, and reshaping expectations.
That shift raised a question inside the kitchen itself.
What happens when packaged ingredients, appliances, and new food technologies promise women more

(03:00):
time?
Time to work, time to control their finances, and to claim a larger role in public life.
In Alaska, where fresh ingredients were often scarce and communities had long relied on
shelf-stable foods brought in through supply chains and institutional systems, cake mixes

(03:26):
made a lot of sense.
For generations, Alaskans have adapted to what's available, working with canned foods,
powdered ingredients, and foods designed to travel long distances before reaching the
table.
A box of cake mix fit easily into that reality.

(03:47):
Julia has been tracing these stories through old cookbooks and community recipes, even
digging into ones from Boomtown Fairbanks in 1909 to understand how something as ordinary
as cake can tell us about women's lives, shifting ideas of feminism, and the creativity

(04:07):
that unfolded in Cold War kitchens.
Because food, Julia says, is always a story.
It's one of history, origin, climate, and longing.
And in the Cold War kitchen, when the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered in the background

(04:28):
of daily life, even something as simple as baking a cake could feel like a small act
of reassurance.
So here she is, Julia O'Malley.
Welcome to Chatter Marks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska

(04:54):
and the circumpolar North through the creative and critical thinking of ideas, past, present,
and future.
My name is Cody Liske and I'll be your host.
What's the value in using food as a lens to explore larger historical and political themes

(05:22):
like the Cold War?
Oh man.
If you think about food, in some ways it's sort of this intangible, I mean, you can hold
it but it's something that doesn't last, right?
It's like if you're talking about food from a certain era, it's not like you, you know,

(05:45):
can go and sit at that table.
But if you look at the things that give you some sort of sense of evidence of food, artifacts
of the way that people eat, it's really instructive because food is such an outlet for our psychological
yearnings as well as it tells the story of kind of where we are in history.

(06:08):
It talks, speaks into economics, it tells you even about climate.
So things like recipes or advertising, you know, from the Cold War era, which is a really
long time period, right?
It goes from the end of World War II into the 90s.

(06:29):
But if you look at those artifacts, the recipes, and if you look at the packaging and you look
at the, you know, advertising, did I say that already?
Sorry.
Recipes, packaging, and advertising, if you look at that stuff, it helps you kind of start

(06:51):
to unpack or think about the story of that time and it's just like a kind of a neat way
in.
And then you pair that, you know, for the audiences who might come with me on a kind
of a journey into this food story with nostalgia, right?
So a lot of us, for example, growing up in Alaska did stuff like we drank Tang, we ate

(07:15):
Spam, we, you know, anywhere in the United States in the 70s and 80s, you were probably
eating cake mix and doctored cake mix too.
And so those sorts of flavors that specifically come that way, you know, they bring us back
into a moment in time.

(07:36):
And what I like about that is that, you know, when you add facts to nostalgia, it shifts
how you remember something.
So it adds context to that personal experience or that childhood memory.
So nostalgia then moves from sort of this act of kind of an intellectual act or an emotional

(07:59):
act into something that is a, it basically allows you to have sort of curiosity about
that moment.
When before that moment was defined by your, you know, just personal experience of it.
Are there any specific Cold War recipes, meals or ingredients that feel especially loaded

(08:22):
with meaning when you look back now?
Well, I've been doing a bunch of work this past few weeks in advance of a event at the
museum that's built around cake and Cold War era cake.
And so I've been doing a lot of thinking about the way that cooking shifted as food technology

(08:48):
was introduced into the market with the purpose of saving women time so they could do other
things.
But directly after the war, when women were first introduced to the idea of cake mix,
it was a just add water kind of a proposition.
And the making of a cake, that act of baking was so central to women's sense of purpose,

(09:13):
identity, the definition of femininity, it was all about sort of a time that really had
a fetish for domesticity, like all of that.
Women were sort of not warm to it at first because it was too easy.
So the makers of cake mixes went back and reformulated the mix to add an egg.

(09:35):
So it then seemed like you were doing some work.
So you weren't totally derelict in the kitchen because you were adding an egg.
And then soon, these things were sort of embraced, you know, very broadly.

(09:58):
And I was reading like a paper from the 60s that was looking at the way that farm women
had come to accept, farm women with lots of children who had to cook for a lot of people
had come to accept cake mix because of its labor saving ability.
And also, we have to know that at this time, we're as a culture grappling with the role

(10:24):
of science and technology.
And of course, you know, the like atomic bomb is kind of at the center of that nuclear arms
race is at the center of that.
So this anxiety about a technology that we have created, but that is now existential
and has kind of gotten out of control.

(10:46):
That's the backdrop for this moment when this technology enters the kitchen.
And this is also the same time when like, they're developing all these kitchen appliances
that look like spaceships, you know.
So like, everything is kind of referencing also like this, you know, the other place
where we're having all of these, you know, geopolitical tensions that are occurring in

(11:07):
space over, you know, the race to dominate in that place.
So like, if you look at all of our sort of relationship to technology, which is like
both fascination, maybe even fetish and also fear and technology itself might be kind of
a little bit outside of our control as soon as it becomes, you know, part of the arsenal

(11:30):
of another of a warring, you know, like of a power that is opposed to us, it becomes
outside of our control.
So if you think about all that, and then we return to the kitchen, and we've got these
cake mix cakes, you know, there is this ambivalence for women who are like, well, you know, on

(11:51):
one hand, I could make this from scratch.
But on the other hand, the world is demanding more of me also, right?
Because women are starting to tiptoe into the workforce.
So can I bake this beautiful cake and also use the time saved, you know, to do to do
something else?

(12:11):
So it's just cake, actually, it speaks into, I mean, a lot of things like that's just one
of them.
But one of the other papers that I was reading was looking at, you know, just cake as, you
know, part kind of in miniature, this kind of technology that people felt simultaneously

(12:36):
fascinated by, and also a little bit scared of.
They were scared of cake.
That's just scared of the idea that women wouldn't be engaging in that work, then what
else would they do?
Right?
Did that paper or maybe you can hazard a guess, you know, what did what did men think that

(13:01):
women were going to do with that extra time?
I mean, what was so dangerous about it?
Well, a woman with extra time could get a job.
I mean, you know, the society was changing these sort of foundational pillars of, you
know, the way that things were structured.
Women were entering the workforce, women were beginning to demand more rights, they

(13:26):
wanted to have their names on, they wanted to open bank accounts, and they wanted to
have credit cards, and they, you know, they wanted to have their own jobs and careers
and you know, all of that stuff.
So and cake mixes acknowledging those other sorts of curiosities for women.

(13:51):
And it just and I think social change makes people uncomfortable.
And also honestly, I you know, you and I were talking before we got started about the 90s.
But I think there are certain corollaries to this moment, you know, where there is this
tremendous longing around among people my age.
So I'm like, right at the tail end of Gen X, for analog technology, because it's something

(14:17):
that's familiar, it's not monetized, it's not controlled by algorithms.
You have like, a completely direct path of communication.
So it's not like you're, you know, writing a text on your phone, you're like sending
a love letter, or making a mixtape.
And I think some of that longing is actually similar to, you know, that and, and the ambivalent

(14:43):
feeling that we might have about our phones, you know, is similar to what was kind of going
on, especially in this early Cold War period, when these cakes were entering, you know,
our diets.
Because you're sort of like, this thing is convenient, but what am I giving up?

(15:05):
And you know, and it is true that technology like the mapping programs, and, you know,
the AI, Google, and even spellcheck, it relieves our brains of things that we were doing before.
And if we were left to our own devices, could we actually find our way around, you know?

(15:26):
So what does it mean that you're not actually cooking the whole cake?
Obviously, cake mix won, won that debate.
I mean, now, in the United States, in general, cake mix, it kind of has crested in terms
of being something that people were relying on, and now is kind of declined somewhat.
But in Alaska, cake mix remains, especially rural Alaska, really central.

(15:51):
And it's because it is so practical.
And then though, of course, just like you can have like in a beautiful morning of like
poetry and songs, just going scrolling through Instagram, depending on what your algorithm
shows you, women began to apply their imaginations to these cake mixes.

(16:13):
So even though they weren't adding an egg and measuring out the flour, now, they were
tricking out these box mixes.
And that's when we enter the 70s, which is, you know, really where some of my fascination
lies, where these cakes become this vehicle for female fantasy and longing, you know?

(16:39):
So it's like art.
I don't know how much you want.
Yeah, exactly.
Absolutely.
Because think about how few avenues for expression existed.
You know, it was limited for women in these times.
And it was, of course, changing.
We were in the middle of the civil rights movement.
We were, women were, you know, gaining footholds in all kinds of different areas, but these

(17:07):
sort of pedestrian, cheap cake mixes became a medium for women to express themselves.
And I mean, in a way, baking and cakes have always been an act of self-expression for
women, you know, predating the cake mix time.

(17:30):
And I was writing about this yesterday, but the, you know, the first cookbook, the earliest
cookbook that I have found in the museum archives comes from 1909 in Fairbanks.
And in it, there is, there are a number of, it's mostly handwritten, there are a number,
it's by like the women's, Presbyterian Women's Club.

(17:54):
And at this time, it's like boomtown Fairbanks.
It's maybe, it's not even been in a town for a decade yet.
There is a whole red light district where women are madams and dance hall girls and
all that.
But then there's this other little women's world where they are trying to like open schools

(18:16):
and they're having little like church societies and what have you.
And the church society makes a cookbook.
So it's a place where women can express their sense of identity through these recipes and
they're all these white cake recipes.
But then if you look up what was actually available to them, the ingredients, some of
these ingredients are like flour in particular are prohibitively expensive and eggs are not

(18:42):
available year round and milk, fresh milk is not like available all the time and they've
only got canned milk.
And you realize that they're all writing white cake recipes for cakes that they probably
aren't even going to bake.
But the idea is that they are writing them down to express their sense of identity as

(19:03):
white cake ladies who would make this cake.
And they also want other people to know how to make the cake.
And there's this part of our food culture that's all about that sort of storytelling
and also that preservation.
So it's like, okay, I'm on the Yukon River and we haven't had any fish that we can get

(19:26):
for a number of years.
But even so, I'm going to find red salmon and I'm going to bring it back to my village
from the Copper River and I'm going to get my grandchildren, I'm going to show them how
to cut it and how to dry it and how to smoke it because that is so deeply part of my identity.

(19:47):
So again, when we're like in the Fairbanks story, it's these women who have come from
elsewhere to this male-dominated boomtown and they're like, hey, except for this is
what it means to bake and this is what we bake and this is what we eat and people like
us do this.

(20:09):
And then again, in World War II, during the ration time when you had to use a booklet
in order to buy your staple foods, I was looking through the Women's Pages recipes
in the Anchorage Times from that period and I stumbled on a recipe for tomato soup cake,

(20:30):
which does not use eggs and it rises with the chemical reaction between the aching soda
and tomato soup.
But again, this is a moment when everyone is being called to like grow a victory garden.
They're making victory rolls.
They're supposed to be thrifty and efficient and patriotic and stiff upper lip.

(20:54):
It was all about trying to raise the morale of Americans during a time when food was scarce
and being rationed.
And so again, women are entering, they're entering the national conversation from the
kitchen with this cake.

(21:17):
So I guess I'm just using these examples to sort of preface this conversation about the
Cold War and this particular food technology, food, because these cake mixes are, they carry
a lot of cultural meaning.

(21:41):
And so can I tell you about some of the things that the cake mixes expressed because I'm
not used to it?
Please, yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm doing this event and it's given me the opportunity to really go hard into these
cookbooks from the 70s and 80s and then to look more broadly at kind of what their many,
there's a lot of iterations of various recipes, but I'm just trying to think about like what

(22:05):
would be my first favorite one to start with.
But one of the things is that cake is the food of the rich, right, theoretically.
It's this luxury food, but cake mix made it democratic.
Everybody could use it.
And so then the cakes then took on this kind of work of expressing women's fantasy lives.

(22:28):
So one of the cakes that I'm making is a pink cake, strawberry, but it's soaked in
champagne, a champagne and strawberry cake, very luxury.
Another cake I'm making that's just kind of beautiful is called the Watergate cake.
And the Watergate hotel before, you know, the cakes meaning changed, you know, after

(22:52):
actual Watergate, after, you know, the scandal with Nixon.
But the hotel was kind of a luxury place.
So the cake is a pastel green.
Oh, also these cakes often, so not just the tech of the cake mix, but they often call
for other food tech.
So Jell-O, which is a very old food technology, they often call for Jell-O or pudding mix.

(23:18):
So the Watergate cake is kind of like this pastel, beautiful pastel green colored with
pistachio pudding, which is kind of come back into vogue, but is a pretty retro kind
of food.
And then it has like a pillowy green whipped cream frosting that is like also colored with

(23:42):
pudding mix.
And then you sort of, it's actually delicious, has coconut and pistachio in the batter mixed
into the batter.
So that's another cake that I'm making.
And then there's this cake.
So also the cakes became more adults oriented.
So the other cake that I'm working on is, is called the Harvey Wallbanger cake.

(24:07):
And Harvey Wallbanger was a cartoon character created by Galliano, which was a, or the company
that was selling Galliano, which is sort of an Italian style, licorice flavored aperitif
bottle is huge and yellow.
It's like, it kind of looks like pee, it's like bright yellow.

(24:30):
Like I put some in a jar and I was like, this seems weird.
Unhealthy pee?
Yeah.
It seems like unhealthy pee, but anyway, they made up this drink called a Harvey Wallbanger,
which basically like a screwdriver with this aperitif in it.
And then they also made like a lady, like appealing thing, which was to write a recipe

(24:56):
for the Harvey Wallbanger cake, which is a Bundt cake, demure, however, it is like flavored
up with the alcohol and then it has an alcohol, an alcohol glaze on the top.
So not really, and, and its flavors aren't really for the children necessarily.

(25:18):
So that was also this thing of like a sort of the cake, it looks like a cake, but it's
a secret nod to kind of like adult party times.
But my most favorite cake is this cake.
So there's a genre of cakes that were called the better than sex cakes.
And these were just like highly, highly indulgent.

(25:39):
So this other thing that just spoke to the sort of, I think really spoke to feelings
of deprivation, secret feelings of deprivation that women were harboring.
But these cakes are like chocolate cake with like condensed milk and a layer of pudding
and then Cool Whip and then Heath crushed Heath bars on top or whatever.

(26:00):
And they, and, you know, women's magazines picked them up and sort of like jokingly called
them BTS cakes, like it was like a code.
And then there was the better than Robert Redford cake, but the cake that I'm making
is like a Hawaiian version and it's a better than Tom Selleck cake.
And I forgot, I remember now watching Magnum P.I. when I was six and just getting that

(26:26):
little feeling unidentified at that time about Tom Selleck, he's super cute in those years.
I mean, I think he turned into kind of a weird guy, but, but like in the little shorts with
the little ball cap and the Hawaiian shirt and his gun, like, oh my God, anyways.
So so and I just, I love the idea of like, you know, the married mother there in the

(26:55):
kitchen giving a little wink to her adult thoughts, even though she's making a yellow
cake that is soaked in condensed milk with a layer of pudding and some Cool Whip with,
you know, some coconut on the top.
So again, but this is like all of these things are occurring in this Cold War period.

(27:20):
So yeah.
Where are people eating these cakes?
Are they having them at home?
Are they having them at parties?
I think they are having them in all the ways that a person might have them.
I think cake was a much more was much more commonly ingested than it is now.

(27:41):
And you know, there was cake was sort of cake and punch, and the punch might be alcoholic
was kind of a thing.
You know, that whole idea of refreshments and not quite a meal, but a little something.
This is another thing that I think we've actually lost now.
With these kind of small semi-formal social events, you're not even formal, but your PTA

(28:07):
reception, your after graduation party, that sort of light kind of refreshment oriented
gathering was a place where you would find these cakes.
And they also came to define passages, which they still do, like a birthday child's birthday

(28:28):
party or, you know, a wedding, right?
Cake is like at the center of those things.
I feel really weirdly nerdily inspired by this cake mix project to like this point where
I'm like embarrassed to talk about how much it's like carried me away.

(28:54):
Do you know what happened when women didn't or couldn't live up to this ideal in the kitchen,
whether it was imposed by the government as patriotic or imposed by their husbands or
their families as, you know, this is your womanly duty?

(29:15):
Well, that's the beauty of cake mix too.
So I should mention that if you read cookbooks and you go back a hundred and, you know, I
would say to the late 1800s, you'll notice that like in that early period, you don't
see any measurements in those cookbooks because women were supposed to know.

(29:39):
They don't also, they're not working with oven technology that's as precise.
So you don't also see like bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
And so much of what was done in the kitchen was passed on from mother to daughter in the
way that you might pass a craft on.

(30:00):
And it was unspoken and unrecorded and just part of what it meant to be a woman.
But as we, and in that paper I was talking about from the 60s that was looking at the
market for cake mixes, it was talking about women who for whatever reason had not been
trained by their mothers and how to bake and how a cake mix was a workaround to please

(30:22):
your husband.
And we should also talk about cake mixes as this sort of thing that also has like certain
symbolism about women's bodies that is imbued with kind of a gendered, charged femininity.

(30:44):
And so, you know, one of the other articles I was reading was looking at the way that
cake mix advertising presented cakes similar to the way that Playboy, which was just beginning
to offer itself in full bleed color at that time.

(31:07):
That like the way that the women were presented in Playboy was very similar to a sudden sort
of burst of very voluptuous, colorful, full bleed cake.
And you know, it was quoting these magazines talking about how, you know, a wedding cake

(31:30):
is like a woman before her wedding night, right, without a slice taken out.
And so,
And does that mean that once the guests start eating the cake, is that?
I think the metaphor starts to fall apart.
But they were basically just talking about the way that a wedding cake should be presented
and how it was symbolic of the virginal bride.

(31:53):
But then there was also sort of an analysis after we dropped the atomic bomb and, you
know, created an atrocity of cake advertising that was actually coming out at that same
time.
And there was a cake that was like, it was like a red, white and blue cake.

(32:15):
But basically, it looked like it was bleeding, I think not purposefully, but people were
super offended by it.
Because it was supposed to be patriotic, but it had it was like a white cake with cherries
in it.
And it looked like an atrocity.
And it looks kind of like you were trying to use cake to normalize an atrocity.

(32:39):
And are people seeing these cakes in a magazine in the newspaper?
Okay,
so imagine it's like, you're reading Time magazine, and you're reading about, you know,
an atrocity created by the dropping of the bomb, and then you're seeing a advertisement

(33:00):
for a bleeding cake.
And you might react to that.
And people did.
Yeah, anyway, so these cakes, they play.
If you start thinking about them in this way, you kind of see how they are a cultural artifact

(33:22):
that carries with them, you know, this ability to tell us a story about women's lives and
the periods in which they are baking.
And so I find that I just find that really interesting.
Yeah, I have tested so many cakes now.
I don't really want to eat them.
But what has been your favorite?

(33:45):
Of the cakes?
Yeah.
I mean, it's got to be Tom Selleck.
I don't know.
That guy.
I mean, the Harvey Wallbanger cake is actually pretty good.
That cake is and this is also just like about women's ingenuity.
It's whipped for a long time, like longer than you would usually do.

(34:05):
And it creates more of this kind of interesting, very soft, sort of a chiffon texture.
And then you, you know, saturate the cake with alcohol.
So it is a pretty it is a pretty and there's something about a burnt cake that's just nostalgic.

(34:26):
But it is a pretty good cake.
But I got it.
I will forever.
And it's nostalgic for me that the flavor of like a pineapple whipped cream on top of
like the the Tom Selleck, all the layers of that, like speak to me pretty deeply.
So I don't know, that's probably my favorite.

(34:47):
I mean, I do like a funfetti cake if I'm not but that came later.
That's like a kind of an eight.
I think that came actually in the early 90s.
You know, I'm thinking about the military presence, you know, have you thought about
how military presence or base supply chains in Alaska influenced home kitchens during

(35:10):
the Cold War?
Absolutely.
And that's another thing, you know, just foundationally, that we should talk about is that Alaskans
have always relied more heavily since contact, since we began eating things that were no
longer just 100% from the land.
We've always relied on shelf stable food that has been brought in, in a kind of institutional

(35:36):
or ration sort of setting.
I mean, this goes back to like, the hard tack that we were trading for that came on rushing
Russian ships.
So that would be like the predecessor to pilot bread.
And so these things like instant coffee, Tang, Spam, Cool Whip, Jell-O, pudding, cake

(36:08):
mix, certain kinds of canned, so for example, canned pineapple for whatever reason goes
back forever.
But these foods, because of their practicality, but also because of the way that the military
and the culture of the military and people who had just come from places where they were

(36:31):
eating rations, that military technology, which is the predecessor to the processed
food movement, that really kind of came with the expansion, you know, the anxious expansion
of the military presence in Alaska.

(36:53):
And those are also, that was, people were shopping at the PX, right?
And so that food and that food was traveling far.
So just all of those, you know, powdered milk, like Dream Whip, all of those shelf stable
food tech foods, which were, that food technology that we're talking about really came out of

(37:17):
the World War II era when there was lots of sort of experimentation being done to make
rations.
Oh, cheese powder, so like the early Kraft mac and cheese vibe, that also came in that
period of time.
And so Alaska's population is suddenly heavily influenced by the military, its supply lines

(37:41):
are bolstered by this kind of food that is being, you know, that troops were used to
eating and that is being now manufactured for military families that are far away, because
another place where this kind of food is being eaten in the same period would be Hawaii.
And that's why certain, like Spam, for example, and the Philippines, that's another place,

(38:08):
where certain packaged foods go way back and have had this kind of influence on food culture.
But in Alaska, you're still seeing that influence amplified in rural Alaska, because these foods
make a lot of sense.
They are satiating, they are sweet, they have buttermilk powder, they have, you know, they

(38:34):
carry with them a lot of citric acid when in a place where it's like an orange isn't
gonna is expensive and doesn't, you know, all of that stuff.
So it makes a ton of sense here.
And I hate the judgment of it, to be honest, because it's just what it is, you know, what
does that sound like the judgment?

(38:54):
It's like this whole thing of like, it's all true.
These are ultra processed foods.
Yeah, right.
The number one enemy of all of our health.
But these are also available cheap, they don't spoil, they add to or augment what's available
for people, and they have memories attached, right?

(39:17):
People have been eating them over a long period of time.
And so it's just like, you can eat a little bit, you drink a little bit of Tang, like
don't fret, you know, and like, and have, you know, if you want to make cake, you want
to use cake mix, go for it, like, yeah, and and go for probably because it belongs to

(39:38):
us in this way.
You know, people are having cake walks in villages for to pay for surgery and basketball
trips.
And like, because that cake, people like to eat it and there isn't a bakery there.
There's no grocery store that's selling cake.
So I don't know, I just it's like, you can look at foods in many dimensions in terms

(40:04):
of thinking about their importance to us.
Everything in moderation, you know.

(40:57):
You know, I, I, I like this, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

(41:26):
I like this embrace of ultra processed food, but it also sounds like you're talking about
in moderation because it is so unhealthy.
I wonder when you started to embrace it, because, you know, you recognize that you did have
all these food memories from it, or, you know, fill in the blank.

(41:50):
I mean, I guess it's like, I just over time have started to look at food in a three dimensional
way.
You know, there's always a question with food because I've written a lot about restaurants
and reviewed restaurants and that thing is like, well, is this good?
Is it good?
And but that is so subjective.

(42:13):
And I listened to Pete Wells, who was a food reviewer for the New York Times talking about
how to write about food once and he was saying, you know, sometimes he writes about food because
it transports him somewhere.
So he's like, you know, this bite took me directly to like a wooden table in a seaside
town where I was going to eat, you know, a whatever crab lobster roll or something.

(42:41):
And there's another thing about ultra processed foods in the context of Alaska is that they
come from a world that is so different and they carry a sense of national identity, but
of a place that some of us have never really understood or traveled to.

(43:02):
So like you take, for example, a bright pink, double layered birthday cake and imagine
that you live where I have, I've been to, you live in on St. Lawrence Island and somebody
makes you that birthday cake and maybe you're relying on 70% wild food and you haven't really

(43:31):
been off the island.
But that cake comes from this wider vocabulary of American foods.
It's meaningful not just to you because it's your birthday, you know, and you've got your
Nick your village nickname written on it, you know.

(43:51):
It's meaningful because it connects you to this, the sort of food vocabulary of the wider
world allows you to be part of that conversation, even though in Alaska, many of us feel, you
know, like the outside feels mysterious, feels hostile, feels like a novelty, feels like

(44:13):
a fascination, but feels separate from us.
But when we engage, when we are eating ultra processed food that comes with this sort of
democratizing story, it attaches us to like a larger world for better or for worse.
Yeah.

(44:33):
Because the other thing is every food is a story.
Food is always a story.
You know, it's a story of history, of origin, of longing, of climate, whatever have you.
And prepackaged foods are a national story.

(44:54):
They're part of the American identity.
These kinds of foods for better or for worse.
So I'm just like, I like to look at more as like, what does this food mean to us?
And not like, should we or should we not eat it?
You know, because that's just more interesting to me.
And is it or is it good or not?
It's that such as that also is almost a boring question.

(45:17):
I mean, I think some things are delicious and I eat a lot of food and I cook a lot of
food.
So maybe you should listen to me about it.
But is that as important as sort of, you know, what does that food mean?
What story does it carry?
What does it preserve for us?
What does it tell us about where we've come from?

(45:38):
And that's another thing about these cake mixes are so kind of retro in this way, except
we hold on to them.
They're still of use because women have less time than ever to bake.
When you're making these cakes and you're reading these old recipes, you're making the

(46:01):
same exact thing that these people were making, you know, decades ago.
And that's like almost a form of time travel.
That's a cool way of looking at it.
One thing I didn't say about cakes is that they're like a time machine.
But that's the thing about origin and tradition and identity.

(46:23):
But I do think about, you know, these women's club cookbooks, women had to put their name
on each recipe.
And so the recipe became an avatar, right?
It became a thing that told the world what they were all about.

(46:45):
And I just, I sometimes also just reflect on, you know, how they, like take for example,
like menopause, everybody now talks about it.
It's like this whole thing and there's like websites and books and derp-a-derp.
But like my grandmother's time, nobody even talked about it.

(47:05):
And they just like went through all of these like changes, some of which are pretty profound
without any sort of community around it.
But I think about these women, you know, raising kids, trying to work, living in a society
where they like couldn't have a credit card or checking account.

(47:26):
And I think about all the things that they were carrying and how they were also expected
to meet this sort of standard in the kitchen.
And in that sense, I feel like there's a way you could say that cake mixes, despite all
their baggage, are sort of a feminist item, like a tool that, you know, and in Alaska,

(47:55):
it's like, well, what would they be spending their time doing if not baking?
Well, they'd be like mushing dogs and, you know, picking berries and pulling in nets
and flying planes.
You know, all of the things that, you know, the interesting ways that the Alaskan lifestyle
complicates traditional gender roles and always has, you know, the cake mix is kind of a,

(48:20):
it boosts that up.
So cakes are really, cakes are feminism also.
On top of all that, a box cake mix is politics and yeah.
What was the last piece of food that you had that transported you to a specific time?

(48:47):
I was writing about this a couple of weeks ago in my newsletter, but I went to this little
storefront in midtown Anchorage and I, where I was going there to eat a banh mi sandwich
because this lady has like kind of a reputation for making these cool, super authentic Vietnamese
style sandwiches.

(49:07):
That was my dog barking.
But she had all of this tropical fruit and super in perfect shape, all beautiful.
She cut up this tiny papaya and it was a firm green papaya and she tossed it in like a fish
sauce dressing with Thai chili and sugar.

(49:30):
And I bit into that thing and man, it took me right to, there is this such a connection
between Alaska and Hawaii.
My grandfather was born in Hawaii and to my first trip to Hawaii, which is also interestingly
around the time I was watching a lot of Tom Selleck, when I was six and when I went with,

(49:56):
and it was to the Island of Molokai and I went to eat to a roadside papaya stand.
And my parents were so delighted.
I remember them being so overjoyed to buy these papayas and we put our cash in the basket
and we took the papayas home and to hold it in my hand and to smell it before I ate it

(50:19):
and be curious about it.
It was that same sort of direct line from mouth to memory that happened when I was in
in January in the slush in this like little strip mall.
Yeah.
So brought you right back to Molokai.

(50:39):
Yeah, it took me right to Molokai.
Yeah.
It's a beautiful Island.
Me and my family used to go there a lot until things started to move out.
And then we, we started going to Kauai years and years and years and years ago.
And yeah, I have really fond memories of Molokai is a beautiful Island.

(51:01):
Just yeah, there's like a whole other set of shows to be done about Alaskans and their
Hawaiian dreams, thoughts, big connection there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it was common for, sorry, I'm switching gears here a little bit because I keep looking
at this question and I'm like, I got to get this question in here.

(51:22):
It was common for fallout shelters to include food plans during the cold war.
Do you know what kinds of meals were planned for the end of the world?
I don't, not exactly.
One of the more interesting food traditions that is sort of corollary in the American

(51:47):
West would be the pantry building tradition that women in the Mormon church have, which
involves having and cycling through a year of food supply.
And I think that, you know, there's a lot of staples included in that.

(52:08):
So staples like unground barley that you would maybe grind into flour, rice, beans,
that kind of thing.
But I don't know what those end of the world rations look like.
I definitely have been on ADAC in some of those bunkers, but they no longer contain

(52:31):
the food.
So that's an interesting question, but I don't, I don't actually know specifically the answer
to it.
Yeah, that's okay.
You know, I'm, I'm also thinking, you know, how do you think cold war cooking blurred
the line between everyday life and existential threat?

(52:52):
Well, one of the things I think that was always in the background was this, was this sense
of threat.
And I think a lot of the presentation and ritual around food was about soothing, a normalization
or self-soothing sort of practice where it's like, you're going to make a meal that looks,

(53:20):
and that's, everything is so, especially for women in these cookbooks, where they talk
about how not just to make the food, but how to present it and prepare it, you know,
so that it's like, if you look at food photography in the cookbooks, especially immediately post
war, things are abundant, but they are so tidy.

(53:46):
There is like space between the green beans and the meat and the potatoes on the plate.
Right.
And, and things, as we move deeper into the cold war period, the sort of idea, the sort
of abundance, the sort of like crowded plates, kind of, and also the influences of these

(54:09):
other food movements that are sort of things like vegetarianism, things become more kind
of relaxed, but in that immediate post-war period, things are tidy and spare.
And there is a sense of order and symmetry, all of these kinds of ways in which we might

(54:32):
organize our plates and our meals and our diets.
And there are many, many, many full day menus for women to make, you know, that are meant
to like, help to make your children strong and you're a man better at work and all of
that kind of stuff.
So women are engaged in this, like this work of like, preserving and saving the family,

(54:56):
right.
Sort of causing them to be stronger and more resilient and, you know, women have this kind
of savior role through these like, interesting domestic food channels.
And I think a lot of that is in response to the existential anxiety that's created by

(55:19):
the threat of nuclear annihilation.
This idea, and it's, it's a normalization, it's a, it's an ordering behavior.
So it's like, you're rearranging the chair, the deck chairs on the Titanic kind of impulse,
though.
Of course, we know now that nobody died, who knows how it'll go now with today's news.

(55:41):
But and also, you know, strict gender norms also help.
They are a soothing thing.
So there was, you know, that also was part of that post war period.
Also there was sort of a, I don't know what, a soothing quality to the democratic nature

(56:10):
of foods availability.
Like, in this period, we will go, we will make our homes, our tidy little homes with
their tidy little meals, and we will go to the market and most foods will be available
to us.
We will expect that many foods will be available to us because there is, because America is
the land of milk and honey.
We are, you know, we have vanquished the enemy and everybody can have a middle class life

(56:37):
here.
But all of that, that sort of engagement in that kind of capitalist dream is a way to
sort of distract from the larger existential question that looms over us.
If you were to curate a Cold War kitchen dinner, you know, three dishes that represent

(57:03):
that era's food culture, what would be on the menu?
Oh, well, probably we'd have to have a TV dinner.
I was talking with a friend about whether like if you tried to make Salisbury steak,
which is like kind of like a, I think it's like a hamburger in gravy, basically, like

(57:25):
if it would actually, if you could make it good or if it should just be like soggy and
weird.
So yeah, so I think, but that would be like a classic TV dinner dish.
And I, you know, I would probably think about like a beverage, beverages, this was like
the explosion of beverages.
Sorry, I'm giving my dog a dog bone right now because he's threatening to bark at us.

(57:47):
So I would probably have, you know, like, I don't know, either, probably maybe it was
a little cocktail or something that came from this era.
Maybe, maybe it'd be a Harvey Wallbanger.
I don't know.
And then I would probably, I would probably make cake.

(58:11):
It would be, it would be a sheet cake, not a sort of fancy cake.
I'd probably poke holes in it and pour something on top of it, maybe jello.
And then I would serve it with cold whip, because why would you make whipped cream when
you could just get some kind of greasy sort of whipped cream equivalent in the freezer

(58:37):
section?
Exactly.
It's already made.
Yeah, exactly.
Who has the time?
So I don't know if that, if that fits your question, but it does.
Yeah.
It sounds delicious.
Yes.
See, you can come over.
I don't know if I'll make you Salisbury steak.
I feel really ambivalent about Salisbury steak, but, but, you know, you and I grew up in the,

(59:01):
you and I grew up in the, in the era of lots of convenience foods that were super normal
to us, you know, like, yeah, it was just like, normal, for example, and, you know, and these
foods are not just part of American culture.
Like think about our thing about top ramen, how much of that we ate or cup of noodles
or, you know, and then there's like craft Mac and cheese.

(59:22):
There's like Chef Boyardee, canned pasta.
Did you ever put an egg in your top ramen?
No, but I did put a slice of American cheese.
American cheese would be another one.
Inside your top ramen?
You put cheese?
On top it.
Oh, on top.
10 out of 10.
I still like that.
Yeah.

(59:43):
It's good.
It's called cheesy ramen.
It's actually a thing.
You can order it.
Okay.
But I now I would put it with an egg and like some maybe something like a like a chili crisp
or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, but yeah, I mean, this is stuff that you and I fully, it was normal in our lives.

(01:00:03):
I, when I got sick, people gave me Tang, they were like, you need vitamin C, you know, and
ginger ale.
Like, and now I'm like, my kids don't even, I don't think they even understand, you know,
like we thought ginger ale was going to somehow cure the stomach flu.
And it's like, it doesn't even really have ginger in it.
Like I don't know.
Ginger ale was like a cure all.
Yeah, exactly.
Ginger ale.

(01:00:23):
Oh, a Campbell's soup.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, for sure.
Yeah.
Canned soup goes way back.
Like it goes, you know, to the big, I think it probably predates the first world war.
But yeah.
Is that just marketing?
Is that just marketing that, that led us to believe that, you know, soup, a chicken

(01:00:43):
noodle soup, this is what you have when you're sick.
I think so.
And another thing is Alaskans, maybe more than other places, because they were being
introduced to new foods through these sort of limited channels.
So, you know, they would like introduce a new kind of packaged food at the grocery store.
There wasn't like a ton of alternatives, certainly if the food was kind of going to replace a

(01:01:06):
fresh, a fresh food that was hard to get anyway.
Those foods would then be advertised to women on the women's pages with recipes.
So it'd be like, how to make it.
Here's this new food technology food and here's how to make it.
I mean, they had to also do advertising around like certain kinds of produce because they
would be like, what is this Kiwi?

(01:01:27):
Like how do you eat it?
And my parents still are just like, you know, can like quote advertising for Kiwi fruit
that they like read as children because it was like so novel.
I think they must have been teenagers.
But they would be like, it was like peel, scoop, cut, eat, like, yeah, you know, trying
to explain.

(01:01:47):
How to eat a Kiwi.
This how to eat a Kiwi.
Yeah.
I mean, I didn't have a mango until I was like college age, I think.
I wasn't, you know, that there was like some stuff that I don't think I ever had.
But now it's really commonplace, even, you know, just growing up here in the eighties
and nineties.

(01:02:08):
I think the first time I ever had a star fruit was actually on Molokai when I was a kid.
And I remember looking at it in the grocery store and it just looked plastic.
And it's funny because I had a piece of star fruit before I actually saw a full, you know,

(01:02:29):
a full fruit.
And I remember just picking it up in the grocery store.
I'm like, what is this?
Is this like, cause I thought it was maybe like some type of confection that they had,
like some type of, you know, I don't know.
But anyway, that reminded me of that, you know, coming from Alaska and you're introduced
to these, these like exotic fruits, you know, in your mind.

(01:02:52):
And you're like, how do I even eat this?
We have these, like this incredible abundance of wild food and protein, but this real lack
of agriculturally produced food.
I mean, that's changing that.
And we've had more or less of it over time, but, but that's one of the kind of interesting

(01:03:16):
aspects of our food culture where on one hand you can have more salmon than like anyone
else in the United States in your freezer.
But then on the other hand, you may never have tasted a mango until you were 18.
Yeah.
Have you ever noticed any Cold War era menu items around Anchorage or maybe throughout

(01:03:45):
your other travels in Alaska?
Well, it's such a long, it's a big era.
Like menu items that seem particularly retro, you know, I don't, I don't even know.
Like there are some restaurants that have been open for that whole entire time.

(01:04:05):
You know, like the White Spot or Great Burger, Lucky Wishbone, Great Burger again.
Yeah.
Club Paris.
Yeah.
Club Paris has, feels iconically Cold War-tastic because just the sort of classic Mad Men kind
of cocktails, you just feel really at home, like having a martini there and eating like,

(01:04:32):
you know, steak or whatever that they offer.
Their menu feels very kind of classically of that moment.
So that's a place that I think would be like kind of unmistakably or iconically, you know,
kind of of that moment, if I was going to think of like a place with a menu that feels

(01:04:53):
like it fits in with that Cold War, post-war food time.
We talked about this a bit earlier, but I was wondering if you could get a little bit
more specific.
So when you look at today's anxieties, climate change, AI, political polarization, global

(01:05:16):
conflict, do you see similarities in how people turn to food for comfort or control?
I mean, I absolutely do.
I think that we, there has been since COVID, I think like one way of looking at it would
be the anxiety created by the sense of having no control.

(01:05:41):
And COVID absolutely did, quiet, the sense of having no control, COVID absolutely did
that to us.
And you saw this thing of people leaving, they began to further distrust institutions,
they began to leave cities and go to rural places where they could live by their own

(01:06:03):
hand.
And, you know, teach their children in homeschool, people abandoned vaccines, they wanted to
kind of like move back in time, the Make America Great Again speaks directly into that impulse.
And I think there's like, probably a word for the feeling of longing for a time period

(01:06:29):
in which you were never, you never lived.
But the thing about cooking is it is this essential act of agency that's directly created,
I mean, directly connected to survival.
So, you know, I think I just walked down the stairs and now I'm breathless, trying to escape

(01:06:52):
the dog.
Anyway, sorry, what was I saying?
Okay, so the thing about cooking is that it is, it is an analog activity.
It does not involve any kind of technological mediator.
It is, you know, ancient, it connects you to other moments in time.

(01:07:17):
I think one of the things that's happened in the last five or six years is this sort
of fascination with kind of DIY processing technology.
So people are like pickling and making their own cheese and like making ricotta and like,
you know, the ballerina farm woman, I don't know if you're familiar with her, but she's

(01:07:40):
like mother ginormous Mormon family.
She's like a brand and all she'll be like, I'm gonna make pizza.
So she'll literally like grind the flour and make the dough and then like make mozzarella
and then like go to her garden and get the tomatoes and like make the sauce, you know,

(01:08:03):
that whole thing.
And she's just blowing up bonkers.
People love to watch that.
And it speaks to this longing for a closer connection between people and their food.
The idea that you can feed yourself from your own work and the sense of control that
brings.
She's also rural.
I think there's like a real renewed fascination with rural life.

(01:08:29):
And you know, food and cooking is, even though you can apply all kinds of technology to it,
it is essentially a kind of analog activity.
And I think people take a lot of comfort from that.
So are we in a new era of cooking like we did during the Cold War?

(01:08:52):
I mean, probably before the Cold War, some of the stuff that people are into where they're
like making their own butter and cheese goes way back.
But I think people are also their attention is split by all of the different digital stimulus.
They are feeling a total loss of control as our like democratic rights are eroded.

(01:09:17):
And it's terrifying.
And in these kind of deep, quiet, slow moving ways.
And if you can bring people together, the ancient act of I think there's a word that's
convivian, but the ancient act of bringing people together around food, providing food

(01:09:39):
for your family.
In a way that those kind of relationships, that's like all we have as our relationships
and sense of trust in the wider world and its institutions has eroded.
All we have is the table.
That's kind of all that's left.
So I think there were a lot of similar feelings that may be expressed differently post-war.

(01:10:06):
People had had, and my grandparents are a great example of this.
They came up, both sets of my grandparents came up to Alaska to start new lives after
the war because of all of the things that they had been through.
They actually wanted to leave that behind and live in a place where it felt like you
could make more of an impact because the place was smaller in terms of its people.

(01:10:27):
But larger in terms of the storyline of its landscape.
And so I do think that there's this moment and the immediate post-war, Cold War moment
share a lot of the same anxieties, though I think people's longings in those two times,

(01:10:51):
I think that my grandparents longed for order.
They wanted to participate in the building of a place.
I think there's more of a longing now to escape the structures of society and make
your own rules to gain a sense of safety from your remoteness, which, you know, I mean,

(01:11:13):
I don't know.
Maybe that is something that my grandparents wanted was maybe like a sense of emotional
safety by being far away from the places and institutions that they had been part of during
the war.
One of my grandmothers came all the way from Italy, burning all of her journals and making
a new life here.

(01:11:34):
Burned all of her journals.
And renouncing her Italian citizenship.
Really?
Because the things that she had experienced during the war were so, I mean, she was in
Florence when it was occupied by the Nazis and saw people killed and lost a boyfriend
and lost her father and all that stuff.

(01:11:57):
I think she dealt with that by wanting to leave it behind.
And there's a lot that's been written on the post-war era and people's kind of obsession
with things that were orderly and tidy and defined and how that came from the trauma
of the chaos that came with experiencing the war.

(01:12:19):
I don't know.
We've gotten, we've probably gotten far afield now.
We're far away from cake, but not really, actually, if we really think about it.
I mean, yeah, it's true.
Yeah.
If future historians studied our kitchens the way that we studied Cold War kitchens,

(01:12:41):
what do you think they'd find?
I think that one of the things that has occurred in the way that we eat is that it is so, that
many Americans have learned about other cultures through eating their food.

(01:13:02):
That there's a kind of a flattening of the world that has occurred for better or for
worse where everybody's tasted sushi, they know what Pad Thai is, they are also eating
spaghetti and tuna fish sandwiches, and they're putting Thai spice in their tuna fish sandwich.

(01:13:23):
I think that what you would, one of the things they would take note of is the really international
kind of flavor and understanding that you find in just the average American kitchen,
and that our cuisine actually reflects the increasing, with every generation, diversity

(01:13:49):
of our populace.
I think, I don't know, another thing they might study is the influence of plastics.
I think-
Yeah, for sure.
... compared to the post-war era, our kitchens have 1,000 flavors of plastic, and I say flavors

(01:14:13):
because most of them are probably putting microplastics in our food right now.
They would, I mean, we have appliances, but I think many of the sort of stalwart central
kinds of appliances, the mixer and the chopper and the coffee grinder, that kind of stuff

(01:14:37):
has stayed, I mean, it's buttons are different and it's more cheaply made probably, but costs
more money, but that stuff has stayed the same.
People are kind of attached to those kinds of technologies.
There's just more in our kitchens.
I would say that our cupboards are more full, we have far, far more processed food than

(01:15:03):
we did, shelf-stable food than we did, and in general, we just have more food everywhere.
I mean, some people don't, but if you were to go into an American pantry and look at
the size of the American pantry in a newly built home and compare it to that same thing

(01:15:24):
in Cold War era, early Cold War era, I think you would find that, I think you would find
actually a ton of storage for canned goods, like home canned goods, because that was pretty
common back then, but in terms of storing your Costco size crate of beef jerky and

(01:15:47):
mayonnaise and Nutella, like all that, I think we do more of that now, and it also kind of
speaks to the economics of food, the base cost of food, how much money people make,
and also the Alaskan psychology.
I mean, we've always kind of hoarded up food, but the opportunity to do that and the diversity

(01:16:12):
of foods that we can store would be different.
Also the kitchens are arranged differently.
Kitchens were hidden, and often there was like a place where people ate that was different
than the kitchen, but now everybody's kitchen is like an open concept with like a island

(01:16:33):
in the center kind of thing.
So we eat in the place that we cook, whereas women toiled privately in kitchens and produced
food.
That was another kind of a shift as well.
A few minutes ago, you're talking about the diversity of our cuisine.

(01:16:58):
Do you think that that helps us be more understanding and more receptive of other people and other
cultures?
I would like to think that what I see in terms of the types of foods that people like to
eat and their diverse origins, that it speaks to a level of tolerance and connection.

(01:17:25):
I think about that sort of tolerance and connection and how unique America is in the
world for its diversity and its love and the way that food is central to that.
People come to know other cultures first in certain places and certainly here through

(01:17:46):
eating at those restaurants and feeling connected to the people who make that food and the food
itself.
I would like to think that that could be part of the glue that holds us together and allows
us to live through this period where we are seeing a sort of violence targeting of people

(01:18:14):
who are different, their citizenship kind of not even really central to the question.
I think about how will we survive this moment and I hope that our connectedness and our
diversity is what will help us to pull through, to recognize a common good, to hold precious

(01:18:45):
the value of diversity and tolerance.
I really can't tell you if it's enough.
We have the story of ICE officers eating at a Mexican restaurant and coming back and hauling
everybody who worked there off from Minneapolis.
But this moment with ICE is having a profound impact on restaurants, on the way that people

(01:19:10):
are eating, on the people who provide the labor in restaurants.
It's affecting all kinds of parts of American life that people who are not in those communities
don't think about, but I cannot underscore enough how important that diversity is to

(01:19:32):
the way that the expectations we have around how we eat and what the American diet looks
like now.
Well Julia, those are all the questions I have for you.
I want to thank you for your time, for your insight, for talking with me about cake, and

(01:19:57):
for helping connect those big Cold War ideas to Alaska and the way people actually lived.
Thanks for having me.
For more information about the Anchorage Museum, visit anchoragemuseum.org.

(01:20:23):
This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage Museum, with additional
help from Julie Decker.
Chatter Mark's music is produced by Keys Open Doors.

(01:21:03):
Chatter Mark's music is produced by Keys Open Doors.