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McDonald’s Broke My Heart · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:18
Speaker 2: My parents didn't take us to fast food places when
0:20
Speaker 2: I was little. They thought they were an abomination. In
0:24
Speaker 2: any case, we didn't have a McDonald's back then in
0:26
Speaker 2: our little town, so it wasn't like I was confronted
0:29
Speaker 2: by the fact of French fries. They were some dimly
0:32
Speaker 2: understood concept, something that people out there somewhere did to
0:36
Speaker 2: a potato that somehow implicated the French. Then one day,
0:43
Speaker 2: after track practice, thirteen years old, I went to my
0:47
Speaker 2: first McDonald's. Have you ever seen a puppy encounter snow
0:52
Speaker 2: for the first time. He burrows his nose into it
0:55
Speaker 2: with this look of perplexity and sheer delight because he
0:58
Speaker 2: can't understand where this white thing came from that is
1:00
Speaker 2: both fluffy and cold. It was like that for me,
1:05
Speaker 2: a slice of potato, crispy on the outside, yet somehow
1:08
Speaker 2: pillowy soft on the inside. Right then and there, I
1:12
Speaker 2: gave my heart to McDonald's, and then McDonald's broke it.
1:21
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
1:24
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This week, I'm
1:31
Speaker 2: on a mission to understand why McDonald's betrayed me so
1:34
Speaker 2: many years ago. Our story begins in a nondescript office
1:45
Speaker 2: park in Foster City, California, just south of San Francisco,
1:49
Speaker 2: a place called Matson, maybe the top food research and
1:52
Speaker 2: development house in the country, the Los Salamos of food science.
1:56
Speaker 2: I came here to walk back the cat, as they
1:59
Speaker 2: say in the intelligence business, to figure out what happened
2:02
Speaker 2: on July twenty third, nineteen ninety, the day McDonald's changed
2:06
Speaker 2: the recipe of their fries forever and turned in their
2:09
Speaker 2: backs on everything I once held.
2:11
Speaker 1: Dear, I'll go get.
2:20
Speaker 3: Another likes mort and then I'm just gonna take the
2:22
Speaker 3: temperature down to.
2:23
Speaker 2: The I said to Mattson, make me some fries the
2:27
Speaker 2: old way. Let's do a taste test modern fries versus
2:31
Speaker 2: original McDonald's fries.
2:33
Speaker 1: So we did.
2:34
Speaker 2: We ate them, sat there in the Matson conference room
2:38
Speaker 2: in a blissful food comma.
2:40
Speaker 1: These are I'm going back to the Those are King fries.
2:47
Speaker 2: Then we thought, let's call in some people too young
2:49
Speaker 2: to who ever tasted the old kind, just to make
2:52
Speaker 2: sure we weren't all dreaming that this wasn't some middle
2:54
Speaker 2: aged fantasy about how everything was better in the good
2:57
Speaker 2: old days.
2:58
Speaker 1: Do we have a millennial grab right away?
3:02
Speaker 2: Maybe quick before the fries get cold. We had the
3:08
Speaker 2: batches of fries in identical baskets, identified only by number
3:13
Speaker 2: six thirty seven, one, twenty eight, and seventy five. We
3:18
Speaker 2: lined up the millennials. Start here, go down the line.
3:22
Speaker 2: I want to know which one you.
3:23
Speaker 1: Like the best millennial French for Asbians.
3:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the millennial French fried eating contest.
3:31
Speaker 1: We have three Just for the record, we have three
3:33
Speaker 1: millennials here, that's.
3:34
Speaker 2: Correct, twenty three, twenty eight, twenty five years of age.
3:38
Speaker 2: The food scientists of the future. They sample all three options.
3:43
Speaker 2: They all reach the same conclusion.
3:45
Speaker 1: I like this one. You like the first seven?
3:48
Speaker 3: Yeah?
3:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, who's next?
3:52
Speaker 3: I also choose six thirty seven.
3:54
Speaker 4: I think I like I'm kind of torn between one,
3:57
Speaker 4: twenty eight and sixty three seven, but I think I
4:01
Speaker 4: like a six three seven slightly.
4:03
Speaker 2: Better, six thirty seven, six thirty seven.
4:13
Speaker 5: I've had the great opportunity to make a lot of
4:17
Speaker 5: money and do something with it.
4:20
Speaker 1: To help people.
4:22
Speaker 2: There was a time in America a generation ago when
4:25
Speaker 2: a man called Phil Sokoloff was a household name.
4:29
Speaker 3: My dad was just very intense, and he was a
4:33
Speaker 3: lovely person, but very intense.
4:36
Speaker 2: That's Karen Javic, Phil Sokoloff's daughter.
4:38
Speaker 3: It's hard to explain it. You have to experience it.
4:41
Speaker 3: I mean the man that bought his business from him. Okay,
4:45
Speaker 3: my dad would talk a lot. This guy would sit
4:49
Speaker 3: with my dad for hours. And this was an accountant.
4:52
Speaker 3: He knew so many people around Oman, and he came
4:54
Speaker 3: to me, he said, your father is the most intense
4:59
Speaker 3: person I have ever met.
5:01
Speaker 2: Sokoloff started the business making cornerbad which is the metal
5:05
Speaker 2: bracing that you use when you installed drywall. He noticed
5:08
Speaker 2: that it was really expensive, decided he could make it cheaper.
5:12
Speaker 3: And he just found this niche that you know, just
5:16
Speaker 3: happened to make a lot of money. And he was
5:18
Speaker 3: very driven and he knew he'd make a lot of money.
5:20
Speaker 3: But once he made his money, and then he sort
5:23
Speaker 3: of got tired of the business and he knew he
5:25
Speaker 3: wanted to try and do something to help people.
5:28
Speaker 2: Then Sokoloff had a heart attack. He was forty three years.
5:31
Speaker 3: Old and he was in good shape. The only thing
5:34
Speaker 3: he did wrong was he didn't eat right and he
5:37
Speaker 3: had a high cholesterol.
5:39
Speaker 2: When you say he didn't eat well. Were what was
5:42
Speaker 2: he like.
5:42
Speaker 3: Before the Yeah he was then. He always said he
5:47
Speaker 3: ate too much chili, he ate too much meat, too
5:51
Speaker 3: many fats, and high cholesterol. Though also is genetic, he
5:55
Speaker 3: had heart problems in his family.
5:57
Speaker 2: He was really shaken by this, by this heart attack.
6:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, this totally devastated him. Never ever expected this
6:05
Speaker 3: to happen. And when you're forty three, you know, you
6:07
Speaker 3: think you're gonna live forever. And this really changed his
6:11
Speaker 3: life totally.
6:13
Speaker 2: Sokolov's doctors tell him his diet and his high cholesterol
6:16
Speaker 2: levels put him at risk for more heart attacks, so
6:19
Speaker 2: he decides to do something about it, not just for himself,
6:22
Speaker 2: but for everyone. He starts a crusade. He wants to
6:26
Speaker 2: save America from saturated fat, the alleged culprit in high cholesterol.
6:31
Speaker 2: Skoaloff pays to have cholesterol tests for thousands of Nebraskans.
6:35
Speaker 2: He goes to Capitol Hill and does the same thing
6:38
Speaker 2: for ten thousand people who work there, including seventy senators.
6:42
Speaker 2: He starts campaigns to get low fat milk in school lunches.
6:45
Speaker 2: He buys full page ads in the Wall Street Journal
6:47
Speaker 2: and The New York Times and The Washington Post with
6:50
Speaker 2: huge scary headlines. One year, he buys a two point
6:54
Speaker 2: five million dollar ad. During the Super Bowl, he takes
6:57
Speaker 2: over a billboard in Times Square to say, cut fat,
7:00
Speaker 2: intake and live longer. This campaign that he was involved in,
7:07
Speaker 2: he's spent an enormous amount of his own money on this.
7:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, he really did. I'm not sure how much. Whether
7:14
Speaker 3: it was fourteen fifteen million, I can't remember.
7:17
Speaker 1: Wow.
7:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, which thirty years ago is a lot of money,
7:20
Speaker 2: A lot of.
7:20
Speaker 3: Money it still is. I remember my aunt telling me
7:23
Speaker 3: he's spending all of your inheritance.
7:31
Speaker 2: Sokoloff was un Phil Donahue, the Nightly News.
7:35
Speaker 6: For most of us, cholesterol was a private affair. But
7:38
Speaker 6: an Omaha man has made it a public crusade, and
7:41
Speaker 6: he is spending a personal fortune going after what he
7:44
Speaker 6: thinks are the fountains of fat in America.
7:48
Speaker 2: The fountains of fat. Sokoloff goes to the source. He
7:52
Speaker 2: finds a way to personally lobby the CEOs of big
7:54
Speaker 2: food companies Kellogg, Ralston, Purina, Pillsbury. How on earth he
8:00
Speaker 2: got through? No one seems to know. When he called
8:03
Speaker 2: up some of these executives at big food companies. What
8:07
Speaker 2: was he saying to them? Is he charming them? Was
8:10
Speaker 2: he browbeating them? Was he I'm just curious about what
8:13
Speaker 2: kind of conversations were going on.
8:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was that he was eventually browbeating them.
8:22
Speaker 3: I hate to say that. I mean, I think he
8:24
Speaker 3: was charming at first, but then he got down to business, like,
8:27
Speaker 3: you know, you need to take this product out of
8:29
Speaker 3: your cereal or I'm gonna, you know, come forth with
8:33
Speaker 3: the big ad, you know, And he did it, and
8:36
Speaker 3: he got them to take the product out. They were,
8:39
Speaker 3: I'm sure very surprised. They called him, you know, David
8:41
Speaker 3: and Goliath. He's the little David taking on these big
8:45
Speaker 3: food companies. He loved that that they said that about him.
8:49
Speaker 2: Then it happens, and maybe it was inevitable. Phil Sokoloff
8:54
Speaker 2: goes after McDonald's, the biggest prize of them all.
8:58
Speaker 5: A full page newspaper ad that ran in many parts
9:01
Speaker 5: of the country yesterday is giving new meaning to the
9:03
Speaker 5: term big mac attack.
9:04
Speaker 2: They've been cooking their fries in beef tallow animal fat,
9:09
Speaker 2: decides they have to stop.
9:11
Speaker 5: The ad is headlined the Poisoning of America and it
9:14
Speaker 5: accuses McDonald's of selling burgers and fries that are loaded
9:17
Speaker 5: with fat. McDonald's denies the charges in the ad, which
9:20
Speaker 5: it calls reckless, misleading, and intended to scare rather than informed.
9:24
Speaker 2: Sokoloff is all over the media, the lone guy from
9:27
Speaker 2: Omaha up against the mightiest fast food company in history.
9:31
Speaker 2: It's riveting live TV.
9:33
Speaker 5: Phil Sokoloff is the man who places the ad. He's
9:35
Speaker 5: a Nebraska businessman and the president of his group, which
9:38
Speaker 5: he calls the National Heart Savers Association.
9:40
Speaker 2: Here he is on Good Morning America.
9:42
Speaker 5: Also with us is Dick Starman, his senior vice president
9:44
Speaker 5: of McDonald's. Gentlemen, good morning to both of you, Maritans.
9:47
Speaker 5: And we're really on the same site. We just go
9:49
Speaker 5: about it.
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Speaker 6: They're on the same site.
9:50
Speaker 5: And exactly, I don't want people to eat your hamburgers,
9:53
Speaker 5: they're too fat, but we want people to eat lean, browerboth.
9:55
Speaker 5: I'm concerned about diet and healthy food.
9:58
Speaker 2: America is watching and mighty McDonald's and the giant killer
10:02
Speaker 2: from Omaha are going at it tooth and nail. Sokoloff shouts,
10:06
Speaker 2: that's not true. Your fries are cooked in at on
10:09
Speaker 2: the fat the McDonald's guy gets flustered, tries to say something.
10:13
Speaker 2: Sokoloff doesn't let him finish.
10:15
Speaker 6: Vegetable and they are beef Tello or a mere company.
10:20
Speaker 6: It's what do we have it now?
10:23
Speaker 3: Pople send all of our red just took.
10:24
Speaker 5: Out chicken skin out of their chicken McNugget three weeks ago.
10:28
Speaker 6: Tell them about the egg mcmuffins.
10:30
Speaker 5: Tell them about your the beef tallow and your French rice.
10:32
Speaker 1: Tell and on it goes.
10:35
Speaker 2: McDonald's calls in lawyers. They send threatening letters to newspapers
10:40
Speaker 2: warning them not to run any more of Sokoloff's ads,
10:43
Speaker 2: But that just winds up Socoloff even more. He loves
10:46
Speaker 2: a good fight, so he runs another round of ads,
10:49
Speaker 2: and finally McDonald's surrenders. July twenty third, nineteen ninety, they
10:54
Speaker 2: quietly announced no more beef Tello. Just recently, I got
10:59
Speaker 2: in contact with Dick Starman, the McDonald's executive who went
11:02
Speaker 2: toe to toe with Bill Soakoloff.
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Speaker 1: On Network TV.
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Speaker 2: I wanted to know what happened inside McDonald's headquarters after
11:09
Speaker 2: Socoloff came at them. Did they have a picture of
11:11
Speaker 2: him with a bull's eye on it? How was it
11:13
Speaker 2: that a company making mass produced milkshakes, hamburgers, and deep
11:18
Speaker 2: fried potatoes was somehow sensitive to the charge that they
11:21
Speaker 2: were making unhealthy food that kind of thing. He didn't
11:25
Speaker 2: want to talk. Maybe it's still a sore point after
11:28
Speaker 2: all these years. All we know is McDonald's gave in.
11:32
Speaker 2: They folded, and once they folded, everyone else did too.
11:36
Speaker 2: Wendy's announced they were going with one hundred percent corn oil.
11:40
Speaker 2: Burger King said they would switch to cottonseed in soybean.
11:43
Speaker 3: I look at my dad as being a powerful man,
11:47
Speaker 3: and it was like, whenever I was with him, was
11:49
Speaker 3: like I knew nothing bad would happened to me. He
11:52
Speaker 3: was just like kept me safe. You know. I think
11:55
Speaker 3: girls tend to think that about their dads anyway, but
11:59
Speaker 3: he was. He was powerful.
12:05
Speaker 2: Because this has consequences for all of us, I feel
12:09
Speaker 2: I have to go back to the beginning. It all
12:14
Speaker 2: starts with a man named Ray Kroc. He made his
12:17
Speaker 2: living selling the five spindle multi mixer milkshake machine out
12:20
Speaker 2: of Chicago, and in nineteen fifty four he began hearing
12:24
Speaker 2: about a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California. This particular
12:29
Speaker 2: restaurant he was told had no fewer than eight of
12:32
Speaker 2: his machines in operation, meaning that it could make forty
12:35
Speaker 2: milkshakes simultaneously. He couldn't believe that. He flew from Chicago
12:40
Speaker 2: to Los Angeles and drove to San Bernardino, sixty miles away,
12:44
Speaker 2: and sat in his car and just watched one happy customer.
12:48
Speaker 2: After another drive up, he goes up to a blonde
12:51
Speaker 2: and a yellow convertible and says, how often do you
12:54
Speaker 2: come here? And she says anytime I'm in the neighborhood.
12:59
Speaker 2: He realizes people are addicted. Next morning, he goes back
13:03
Speaker 2: and sits inside the kitchen, watching every move everyone there makes,
13:07
Speaker 2: the griddle man, the food prepared, everything done with military precision,
13:12
Speaker 2: and suddenly he has this vision of restaurants just like
13:15
Speaker 2: this all around the world. So he asks the two
13:20
Speaker 2: brothers who owned the place if he could buy their
13:23
Speaker 2: franchise rights. They said yes. Their names, of course, Dick
13:27
Speaker 2: and mac McDonald. Now why is Raycroc so smitten with
13:32
Speaker 2: McDonald's Not because of the burger. The burger is fine,
13:36
Speaker 2: but it's not any different from burgers anywhere else. It's
13:39
Speaker 2: because of the fries. Raycroc can't believe how good. They
13:43
Speaker 2: are golden brown, crispy on the outside, light and fluffy
13:47
Speaker 2: on the inside. Let me quote to you from Kroc's autobiography,
13:52
Speaker 2: the crucial passage. To most people, a french fried potato
13:57
Speaker 2: is a pretty uninspiring object. It's fodder, something to kill time,
14:01
Speaker 2: chewing between bites of hamburger and swallows of milkshake. That's
14:06
Speaker 2: your ordinary French fry. The mc donald's French fry was
14:10
Speaker 2: in an entirely different league. They lavished attention on it.
14:14
Speaker 2: I didn't know it then, but one day I would too.
14:18
Speaker 2: The French fry would become almost sacrisanct to me, its
14:21
Speaker 2: preparation a ritual to be followed religiously. The McDonald's brothers
14:28
Speaker 2: used top quality eight ounce Idaho Russets peeled soaked in
14:32
Speaker 2: cold water, then deep fried in something Crock would come
14:35
Speaker 2: to call Formula forty seven, which was a special beef
14:38
Speaker 2: tallow mix. Formula forty seven was what's called a hard fat.
14:46
Speaker 2: Butter is a hard fat lard, which is pork fat
14:49
Speaker 2: is a hard fat. Hard fats are saturated fats. From
14:54
Speaker 2: time immemorial, practically every culture in the world has used
14:57
Speaker 2: hard fats for baking and cooking For good reason. Hard
15:01
Speaker 2: fats are stable, they don't undergo strange chemical changes when
15:05
Speaker 2: they're heated, and they're thick and creamy, not oily and fluid,
15:09
Speaker 2: which makes a big difference. You put butter on a
15:12
Speaker 2: slice of bread, it stays nice and thick on the surface.
15:16
Speaker 2: You put vegetable oil on bread and the next thing
15:18
Speaker 2: you know, your nice, firm slices turned to mush When
15:23
Speaker 2: Nibisco took saturated fat out of the creamy middle of
15:26
Speaker 2: the Oreo cookie. The R and D was like the
15:28
Speaker 2: Apollo space program. The greatest mines in food engineering had
15:33
Speaker 2: to sit down and try and figure out how to
15:35
Speaker 2: keep the white part from turning into a slippery, oily mass.
15:40
Speaker 2: When Ray Kroc said that the French fry was sacrisanc
15:43
Speaker 2: to him, what he meant was that every element of
15:46
Speaker 2: its preparation was chosen for a reason, chosen because it
15:50
Speaker 2: made for the optimal French fry experience. Kroc has a
15:58
Speaker 2: line in his autobiography where he talks about how the
16:00
Speaker 2: McDonald's brothers taught him never to cook French fries in
16:03
Speaker 2: fat that had been previously used to cook anything else
16:06
Speaker 2: like fried chicken, any restaurant will deny it, he writes,
16:10
Speaker 2: but almost all of them do it. But Croc he listened,
16:14
Speaker 2: and right from the beginning he put his foot down
16:16
Speaker 2: there would be no cross contamination of the McDonald's cooking oil.
16:20
Speaker 2: That's someone who truly cares about French fries. That's the
16:23
Speaker 2: legacy he created under the golden arches. And then all
16:28
Speaker 2: of a sudden, this random guy from Omaha puts a
16:31
Speaker 2: gun to McDonald's head and says, change or else. McDonald's
16:38
Speaker 2: challenge was to find a way to replace a hard
16:41
Speaker 2: fat with a liquid fat, and liquid fats are less
16:45
Speaker 2: than ideal in a deep frier. That's problem number one.
16:49
Speaker 2: The first replacement oil in McDonald's experiments with is a
16:52
Speaker 2: cottonseed in corn oil blend, but that turns out to
16:55
Speaker 2: be really high in something called trans fat, and it's
16:58
Speaker 2: not long before everyone realizes that trans fats are way, way,
17:02
Speaker 2: way worse few than animal fats. It's not even close.
17:06
Speaker 2: So in two thousand and two, McDonald's change the oils again,
17:10
Speaker 2: cutting the trans fat in half. Six years later they
17:14
Speaker 2: have to switch yet again, this time to get rid
17:16
Speaker 2: of all the trans fat. Then there's a problem that
17:20
Speaker 2: vegetable oils aren't nearly as stable as hard fats. All
17:23
Speaker 2: kinds of nasty things happen when you heat them up.
17:26
Speaker 2: The deep frier suddenly becomes a kind of witches cauldron
17:29
Speaker 2: spewing dangerous elements.
17:31
Speaker 4: There's a big cloud of electrons there and it can
17:35
Speaker 4: react with the oxygen that might be present in the
17:37
Speaker 4: oil or above the surface.
17:39
Speaker 2: Gerald McNeil, he's global vice president for fats, oil and
17:43
Speaker 2: Nutrition for Lotus Croklin, a big multinational. He's part of
17:47
Speaker 2: big cooking oil.
17:49
Speaker 4: And that will start degrading the oil very rapidly, and
17:52
Speaker 4: certainly the breakdown products have a lot of aldehydes as
17:56
Speaker 4: a byproduct, and aldehydes they attack the proteins and DNA
18:04
Speaker 4: you know in our bodies.
18:06
Speaker 2: You don't really want to know what the current thinking
18:08
Speaker 2: is on aldehydes, trust me, but in case you do,
18:12
Speaker 2: it's a l D e hydes. Google that and the
18:18
Speaker 2: words scary.
18:21
Speaker 4: So while the big companies that are touting probably unsaturated
18:25
Speaker 4: or else and saying they're healthy, well, as soon as
18:28
Speaker 4: you put them in a fryer, it's the last thing
18:30
Speaker 4: you want to eat.
18:32
Speaker 2: Crazy stories when around the industry, as the fast food
18:35
Speaker 2: chain struggle to figure out how to make these vegetable
18:38
Speaker 2: oil mixes work. Turns out that after a lot of frying,
18:41
Speaker 2: a kind of paint would form in the fryer.
18:43
Speaker 4: And what happens is it breaks down in the fryer
18:47
Speaker 4: and then you know, fumes come out and it goes
18:49
Speaker 4: all around the restaurant, let's say in McDonald's, and the
18:53
Speaker 4: surface of the furniture is sticky because this stuff that
18:57
Speaker 4: they call a mist, you know, comes out because of
18:59
Speaker 4: the breakdown products.
19:00
Speaker 2: The myst gets on everything, including the uniforms of the
19:03
Speaker 2: fry station workers, which creates a nightmare when the overalls
19:07
Speaker 2: have to be laundered.
19:08
Speaker 4: And they went into the truck, you know, to go
19:11
Speaker 4: off to be cleaned. Sometimes just by piling the coats
19:16
Speaker 4: on top of each other, those coats would spontaneously combust
19:21
Speaker 4: and go on fire. Because the breakdown products from the
19:24
Speaker 4: oil were highly flammable.
19:28
Speaker 2: They would spontaneously combust. The point is that this is
19:35
Speaker 2: not some trivial matter. It's not if you order a
19:38
Speaker 2: fried egg in a restaurant, you don't stipulate the medium
19:41
Speaker 2: in which you would like the egg to be cooked.
19:43
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter that much. A fried egg is a
19:46
Speaker 2: fried egg. But think for a moment about what a
19:49
Speaker 2: French fry is. You start with a potato, and a
19:52
Speaker 2: potato is basically starch and water, maybe eighty percent water.
19:56
Speaker 2: You plunge the potato into a vat of cooking oil,
19:59
Speaker 2: and the heat of the oil turns the water inside
20:02
Speaker 2: the potato into steam. That steam is the key to
20:06
Speaker 2: the fry. First, it makes the heart hard starch of
20:09
Speaker 2: the potato swell and soften, which is why the interior
20:13
Speaker 2: of a fry is so fluffy and light. At the
20:16
Speaker 2: same time, the steam rising from inside the fry keeps
20:19
Speaker 2: the cooking oil on the surface of the fry instead
20:22
Speaker 2: of seeping into the middle. That's why a fry is
20:25
Speaker 2: brown and crisp on the outside. Elizabeth Rosen once whatt
20:31
Speaker 2: a great book called The Primal Cheeseburger, where she calls
20:34
Speaker 2: the French fry the quote near perfect enactment of the
20:37
Speaker 2: enriching of a starch food with oil or fat. And
20:41
Speaker 2: she's absolutely right. You can add fat to potatoes without
20:45
Speaker 2: deep frying. That's called mashed potatoes. But at the end
20:48
Speaker 2: of the day, mashed potatoes are just mush. They don't
20:52
Speaker 2: have that crucial contrast between the fluffy and the crispy.
20:56
Speaker 2: The point is that the oil in which you deep
20:59
Speaker 2: fry the French fry is not incidental to the creation
21:02
Speaker 2: of the French fry. A French fry is by definition
21:06
Speaker 2: a potato derivative in which the water has has been
21:09
Speaker 2: replaced with fat. The fat is as much a constituent
21:13
Speaker 2: of the French fry as the potato. So when you
21:16
Speaker 2: change the oil in a French fry from hard to liquid,
21:19
Speaker 2: fat from saturated to unsaturated, you change the French fry.
21:25
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety, McDonald started serving us a different product.
21:34
Speaker 2: That's why I had to go to the food scientists
21:36
Speaker 2: at Matson.
21:38
Speaker 7: So we're here in what we call the Matson Food Lab,
21:41
Speaker 7: and we are getting ready to fry some French fries,
21:45
Speaker 7: and so we have a standard.
21:47
Speaker 2: When you walk into Matson, you think you're at an
21:49
Speaker 2: accounting firm. There's a lot of beige carpeting and a
21:53
Speaker 2: big bland conference room. Then you go down the corridor
21:56
Speaker 2: and you see lots of people in white coats. You
21:59
Speaker 2: turn a corner and start to smell all kinds of
22:01
Speaker 2: strange things. All of a sudden, you're in a big
22:05
Speaker 2: kitchen with lots of little beakers and weapons, great appliances.
22:09
Speaker 2: On the day I was there, they were testing some
22:11
Speaker 2: plant based milk prototypes. They had them all out on
22:14
Speaker 2: the counter in little cups. I got to sample them.
22:17
Speaker 2: There was one in particular with a nut flavor that
22:20
Speaker 2: was kind of fantastic.
22:21
Speaker 3: Carf fried and power and then beef.
22:24
Speaker 2: Tello Matson agreed to stage a taste test for me.
22:27
Speaker 2: They would get a batch of frozen fries from the
22:29
Speaker 2: same suppliers that the fast food chains use and they
22:32
Speaker 2: would cook them in vegetable oil, just how they cooked
22:35
Speaker 2: them in a McDonald's. They would also do a pre
22:38
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety French fry cooked in something as close as
22:41
Speaker 2: they can fined to formula forty seven, so I would
22:44
Speaker 2: get a chance to compare the contemporary French fry with
22:48
Speaker 2: something no McDonald's customer has tasted in a generation.
22:52
Speaker 7: So we have a standard food service to bay fryer.
22:57
Speaker 2: Do you know what temperature were frying at, by the way.
23:00
Speaker 7: Three sixty three fifty And what we've done in advance
23:04
Speaker 7: of you coming here is we filled the bins with
23:07
Speaker 7: oil or tallow that's.
23:09
Speaker 2: Barb Stucky, co President of Matson. I met her years
23:13
Speaker 2: ago when Matson was running a contest to create the
23:16
Speaker 2: world's healthiest cookie. Stucky's short, blonde hair, high energy. If
23:21
Speaker 2: she were a basketball player, they would say, she's.
23:24
Speaker 1: Got a motor. Where did you get your talent? And
23:27
Speaker 1: how did you choose your talo?
23:30
Speaker 3: Very good question.
23:30
Speaker 7: We're going to taste some because we chose it because
23:34
Speaker 7: of the flavor. We wanted to kind of go back
23:37
Speaker 7: in time with you, So we tried to find the
23:39
Speaker 7: tallo that we thought had the beefiest flavor, which would
23:44
Speaker 7: be probably the closest thing to what McDonald started with.
23:47
Speaker 7: So I sent Paolo to the local Mexican market right
23:51
Speaker 7: up the street, and we found a tallo there that
23:54
Speaker 7: has a really nice, rich, beefy flavor.
23:57
Speaker 2: Paolo is Paolo Beltrin, who's going to be one of
23:59
Speaker 2: our fry chefs, along with another Matson specialist, Kathy Westfall.
24:05
Speaker 2: The fourth person in the room is Justin Shimmick, who
24:08
Speaker 2: runs the company along with Stucky. We've gone old school
24:11
Speaker 2: with our talo, very old school exactly. The plan is
24:14
Speaker 2: to use pre frozen Russet Burbank potatoes. They're a little
24:18
Speaker 2: lower in water content than other potato varieties seventy seven
24:21
Speaker 2: to eighty percent water, which is a defense against sogginess.
24:25
Speaker 1: Three batches.
24:26
Speaker 2: One batch fried twice in vegetable oils, just like the
24:29
Speaker 2: fries you get in McDonald's today. The second batch a
24:33
Speaker 2: mix fried once in vegetable oil, then a second time
24:36
Speaker 2: in beef tallow, and the third batch old school, fried
24:40
Speaker 2: both times in beef tallow. The fries I tasted at
24:43
Speaker 2: thirteen the ones that blew my mind.
24:46
Speaker 1: The first fry was three minutes.
24:48
Speaker 2: The first fire was three minutes. Yeah, it's hard to
24:54
Speaker 2: describe what the matt Knights are like. In one sense,
24:57
Speaker 2: they're foodies, although that word suggests a kind of sybaritic,
25:01
Speaker 2: slightly decadent approach to food, smacking their lips and tucking
25:04
Speaker 2: into something fantastic and telling you about that time they
25:07
Speaker 2: had barbecue in Kazakhstan. I was out of this world.
25:11
Speaker 2: That's not how the Matt's Night's talk about food. They're dispassionate, objective,
25:16
Speaker 2: oddly specific. When Stucky, Shimmick, and I retreated back to
25:19
Speaker 2: the conference room to wait for the French fly samples
25:22
Speaker 2: to be cooked, Stucky started talking about a restaurant should
25:25
Speaker 2: just eatn at.
25:26
Speaker 7: So I had a tomato soup last night that had
25:28
Speaker 7: rosemary in it, and the rosemary was so high it
25:33
Speaker 7: tasted like a Christmas tree soup. It was I couldn't
25:41
Speaker 7: eat it, And all I could think was if we
25:43
Speaker 7: were in the lab at the bench top, all of
25:47
Speaker 7: my colleagues would have caught this, that the rosemary is
25:50
Speaker 7: too high.
25:51
Speaker 1: Wait did you were you?
25:53
Speaker 4: You?
25:53
Speaker 1: Who you having to get with you friends? Did any
25:56
Speaker 1: of them have the tomato soup? Yes?
25:59
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
26:01
Speaker 2: The rosemary was so high that it tasted like a
26:04
Speaker 2: Christmas tree, Like a Christmas tree. That's so great. We
26:08
Speaker 2: weren't sitting for more than a few minutes when the
26:10
Speaker 2: door to the conference room opened.
26:12
Speaker 1: All right, oh wow, look at this. Here we are.
26:16
Speaker 1: This is major excitement.
26:19
Speaker 2: The mats and chefs had the batches in identical metal
26:22
Speaker 2: mesh baskets. Each was identified only by number seventy five
26:27
Speaker 2: one eight, six thirty seven. The taste test was blinded.
26:31
Speaker 2: We had no idea which fry was which.
26:34
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna start with you so six thirty seven. Ooh.
26:42
Speaker 8: As a century professional, we're not supposed to do you
26:45
Speaker 8: have anything away or saying anything I have a hard
26:48
Speaker 8: time doing this.
26:50
Speaker 9: That's a I'm sorry, that's amazing, You're a bad How
26:59
Speaker 9: is that not great?
27:02
Speaker 2: The baskets of fries were on the conference table in
27:04
Speaker 2: front of me. Everyone else had gathered around. These were
27:07
Speaker 2: people who make and can assume some of the world's
27:10
Speaker 2: most exotic prepared foods for a living. You'd think they
27:13
Speaker 2: would be jaded, but they weren't. They were on it
27:16
Speaker 2: and me My head was spinning. I was in heaven.
27:20
Speaker 2: It was all I could do to keep the rigorous
27:22
Speaker 2: objectivity necessary for a valid blind taste test?
27:25
Speaker 1: What are you tasting with? The first one? Six thirty seven?
27:32
Speaker 8: Texture in six thirty seven is shatteringly crisp. It's amazing,
27:37
Speaker 8: perfect French frie texture.
27:39
Speaker 1: It's wild yea Chewett's spungey crisp.
27:43
Speaker 8: But there's no hole in the middle, and it's it's
27:46
Speaker 8: nice and fluffy in the middle. They're like perfect French
27:49
Speaker 8: fries and they have a lot of flavor.
27:54
Speaker 1: All right, seventy five? How do you feel? It's seventy five?
27:56
Speaker 1: Number two?
27:57
Speaker 2: Nobody was interested. In seventy five they were oily, not crispy,
28:01
Speaker 2: almost sodden.
28:03
Speaker 8: Plant just mac.
28:10
Speaker 1: All right.
28:10
Speaker 3: Next one, the surface is really porous. There's a lot
28:17
Speaker 3: of oil squirts out when you bite into it.
28:20
Speaker 2: Three batches of fries prepared according to the same exacting specifications,
28:24
Speaker 2: but two were entirely forgotten and we didn't have to
28:28
Speaker 2: be told what kind they were. They were what the
28:31
Speaker 2: fast food world has been passing off as a French
28:33
Speaker 2: fry for the past quarter century. But the third batch,
28:37
Speaker 2: six point thirty seven, to die for. That was the
28:41
Speaker 2: old school fry, the kind of French fry that doesn't
28:44
Speaker 2: exist anymore. We have a big win for tallow That's
28:48
Speaker 2: what we're saying.
28:50
Speaker 7: There's so much going on here.
28:51
Speaker 3: Also, look at the color difference.
28:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, those look like fries. My heart is full of
28:58
Speaker 2: sadness again to think about how many millions and millions
29:03
Speaker 2: and millions of people around the world have never tasted that.
29:12
Speaker 2: That's when we brought in the millennials as a second opinion,
29:16
Speaker 2: but also as an act of mercy, because they had
29:19
Speaker 2: no idea that this is what a French fry could
29:21
Speaker 2: be like, and it seemed unbearably cruel to deny them
29:24
Speaker 2: that privilege. When a mound of six point thirty seven
29:27
Speaker 2: was just sitting there on the table.
29:30
Speaker 1: Can we agree with those are the best fries. We
29:31
Speaker 1: taste it all afternoon. I don't have more.
29:39
Speaker 2: Now do I hate Phil Sokoloff. I've thought a lot
29:43
Speaker 2: about this in the intervening years, and I've come to
29:46
Speaker 2: realize that I don't hate him for killing Formula forty seven.
29:50
Speaker 2: He could have bought a yacht and a big house
29:52
Speaker 2: in a gated community in Florida and play golf, and
29:55
Speaker 2: you know how I feel about golf. Instead, he took
30:00
Speaker 2: on McDonald's in an attempt to make the world a healthier,
30:03
Speaker 2: better place. My hat is off to him. It's really
30:09
Speaker 2: Donald's that I blame. They were custodians of a French
30:12
Speaker 2: fry legacy. The fry was sacrosanct. Their own founder said so.
30:18
Speaker 2: And what did they do. They rolled over, sold out
30:22
Speaker 2: their own heritage, as if how a French fry tastes
30:25
Speaker 2: were suddenly a secondary consideration. That's crazy. The only reason
30:30
Speaker 2: there was an argument about fries in the first place
30:33
Speaker 2: is that millions of people thought they were delicious. So
30:35
Speaker 2: what do we do? We made them not delicious. Wait
30:39
Speaker 2: a minute, I'm not done. It's worse than that. The
30:42
Speaker 2: original fries were sold in just one size two point
30:46
Speaker 2: four ounces. You don't need any more fries than that.
30:49
Speaker 2: But nowadays, what's the large serving of fries at McDonald's
30:53
Speaker 2: five point nine ounces, more than twice as big as
30:56
Speaker 2: it used to be. So we've gone from the McDonald's
30:59
Speaker 2: brother's original product, which gave us a modest amount of
31:02
Speaker 2: something sublime, to a large amount of something that tastes
31:06
Speaker 2: like cardboard.
31:07
Speaker 3: I remember going to McDonalds and having some French fries
31:11
Speaker 3: and going, oh, these don't taste is good because my
31:14
Speaker 3: dad had them changed the way they were made. But
31:18
Speaker 3: I think that's absolutely incredible that he did that. You know,
31:22
Speaker 3: he was really he was made to do something huge,
31:25
Speaker 3: and you know he did. He was amazing.
31:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, what did he say? You said that, You know,
31:34
Speaker 2: he got McDonald's to change the way they made fries
31:36
Speaker 2: and the frieses and taste is good. What did he
31:38
Speaker 2: say when you said that to him? Did you ever
31:40
Speaker 2: say that to him?
31:41
Speaker 3: Yeah? He just laughed. He agreed and he laughed. I mean,
31:46
Speaker 3: he did have a good sense of humor.
31:52
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised Phil Sokoloff wasn't interested in the sensual
31:55
Speaker 2: aspects of the French fry. Of course, not he was
31:59
Speaker 2: a zealot, a man shaken by his brush with death.
32:03
Speaker 2: He nibbled on vegetables and maybe an occasional turkey sandwich.
32:07
Speaker 2: He saw his job as getting all of us to
32:08
Speaker 2: think about the nutritional consequences of what we put in
32:11
Speaker 2: our mouths, and for that I think we are in
32:15
Speaker 2: his debt. But McDonald should have stood up and pointed
32:19
Speaker 2: out what is lost when we define food so narrowly,
32:22
Speaker 2: the world's oblique place, when there's no room for pleasure.
32:27
Speaker 2: You know what one of the Matson millennials said after
32:30
Speaker 2: she had tasted a tallow fry for the first time.
32:33
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you for the delicious fries. Revisionist History
32:55
Speaker 2: is produced by Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista,
32:59
Speaker 2: Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton.
33:05
Speaker 2: Fln Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Gara.
33:09
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Andrew Stelzer, who came with me to Matson,
33:12
Speaker 2: and as always to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg at Panopley.
33:17
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
33:22
Speaker 2: While I still have you, I want to remind you
33:24
Speaker 2: that Revisionist History has a website where we provide links
33:27
Speaker 2: to books and articles and videos of relevance to the episodes.
33:30
Speaker 2: Please check it out at revisionisthistory dot com. For this episode, though,
33:35
Speaker 2: I want to give a special shout out to two
33:37
Speaker 2: people whose work helped me a lot. One is Gary Taubes,
33:41
Speaker 2: who has been writing really provocatively about what we eat
33:44
Speaker 2: and what it does to us for a very long time.
33:47
Speaker 2: His most recent book, which I loved, is The Case
33:49
Speaker 2: Against Sugar. The other is Nina Teischeltz, whose fantastic book
33:54
Speaker 2: The Big Fat Surprise, Why Butter, meat and Cheese Belong
33:57
Speaker 2: in a Healthy Diet was of enormous help to me
34:00
Speaker 2: in researching this episode. Thank you Nina, thank you Gary,
34:04
Speaker 2: and to all those of you listening, I recommend those
34:07
Speaker 2: two authors to you whole heart.
34:09
Speaker 9: Whe did it thin