Your Mama's Kitchen Episode 14: Michael Pollan
Audible Originals presents Your Mama's Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris.
Michael Pollan: No one has seen a watermelon seed in years. But in those days they had plenty of seeds. And the ones you didn't swallow, you'd spit out. And I just kind of kicked it into the dirt in this spot and returned three or four months later to find a vine cradling this watermelon. It was like the size of maybe a football. it was absolutely thrilling and shocking. And I made the connection. I had made this happen and I promptly, like, broke off the vine and carried it running and screaming to show my mother in the house. I proceeded to trip and the watermelon squirted out of my arms and just splatted. That was a kind of formative moment for me. I don't run with produce anymore
Michele Norris: Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast where we explore how the food and culinary traditions of our youth shape who we become as adults. I'm Michele Norris.
Our guest today is Michael Pollan, author, journalist, lecturer and gatekeeper for good eating. His books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and This is Your Mind on Plants. Michael has spent a lifetime looking at the places where nature and culture intersect—in the grocery store, in our gardens and industrial farms. In restaurants and school lunch kitchens and at our dinner table.
As you can guess—he’s a clean eater. Not much meat. Not much dairy, sugar or fried food. So I was a little bit surprised that when he went down memory lane to his mama’s kitchen, his version of childhood comfort food was Chicken a la Kiev.
Yes! Chicken a la Kiev. If you’ve never had this dish before, it is just as frilly and frou-frou and complicated as it sounds. Those who have had it, or even those adventurous enough to have made it, can appreciate the intricate, almost excruciating, process it takes to bring this entree to life. This dish combines staples of classic American home cooking like chicken, butter, and breadcrumbs to create something elegant and elevated... and deep fried. It was a THING in the 1970s, and while not as popular now, it's rolled up in nostalgia. Usually, you’d find Chicken Kiev being served on fancy china in a posh restaurant, but Michael Pollan was lucky enough to have it served up for a weeknight dinner growing up on Long Island.
We learned a lot about Michael by hearing about the sunny yellow kitchen that was the center of his life, the garden out back where he first put his hands into the soil, and the places that influenced the food guru who has changed the way Americans think about food and the places where it is grown, processed, packaged and served up.
We’re serving up his story, next.
Michele Norris: Michael Pollan, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for making time for us.
Michael Pollan: Oh, thank you, Michele.
Michele Norris: I have always wanted to talk to you, and I've never had a chance to do so.
Michael Pollan: I know, I'm kind of surprised our paths have not crossed, but this was such a wonderful concept.
Michele Norris: We think so, too. And it's a podcast that begins with a very simple question. Tell me about your mama's kitchen. What was it like? Take me back there. Close your eyes. Paint a picture for me.
Michael Pollan: I mean, I've thought about it a lot and I've written about it. My mom was and is a wonderful cook and takes food very seriously and has since I was a little kid. I have clear memories of her watching Julia Child on TV, which was appointment television for her. And we were the lucky beneficiaries of that interest because there were just the four of us kids. My father was seldom at the dinner table. Long story. But basically he had a long commute and usually had leftovers later. Often after we went to sleep. So it was really the four kids and her, but she wanted to cook serious things. So we would have Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon on a Thursday, which we didn't fully appreciate at the time.
Michele Norris: Who has time for that? That's amazing.
Michael Pollan: It was amazing. But she was hardcore. So we had a family dinner every night except on the weekends. They would often go out Friday or Saturday and we would get to have TV dinners, which was a great treat. We loved TV dinners and then Saturday night we'd often order in. But during the week, 6:00 on the dot, we would be home for dinner. And she had a kind of rotation of dishes that she would prepare. We could kind of assume on Tuesday it would be pasta, on Thursday would be beef. Wednesday would often be chicken, but a variety of different chicken dishes. I loved her cooking, and I think my sisters did, too, although eventually two of them became vegetarians, which complicated the whole picture.
Michele Norris: Was this when they were still in the house, in high school?
Michael Pollan: Oh yeah, pretty early. They must have been 12 or 13. My mother was very accommodating, though, she would make something different for them. But before that we all, both figuratively and literally, ate from the same pot. And that I think is just a such a wonderful tradition, because it does a lot. It's metaphorical as well as literal. It gets everybody on the same page. Psychologically, I think when we share food, she would also let us help in the kitchen or sometimes require us to. I mean, there were jobs. You had to set the table clean up after or you could help in the preparation. And I loved helping in the preparation. I just thoroughly enjoyed all the processes of transformation that happened in the kitchen. And these miracles of transubstantiation that happened, you know, from raw pieces of meat and a few vegetables suddenly emerging as something quite wonderful and magical.
Michele Norris: I want to get back to the family meal in just a bit, but I want to learn a little bit more about the space where your mother made this magic. What did her kitchen look like? What kind of stove did she have? Did you have a kitchen renovation when you were young or was it a fancy kitchen?
Michael Pollan: When I was six, we moved into a new house in a development in the suburbs. This is suburban New York on Long Island, in the town of Woodbury. So everything was brand new at that time. There was a new stove. I remember the appliances were yellow, which is a very popular sixties color for appliances. You don't see it very much anymore. So I think the fridge was yellow. If she were here, I would ask her. But the stove and range, I remember being yellow. It was very modern in feeling. My mother was very up on design and still is. And so there was a a kitchen table, a kind of a breakfast table that was near the phone, which was on the wall. And this table was kind of some sort of plastic or resin and it was white. And that's where we would have breakfast or if we were home for lunch, the sink faced the front of the house, which was very shaded and wooded. There was a double trunk oak tree that you could see outside this window, but we ate in the dining room and that was a separate room. And there was a swinging door that opened on to the dining room. And we ate at this big Nakashima table. Nakashima is a famous furniture designer from the sixties, and we had this beautiful piece of walnut table where we ate.
Michele Norris: Now, your mother was a working woman. She edited the Best Bets section of New York magazine.
Michael Pollan: Yeah, for 17 years. And she is, I still meet people who remember the Best Bets column. And she was really an institution in New York when she was writing that.
Michele Norris: And she edited Gourmet magazine also. So she was working and still making time to make dinner. Do you marvel at that now?
Michael Pollan: Absolutely. Her energy is extraordinary. I mean, she made Passover for 25 people. She didn't make every dish we chipped in, but she made the brisket. She made the chicken and she made the matzo ball soup over the course of two weeks. Very stressful. But she got it down and it was all delicious, although not all to her standard. She's highly self-critical of her cooking and she's still chewing over why the gravy on the brisket was as thin as it was, and what and how she could course correct for next year.
Michele Norris: Was the gravy actually thinner than she wanted to be, or is that part of the performance of cooking?
Michael Pollan: Oh, no, no, no. Everyone loved it. The grandkids, she's got 11 grandchildren. They all took home as much as they could for leftovers. No, it was purely her. She has a platonic ideal of that sauce. The relationship of the meat and the sauce and the continuity between the two. And it was broken. She has some theories as to why. And we did a we did quite an autopsy over it, actually.
Michele Norris: An autopsy?
Michael Pollan: Yes.
Michele Norris: So it would after action report.
Michael Pollan: Exactly. And I think we figured out the problem. But, you know, she makes extensive notes from one holiday to the next, exactly how long she cooked the turkey for Thanksgiving. At what temperature? When did she take it out? She has this kind of playbook for these big meals.
Michele Norris: She has playbooks? Say more about that. Is it electronic or is it...
Michael Pollan: No, no. It's all in her handwriting. And after a big meal, she would sit down and make notes. What worked, what didn't work? Were the potatoes crispy enough? If they weren't, why not? She holds herself to a very high standard.
Michele Norris: When I ask about your kitchen, I feel like I should not just ask about the space where the cooking was done, but maybe look through the kitchen window and imagine the garden just outside because you were very influenced by the garden and you had something, I guess you called it the farm.
Michael Pollan: I did.
Michele Norris: In back of the house?
Michael Pollan: I was one of the producers supplying food to this kitchen on the order of like, three strawberries at a time. Nothing major, but yes, I, from a very young age, started gardening. I loved gardening. I had a grandfather. My mother's father, who was a Russian immigrant, could not read, was totally uneducated, and he started out selling produce on a street corner in Hempstead, New York. He would sell baked potatoes and then more produce, and then he gradually had a market selling produce. And then he was a distributor and he got some contracts with the military during World War II, and he was supplying to the military bases on Long Island. When the farmers started selling out, he started buying their land and started doing real estate and he built strip malls, you know, as generally involved in despoiling the Long Island landscape after supporting his farmers for as long as they could hold out, I had kind of tense relations with him. He thought I was kind of a hippie. I wore my hair long and I had a leather bracelet that I wore that just drove him absolutely crazy. He was very conservative, man, but we could connect in the garden and he had a beautiful big garden, much bigger than it needed to be. It was just him and my grandmother. But he grew like a truck farmers amount of produce which he would, you know, load into his Lincoln in the trunk and give it out to his tenants as he drove around Long Island. My happiest moments at my grandparents’ house was in the garden and especially around harvest. I still find it's thrilling to find a ripe red tomato under that canopy of leaves or pull a carrot out of the earth. It still amazes me. And I learned that from him. I mean, I garden in a different way. There was no pesticide he didn't love. I mean, he had Scotts Miracle-Gro and all their Allide products, so he wasn't an organic grower, but his produce was beautiful. He would also always grow the variety you could get in the supermarket, where I tend to grow the variety you can't get in the supermarket. So he would have big beefsteak tomatoes and globe eggplants, and it looked just like a really good produce section.
So yeah, my interest in food goes back to that. I mean, it really goes back. The first encounter I had with growing food was when I was four years old, and this is when we lived in a house on the south shore of Long Island in a neighborhood of just kind of very tiny row houses. It was a working class neighborhood, and there was a hedge behind our house, and the property line was behind that, a couple of feet. And I loved watermelon and I spit out some watermelon seeds and kind of buried them to see if anything would happen. Completely forgot about them. This happened.
Michele Norris: You were four when you did this?
Michael Pollan: Yeah. Four, you know, I'd heard the story about seeds turned into things and that watermelon, you know, remember when you ate watermelon as a kid and you swallowed the seeds, there was this kind of concern it might start growing in your stomach.
Michele Norris: We have to pause for a minute because watermelons actually had seeds back then.
Michael Pollan: Yes, that's right. No one has seen a watermelon seed in years. Good point. But in those days they had plenty of seeds. And the ones you didn't swallow, you'd spit out. And I just kind of kicked it into the dirt in this spot and returned three or four months later to find a vine cradling this watermelon. It wasn't huge. It was like the size of maybe a football, and it was absolutely thrilling and shocking. And I made the connection. I had made this happen and I promptly, like, broke off the vine and carried it running and screaming to show my mother in the house. But between the door to the house and the hedge was a concrete patio where I proceeded to trip and the watermelon squirted out of my arms and just splatted. That was a kind of formative moment for me. I don't run with produce anymore, but it was, you know, that's where I had my proof that, yes, you could really put seeds in the ground and get something you wanted. And isn't this miraculous?
Michele Norris: Your mother was taking on some big sophisticated dishes at a time when a lot of women were looking to get out of the kitchen. Why do you think she did that?
Michael Pollan: I mean, my mother became a career woman and she always had aspirations. She'd been in college. She was a very serious student of literature and a big, big reader. I don't know that she saw cooking as oppressive as some women did or came to. That would be a really interesting question to ask her. For her it was a creative outlet, and I think for a lot of women, then, you know, the women who were watching Julia Child, they were cooking.
Michele Norris: That was a real thing.
Michael Pollan: It was a huge thing.
Michele Norris: It was like appointment viewing.
Michael Pollan: Yeah. And I remember I would watch it with her sometimes. I mean, I thought it was kind of hilarious. And Julia Child, you know, she had that crazy voice and she made an intimidating cuisine unintimidating. I mean, because she was a bit goofy, but it was serious French cooking. Translating that from what she saw on TV or read in the books, the cookbooks to our table was a process that was very creative for her.
Michele Norris: Did she send you to school with a bag lunch?
Michael Pollan: Not always. Weirdly, I really liked the food at school.
Michele Norris: What school did you go to?
Michael Pollan: I went to a public school and food—was it really good food? I'm dubious, but at the time I liked it. I mean, I didn't like the hamburgers. They had strange materials oozing out of them, exuding. But I loved the pasta and spaghetti and pizza and sloppy joes and Salisbury steak, which is a very dubious product. My sisters and I had certain favorites at school, and we would ask my mother to simulate the school food and she would she took that as a challenge akin to, you know, making a Julia Child recipe and she would make us Salisbury steak or chicken fried steak or something that they had. And she was game. And we would tell her it's not quite as good as at the school we went to.
Michele Norris: And she just rolled with that. Not quite as good as the school lunch.
Michael Pollan: You have to understand, my mother was what we would call quite permissive. There was very little we could do that she had a problem with. We had an unusual degree of freedom.
Michele Norris: There's a lot of things that happened in the kitchen that have nothing to do with food that also shaped us. Was there anything that happened in your kitchen that you look back and see shaped you in an interesting way that had nothing to do with food and the subject of your life's work now?
Michael Pollan: I mean, there was a lot of talk in the kitchen when my mother was cooking. I loved hanging around in the kitchen when she was cooking. I particularly loved it when her mother came over and they would cook together and make strudel and things like that. My mother's mother cooked a completely different cuisine that my mother had grown up, and one of the peculiarities I think, of American culture compared to other cultures is we don't eat the way our parents fed us, and they fed us in a way their parents didn't feed them. I mean that every generation the food changes. And in my case it was an immigrant generation to a, you know, first full American generation to me. And food ways in America are very fungible. I mean, they're changing every generation. We don't eat the way people did 20, 30, 40 years ago. And that's a positive and a negative. It's a negative in the sense that we don't have a stabilizing food culture. People in Italy, you know, have been eating the same way for many, many generations. Ditto in France. And, you know, yes, junk food finds its way in, and fast food. But what is considered a proper meal hasn't changed. Whereas my mother grew up eating, you know, parts of cows that I would never consider eating. They ate udders. You know, that was considered a delicacy. They didn't have a lot of money and sweetbreads and all sorts of weird glands and tongue. Yeah, tongue. My dad loved tongue. And I don't eat the way all those foods I'm describing that my mother cooked with the exception of, you know, pasta. I don't make beef stews. I don't make fried chicken. But there was the continuity when my grandmother Mary came and she and my mother would often, you know, hang out in the kitchen or cook in the kitchen. And I loved listening to conversations. The other set of memories I have about the kitchen is, as I mentioned, my dad was missing from most of our family dinners because he worked in Manhattan. He had this like, I don't know, hour and a half, two hour commute.
Michele Norris: That's a long time.
Michael Pollan: A very long time. And he would get up very early to leave. And the only time I could have with him during the week, and I loved being with him, was while he was having breakfast. So I would actually drag myself out of bed at like six or 6:30 or whatever time it was and sit down and have coffee with him. And so as a result, I started drinking coffee at a very young age and I've had a lifelong relationship with coffee. I don't know how old I was, eight or ten, but…
Michele Norris: And he let you drink coffee with him at eight or ten.
Michael Pollan: I'm telling you, I had very permissive parents.
Michele Norris: Loads of sugar in it?
Michael Pollan: Definitely loads of sugar and milk. And because, you know, kids don't like the taste of coffee, they have to domesticate it. But anyway, that was precious time to be in that kitchen with my dad. My sisters wouldn't be up late. My mother wouldn't be in the kitchen yet. And that was our one-on-one time. I mean, we had some of the weekends, too, but that was key time growing up.
Michele Norris: Did your dad ever cook, because you've written that men need to get back in the kitchen?
Michael Pollan: Yes, they sure do. And he was not a good model in this regard. He would grill, you know, the classic male.
Michele Norris: Yes. Where fire is involved men will cook.
Michael Pollan: But he was terrible at it. I mean, he would burn things. And my mother never knew that. Whether there'd be food on the table when he was grilling, he just wasn't very good at it. I mean, I learned a little bit about it and I love grilling and I would help him to the extent I could. So we spent summers on Martha's Vineyard when I was young. They built a house there in 1965, and we'd go to the beach every day as a family with friends. And at least once a week, he would schlep a grill down there to make a hot meal on the beach. This was so much trouble because then you had to bring the bag of briquettes. You had all the hot dogs and the hamburgers. My mother would make coleslaw and we would have a cookout at like noon on the beach. It was like, I can't imagine ever doing that. And he would cook with my help.
Michele Norris: Alittle hibachi grill?
Michael Pollan: It was a big grill.
Michele Norris: Oh, really? It was a big grill?
Michael Pollan: Oh, no, no, no. It wasn't hibachi. I mean, we didn't have those kettle grills then. It was rectangular, but it was pretty big. And yeah, it just seemed like an awful lot of trouble when a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would have done the trick.
Michele Norris: What is it that you've cooked that you think perhaps delights your—how many kids do you have?
Michael Pollan: Just one.
Michele Norris: Just one. Your son, right?
Michael Pollan: Yes. Isaac.
Michele Norris: What have you made for your son, Isaac, that delights him the same way a dish from your mom delighted you?
Michael Pollan: So my son is a big meat eater. And when I was writing Cooked, which is my book about cooking, I really got into Southern barbecue. And I spent time in North Carolina, and I apprenticed myself to Pitmasters. And I started cooking that way at home. And in fact, we have a firepit in our garden in the front of our house. And once a year or so, we would do a whole pig. I'd get often my students, I would have a group of students and we'd invite them all over. And it was a 24 hour cook because you started it around dinner time and then someone had to watch it all night. We took turns watching it and my son would participate because he wanted to cook very slowly at a very low temperature, but obviously not too low. And Isaac loved that meat. And it was pretty extraordinary. And he would help out. And, you know, and then there's the process of getting the meat off of the animal and shredding it and mixing in the the apple cider vinegar and whatever else you were putting in it. And so I would say that was his favorite meal that we ever cooked. It was very special occasion and then there was the kind of miniaturized version of that I learned how to do, which was a slow cooked pork shoulder that I would cover in sugar and salt and then cook very slowly on the grill and then shred it.
Michele Norris: Sort of like the Momofuku recipe.
Michael Pollan: Yes. And in fact, I did work from that recipe. Sometimes. I love that recipe.
Michele Norris: When did you start cooking more for yourself? Was it somewhere along the line when you began writing more about food and agriculture, and when you did start cooking, how much of your mother's hand was in that?
Michael Pollan: After college, I lived in this apartment where I was growing some pot on 110th Street in Manhattan. We would get ravioli from a store in New York called Risottos that has just has always had for the last 60 years the best ravioli, spinach and cheese. And then my idea of a fancy meal, if I had friends over, would be to melt some butter and then put some sage leaves in it and then serve that over that ravioli. And that was it. It was pretty simple. So I was cooking very simple. When Judith and I started living together, she brought her recipes. I had some I had learned from my mom. And we would we started cooking regularly, you know, in New York, in your early apartments, you don't really have a very good kitchen. You don't even have a kitchen. I mean, in my apartment on 110th Street, there were these louvered doors that I would open and there would be this two burner range and a little fridge aerator. And it was not easy to cook. There was no counter space. For example, you had to use the table, the dining table as a place to chop stuff. I think it's really we got serious about cooking when we got this house in Connecticut. This was in the early eighties and there weren't a lot of good restaurants around and they were all too far away. And there we got much more serious about cooking and started looking at cookbooks and figuring out what we like to eat. And I then put in a big garden and we would eat from the garden all the time.
Michele Norris: And how much of your mother's hand was in that when you started doing the serious cooking?
Michael Pollan: Well, the fact I was doing serious cooking at all is all her hand. I mean, you know that I took it seriously and had a little bit of technique I learned from her. So it definitely had an influence. As I said, I don't know that I was making the same dishes, but she wasn't either. She had moved on too I mean, she had started after trips to Italy. Yhe focus on French cuisine gave way to Italian, as it did in the whole culture at a certain point. Right. It used to be in Manhattan, if you were a person in a certain class and you wanted to go out for a nice meal, it was always French. Sixties and into the seventies. And then suddenly it was Italian, right?
Michele Norris: Northern Italian in particular.
Michael Pollan: Yeah, Northern. Exactly.
Michele Norris: So you've done research. You've traveled the world. You can learn a little bit about a culture. If you look at where people cook, you know, and it's not always in a kitchen, sometimes it's a pot over a flame. It's, as you say, you know, a pig in the ground in the backyard with coals on top. Yeah. What do we learn about America by looking at our kitchens and the way we cook and particularly looking backwards over our shoulder in the kitchens that we grew up in, how has it shaped a generation of people?
Michael Pollan: I think the kitchen in America is going on used to it to a tremendous extent that these have become rooms of display, you know, with the fancy stoves and the fridges, and they're approaching, you know, this professional level with all the—and I'm speaking in pretty affluent kitchens, obviously—but with all the fancy gear, yet they're used less and less. We are not cooking at home very much. There was an uptick during COVID, but I think we've fallen back on habits of ordering, you know, ordering and going out. The family meal is an endangered institution. You know, I've written about this because it concerns me. We learned very important things at that table. You know, I don't exaggerate when I say that the family dinner and that table is a nursery of democracy because it is at that table that the family comes together, which otherwise is quite centrifugal. Right? Everybody's in their own room, on their own screens now. They don't watch TV together anymore. So it's at that table that we learn how to share. Talk about the news of the day. I have vivid memories of when my dad was at the table talking about the Vietnam War and what was going on. And we learn how to share to take turns. We learn how to argue. Without fighting, there'd be penalties. You know, if you said something awful at the table to your sister, you'd be exiled. So I just think they're so important. They teach people about a lot more than eating, but they also teach people about eating what is real food as opposed to all this other stuff that now represents about 60% or 65% of the American diet, ultra-processed foods of one kind or another. I understand why we stopped cooking. You know, the fact that as women went back to work, the old system was untenable. But there was another solution. And that, of course, was a renegotiation of responsibility in the household between men and women. And that conversation which started in the seventies and I remember it and there was a source of some tension in our house was aborted by the fast food industry who saw an opportunity that they could relieve the tension of men and women arguing about responsibility. And the best symbol of this I know of was a billboard that Kentucky Fried Chicken ran around the country in the 1970s, and all it was was a bucket of fried chicken and the headline “Women's Liberation.” So the food industry aligned themselves with the aspirations of women as the solution to this problem.
There was another solution, but it didn't lend itself to capitalism quite as well. And that other solution, of course, was sharing the work when it becomes much less oppressive and more fun. I mean, my wife and I cook together and we figure out at the beginning of the meal who's going to make what, and we stand around the same table and that's when we review, you know, what happened in our day and our plans for the weekend or whatever else it is. And that is like our catch up time and it's precious.
Michele Norris: We have a habit here, we try to give our listeners a recipe in every episode and Michael wanted to share the fancy laborious homemade chicken dish that his mom Corky made for special weeknight dinners.
Michael Pollan: The dish that she taught me to make that became my signature dish was Chicken a la Kiev.
Michele Norris: Which just sounds fancy.
Michael Pollan: I know it does sound fancy.
Michele Norris: Served on a beautiful China platter.
Michael Pollan: And it was. And this was something we would have, like, birthdays and I would ask for it on my birthday, but I would cook it, I mean with her. And it was a very elaborate process because you started with chicken breasts that you had to pound until they were about a quarter inch. Even, you know, between layers of wax paper.
Michele Norris: Did she have that little wooden mallet that she would use?
Michael Pollan: She had the mallet, yeah. And you had to do that. But if you hit it too hard, you'd have holes. And then for reasons you'll see in a minute, that was a disaster. You had to because you had to create a tight seal and then you would take this, you know, piece of paper that was really chicken breast. You know, in advance you'd made these little bars of butter that had herbs and garlic in it and that you'd refrigerated after you made them. And you would roll one of these and tuck in the ends very carefully and then roll the whole thing in what looked like a devil dog or something, which was a popular snack at the time. And you'd roll that in flour and then roll that in egg and then roll that in breadcrumbs, and then you would deep fat fry it. And we had a fryolator, a plug in, fry it.
Michele Norris: Oh, my goodness. A fryolator. I haven’t heard that word in so long.
Michael Pollan: I don't think they have them anymore. They're probably fire hazards. I think they maybe they were banned. I don't know. And then you would fry it and it would get this beautiful golden color and you'd watch very carefully because something could go wrong. And what that wrong was the leaking of the melting butter inside. So you had to handle it very gently with a slotted spoon. And when it worked, you would take it out and put it on some paper towels to get to get some of the fat off and then you would slice into it and this aroma of garlic and herbs would waft up and then this pool of butter would surround this thing on your plate. It was the most magical thing. I just loved it. I loved everything about it, the mechanics, the taste, the process. And she taught me that out of Julia Child. And I have not made it. And I think I made it for my wife and son once. I don't eat chicken anymore. I don't need butter anymore. It's just like so far beyond how I eat now. But at the time there was no higher and I and my parents once took me to a Russian tea room and I got to have their version and it was no better.
Michele Norris: No better than your mom's?
Michael Pollan: No, my mom's was the best.
Michael Pollan: That would be great, Michele. I would enjoy that.
Michele Norris: Thanks so much for your time.
Michael Pollan: Oh, my pleasure.
Michele Norris: Michael is right. The kitchen is a magnet that holds people together. It’s where we catch up on mundane updates. It’s where we argue. And yes it is—as he says—a nursery for democracy—I love that line—because we stay at the table with people we don’t agree with. We learn how to listen to other people. We learn give and take. And what we take away from all of those experiences, if we’re lucky stays inside us for a lifetime. Thanks for listening to Your Mama's Kitchen. I'm Michele Norris. See you next week.
Michele Norris: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original produced by Higher Ground Studios. Senior Producer Natalie Rinn, Producer Sonia Htoon, and Associate Producer Angel Carreras. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Roy Baum. Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camila Thur De Koos. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Zola Mashariki, Nick D'Angelo and Anne Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media. Our talent booker is Angela Peluso and special thanks this week Clean Cuts in Washington DC.
Head of Audible Studios Zola Mashariki, Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza. And that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Come back next week and until then, be bountiful.
Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound Recording. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.
