Speaker 1: Pushkin. My parents didn't take us to fast food places
Speaker 1: when I was little. They thought they were an abomination.
Speaker 1: In any case, we didn't have a McDonald's back then
Speaker 1: in our little town, so it wasn't like I was
Speaker 1: confronted by the fact of French fries. They were some
Speaker 1: dimly understood concept, something that people out there somewhere did
Speaker 1: to a potato that somehow implicated the French. Then one day,
Speaker 1: after track practice, thirteen years old, I went to my
Speaker 1: first McDonald's. Have you ever seen a puppy encounters snow
Speaker 1: for the first time? He burrows his nose into it
Speaker 1: with this look of perplexity and sheer delight because he
Speaker 1: can't understand where this white thing came from that is
Speaker 1: both fluffy and cold. It was like that for me,
Speaker 1: a slice of potato crispy on the outside, yet somehow
Speaker 1: pillow he saw donee inside. Right then and there, I
Speaker 1: gave my heart to McDonald's, and then McDonald's broke it.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History
Speaker 1: MIGHT podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This week, I'm
Speaker 1: on a mission to understand why McDonald's betrayed me so
Speaker 1: many years ago. Our story begins in a nondescript office
Speaker 1: park in Foster City, California, just south of San Francisco,
Speaker 1: a place called Matson, maybe the top food research and
Speaker 1: development house in the country, the Los Alamos of food science.
Speaker 1: I came here to walk back the cat, as they
Speaker 1: say in the intelligence business, to figure out what happened
Speaker 1: on July twenty third, nineteen ninety, the day McDonald's changed
Speaker 1: the recipe of their fries forever and turn their backs
Speaker 1: on everything I once held. Dear, I'll go get another
Speaker 1: light smart, and then I'm just gonna take the temperature
Speaker 1: down the tallow. I said to Matson, make me some
Speaker 1: fries the old way. Let's do a taste test modern
Speaker 1: fries versus original McDonald's fries. So we did. We ate them,
Speaker 1: sat there in the Matson conference room in a plissful
Speaker 1: food comma, I'm going back to the frist on. Those
Speaker 1: are king fries. Then we thought, let's call in some
Speaker 1: people too young to who have ever tasted the old kind,
Speaker 1: just to make sure we weren't all dreaming that this
Speaker 1: wasn't some middle aged fantasy about how everything was better
Speaker 1: in the good old days. Do we have a millennial
Speaker 1: we can grab right away, maybe quick before the fries
Speaker 1: get cold. We had to batch of fries in identical baskets,
Speaker 1: identified only by number six thirty seven, one, twenty eight,
Speaker 1: and seventy five. We lined up the millennials. Start here,
Speaker 1: go down the line. I want to know which one
Speaker 1: you like the best? Millennial French f aspiens. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a millennial French fried eating contests. We have three.
Speaker 1: Just for the record, we have three millennials here in
Speaker 1: this great twenty three, twenty eight, twenty five years of age,
Speaker 1: the food scientists of the future. They sample all three options.
Speaker 1: They all reached the same conclusion. I like this one
Speaker 1: first seven, Yeah, yeah, okay, who's next? I also choose
Speaker 1: six thirty seven. I think I like I'm kind of
Speaker 1: torn between one, twenty eight and sixty thirty seven, but
Speaker 1: I think I like sixty seven slightly better. Six thirty seven,
Speaker 1: six thirty seven. I've had the great opportunity to make
Speaker 1: a lot of money and do something with it to
Speaker 1: help people. There was a time in America a generation
Speaker 1: ago when a man called Phil Sokoloff was a household name.
Speaker 1: My dad was just very intense and he was a
Speaker 1: lovely person, but very intense. That's Karen Javic, phil Skoloff's daughter.
Speaker 1: It's hard to explain it. You have to experience it.
Speaker 1: I mean the man that bought his business from him. Okay,
Speaker 1: my dad would talk a lot. This guy would sit
Speaker 1: with my dad for hours. And this was an accountant.
Speaker 1: He knew so many people around Noman, and he came
Speaker 1: to me, he said, your father is the most intense
Speaker 1: person I have ever met. Sokoloff started a business making cornerbead,
Speaker 1: which is the metal bracing that you use when you
Speaker 1: installed drywall. He noticed that it was really expensive, decided
Speaker 1: he could make it cheaper, and he just found this
Speaker 1: niche that you know, just happened to make a lot
Speaker 1: of money. And he was very driven and he knew
Speaker 1: he'd make a lot of money. But once he made
Speaker 1: his money, and then he sort of got tired of
Speaker 1: the business and he knew he wanted to try and
Speaker 1: do something to help people. Then Sokoloff had a heart attack.
Speaker 1: He was forty three years old and he was in
Speaker 1: good shape. The only thing he did wrong was he
Speaker 1: didn't eat right and he had a high cholesterol. When
Speaker 1: you say he didn't eat well. Were what was he
Speaker 1: like before the Yeah, he was then. He always said
Speaker 1: he ate too much chili, he ate too much meat,
Speaker 1: too many fats. And the high cholesterol though also is genetic.
Speaker 1: He had heart problems in his family. He was really
Speaker 1: shaken by this heart attack. Yeah, oh, this totally devastated him.
Speaker 1: Never ever expected this to happen. And when you're forty three,
Speaker 1: you know, you think you're gonna live forever. And this
Speaker 1: really changed his life totally. Sokolov's doctors tell him his
Speaker 1: diet and his high cholesterol levels put him at risk
Speaker 1: for more heart attacks, so he decides to do something
Speaker 1: about it, not just for himself, but for everyone. He
Speaker 1: starts a crusade. He wants to save America from saturated fat,
Speaker 1: the alleged culprit in high cholesterol. Sokolov pays to have
Speaker 1: cholesterol tests for thousands of Nebraskans. He goes to Capitol
Speaker 1: Hill and does the same thing for ten thousand people
Speaker 1: who work there, including seventy senators. He starts campaigns to
Speaker 1: get low fat milk in school lunches. He buys full
Speaker 1: page ads in the Wall Street Journal and the New
Speaker 1: York Times and The Washington Post with huge scary headlines.
Speaker 1: One year, he buys a two point five million dollar ad.
Speaker 1: During the Super Bowl, he takes over a billboard in
Speaker 1: Times Square to say, cut fat, intake and live longer.
Speaker 1: This campaign that he was involved in, He's been an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of his own money on this. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: really did. I'm not sure how much. Whether it was
Speaker 1: fourteen fifteen million, I can't remember. Wow. Yeah, which thirty
Speaker 1: years ago is a lot of money, A lot of
Speaker 1: money it still is. I remember my aunt telling me
Speaker 1: he's spending all of your inheritance. Sokoloff was on Phil Donahue,
Speaker 1: The Nightly News. For most of us, cholesterol is a
Speaker 1: private affair, but an Omaha man has made it a
Speaker 1: public crusade, and he is spending a personal fortune going
Speaker 1: after what he thinks are the fountains of fat in America,
Speaker 1: the fountains of fat. Sokoloff goes to the source. He
Speaker 1: finds a way to personally lobby the CEOs of big
Speaker 1: food companies Kellogg, Ralston, Purina, Pillsbury. How on earth he
Speaker 1: got through? No one seems to know. When he called
Speaker 1: up some of these executives at big food companies. What
Speaker 1: was he saying to them? I mean, was he charming them?
Speaker 1: Was he browbeating them? Was he i mean just curious
Speaker 1: about what kind of conversations were going on. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it was that he was eventually browbeating them. I
Speaker 1: hate to say that. I mean, I think he was
Speaker 1: charming at first, but then he got down to business, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you need to take this product out of
Speaker 1: your cereal or I'm gonna, you know, come forth with
Speaker 1: the big ad, you know, And he did it, and
Speaker 1: he got them to take the product out. They were,
Speaker 1: I'm sure very surprised. They called him, you know, David
Speaker 1: and Goliath. He's he's the little David taking on these
Speaker 1: big food companies. He loved that that they set that
Speaker 1: around him. Then it happens, and maybe it was inevitable.
Speaker 1: Phil Sokoloff goes after McDonald's, the biggest prize of them all.
Speaker 1: A full page newspaper ad that ran in many parts
Speaker 1: of the country yesterday is giving new meaning to the
Speaker 1: term big Mac attack. They've been cooking their fries in
Speaker 1: beef talo animal fat, so decides they have to stop.
Speaker 1: The ad is headlined the Poisoning of America and it
Speaker 1: accuses McDonald's of selling burgers and fries that are loaded
Speaker 1: with fat. McDonald's denies the charges in the ad, which
Speaker 1: it calls reckless, misleading, and intended to scare rather than inform.
Speaker 1: Sokoloff is all over the media, the lone guy from
Speaker 1: Omaha up against the mightiest fast food company in history.
Speaker 1: It's riveting live TV. Phil Sokoloff is the man who
Speaker 1: placed the adis a Nebraska businessman and the president of
Speaker 1: his group, which he calls the National Heart Savers Association.
Speaker 1: Here he is on Good Morning America also with us
Speaker 1: as Dick Starman is senior vice president of McDonald's. Gentleman.
Speaker 1: Good morning to both of your mornings. And we're really
Speaker 1: on the same site. We just go about it. They
Speaker 1: are on the same site, and exactly, I don't want
Speaker 1: people to eat your hamburgers, they're too fat, but we
Speaker 1: want people to eat lean. But we're both concerned about
Speaker 1: diet wood and healthy food. America is watching and mighty
Speaker 1: McDonald's and the giant killer from Omaha are going at
Speaker 1: it tooth and nail. Sokoloff shouts, that's not true. Your
Speaker 1: fries are cooked, and I'm a fat The McDonald's guy
Speaker 1: gets flustered, tries to say something. Sokoloff doesn't let him
Speaker 1: finish vegetable and they are beef TALLO mere company. What
Speaker 1: do we have it now? Yes? It all feeding the
Speaker 1: people send all of our ray. Just took out chicken
Speaker 1: skin out of their chicken McNugget three weeks ago. Tell
Speaker 1: them about egg mcmuffins, Tell them about your beef tallow in,
Speaker 1: your French rice solo budgers, and on it goes. McDonald's
Speaker 1: calls in lawyers. They send threatening letters to newspapers warning
Speaker 1: them not to run any more of Sokoloff's ads, But
Speaker 1: that just winds up Sokoloff even more. He loves a
Speaker 1: good fight, so he runs another round of ads, and
Speaker 1: finally McDonald's surrenders. July twenty third, nineteen ninety they quietly
Speaker 1: announce no more beef talo. Just recently, I got in
Speaker 1: contact with Dick Starman, the McDonald's executive who went toe
Speaker 1: to toe with Bil Sokoloff on Network TV. I wanted
Speaker 1: to know what happened inside McDonald's headquarters. Sokoloff came at them.
Speaker 1: Did they have a picture of him with a bull's
Speaker 1: eye on it. How was it that a company making
Speaker 1: mass produced milkshakes, hamburgers, and deep fried potatoes was somehow
Speaker 1: sensitive to the charge that they were making unhealthy food
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. He didn't want to talk. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's still a sore point after all these years. All
Speaker 1: we know is McDonald's gave in. They folded, and once
Speaker 1: they folded, everyone else did too. Wendy's announced they were
Speaker 1: going with one hundred percent corn oil. Burger King said
Speaker 1: they would switch to cotton seed and soybean. I look
Speaker 1: at my dad as being a powerful man, and it
Speaker 1: was like whenever I was with him, was like I
Speaker 1: knew nothing bad would happened to me. He was just
Speaker 1: like kept me safe. You know. I think girls tend
Speaker 1: to think that about their dads anyway, But he was powerful.
Speaker 1: Because this has consequences for all of us, I feel
Speaker 1: I have to go back to the beginning. It all
Speaker 1: starts with a man named Ray Crock. He made his
Speaker 1: living selling the five spindle multi mixer milkshake machine out
Speaker 1: of Chicago, and in nineteen fifty four he began hearing
Speaker 1: about a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California. This particular
Speaker 1: restaurant he was told had no fewer than eight of
Speaker 1: his machines in operation, meaning that it could make forty
Speaker 1: milkshakes simultaneously. He couldn't believe that. He flew from Chicago
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles and drove to San Bernardino, sixty miles away,
Speaker 1: and sat in his car and just watched one happy customer.
Speaker 1: After another drive up, he goes up to a blonde
Speaker 1: and a yellow convertible and says, how often do you
Speaker 1: come here? And she says anytime I'm in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: He realizes people are addicted. Next morning, he goes back
Speaker 1: and sits inside the kitchen, watching every move everyone there makes,
Speaker 1: the griddle man, the food, everything done with military precision,
Speaker 1: and suddenly he has this vision of restaurants just like
Speaker 1: this all around the world. So he asks the two
Speaker 1: brothers who owned the place if he could buy their
Speaker 1: franchise rights. They said yes. Their names, of course, Dick
Speaker 1: and mac McDonald. Now why is Raycroc so smitten with McDonald's.
Speaker 1: Not because of the burger. The burger is fine, but
Speaker 1: it's not any different from Burger's anywhere else. It's because
Speaker 1: of the fries. Raycroc can't believe how good they are.
Speaker 1: Golden brown, crispy on the outside, light and fluffy on
Speaker 1: the inside. Let me quote to you from Croc's autobiography,
Speaker 1: the crucial passage. To most people, a French fried potato
Speaker 1: is a pretty uninspiring object. It's fodder, something to kill time,
Speaker 1: chewing between bites of hamburger and swallows of milkshake. That's
Speaker 1: your ordinary French fry. The mc donald's French fry was
Speaker 1: in an entirely different league. They lavished attention on it.
Speaker 1: I didn't know it then, but one day I would too.
Speaker 1: The French fry would become almost sacrosanc to me, its
Speaker 1: preparation a ritual to be followed religiously. The McDonald's brothers
Speaker 1: use top quality eight ounce Idaho Russets, peeled soaked in
Speaker 1: cold water, then deep right in something Croc would come
Speaker 1: to call Formula forty seven, which was a special beef
Speaker 1: tallow mix. Formula forty seven was what's called a hard fat.
Speaker 1: Butter is a hard fat lard, which is pork fat
Speaker 1: is a hard fat. Hard fats are saturated fats. From
Speaker 1: time immemorial, practically every culture in the world has used
Speaker 1: hard fats for baking and cooking for good reason. Heart
Speaker 1: fats are stable. They don't undergo strange chemical changes when
Speaker 1: they're heated, and they're thick and creamy, not oily and fluid,
Speaker 1: which makes a big difference. You put butter on a
Speaker 1: slice of bread, it stays nice and thick on the surface.
Speaker 1: You put vegetable oil on bread, and the next thing
Speaker 1: you know, your nice, firm slices turned to mush. When
Speaker 1: Nabisco took saturated fat out of the creamy middle of
Speaker 1: the Oreo cookie. The R and D was like the
Speaker 1: Apollo space program. The greatest minds in food engineering had
Speaker 1: to sit down and try and figure out how to
Speaker 1: keep the white part from turning into a slippery, oily mess.
Speaker 1: When Ray Kroc said that the French fry was sacro
Speaker 1: sank to him, what he meant was that every element
Speaker 1: of its preparation was chosen for a reason, chosen because
Speaker 1: it made for the optimal French fry experience. Kroc has
Speaker 1: a line in his autobiography where he talks about how
Speaker 1: the McDonald's brothers taught him never to cook French fries
Speaker 1: in fat that had been previously used to cook anything
Speaker 1: else like fried chicken. Any restaurant will deny it, he writes,
Speaker 1: but almost all of them do it. But Croc he listened,
Speaker 1: and right from the beginning he put his foot down
Speaker 1: there would be no cross contamination of the McDonald's cooking oil.
Speaker 1: That's someone who truly cares about French fries. That's the
Speaker 1: legacy he created under the golden arches. And then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, this random guy from Omaha puts a
Speaker 1: gun to McDonald's head and says, change or else. McDonald's
Speaker 1: challenge was to find a way to replace a hard
Speaker 1: fat with a liquid fat, and liquid fats are less
Speaker 1: than ideal in a deep friar. That's problem number one.
Speaker 1: The first replacement oil McDonald's experiments with is a cotton
Speaker 1: seed and corn oil blend, but that turns out to
Speaker 1: be really high in something called trans fat, and it's
Speaker 1: not long before everyone realizes that trans fats are way, way,
Speaker 1: way worse for you than animal fats. It's not even close.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand and two, McDonald's change is the
Speaker 1: oils again, cutting the trans fat in half. Six years
Speaker 1: later they have to switch yet again, this time to
Speaker 1: get rid of all the trans fat. Then there's a
Speaker 1: problem that vegetable oils aren't nearly as stable as hard fats.
Speaker 1: All kinds of nasty things happen when you heat them up.
Speaker 1: The deep friar suddenly becomes a kind of witches cauldron
Speaker 1: spewing dangerous elements. There's a big cloud of electrons there
Speaker 1: and it can react with the oxygen that might be
Speaker 1: present in the oil or above the surface. Gerald McNeil,
Speaker 1: he's global vice president for fats, oil and Nutrition for
Speaker 1: Lotus Croakland, a big multinational. He's part of big Cooking Oil,
Speaker 1: and that will start degrading the oil very rapidly, and
Speaker 1: certainly the breakdown products have a lot of aldehydes as
Speaker 1: a byproduct, and aldehydes they attack the proteins and DNA
Speaker 1: you know, on our bodies. You don't really want to
Speaker 1: know what the current thinking is on aldehydes, trust me,
Speaker 1: but in case you do, it's a ldhy ds. Google
Speaker 1: that and the words scary. So while the big companies
Speaker 1: that are touting poorly unsaturated oils and saying they're healthy, well,
Speaker 1: as soon as you put them in a friar, it's
Speaker 1: the last thing you want to eat. Crazy stories when
Speaker 1: around the industry, as the fast food chain struggle to
Speaker 1: figure out how to make these vegetable oil mixes work.
Speaker 1: Turns out that after a lot of frying, a kind
Speaker 1: of paint would form in the fryar. And what happens
Speaker 1: is it breaks down in the fryar and then you
Speaker 1: fumes come out, and that goes all around the restaurant,
Speaker 1: let's say in McDonald's, and the surface of the furniture
Speaker 1: is sticky because this stuff that they call a mist,
Speaker 1: you know, comes out because of breakdown products. The mist
Speaker 1: gets on everything, including the uniforms of the fry station workers,
Speaker 1: which creates a nightmare when the overalls have to be
Speaker 1: laundered and they went into the truck, you know, to
Speaker 1: go off to be cleaned. Sometimes just by piling the
Speaker 1: coats on top of each other, those coats would spontaneously
Speaker 1: combust and go on fire. Because the breakdown products from
Speaker 1: the oil were highly flammable, they would spontaneously combust. The
Speaker 1: point is that this is not some trivial matter. It's
Speaker 1: not if you order a fried egg in a restaurant,
Speaker 1: you don't stipulate the medium in which you would like
Speaker 1: the egg to be cooked. It doesn't matter that much.
Speaker 1: Fried egg is a fried egg. But think for a
Speaker 1: moment about what a French fry is. You start with
Speaker 1: a potato, and a potato is basically starch and water,
Speaker 1: maybe eighty per water. You plunge the potato into a
Speaker 1: vat of cooking oil, and the heat of the oil
Speaker 1: turns the water inside the potato into steam. That steam
Speaker 1: is the key to the fry. First, it makes the
Speaker 1: hard startch of the potato swell and soften, which is
Speaker 1: why the interior of a fry is so fluffy in light.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the steam rising from inside the
Speaker 1: fry keeps the cooking oil on the surface of the
Speaker 1: fry instead of seeping into the middle. That's why a
Speaker 1: fry is brown and crisp on the outside. Elizabeth Rosen
Speaker 1: once what a great book called The Primal Cheeseburger, where
Speaker 1: she calls the French fry the quote near perfect enactment
Speaker 1: of the enriching of a starch food with oil or fat.
Speaker 1: And she's absolutely right. You can add fat to potatoes
Speaker 1: without deep frying. That's called mashed potatoes. But at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, mashed potatoes are just mush. They
Speaker 1: don't have that crucial contrast between the fluffy and the crispy.
Speaker 1: The point is that the oil in which you deep
Speaker 1: fry the French fry is not incidental to the creation
Speaker 1: of the French fry. A French fry is by definition
Speaker 1: a potato derivative in which the water has been replaced
Speaker 1: with fat. The fat is as much a constituent of
Speaker 1: the French fry as the potato. So when you change
Speaker 1: the oil in a French fry from hard to liquid,
Speaker 1: fat from saturated to unsaturated, you change the French fry.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety, McDonald started serving us a different product.
Speaker 1: That's why I had to go to the food scientists
Speaker 1: at Matson. So we're here in what we call the
Speaker 1: Matson Food Lab, and we are getting ready to fry
Speaker 1: some French fries, and so we have a standard. When
Speaker 1: you walk into Matson, you think you're at an accounting firm.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of beige carpeting in a big bland
Speaker 1: conference room. Then you go down the corridor and you
Speaker 1: see lots of people in white coats. You turn a
Speaker 1: corner and start to smell all kinds of strange things.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, you're in a big kitchen with
Speaker 1: lots of little beakers and weapons great appliances. On the
Speaker 1: day I was there, they were testing some plant based
Speaker 1: milk prototypes. They had them all out on the counter
Speaker 1: in little cups. I got to sample them. There was
Speaker 1: one in particular with a nut flavor that was kind
Speaker 1: of fantastic, hearted and beef tallow. Matson agreed to stage
Speaker 1: a taste test for me. They would get a batch
Speaker 1: of frozen fries from the same suppliers at the fast
Speaker 1: food chains use and they would cook them in vegetable oil,
Speaker 1: just how they cooked them in a McDonald's. They would
Speaker 1: also do a pre nineteen ninety French fry cooked in
Speaker 1: something as close as they can find to formula forty seven,
Speaker 1: so I would get a chance to compare the contemporary
Speaker 1: French fry with something no McDonald's customer has tasted in
Speaker 1: a generation. So we have a standard food service to
Speaker 1: bay fryer. Do you know what temperature we're frying apt
Speaker 1: by the way, three sixty three fifty. And what we've
Speaker 1: done in advance of you coming here is we've filled
Speaker 1: the bins with oil or tallow that's barbed Stucky co
Speaker 1: president of Matson. I met her years ago when Matson
Speaker 1: was running a contest to create the world's healthiest cookie.
Speaker 1: Stucky's short blonde hair, high energy. If she were a
Speaker 1: basketball player, they would say she's got a motor. Where
Speaker 1: did you get your talo and how did you choose
Speaker 1: your talo? Very good question. We're going to taste some
Speaker 1: because we chose it because of the flavor. We wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of go back in time with you, So
Speaker 1: we tried to find the talo that we thought had
Speaker 1: the beefiest flavor, which would be probably the closest thing
Speaker 1: to what McDonald started with. So I sent Paulo to
Speaker 1: the local Mexican market right up the street, and we
Speaker 1: found a talo there that has a really nice, rich,
Speaker 1: beefy flavor. Paulo is Paulo Beltran, who's going to be
Speaker 1: one of our fry chefs, along with another Matson specialist,
Speaker 1: Kathy Westfall. The fourth person in the room is Justin Schimmick,
Speaker 1: who runs the company along with Stuckey. We've gone old
Speaker 1: school with our talo, very old school exactly. The plan
Speaker 1: is to use pre frozen Russet Burbank potatoes. They're a
Speaker 1: little lower in water content than other potato varieties. Seventy
Speaker 1: seven to eighty percent water, which is a defense against sogginess.
Speaker 1: Three batches, one batch fried twice in vegetable oils, just
Speaker 1: like the fries you get in McDonald's today. The second
Speaker 1: batch a mix fried once in vegetable oil, then a
Speaker 1: second time in beef talo, and the third batch old school,
Speaker 1: fried both times in beef talo. The fries I tasted
Speaker 1: at thirteen the ones that blew my mind. The first
Speaker 1: fry was three minutes. The first fire was three minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to describe what the mats Nights are like.
Speaker 1: In one sense, they're foodies, although that word suggests a
Speaker 1: kind of sybaritic, slightly decad an approach to food, smacking
Speaker 1: their lips and tucking into something fantastic and telling you
Speaker 1: about that time they had barbecue in Kazakhstan that was
Speaker 1: out of this world. That's not how the Matt's Knight's
Speaker 1: talk about food. They're dispassionate, objective, oddly specific. When Stucky,
Speaker 1: Shemmick and I retreated back to the conference room to
Speaker 1: wait for the French five samples to be cooked, Stucky
Speaker 1: started talking about a restaurant should just eatn at. So
Speaker 1: I had a tomato soup last night that had rosemary
Speaker 1: in it. And the rosemary was so high it tasted
Speaker 1: like a Christmas tree soup, and it was I couldn't
Speaker 1: eat it. And all I could think was if we
Speaker 1: were in the lab at the bench top, all of
Speaker 1: my colleagues would have caught this, that the rosemary is
Speaker 1: too high. Did you were you? Who are you? Who
Speaker 1: are you having dining with your friends? Did any of
Speaker 1: them have the tomato soup? Yes, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: The rosemary was so high that it tasted like a
Speaker 1: Christmas tree, Like a Christmas tree. That's so great. We
Speaker 1: weren't sitting for more than a few minutes when the
Speaker 1: door to the conference room opened. All right, wow, look
Speaker 1: at this. Here we are. This is major excitement. The
Speaker 1: mats and chefs had to batches in identical metal mesh baskets.
Speaker 1: Each was identified only by number seventy five eight six
Speaker 1: thirty seven. The taste test was blinded. We had no
Speaker 1: idea which fry was which. Okay, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: start with six thirty seven. As a sensory professional, we're
Speaker 1: not supposed to do you have anything away, we're saying anything.
Speaker 1: I have a hard time during this that's I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. You're a bad sensory How is that not great?
Speaker 1: The baskets of fries run the conference table in front
Speaker 1: of me. Everyone else had gathered around. These were people
Speaker 1: who make and can assume some of the world's most
Speaker 1: exotic prepared foods for a living. You'd think they would
Speaker 1: be jaded, but they weren't. They were on it and
Speaker 1: me my head was spinning. I was in heaven. It
Speaker 1: was all I could do to keep the rigorous objectivity
Speaker 1: necessary for a valid blind taste test. What are you
Speaker 1: tasting with? The first one? Six thirty seven texture? And
Speaker 1: six thirty seven is shatteringly crisp. It's amazing, perfect French
Speaker 1: rie texture. It's loud, crisp, but there's no hole in
Speaker 1: the middle, and it's it's nice and fluffy in the middle.
Speaker 1: They're like perfect French fries and they have a lot
Speaker 1: of flavor. All right, seventy five? How do you feel?
Speaker 1: It's seventy five? Number two? Nobody was interested in seventy five.
Speaker 1: They were oily, not crispy, almost sodden bland, just mac
Speaker 1: all right. Next one, the surface is really poorous. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of oil squirts out when you bite into it.
Speaker 1: Three batches of fries prepared according to the same exacting specifications,
Speaker 1: but two were entirely forgotten and we didn't have to
Speaker 1: be told what kind they were. They were what the
Speaker 1: fast food world has been passing off as a French
Speaker 1: fry for the past quarter century. But the third batch,
Speaker 1: six thirty seven to die for. That was the old
Speaker 1: school fry, the kind of French fry that doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: We have a big wind for tallow, That's what we're saying.
Speaker 1: There's so much going on here. Also, look at the
Speaker 1: color difference. Yeah, those look like fries. My heart is
Speaker 1: Philip sadness again to think about how many, how many
Speaker 1: millions and millions and millions of people around the world
Speaker 1: have never tasted that. That's when we brought in the
Speaker 1: millennials as a second opinion, but also as an act
Speaker 1: of mercy, because they had no idea that this is
Speaker 1: what a French fry could be like, and it seemed
Speaker 1: unbearably cruel to deny them that privilege when a mound
Speaker 1: of six thirty seven was just sitting there on the table.
Speaker 1: Can we agree that those are the best fries. We
Speaker 1: tasted all afternoon. I don't have more. Now. Do I
Speaker 1: hate Phil Sokoloff. I've thought a lot about this in
Speaker 1: the intervening years, and I've come to realize that I
Speaker 1: don't hate him for killing Formula forty seven. He could
Speaker 1: have bought a yacht and a big house in a
Speaker 1: gated community in Florida and played golf, and you know
Speaker 1: how I feel about golf. Instead, he took on McDonald's
Speaker 1: in an attempt to make the world a healthier, better place.
Speaker 1: My hat is off to him. It's really Donald's that
Speaker 1: I blame. They were custodians of a French fry legacy.
Speaker 1: The fry was sacrosanct. Their own founder said so. And
Speaker 1: what did they do. They rolled over sold out their
Speaker 1: own heritage, as if how a French fry tastes was
Speaker 1: suddenly a secondary consideration. That's crazy. The only reason there
Speaker 1: was an argument about fries in the first place is
Speaker 1: that millions of people thought they were delicious. So what
Speaker 1: do we do? We made them not delicious. Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I'm not done. It's worse than that. The original fries
Speaker 1: were sold in just one size, two point four ounces.
Speaker 1: You don't need any more fries than that. But nowadays,
Speaker 1: what's the large serving of fries at McDonald's five point
Speaker 1: nine ounces more than twice as big as it used
Speaker 1: to be. So we've gone from the McDonald's brother's original product,
Speaker 1: which gave us a modest amount of something sublime, to
Speaker 1: a large amount of something that tastes like cardboard. I
Speaker 1: remember going to mcdone donalds and having some French fries
Speaker 1: and going, oh, these don't taste is good because my
Speaker 1: dad had them changed the way they were made. But
Speaker 1: I think that's absolutely incredible that he did that. You know,
Speaker 1: he was really he was made to do something huge,
Speaker 1: and you know he did. He was amazing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what did he say? Well, you said that he you know,
Speaker 1: he got McDonald's to change the way they made fries
Speaker 1: and the friesesn't tastes good. What did he say when
Speaker 1: you said that to him? Did you ever say that
Speaker 1: to him? Yeah? He just laughed. He agreed and he laughed.
Speaker 1: I mean, he did have a good sense of humor.
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised Phil Sokoloff wasn't interested in the sensual
Speaker 1: aspects of the French fry, of course not. He was
Speaker 1: a zealot, a man shaken by his brush with death.
Speaker 1: He nibbled on vegetables and maybe an occasional turkey sandwich.
Speaker 1: He saw his job as getting all of us to
Speaker 1: think about the nutritional consequences of what we put in
Speaker 1: our mouths, and for that I think we are in
Speaker 1: his debt. But McDonald's should have stood up and pointed
Speaker 1: out what is lost when we define food so narrowly.
Speaker 1: The world's oblique place, when there's no room for pleasure.
Speaker 1: You know what one of them, Matson millennials said after
Speaker 1: she had tasted a tallow fry for the first time.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you for the delicious fries. Revisionist History
Speaker 1: is produced by Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista,
Speaker 1: Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Flawn Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Andrew Stelzer, who came with me to Madison,
Speaker 1: and as always to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panoply.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladwell. While I still have you, I want
Speaker 1: to remind you that revisionist History has a website where
Speaker 1: we provide links to books and articles and videos or
Speaker 1: relevance to the episodes. Please check it out at Revisionist
Speaker 1: history dot com. For this episode, though, I want to
Speaker 1: give a special shout out to two people whose work
Speaker 1: helped me a lot. One is Gary Taubes, who has
Speaker 1: been writing really provocatively about what we eat and what
Speaker 1: it does to us for a very long time. His
Speaker 1: most recent book, which I loved, is The Case Against Sugar.
Speaker 1: The other is Nina Teitscheltz, whose fantastic book The Big
Speaker 1: Fat Surprise, Why Butter, meat and Cheese Belong in a
Speaker 1: Healthy Diet was of enormous help to me in researching
Speaker 1: this episode. Thank you Nina, thank you Gary, And to
Speaker 1: all those of you listening, I recommend those two authors
Speaker 1: to you whole wordedly.