Support for this American life comes from Capital One right now, you can earn 100000 bonus miles, you can actually use redeemable for vacation rentals, car rentals and more. When you spend 20000 dollars in your first year with the Capital One venture card, what's in your wallet? Limited time offer terms apply the Capital One dotcom for details. Back on one of the early episodes of our radio show, my friend Vertamae Grosvenor, come on, Berta was this amazing cook with a cookbook in 1970, Vibration Cooking that is still in print today.

I've already had the story that you would tell some times that back when her book was published, she was interviewed on the Today Show by Barbara Walters, who on the show back then and the Waverider told the story. She was on TV making fried chicken for Barbara Walters. And at some point, Barbara Walters asked her how detail the chicken done. And Verda says, you can tell by the sound.

And invertors telling McWhorter's gives her the skeptical look like give me a break and cuts to commercial, but he said that was always people's reaction.

They say, you're crazy, VirTra. That's not it. They said, you know, tell me something real, like, why is it 15 minutes, 20 minutes or whatever? And I said, you've got to listen to the sound of the grease, listen to the music.

So for years, Vertamae claim that you can tell if a chicken's done purely by the sound.

And to prove the point, you agree to come onto our radio show to conduct this little radio experiment where my co-workers and I fried chicken and we recorded it at four different stages of frying and then shuffle the order of the recordings to play Poveda to demonstrate once and for all. Was it true? Can somebody tell if a chicken's cooked without any visual clues, without smell? OK, and so here is me playing the four recordings for her and her trying to pick out which one is the chicken when it's finished.

Let's roll. And our listeners at home can play along with us here. Let's roll the first little sample sound. I would say, yeah, I'd say that's something like the middle, OK, but that definitely isn't towards the end you're saying, yeah, it's in the middle, going toward the end, it's in the three four.

OK, let's let's hear let's hear it sound. Number two, please.

Number two is toward the end to OK, number three. I think that's the beginning, more toward the beginning, that is more towards the beginning and number four, that's an anger toward the end, OK?

When all those little balls are forming on the bottom, that's little nice crusty.

Now, Verdie, if you would have to hazard a guess as to which one would be the very last one.

So I still say it's one or two that's toward the end.

The answer is no to. So Vertamae came reasonably close, but she was not totally certain.

Telling if a chicken is done only by sound turned out to be harder than she thought it'd be.

Yes, it was hard. You have to see it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, it's. I mean, it's a serious you know, it's a labor intensive thing. You've got to stay on it. You just can't be talking on the phone and watching TV. You got to stay on that chicken.

I was asking your daughters today and they were saying how they can also tell if Rice is done by the sound.

Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I taught them that those are the kind of family values I taught my children, listen to the sound of the chicken, listen to the sound of the rice.

Video died four years ago. So I have to say, it got to me a little listening to this next part of the interview where she talks about her daughters and how happy I made her to hear what they said about her.

You talked to both of them? I talked to both of them. They were both really funny. One of them said everything that she cooks is golden brown and perfect. Perfect, perfect. Who said that? That was I believe it was Shandra, really.

But she said, but just because we're her daughters, that doesn't mean that she tells us the real recipes. We ask for the recipes and she tells us recipes. But then when we cook them, they're not the same. And we know that she's holding back on ingredients.

That's, well, not quite true. But you know what?

I just tell them. But then they have to they have to find out the rest for themselves.

There you go. This is what I say. I said, as with so many things in parenting, I say I put a little ginger in. Now I'm not going, you know, and they have to figure out how much a little ginger is.

Yeah, that's what they have to do. But, of course, really is everything, it's family and its culture and its tradition, it's improvisation, it's art. And today in our show for Thanksgiving weekend, we put together a show made of stories we've done over the years about food. In every one of these stories, somebody heads out on a quest either to figure something out or to do something very differently with food than most of us do.

I'm busy. Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us.

That's one dead ringer. So a few years back, one of our producers, Ben Calhoun, set out on a mission much more eccentric and labor intensive, the figuring out if a chicken is done by listening to the sound.

Here he is. I first heard about this whole thing in an email. It came from a listener, a woman named Emily Ranter. She works in the food industry.

And the letter Emily wrote was about a story she'd heard from a farmer, the farmer who told her this is apparently a person of some standing in the pork industry. And admittedly, I don't know the first thing about the pork industry, but he's in charge of a pork producing operation that spanned several states. The story he told Emily went something like this. A while ago, he was visiting a pork processing plant in Oklahoma. He's walking through it with a friend, a guy who managed the plant, actually, and at some point he saw boxes stacked on the floor labeled artificial calamari.

He stood there wondering for a second. And then he asked his friend, what's artificial calamari? Bung, his friend, replied, It's hog, rectum, rectum that would be sliced into rings, deep fried and boom, there you have it. OK, if I can. Let me just narrate for you what this would mean, it would mean that in restaurants everywhere, right this second, people are squeezing lemon wedges over crispy golden rings, dipping the rings into marinara sauce and they're eating hog rectum now.

They're chewing satisfied and deeply clueless. It's payback.

It's payback for our blissful ignorance about where our food comes from and how it gets to us. It's amazing and it's perfect. But it also seems like it couldn't possibly be true. So I called up the farmer to talk to him personally, I wanted to hear it firsthand. And the farmer confirmed the story, the entire thing, the boxes, the bung, but when I asked him to go on the record to tape an interview and give his name here on the radio, he very politely declined, which seems suspicious.

Right? When I asked him why, he said he'd spoken with his girlfriend about it and she suggested that he should think about the words that he wanted to come up when somebody Googled his name. This was all fine, though, because he referred me to the real expert, the guy who gave him the tour of the hog processing plant, and that guy, he agreed to talk. Hello. Hi, is this Ron? Yeah, yeah, this is Ron Mique, meat processing plant manager, presently residing in Mountain View, Missouri, where he runs an organic beef processing plant there called Beyond Organic.

If the story really were true, Ron would have been the guy who explained to the farmer what was in those boxes.

The boxes are 10 pound boxes and they were all. That cut off so much like maybe 10 or 12 inch piece of the bone and you know what it looks like this looks like after they're cleaned and washed and everything, they just looked like a bunch of big noodles in a box. Well, it looks like.

But but the specifically the labels that said imitation calamari, where where did you personally see the imitation calamari? Lavina.

I've never seen a label say that. That's all I was told by the people that told me that the people I work for, they told me that, oh, the people that you worked for told you that it was used for imitation calamari.

Right. And is there any possibility that you think that the when they were explaining this to you, that they were kind of having you on a little bit? Having me on. Yeah, like me. Yeah, well, I wouldn't think that, you know, it could be five percent. Could have been that, you know, but I seriously doubt it.

OK, just to give a little better picture, a pork bun and bung is the actual industry term for it is long and floppy and ugly.

At one end, it widens out into this more bulbous shape like a pink wrinkly pear. That's the rectum. At the other end, it narrows into a soft pinkish white tube. I know it sounds gross, but also consider we are a nation that eats more than a billion pounds of sausage every year.

Billion with a B..

Maybe you like liverwurst or cap cola or some sausage with a natural casing. Then you, like me, have eaten bung stuffed dried bong. A lot of brats and Italian sausages are stuffed in intestine. So if you eat those regularly, you pretty much live up the street from. So why does the idea of a fried ring of bong just feel grosser?

Partly it's the visual, right? When you see that little ring of calamari, you don't want to picture it in the context of a pig's behind. Then there are all the people who don't eat pork, period. Ron said there's also another reason, just because of the word boom, probably, and people don't just want to jump up and say, man, I might need some Bungoma, you know, I mean, that's just the way it is.

But the big question, the question you've been thinking about since we got on this topic, have you or I eaten imitation calamari bung dressed up as seafood? Well, Ron didn't know. He said his plant exported a lot of their bone to Asia, but he just didn't know much about whatever happened after it left the door. So he could only speculate anything he said would be a wild guess.

But. So I turn to people who would know is pork bun being falsely peddled as calamari? I called the USDA, the USDA's Food Inspection Service issued the following statement to me. Products we inspect, including those derived from pork, must be accurately labeled and cannot purport to be a product of another species. So it's against the rules, but people break the rules. A recent study of seafood by a group called Oceana use DNA testing and found that all across the country, fish is regularly being labeled as other species in restaurants and in grocery stores.

Escalade sold his white tuna Pacific Rockfish being fraudulently sold a snapper in Miami.

More than 30 percent of fish was being sold as something it wasn't. In New York, the number was 39 percent. Boston, 48 percent.

Los Angeles are already 55 percent, 55. That means if you order fish in L.A., you are most likely eating a species you did not order. In other words, seafood substitution is rampant in this country. And depending on where you live, when I can tell you can get cleaned hog bung for about half the price of clean squid.

So there would be money in it if you could pull off the switch. And as best as I can tell were you to do this, you would not be caught. A lawyer who's familiar with this area of law and regulation told me once Bung leaves the plan. There's a variety of agencies and entities that would be in play, USDA, FDA, state and local government. But ultimately, he said, the regulation we have is not designed to catch an offense like this.

It's aimed mostly at sanitation and food safety.

So bottom line, the lawyer said if somebody wanted to do it, chances are they'd get away with it. So is someone out there doing this? Well, for weeks, I looked for an answer. The USDA says they've never heard of anyone trying to pass pork bung as squid or any other species.

I contacted the National Restaurant Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the National Pork Board, a Squid Fishermen's Association, afternoon, Sysco and other big food and restaurant supply companies.

It's got a bung hog rectum. Oh, my gosh.

That's the executive director of the California Wet Fish Producers Association. But the answer was pretty much always the same. Nobody had heard of it. But almost to a person, they added that that doesn't mean it's not happening somewhere.

Ron makes it a lot of the bunk from his plant got exported. So my next call was to the US Meat Export Federation, which confirmed that, quote, The main destinations for pork buns are China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines. They are mainly used for processing, but we are aware of some uses in soups and certain entrees. We are not aware of them being used as a substitute for calamari.

But it's not impossible, unquote. So over the past few weeks, I've called Asian food suppliers, people who live in, work in and eat in those countries. I talked to a woman named Koreen Trang, who's written an overarching compendium of Asian cuisines. I've talked to academics at NYU and have offered and USC and Harvard. I've reached out to chefs who know Asian food. The answer, again, always similar, never heard of it.

But it's possible, partly because bunging doesn't have such a complicated reputation in Asia, where it has to be some kind of secret ingredient like it does here.

On the other hand, though, people pointed out that in Korea and Japan you can't get more than a few hours from the ocean. Squid is cheap and it's readily available. You'd only eat a substitute if you wanted the substitute. Generally, people said if the switch was happening somewhere, they'd guessed China.

Eventually, I found my way to this guy who I was really excited about, someone who I thought might have my answer. He was, get this, an anthropologist who lived and worked in China for 40 years, where he studied food and specifically meat.

When I talked to him, though, he made two point point one. My question about this happening in Asia was racist. Even just asking the question was racist, because it plays on ignorant stereotypes about other cultures eating things that we perceive as weird point to was that Ron Meek, my guy from the pig plant, Ron, was pulling my leg and he was getting away with it because I was a dumb ass. He told me more than once that I should, quote, find something worthwhile to do with myself.

When we ended our conversation, he told me that he was refusing to even dignify what I was doing by appearing on the radio or by letting me use his name.

OK, so to respond to his points one by one first, am I racist against Asians? Well, I'm half Chinese. My mom's Chinese like anyone. I've had the occasional issue with my mother, but this has not been one of them. We grew up eating chicken feed and fish eyes. And I think it's possible to raise the question of who eats what without being racist.

His second point, though, that Ron Meek was pulling my leg. I mean, the guy was still an expert on meat in China, so I called Ron back. All right. Give me some questions.

Then I told them the whole thing about the anthropologist, about what he said, I guess. I mean, the only thing I want to ask you is, is are are you messing with me?

No. I mean, that was what my boss told me, I was like, what the hell we say these hog bunks where he says, I use them for imitation squid and stuff like that.

But so in your in your heart of hearts, you believe it? Yeah, man.

I mean I mean, I ain't going to sit here and tell you things that are supposed to play with you when when I'm just going off of my knowledge of saving hog bungs. I mean, you got to think about how far advanced slaughterhouses are, especially big ones that want to make every penny count. Like the one I worked at. You bring the pigs, then you stand them and you stick them and the blood goes off into the trough and it goes down in its.

Vacuum sucked out of there with a vacuum. Into centrifuges and they separate the blood from the blood plasma. Uh huh, and they say that. I mean, they say the lungs, they saved the pancreas, they say the spleen's, they say the heart. The only thing left by the time it's all said and done. Is a skull and jawbone. I mean, you can be an anthropologist all you want if you don't work in a processing plant, you don't know.

I contacted the plant and worked out where this happened. And for what it's worth, they backed him up. They said their sales team had heard of people eating pork, bunkie's imitation calamari, though they hadn't witnessed it firsthand or heard it directly from a customer. It was all hearsay. So at the end of all this, I still had no proof that anyone was passing off Boeung as squid. And then I realized I hadn't asked the more basic question here, could Boeung do it?

Could it pass as calamari? And that question led me to a guy named Eddie Lynn. Eddie Lynn has eaten a lot of Boeung at least 100 times. He said probably more. Eddie has an extreme food blog called Deepend Dining and an online TV show called Kamikaze Kitchen.

I can definitely see a resemblance texture wise. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

It's sort of the sort of a rubbery texture, sort of like a kamari, huh? But you would really have to get rid of that, you know. You know, needless to say, fowl flavor and odor from the the bun.

Somehow I hadn't figured that the bun once it was scrubbed and rinsed and cleaned with steam, that it would still taste like, you know.

So yeah, you would definitely have to do some major, major blanching or brining.

I meant brining. Yeah. Huh.

Did you see that those flavors out of there. Yeah.

I mean, those flavors have been, you know, marinating in that pig for quite a while, so a lifetime.

So he thought it wouldn't be easy, but he thought it could be done. And there was only one way to tell if he was right to cook up some bun and eat it. And if the taste was overwhelming and the texture was all wrong, well, then I'd have my answer. And at this point, I'll be frank. I started to root for the bung. I realize that this is not a story about fraud. It's not a bait and switch story.

It's a story about possibility.

It's classic rags to riches, it's about whether a cut of meat, perhaps the lowliest most maligned, a bowl cut of meat in America might somehow in at least one place on the planet, be dipped in the redemptive oils of the great culinary equalizer. That is the deep fryer. And it might emerge transformed, no longer an outcast. But instead, hair combed, clean shaven in a suit and tie, it might walk reborn onto a table through sheer force of resemblance.

It might be love. It's history. Years of drudgery and hardship, doing the bodies, least glamorous job all washed away. Now, this is not the story of a con man like Bernie Madoff, it's pretty woman. This is whether Goodwill Hunting finds his way out of Southey. It's whether Charlie, on that very last chocolate bar really can get a golden ticket. To do all this, to try it, I called my little sister, Lauren, she's a chef trained abroad at the Cordon Bleu, worked at Michelin Star Restaurants.

She's that kind of chef.

Soon we were standing in front of a deli case. And I don't know why I feel hesitant about saying this, because I don't think it's racist.

It was in Chinatown, but there it is. Look at it. It looks like it looks like this, Victor. What do you mean? It looks like this one up here that's cut up.

It looks like a buffalo.

And Lauren had theories about pulling it off, brining, soaking, maybe braising.

But once we got to the store, once she'd seen the meat up close, her doubts got worse.

I think after looking at it, I don't think that. I don't think it's going to. You don't think it's going to work? No, it's too thick. It's too much there's too much muscle like muscle tissue, it's to use like a ring cutter to make it the right thickness. What are those bits are in there?

Oh, you know who? My sister said Eddie Lynn was definitely right.

The giveaway would be the stubborn flavor of poo.

That flavor, she said it's tough to get rid of the earth, revolves around the sun and Bung will always taste like.

But there was no backing out now. We would eat, we would eat our way to the truth. And so what if it didn't look good? So what if Bung was destined to taste like bun, you know, who didn't look good for? And he still put up a fight. Rocky Balboa. That's who this was it. The Bong vs. calamari, squid versus tail. The rumble in the bunghole.

We set up the tasting at a restaurant in the lull between lunch and dinner in the dining room, there was just a few tables eating and all around the restaurant, the morning shift was wrapping up as we walked in with a red cooler filled with squid and Hogben.

So originally I'd recruited some half a dozen people from our office at this American Life as Taster's, the final group, the day of the tasting included from the office, Seth Lynn and Brian Reid.

So when's the last time that you guys had calamari? I had calamari probably like a month ago. And what about what about your brand?

I haven't had it since we got this tip about about the possible. Oh, my gosh. If you've been avoiding. Yeah, no, totally.

And like, to be honest, like, I ate calamari pretty. Right. You know, I'm like a regular eater of calamari like that. It's not like all the time, but like it's something I'll routinely order if it's on an appetizer menu, you know. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in like an Italian American family where, like, my grandparents were also born here. I feel like calamari is just big abang that sector of people I like, you know, Olive Garden and stuff like that.

So I just repeating it, you know, I hadn't realized this for weeks. Brian had been avoiding calamari. He'd been living in fear.

Right. If you find out that they're indiscernible from each other, will you ever eat calamari again? No, I don't think so. That's why I want to do this.

Just to know going forward, back in the kitchen, things were looking bad. I'd given up on the idea that Bung would taste the same as calamari.

Now, I'd hung my hopes on the idea that at least visually, it would look the same.

But as my sister dropped the floured rings of Hogben into the fryer, they had turned into this kind of big, ugly, tangled plot. Nothing like the jiggly squid rings.

Oh, they're very they're very like scraggly looking. But then as if by a miracle, they changed my sister give a shake to the fry basket. And as they sizzled, the bung just seemed to gracefully snap into rings.

Oh, look at that, though. It's like magic. They're like turning into circles. Yeah, I'm going to pull these first one soon.

We were face to face with the plate on it. There were two piles of rings, similar in size, similar in shape.

The boeung had more of a frizzle edge to it, kind of like a fancy onion ring the calamari with smoother. So I asked Seth and Brian to just give a first impression.

I have a guess, but I could tell it's one of the things we like. You're pretty sure, but you could totally be wrong.

I thought it would be more sure. I don't I'm waffling now.

I just my gut reaction my gut reaction is that this was this was calamari and this was not OK.

Before you eat it, you see, I totally thought this was calamari, the other one. OK, so I'm going to do it at the same time.

OK, so just to be clear, what's going on here, Seth has chosen one pile of reins, which he thinks is calamari. Brian has done the same thing. Only Brian is choosing the other stack of fried rings.

OK, so we're about we're about to bite into this simultaneously, which we both think this is calamari, but they're the opposite. The opposite ones.

OK, so in actuality, Seth is right. Seth is eating calamari. The chewing you hear from Brian's mike. That is the sound of a calamari lover eating fried pig rectum.

I should also add there are actually two varieties of bung on the plate that day, one being that my sister had blanched over and over to any organic fecal flavor and then untreated straight up bungs, unfiltered, unchained, uncut, 100 percent pure bunk. That one, the latter one being at its purest at the height of its funkiness.

This is what Brian was eating as they ate. Seth still a confidant, I think. I think that was I think I was right. I think it was right, really.

I don't think I was right. Game, set, match.

Boeung And it wasn't just Brian. I thought so. Damian, who manages the restaurant, he also thought it was passable. A few of us picked up a faint flavor of pork rind. But if you weren't really looking for it, you wouldn't notice it was there. One of the restaurant staff, a guy named Ethan Van Buren, had the simplest, clearest explanation.

I think that when you slice something I really thin and deep fried, it's going to taste like something that's been deep fried.

If if a plate full of the bun came out, how many people do you think would would even like do you think you'd notice if you were in that setting?

I'd say top scenario is somebody says this calamari tastes funny and keeps eating it.

And that's for Brian. Oh, Brian. Brian was reeling a bit, trying to figure out just what this was going to mean for him.

I'm I I'm sure I've been fooled in the past. I'm just like sure of it. You're thinking that you've been places in the past that you've had. But I just imagine, like seeing a plate that looks like that with this food that looks like this on it, like sitting with my family growing up, like we definitely have eaten something that tasted like this and just thought it was calamari for sure.

Not only was he sure if he'd every Calama again, he didn't want to eat the calamari on the plate in front of him. Calamari, I guaranteed him, was real.

Just to repeat one last time, I have no proof that anyone, anywhere has ever tried to pass off pork bun as calamari in a restaurant. All I know is if you wanted to do it, it would be easy. And I'm choosing to believe that it's happening somewhere because at some point in working on this story, I stopped identifying with Brian and anyone who might feel ripped off or grossed out by getting imitation instead of the real thing. Now, I identify with the Bung, and I'd like to think that somewhere out there right now, under a heat lamp, a platter is sitting.

It's warm and it's full of promise and transformation and redemption. That's the world that I'll choose to live in.

For me, for you, for the bung. For the bunging, all of us. Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our program, that is and before you swear off Kamari forever, please, please notice that Ben is only saying it is possible that this is happening, that he did not find actual documented proof that Big Bang is being substituted for calamari abroad or especially here in the United States. Coming up, cooking chicken for dinner right in front of the chicken.

Who is your pet do you live with? Who watches you do it? That's in a minute.

Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Support for this American life comes from Capital One, your miles go further with the Capital One venture card, the travel card that lets you earn unlimited double miles for more than just air travel right now, earn 100000 bonus miles you can actually use redeemable for vacation rentals, car rentals and more. When you spend 20000 dollars in your first year, what's in your wallet? Limited time offer terms apply. See Capital One Dotcom for details.

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Better help. Dotcom LongTail. That's better help. A Dotcom Wagtail. American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today's program, Turkey and a face mask for the holiday season. This unusual covid Thanksgiving with so many things about the holiday are different. We put together a show with stories about food that we have done over the years. We've arrived at Act two of our program Acto Still Life with Chicken.

So Jonathan Gold was a kind of legendary food writer, invented this way of writing about restaurants that treated hole in the wall places and street food with the same seriousness that other restaurant critics had always written about fancy places.

This led to a whole genre of food writing and TV shows like Anthony Bourdain. And before he died in twenty eighteen, Jonathan was on our show a couple of times.

And this interview that I want to play you now, it was one of those conversations that just ended in a very different place than it began. As you hear, it ended with him talking about like I don't even know exactly what to call it, but like the nature of eating.

But it began with Jonathan explaining to me how he ended up living with a chicken. He explained that that happened by accident when he was in his 20s, he was not living the kind of life one usually associates with chickens.

This was during the period when I consider myself to be a performance artist of sort of a naked performance artist, to be specific.

He was putting together a performance. He had a system which could put out the requisite amount of annoying feedback sound at high decibels. He had the two full bottles of glazed American Beauty air freshener, which he would spray in their entirety in the performance space. And he had a live chicken, which he bought the day before the performance and one of those Chinese poultry markets in Los Angeles and comes the day of the show, an audience gathers in a darkened warehouse in West L.A. I don't know if you've been to a lot of performance art, but this was sort of really typical of the stuff that was going on with the period.

And I showed up and I was naked and I was carrying a machete and I was blindfolded and I stood in the middle of this pile of supermarket chickens, you know, like the broilers that you buy.

And the chicken that I had bought was tethered to a three foot rope around me.

And I hacked up and down blindly with a machete toward the chicken or just in general while I was blindfolded.

So I didn't know if was towards the chicken or not.

And I had fully intended that, in fact, I would kill the chicken in the midst of this performance, but chickens aren't that stupid and this chicken wanted no part of the machete state at the end of it throughout the entire time, apparently. And after ten minutes, when I was completely exhausted, I fell to a heap and everybody laughed and the performance was over. I don't know if you've stuck around after an art performance, but the few minutes after an art performance are the some of the most depressing in the world.

How so? You you've done your what you've done.

You're sort of bid for art, which is either worked or it hasn't. But you're sitting there, you're covered with chicken effluvia. In my case, it stinks to high hell. Everybody's gone and you've got to clean up and you're naked. It's really not a pretty picture. So Jonathan cleaned up and when he was done, he had a chicken and he didn't feel like he could kill the chicken, destiny had brought them together. He felt like he could not turn his back.

He says it was the same as if a kitten shows up on your back door scratching and lonely needy. So he took the chicken home. And in doing that, he stumbled across that thin, thin line that separates food items on the one hand from pets, on the other that divides the animals we eat from the animals we love.

So I get home and I have this chicken and I don't know what to do with it. So I spread out some newspaper on the top of my refrigerator and I put the chicken up there. I get a can of green giant bread niblets from under the counter and I open it and I put it in a little bowl for the chicken and I give the chicken a little water and the chickens on top of my refrigerator.

Because you think chickens eat corn, you should read that or something. And that was the available corn.

That was the available corn. I wish I had thought better of the niblets idea. Why? Because, in fact, if you're buying three or four cans of niblets a day, which is what the chicken made in your existing on almost nothing, which I was, then your Niblett bill turns out to be like some, you know, to figure percentage of your total income each week.

I mean, you can imagine living on fifty dollars a week, but ten dollars of it goes for anybody. It's just hard to justify an expense like that.

So at the remove of 15 years, I think I can probably safely admit to you now that one of the reasons that I stuck with niblets is because I like saying the word Niblett so much.

And this gave me the the excuse to use the words like Niblett in general conversation several times a day.

Usually it just doesn't come up.

And the chicken stayed there on top of my refrigerator for a long time, months, six months, I think it is like a one room apartment, a but I had a kitchen and a bedroom, so I didn't have to look at the chicken when I was sleeping, though, I did have to look at it when I was cooking.

Did you ever cook chicken? Of course I cooked chicken. Didn't you feel intensely disloyal?

No, I felt no particularly loyal to this chicken. I don't know if you've ever had chickens, but it's not like I mean, you don't pet chickens. Chickens don't really like you to pet them and you don't hold them. There's really no love that you feel for chicken in your life, I don't think.

But yet you kept the chicken. I kept the chicken because I couldn't bear to do anything else. And it's not like I could have carried it out onto Pico Boulevard and said, Bee free little chicken, be free.

Wow, wow, wow, wow. Did you give the chicken a name? I never named the chicken when I referred to the chicken public. I always call it the ham. How did you not name it? It was it was it was a creature in your house. The chicken always seemed temporary. It never occurred to me that I might have the chicken as long as six months. The chicken always seemed like something that I would have for just a couple of days.

And then what did you think was going to happen? I guess I thought a thought about the chicken expiring. B, I have to admit that there was a possibility that someday I would actually cook the chicken.

I went through a lot of chicken recipes, hundreds and hundreds of chicken recipes, but thinking maybe this will be the recipe for my Niblett Fed chicken. Exactly. Possibly, I have to say the most delicious chicken that you could ever eat because of this Knebworth, you can't buy Niblett Fed chicken for love or money, I don't think.

I'm not sure that a risk being existed that would have lived up to the fact of the chicken, this animal who you have come to know on a fairly intimate terms and who you have raised and who have put a certain amount of emotion into a chicken, if I might say, who has seen you naked?

The chicken did see me naked. Damn it.

The fact is, we need food to be just food, and as soon as it becomes a living thing, especially if we're city people, you know, we're not used to the conversion of living things into our food. It's it's hard. It's hard to handle without thinking. It has to be bigger than food, you know, without wanting to make it ritualised or something bigger than food. Exactly. I tell you a short, small story. Yeah, of course.

Um, a few weeks ago, I was in this Korean restaurant in Koreatown in Los Angeles. It was this place called the Living Fish Center that I'd always wanted to go because the name of it was so splendid, you know, living fish theater, I imagine, you know, some sort of like vast Vivarium where, like, Flipper was jumping through hoops and stuff. And I go in there and of course, it's just like a crummy Korean restaurant.

I mean, it's it's not that clean. And I don't know their tanks and stuff. I don't know what to order. So I order a fish soup because it looks like they have a small fish soup specialty on the menu. And it comes and it's just really strong spelling out that grade. And I try squid fried with bean sauce and onions, which was it wasn't that happening? And I'm about to give up and pay the check and go home with a vast table filled with ideas and stuff.

And it suddenly occurs to me what the specialty of the restaurant is. And, you know, I way the waitress over and I tell her that I'd like a prawn. And she is puzzled. She didn't expect me to ask for a prawn. But I repeat my question and she shrugs and goes and tells the sushi chef and he goes to one side of the restaurant and he climbs on this chair, this ordinary folding chair, and he reaches into this long tank that's running just below the ceiling.

And he wiggles his fingers in the water. When he wiggles the fingers, the prawns just become enraged and they start nipping at his fingers and they start attacking him and he picks out a couple of the liveliest ones and brings them back to his counter. And without washing his hands, mind you, just makes a few motions over it. And a couple seconds later, the waitress comes over with the prawns on this huge mound of ice.

And what he'd done is he'd taken off the exoskeleton. He'd essentially like the head was intact. And that little part of the tail that is always on prawns is still there. But the middle part is naked like a grub. And I picked up the problem with my chopsticks and it was not dead. This prawn, it was extremely alive and it was wiggling its legs and it was wiggling its antennas and its eyes were like swiveling madly on its icebox. And I was looking back at me, seeing me as actually the predator, the third creature that was going to eat it.

And that was a really freakish moment because as much as as much stuff as I eat and is low, low as I eat on the food chain and as many prawns as I have dispatched to my life, I have never before killed a living being with my teeth. And the prawn knew what I was going to do and he did not like it and I wasn't quite sure what to do. But if I put it down, the problem would have died anyway.

I mean, it's not going to live without a child. Somebody else would have eaten it, blah, blah, blah. So I bit into it. I bit his body off with my teeth and the prawns just relaxed in this way. That was really eerie. And the taste of the prawn, the taste of the meat of it was extraordinary. I mean, it was sweet. It was like there was life coursing through it. It was the most alive thing I've ever eaten, you know, obviously, literally.

But again, it was freaky. It was getting too close to the actual nature of consumption, which is killing a living creature with your teeth.

When you when you bit into the prion, did you actually bite off its head?

It's living head and have its head in its eyes. In your mouth?

No, I bit off its body and I held the and I held the head in my hands.

So so you so you had the head and kind of one hand in the tail on the other and you bit the centre. Right.

And I thought that, I thought that I killed it. But in fact, when I put it down, it was still had so much life in it that it. Grabbed a piece of salmon sashimi and wouldn't let go of it, and I don't think I ever want to do that again.

Did you feel like there was something about the experience that made it more? This word is a little corner than I intend, but it's in a way that I can think of that made it more sacred, that took it out of the mundaneness of the way that we eat, which most of us is eating without actually tasting and experiencing and thinking about what we're eating and what on the earth it is that we're killing to survive. Do you think in some way that it's that it's more acceptable to eat an animal if you are more awake to the fact that it is an animal and what's happened to it?

Or do you think it really doesn't matter? I think it matters a great deal. I mean, one of the greatest metaphors in Western civilization is that of, you know, Christ who gave his life so that others might live. And I don't want to be sacrilegious and I don't want to, you know, belittle that myth in any way. But a pig is giving its life so that we might chicken is giving its life so that we might eat.

And I think the least that we can do is to think about that chicken, to think about that calf that we're eating, not necessarily to be sad for it, but to celebrate it, to be aware of that being that it was that it wasn't just this bit of, you know, bioengineered protein that somehow managed to find its way into our plates. Jonathan Gold, if you're curious about his writing this, a collection of his columns called Counterintelligence.

I want you to go back to actually lunchtime with the king of ketchup.

So our today with the story of a man who has a very simple mission in life to give a little special treatment to a group of people whose contribution to society is often overlooked. The men and women of the food service industry who, when they meet this guy, tend to give him a little special treatment in return.

The story, as you'll be able to hear when you hear it, was first broadcast long before the pandemic. Jonathan Goldstein, whose name I know is very similar to the guy and actor, but that means nothing. Tells the tale, Howard Schaikewitz and I have been friends since we were kids, and so I can say with great authority that almost every day for the past 10 years, Howard Checkout's has either dined out or ordered in at least one of his meals.

Sometimes when Howard isn't sure what he's in the mood for, he'll lift an empty hand up to his mouth and pretend that he's eating. He stares straight ahead, trying to figure out if he likes the taste of the imaginary food he is shoving into his mouth. Sometimes his hand is holding a hamburger, sometimes a fork wrapped in spaghetti, and other times he is double fisting, either end of an invisible pork rib.

Howard's always loved a restaurant.

He was raised in a Jewish Eastern European household where the very idea of a restaurant was a ridiculous piece of decadence, something for Cossacks and cocaine addict who enjoyed flushing their money down the toilet. Restaurants had a transgressive allure, and as soon as Howard was old enough, he started sneaking away to them after school or sometimes on weekends while the whole family was still asleep. In fact, Howard was the very first person I've ever dined out with, alone, without any family.

We were 12 years old and we ate at Atomics Pizzeria, a place just down the street from us. It was owned by a crotchety old Greek man named Costa, who served a ridiculously large portions of food. We'd get a plate of fries the size of a dead Shetland pony, but right alongside of it, Costa would place one measly packet of ketchup. When we asked for more, he looked at us like we had just asked for more blood from his mother, still beating heart.

Whereas I learned to ration eating four to 500 French fries with a bottle cap sized dollop. Howard learned how to talk to Costa, how to win him over, how to make him see that giving us more ketchup was just the right thing to do. Along the way, Howard learned how to say in Greek, Thank you, kind sir. Bless you for the ketchup as well as the excellent kronur Paula. Versatile ketchup sauce. Here's many years to your ketchup.

Ever since way back then, Howard has had a very special rapport with the men and women of the food service industry, and he has worked very hard over the years to cultivate this relationship.

This is my neighborhood here. I've been to every single restaurant. They were like several times. So I feel like I can call it in every restaurant.

A couple of weeks ago, Howard took me on a walking tour of the best places to eat in his neighborhood. I've walked into bakeries with Howard, where the young girls and old man alike who work there have dropped their donut tongs to cry out with Joy. Howard, I've watched him get moved to the front of the line outside restaurants in Chinatown when he's relating to a waiter or a deliveryman. All that Howard sees is one person giving another person food.

He talks to them as though they are friends, brothers, even his servers are able to sense his purity of vision, and they bestow on him in every exchange some little bit of special treatment. Let me just show you a ghost. Here on the corner, there is a place called I'm not sure they used to be called the Diffie, which is the challenge. And that was a really great place. And they closed and they moved right across the street and they had needle spaghetti meal.

I would go there every day and I brought a lot of friends, but I got so it got to the point where when I came in, I was actually able to serve myself. That's nice. Of course we go. We go and they greet me. They won't even get up. I would go out for myself coffee. And I was actually I would actually serve other people coffee. I say more coffee, sir. At first it's a novelty.

Then they got very used to it. They actually liked it. The other funny thing is to one time they actually made me let me make toast and stuff, actually make something. I feel that's actually a true story.

In fact, Howard is such a beloved figure in the neighborhood that whenever our friend Tucker goes in to get takeout from Saras, a local Middle Eastern restaurant, he'll tell whoever is serving him that, in fact, the food was not for him, but that he was picking it up. For Howard, this earned in portions that were almost twice as large as what he'd normally get. Howard, he is the best man, his server would say as he piled food onto his plate.

You are so lucky to have a friend like Howard. Indeed he was.

But the funny thing is, is that Howard is so doted upon when he eats in restaurants that sometimes it makes it difficult for him to just sit back and enjoy his meal. He feels he has to balance things out and so he dotes right back. Because of that, it could be hard to carry on a conversation with him. His eyes will nervously scan the restaurant for any way he could be of help to the waiting staff. Howard's ears can detect the muted clink of cutlery falling to the carpet from clear across the room.

And when he does, he'll do a kind of concerned gym coat, trot over to the mishandled piece of silverware and pluck it up off the floor. So as much as Howard loves restaurants when he really wants to relax, he'll get home delivery. And since it was nearing lunchtime, rather than step into one of the many restaurants we were passing, Howard ushered us back in the direction of his house to dial out for our grub at his place. He pulled open his top kitchen drawer and I saw the many choices that lay before us.

There's about 400 menus in that.

Sure, I would say 400.

I'd love to count it.

I'd say if this if this handful is about 10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, as much as restaurant owners and waiters love Howard, it's deliverymen who really, really love him.

I mean, who among us even knows our delivery man's name? Howard knows their names and the names of their wives and children. When they come to his door, he invites them in and offers them water. And in return, they'll actually call Howard later on to see if his meal was to his liking, that it was warm enough, that there was enough ketchup and 90, 200 hundreds, very embarrassing to 10 to 20 to 30, but 250 menus.

And here there are some doubles for sure, or even like even like multiple copies, but only a residence order from all the time.

We decide to order from Howard's favorite restaurant, a souvlaki place called the Greek Village.

I mean, it took a number, tended to Europe, and I think that's it. Thanks. Have a nice day.

But while we wait for the food, Howard waves me over and opens his kitchen cupboard to reveal physical proof of his good standing with the service industry.

Here we go. These are all bags of ketchup, salt, soy sauce. And this is all from takeout. Yeah. And these are like big bags full of nothing but ketchup. Other some soy sauce.

So gone are the days where you had to, like, wheedle out a single packet out of Costa's hands free for your French fries. It's true that I have so much now. You know, I have so many packets here, but I no matter how many packets I mess, it'll never catch up to what I missed as a child.

Catch up then with vaudeville timing, our delivery arrives a shimmy.

Howard greets the delivery man like an old friend he hasn't seen in quite some time.

Thanks so much, man. He's your friend. He's a beautiful man. It's such a nice man. I'm telling you, I didn't get you in trouble the way it's customary in Montreal. I have.

Each time you give me Apple, you give me a juice, you give me everything.

When I order in. Like most people, I figure these guys want out of my house as badly as a bird that's accidentally flown in down the chimney. And I assist them in their passage, usually having the exact change with a tip already for them at the door. But at Howard's house delivery man, stay a long time. They seem to want to see me.

Can I offer you something? No, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much. It's not working anymore. I no, because I think I know someone else. OK, ok. I see everything is different. I feel so bad but my colleagues won't ask you, you know, I feel like well we don't know where you're going to go. You don't have to feel. I know, but I don't really get you.

After about ten minutes of this, I just want to eat. I find myself eyeing the bag of souvlaki lying on the floor like a campground bear. I realized then that I'm just not made of the same stuff as Howard and I never will be.

When we finally sit down to eat, I can't even get Howard to admit that he's doing anything so special with guys like Schmeer. I think we go back and forth on this.

Yeah, because, I mean, most people won't go to the extent that you do, which is why you have guys at work, the telephone coming by their house to meet you.

That probably doesn't happen that often, but I really believe I don't really do anything. I'm not.

But I mean, just empirically, you have to see at this point that you're getting responded to differently than most people. So there must be something different. No, you know, someone's got to come to my door more than a few times and they know my face and are saying, how are you going to treat that person like a human being? And most people, I think, are probably rude to them, like most people that I know give me a buck.

And I think like that they do a they have a harder job than a waiter or a waitress, because here's a guy who takes your food, gets into a car with his life, goes into traffic, come back in a second, risked his life. I know he's driving a car, you know.

Howard's worked all kinds of food service jobs himself as a waiter, a busboy, a short order cook, and he says that as a result, he absolutely loathes the feeling of being served. There's something that just feels embarrassing and unnatural about it. But it even goes further than that in his interactions with the service industry, he's looking for a particular feeling, a kind of cozy moment where he can palpably sense that the waiter has forgotten that he is a waiter and that they are both simply relating as human beings.

And then once he knows this, once he knows they're both getting along and everyone's happy, he can move on. He isn't looking for anything else from them. His motives appear that way. But these kinds of special moments don't come without strings attached. And sometimes Howard gets into trouble. Earlier in the day during our walking tour, there was one place we didn't stop into a little convenience store around the corner. Howard became uncharacteristically somber and quiet as we walked by the storefront window.

The owners, a Greek woman in her 60s named Voula and her older sister, used to be pretty friendly with him. Sometimes Voula wouldn't charge and the tax on his chocolate bar, and on occasion she'd have him sit behind the counter with her on a plastic milk crate. It wasn't much, but it was still more than what the other customers got, and it made Howard feel special. But then at a certain point, things started to get more intense.

There had been several hold ups there by knife point, gun point. And, you know, I felt really bad for them. I'd see them really shook up the kind of tough ladies. But, you know, they're alone. And I told them myself, you know, if you have any do you think there's any trouble or something? I'm just around the corner. You give me a call.

And I really meant it, like in in case of emergency or, you know, just that there someone they can call some kind of community effort a community. But she started she would call every day.

She would call them for all kinds of reasons to have them come by and fix things or to run errands for her. And he would try his best to be accommodating, should even call him just to chat, even though all of this was more than Howard could shoulder, he was reluctant to put an end to it. It was only after the calls got later into the night at one and two in the morning that Howard's friends started insisting he tell her that enough was enough and against his better judgment, he did so.

Howard wonders if it was right to give her his number in the first place.

I made that offer, assuming that that it would be understood that there's a cutoff point. But to another person, you know, that offers a is a real genuine offer. If I need help, I'm going to call you. And she did. And and maybe she's the one. That's right. You know, so it's ironic that, you know, just, you know, like being nice to someone. I actually had the adverse effect, the opposite effect.

And and it ended up being like a disaster. And like now two people are not even friendly with each other. There have been other disasters for Howard disasters where he was the one who went a little too far, like there's a time he became so consumed with helping this neighborhood Chinese restaurant that without being asked, he took it upon himself to draw pamphlets for the place. The owner accepted Howard's flyers but never circulated them. Later, the owner picked a screaming fight with Howard over an order, and Howard never went back.

And then there was the time he brought in beautiful framed photos of Lebanon to his favorite Lebanese restaurant so they could be reminded of home.

But the photos were never hung up, nor were they ever referred to again. But for Howard, those things don't matter, and I know that he'd probably even do them all again. There are so many other moments that make his good intentions feel repaid in full. Some of his favorites are when delivery, many no's passing by in their cars. As he's walking down the street, it shocks him out of his reverie when they honk their horns in a quick, affectionate burst.

For a brief moment, it feels like a reassuring slap on the back. Howard thinks to himself that they're the best, and it fills him with so much gratitude that if he had a pear or a peach in his coat pocket, he would wave them over and give it to them.

Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast Heavyweight, which just finished its fifth season, I heartily recommend it. Great stories. You can hear it on Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts.

The. Well, our program was produced today by Nergal with mixing up from St. Nelson, Beth Lake and Matt Tierney, special thanks today to the restaurant Aurora and Brooklyn, who let us use the kitchen for our calamari taste test in Act one, our website, This American Life Dog.

We can do over 700 episodes of our program for absolutely free. This American Life is devoted to public radio stations by PRICK'S, the Public Radio Exchange.

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You know, that's just the way it is. I'm IRA Glass.

Back next week, the more stories of this American life.