The Stupid Little Yogurt Question

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I don't miss much about being a teenager, but one thing I do sometimes miss is just how fun it was to be a teenage zealot.

The world at the turn of the millennium seemed to my eyes so deserving of skepticism.

The war on terror, bullshit.

The oil companies, they were bad.

My suburb, maybe worse than both of them.

George W.

Bush was obviously the worst president America was ever going to have, assuming it even survived him.

I think I thought then that most of the adults I knew had just been compromised somehow.

It almost felt like maybe adulthood itself corrupted you.

Something about corporate jobs or paying taxes or maybe an actual invisible toxin in the suburban air muddied your vision.

So you lost the x-ray teenage clarity me and my friends all had.

That's how I saw it then.

Today, in theory, I think both sides have a piece of the truth, the young and the not-so-young.

But when I meet actual teenagers, I will admit I'm kind of astounded by their withering skepticism, their oracular pronouncements about what's bullshit and what's cringe.

Was I really like this?

Is it possible they see me as out of touch?

Corny?

But I think that's why every year year I become a little more astonished by high school teachers.

These people who stand up in front of a somewhat hostile audience day after day and just try to convince them to care about whatever the evolving adult agenda is.

This week, reporter Garrett Graham has a story from one of those classrooms about a teacher who had a question and who had the audacity to try to make his students curious about its answer.

Garrett was there to watch, to see if such a thing could ever really happen.

Okay.

Shall we?

Where do you want to start the story?

So I'm going to start the story almost two years ago, actually, October 2023.

I don't know if you remember this, but you get a tweet from a guy named David.

And what was David saying?

I'm just going to get you to read that tweet.

I'm going to put it in your Slack.

All right.

Sorry, I have a notification from Domino's Pizza saying I have 80 Domino's points.

A currency I never want to do.

You live in New York and regularly order dominoes.

It's different.

Okay.

This is from DFree86 at pjvote

hi pj i'm a high school english teacher and i teach a class called knowledge of the world that asks students to pose big and small questions for research projects they'll eventually pursue and present on i've turned them on to search engine and we're currently obsessed with the question

why is la fermier is that how you say it la fermiere la fermiere la fermiere the only yogurt that comes in a clay pot.

We're deep in the throes of our investigation.

Can you help us?

Yeah, Yeah, so that was the question we received on Twitter.

Small question about a specific yogurt brand and why it came in a clay pot rather than a plastic one.

Okay,

check, check, check.

And it turned out the school that this question was coming from was just a few subway stops away from our office.

So Shruti and I figured we would investigate their investigation.

The story we found, I'm going to tell it to you in chapters.

So chapter one, the school.

Can you tell me where we're going?

Yeah, we are on 75th in New York, and we are headed to Lycée de New York, too.

By this point, I'd already treated some emails with DFree86.

His real name turned out to be David Freeman.

And he explained that he was a teacher at this French school in Manhattan, and one of the classes he teaches is basically a French school version of Search Engine.

Like, that's kind of what he seems to be doing here.

Sacred Blue.

I'm going to do that seven more times.

I'm so sorry.

What does that mean, Sacred Blue?

I have no idea.

It could be super rude.

It means sacred something.

Sacred blue.

Sacred Blue.

david hey david hey garrett how you doing doing great yeah nice to see you thank you for coming thanks for meeting us down absolutely um i think we got a sign link david greets us and i want you to imagine like the prototypical high school english teacher which prototype youngish tasteful glasses sharp haircut yeah that way okay up the staircase

towards a sort of adjacent building so the lyse francais de new york it's a bilingual school mostly kids from france and the u.s although there are students from all over And it's an old school, started in 1935.

This was before my time.

But it was in these big, sort of old New York City walk-up buildings.

David's been at the school for the last 14 years, and he teaches two subjects: English and also the class that we're here to see.

A class all about curiosity.

Guys, try to see.

What time does the class usually start?

The class starts at 10:15.

And I did recommend that they be on time.

The students start streaming in.

It's about 15 students in total.

And as the final stragglers take their seats, David just launches into his lesson for the day hi guys we ready yes good hi by the way

happy thursday all right so i want to talk a little bit about the course in general um and then the nature of the sort of question asking in it and then we're going to make our way to a specific example question which i hope will stimulate you as much as it stimulates me and david i should say at this point

avid podcast listener maybe a bit of a podcast producer at heart and so with a bit of a flair for the dramatic he begins to recreate the question that brought us us here.

The question that has been obsessing me, the question that I keep finding myself affronted by, is to do with the cafeteria in the school.

And walking through the cafeteria line and looking at all the things available for purchase.

And every time I walk by, I see the same thing that you see, which is

this thing.

The students start giggling here because David has very theatrically revealed a pot of yogurt.

All right, what are we looking at?

La Fermier yogurt.

La Fermier yogurt.

La Fermiere is a small artisan French yogurt brand.

Do you know this brand?

I really despise yogurt.

So I

historically have not known it because of this question.

And now when I'm in like a fancier corner store, I notice this brand.

You'll see them.

Yeah.

So La Fermiere yogurt stands out from the other brands in the grocery store because instead of the plastic packaging you typically see yogurt come in, La Fermiere comes in these cutely colored, often lavender clay pots.

It's a premium yogurt, definitely more expensive than your Chibanis and your Yoplas.

They have like premium sounding flavors, rose, lavender, orange blossom honey.

So I walk by this thing, and

I would say I'm a yogurt consumer.

I like to eat a yogurt.

And every time I walk by it, I ask myself this question.

Why is this the only yogurt in the entire world that comes in a clay pot?

Now, there's an asterisk.

It's not the only yogurt in the whole world.

But it's the only one that I see in my everyday life that comes in a clay pot.

None of the other ones do.

So my question is, why?

David asks his students for theories like why would this one company choose to use clay pots when pretty much no other company does.

Anybody have any theories?

Come on, be honest.

Mario?

Is it good for the environment?

Anook?

Also, is it cheaper to produce than plastic pots?

Right.

Romy?

Is it some type of marketing thing where it's, oh, I'm not eating yogurt out of a plastic pot.

I'm eating it out of a clay pot.

You know, it's like some type of image.

Good.

If this were the small question we were starting with, as a small question to start with, what are some things that we could do to try and figure out the answer to this question?

Estelle?

We could contact the brand to see if they had any specific reasons when they first produced the yogurt.

Specific reasons for packaging it the way that they do?

Okay.

Is it strange for you at all like observing a sort of search engine style inquiry unfold in the real world?

It's weird seeing this teacher do the thing that we do in pitch meetings, which is just to start to wander at the possible explanations for these strange questions we encounter.

Yes.

Other ideas?

Anuk?

Just go on their website and see if they have anything about it.

Go on their website and see if they have anything about it.

Here's why we do this thing.

Olivia?

Ask people that buy these yogurts, so like the cafeteria or others, why they want to buy this type of yogurt.

So, in other words, if it sells, if it's popular, if it okay,

I think we're gonna stop there.

Good job, guys.

So, David wraps up the class discussion, and he pulls me and Trithy aside.

He had told us earlier that he'd chosen two students for this yogurt question to try to figure out why, like, why La Fermiere was using clay pots for their yogurt.

And they are my intrepid student volunteers for this particular project.

I don't know if that's good luck or bad luck, but thank you all the same.

So, we're gonna start at the cafeteria.

Chapter 2.

The students.

Okay, for the record, can I just get you to say your name?

My name is Romy.

And my name is Anouk.

Romy and Anouk.

Both 11th graders at the school.

Junior.

So juniors, yep.

And which in French is what it's called?

Premiere.

Yeah.

I'd get to know Romie and Anouk much better in the many months that would follow.

Romy, I would learn, grew up in New York.

She's one of those teenagers who almost seems like a fully formed professional somehow.

Yes, yes.

Anouk's family is from France, and she's a more laid-back type.

Like, she seemed to have the kind of curiosity that chases all sorts of things, just not necessarily the stuff that shows up on a syllabus.

Yeah.

And of course, anytime we're trying to help somebody answer a question, one thing we want to know is why do they specifically care about it?

Well, first of all, do you guys, do you eat yogurt?

I mean, you used to eat more yogurt than now, but yeah, I would say I eat some yogurt.

And yes, on a daily basis, probably.

And what about La Femiere?

No, I don't really eat La Femiere yogurt, except when I want yogurt at school, because it's the one they sell, but usually not.

And what do you usually eat?

Trader Joe's creeped yogurt.

Are we doing recommend?

So Romey and Anuk, a little more blase about La Fermiere than their teacher.

Okay.

Enough so that Shruthi and I are beginning to wonder, like, are these two student investigators even interested in this question?

Like, is this something they're excited about, or is this just a homework assignment?

So I do have one question though, and everyone has to be honest here.

Whose question is this really?

Is it your question, David, that you have sent your students off to investigate?

Or do you, does either of you have, like, is this something you're thinking about?

I'm curious how you would answer this.

It was your question.

It was your question, yeah.

Both of them sort of say immediately, it was your question, David, not our question.

And then David replies in what I can only describe as fluent teacher.

I would say it was my question in a pedagogical, demonstrative, educationally effective capacity, which was, because when we first had the conversation, it was a couple of months ago, right?

And it's a brand new course.

It's a little nebulous to them and to me.

And so when we were thinking about how you find a research question, you know, big, small, small, big, I wanted an example that I could be honest and earnest about for how you start with a small question and turn it into something that can be big enough to encompass a research project, right?

So where this thing ends up, where it lands in terms of...

the various reasons why this thing is, is itself a kind of representative of the sort of process that the kids are going through, right?

They themselves have to reach.

I will admit, Fiji, in this moment, my faith in this yogurt question was getting kind of low.

Reasonably.

I was like more with the students here and their seeming ambivalence than I was with their teacher.

But also, it turned out I was underestimating him because by the time this was all over, this question would become interesting.

Actually, interesting.

Yeah, not in a pedagogical, demonstrative, educationally effective way, like properly interesting.

Okay.

But on that day we all just sort of dutifully get into the elevator.

We're heading to the school cafeteria which is the first stop in our investigation.

And on our way there I started talking to Anuk about her relationship to dairy products back when she was growing up in France.

So I would say just consuming milk and milk-based products is something that's very advertised in France.

For example, in my like my childhood TV show and everything, they would say at every like ad break, oh you have to consume five like vegetables a day, also three different milk-based products a day.

So it's definitely like a big part of, especially children's lives, because there's this thing of like, you're going to grow taller if you eat yogurt and all of that.

I didn't really think about this at the time when I first showed up to the Lycee, but one of the reasons this question was coming from this place is just that French people are extraordinarily precious about their dairy products.

Oh, right.

They like cheese.

They take, and just food in general, they take the like quality and craft of food far more seriously than we do.

Like it felt unintuitive for me as a kid who grew up on easy cheese and country crock.

Like, I know you don't like yogurt, but if you've ever had like a fancy cheese or a traditional French butter and then gone back to like the mass-produced American people.

Oh, totally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they just eat way more of it than we do too.

Like the average French person eats something like 60 pounds of cheese and 45 pounds of yogurt every year.

Wait, sorry, what?

Which is a lot more than Americans consume either.

Eat 60 pounds of cheese.

And 45 pounds of yogurt every year.

The thing that's so funny about that, besides everything, is it's an average.

So, like, there's lactose intolerant people in France, and other people are eating enough to make the average go up to that number.

The upper end of that bell curve is probably very upsetting.

But back at the school, our little yogurt investigation squad walked into the cafeteria.

Classic high school lunchroom with those long tables with the little attached stools, food serving stations in the back.

The cafeteria is empty at this point, except for two adults who were seated at this one table.

Hello, how are you?

Martin Stecheff.

And this is Romy and Danouk.

They are 11th graders who are helping us with this project on yogurt.

We were here to talk to the head of the cafeteria about La Fermiere.

He was one of the people responsible for stocking this specific yogurt in the lunchroom.

He was another adult like the teacher who seemed enchanted by this brand.

And so Romy, one of the students, asks, So, how popular is this yogurt?

Like, do you sell out every day?

Do a lot of people eat it?

Teachers, students?

It's pretty popular with the staff and with the faculty.

The students unfortunately I think are more toward like oh I want a cookie or I want chips but the adults seem to really enjoy it.

Yeah why do you think it's the only yogurt basically the most popular yogurt that comes in a clay pot?

Well, if you check out the Lepimiro website it's actually a really great website and they do this whole promotion on reusable and sustainable and you can take these pots and they give you all these ideas what you can do with them.

So I think Mark didn't have much of an answer here beyond what the company was already saying on its website that clay sometimes they'll say terracotta or ceramic basically the same thing but saying it's a premium material with all kinds of reusability and sustainability benefits it's really you can do a lot of things with a clay pot and honestly we're all just kind of sitting there and nodding along rome and anuke i wouldn't say they're like actively engaged at this point like we're still inside the school building their teacher's still hovering close by

They're a little reserved.

But after the cafeteria, the next stop on our investigation list was just the local cafe next to the school, a spot with what I thought was a slightly over-the-top French name.

Okay, so we're just outside of school right now, and we're gonna go in a cafe called Chelde Frenchise, which is right next to the school, literally next door, the key hangout spot.

How often do you come here?

I don't come here that often, but a lot of people do, especially if you don't have time to go get a snack and you only have 15 minutes.

And there's just, it's a lot of just French products.

So if you want something French, come here.

It smells like France in here.

Yeah, it does smell like France.

PJ, I should tell you something.

I know you have teenagers in your life.

I don't really like to reveal a prejudice of mine.

Like high school students kind of make me nervous.

Because you feel like they're going to humiliate you, maybe?

Yeah, like I have Gen Z friends.

I've had Gen Z colleagues, but when you start getting to the younger parts of the generation, or like whatever we're calling the next generation, Gen Alpha,

I just, I don't know.

I don't know how to hang.

I don't know the lingo.

Well, the thing that's hard, actually, just so you know, it's not knowing the lingo because you're not supposed to use the lingo.

And when you say, like, no cap on God, it really upsets them, which is a reason to do it.

It's actually that there's certain words we use that they really react to.

Like, they're almost allergic to them.

As an example,

sick.

Sick.

That's sick.

Oh, it just feels like millennial cringe or what?

They wouldn't even say millennial cringe, but they're just like, it's like being like, what's up, dudes?

Like, they hate it.

And it made me realize, like, oh, right.

Of course, the generic words for cool get generationally cycled.

Yeah.

Because there's other words for something being cool or agreeable that you can use that they won't react to.

But like say that something's sick in front of someone around 13, they will burn you to Hades.

And it, it doesn't not feel bad.

It feels quite bad.

Yeah, it sounds bad.

It's really bad.

I think it's also just like.

I think for some reason, when you become old, you expect that young people will automatically afford you respect, which I never did as a young person.

And they don't do either.

The thing that you're describing is the thing that made me kind of nervous walking into a high school with somewhat aloof high school kids.

I understand.

I don't like to eat American yogurt.

And I'm feeling that way as we talk to the owner of this cafe, learning once again that adults love this yogurt.

The pots are cute.

They're reusable.

You use them for different things.

But as the hour winds by, I can slowly feel Romy and Anuk warming to the assignment a little bit.

Or maybe it's just because we're starting to get to the point where they might get to miss their next class and that's like exciting for them.

You guys owe me for letting you miss math class?

I'm missing philosophy right now.

Ooh, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Sometimes.

Okay, it depends on the lesson.

Yeah, depends on what you guys study.

So we're making small talk about class.

David, the teacher, has to duck out to go teach his next class.

Yeah, thank you.

And so for the first time, Truthy and I get a moment alone with these students.

No, that's great.

Which means I finally get to ask them what they really think about this investigation we're on.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it.

Chapter 3.

The students' point of view.

So you had this conversation in class.

We sit down in the school library and I just asked them to tell me about that first class when their teacher David pitched this yogurt question to them.

Can you just briefly in a few sentences describe sort of what that class looked like in that day?

So in the beginning we were all very surprised with the question and kind of confused.

Like Mr.

Freeman was, oh my god, I have this really interesting question.

It's we were like, that this is your question?

I feel like everyone was kind of annoyed at the end of this class because they were like, why do we have to spend so much time, like so much of our free time, homework and everything on a yogurt question that nobody cares about?

They're like, look, I get it.

This is school.

But if we're going to be taking a two-year research class, like, why can't we spend our time researching stuff we actually care about?

We have been told that, oh, you have to do a project about something you're passionate about, but we have been presented with things we're not passionate about.

Yeah, especially with this class, it's like when teachers are asking you to do something and to research something you're not interested in, it's hard.

But with this question, we all have kind of come up with topics that we are interested in, all of us.

But then we're asked to to do this about yogurt.

We're just like, why can't we spend more time researching the things that we're actually interested in, if that makes sense.

So what do they want to know about?

Not yogurt pots.

What do you wish you were spending your time on instead of thinking about yogurt?

So I have mostly I've been researching like, why is America over-medicated?

And I really am interested in like the 19th century, the Civil War, kind of where that all started with morphine and how that's progressed to where we are now, which is this like cataclysmic cataclysmic crisis.

Like hearing her talk about this, I was like, oh, of course this yogurt question sounds stupid to you.

Like, of course, this feels like a waste of your time.

It's also so funny to hear the difference between

the curiosity you're asked to have versus the curiosity that you have.

Like people, the aliveness with which when someone talks about a real question, they come alive.

And that was the feeling I was having in this library.

It's like, oh, these students are coming alive for the first time because they're talking about stuff that they're excited about.

Yeah.

And it's not yogurt.

And what do you wish you were thinking about in your yogurt thinking time?

To be completely honest, I wish I was spending this time to figure out what I want to spend it about.

Like, I'm really bad at just finding specific questions or specific things that I'm interested about.

So I have some, like, general themes.

So I love design, I love architecture, art, but I just haven't been able to come up with a specific question.

A nuke doesn't know what she wants her final project to be, but in what I'm learning is like kind of classic Anuke fashion.

She was like, I'd rather just be using this time to figure out what I actually am interested in.

And so like, again, a clay pot of yogurt, not something that was immediately attention grabbing for her.

Right.

Okay.

So where do you go from there when you realize your two principles are like have other designs?

Well, it's funny because this is something that like occasionally comes up for us on our show.

Some weeks we spend our time thinking about small and unserious questions.

Yeah.

Like we might be trying to track down a Russian rapper and meanwhile the economy is crashing and the president's trying to like dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or something.

It's like, wait, how sad are the monkeys in the zoo again?

And that was coming to mind as I was hearing them talk about their serious research interests bumping up against this silly yogurt question.

But this is in some ways the entire point of David's class.

He's trying to teach them the disciplined form of curiosity.

Yeah, he's trying to say maybe it's a more valuable skill, or at least it's the skill that this class is trying to teach you that you should be able to chase down answers to questions that you don't care about.

And you might learn in the process that somebody used to say to me about exercising.

My friend Lillia was like, action precedes motivation.

Like, start doing it and you might discover something.

So you're now on board.

You're like, let's force these children to talk yogurt.

I've kind of been like a connaissance demand pilled where I'm like, let's just see if this is possible.

We're going to take a short break.

And then this week, search engines Garrett Graham will embed with this pair of teenage detectives as they complete a very involved homework assignment, as accusations are hurled, as a beloved international yogurt brand becomes somewhat unsettled.

All that after these publicités.

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Welcome back to the show.

Chapter 4.

Looking for treasure.

So, PJ, a couple of months have passed since my first visit to the French school, and we're about to hop on a call to start our investigation for real.

And the first thing has a curiosity at this point, is it inside you?

Like, are you like, it's not, I feel like it hasn't yet been you.

No, the thing that I think is propelling me and motivating me at this point is the fact that I'm getting to like investigate this alongside two high schoolers who seem bored by it.

Like the fun part for me is not, can I answer this question?

It's

make them care about it.

Can I get these students interested in this question?

Okay.

So I get on a Zoom with Romey and Anuk.

Can you both tell me what you had for breakfast this morning so I can check your levels?

I had cereal for breakfast.

I had a child's breakfast.

I had carrot cake and chocolate cake.

For breakfast.

You had two types of cake for breakfast.

That's inspirational, I have to admit.

It's funny, everybody we ever interview, we ask what they had for breakfast.

And then, with an adult, we usually follow that up by saying, Can you say your name and what you do for a living?

But for high school students who don't yet do anything for a living, I had a different introductory question that I thought might tell me something about them.

So, when you guys were both younger, I'm curious, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Like the earliest answer you can remember for yourself for that question.

What did you guys want to be?

I think I wanted to be like

either a doctor or a scientist.

I think I wanted to be an archaeologist.

I was really obsessed with history and I was a super curious kid and I really wanted, like I loved treasure hunts, stuff like that.

For example, I love thrifting and I think it's the same feeling in a way.

It's like you're trying to find this treasure.

That feeling that Anuk's teacher is trying to inspire in her, like curiosity about the small things, she says it's a feeling she often has, just rarely about school.

So I don't really like school because it just takes away like free time from me.

Like I would much rather just spend my entire days like drawing and playing music, stuff like that.

So I usually find school pretty boring.

Yeah, there are some classes that I do like enjoy.

I really like to learn, but I think kind of the stress of it sometimes takes away from that.

Well, sometimes a lot of the times takes away from like the kind of

pleasure you get from learning or like the drive that you have.

Because I think I'm a very driven person when it comes to that and if the things I care about but some of the classes I just cannot I couldn't care less

and that's a little bit how these two students were feeling in their class about curiosity with that exceptionally eager teacher David Freeman like some of the early assignments to them just felt pretty dull we had this assignment that was like this research project about your building that you live in yeah and it was still not really clear what the whole thing was about and everybody's still a little bit confused and then came that day that mr freeman showed up with his pot of yogurt and you know what happens from there i mean i feel like when we came in we were like oh come on like not another stupid project and this time it's about yogurt too like the most stupid one in our opinion like just about a pot of yogurt but then two weeks later

he said I contacted this podcast team then I think that made it more exciting at least for me because it made it feel more real.

David told us class that he had two spots available to be a part of the project and Romy and Anuk decided to go for it.

Just had to send him an email with all our arguments to how we would make the best students for the assignment.

But I feel like I just have this thing of like fear of missing out.

Also, I had seen that Mayahawk was on the podcast.

I think Anouk and I are the only people who applied.

We're not the best.

We're just the you're the only.

I mean, I think that's what it was.

So that all brings us to today on this Zoom call, talking about how we want to tackle this yoga question.

Yeah.

And we decided to start someplace easy.

La Fermiere's website.

Chapter 5.

Red Flags.

The website, it's very artfully designed, very sleek-looking photos of their yogurt.

And we just navigate over to the FAQ page.

Okay.

Should I just read it?

Yeah, go for it.

Where, hopefully, maybe a little anticlimactically, one of the questions there is our question.

Why are you using terracotta in glass pots?

And the company's answer?

We believe that our all-natural yogurt deserves an all-natural packaging.

Terracotta is a natural material that has been a useful tool in the kitchen for centuries.

Pots, plates, platters, etc.

And it still is today.

Already, from the first sentence on, they're trying to use the packaging as a way to say that their yogurts are great, because they're calling it an all-natural packaging for all-natural yogurt.

And those are very broad words: like, what does all-natural really mean?

Is that a reason?

So, finding the American website lacking in detail, we head over to the French website website to see if it had any other information we could use.

And you've been taking French classes.

I have been taking French classes.

The translation is roughly, these packages remain among the most ecological because they are inert, meaning they do not deteriorate the materials they come into contact with in a way that could cause damage to the environment.

Unlike plastic, for example, which when decomposed produces byproducts that are potentially dangerous for the environment and health.

And so when the students read the company's appeal to sustainability on this website, it was like they were just naturally wired to think that this company was trying to pull a fast one on them.

I mean, certain brands have a whole page on their website where they can actually detail to you what exactly they're doing to be sustainable.

You know, if you look at La Fermiere, there's only like a few sentences.

Is this really giving me a full explanation as to why?

Not really.

It was like,

oh, it's because we're eco-friendly i just had the biggest eyebrow raise ever like really

i don't know big question mark that's what it feels like big question mark oh so now it's like now they're curious because now they're a little paranoid this is the first time that i start to see the like flicker of real curiosity in their eyes is like this company is lying to us oh you're saying that these youngsters have a more suspicious uh relationship to capitalism than us oldsters well it's funny i wasn't quite sure if it was their generation or if it was their like Frenchness, but they are naturally far more skeptical of corporations than I think I was at least in high school.

Yeah.

But Romy told me this story that helped me understand where this generation is coming from, like really how the media they've experienced has shaped their worldview.

If you've ever watched Nickelodeon in your lifetime, you know that there are a plethora of ads.

Like, and they're all so colorful and you know, bright and they have this really obnoxious music.

I feel like I always embraced them as a kid.

I don't ever have a memory of not.

But I don't know.

It's interesting.

You kind of grow older and you start to be a little skeptical.

I think that also kind of just comes with being a teenager, I'm not going to lie.

And then, you know, I think also in quarantine, like we were all on our phones.

And so you actually learned a lot.

Like, you know, people always like, oh, yeah, you just sit in bed and do nothing, but like, you actually learn a lot on a deep dive on some sort of TikTok or Google.

Like,

you kind of learn about fast fashion, what that does to the environment, and you start learning about the detriments of what companies do.

I think it was specifically with fashion.

I think it really was a turning point for me.

You learn about how horrible, you know, the working conditions are, they're barely paid, how much they produce, and how much people are buying just to wear the shirt once and never again.

To me, it was interesting.

I've heard parents talk about how much screen time their teenagers were getting during the pandemic, but I never actually heard anybody wonder about like what specific rabbit holes they were going down while looking at their screens.

And for Romeo and Auke, it seemed to be this kind of anti-consumerist rabbit hole.

I know that when a brand says that they're doing something fully for their customers and fully for the environment, it's usually hiding something and it's usually they're doing it for their own profit because that's just how everything works.

And we wouldn't be facing climate change and we wouldn't be having those issues if every company's first motive was to make Earth and the people happy.

like, I know that in our world, everything,

most things are for profit and have to be for profit.

Yeah, because if it was actually the best way to make yogurt more sustainable, why are there only like two other brands here and there that do it?

Yeah, I was thinking, I feel like

maybe ceramics is better for the environment.

Like, it doesn't like if you discard it in nature, it's not going to like last as long, whatever, than plastic, but it's also a lot heavier.

So, when for transportation, that means you can't transport as much of it.

It's like more CO2.

So the students, what they seem to think was going on here was that the company knows sustainability is important to high-end consumers.

So if a product looks sustainable and can be marketed as sustainable, who cares if the thing is actually sustainable?

Like what's important is what the consumer thinks, because what the consumer thinks will determine how much they can sell it for.

Yeah.

And like, you know, there's plenty of evidence in our culture for this idea that oftentimes labeling something as ethical is a thin marketing technique and la fermiere's ceo probably goes to bed every night not wondering if a crack team of high school skeptics is going to descend on his terracotta plant or her terracotta plant well to be clear there's no evidence at least online at this point that anything actually fishy was going on this is just some teenage theorizing at this point.

But we decided to reach out to the company to see if anyone there was down to talk to us about their clay pods.

Like a bunch of French kids think you're lying.

Do you want to be in our vibe?

I didn't go.

That was was not my email to the company.

And to be clear, we were going in skeptical, but also with an open mind.

Chapter 6, The Yogurt Executive.

Can you hear yourself when you talk?

Um, no, I can't hear anybody.

I can't hear anybody.

I can hear a nuke.

Oh my God, I can hear my peoples.

I can hear myself talk.

Can you guys hear me?

Yeah, that's yeah.

Is that normal?

So I meet up with the students and their teacher David at Search Engine HQ.

It's all very exciting.

An executive at La Fermiere has very generously agreed agreed to talk to us.

Okay, so hi, could you say maybe your name and what you do?

Yeah, of course.

So my name is Charlotte Marchand, and I've been with La Fermier for five years now.

I'm the head of sales and marketing.

So as the head of sales and marketing in the US, Charlotte would be the first one to admit, like, she's not a sustainability expert, but she does know the company and its products very well.

And so Romy asked her, Can you just tell me the story of the ceramic pots and kind of how they came about and what they mean to the company in general?

Around 1995, this was the appearance of the terracotta pot actually, because at the beginning they were using a paper cup.

But very soon after

the creation of the company, the former owner wanted to give to the consumer an elevated experience, but also he wanted something new.

in the market, something no one did before.

So he wanted like the perfect packaging for this and the perfect packaging for this was ceramic pots.

So basically La Fermiere yogurt for many decades had come in wax coated paper pots and then in the 90s Charlotte tells us that the company decided to switch to the terracotta pot both because they wanted to stand out to their customers but also because they were thinking about the environment.

For us it's very important to propose one of the most sustainable packaging for our product.

I don't know if you know but our ceramic pot is made of 95% of clay which is a natural material, and then 5% of non-toxic clay, so there is like a minimal environmental impact because it's made from natural materials.

And as soon as Charlotte is starting to like sing the praises of this terracotta pot for all of its ecological virtues, I can see the students kind of like squirming in their chairs.

It's just making them more suspicious.

They sort of get this wry smile on their face.

You know, because Charlotte is more or less repeating what we found on the website.

She keeps saying, high-quality ingredient, high-quality packaging.

High quality ingredients, high quality packaging, which is like a good slogan, but doesn't necessarily offer much of a window into how the company is actually thinking about the environmental trade-offs.

And she's wandering into a room full of teenage sharpshooters.

So Romy tries to press Charlotte on the topic.

So one thing we've learned actually from our research is that it's really hard to measure sustainability and how something actually impacts the environment because there are just so many factors involved.

How did La Famia decide that ceramics were the most sustainable option?

So I will not say we will not say it's the most sustainable option.

I will say it's one of the most sustainable options and one of the best options we could have today.

I totally agree with you.

It's more complex than that because there is multiple factors and I will not be able to answer you properly as I'm not a sustainability expert, you know.

But for sure when you take the mix of the consumer experience, the fact there is no impact on the environment, if you just throw away your products, it will not damage the environment so that means there is no pollution on the air again no pollution on the ocean no pollution for any more etc and charlotte's like look terracotta not the villain here the villain here is the other kinds of packaging and the word that nobody's saying is like plastic's the obvious villain here like terracotta is obviously better for the environment than plastic but her this corporate cheer and insistence is not totally playing with the teenage skeptics.

No, it is not.

And they're also asking these kinds of serious hardball questions.

Like they're teenagers, but they just seem very well versed in what I would think of as like adult corporate consultant lingo.

Can you just describe what you want consumers to think about when they think of the brand La Fermier?

Like what does your brand identity really look like?

So for us it's like indigence and natural.

So we want people to have a treat, but a treat with like something that's not harmful to the to the health, you know?

You said you had five ingredients.

What are they?

It was almost like the students had decided to go full prosecutor here.

So we have milk, cream, culture, of course, on the yogurt, vanilla bean, for example, and cane sugar.

So that's the only ingredient we have.

So here in the US, we are manufacturing our product upstate New York.

So we get our milk and cream upstate New York, like very, very close to our production facility.

This is actually surprising to me.

Like, I'd assumed that the French yogurt came from France, but the ingredients are actually arriving from in-state in New York, which did seem maybe more environmentally sound, although not something La Fermiere is particularly bragging about.

We started to wrap up the conversation and we say our awkward goodbyes.

We thank Charlotte for her time.

Charlotte, thank you so much for your time.

This is really helpful.

We appreciate it.

We'll talk soon.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Bye.

Thank you.

Rome and Anuka coming off of that call are just like positively elated.

Like, I think, one, I just think they're excited to be in in the same podcast studio that Maya Hawk was once inside of.

Well, yeah.

But I also think that, like, they just played hardball with a company executive and they kind of won.

Yeah, an adult fledge.

Yeah.

There's no thing that makes the teenager happier than an adult fledge.

And it's not like we got any answers.

Like, it's not like we're actually that much closer to the real answer to our question here, which is like,

is terracotta more sustainable than plastic?

But Romey and Anuk at this point are just increasingly skeptical that the answers the company is giving us are anything more than just marketing speak.

Like for premium brands now, it's kind of a given that if they're going to price it so much higher, they're going to have to do something about climate change because it's like such a marketing.

Yeah, even like literally makeup.

Anything has to have a claim that, oh, we're doing this to protect the planet.

Or ethical.

So whether it be ethics or something.

They're good at like making it show, even though it's not.

Even though it's true.

If they were skeptical just reading La Fermiere's website, Rome and Ouk were much more skeptical having just spoken to a person at the company.

But also, like, we're two 11th graders and a podcast producer who majored in literature.

Yes.

We don't actually know what we're talking about.

Well, what we're told about literature and liberal arts in general is that it's not about what it teaches you, it's about how it teaches you how to think.

Well, it taught me to think that we needed to talk to an expert here.

And after a break, that's exactly what we're going to do.

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Hey, PJ.

Yes.

Welcome back to the show.

Thank you.

Chapter 7.

A surprising answer.

So May of that year, nearing the end of 11th grade for Romy and Auke, I went back to the Lisse for a second time.

And you know that feeling when the end of the school year is around the corner?

You can just kind of feel it.

Everything's a little looser.

Memorial Day is around the corner.

Romy's actually busy the day that I show up.

She had an exam that not even search engine could get her out of.

But I do meet up with a nuke.

Basically, I have this week of school, next week of school, and then two days.

And after that, it's just a full week of studying, then a French final, and then another week of studying, then another French exam, and then I'm done.

So that sounds like a lot of studying and a lot of exams.

The reason Anouk and I were meeting up in the middle of exam season was, of course, we still had some more yogurt homework to do.

We knew La Fermier was saying that terracotta was a sustainable selling point for their brand, but now we wanted to talk to a scientist who could help us understand whether or not that was actually true.

And so after doing some research, we landed on who we thought might be the right expert.

Could you maybe say your name and what you do?

Sure.

I'm Shelly Miller.

I'm a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan.

Okay, great.

And how should we refer to you?

Do you refer maybe Dr.

Miller?

Shelly is totally

all right.

Perfect.

Shelly's work is fascinating.

She does something called life cycle analysis, which means that she studies the environmental impact of products from the moment the materials are extracted from the ground to when they are manufactured, to when they're transported, to when eventually they're disposed or recycled.

And so, Anouk explains the class that she's taking and the question that came out of it to Shelly.

So, Conné Sales Du Monde is this course we have at our school that is part of this international baccalaureate, which is this international exam that we take in France.

And since we're all French, yogurt and this French brand of yogurt called La Famier is an important part of our daily life, especially we go to the cafeteria and there's this yogurt, and we're all wondering, like, why is it in clay pots instead of plastic pots, like all the others?

And so, we started asking some other questions, especially related to sustainability, just maybe trying to find why that was.

Yeah, so first off, I'll just say this is such a great question.

Things like this are a great way of starting to think about sustainability questions and analysis and, you know, really getting into the details of, all right, when we're trying to figure out environmental impacts of something, how do we even start going about doing that knowing that there's lots of different environmental impacts and you know lots of different trade-offs to consider.

So you know for someone like me who really studies these things in a very systematic way, the first thing we do is try to figure out, well, what environmental impacts are we talking about?

The first thing that she says is that to answer a question like this, you need to know what your priorities are.

Because she says that there's really no human activity that is good for the environment.

Podcasting.

Besides podcasting, she said.

We only generate hot air.

That's warming the climate, people.

That's not good.

But what this means is that this is a conversation about trade-offs.

Yeah.

Because different things are bad for the environment in different ways.

And so we asked her to kind of compare our two materials here, terracotta and plastic.

Yeah.

She started with plastic and right off the bat, she's like, plastic is terrible for the environment.

Plastic causes environmental impacts throughout its entire life cycle.

So plastics are made from natural gas byproducts.

Making and manufacturing plastic has environmental impacts and air quality and also climate change emissions.

And then there's plastics afterlife, like it clogs landfills, turtles choke on it, microplastics, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we know for a fact that plastics cause environmental impact.

And sometimes other materials are even worse.

And this is where Shelly started to really surprise me.

I think us actually.

Like, yes, plastic sucks.

Yes.

But remember, everything's a trade-off here.

And so, like, how does plastic compare to everything else out there?

We need to take a broader look of of saying, all right, well, if not plastics, then what?

And are those materials actually better than plastic?

Yeah, so for example, how do you go about weighing a plastic against another material?

Like, how does that work from a like professional standpoint?

Yeah, so what we do is we really look at the entire supply chain of a material.

And so when it comes to plastic, one of the things that, you know, plastic is really good technically because it has some pretty fantastic technical characteristics that other materials don't have.

Shelley says, for instance, you can use a pretty small amount of plastic to perform the same function as much heavier materials like metal or glass or terracotta.

Yeah, it's super interesting because that's exactly where we started to see kind of the fault in the image of La Fermiere, where we started thinking, okay, it's so much heavier that during transportation it probably emits a lot more CO2.

And so we're really wondering where does this idea that plastic is bad or is worse maybe than glass or terracotta, where do you think that comes from?

You know, it's, so I will say that there are social scientists who can answer this question far better than I can as far as the psychology of perception and

how people understand and perceive risk and impact.

I think one of the things that is largely driving the conversation with plastic is that we can really see the impact of plastic in a way that we can't see the environmental impact of other materials.

And so, if we are able to take a picture of a beach that's strewn in microplastics, if we can take a picture of an animal that's entangled in some sort of plastic, or we see the carcass of a dead seabird whose stomach is filled with plastic, those are all heart-wrenching images.

And not only that, we can make the direct connection between what we see in those environmental damaging photographs and our lifestyles.

We can see our own little consumption in those environmental impacts.

Just to say, Shelley is, of course, focusing on just the environmental impact here.

Like, obviously, there's a whole other conversation to be had about the possible health impacts of plastics or microplastics that we're just not going to get into today.

But when it comes to sustainability, Shelley thinks that plastic's reputation as public enemy number one kind of just boils down to how visible its environmental impacts are.

Whereas with other materials like glass, metal, terracotta, a lot of these these things require a ton of energy to produce and to transport and much more than plastic, but their impacts are just more abstract and less visual.

It's really hard to capture climate change in a picture.

We have many, many photos of a polar bear on an ice shelf, but that doesn't give us the same connection as the stuff we see in our recycling bin every day.

Well, I actually never thought of that, honestly.

goes back to this idea that if you see a yogurt in a clay pot and a yogurt in a plastic pot, you're going to think, oh yeah, plastic plastic is bad, while clay has this idea of like, oh, it's natural, it's yeah, it's probably better for the environment.

Yeah, so consumers often think that plastic has the greatest environmental impact of any other material.

It turns out that particularly if we're looking at a climate perspective on the amount of carbon emissions that materials,

plastic generally has a lower carbon footprint than other packaging materials.

And so you, as a very well-informed, conscientious consumer, you're at the grocery store, you have a choice between a yogurt that comes in a plastic container and a yogurt that comes in a terracotta container.

Which would you feel better about picking up on a random Tuesday?

So I would say that if we're just talking about yogurt, it would be buying yogurt in bulk that you're going to eat in a plastic container.

And so that both reduces the total amount of plastic per serving of yogurt

and has a lower packaging impact.

Interesting.

Yeah.

But it's tricky if you're trying to say that your product is valuable and like considered and a delicacy.

bulk plastic container is kind of working against your message.

It doesn't scream up market.

Yeah.

But it just turns out that if you get into the nitty-gritty of the environmental trade-offs here, like the thing that doesn't look environmentally friendly, it doesn't have the aesthetic of environmentalism, oftentimes can be more environmentally friendly.

But, but, this is an important but, Shelly goes on to say that this whole conversation we're having about packaging kind of misses the point entirely.

When we think about things that have the greatest environmental impact, we often focus on packaging.

And so that's the stuff we throw out at the end of the day.

And we tend to say, say, oh, look at all this packaging.

And that's the biggest environmental impact that I have because I have to throw out all this packaging.

What people don't realize is it's the thing inside the package that has a much greater environmental impact than the package itself.

Certainly in the case of food, the food that we're eating has a much greater environmental impact than the packaging it comes in.

She says plastics typically less than 10% of the total environmental impact of the food product that you're consuming.

The food itself, far more important to whether or not you're actually making a sustainable decision.

What's the carbon footprint of yogurt?

This is a good question, and this invites a whole lot of other questions on the other side of it.

But what she's saying is that packaging is kind of a red herring.

And also, like, La Fermier's marketing is kind of encouraging you to follow that red herring.

Like, they're not saying, look how sustainable our yogurt is.

They're saying, look how sustainable our packaging is, which is another reason for me to at least believe that this is primarily a marketing decision.

You're with the teenagers at this point.

I'm with the teenagers.

And also, the funny thing is that La Fermiere's yogurt, which is the thing actually driving whether or not it's a more sustainable option than its competitors, seems to be pretty environmentally friendly.

And there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that the company operates on a kind of make it where you sell it principle, meaning the company's two biggest markets, France and the U.S., the dairy is produced and processed locally in both of those countries.

So you're not adding a bunch of transport miles inside that part of the supply chain, which is going to lower the carbon footprint that's mostly invisible to the consumer.

But also, at least in France, where this data is public, La Fermier is sourcing its dairy from small local farms with an average of only 35 cows.

And farms like these, if they're using certain agricultural practices, they could be better for the environment than large-scale dairy farms.

Although, what I've always been told is that if you wanted to put a huge dent in climate change, just like our reliance on cows as a food input, because of the methane they produce, is hugely bad for the environment.

And so the fact that they're using cows at all is kind of a problem.

Although it's a yogurt company they're going to use.

Yeah, you could eat non-dairy yogurt.

And this is kind of the quality of this kind of sustainability conversation.

It's a hall of mirrors.

Like being human is bad for the environment and all sorts of decisions we make inside of being human are also bad for the environment.

So like, yes, you could say, I no longer eat full dairy yogurt.

I eat.

oat milk yogurt or whatever else is out there and that would be better for the environment and you wouldn't have to have this conversation at all.

But this is the conversation we've chosen.

But this is the thing I hadn't understood when the teacher David first posed the question.

Like, he wasn't just asking about the packaging.

He was asking about all the difficult ethical choices involved, which is actually something that teenagers like thinking through.

And I think as Romy and Anuk grasped that, this question had become their question too.

Thank you so much for your time again.

Honestly, you have no idea how far this has taken us from just a stupid little yogurt question.

So thank you so much for your time.

It is an absolutely fantastic question.

And you guys are asking exactly the right questions.

Okay, skeleton crew.

Hi.

Hello, sir.

All right, so I'm going to ask for

about 10 minutes of your attention.

Again, here's the teacher, David Freeman.

We have something of an answer to the Grand Yogurt question of 2024.

Romey and Anouk are going to tell you a little bit about what we've been up to.

You guys want to come up front?

And yes?

Oh, applause.

We were in the same classroom Shruti and I visited months prior.

I never said that.

Rome and Anuk seemed, and I'd never actually seen the sight of them, a little nervous to speak in front of the class.

So, and now we are back to the last CDM class of the year ever.

Not well, not ever.

There's gonna be classes next year.

And so, yeah, I think this has confirmed a lot of our initial theories.

So, on how

it's a brand thing, it's a brand DNA thing, and also a marketing decision over sustainably, maybe.

And yeah.

And Rome and Anouk just walked the class through the steps of their reporting, everything we had done along the way.

So Mr.

Freeman brought us this question back in like November, December.

And they talked about all the people we interviewed.

The head of sales and marketing at FMLUS.

They broke down all the complicated conclusions we had drawn.

But she also mentioned a very important point, which was that what's inside the packaging matters much more than the packaging itself.

And of course, they shared their marketing advice for La Fermiere.

I feel like they're kind of missing the point in a way because they're really advertising the sustainability aspect of their pots when really they should be doing the same thing but for the yogurt.

Because we just not proved, but we're able to question the fact that clay pots are not maybe sustainable.

But we all know that locally produced food, which is what they do, is good for the environment.

So if they wanted to kind of pitch this climate aspect of it, they should probably focus on the yogurt.

Anyone else have any follow-up questions just while we're here?

This is your last chance to interrogate a dairy product.

Good.

Cool.

All right, excellent.

And with that, homework assignment complete, the stupid little yogurt question was officially done.

Chapter 8

Graduation

So I should say, as sometimes happens on the show, months passed while we slowly worked on the story, and months in the life of an adult, not such a big deal.

But for these teenagers, it meant that we would meet up occasionally as their life was speeding up pretty quickly.

In this case, towards graduation and the life that followed after.

Romy did end up finishing her big research project on morphine addiction.

She's about to head to the London School of Economics in the fall.

Anook's finishing up high school in Paris and is going to head to a French university in the fall.

It's very difficult to open.

Yeah, it is.

But the last time we got together in person in New York, I I brought in a couple pots of la from yere for them to taste.

I mean orange blossom.

Does that mean orange?

I think there's a kind of funny that's orange blossom on it.

Oh shit.

Yeah, there's no orange on it.

Still my bad American, it would be like yellow.

Yeah, so we just opened the yogurt.

There is indeed yogurt in there.

This was the final step in the investigation.

You guys have anything else to say about yogurt?

Nope, just enjoy.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

It's actually, it's good.

It's good.

I agree.

Unfortunately.

What do you mean, unfortunately?

i don't know i want it to be more like not like completely convinced you know i don't want to be convinced by it but like it's not amazing yeah like this texture is amazing it's yeah i don't think i the flavor is really good i mean i'm not a big yogurt person so maybe that's just me but for a yogurt enthusiast it would probably be

good

garret graham He's Search Engine's senior producer.

Big thanks this week to David Freeman and the Lysé Francais de New York for inviting us into their classroom.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthi Pinamanani.

This episode was fact-checked by Claire Hyman.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Additional production support on this episode from Hazel Mae Bryan and Sean Merchant.

Our intern is Oscar Knoxon.

If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some additional audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode.

You can learn more about Incognito Mode at searchengine.show.

Our executive producer is Leah Rhys-Dennis, and thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey.

Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Sha.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week.

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