Alton Brown on Cultural Appropriation, Ozempic, and the USDA
Alton Brown has spent years demystifying cooking on his Food Network show Good Eats. Now he’s brought his same wit and insight to the page with Food for Thought, a collection of essays exploring everything from childhood memories to the cultural power of cuisine. As he embarked on a nationwide book tour, Brown joined The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie in February to talk about the forces shaping how, and what, we eat.
In this conversation, Brown reflects on growing up in the 1960s, when Saturday morning cartoons and sugary cereals were his first taste of consumer culture. He makes a case for curiosity as the most powerful human trait, laments that food competition shows have made cooking something to be won rather than shared, and discusses government food regulations, the decline of home cooking, and the rise of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic.
Reason: You open Food for Thought recalling growing up in the 1960s, watching TV on Saturday mornings, and eating Cap’n Crunch. What is so special about those Saturday morning memories?
Brown: No child today can understand the magic of Saturdays. If you were good, at least in my household, you got complete control of one of the TVs for several hours. It was your first real exposure to choice. It was also your first exposure to a form of media that was completely out of control as far as trying to manipulate your young mind—which it did.
And Cap’n Crunch was just the flavor…the sense memory of these hard little pillows shredding the roof of your mouth, which I enjoyed. I’ve always liked a little pain with my pleasure. That’s what makes that memory so potent.
There were tie-ins between the cartoons we watched and the products that were being sold. How much of the Cap’n Crunch experience was the packaging and the commercials and his swashbuckling?
Let’s step back from the Cap’n and look at the world of sugary cereals in the ’60s. What’s significant is that this was really the first time that children were being directly marketed to by very smart people who were designing products and advertising specifically to [us]. Kids all of a sudden felt seen by a bigger world.
And we can be critical about that because a lot of companies were selling kids really crap nutrition. But the world has not changed one iota. In fact, it’s just taken that model and perfected it as we break into microtribes. It’s the same thing.
You put a lot of emphasis on curiosity and seeking out new things.
I do talk a lot about curiosity, which I think is the most powerful and most positive human emotion. I don’t think that one needs to delve into strange things for the sake of strange things. But there is a real value in the brain being out of its comfort zone, your senses being out of their comfort zone, your body being out of its comfort zone, in a thoughtful, exploratory manner. I’m not going to say that it’s critical to being a good person, but I do think that it makes life a hell of a lot more interesting.
The way you describe a pizza you encountered as a student in Italy is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read in forever. What was going on with that pizza that blew your mind?
I was lucky enough to spend a semester of col
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