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This is 5G built right. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is a special edition of Sunday Morning. With just days to go till Thanksgiving, it's the food issue.
Our annual invitation to eat, drink, and be merry. Much as we may believe that a good meal can cheer us up, is there really any scientific proof? Is it actually true you are what you eat?
Susan Spencer will serve up the evidence. Maybe you eat for pleasure. Maybe you eat to stay fit. But you probably haven't thought about eating to improve your mental health. Well, think again. Food is medicine. Food is brain medicine. How many American families do you think would see an array like this on their Thanksgiving table?
I hope after today that all of them will. Oysters and other food for your mood ahead on Sunday morning. JBJ are the initials of rock star Jon Bon Jovi. And of the unusual restaurant he and his wife operate, Tracy Smith has saved us a table.
Jon Bon Jovi and his wife Dorothea are happy to feed the needy. They just hate taking the credit. What motivates you guys to do this? The question should be asked why am I doing this interview?
I don't like doing interviews because we want somebody watching this to do this. Jon Bon Jovi serving up hope later on Sunday morning. From there it's on to a smorgasbord of treats from all over.
Jim Axelrod has a sampling. From spicy offerings of Indian food along the Wyoming interstate. To tacos served up by movie tough guy Danny Trejo.
To a born in Korea social media must see. We travel the world in search of new taste sensations. Coming up on Sunday morning. Once the Thanksgiving feast is over what do you do with the leftovers? Martha Teichner says the answer is simple. Put a lid on it. Tupperware was designed with an accent on beauty for people of fine taste. Here's something you may not know. Tupperware designed containers for NASA to grow veggies in space. We have metal for the microwave.
Go what? Ahead this Sunday morning you are invited to a Tupperware party. Lee Cowan has discovered it's a lot easier to drink and be merry after you crack open a bottle that's aging well. Before you go out and buy a bottle of something new to toast with this Thanksgiving check out the stuff you've had for years.
Each bottle just like a wine ages in a different way. The haunting allure of vintage spirits. Thank you sir. Later on Sunday morning. We have those stories and more. All coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Has science conclusively proven you are what you eat? Not yet. But it is finding evidence suggesting that what you eat may help determine how you feel. Susan Spencer reports our cover story.
Let's see what else you got. So this is a shot from Japan. Globetrotting photographer Dave Krugman feels at home no matter where he is in the world. This is in Taiwan actually.
Taiwan. You always take your camera with you. Yeah. But he hasn't always felt comfortable inside his own head. You've had issues with depression?
Yeah in my life I have. Even as he was building an Instagram following of about 300,000. It wasn't matching up with the way I was feeling about life which was like that I wasn't enjoying my day-to-day life really.
I wasn't. He tried therapy then antidepressants and finally ended up with an unconventional psychiatrist who posed an unconventional question. Did he ask you specifically what you ate? Yes.
What do you eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner? Yeah we definitely went through it. And thinking about what he put in his mouth really opened his eyes. It made me realize I would just eat whatever popped into my head at that moment. Yeah. I'll go get some ramen that sounds great. Chocolate cake. Yeah chocolate cake.
What's the matter with that? Food is medicine. Food is brain medicine. Psychiatrist Drew Ramsey is Dave's doctor. In your everyday life the number one factor that you have control over in terms of your mental health it's at the end of your fork.
His specialty is the daily special and how it affects your mind. Dr. Ramsey calls this growing new field nutritional psychiatry. Do you treat food as you would a drug and say this is your prescription for anchovies and how does it work? All of my patients have a sense of foods that I want them to be eating more of. Those foods you guessed it the Mediterranean diet. Colorful vegetables, seafood, olive oil and lots of leafy greens. We have some sauteed kale here.
That's Samantha Elkrief a trained chef who works with Dr. Ramsey. Now this is probably my favorite brain food on the table because these are purple sweet potatoes. Together they showed us how to make thanksgiving better for your brain. Oysters anyone? Well Susan someday maybe you'll like the oyster.
I thought you were going to give that to me. No a lot of people don't like oysters. Right. They're these raw slimy scary things that maybe make you sick if you don't eat it in the right month.
Exactly. Food fear. Would you ever sit down and eat a cheeseburger and fries? Well I wouldn't eat a cheeseburger because I don't really eat that much meat and I don't eat dairy but I would eat like a salmon burger with collard green wrap or something like that. Have that all the time.
One of my staples. Unlike cheeseburgers Dr. Ramsey says oysters have unique nutrients making them one of the best foods for depression. Why can't I get these same nutrients out of a multivitamin?
First of all oyster date night is incredible and salmon date night is incredible and fish oil and supplement date night has never really been much fun for me. There's an idea that people have that we can just take supplements and be healthy and that's simply not true. What can you say conclusively about the impact of food on depression? Very conclusively food impacts your risk of getting depressed. And some recent research seems to back that up. In one study of people diagnosed with depression a brain health diet added to standard treatment relieved all symptoms in about a third of the patients. As for criticism that the science still is inconclusive. The evidence has really just started. We've not had any randomized clinical trials about food and the treatment of mental health until 18 months ago.
So this is very new. Given all the emphasis on food what role do you see for antidepressants? Antidepressants are a great treatment for depression. You see the two is complementing one another. The two complement each other perfectly.
This one for sure. While the doctor writes the prescriptions the chef makes the house calls. Do you ever go so far as to physically take patients to the grocery store and say this not this this?
Absolutely they go to their homes and cook with them. If you still find this whole brain food thing hard to swallow neuroscientist Lisa Moscone at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical College says the proof is in the pictures. When you look at a brain scan of somebody who has say the Mediterranean diet. Yeah. And somebody else who doesn't. Can you look at that brain scan and literally see a difference?
Very often yes. And this is a very healthy looking brain. The brain on the left belongs to a woman on the Mediterranean diet. The other one to a woman who eats standard western fare. High fat high carbs.
It shows actual shrinkage with likely cognitive decline Moscone says and she blames our lousy American diet. You tell me yes or no if somebody who's thinking about their brain health would eat the following. Okay. French fries? No. Ice cream? No. Bacon? No.
That was painful. Fruit loops? No.
Don't laugh. Pop tarts? No. Pizza? No. How about anchovies? Yes.
Oh good. Yeah it is amazing that I'm here. Except for those anchovies that's mostly stuff Dave Krugman won't go near today. Waking up having like eggs and some avocado I definitely just have more energy throughout the day. What about antidepressants? Are you still taking them? No no I'm not taking medication for depression right now. Your medication is breakfast.
Yeah exactly. My medication is is very good Italian olive oil. In this time of empty storefronts how handy not to mention tasty would it be to find a cornucopia of dining options under one roof.
Pretty tasty indeed says our Faith Salie. Once upon a time Americans actually left their houses to shop but with the rise of online shopping thousands of brick and mortar retail stores have closed. It's being called a retail apocalypse.
Store after store shutting down. And some developers are hoping to fill that empty space by filling eager bellies. This is a food hall. Even if you've been here 10 times you walk in and you're discovering something different.
Phil Colicchio is a consultant with the real estate firm Cushman in Wakefield. So how is a food hall different than a food court that we'd find in a mall or an airport? Well it's a food hall. It's a food hall. It's a food hall. It's a food mall or an airport. Food court was never really designed to give you an experience of any kind.
It wasn't designed to make you say wow. In a food hall all your senses should get activated. Lots of variety lots of artisanality. What is artisanality?
That's is it that mean fancy? No you know what it means not corporate. They may not be corporate but food halls are big business. In 2015 there were just 70 food halls in the U.S. By the end of next year there will be more than 400. Detroit has a food hall built out of old shipping containers. In Anaheim there's one inside a former citrus packing plant. Chicago already has 10 food halls with more on the way.
For us this wasn't a space filler. This was intended to be a traffic generator. Nebraska real estate developer Jay Nottle. His inner rail food hall is part of a complex on the site of a former racetrack. And these are great. He turned to New York chef Akhtar Nawab to help curate the space. Omaha's inner rail food hall opened last month. The destination here is food. The destination is not to go shopping. People are coming here specifically because they want food they want an experience. Nawab scoured Omaha looking for the best food the city had to offer. Which is how he found 24 year old Chloe Tran. She was anxious to expand but didn't think she had the money to open a second location of her Vietnamese sandwich shop.
Brick motor shop would cost like at least five to ten times more just to get this started. Vietnam isn't the only far off land whose cuisine is represented. In fact culinary diversity is part of what makes each food hall unique. Sagar Gurung serves up Himalayan dumplings called Momos.
Is the first one ready? Gurung was born in Nepal but grew up in Nebraska. Back then his neighbors used to complain constantly about the smell of his family's cooking. And you know fast forward 20 plus years now I see people lining up to pay for the same foods. This is Omaha and there are dumplings from the Himalayas. This is Omaha and there are dumplings from the Himalayas.
Isn't that great? Now there's a place where you can interact with people that you've never met before and try cuisines from around the world. A kimchi mac and cheese egg roll. Hello Korea.
Korea meets America right? Even if all these dishes are Instagram worthy Phil Colicchio says a good food hall should give you something technology can't. A sense of community.
Since the cave people we ate together and that's probably not going to change even in an e-commerce dominated world. Ever been to a Tupperware party? Martha Teichner cordially invites all of us to put a lid on it. Haven't you wished for unspillable containers that wouldn't break? Tupperware was designed with an accent on beauty for people of fine taste. Tupperware parties. A blast from the past if there ever was one.
That's why I'm here to show you how to use the seal properly. Are you wondering does Tupperware still exist? Do they even have those parties anymore? The answer is an emphatic yes. So does anyone else want wine?
But the parties are a lot more fun now. You guys check. We have metal for the microwave.
Go what? We've also got our silicone molds now. At least the one Corinne Brown threw last Sunday outside Charlotte North Carolina was. So literally I've been in Tupperware my whole life. My mom promoted to Tupperware manager right before she gave birth to me. I was born, raised, and burped in Tupperware.
Hear that whisper? Burped? Yep. The bowl that burped began it all. This tiny rim in the container slants out so the narrow groove in the Tupperware seal fits into it.
When you snap the two together and burp them, air is locked out, freshness is locked in. Earl Tupper had paint can lids in mind when he invented the Tupperware seal just after World War II. This is Tupperware. Believe it or not, lightweight unbreakable plastic containers were revolutionary then.
Unfortunately, too revolutionary. At first nobody bought Tupperware. Tupperware, in order to be fully appreciated, must be demonstrated. Enter Brownie Wise, who sold so much Tupperware by demonstrating the products to groups of friends that Earl Tupper hired her and turned her loose to transform the whole business of home sales. Brownie Wise with some of the nation's foremost sales authorities. She was a superstar, the first woman on the cover of Businessweek, a glamorous role model for the army of women.
And it was mostly women who made money, even supported their families as the stay-at-home moms, their husbands expected them to remain. Brownie Wise built their confidence and rewarded their success. As Peggy receives the grand prize of the Tupperware treasure armor.
It was women's empowerment by stealth. Tupperware brands runs according to her playbook to this day, which is good and bad. The stock price has tanked. The CEO just quit. The company has opened a holiday pop-up shop in a trendy part of New York City. In spite of a worldwide sales force of more than 3 million in more than 80 countries, the challenge is reaching people who buy cheaper containers in the supermarket and think of Tupperware as yesterday, if they think of Tupperware at all.
They don't know how to find us and that's the first question anyone asks us. Asha Gupta is head of marketing and strategy for Tupperware. Why should they buy Tupperware instead of this aisle of stuff in the supermarket? Once they start using our products, realize the worth of it.
The products themselves last a very, very long time. You're not taking the Tupperware. And don't you dare walk off. My Tupperware is my Tupperware. With somebody else's Tupperware.
I will come hunt you down and I will get my Tupperware back. That is a serious no-no. He's a Hollywood tough guy with a taste for tacos.
And as Luke Burbank tells us, a tale straight out of the movies. Whiskey. It's a private bar. You're not welcome. You told me that I'm not good enough to drink here. You are not good enough to drink here. You are not good enough to drink here. Get out. When it comes to the movies, they don't make them tougher. Somebody run up with your old lady legally.
You're allowed to cut them. Or more grizzled. I take my time, but I always win. Than Danny Trejo. All right, all right, all right.
But off screen, you're more likely to find him all smiles. Greeting and feeding folks at his chain of L.A. restaurants. Trejo's Tacos. It's good food. You know, good food. And people that know as Danny Trejo's restaurant, they want to see me.
You know, so what I do is I try to be here. And it's not just tacos. He sells donuts too, which were recently named Best in L.A., at L.A. Weekly, and he's even got a beer. While he's quick to admit that he's mostly the weathered face of the operation, Trejo did taste test every item. Oh my gosh. And he knew what he was looking for.
My mom was just an unbelievable cook, but you know, Latino families, you know, we eat really good like the first of the month, all the way up to about the 19th, and then things start getting scarce. Considering those early lean times, Trejo's success might seem improbable, but it's actually unbelievable if you consider where he started. Is this really a shirt that makes it look like I'm doing time? County jail shirt. And he would know, having been in and out of prison most of his young adult life on a variety of charges, drugs, robbery, assault. It's all intimidation.
That was what you had to do. For Trejo, surviving in prison meant making some hard choices. There's two kinds of people in prison. There's predator and there's prey. And you have to decide every day, what am I going to be? If it's prey, then I give up.
If it's predator, then I'm gonna kill somebody. Hooked on heroin and sitting in solitary after starting a prison riot, he finally hit rock bottom in 1968. And I remember asking God, Lord, let me die with dignity. That's all.
Just let me die with dignity and I'll say your name every day and I'll do whatever I can for my fellow man. Somehow he was able to turn his life around and was released in 1969. More important for him, he got and stayed sober. In fact, Trejo's big film break was actually related to his sobriety.
In 1985, he showed up on the set of a film called Runaway Train to give moral support to a production assistant struggling with addiction. The director liked Trejo's unique look and actually put him in the film, amazingly, playing, what else, a convict. I wasn't going to kill him.
He's going to shoot him in the neck. From there, Trejo built a career playing tough, scary guys. I got a spot on my arm just for you. How do you feel about being known as this kind of menacing character in films? I'm really glad I'm known for anything. It's really funny because for me, that menacing isn't hard to do. The minute that director says cut, I have to say I want to hold my kids, anything, because for me, staying in that guy is dangerous.
With over 350 roles, Trejo, now aged 75, can't believe how far he's come. And if you want proof, I used to run these streets here. Just take a walk with him in his old stomping grounds of Pacoima, California. I got arrested right there. They used to deal right there. That was our place to deal. Wait, so you used to deal drugs in this parking lot that now has this mural.
This used to be a dirt parking lot, by the way. It's a moment straight out of a Hollywood script. But this isn't make believe. This is Danny Trejo's real life. At least he's sure hoping it is. Oh, I'm so afraid somebody's going to wake me up.
Hey, Dan, let's go to chow. You mean I'm still in prison? All this is a dream, you know? It never goes away?
No. There are bad people in the world. The best way to protect the good people is to convict the bad. So here's to us.
The Good Fight, the final season, now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. Watch what you eat, goes that familiar expression. But we promise you there's nothing familiar about this story from David Pogue. In the hallowed halls of food fads, what in the world could be weirder than mukbang? Mukbang is a Korean word that means something like eat casting. Basically, it's watching long YouTube videos of other people eating. If you told people the whole deal, like I sit there for half an hour and eat this giant mound of seafood, what would they say?
Most of the time, people just say, oh, OK. You know, with that weird look on their faces like, OK. Bethany Gaskin may be the current queen of mukbang on YouTube, where she's known as Belove. 2.3 million subscribers have watched her daily videos more than half a billion times. Growing up, I haven't had the best life, you know, living in poverty. And so I know struggle. But I also understand what it takes to work hard to get yourself ahead. And get ahead she has. I make money through ads. In 15 months of doing this, I became a millionaire. Wow. Yes.
Washington, D.C., Texas, Arizona. And you should see her fan mail. Words cannot express my love for you. Thank you for helping us and relieving stress. Mukbang began in South Korea in about 2008. Mukbang was the result of a perfect storm of a series of economic, political and social changes. Robert Koo is the chair of Asian Studies at Binghamton University in New York. This includes the change in family structures, where more and more people were eating alone. In Korea, the digital technology was something that was embraced very early on.
And so mukbang emerges at a time when a lot of people who are eating alone could use the digital realm to find some sort of companionship. To find out the appeal for Americans, I spoke to some fans across the country. Hey! It works! Hey guys!
Over video. It seemed appropriate. Every single day, I would say we watch. Yeah, yeah. Every day. Kristen and Jamil Wallace of California are in it for the food.
You know, usually mukbangers are eating indulgent foods that normally you're not going to have in front of you. I have a very simple question for you. Why?
Why? Callie Halliday of Delaware How you guys doing today? watches the videos to have company. I just think you kind of feel like you're not by yourself. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that's a good feeling to know that somebody else can identify with what you might be going through.
It's not for the food. It helps with my anxiety and it helps me sleep at night. And 14-year-old Kirsten Zabauer from Louisiana is in it for the sounds. The smacking and the crunching.
The sounds are like really soothing because I kind of have ADHD so I need something to be plain. Wow. So this is where it all happens.
Yes. Meanwhile, Mukbang has changed Bethany Gaskin's life completely. Her husband Nate quit his job as an engineer to edit her videos and manage the business. You do the peppers and the sauce? It's so good.
She started selling her dipping sauce on Amazon and she's still posting a new Mukbang video every single day. I can't say I understand it. I don't understand it either but I just do it. To have people watch you eat, it's weird.
But the numbers are looking good, the money is right, so I'm going to keep on doing it. Just ahead, a pit stop along an interstate in Wyoming. And as Jim Axelrod shows us, when the truck stops here, an unlikely dining adventure begins. Behind this hole in the wall, at this hole in the wall in Laramie, Wyoming is a you won't believe it situation from the world of truck stop cuisine. If you'd bet me, I would have bet $100 there'd be no decent food of any kind in here.
Yeah, well, she would have lost that bet. Just off exit 290 on I-80, the Indian food Mintu Panda and his staff are cooking up in this small kitchen behind the window guarantees that. This smells like we're in Mumbai, not in Laramie.
Not in Laramie, no doubt. Just a few feet away from the motor oil, the military hats, the trucker shirts. You can smell it. Oh, that's a very familiar smell for Indian food.
That's it. Our storage shelves full of turmeric, coriander and other spices maybe you haven't heard of. This is a leaf, it's called kasuri methi. I mean, if you start putting this on, you will not eat anything without it. There's a rice steamer with no off switch and always full pot of chai. And the soul of any Indian kitchen, a clay oven, the tandoor. The tandoor, the flavor goes in the meat, not out of the meat. Like if you put it on the grill, everything kind of drips down.
This way the heat is all around, it's surrounded by the heat. When Panda bought this truck stop in 2014, it came with a griddle for hot dogs and hamburgers. That's all you need? That's all I need.
Alright, thank you. But figuring truckers could get those up and down I-80, he went with a menu they wouldn't find anywhere else. Did they ever come in and say, all you got is Indian food and I want meatloaf, I want a hamburger, I want a strip steak. So then we tell them, hey, try this, you're going to have that on the next stop anyway.
Just mild spicy, not really spicy. 99 out of 100, they would call again, hey, I want something what I ate last time. That stuff was delicious, I want that meal.
I don't know what was named, but this guy, he gave it to me, I think it's number 29. You have all this today or what? Good.
Yeah? From cross country truckers. I don't know how to rate it, you know. One to ten. I mean, I'd say it's probably, you know, a good nine, I mean.
How's it going? To locals like Sheriff's Deputy Bill Yates. If this is the area I'm patrolling, I know where I'm going to stop to eat lunch. Minto's food has been a hit.
Deputy Yates is partial to both the yellow curry and the broader field of vision that comes with it. It's bringing the world here rather than keeping our world small. Strictly speaking, the restaurant accounts for a small part of Minto's revenue, but that's not how Minto speaks or thinks.
I would say five to ten percent at the most, ten percent. So why bother? This is not a whole picture of the food. The people come and get fuel, other stuff. So they would come in and spend five, six hundred dollars in fuel because they know they can get the meal they desire from the last eight hundred miles here. He's opened another spot in Nebraska and will soon add a third in New Mexico. Turns out there's some money in all these smells and tastes, especially with the changing face of trucking, since nearly 19 percent of long-haul truck drivers in America are now immigrants. No surprise for you that you can recreate all that stuff in the middle of a truck stop on I-80? Well, that was the plan, so we succeeded.
All it took was for Minto Pander to trust his gut and those of hungry truckers driving by. This 1916 vintage bottle of whiskey is unquestionably aging well. It's worth about two thousand dollars. Lee Cowan takes us on a hunt for ancient spirits.
This Thanksgiving, it just might be worth a look in the back of your grandfather's liquor cabinet because those old, dusty bottles you may have assumed had gone bad may in fact be a gift from holidays past. Down in this corner over here. That's where you found it? In there?
Yes. While renovating his Keyport, New Jersey house this past September, Ron Lewert found a stash of Gilby's dry gin, still wrapped in straw, hidden in a crawl space in the roof. It was just in a big burlap sack. Big burlap sack just sitting there. Twelve bottles.
Twelve bottles. Right? They're almost certainly as old as the house, built in 1926.
It would appear that it was placed into the roof when they were constructing the house. That's wild. Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
Pretty cool. Now, old booze doesn't necessarily mean good booze, but it might be. A bottle of McCallum, distilled in 1926, just broke a record at auction, selling for nearly $2 million.
Jamie Ritchie was the Sotheby's auctioneer that day. If you've got probably 40 pours from the bottle, you can give 40 people the greatest whiskey that's ever been made. Geez, that's true. Fun. I want to be at that guy's house at Christmas. Cheers.
Food spirits are indeed rising from the dead. At Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco, there's a private vintage rum club. At the office, a high-end speakeasy in Manhattan, Mark DePisquale, can make you a pre-prohibition martini using vermouth from 1906 and gin from the turn of the century. How much does that go for? $600.
$600. The gin is really cool. The vermouth is really, really interesting. To me, the most interesting part of the martini is this one right here.
That's the martini's bidders, dating from 1896 or before. If you take a sip of it and coat your mouth with it, it just, it has a life to it that modern spirits don't. Which is why some go to any lengths to find these bottled treasures. With bottles packed in straw. Last month, divers in the Baltic Sea hauled up nearly a thousand bottles of cognac and liqueurs from a steamer sunk by a German U-boat in World War I. At a 1920s bowling alley in Los Angeles, bottles of old whiskey were found forgotten in an office in pristine condition. Some now have dedicated their lives to becoming alcohol archaeologists of sorts. Edgar Hart is founder of the UK-based Old Spirits Company. His collection includes thousands of old soldiers standing at attention, waiting to be honored for their service.
You get to sort of experience the past through, you know, rose-tinted glasses in the best way. Hi. What's up, Edgar? How are you?
I'm well, thank you. So who better for Ron Leuert and his wife Alicia to call about that mysterious find in their roof. What do you think we have here?
I think just for what they are, they're probably worth, I don't know, maybe $750 each, something like that. Well, that's worth a toast, but nope. This nearly 100-year-old twist-top needs, well, less delicate methods. There you go. All right, you get the first pour. You're getting the first sip, though.
Just maybe, this is what a sip of Gilby's gin might have tasted like. Cheers. Cheers.
During Prohibition. That's pretty good. I'm impressed. That really is. Well, maybe you're not selling them.
Maybe Edgar's not getting these. The spirit of Thanksgiving, courtesy of generations past. Cheers. That was an early hit for Jon Bon Jovi. And as Tracy Smith explains, for him, those words are more than just the lyrics of a song. For most people, Red Bank is just another stop on the New Jersey rail line. But here, just a few feet from the lumbering train cars, is a place that almost feels like home. Hi, how are you all? Hey, Denise. Hello. Oh, hi.
Hi. This is the JBJ Soul Kitchen, cooking up classic farm-to-table cuisine five days a week. Fancy stuff, but for the needy, it's not so much a restaurant as a refuge. We're right by the train tracks. The train goes by so much you won't even notice it. And it goes by a lot.
Yes, the JBJ in the name stands for Jon Bon Jovi. He co-founded the place eight years ago, turning what used to be an auto body repair shop into a place where no one is ever turned away. Did you deliberately build it on the wrong side of the tracks?
Well, at least we didn't build it on the tracks. And here's how it works. There are no prices on the menu. Diners are asked to pay a $20 donation that covers their meal and someone else's meal, too.
And if you can't donate money, you can donate service, like washing dishes, in exchange for your supper. It's actually the brainchild of Bon Jovi's wife, Dorothea. So how did you share this idea with your husband?
She leaned across the couch. And I said, I have this idea. And you said? It was genius.
Genius, indeed. Nearly all the labor is volunteer, much of the food is donated, and on any given night, nearly every seat is filled, roughly half by donors and half by those who may not know where their next meal is coming from. Hunger doesn't look like what your mind's eye might imagine. It's the people at your church, it's the kids that go to school with your kids. And I think that was eye-opening for a lot of the community here that said, oh, there's no homeless people here. And they look around the restaurant and I say, I can name five people right now that I know are homeless in this restaurant right now. But they don't look like what you think they're going to look like. It's not the stereotype that you're expecting to see. No. No, no, no. It's no surprise that the place is doing well.
The food is really good. And like anything else... I'm John. You're John?
Yeah. Bon Jovi. A little star power always helps. MUSIC John Bon Jovi, of course, is the Grammy-winning artist who sold millions of records and millions more concert tickets.
John and Dorothea met in high school and, much to the anguish of Bon Jovi groupies everywhere, they got married in 1989. And today, she says she's content to live in what has been a pretty big shadow. And I've heard you tell a story that when you guys go out to dinner, you often don't get served. Oh, yeah. That's a fact. Is that true? That's a fact. Because?
Because everyone's focusing on what Mr. Bon Jovi wants. And I'm like, can I? And everyone's meal shows up except mine. It's just like the standing joke in our family. It's true. It's the wrong saying or it doesn't matter.
I just eat it. No one cares. But she's also willing to speak up for a good idea. And this is her latest one. Starting next year, there'll be a JBJ Soul Kitchen at a place you might not have expected. The Newark campus of Rutgers University.
The faculty got a preview last week. We need you guys to spread the message because we can provide great food. But unless the kids are coming in to eat, we failed.
Why a college campus? When you send your kids off to school, you don't think about after tuition, books, living, what's left for food, you know? And so few are on meal plans to begin with. And then that's another reason why they're eating ramen noodles.
We all think it's the rite of passage to sit and study hard and eat the ramen noodles. How about if it's the only thing you can afford? God of mercy, God of light, save your children from this life. We should point out that Bon Jovi's music is very much alive and well. In fact, he just finished a new album last week. But fighting hunger is a priority.
Besides the place in Red Bank, there's another Soul Kitchen in Tom's River. And his JBJ Foundation has plans to open more as long as there's a need. With so much that is wrong with the world today, does this give you hope? You know, it does restore your faith in humanity. Because people will, I believe, given the opportunity, help another human being.
And that's what we see here all the time. Hallelujah, Hallelujah. So how does this compare to an arena of screaming fans? It can obviously never compare to performing or writing songs. But what it does do is it gives you the same sense of fulfillment, I think, when we leave here at night. That's why I say the way to feel good is to do good.
You know, find your good and do it. You might call him the chef's chef. For years, Americans have been watching Jacques Pepin on TV.
But I got to see him in person. Is this fresh enough? Yes. Jacques Pepin ought to know. He's been at it for 70 years. 34 years ago, to get olive was a whole deal. Look at that now. There is 15 different types of olive. When I grew up, I thought olives just came in jars with red pits in them.
What a revelation. Okay, I'm no cook. But the man walking me through his local stop and shop sure is. I'm going to show you two types of omelettes. With four decades on television and two dozen cookbooks. Welcome to Everyday Cooking. Chef Pepin has been influencing American tastes and techniques for generations. If you have a passion, is it food or is it teaching? I think teaching about food, yes.
I like to explain, break it down. His own culinary education began in France, near Lyon, when he became a chef's apprentice at 13. From 8 in the morning, usually 10 at night, with a break in the afternoon of two or three hours, we slept upstairs, we were not paid. You were paid. No, there was no pay. Why didn't that teach you that I do not want to be a chef? It's very hard work. I was very happy.
And ambitious. When I moved to Paris, I was 17 years old at the time. I told my mother I had a job, I didn't. I took the train, went to Paris and started working. And there he learned it wasn't creativity, but conformity that mattered. At the Plaza Etienne in Paris, the lobster souffle was very famous, where we were 48 chefs. I think any one of us could have done that lobster souffle, no one would have known who had done it. If you're one of 48 chefs at one of the finest restaurants in Paris, how was it discovered that of all those chefs who make the souffle, this one's special? I suppose the executive chef that we call monsieur, maybe he saw something.
At 20, he was drafted. The French navy put him to work, cooking, of course. And before long, he was personal chef to President Charles de Gaulle. If it sounds glamorous, he says it wasn't.
If anyone came to the kitchen because something was wrong, they were going to be yelled at. Then he came to see America, a visit that has lasted some 60 years. He landed a job at Le Pavillon, then the best French restaurant in New York City, a favorite of Jackie Kennedy, who was about to need a chef for the White House. Jacques Pepin turned her down. Wouldn't most people be kind of intrigued by the White House invitation? Since I had experienced something similar in France with the president, there was nothing very glorious about it.
Been there, done that. But there was another Pavillon regular by the name of Howard Johnson. Yes, the owner of what was then one of the largest restaurant chains in America.
Pepin became its director of research for a decade, and he loved it. Howard Johnson was something entirely new, mass production, marketing, chemistry of food, which I didn't know anything about. I don't know about the American eating habit, American taste. Did Americans have taste?
Oh, yes. I mean, we had beautiful beef prime. It wasn't taste that America lacked, he says, but technique. And he had an idea, a lavishly illustrated cookbook and how-to guide. I mean, I used to give classes a bit all over the country, and I would never have put in a book how to peel a carrot, except that I would peel a carrot in a class and say, oh, that's how you peel a carrot?
I said, yes. I said, maybe I'll put that in the book, too. The book, called La Technique, was a sensation, and Jacques Pepin took to the road, giving demonstrations. Cook with organic produce the way my mama always done it. A pioneer in the demo kitchen. Coming up on today's Go Way. With more than a dozen TV series.
You want to bang the dough a little bit like this. That's a wonderful way of doing it. Most notable, perhaps, was his partnership with his old friend, Julia Child. I learned that in Paris. Julia Child is the most unlikely television personality, but boy, was she successful, and the two of you had such chemistry.
Was that instantaneous? We had a great time together. She was a formidable eater. That's good. They're eating, cooking.
Go! And even gentle disagreements. I have washed this chicken with hot water. I won't wash my chicken.
Earned them an Emmy. I have been spending every Sunday with you for the last 20 years. Oh boy. At 83. So you have a head of garlic here. Jacques Pepin still loves giving cooking demonstrations. Heat it on the side, that will separate your clove of garlic.
As he did earlier this month at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. You go down, forward. That really is the essential oil. His emphasis on the basics as the foundation of good, great, or masterful cooking. Basically you need three knives.
Inspired me to ask, is it ever too late to learn? You have to hold your hand this way, never this way. First. So here, my hand is glued to the knife here.
How to properly use a knife. Then I start moving very, very slowly. Then I move faster, then faster. Now my turn. If you go back, then I follow you.
Wherever you go, I'm going to follow you. Do we have any bandaid here? No, just kidding. I graduated to zucchini.
That's it. Not moving the vegetable at all. You want a job? For Jacques Pepin, cooking is more than a job. It is an act of love in many ways, you know, to cook for someone.
Is it an act of love if the only thing that you can reliably do in the kitchen to help is clean up? Yes. Talk about slow food. Baraka asks, snails anyone? On the north shore of New York's Long Island, nestled between a vineyard growing grapes for Pinot Noir and a herd of French cows, is a very small farm.
Only 300 square feet. Where Taylor Knapp raises snails. We say it's a small farm, but a large snail farm. In fact, his is the largest snail farm in the country.
To be fair, there are only two. How many snails in here? Right now it's about 50,000.
We could probably fit another 50. A pretty extraordinary population density. He calls himself a snail wrangler. These snails are kind of hibernating. It's actually called estivating, when they kind of retract into their shells and they just kind of hang out on the walls like that. But that one's moving. So they do move.
Yeah, they're hanging out. Were you a fan of snails growing up? I think the business opportunity of raising something in this country that wasn't being raised at the time was appealing. I mean, the best restaurants in the country, there's snails on their menu. And until we came around, those snails were coming out of a can from Asia or Europe, which is just insane. Taylor delivers his fresh snails to some of New York City's finest restaurants, like Franchette. Hey Chef, how are you?
Hello, nice to see you. Where Chef Lee Hansen uses them to make briard, a kind of French scrambled eggs, with escargot. Escargot is French for snail. They're smaller than some of the snails you've had in restaurants. They're super flavorful. All those things that Taylor feeds him, you know, the herbs, the wild foraging stuff that he gets. So these are all wild greens that we've picked for them. This is burdock, some dandelion, mustard cress. Yes, these Long Island snails eat well.
These are little tangerine marigolds, some golden rods. So these are all wild plants that you'd find around Long Island to kind of give them this Long Island terroir flavor. For snails, that old saying, you are what you eat, is especially true.
We've had Michelin star restaurants ask us to feed them mint, and the snails tasted just like mint. Some of them are cute. Yeah, they are. They're good looking animals.
We try to avoid the word cute because they become dinner later. Can I hold one? Yeah. It's checking you out. Those little black dots on the top of their antennae are their eyes. Where are their ears? No ears. So this one can't hear me saying how good looking it is. No, it can't say no.
You have to express it in your face. And is this one a male or a female? They're both male and female. Actually, they're hermaphrodites. So all of these snails have both male and female sex organs, and any two of them could mate. And yes, a single snail could also self-fertilize, go through the whole process and lay eggs all on its own. Yeah, there's no such thing as a lonely snail. That's right.
No, not in this world. And though these little creatures do move at a snail's pace... They reproduce very quickly, and they're voracious eaters. So when something is put in front of them to eat, they keep eating it until it's gone.
So if they were in a crop of vegetables or someone's grapes, for instance, they could do a lot of damage. So a snail jailbreak is not a joke. Not a joke. It's a real thing.
So we're overseen by a part of the USDA that makes sure that that doesn't happen, and we've developed a lot of containment protocols so that that doesn't happen. You got it. You're wrangling. Whoa! Oh, you did it.
Whoa! And they are uniquely flavorful. With garlic and butter. Or in a stew like babalucci. Or with your eggs on Sunday morning. Bon Appetit! I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And please join us again next Sunday morning. Thank you.
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