The Uncanny Valley of Meat

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Amy Scott: Deep in the halls of the engineering school at Columbia University, behind a locked set of blue doors, is one of the coolest labs I've ever seen.

Oh my gosh, there's so many toys in here.

Hod Lipson: This is the creative machines lab, where we look at all types of robots.

Amy Scott: Hod Lipson runs this lab. He's a roboticist and Professor of Engineering and data science, the shelves and tabletops are packed with his students' creations: blue robot heads, a robot that looks like a spider with spiky legs.

It kind of looks like a prop shop, like on a Hollywood set, or something. Like I could see all these things being in some kind of sci fi movie.

But I'm here to look at a very different kind of toy, a 3D printer that prepares and cooks food.

Hod Lipson: It started for us as really is a frivolous activity.

Amy Scott: About 20 years ago when 3D printing was taking off, Hod's students started playing around with ingredients like frosting and easy cheese, late night snacks that grad students had on hand and that opened a door.

Hod Lipson: My students started playing around with sort of biological materials that kind of branched off into two areas. One is an area called bio-printing, which is now actually a big field, printing organs, printing biological models to test medicine.

Amy Scott: I heard that someone printed an ear? 

Hod Lipson: That's right, so one of my former students about two years ago printed an ear that was actually made from cells that were harvested from a woman that was born with one ear missing, and that ear was implanted back

Amy Scott: Amazing.

Hod Lipson: But the kind of sister application of the same technology of bioprinting is food printing. It's the same kind of materials, but the bar is much lower. I think the market is larger as more people need food than medicine, and we need it every day. It's consumable. Again, the space of possibilities is huge.

Amy Scott: And then in 2016, Jonathan Blutinger arrived in Hod’s lab. He was fascinated by the potential of what he calls software-enabled cooking.

Jonathan Blutinger: I'm a big foodie. I love to cook. My mom's Italian. So it's in my culture. It's in my blood. So I just was really intrigued by it.

Amy Scott: In a corner of the lab, Jonathan shows me a machine he and a team of students developed. It's got a magnetized claw that can pick up different tubes of ingredients and print them in layers through a nozzle onto a plate.

Jonathan Blutinger: And then it can also cook using one of two different lasers, which are on the side of this tool head.

Amy Scott: Does it have a name?

Jonathan Blutinger: I don't have a name for this. This is version five. That's what I call it.

Amy Scott: Boring.

Amy Scott: They started with simple breads, then pizza, and even printed a key lime pie. And eventually, Jonathan turned his attention to meat. Since college, he'd been trying to eat less of it for health and environmental reasons, but plant-based alternatives still hadn't nailed the flavor and texture. Jonathan came to think of the problem as the uncanny valley of meats.

Jonathan Blutinger: So the uncanny valley is a thought that a Japanese researcher came up with years ago, where the closer we get to mimicking human likeness with robots, the more we tend to be irked by them.

Amy Scott: Jonathan says the same phenomenon happens when we eat fake meat that's trying to look, taste and feel like the real thing.

Jonathan Blutinger: I think a plant based burger that bleeds kind of scared a lot of people. People who are meat eaters are used to the texture, the feeling, the flavor, all the sensory aspects of any meat they've had from the hundreds of 1000s of times they've tried it. So as soon as they try something that's trying to mimic that, they're extra cautious and kind of, you're almost like your fight or flight system kind of engages, and you're like, okay, wait a second. This is trying to be meat. It looks like it, but it's not quite there.

Amy Scott: 3D printing had the potential to solve this problem, because it can precisely build layers of protein, fat and starch to mimic the marbling and mouth feel of, say, a rib eye steak, to help plant based meat companies do that better. Jonathan and Hod developed technology to analyze what makes meat meat.

Jonathan Blutinger: It's a machine that can poke steak at a bunch of different points and create these more kind of high fidelity texture maps and see more clearly, you know, the toughness of different parts, elasticity.

Hod Lipson: We try to capture quantitatively. How hard is it to cut it with a knife? How hard is it to poke it with a fork? How hard is it to chew.

Amy Scott: They couldn't show us that machine. They actually sold it to an Israeli company called Redefine Meat that makes 3D-printed steaks. Right now you can only get Redefine Meat products in Europe and Israel. But Hod, an avowed meat lover, is optimistic that meat alternatives are getting competitive.

Hod Lipson: For me, it is good enough. So I think we are very, very close to crossing the uncanny valley, and at that point, all bets are off.

Amy Scott: I'm Amy Scott, welcome to How We Survive. 

This is episode two, the uncanny valley of meat. We hear all the time that one of the best things we can do for the climate as individuals is eat less meat, especially red meat. 3D-printed alternatives aren't on the market here yet. So we got our hands on another new food tech that some argue could allow people to have their steak and eat it too, cell-cultivated meat. That is, real meat grown from cells instead of grazing burping animals, the cultivated salmon I tried at Wildtype last episode, passed the test for me. But as we just heard, for meats like beef and chicken, it can be hard to get the texture just right. So does cultivated meat pass the uncanny valley? The only way to find out is to do a taste test.

Okay, so there is a slight catch when it comes to this taste test. I gave up eating meat. More than 30 years ago, there was a vegan boyfriend and a book called Diet for a New America by John Robbins that exposed the less savory aspects of factory farming. Today, I consider myself a pescatarian. I do eat fish. Anyway, when it comes to how meat should taste, I'm a little rusty. So for this test, I'm bringing in an expert.

Francis Lam: Hey, I'm Francis Lam, and I'm the host of The Splendid Table.

Amy Scott: In addition to hosting my favorite cooking show, Francis is the editor in chief of Clarkson Potter, the cookbook publisher, so he knows his stuff.

Francis Lam: Alright. So let's make some Upside Foods barbecue chicken sandwiches.

Amy Scott: For our taste test, we bought some cultivated chicken from a company called Upside Foods. They shipped us some shredded chicken already cooked in barbecue sauce, along with a recipe for barbecue chicken sliders. 

All right, so add barbecue chicken to a small sauce pot and cook on the low.

Francis and I got to work in our own kitchens,

I’ve got my pot here …

And then we hopped on a call to taste our cultivated chicken sliders together. 

Well first, before we taste it, I want to just ask your experience of preparing this dish, like what came to mind as you were opening the package and cooking this chicken?

Francis Lam: Oh, man. So a lot of things, the first and foremost, honestly, is I am not philosophically opposed to the idea of cultivated meat. You know, anything we can do to help alleviate the consumption of meat and other food products in terms of our ecological footprint is worth exploring, for sure. I have to say, when it went in the pan, it looked very chickeny, and I was curious as to like when they were creating this product, if they were going to try to mimic chicken breast or chicken thigh, like they're, you know, when I know you don't eat meat, Amy, but you know, for chicken eaters, a lot of times there is a preference for the dark meat, which is the thighs and legs, or the breast, which is the white meat. And it was interesting, I was like, trying to see if they were trying to mimic one or the other. And even though it's shredded, you know, they left it in big enough chunks where it, to me, it looked like chunks of chicken thigh that had been sliced, which I thought was interesting. And most people who are like, super into food, prefer the thigh over the breast. So I thought that was probably a choice they're really trying to like, make it feel appealing and delicious. So I thought that was interesting.

Amy Scott: All right. Well, should we try it before it gets cold?

Francis Lam: Yeah, okay, okay. 

Amy Scott: I have to admit, I'm a little scared because I haven't tasted chicken on purpose since I was a teenager.

Francis Lam: Which was six or seven months ago. 

Amy Scott: Yeah, right … Yes, okay, I'm processing this.

Francis Lam: I want to know what you think.

Amy Scott: I don't know how to describe it.

Francis Lam: You're having an out of body experience. 

Amy Scott: I am, I am! Honestly, I don't really remember chicken, you know, I've had a lot of like, fake chicken as a vegetarian, you know, like the not chicken nuggets and that kind of thing. This definitely tastes different. What about you? Does it taste like chicken?

Francis Lam: It does taste like chicken. I think it's interesting, like so, you know, it's obviously already prepared in barbecue sauce and with the coleslaw and the pickles and the bun. Like, I could eat this and be like, oh, cool, yeah. It's a little like barbecue chicken sandwich. I did taste it on its own, meaning, without the bun and the slaw and the pickles, and in that sort of more pure form, I could tell that it wasn't exactly like what I would expect if I was biting into chicken that was raised. There's something about the texture. The texture is like probably 80% there, 85% there. But there's a slight sponginess to the texture that I don't normally experience in, like, meat chicken. What are we going to call regular chicken? Yeah, unalived chicken doesn't have quite the same it's a little more dense, a little more compact, so there's a slight difference in the texture. And I have to say, there's something in the flavor that I wasn't expecting. And there's something in the flavor actually tastes to me more like the sort of soy-based chicken or the TVP products texturized, texturized vegetable protein, I think they call it. Like those, basically like the vegetarian chicken nuggets or chicken patties and stuff like that. There is something in the flavor that really reminds me more of that than of unalived chicken.

Amy Scott: Unalived.

Francis Lam: Harvested, harvested chicken. 

Amy Scott: Well, so, we're talking this episode about this concept of the uncanny valley of meat. And first of all, I'm curious, like, does this cross that uncanny valley for you. Is it all the way there, or is there any part of it that feels a little icky?

Francis Lam: Once you know, we, we decided to do this, there was a part of me. I was like, Huh? There was a pause, and I, and I don't really know what that pause was, but I felt it. I think for a lot of people, they're not, they're gonna listen to that sound in their, in their, in their head, and they're good to be like, no thanks, right? I don't know that I would choose to eat this over just some vegetables instead, but that's not really their point, right? Their point is, hey, we want when you want to eat meat, like, here's an alternative for you.

Amy Scott: Yeah, I feel like this isn't for people like me, right, who have forgotten what chicken tastes like, it's for people who like meat, want to keep eating it, but are worried about the climate impact or the impact on animals. I mean, the fact that this was grown from cells without killing a chicken is amazing to me, right? Yeah, that's and I could see this going a long way for people who are, who want to keep eating chicken.

Francis Lam: Yeah, yeah. I think it's like, in this dish with condiments, with a bun, with the sauce I would eat if you didn't tell me what it was like, I might be like, I don't know that I would necessarily, would have keyed in on the idea that this is not quote, unquote real chicken. I mean, I, I probably could have, but I'm also, like, a super geek when it comes to, like, what I'm tasting.

Amy Scott: You're an expert.

Francis Lam: But like, I think for most people, in most situations, you're like, Oh, cool. It's like, oh, tastes like a barbecue chicken sandwich, cool. One thing I'm really curious about is, okay, when you're when you get to, like, the sort of realms of people who, you know, the little Portlandia skit of like, ‘is the chicken local’ and like, ‘the chicken's name was,’ you know, but oh, there's, there is this idea that, like, oh, how you raise a chicken will impact the taste and flavor and texture of the chicken. What you feed the chicken will impact the taste and flavor, so on, so forth. And so I was really curious about when they were creating this, the Upside Foods chicken, like, how were they conceiving of the flavor of chicken, and were they actually going to try to mimic, like, a high-end chicken flavor, or are they mimicking a sort of, like baseline, average chicken flavor, and how they get went about that? I'm like, actually super curious about the engineering of this thing.

Uma Valleti: You know, I think that's a very good question.

Amy Scott: Uma Valleti is the CEO and founder of Upside Foods, the company that sent us the barbecue chicken

Uma Valleti: I know from our experience, when people have tasted our chicken, the one that's on the market, they've come and said, ‘Hey, this reminds me of the taste of a breed of a chicken called La Belle Rouge.’ 

Amy Scott: La Belle Rouge, as in red label, is actually a French certification for high quality poultry. Uma isn't sure which kind of chicken we tried. It might have been grown to have a more generic taste.

Uma Valleti: The way we raise our chicken and how we make the final product formulation, we can have it taste like a really high end chicken flavor, or have it much more gently palletized to an American palate, which doesn't like the big range of flavor.

Amy Scott: As for the engineering, it's pretty similar to what we saw at the salmon company Wildtype last episode.

Uma Valleti: We took a really high quality breed of chicken. We took some cells from the egg it's laid, and we identified the cells that were doubling every 24 hours, just like they would in the body of a chicken. And we basically created that breed of cells, chicken cells, and we use that as somewhat like a starter dough.

Amy Scott: From there, they grow the cells, moving them into different steel tanks called cultivators as they mature, feeding them a mixture of nutrients, including fats, proteins, sugars, vitamins and minerals.

Uma Valleti: Once we get to a few weeks, something in the range of two to four weeks, we have enough of the chicken meat that has grown in the cultivator, and we drain all the feed, the animal cell feed, and we take what is left behind, which is the chicken meat. We harvest that we have an FDA inspected facility, so we use it according to the FDA standards, and then we hand it over to the USDA-inspected side of our facility, where a USDA inspector is looking and inspecting the meat and says, okay, this meat is clean, approved for sale.

Amy Scott: So full disclosure, I'm not a very good judge of what chicken should taste like, so I brought in some help, Francis Lam, who is a food expert and cookbook editor, he said, he said, when he first took a bite, there was a very slight, spongy texture that kind of clued him into the fact that it was, you know, maybe not grown from an animal, but then afterwards, like the longer he sort of processed it, the more meat-like it felt. I'm just curious how you respond to that.

Uma Valleti: Well, I'm delighted. I mean, that's the response we're looking for from people, because the first response we want, obviously, is to say, hey, this connects to something familiar. It connects to meat and meat experience. And 70% of the people that taste the meat that we're sending for sampling cannot tell the difference, so maybe, let's say you could have been in that category, but 30% say, hey, I'm picking up a slight difference. It could be more tender, sometimes it could be spongy, sometimes it could be more chewy than they expect. And different is okay for us, because foods always evolve, and especially when you take meat, if you take chicken from meat from France or India or China or from broiler in the US, they all have different textures, and some of them come off as taste more tender or spongy. And I think that's okay. What we're trying to explicitly not do is to be a facsimile of exact same thing.

Amy Scott: I should say chicken is not the biggest climate offender when it comes to our food. That's beef and lamb, but all meat production requires land and water and spews carbon dioxide and methane emissions. As a climate solution, cultivated meat still has a ways to go. Powering the bio reactors takes a lot of energy, which in the US still comes primarily from fossil fuels, though Upside Foods’ Emeryville, California plant is powered by renewable energy, and producing the nutrients that feed the cells still takes resources, though far less land and water than traditional meat. There are companies working on cultivated beef products, but none of those products have been cleared by the FDA and USDA yet. And as we told you last episode, some states have banned cultivated meat. Another barrier is the cost. Upside Foods is working on bringing some products to retail to be available in grocery stores in the next three to five years, likely with a price point similar to the highest quality organic chicken out there. But maybe the biggest barrier is still public perception.

So what do you say to people who are kind of freaked out by this. We talked to one rancher who, you know, heard what we were up to, and said, you know, hope that nothing grows out of your forehead. He thinks it's like the end of civilization to be growing food in a lab. I know you don't like the the lab-grown term, but that's kind of where it starts.

Uma Valleti: Right. Look, I think there is freedom of speech, there is freedom of imagination and freedom of fear. So I think he's coming from freedom of fear. I do think it's important. I do think it's important for this gentleman to come and look at the production facility, taste the meat, because the magical moments really happen when someone tastes the product, someone sees how it's being made, how clean the production facility is. Because people expect to come into a meat production facility and just see all kinds of stuff like grossed out, and they don't want to even actually see a meat production facility. And in most states you can't see it, because you'll be put in jail if you take a picture of a meat production facility, right? That is how much it is protected. You know, suddenly you lift the veil and say, you have a production facility that class walls around it. You can walk around. You know, we give tours to kids in middle school and high school and grad schools, just to walk around and say, this is how meat of the future could be made. Seeing is believing, tasting is believing.

Amy Scott: Coming up after the break. If cultivated meat isn't your thing,

Francis Lam: I love small, oily fish. It's not the most appealing marketing term, I guess, right up there with Unalive Chicken.

Amy Scott: Francis shares some ideas for how to make climate-friendly proteins taste great. You.

Amy Scott: Every Thanksgiving, Francis' show, the splendid table does something called Turkey confidential. People call in with their Thanksgiving dinner questions and crises and get Francis's advice. So while I had a direct line to the cooking guru himself, I decided to have my own personal Turkey confidential, except my questions were about how to make climate-friendly proteins delicious, because one way to avoid the uncanny valley of meat altogether is to eat alternatives that aren't trying to be anything else. The first one on my list, sardines and other oily fish, which have among the lowest carbon footprints of any animal protein.

Francis Lam: I love small oily fish. It's not the most appealing marketing term, I guess, right up there with Unalive Chicken. But mackerel, sardines, these fish. I think the key with them, honestly, is you do have to get them very fresh, because the high oil content, like fish, when fish starts to smell funny, it's actually the oils that are turning first, not necessarily that fish is more, you know, like food safety, fragile than other proteins, but the oil does tend to turn first. And when it's a fatty fish, that oil is there, and it can be an intense flavor, like that, oil does bring a lot of flavor. So what I would say is, you do have to get it very fresh. When I say fresh, I don't mean it has to have come right off the boat. A lot of fish that you buy at the market, that's quote, unquote fresh fish was frozen. It was frozen at sea. And in fact, the technology for freezing fish at sea preserves the freshness more than if you were to, just like, haul it in and then bring it to the market, because by the time it gets to you know, your plate, it's been at least several days, if not weeks. So frozen at sea fish that's defrosted properly is functionally fresh fish, and it's fresher than most fresh fish. But get really good sardines. You can tell when you smell them. They should smell, this is cliche, but they should smell more like the sea than like fish. And have them like cleaned or gutted from the fish shop. And then in a lot of Japanese cuisine, they do tend to, like marinate it with a little bit of vinegar, little vinegar, salt and sugar, or, like, they're so good grilled, they're so good grilled, and so much of that fat comes out and gets that like they get the fat gets singed in the grill, and the little char bit, so, like, a grilled sardine tastes like the most grilled food on earth, if that makes sense, it absorbs the flavor of the grill like, way more than, like a grilled piece of chicken, for instance, like it actually absorbs the flavor of the grill. So I would, I would start there.

Amy Scott: So beans and lentils are a go to for a lot of vegetarians, of course, but, you know, there must be some more interesting ways to prepare them. What's your go to?

Francis Lam: I have to say, I'm such a fan of beans and lentils that I actually, I am, like, the least creative person preparing them, I literally boil them in water, like I don't, I don't make stock and boil them in stock or, you know, put in, like, aromatics and, you know, to give them flavor, that's fine. I personally don't even bother. I do tend to buy nice beans. Rancho Gordo is a very popular nice bean company, and they are more expensive, but it's like eight bucks for a pound, and a pound of beans is like 10 meals. So don't actually feel like I'm spending that much money in terms of, like, the amount of money you spend buying a nice bean is, like, is more than a cheap bean, but like, the difference in quality is so much greater that, like, you won't miss the extra three bucks you spent on it, you know what I mean.

Amy Scott: I think I've been doing this wrong. No, no, no, no. I'm gonna invest in some high end beans.

Francis Lam: I don't think you're doing anything wrong. If you've been able to feed yourself, you're doing okay. But I would say, like, I said, I just cook them in water. And I, in fact, I like the flavor of the beans so much that I save the water, like, I'll drain it, but I'll, like, drain it into a bowl. So I save that water and I use that water as stock. Like, I don't make chicken stock or whatever. I just use the bean cooking water because it has body and it has its own flavor. And then after I've cooked the beans, people are like, oh, my God. Literally, plain beans, yes. But then I season them. So while the beans are still hot and they're drained from the water, I season them with salt. And actually, when you get them, when they're still hot, they absorb the salt very quickly. So it's great. So you don't have to, like, people are like, oh, when do you salt the water in the beans? I'm sure you've seen the recipes be like, oh, you have to salt in the beginning, you have to salt in the end. I don't even salt it. I salt it when the beans come out of the water, when they're still hot, and they absorb that salt so quickly and so beautifully. So then I'll salt, and I'll maybe put some olive oil, and then I save the beans, and today I might recombine the beans with their liquid, and then maybe, then I'll add garlic and onions and or you can add meat or whatever and have a stew. Or, like, have like, just like, nice stewed beans to go with rice. Or I take those beans and I'll, like, saute them with butter and maybe some, like, little bits of vegetables and season it with a little bit of, like, oil and vinegar or, you know, something like a salad dressing or something like that, and it becomes like a nice, warm base that I might put, like a piece of fish on, or something else on, or I'll just eat with toast or bread or rice. Also really good is, I always recommend keeping bread crumbs on hand. You crisp the bread crumbs in a pan with a little bit of olive oil to them nice and crispy. Season them with salt from if they’re not already seasoned and just a big spoonful of crispy bread crumbs on top of the beans. Is really delicious. Or you can go super janky, but it's awesome. Is like, take a handful of potato chips and crush them up on top. So something

Amy Scott: Oh I've totally done that when I'm out of bread crumbs, it's so good.

Francis Lam: Something to give you a little crackle to go with the beans that have this sort of nice, sort of, but like, soft texture, I think that's really delicious.

Amy Scott: This is so great. I'm excited to cook beans, which I haven't felt in a long time. Well, I'm so glad. You know, a lot of these foods I feel like get kind of a bad rap. I'm thinking of tofu, you know, like most people, well, maybe not most people now, but when I became vegetarian back in the 90s, there just weren't a lot of options. And I think people were kind of, you know, it was sort of a joke, like, vegetarians eat bean sprouts and tofu. How do you prepare tofu?

Francis Lam: Okay, I think the key with tofu, and I think the problem is that, like, whatever it was, a piece of protein that you could cut, and so people–it was like a piece of meat in that way, right? Like you could visually, you could sort of pretend it was a piece of meat. And then I think too many people tried to pretend that tofu was meat, and that people eat meat are like, you're not hoodwinking me with that. So, like, so that I think if you treat it as its own thing, rather than, Oh, hey, here's this delicious steak–psych, you know? It's really it's really lovely, okay, a beautiful thing about tofu is it is mostly protein and water, right? Like and so if you marinate it lightly, I will marinate with a little bit of fish sauce, which is obviously not vegetarian, but you can do it with soy sauce, not to, like, douse it or dunk it, but enough to, like, kind of change the color a little bit, and it sort of absorbs the flavor also salt it. So I've cubed the tofu, right? So like, cup tofu caves, and I'll, like, dress it with a little bit of soy sauce, or fish sauce and salt, just so it absorbs the flavor. You don't want the exterior too wet still, but it'll it'll soak it in. And then what I find is you can put it like a non stick pan over like, medium heat and some oil in the pan. If the if the tofu is like, visibly wet on the surface, then you might want to pat it dry, put the tofu in the pan, in one layer, and just let it slowly, sizzle and crackle. The beautiful thing about tofu is you can't overcook it, like, it's like, you literally can't overcook it. It won't get tough. It won't get, you know, dry or stringy or whatever. So you just let it ride and cook until it gets, like, crispy, like crackly crispy on one side, and then you flip it and do on the other side. You can do all six sides of the dye if you want, and then you have this incredible texture. And as it's cooked, it's actually, really, it keeps steaming off its own water. So, like the flavor it does have, it's concentrated. So at the end of it, the tofu would look like half the size of what you put it in, because you've actually cooked out all the water, and now it's super concentrated, and it has such a cool, like, chewy texture, and the edges are, like, really crisp and brown and, and that's like, a really nice, like, like, first step for it. And, like, oh, you can do you can then toss that in a sauce, or, you know, you can put that in a fried rice, or, you know, you know, whatever you want to do with it from there.

Amy Scott: That sounds amazing. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for tasting this with me. And, you know, giving me a meat-eater opinion.

Francis Lam: Well, it was great to talk with you. Thanks for having me

Amy Scott: That's it for this special cooking edition of How We Survive.

You know how I mentioned how a book about the horrors of factory farms was part of what turned me off from meat? Well, when it comes to climate impact, the picture is a little more nuanced.

Michael Grunwald: One thing about them is that they do make a lot of food, and we are going to need more food with less land.

Amy Scott: And how are we going to do that?

Loren Pancia: The feedlot is more efficient in terms of speed and economy and turning out more protein in a short amount of time. But what about all the inputs that go into the animal? 

Amy Scott: Next time on how we survive, we explore an unsavory solution.

Steve Gabel: If we're forcing them into this environment and we're forcing them to eat these ingredients that they're not used to eating, how can we not be devils? 

Amy Scott: Thanks for listening, and if you like what you hear, please rate, review, and share us with a friend. Also, we want to hear your questions about food and the climate crisis. You can send a note, or better yet, a voice memo to survive@marketplace.org and we'll try to answer as many of your questions as we can in an upcoming episode. I'm Amy Scott. Hayley Hershman produced this episode and is our senior producer. Production support by our intern, Emma Condon. Caitlin Esch is Deputy Managing Editor. She also edited this episode. Scoring, sound design, and mixing by Brian Allison. Special thanks this week to Marissa Cabrera, Kristin Schwab, Tony Wagner, and our colleagues at The Splendid Table. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Bridget Bodnar is director of podcasts. Kelly Silvera is news director. Joanne Griffith is Chief Content Officer, and Neil Scarbrough is the vice president and general manager of Marketplace.