Happy Birthday to Us: Gastropod Turns Five

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Speaker 4 My favorite episode is probably the one on Saffron. Second favorite, analyzing cheese microbes.
Drink.

Speaker 5 Hi, this is Bill from New York City. If I had to pick just one of the many excellent episodes, I'd pick the one on locks and bagels.

Speaker 5 I've grown up with this food for over 50 years, but I had no idea of the history.

Speaker 6 The episode about cocktails is my favorite. I use the facts from that, especially that pinch of salt, every time that I mix one up.

Speaker 6 And when I recommend y'all to people, I tell them they absolutely have to listen to this episode.

Speaker 10 The Golden Spoon captured my attention and interest like no other premiere episode of the podcast ever has before or since.

Speaker 12 We asked you to tell us your favorite episodes because, as you all know by now, it's our fifth birthday and we're celebrating.

Speaker 13 All those years ago when we released our very first episode, who could have dreamed we'd reach the grand old age of five?

Speaker 12 I'm fairly sure there's no chance you even imagined this when you sent me that email suggesting we join forces, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Speaker 12 Yes, this is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, and I am still Cynthia Graeber.

Speaker 13 Five years older, wiser, and all around better, but yes, I too am still Nicola Twilly. And this episode is our fifth birthday bonanza, and it is filled with birthday treats.

Speaker 12 Many of you voted for your favorite episodes or stories or weird facts, and we have the results. We're going to take a jaunt through the past five years.

Speaker 12 We'll be revisiting some of your and our favorite moments on the show.

Speaker 13 But although this is a birthday, not a wedding, we wouldn't bring you something old without something new, so we've also got something special on the menu. Specifically, birthday cake.

Speaker 12 Cake history and science, that is. But before we put our party hats on, we have a hat for you.
I'm actually not kidding. We have awesome new merch.
You've asked for it.

Speaker 12 Now that we're five, we've finally got it.

Speaker 13 We have four items for our fifth birthday. It's not that we can't count, but we're just dipping our toes in the world of swag.
But I want all four.

Speaker 13 We have a t-shirt, of course, but not just one t-shirt. We have a unisex and a really cool, slouchy scoop neck and a more feminine cut, and they are both green and have our logo.

Speaker 13 I will basically only be wearing that from now on.

Speaker 12 We also have a lime green stainless steel water bottle with our name and logo and super cute drawings of lots of different kinds of food. And we have a green hat, a beanie really, with just our logo.

Speaker 12 That one will actually only be available in a couple of weeks. I love them both.

Speaker 13 And we built a new page on our website, gastropod.com, so you can see them and buy them too. It's at gastropod.com/slash shop, or you can find it under the About tab on our homepage.

Speaker 13 Six years ago, something very, very important happened to me. I met Cynthia Graeper.

Speaker 12 It was important to me too, though I had no idea at the time.

Speaker 13 We were two of the six fellows, old lady fellows, as it happens, in the very first year of the UC Berkeley 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship run by Michael Pollen and Malia Wallen.

Speaker 12 It probably won't surprise any of you listeners to know that Nikki and I got along well pretty quickly.

Speaker 13 And so we stayed in touch and then one fateful day in May 2014 I was having a complete catastrophe of a morning when I got an email from Cynthia.

Speaker 12 So to back up a bit on my end, I'd been working in audio for a while and I was ready to set out on my own.

Speaker 12 So I had this idea that would combine three things I was obsessed with and unsurprisingly those three things are food, science, and history. I wanted to start a new podcast.

Speaker 12 I wrote up my idea as a proposal, and then I wanted to distract Nikki from her catastrophic morning, so I sent this idea for a new podcast to her in an email.

Speaker 13 I had gone to the gym to vent my rage about all the disasters that had befallen me since getting out of bed, and I got Cynthia's email and I was like, How on God's Green Earth do you think you can make a show like this, which has my name stamped all over it without me?

Speaker 13 At the time, I had a blog all about food and history and science, so I was like, Hello.

Speaker 12 Well, obviously, that's why I wanted your input. I had no idea you'd be interested in ever doing it with me.
I mean, in addition to that popular blog, you had a full-time job.

Speaker 13 But not for much longer. Anyway, long story short, with all the force of my rage-filled morning, I emailed Cynthia and was like, this is fine, but you need a co-host and it needs to be me.

Speaker 12 Which frankly, I thought was a totally fantastic idea. And so Gastropod was born.
Well, not quite. We had a lot of work to do for us to get ready to launch the show in September that year.

Speaker 13 But we did it.

Speaker 13 And you know, when we decided to celebrate our five-year anniversary by asking you all to vote for your favorite favorite episode, pretty much every single episode we've ever made got at least one vote, which was a relief.

Speaker 13 I would have been sad if some of my babies were left out.

Speaker 12 But this episode, we are going to reveal your top ten favorites.

Speaker 13 Ten, nine, eight. The first clip we're playing today from your top ten picks is from our very first episode.
Apparently we started with a bang.

Speaker 12 There were so many things in that first episode that blew my mind as we were reporting them, and I couldn't wait for all of you to hear the stories.

Speaker 12 Like like this bit about how the fork is such a recent invention.

Speaker 14 And the fork, when it first was introduced into Europe, in most places was seen as this bizarre, weird,

Speaker 14 slightly fetishistic device. Why would you want to put metal prongs into your mouse along with the food?

Speaker 14 It just didn't seem like a natural way to eat, except in Italy, the reason being pasta, the Italians were far quicker to adopt forks than any other European country.

Speaker 14 And they started off with these single-pronged devices called puntavrole,

Speaker 14 and then they figured out that if one prong was very good for eating noodles with, then two prongs would be better and three might be better still.

Speaker 14 But it took centuries after the Italians for people in England or France to see the need of forks.

Speaker 13 That, of course, is Bea Wilson, one of our favourite food writers. She's been back on Gastropod lots of times since.

Speaker 13 But the other piece that blew people's minds was about what those forks and spoons and knives were made of.

Speaker 12 In the episode, we spoke with materials scientist Zoe Loughlin. Here's the clip where she describes her research.
She studied how different materials like tin and copper affected the taste of food.

Speaker 15 For me, the non-taste of the gold spoon

Speaker 15 is just sort of divine. And it's got this ever such a slight sweetness to it.

Speaker 15 Or maybe it's just, it reveals your own mouth chemistry as slightly sweet, but there's something about it that's just incredibly delicious and makes everything you eat feel more delicious because you're, you know, you've never tasted mango sorbet until you've eaten it off a gold spoon.

Speaker 15 That's what it was like.

Speaker 15 That was the moment when I thought,

Speaker 15 I can't believe I'm ever going to eat off anything ever again other than gold.

Speaker 15 But sadly, I do.

Speaker 12 I sadly am not the proud owner of a gold spoon, but I'd like to focus on the mango side of that equation. We did an entire episode about mangoes.

Speaker 12 I am still dreaming about some of the ones we tasted in Florida that I may never get to eat again.

Speaker 18 I love mangoes, and I was crushed to limit since I'm an American. I've never actually had a good one.

Speaker 13 Yep, we made an entire episode about mangoes, including Harley-Davidson's and George W. Bush, and we did another entire episode about ice cream.

Speaker 12 Some of you wrote in to say how much you loved those episodes, and some had other favorites.

Speaker 19 I love the episode on David Fairchild. I found myself thinking about it and talking to others about it for weeks.
And I still wonder what other agriculture could be grown in the U.S.

Speaker 19 if the seeds and fruit hadn't perished at sea.

Speaker 20 What is Native American cuisine? Your episode dealt with the horrors and dualities of colonization with great care and tenderness.

Speaker 13 The Pawpaw

Speaker 21 It's also the episode that I used to get my PhD advisor hooked on Gastropod. He is very proud of his two pawpaw trees.
Also, we study slugs, so he gets a kick out of the podcast name.

Speaker 13 The Pawpaw episode was another one that made it into your top 10. And it was another big big moment in our relationship, Cynthia.
We went through one of life's great milestones together.

Speaker 13 Let's revisit that moment.

Speaker 13 We're about to lose our pawpaw virginity. I'm very excited.

Speaker 12 Chris burst our bubble before the grand deflowering. That's it.

Speaker 13 Well, no, you're not.

Speaker 22 This is frozen pawpaw, which is not the same as because of the delicate sugars in the pawpaw.

Speaker 23 You know, there's really...

Speaker 23 There's really no substitute for the fresh pawpaw, but this is all we got right now.

Speaker 13 Go ahead.

Speaker 13 Okay, here we go. Are you ready? I'm ready.
Are you ready? I love that we're going through this milestone together. This is a big deal.
Yeah. Okay, here it goes.
Cheers. Cheers.

Speaker 13 Mmm.

Speaker 13 Finally, I see what the fuss is about. This is good.

Speaker 12 It is, it's

Speaker 13 like a more floral, better banana. If you're wondering what a pawpaw is, we did, of course, figure that out in the episode.

Speaker 12 Pawpaws are not papayas. They're not prickly pears, they are a delightful and not particularly well-known fruit native to a huge swath of North America.

Speaker 13 But enough of all this fruit, delicious though it may be. It's our birthday and I want cake.

Speaker 12 And we now interrupt our top 10 countdown to bring you exactly that, the history and science of birthday cake.

Speaker 15 Well my name's Elisa Levine. I'm a reader in history at Oxford Brooks University and the book we're talking about is called Cake, The Short, Surprising History of Our Favorite Bakes.

Speaker 12 Unsurprisingly, Elisa was the expert we turned to to bring some cake to our birthday episode. And we started with the obvious first question.
When was cake invented? Who was eating the first cakes?

Speaker 15 Well, that's very difficult to answer because there's a very fine line between cake and bread.

Speaker 15 So we know that civilizations, ever since they've cultivated any sort of agriculture, have made bready-type cakes.

Speaker 13 But just because it's round and bready doesn't make it cake in my book.

Speaker 15 But if we start to think about cake being something more special, then we probably need to move ahead to the ancient Egyptians, who really started to sweeten up up their their bread doughs and make them for special occasions and give them special significance.

Speaker 15 They they had quite an exciting cake culture. They developed cakes for all sorts of different occasions.

Speaker 12 Texturally they were probably still more like a flattened bread, but the Egyptians might have sweetened those special doughs with honey, maybe they'd have added dried fruit, they might have enriched the dough with eggs, and they decorated them.

Speaker 13 Cakes only got better with the arrival of the ancient Greeks, whose word for cakes in general was placus, which, by the way, is the origin of the word placenta.

Speaker 13 Apparently, the idea is that cake is a life-giving source of nourishment, which is kind of the role it plays in my life, too.

Speaker 12 And like the Egyptians, the Greeks went to town with their decorations.

Speaker 15 So we know that the ancient Greeks and Romans as well started to get really imaginative in the shapes that they made.

Speaker 15 So there were a lot of round ones, partly because they were made in honor of the goddess of the moon.

Speaker 15 But then there were ones shaped like pyramids, ones shaped in much more sort of naughty shapes for particular occasions.

Speaker 12 Like in the shape of female genitals to honour honour the gods Demeter and Persephone, and also in the shape of breasts.

Speaker 13 Ancient Greeks do often come across sounding like contemporary frat boys, to be honest. But credit where credit is due, they also started the classic cake-and-candle combo.

Speaker 15 Partly because candles and fire always had great significance across many, many cultures, warding off of spirits and obviously warming people through the long winters, and then also having a ceremonial function in temples and so on.

Speaker 15 And so, one suggestion is that people started to to light candles on cakes again in honour of the goddess of the moon.

Speaker 12 So Elisa's pretty convincing that the Greeks had a great cake culture, but how did she figure that out? Where was cake history written?

Speaker 15 There is intriguingly, apparently there was a whole treatise written about cakes, but it hasn't survived, it's only ever referred to, so that that's a bit annoying from a historical point of view.

Speaker 15 But we see it written about, they feature in plays, in artistic depictions on jugs and earthenware, and then in the ruins of Pompeii we even have have some preserved remains of cakes and of shaped cake tins as well.

Speaker 15 So adding all those things together means that we can start to build up a picture of what people were doing.

Speaker 13 So we know that ancient Greeks and Romans were eating plenty of cake, but would they have eaten it on their birthday?

Speaker 15 Perhaps if you were very wealthy, but for most people, a fixed notion of time and of age wasn't really thought of in the same way as today, so probably most people just didn't really celebrate their birthdays at all and probably couldn't really afford something very rich and lavish.

Speaker 12 Apparently the ancient Roman poet Ovid was one of those very wealthy and he described his birthday as a white robe hanging on his shoulders, a smoking altar, grains of incense and holy fire, and quote, myself offering the cakes that mark my birthday.

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Speaker 9 I love all of the gastropod episodes, but if I have to pick an absolute favorite, it would be the United States of Chinese food because of how it blends all of the things I love about your episodes.

Speaker 13 Hi, I'm Natalia from Colorado.

Speaker 30 I love your show. One of my favorite episodes over the years has been the tea episode because of obscure history, fun facts, and espionage.

Speaker 12 I do sometimes think about Robert Fortune when I drink tea, and I drink tea literally every day. It's one of my favorite food groups.

Speaker 12 This episode made it into your top 10, so let's listen to some of Robert's undercover adventures.

Speaker 13 The story begins with Brits getting fed up with having to buy tea from China to feed their raging tea addiction.

Speaker 13 So they sent Robert Fortune to steal tea plants to plant in India, which was a British colony at the time. Minor detail.
Robert is a tall white Scotsman who doesn't speak Chinese.

Speaker 31 No white people are allowed beyond the treaty ports. For Robert Fortune to go exploring, he needs to not be a white person.

Speaker 31 And so he shaves his head, he sews a Q into it, a ponytail down the back, which is how people sort of would signify that they are Chinese, and wore Chinese clothing.

Speaker 31 And I know it sounds absurd that some six-foot-tall white guy could pass as Chinese, but the idea was that China was so big and really so diverse and also so closed from the world that it wouldn't know what they were looking at since nobody was having trade with the West.

Speaker 31 Nobody knew that Westerners had long noses and round eyes. And also, China at that moment is ruled by the Manchurian court, and the Manchurians are foreigners.

Speaker 31 So there's this idea that foreignness is something internal, and as long as he was wearing the signifiers that made him Chinese, he could be Chinese.

Speaker 31 There isn't even a one national language at this moment. There are many different languages.
So it's possible he just didn't speak the local dialect.

Speaker 13 So did this incredible plot to steal tea work? You'll have to listen to the episode again to find out.

Speaker 12 We've had a number of stories about food theft on Gastropod. In fact, we had an entire episode called Grand Theft Food.

Speaker 12 But another story of thievery made it into your top 10, and it told the tale of plant explorer David Fairchild.

Speaker 13 Here's a little tale from some of Fairchild's undercover plant theft adventures. This story comes from his first mission.

Speaker 13 He'd been sent to Corsica by the US government, which sounds like a sweet deal, but his job was to steal a citrus fruit called a citron, and he'd been accused of being a military spy, thrown in jail, and had to talk his way out of it.

Speaker 22 And on his way out of Corsica, he dips into a grove of citron and he takes three cuttings and he takes three fruit, stuffs them in his jacket, and before he leaves, he sticks the cuttings in potatoes so that they will be nourished on the month or two month long voyage back to America.

Speaker 22 They are sent to USDA experiment stations in California, citrus zone,

Speaker 22 and they are infused into the citrus crop and the citrus industry out west in a way that really fuels new growth. The exact sort of thing Fairchild had in mind.

Speaker 12 Fairchild kicked off the citrus industry in California, and in our citrus episode, we got to visit the citrus variety collection, also in California, which was totally amazing and delicious.

Speaker 12 But what you all particularly loved was the story of what happened in Sicilian lemon groves in the 1800s when lemons were a hot commodity.

Speaker 13 Wealthy landowners in the region saw all these poorer people wanting to get into the lemon business, and they came along and made a quote-unquote friendly offer to help them dig wells and build walls and get their lemons to the docks.

Speaker 13 Like, hey, why don't I do that for you and you can pay me?

Speaker 12 But that why don't I do that for you was more of a command than a question. The lemon farmers had to pay them off.

Speaker 33 And so they had the whole industry absolutely in their hands and it's here really that you see the beginnings of mafia behaviour because you've got intimidation.

Speaker 33 You know, if you said no to any of the services they were offering, the same guy who'd come and offered you so kindly so much help would dispatch a gang to scale the walls of your lemon grove, hack down your trees, smash up your irrigation plant and spoil your fruit.

Speaker 12 The story of lemons and the mafia takes us halfway through our top 10 countdown and now it's time for some whiskey.

Speaker 13 Halftime refreshment of champions. Fortunately, in at number six in our countdown is the story of Jack Daniels and Nearest Green, the enslaved man he learned how to make whiskey from.

Speaker 12 Fawn Weaver is the one who uncovered Nearest's role. Here's a bit of that episode.

Speaker 7 And so we then were able to start piecing together, well, if Jack Daniel distillery began on this property that makes Nearest Green their first master distiller.

Speaker 13 This is Fawn's biggest discovery. The Jack Daniels company didn't know this.
She's rewriting American whiskey history.

Speaker 12 The story is an amazing one, and if you haven't listened to it yet, you should. And if you have, you should go listen again.

Speaker 13 So, four more episodes to go in our countdown. We've had some whiskey.
I fancy a second slice of cake. Is that greedy?

Speaker 12 Not at all. In fact, I'm in the mood for some more cake as well.

Speaker 13 And we have Elisa Levine to answer all of our pressing cake questions, such as the important scientific principles that underlie cake and what she calls its four basic elements.

Speaker 30 Flour, fat, sweetener, and air.

Speaker 12 Let's start with the flour.

Speaker 15 So for centuries, people were milling grains, but it was really hard work. So you would get something that you could turn into a stew or that you could turn into some sort of bread or paste.

Speaker 12 And that wasn't a fine enough flour to make the type of cake we enjoy today. It would have been heavy and dense.

Speaker 15 But there were a whole lot of things around the time of the 18th century that seemed to converge that meant that cakes became a lot more like we think of them today and one of them was the quality of the flour.

Speaker 15 It was much lighter, much finer and much whiter, which meant that it was much more sought after and therefore more expensive.

Speaker 13 The big difference came with the invention of steel roller mills at the start of the 19th century. That's when fine white flour became much cheaper.

Speaker 12 And now the fat. Obviously fat makes a cake have that kind of moist mouthfeel and rich taste, but that's not all it does.

Speaker 15 So the fat and the sugar, which in most cake recipes are creamed together, do two things.

Speaker 15 They tenderize the wheat protein, which means that it's not as tough and chewy as it is in a bread dough, but also they introduce more air into the batter.

Speaker 12 When you whip fat, the fat molecules trap air, and sugar actually brings along some more air on its rough crystalline surface.

Speaker 13 And air is really the critical thing in cake.

Speaker 15 Well, if you're going to get a risen cake in the way that we think of today, you have to introduce a lot of air into the batter.

Speaker 15 And that was one of the key differences in this sort of difference between 17th century, 18th century cakes.

Speaker 15 So, prior to that, most of the cake recipes that we have in cookbooks are big, dense fruit cakes.

Speaker 15 And when you're using not particularly finely milled flour and quite heavy, unrefined sugar, and then a lot of dried fruit. The batter's just going to be really heavy.

Speaker 13 It's so funny, fruitcake seems so old-fashioned today, but that's because it literally is. It's cake technology 1.0.
The upgrade, refined sugar and refined flour, made fruitcake obsolete in some ways.

Speaker 13 Although, I still like it at Christmas.

Speaker 12 But the main thing is, refining sugar and flour meant they were light enough to get more air in the batter for fluffier cake. And then the whisk was invented in the 1840s.

Speaker 12 We actually talked about that in our marshmallow fluff episode: More Air, Even Fluffier Cake. And then chemical leaveners were invented in the 1930s.

Speaker 12 Now, almost everyone can enjoy the easiest, fluffiest cakes of all.

Speaker 15 Well, it all started to come together that people started to appreciate this very light, fluffy cake rather than the heavy, dense ones that they'd been used to before.

Speaker 15 And that was aided by the fact that they started to drop all of the dried fruit, which was another way that they were sweetened, and instead use more refined sugars.

Speaker 15 And then that started to be the thing that was fashionable. It was lighter and it was whiter and it was more refined and more elegant served on the dinner table.

Speaker 15 And that, of course, was then the foundation for an enormous slew of innovations in presentation and layer cakes and so on.

Speaker 13 Thank you, technology, for bringing us cake.

Speaker 12 We are not done with cake. We will soon reveal everything you ever wanted to know about the birthday cake.

Speaker 12 Plus, listeners share how Gastropod has changed their lives, and we finish our countdown and reveal your very favorite episode.

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Speaker 29 Congratulations on the big birthday.

Speaker 29 In the survey, you were asking what some of our favorite episodes and surprising facts are that we learned from Gastropod, and there's just so many.

Speaker 29 The story of citrus fruit being the root of a mafia is really surprising, as is the fact that olive oil is actually juice.

Speaker 11 Lord Byron weighed himself on an agricultural scale.

Speaker 30 That medieval nuns were getting lit on saffron.

Speaker 38 A real knee slapper. The story about how the Michelin of Michelin stars is the same as the Michelin of Michelin tires, because that fact got me a date.

Speaker 39 Dutch research is mentioned in your podcast quite often. I had no idea it was so important, and I am Dutch.

Speaker 8 My favorite fact comes from the episode Crunch, Crackle, and Pop. I found it fascinating that people can distinguish between hot and cold liquids being poured into a glass while blindfolded.

Speaker 12 We'll actually do it again right now. Can you tell which liquid is hot and which is cold?

Speaker 13 Alright, have you decided? If you thought the first one was hot, you're right. Isn't that weird?

Speaker 12 But wait, there's more.

Speaker 22 From the balsamic vinegar episode, we learned the essential phrase, microbial death caskade.

Speaker 40 And we also learned how to distinguish between real balsamic and imitations.

Speaker 41 That cilantro tastes like soap to some people. I love cilantro and my mind was blown when I learned this.

Speaker 42 That Queen Anne's lace are wild carrots. I always grew up seeing them on the side of the road and had no idea.

Speaker 9 There are so many amazing things that I have learned from Gastropod, but I think my favorite has to be the story of where the word cocktail comes from.

Speaker 43 You asked what was the most interesting, astonishing, or fascinating thing I had heard on the show. I responded that I heard that saliva is filtered blood.

Speaker 13 Ew.

Speaker 13 Speaking of grossness, it's not all fun and games and deliciousness here at Gastropod HQ. We suffer for our art.

Speaker 12 The worst for me was when we had to eat those disgusting muffins and weigh every single morsel of every ingredient for two whole weeks. That was horrible.

Speaker 13 That was not my idea of a good time either, but the closest I came to vomiting was probably the kombucha episode. Let's relive that moment, shall we?

Speaker 12 We each brought a small segment of our personal blobs in their brewing liquid into the lab. We're donating our kombucha cultures to science, but really, we want to know whose is best.

Speaker 13 So first, the snip test. My blob went first.
Oh, hello. Whoa.

Speaker 12 Oh, it's pretty strong. Smells good.
Smells like kombucha. It does.

Speaker 13 It smells like a classic kombucha.

Speaker 13 I loved it.

Speaker 22 This is my first ever batch, you know.

Speaker 13 Oh, really? Congratulations.

Speaker 13 I was feeling pretty good at this point. And then Ben sniffed Cynthia's blob.
Oh.

Speaker 13 Oh, yours is less.

Speaker 13 Mine's more venigated. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I think I won the sniff test, but that's not the end of the kombucha competition.

Speaker 13 What we're going to do is look at them under the microscope to sort of get a feel for what they look like, and we may already see some differences there.

Speaker 13 And then what we're going to do is incorporate them into our culture collection and see how fast they grow to see if they grow differently. We'll sequence the yeast and the bacteria that are there.

Speaker 13 So we'll learn a lot about what's inside your kombucha. And is there prizes for everyone, or does only one of us win? It's unclear what winning is in kombucha.
So

Speaker 12 I can tell you my winning would be to know that I am not poisoning me and Tim.

Speaker 13 I think we'll find that out for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So Ben sterilized the scalpels and prepped the petri dishes and set up the slides for the microscope.

Speaker 13 So this is Cynthia's blob.

Speaker 12 Let's get a chunk of it. Cut it this morning.

Speaker 12 I'm not sure how perfectly sterile everything was.

Speaker 13 I should have fished it out for you guys. I wasn't

Speaker 13 I wanted to touch it as little as possible, to be totally honest.

Speaker 13 It looks like raw chicken breast. I've been sitting on a sidewalk for a second.

Speaker 12 And then he took took a look at Nikki's blob.

Speaker 13 Oh, my.

Speaker 12 Oh, yours gets a lot goopier than mine does. Mine doesn't look like that.

Speaker 13 It looks like a manta ray. Look at him like

Speaker 13 that.

Speaker 12 Mine just forms the layers. I don't get all that weird goop.

Speaker 13 So we're really fascinated by... Nikki's totally grossed out.
Do you need a barf bag?

Speaker 13 We have a biohazardous waste bin over there. You can just go vomit it if you want.

Speaker 13 Sorry. Getting rid of that kombucha blob was a huge relief.

Speaker 12 I'm actually still brewing with mine. I love kombucha.

Speaker 13 And I love Ben Wolf. Longtime listeners will recognize him as our in-house microbiologist.
Sneak peek, he'll be back on the show this autumn to talk microbes again.

Speaker 12 Drink. And a lot of you are drinking kombucha because, well, I didn't manage to convert Nikki well.

Speaker 11 It did help me overcome my fear of kombucha.

Speaker 4 Gastropod is responsible for my husband's kombucha hobby, which is gradually taking over our basement, one microbial mat at a time.

Speaker 13 Gastropod has changed our lives, obviously, but it turns out it's also changed your lives too.

Speaker 44 I use balsamic vinegar on my eggs and everybody looks at me funny. I can't thank you for that.

Speaker 12 Love you guys.

Speaker 16 The David Fairchild episode was my favorite episode. I was so inspired.
I'm going to apply for grad school in horticulture.

Speaker 42 Hello, Cynthia and Nikki. This is Alicia from Pismo Beach, California.
Thanks to listening to Gastropod. I started an algae farm company with two friends in California called Kelpful.

Speaker 42 Thank you so much for everything you do and happy birthday!

Speaker 43 Since I've been listening, my hair has all come back without any gray, my teeth have straightened, my skin glows with vitality and I'm now extremely attractive to other people. Thank you so much.

Speaker 12 Oh, I can't say that's happened to me yet. I mean, we have years to go.
There's still hope.

Speaker 13 Quite the reverse. I found my first gray hair after starting to make this show.
But it has changed my life in other ways.

Speaker 13 I'm now a person who mail orders peanut butter thanks to our peanut butter episode. It's so embarrassing, I can't believe I even said it out loud.

Speaker 12 What happens to me is that I tend to eat a lot of whatever it is that we're reporting on. But let's get back to your favorite episodes.
One of those was our episode on Native American foods.

Speaker 12 I did love traveling to Minnesota with Nikki for this story. It was incredibly moving to speak to the farmers and scientists who are bringing back Native food waste.

Speaker 13 Another top 10 pick was our fake food episode, which was one of my personal favorites. I still sort of fantasize about an alternative career where I am a food detective.

Speaker 13 So meeting the world's first food detective for our episode was amazing.

Speaker 12 We are down to the final two favorite episodes. Unsurprisingly to me, the pudding episode got a lot of votes.

Speaker 13 It was extremely exciting. Listener and great British Bake Off star Tom Gilliford rounded up a couple more bake off friends, Jan and Selassie, and we set a challenge to create a mini spotted dick.

Speaker 12 My partner Tim was the rookie baker we threw into the competition with his incredibly enthusiastic agreement, of course.

Speaker 12 And so back home in Boston, Tim invented his own spotted dick recipe for the competition, a Yankee dick, and he and I gave it a try in this clip from the episode.

Speaker 13 Mmm. Mmm.

Speaker 13 Hmm. Okay.

Speaker 5 So I think it's a little too sweet, because the cranberries are very sweet.

Speaker 12 They're sweet, and just the dough, like the

Speaker 12 pudding part itself is pretty sweet. And you're going to put a custard on it, and so I agree it needs to be a little less sweet.

Speaker 23 Cut back the sugar, but the cornmeal has a really nice, crunchy texture.

Speaker 12 So I have to say, neither of us have ever had spotted dick before, so we actually don't know how this compares.

Speaker 36 This is the best spotted dick I've ever had.

Speaker 13 Okay, I know they're all my favorites, but the pudding episode might actually be my favorite favorite, even though it was also the most nerve-wracking because I was so starstruck.

Speaker 13 Can we play some more?

Speaker 12 Of course. The whole evening was so exciting.
All four bakers made their mini spotted dicks and the custards. Selassie nearly set the kitchen on fire, and then the puddings came out of the oven.

Speaker 13 Yans were first. Let's listen.
Which is not as good as what we did in person, which was smell them. Wow, Jan, that's beautiful.

Speaker 13 Oh, it's put! Smell it, smell it.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God. Smell it, smell it.
Smell it. Oh, wow.

Speaker 13 Oh, lovely.

Speaker 13 And then, as the bakers brought their spotted dicks out to the table, our expert panel of Felicity, Sam and Danny grabbed their spoons and prepared.

Speaker 22 The fact is we're determining what the best spotted dick is based on.

Speaker 13 Sam, if you don't know how to judge a spotted dick at your.

Speaker 13 I don't know, but

Speaker 13 is it look, is it texture, is it feel?

Speaker 32 Like, you know,

Speaker 22 what makes a good dick?

Speaker 13 What do you value in the spotted dick? Or a mini dick, I should say.

Speaker 13 It's a horrible wormhole, isn't it?

Speaker 22 I was going to get excited about mouthfeel, but that's...

Speaker 32 When you see the blushes on radio.

Speaker 13 Everyone's like, oh, a little bit awkward.

Speaker 13 Everyone's suddenly aren't really awkward in the world.

Speaker 13 We are British. I was going to say,

Speaker 12 not the Americans.

Speaker 13 We have no problem.

Speaker 13 As much as I love Spotted Dick, and I do really love Spotted Dick, it is not what is called for this episode, though. This episode, we need a different bake.

Speaker 12 We need some birthday cake. It's It's time for one last slice of cake with Elisa before we reveal your very favorite episode.

Speaker 13 Elisa says the first recipes specifically for birthday cake start being published in the late 1800s. Fanny Farmer's famous Boston Cooking School Cookbook only had one birthday cake recipe.

Speaker 13 It was an orange-flavored fruit and nut cake that also included a generous slug of sherry.

Speaker 15 Well things like sherry harken back to an earlier era where there would often be some sort of alcohol in the cake and again that goes back to the sort of fruit cake era.

Speaker 15 And I suppose people just thought in a slightly different way about what was appropriate for children. Perhaps it was seen as a preservative or something that just enhanced the flavour of the cake.

Speaker 12 Cakes for children in the 1800s were usually actually kind of boring and not too sweet. Children weren't supposed to be overly stimulated.
They needed plain food.

Speaker 15 But then into the start of the 20th century, we see more and more birthday cakes, decorated cakes.

Speaker 15 So we're starting to think about cakes as something appealing for children as well as just the ingredients.

Speaker 13 In the past, at least in America and the UK, it was also considered less appropriate to make a big hoopla of children the way we do today.

Speaker 13 There was even some superstition around celebrating their birthdays given the much higher child mortality rates back then.

Speaker 13 But in the 20th century, that all began to change, and birthday cake became a thing, particularly for children.

Speaker 15 It didn't raise their status too high in an inappropriate way, but in an increasingly child-centered society, it made them feel special for that day.

Speaker 12 Speaking of child mortality, Elisa told us it's a myth that parents didn't invest as much love into their children before the 1800s, but they were certainly aware that many of their children might not survive into adulthood, and that fact probably inspired having your birthday year marked by the number of candles on your cake.

Speaker 15 We know that there are German traditions going back a long time of lighting candles, but not so much in a celebratory way, but to keep away evil spirits.

Speaker 15 The smoke would waft up towards the ceiling and take away those evil spirits.

Speaker 15 And gradually this seems to have become lighting as many candles as the child's age, sometimes adding an extra one for the child to grow on, which again is a bit of a superstitious belief that it will help the child get through its next year.

Speaker 15 So it was really tangled up with quite a lot of superstitious beliefs still dating back to a time when child mortality was much higher.

Speaker 12 Luckily, the candles today are celebrating a child's life and years, or a podcast's life and years, and not warding off the Grim Reaper.

Speaker 13 In case you hadn't noticed yet, I love cake. But birthday cake today is not my favourite kind of cake.

Speaker 13 It's become shorthand for plain yellow cake that tastes of not very much and is buried under a ton of icing and sprinkles and fondant decoration. Frankly, I'd rather have Fanny Farmer's sherry cake.

Speaker 12 So when did birthday cake become kind of gross?

Speaker 15 Yes, I think that's a good point. Um I think that's partly to do with catering to children's tastes, because a lot of the idea of the birthday cake is the the entire ceremony around it.

Speaker 15 So the birthday child seated at the table and the procession of the lighted candles on the cake coming in. So, it's a lot more about the presentation and the act of blowing out the candles.

Speaker 15 And especially for children, the taste is actually fairly secondary.

Speaker 15 So, I think probably we've developed cakes that will just be sturdy enough to take the weight of all that icing and all the expectations that are thrown on them.

Speaker 15 And then, the actual eating of them is fairly secondary for most children. They lick the icing, send them home in the party bags, and the taste doesn't really matter too much.

Speaker 13 Sad but true. But although Gastropod is only five, we actually have a very sophisticated palate, and I'd like to do something a little more exciting for our birthday cake.

Speaker 13 Heck, we don't even need to restrict ourselves to cake as we know it. There's a whole world of birthday foods to explore.

Speaker 15 So I think Britain and America share fairly similar cake cultural heritages. So something quite light, increasingly something brightly decorated with the candles on the top traditionally round.

Speaker 15 But in other countries it could look quite different. They might be much more bready doughs.

Speaker 15 In China there's much more of a history of steamed buns with sweet fillings which could be used for celebrations and all sorts of ceremonies dating different life events.

Speaker 12 I'll go for the steamed sweet bun this year.

Speaker 13 And I'll have a slice of sherry cake and a steamed bun with you.

Speaker 12 Sounds like a plan.

Speaker 13 Alright, time to end this party with a bang. It's your most favorite episode from the 117 episodes we've made.

Speaker 36 Three, two,

Speaker 13 one.

Speaker 13 Go,

Speaker 36 start,

Speaker 18 blast off.

Speaker 12 We traveled all the way to Belgium for this particular episode. We got in a car and rode to the very edge of the country to hang out with two scientists and a dozen bakers.

Speaker 18 Keep your eyes on the door.

Speaker 17 Well, let's go for some magic. Three,

Speaker 13 two,

Speaker 13 one.

Speaker 13 And with that, we stepped inside the world's one and only sourdough starter library.

Speaker 12 It's a library, yes, but instead of bookshelves, there are 12 illuminated refrigerators with glass doors so you can see the jars inside.

Speaker 12 Carl's collected 93 different sourdough starters from 17 different countries and they look totally different from one another.

Speaker 17 Some of them are liquid and some are stiff and then some are very dark, some are spickled, some are almost looking like crumble because they're so dry.

Speaker 17 So there's a lot of colors, very dark ones to brownish ones to yellow ones and then the normal white ones.

Speaker 13 Carl took some of the jars out and allowed us to smell the starters. Some smelled fruity, some were acidic, some were biscuity, some were creamy.

Speaker 17 The Chinese, for example, one of them is very meaty. When I open the jar, it's like almost a sausage, very savory.

Speaker 17 Some of them are really very pungent. That when I open the jar and I smell the first, that you really feel the

Speaker 17 acids go into your nose and it's like if you would have a spoon of

Speaker 17 very heavy mustard, so the Dijon mustard that you, well, that reaction.

Speaker 13 Making our sourdough episode was the most bread-centric 48 hours of my life. We ate bread for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks that weekend.

Speaker 12 It was a carb fest, but as was the case that weekend, I still have room for a little bit more. Let's listen to the scientists swabbing the bakers to find out what microbes live on their skin.

Speaker 45 I'm gonna be swabbing your hands, and I'm gonna ask that you put your hands out just in a way that I can apply some pressure.

Speaker 45 And I'm gonna spend kind of a few seconds just going over the front, and then I'm gonna ask you to flip, and then I'll do the back.

Speaker 45 And if we could not talk over the swab when it's out, so that we can not introduce some of our oral microbes.

Speaker 13 Sure. Thank you.
Anne was swabbing the baker's hands because if any microbes are going from a baker's body into their sourdough starter, they're probably getting in there via their hands.

Speaker 35 It would be wonderful in some future version to top to bottom swab all these bakers and really start to tease out, you know, which body part is really contributing.

Speaker 35 But we had to start somewhere, and so we start with the hand connection.

Speaker 12 If you want to find out where the microbes in sourdough come from, you will have to go back and listen to the episode.

Speaker 13 And I am going to go and have a lie down. I can't believe that we made all these episodes with just the two of us.

Speaker 12 We have occasionally had a little help from some wonderful volunteers, specifically Ari Lebowitz, Emily Pontecorvo, and Sam Panzer.

Speaker 13 But really, we do pretty much everything ourselves. We get emails addressed to Nikki, Cynthia, and the Gastropod team, and I'm like, I wish it's just us.

Speaker 12 And we keep getting more and more ambitious, which is great, but it's more and more work and, frankly, more money.

Speaker 12 Gastropod started off as a labor of love, and now, yes, we can pay ourselves a full-time salary, but it's still a huge stretch.

Speaker 13 Thanks to our growing number of listeners, we can sell ads. That's a place where you've all been a huge help, telling your friends and family to listen to us.
That gets us to nearly 50% of our budget.

Speaker 13 Then we have some support from foundations. Thank you, Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation, for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics, and the Borrows Welcome Fund.

Speaker 12 And thanks to all of you who are able to donate to the show. Every even small donation helps.
We get nearly a quarter of our entire budget from donations.

Speaker 12 And the more support we have from you, the more ambitious we can keep being. We are so incredibly thankful for all of your support and love.

Speaker 13 So grateful that we're spending our birthday giving you presents. That's right, if you give during our birthday month this September any amount at all, we have a special prize for you.

Speaker 13 And we've got some rewards for long-term supporters, too. Keep an eye on your inbox.
You'll hear from us in a month or so about that.

Speaker 12 Because remember, it's just the two of us making the show, so sometimes these things take a little while to get to in between making all the episodes.

Speaker 13 Okay, that was a good party. But there's no rest for the wicked.
Cynthia, we've got another episode to make.

Speaker 12 Right, okay. Onwards and upwards.

Speaker 13 Thank you so much for listening and voting and recording your voices. We wish we could have used all your recordings, but listening to them was quite delightful.

Speaker 12 Thanks so much to Elisa Levine, author of Cake. We have a link to her great book on our website, gastropod.com.
Obviously, she covers a lot more than birthday cake.

Speaker 12 And really, hugest thanks to all of you who wrote in and who recorded snippets for us and who donated in celebration of our birthday. This has been the best podcast birthday party ever.

Speaker 13 Thanks also to Sam Panzer, who dug up some awesome birthday cake stories for us. We have more of that to share in our special extras email for supporters at the Superfan level.

Speaker 13 That's $5 per episode or $9 per month. This episode's extras will include JFK and Ben Franklin, so, you know, get in there.

Speaker 12 We'll be back in two weeks to get started on our next five years.

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Speaker 25 Support for the show comes from TrainDreams, the new film from Netflix.

Speaker 25 Based on Dennis Johnson's novella, TrainDreams is the moving portrait of a man who leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty during a rapidly changing time in America.

Speaker 25 Set in the early 20th century, it's an ode to a vanishing way of life and to the extraordinary possibilities that exist within even the simplest of existences.

Speaker 25 In a time when we are all searching for purpose, Train Dreams feels timeless because the frontier isn't just a place, it's a state of being. Train Dreams, now playing only on Netflix.