Alton Brown on cultural appropriation, Ozempic, and the USDA

Alton Brown has spent years demystifying cooking on his Food Network show Good Eats. Now he’s brought his same wit and insight to the page with Food for Thought, a collection of essays exploring everything from childhood memories to the cultural power of cuisine. As he embarked on a nationwide book tour, Brown joined The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie in February to talk about the forces shaping how, and what, we eat.

In this conversation, Brown reflects on growing up in the 1960s, when Saturday morning cartoons and sugary cereals were his first taste of consumer culture. He makes a case for curiosity as the most powerful human trait, laments that food competition shows have made cooking something to be won rather than shared, and discusses government food regulations, the decline of home cooking, and the rise of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic.

Reason: You open Food for Thought recalling growing up in the 1960s, watching TV on Saturday mornings, and eating Cap’n Crunch. What is so special about those Saturday morning memories?

Brown: No child today can understand the magic of Saturdays. If you were good, at least in my household, you got complete control of one of the TVs for several hours. It was your first real exposure to choice. It was also your first exposure to a form of media that was completely out of control as far as trying to manipulate your young mind—which it did.

And Cap’n Crunch was just the flavor…the sense memory of these hard little pillows shredding the roof of your mouth, which I enjoyed. I’ve always liked a little pain with my pleasure. That’s what makes that memory so potent.

There were tie-ins between the cartoons we watched and the products that were being sold. How much of the Cap’n Crunch experience was the packaging and the commercials and his swashbuckling?

Let’s step back from the Cap’n and look at the world of sugary cereals in the ’60s. What’s significant is that this was really the first time that children were being directly marketed to by very smart people who were designing products and advertising specifically to [us]. Kids all of a sudden felt seen by a bigger world.

And we can be critical about that because a lot of companies were selling kids really crap nutrition. But the world has not changed one iota. In fact, it’s just taken that model and perfected it as we break into microtribes. It’s the same thing.

You put a lot of emphasis on curiosity and seeking out new things.

I do talk a lot about curiosity, which I think is the most powerful and most positive human emotion. I don’t think that one needs to delve into strange things for the sake of strange things. But there is a real value in the brain being out of its comfort zone, your senses being out of their comfort zone, your body being out of its comfort zone, in a thoughtful, exploratory manner. I’m not going to say that it’s critical to being a good person, but I do think that it makes life a hell of a lot more interesting.

The way you describe a pizza you encountered as a student in Italy is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read in forever. What was going on with that pizza that blew your mind?

I was lucky enough to spend a semester of college in a small town in Tuscany, Italy, doing theater there with the University of Georgia. I got invited by this old man and his grandchildren to go up in the hills—I would never be able to find it again in 100 years—to this shack. This guy was making pizza. The pizza was utterly alien when delivered to me. It was like an amoeba of flat, crackery, burnt-on-the-bottom dough with a little oil, a little cheese, and shaved artichokes—which I’d never had before—and some peppers.

I’ve never been able to completely get my head around why that was so important. But I will also say that the place itself was very important—this strange, mysterious place. It was almost like something out of The Odyssey. It’s become in my mind, over decades, epic.

You tell another story about a meal you had at a motel in South Carolina with an Indian family who were living on the premises. Why has this stayed with you?

I can’t remove the incredibly generous hospitality and openness with which it was given to us. These were really humble people living in a very humble little apartment in the back of a motel. And they opened that home up to us without reserve. I think that flavors the meal in a very powerful way. Yes, the soup was amazing. It was redolent of all these spices. It was literally like somebody had put Southern India into a juicer, extracted out everything of it, and then put it in this little cup. That was a powerful sense memory thing. But I don’t think that I had ever experienced that level of open hospitality of just the simple act of strangers feeding me.

What’s the positive case for “cultural appropriation” in an era where people often say that you shouldn’t make food or maybe even eat foods from other cultures?

I have an essay in the book about this, because it’s something I think about a lot. So many foods are not actually [from] where you think they’re from. I talk about the fact that fish and chips in England, that’s a Jewish diaspora dish. A lot of national dishes are that way. Shakshuka in Israel—it’s North African. Everything’s fluid as people move around the planet.

If a Greek family starts a pizzeria, if a Chinese family straight from Beijing opens a hot dog shop, are they appropriating or are they just smart? If I put Sriracha on my scrambled eggs, am I appropriating or is that just culinary sense? I think it’s all a matter of how you do it.

This is America. You buy the groceries, the food is yours. But if you really love something and you spend time learning about it, appreciating it, and give credit where credit is due, I don’t think it’s appropriation. If it’s done right, it’s celebration.

This whole thing of “You shouldn’t even be eating it”? I’ll eat whatever I freaking want.

Cuisine in America has gotten astronomically better and more interesting over the past 60 years. Why did that happen, and is it a good thing?

It happened because of food media, above all. If a Laotian family opens a small restaurant in Buffalo, New York, and no one but Laotians go to it, then it doesn’t blow up. Instagram and the internet in general change that exposure level—which is good, because then more people learn about it, the world becomes more intimate, and there’s a great amount of appreciation.

The flip side is, unfortunately, that America’s cooking skills at home are decaying. I think that part is because now so many young people consume so much culinary content in places like TikTok where food videos are more freak shows than they are representations of food that you would want to make and eat.

You’re down on the competition shows, right?

I don’t want to do any more of them. I did my share. I did them because I had a contract and I had to do the work. They have a place, but that’s all there is anymore. I think young people now see food as simply something you use to beat somebody else.

Why does the perfection of shows like Martha Stewart’s rankle you so much?

I know a lot more people that stopped entertaining after the rise of Martha Stewart than those that started entertaining. They suddenly became self-aware of their own lack of perfection and the fact that they didn’t have the right pots and pans. I absolutely hate that. I’d rather somebody make a big pot of soup and invite a bunch of people over and have a good time. That used to be what hospitality was about. It wasn’t about impressing; it was about sharing. I think we had a lot more fun then.

How did you come up with new ways to illustrate the science of gluten or how different molecules mix on Good Eats?

Probably 50 percent of the time spent researching and writing that show was about coming up with workable, visual, entertaining, and yet accurate models. What I did not let myself get caught up in was a level of exactitude that would’ve resulted in no one understanding any of it at all. This is a complaint that scientists had about the show. They would say, “Well, that’s not really how gluten works.” A lot of teaching done by scientists ends up not working because they go for 100 percent or nothing. I’d rather have people get 70 percent in a way that’s entertaining, which is absolutely critical. If you aren’t entertaining people, they are not paying attention.

With Good Eats we saw a whole person type get off the sofa for the first time, and that was the engineer-minded American male. A lot of them were motivated by either the devices that we hacked—like smoking a fish in a cardboard box—or understanding how something worked. [That] got a lot of people into the kitchen who had not been in the kitchen before.

What’s your take on drugs like Ozempic?

First, we can’t just look at them as weight-loss drugs because a lot of these drugs are proving to have a lot of effect in other areas. I am not a doctor. I read a lot—but I’m not about to get into the discussions of any of these other things.

I will say this: Medicine should cure things, right? And then allow you to go on your way without it. If you break your leg, you get a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with a crutch. Do you want to walk on it for the rest of your life? I personally wouldn’t. Whatever it is, I think the goal is to get yourself to where you don’t need it anymore. What I’m afraid of is that that is not going to be what happens with these drugs.

You have been outspoken in talking about how the United States Department of Agriculture [USDA] and the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] are not particularly good. What do you see as the problem with those agencies?

[They’ve] almost always been designed for industry. The USDA was created to support industry, not to protect consumers.

Organizations like the USDA should absolutely have hard and fast labeling rules, quality rules. You shouldn’t be able to say one thing when it’s another. I don’t even think you should be able to take a container of corn oil and put the label gluten-free on top of it. OK, yeah, it is. But there’s no gluten in corn.

We need better controls on what goes into food. We need warning labels. We need education. I used to say that culinary and nutritional education should be in the home. It’s not realistic anymore. I don’t know any parents that can fight phones and iPads and social media.

We need to be like the Japanese. We need to have home ec in school from about age 6 to graduation. The Japanese put a lot of emphasis on the fact that if you teach a child about nutrition and empower them—whether it’s shelling the peas or draining the tofu—they then go home and engage in their families in a more team-like way, which is probably the most important part of the model. It makes them better family members.

If we don’t get culinary nutritional training into schools, I don’t know what will happen. People don’t want to admit what a problem obesity actually is, because two industries thrive on it—the food industry and the medical industry.

What’s your sense of the Make America Healthy Again movement that has emerged with the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services?

I have not read a piece of news since the election. I needed to disengage from all of that. They’re all going to do whatever it is that they’re going to do and we’ll all live with it, I guess.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.