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Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is a special edition of Sunday Morning. It's the food issue. Our annual look ahead to Thanksgiving and the holidays. Sadly, this year, the COVID pandemic is putting millions of us at real risk of going hungry. Still, many of us will be talking turkey all the same, thanks to the help of generous and committed volunteers.

As Lee Cowan will report in our cover story. God bless you. Happy Thanksgiving. This COVID Thanksgiving, millions of grateful people will be celebrating one more chicken with food they received in a parking lot. Now we're able to, you know, say, okay, we're going to have a turkey and you know, the dressings and all the sides and stuff like that.

The story behind a photograph that captured America's need and hearts ahead on Sunday morning. What's round, chewy and wholly satisfying. Martha Teichner this morning goes round and round with bagels. Okay. You've decided to change careers and open a bagel shop.

One problem. I've made a mess of that one. You know nothing about making bagels. Beth George to the rescue later this Sunday morning, bagel bootcamp. And then Nancy Giles invites us all to snack time. Americans certainly have an appetite for snacks. Most of us have at least one a day. Snacks can be salty or sweet.

They can be really healthy or they can be total glorious junk. Coming up on Sunday morning, how we became a nation of snackers. Does the fight against world hunger have a secret weapon? Yes, it does.

Only it's not so secret. It's Kate Hudson, the Oscar nominated actress who's talking with our Tracy Smith. People talk about feeding the hungry, but Kate Hudson is walking the walk.

Could you see the results? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We have it. There is a cure. The cure is that the food is, we have it. She's the UN World Food Program's not so secret weapon.

If I had another 100 K's, I think we could solve world hunger and all the problems around the world. A little help from Kate Hudson later this Sunday morning. Turns out we don't know beans about beans.

Jonathan Vigliati passed the proof. Smack dab in the middle of wine country, a new crop is catching on. When I think of Napa Valley, I don't think of pintos and red beans.

And yet you did. Single handedly. It's the land of beans now. Spilling the beans ahead on Sunday morning. Much more besides on our food issue for Sunday morning, the 22nd of November, 2020.

And we'll be right back. Talking Turkey this Thanksgiving might be a little easier for distressed families, thanks to assistance from some hardworking organizations. Even so, Lee Cowan tells us more needs to be done. As a staff photographer for the San Antonio Express News, William Luther may have done more to help hungry Americans this Thanksgiving than anyone will ever really know. We were hearing from politicians that they were calling each other saying, have you seen the picture? And people, they didn't have to describe it. They already knew did you see the picture? The picture he's talking about is this drone shot taken back on April 9th. High above some 10,000 people, their cars parked bumper to bumper in a vast San Antonio parking lot waiting for food.

Look, look at these lines. That is the stark reality of this pandemic. That in session went viral. And I can't get that image out of my head in San Antonio. Do you know how many places that picture went?

No. It's a lot though. It was a lot.

I think it really helped put clarity on something that was really difficult for people to understand. If there was any doubt that COVID has deepened America's hunger crisis, that picture dispelled it. Folks at the San Antonio food bank as well as its hundreds of volunteers like Paul Drummond haven't seen the lines stop yet. You know when it's the kind of thing that you keep thinking it's going to be over and not only is it not over but the need just grows. There have been thousands of other food distributions all across the country.

Just this past week, this massive one in Dallas-Fort Worth. What all these lines have in common is that many of the people have never asked for food before. What would you do without them you think? Well probably go start growing my own food in the backyard probably. We are relying I think too much right now on the charity food system. Diane Chazenbach is the director for the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She found that in the first few months of the pandemic the number of Americans who didn't have enough to eat surged from around 8 million to nearly 30 million. This has revealed some big holes in our safety net but they're holes that Congress can fix. Since the pandemic started as many as 7 million people have enrolled in the federal government's food stamp program now called SNAP. Chazenbach says Americans need at least a 15 percent increase in those benefits to survive but negotiations over the next COVID relief package are stalled in a lame duck Congress. Do they not believe that so many people are hungry? Have they not gone out to see what's happening at these food banks and food pantries? Those impacted the most are Black and Latino Americans especially those with children. We were in need of food. Catherine Nguyen. She's a mother of five.

She lost her job as a housekeeper in San Antonio during COVID. You have to like decide if you're going to pay a bill or not or decide to go get groceries and maybe your water or your lights might get turned off the next month or something. It's down to that now.

Yeah it's down to that. Hardship is nothing new to San Antonio. Since 2013 the overall poverty rate in the city has hovered between 18 and 20 percent.

That's nearly twice the national average. In 1968 a CBS documentary hosted by our very own Charles Kuralt put the city's struggles with hunger right into everybody's living rooms. CBS news has spent the last 10 months investigating hunger in America.

The hour-long special offered an unflinching look at hunger in the richest country in the world. Father Ralph Ruiz a Catholic priest lives and works with the poorest of San Antonio's Mexican Americans. What school do you go to?

Cameras captured this moment with a young boy named Jerry. Do they have a cafeteria there? Yes sir. He told Father Ruiz that he couldn't afford the 35 cents for lunch at school. What do you eat at noon then? Nothing. We found Ruiz now 85 retired from the priesthood still living in San Antonio. The poor needs the assistance of those who have. That never changes over time.

That's why we have to work hard to make a change. We met him at the inner city development community center. It also houses a food pantry. It's a program Ruiz started after the documentary. It's fed more than 3 million hungry San Antonians cents. Thank you. Have a good one.

Thank you sir. The world is full of hungry people. You find four people you find hunger. It's probably fair to say that Ruiz never could have imagined San Antonio's food bank this busy or this big. The warehouse holds about two weeks worth of food. Eric Cooper is president and CEO here.

How are you? But it's hardly a desk job. You'll get through this. He routinely walks the lines getting to know those he serves. Without the food bank we wouldn't make it sir. In April he was in the midst of that endless line apologizing to the hungry for having to wait so long. I wanted to make sure that those families knew that I was sorry and instead of being greeted with like yeah we've been here for hours um I was greeted with this like god bless you you know thank you. Not a single family left that day empty-handed. A loaves and fish kind of miracle that is being performed here and all around the country almost every day.

I think we in life go through seasons of struggle and COVID-19 has created a lot of struggle but this season will pass and we just have to get through it together. You don't have to go far to enjoy bagels but you do have to know what you're doing to make them right. Martha Teichner has the whole truth. It seems downright cruel that Beth George has to teach her clients to make bagels over Zoom instead of in person right now. They're wonderful.

Yeah it's an art. A client in Mexico. I'm from Bangalore, India. Bagels in India. Now I'm going to show you the oven.

Ready? Who knew that a woman in Rwanda might want to open a bagel shop? Have you ever seen a mixture this big?

No no never. Beth George practiced law for decades before starting BYOB Bagels. Can be be your own boss bagels.

It's also bake your own bagels bagels and build your own business. Bagels were brought to the United States by Eastern European Jews in the 19th century. How did a Lebanese Christian end up one of the world's few go-to bagel experts?

Because of her son Spencer. As a kid he was diagnosed with serious food allergies. When I realized that Spencer could not eat regular wheat anymore, I said to him what do you miss the most? And he said bagels.

Ta-da! There's the bagel moment okay. Beth George taught herself how to make bagels out of spelt, an ancient relative of wheat Spencer could eat, and went into business joining forces with Frank Morrow who sells bagel and bakery equipment. He convinced her to stop making spelt bagels and start teaching people how to make the perfect New York style bagel. We like our bagels in New York, crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside. For the record her commercial kitchen is in New Jersey. It's all about the ingredients.

It's the water obviously but it doesn't have to be New York water, it just has to be good water. So you can make a bagel outside. So you can make a bagel outside of New York, a very good one. She enlisted me I think to demonstrate that a bagel, it's okay if it falls on the ground, is not a piece of cake.

I was doing pretty well for a while. Did you know bagels have to be boiled or steamed before they're baked? Don't forget the schmear, Yiddish for what you spread on your bagel, and the lox, the smoked salmon. Goldilocks Bagels outside of Boston, yes Goldilocks, is one of 40 or so businesses Beth George has helped launch.

Lindsay Gardette was a business analyst for a high-tech company. Her husband Ed Thill is a chef. Right away Beth put us to work, she's like you you know go way out this tub of water and this much flour and you you do this you do this which meant we got it was boot camp and we got we got to learn. I called Beth my bagel whisperer and I called her my bagel mama.

There's an umbilical cord that goes across the sea from her to me. All the way to Gothenburg Sweden where transplanted New Yorker Elizabeth Rubin in 2018 opened Jimmy and Joan's New York named for her father and his twin sister. In Sweden they had what looked like a bagel but it was just bread with a hole it was like an imposter.

Now they've got the real thing. America's black chefs have been shaping our country's cuisine since its earliest days. Contributor Mark Whitaker has been talking to a chef of our own time who's telling their stories.

Wow man that looks looks good right? Over the course of his storied career chef Marcus Samuelson has heard that a lot. A tv veteran a restaurant and cookbook impresario he's always delighted by how our curiosity for new tastes draws us together.

We smile your eyes get really watery and warm and you lean in but when we do that around race and there's no entry point we look down and don't talk to me. And finding an entry point to talk about race matters a lot to Samuelson. An American by way of Ethiopia and Sweden he's become increasingly troubled by our racial divisions. So as a chef what's my role how can I contribute to this and that's really where the rise started. The rise Samuelson's latest book is his recipe for a national conversation by celebrating the contributions of black chefs and black cooking.

I want to share stories about amazing people about this amazing country around food. The most delicious way about having a conversation about race is to cook it and eat it together. So black food matters.

Yeah. What is black food? How do you define it? Delicious, complex, layered, it's worldly, it's local, it's southern and it's finger licking good. You may or may not fully understand it but get into it. For Samuelson getting into black food starts with understanding its history. So he introduces us to one of the field's preeminent writers Jessica B Harris. How would you describe the influence that the black cooking tradition has had on American cooking in general?

Well I think it's difficult to even conceive of the vastness of the influence. Harris says that influence begins with some of the staples of southern cooking that actually arrived with enslaved Africans. Watermelon, black-eyed peas, you get strange things that arrive here via the African continent. Peanuts and of course the big daddy of them all the mucilaginous pod okra we slipped and slid into everybody's life. Add to that the critical know-how for a food as essential to the south as rice. The rice growing knowledge came from West Africa from which the people were enslaved and you can find posters that say slaves newly arrived from and that was sort of like a euphemism for these folks know how to grow rice. Tell us about the black chefs who fed the founding fathers.

Well there are two of them that we talk about a lot. Hercules Posey was George Washington's enslaved chef. He was reputed to be a dandy. The first celebrity chef.

Absolutely and probably the most famous of the early runaways. He left. Never caught. It infuriated Washington. When Thomas Jefferson represented the U.S. at the French court of Louis XVI, he sent for his enslaved chef James Hemings. Hemings is in their kitchens learning French cuisine and then eventually petitions for his freedom which Jefferson grants grudgingly. Enslaved or free, cooking ham for others, pigs feet for themselves, Samuelson says the vast majority of black cooks worked for little reward or credit. Black chefs was kind of like this anonymous backbone that never got acknowledged in food history. They serve as the inspiration for one of the many chefs Samuelson profiles, Eduardo Jordan. The talent and the skill of the African-American cook is so built in our DNA that I now get the privilege to tell that story through my food. A Florida native raised on southern food, Jordan says he pays tribute to his ancestors at his Seattle restaurant June Baby. Oxtails slowly braised just like my mama used to do. This was Louisiana style gumbo and this is a take on candy yams. This is true southern food at its best just like next level. Jordan is a classically trained chef and when he opened his first restaurant, the award-winning Solari featuring European cuisine, he had an agenda.

What I wanted to do is flex my muscles. I didn't want to be pigeonholed to be the black chef opening up a black restaurant. But when he added African and Caribbean influences to the menu. It made me feel happy because I wasn't trying so hard to try to cook someone else's food when I could actually just do me and be me. There is more to southern food than what meets the eyes.

There's a deeper story. It's an insight central to the larger purpose of Marcus Samuelson's book, Let the Food Do the Talking. When we're able to sit down and break bread, share our food, tell our stories, we gain a better appreciation for each other. And when we cook together, we start realizing how incredible, delicious America is. And what we have in common.

Yes. If you think all beans taste like the store-bought kind, Jonathan Vigliati tells us you don't know beans. Up the road from Napa Valley's world-famous wine vineyards, you'll find an old chapel, now a home, whose sole inhabitant is preaching about a different kind of crop. So bean stalks live up to the fable. They do. They want to grow. Steve Sando's beans aren't your typical garden variety. They turn into this beautiful purple gunmetal color almost.

Yeah. And as he explains, you can't find his dried bespeckled gems in your local grocery store. There are commodity beans which actually serve a great purpose. They really feed a lot of people easily and cheaply and they provide protein. But heirloom beans are ones that have been saved for generations and they're saved because they taste like something. Where do you source them from? Where do you find them?

Well, that's, I can't tell you. No, I mean, that's really, we've spent years and years developing relationships with growers and farmers and collectors. Farmers and collectors mainly from small Mexican villages, where seeds are revered like old handwritten family recipes. Sando's menu of more than three dozen varieties includes everything from heritage pinto's to his rare eye of the goat. With flavors ranging from chocolate to coffee, the creamy texture like butter. A bowl of heirlooms, maybe with a squeeze of lime, a little chopped onion. I mean, there's kind of nothing better. This is a bay leaf.

We just put one in, just why not? The key to unlocking the flavor? Take it over to the stove. First, a rapid 10 minute boil. But that first 10 minutes you're letting the beans know, I love you, but I'm in charge. Second, a simmer with some inexact science.

I actually don't focus on the time too much, but one of my favorite things to do on a Sunday is to put on the classic Betty Davis movie, All About Eve. And at one point she's going to say fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night. And that's the point I had the salt. And then later in the movie she says, funny business, a woman's career.

The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. And that's like, oh, we should start testing them. They might be done. Isn't that what they always say? Betty Davis has spoken. The beans are done. The magic here is how simple it is.

Exactly. It's because they're a new crop and it's because they're heirlooms. Sando's obsession with quality heirloom beans first started in 2000. I turned 40 and I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life. So I started growing heirloom vegetables.

So most people going through a midlife crisis get a fancy car. You picked up a shovel. Yeah. But I intuitively knew if I had a garden I'm going to be okay. And he was okay. Once Napa Valley's famed restaurants like the French Laundry discovered his crop, putting his beans on their menus and Sando on the map.

It was like seagulls on a fish in the ocean or something. Enjoy your beans. All right. Those seagulls now flock to Rancho Gordo, Sando's Napa Valley shop built by beans. We're in wine country. Yes. Wine is sexy. Beans? Are they sexy?

Oh, they are. Someone even said, oh, you made beans sexy, which is, I'll take that. With the uptick in sales, Sando did what any Napa business owner does. He started an exclusive mailing club. Rancho Gordo, our favorite. It's 11,000 members strong with another 11,000 on the waiting list to get in. Penny Garcia of San Antonio, Texas is a member. I always tell my husband, I will never, ever give up my spot in the Rancho Gordo bean club. Sando and his beans, now surely Napa staples. Is it fair to say some of the people in the wine club are a little jealous of the bean club?

Oh, sure. No, I mean, 11,000 members in a wine club. Most wine clubs would be very happy, really happy for that.

I think the lesson is if the big boys don't let you into their club, create your own club, but do it to make yourself happy. Feeding India's millions is an enormous challenge in any time. Jim Axelrod has visited a New York chef with a secret recipe. In a makeshift kitchen on the terrace of a New York City apartment, these are one of the most interesting peppercorns in the world. Chef Vikas Khanna's attention to detail is on full display, as is his trademark drive to get things right. So how many versions of this dish did you go through in development? Seven in seasonings, 11 in the In a makeshift kitchen on the terrace of a New York City apartment, these are one of the most interesting peppercorns in the world. Chef Vikas Khanna's attention to detail is on full display, as is his trademark drive to get things right. So how many versions of this dish did you go through in development?

Seven in seasonings, 11 in terms of plating. Looking at his pan-seared roasted squash with yogurt and beetroot powder, it's hard to argue with his approach. Combining the tastes of his grandmother's Indian kitchen with classical French training to develop his own distinctive South Asian cuisine.

I like to combine Indian flavors and incorporate them almost in a creative way. And open some of the hottest restaurants going in New York and Dubai, and soon Beijing and Singapore. But that is what the purpose of cooking is now. You know, you should be cross the borders. These days, crossing borders is all Vikas Khanna thinks about.

Lentils, we're looking at 10 kgs. Getting help to as many of the 400 million people in India forced into poverty by COVID as he can. That is the true meaning why you became the chef. That is the reason that you were given all these trainings to be that one, to understand hunger so deeper. And then to do something about it. Find a solution.

There is always a solution. Chef Vikas. Leveraging his fame back home as a Michelin-starred chef, author, film director, and entrepreneur, Vikas started Feed India. Did you have any idea the size of the undertaking when you got started? Do you think, Jim, anyone could envision the magnitude of this pandemic in the beginning? He's assembled a coalition of food producers, distributors, even bureaucrats. So they came on board.

There was no financial transaction. Okay, what do you want? We want 100,000 kgs of rice. Okay, sir, it's coming here.

And from half a world away, Amritsar is right on the border of India and Pakistan. Mobilized an army. I put satellite kitchens together in six days. And we had the food on the trucks in eight hours.

Thank you. Feed India has provided 50 million meals so far. 50 million meals.

5-0. It's an extraordinary number. They're served in shelters, orphanages, and from gas stations on roads where people are walking to work. You are 7,000 miles from where you grew up.

It's nine and a half hours time difference. How can you manage the logistics when you're so far away? This is my mission and I am not moving my eyes off anything. The lentils were done very creatively. For now, Khanna has put all the other parts of his cooking empire on hold, with the voice of his mother always in his ear. Everything you ever sold or got your awards, everything belongs to everything. Everything belongs to every single person in this country. You just took it and you served it to the world. So don't give me this excuse that this is not your problem. So your mom was reminding you you have an obligation to do this.

Beauty. She said this is your duty to feed India. That is the word where Feed India comes from.

He is seeking to nourish on a grander scale, filling the stomachs of millions in India as well as his own soul here in New York. You've written dozens of cookbooks, cooked for presidents. You've produced a movie. Where does this effort rank for you in terms of satisfaction? Number one.

Number one. This is Intelligence Matters. With former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation, is not being matched up with what we're doing.

Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts. And now streaming. I used to believe in progress that no matter what we do, we just end up back at the start.

We're in crazy time. The Paramount Plus original series The Good Fight returns for its final season. The point isn't the end.

The point is winning. 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. Snack time is served up by Nancy Giles. For me, more time at home this year has meant more time to snack.

But I'm not alone. One in three people say they've been snacking more since the pandemic began. In fact, in the second week of March, savory snack sales were up $190 million. Snacking brings a little pleasure and a little happiness during a kind of a crazy time. Tori Johnston is the vice president of sales at Chattanooga Bakery, maker of Moon Pies. The cookies have been around for a century, but this spring online sales more than doubled.

We've seen a definite uptick. We're nostalgic, we're kind of a comfort food, a reminder of simpler times. A snack is anything that we eat that falls outside of the context of regular meals.

They can be really healthy or they can be total glorious junk. Nadia Berenstein is a flavor historian with an appetite for snacks. They've found popcorn in Incan tombs and pretzels date from early medieval Europe. But modern snack food, that really begins in the late 19th century or early 20th century. With foods like popcorn, peanuts, and Cracker Jack. Peanuts, for one, became popular during the Civil War, when Union soldiers developed a taste for the southern crop.

By the 1900s, they were staples in northern cities. So you'll have pushcart vendors who are selling roasted nuts and popcorn outside of places of public entertainment, movie theaters, baseball games, circuses. So snacks begin as foods that people are eating in public among crowds.

But that soon changes. Food concentration has become a whole new American industry. After the Second World War, there was this huge boom in processed food. And all of this new food technology that was developed started to be applied to the manufacture of snack foods. Technology like the ability to package and ship snacks while keeping them fresh. By mid-century, snacking had become an all-American pastime, filling shelves and screens. A potato you can slice this thin makes a chip so crisp, so light you can eat a million of them. But nobody can eat just one.

Delicious. And as that popularity grew, so did waistlines. There was roughly a 20-pound weight gain among Americans on average between 1980 and 2000. And that was because of more frequent snacking and larger portions.

Dr. Marion Nestle specializes in nutrition and public health. If there was one thing that you could tell Americans about snacking, just one thing, what would it be? They have calories.

A lot of calories, right? They're formulated to make you love eating them. We just love the taste of salt and sugar.

We love it. And so when presented with it, we always want more. Wow, that's deep. That's dastardly.

Yes, indeed. But salt and sugar aren't the only reasons we keep coming back for more. We go to snacks for pleasure, for relief from boredom.

You can have a mid-morning snack, an after-school snack, or a midnight snack. You can snack anywhere and everywhere. So where can you find America's oldest Chinese restaurant?

Luke Burbank has saved us a booth. The oldest continuously running Chinese restaurant in the U.S. isn't in San Francisco or New York. It's in, of all places, Butte, Montana. Welcome to the Pekin Noodle Parlor, the oldest Chinese restaurant in the United States. Jerry Tam's parents, Danny and Sharon, were the third generation of the family to run the Pekin, which opened in 1911. This was a traditional mom and pop restaurant where my mom used to work here, my dad worked here. I have four older sisters that all worked here.

My first job was washing dishes and I'm still washing dishes today. Walking around the Pekin Noodle Parlor can feel like walking back in time. What is the story behind these booths? These are very iconic. Well, they were originally put up in the early 1900s for privacy. This is sort of social distancing from a hundred years ago.

Jerry's father read that the unusual orange color stimulated appetite. Well, the true history of the Pekin starts with these stairs. Speaking of unusual things, the Pekin is actually up on the second floor of the building. This is going to the first level, which at one point was a herbal shop. Wow. And then we go to a sub level where it was all the illegal gaming. So as you can see, there's a casino cage.

Uh huh. There are dusty Kino boards and old bedding slips. They still have nickels in them. And even the suitcase that Tam's father brought over in 1947. When he was 14 years old, it was just him and this suitcase and his belongings. Pretty amazing thing to think about this whole building we're in.

All the people who've eaten in the restaurant and the people who've gambled down here in the basement, all those experiences. Stems from one man, his vision to come to America. Technically, it was more than just one man.

Going back generations of Jerry's family and extended family. The history of Chinese Americans in the West is almost as old as the American West itself. In the 19th century, tens of thousands of Chinese, mostly men, came to work on the railroads or in mining, but they weren't always so welcome.

According to author, Jennifer 8 Lee. Starting in like the 1870s and onwards, there was huge waves of anti-Chinese violence. You know, there were shootings or beatings, there was lynchings. There was lynchings, the hatred culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

It was the first time actually in American history that the concept of illegal immigration was introduced. One of the ways Chinese immigrants got around the law was the so-called Lomain loophole, which allowed restaurant workers into the country from 1910 to 1930. The number of Chinese restaurants quadrupled. Today, there are more Chinese restaurants than McDonald's.

To cater to local tastes, Chinese restaurants in America created a cuisine quite distinct from the food in China. For instance, chop suey. The word chop suey in Mandarin is zha sui, which means basically odds and ends. So we actually thought, as in the United States for a long time, that like chop suey was like the national dish of China.

Like, you know, this is what like, you know, emperors ate. Today, the Pekin Noodle Parlor still proudly serves up its chop suey. along with all sorts of other time-honored favorites. Sweet and sour shrimp, pork fried rice, and noodles. I like their noodles.

Jerry isn't sure how much longer the Pekin will be serving its noodles. Like everyone, they've been hit hard by the pandemic. But one thing is clear. His family's place in American history is here to stay. We've been through the Spanish flu. We've been through two world wars. So I guess people in Butte, they love my father.

They love the restaurant and they would never want to see anything happen to it. That actress Kate Hudson has played a lot of movie roles is no secret. Less well known is her role in feeding the world's hungry.

Tracy Smith sets the scene. If you think that feeding hungry people is hard work, try doing it in a war zone. Somewhere in the world, every minute of the day, the people at the UN World Food Program are trying to keep millions from starving to death.

Out here, it's a brutally simple equation. Conflict equals hunger and hunger equals more conflict. And that's without a worldwide pandemic. Clearly, COVID-19 has made a bad situation worse.

This virus, it hurts the poor people more than anybody else. When UN World Food Program Chief David Beasley took charge three years ago, he says he had 100 million hungry people to feed. But now we're talking about 135 to 270 million people. I'm not talking about going to bed hungry. I'm talking about people literally marching towards starvation. That's why we got to get ahead of this thing and do it right. And doing it right starts with getting people's attention.

Two years ago, actress-entrepreneur Kate Hudson was appointed a World Food Program ambassador, visiting places like Cambodia to raise awareness and to actually help hungry people feed themselves. What made you become so passionate about it? What got to you? It's endless. When you start to get involved with it, it's just like, you know, it's one of those things.

You're just, you're just hooked. It's not like, oh, I hope we find a cure. We have, there is a cure. The cure is that the food is, we have it.

It's there, it's available. So it's really about how we get there, you know. And you might say Charity runs in her blood. Her mother, Goldie Hawn, founded her own nonprofit to help children. But Kate's fight against hunger took on new meaning when she became a mother herself and met a struggling mom in Cambodia. There was a mother that was one of the mothers of a child in the school, and she had just had a baby. And, you know, I said, are you, how are you feeling? You know, and she was like, oh, like this. And you realize that as mothers, the first thing that we do with our babies is we would do anything to feed them. And when that goes wrong, I mean, you can't explain it if you don't know what that feels like, if you can't give your baby milk, if you're not producing.

It's the fundamental fear if we cannot feed our children. It's hard to say exactly when Kate Hudson became a household name. It might have been after her Oscar-nominated turn as Penny Lane in 2000's Almost Famous.

I'm going to live in Morocco for one year. But she says she always knew she'd do some good in the world and that being really famous could help. What do you hope you personally can do by joining forces? You know, I try to be very real about these things. You know, I have one thing that I think I have. I have, well, I have a couple of things. It's my personal heart and drive. That's one thing. But I have a platform and, you know, I've got millions of people that follow me on my Instagram and I can have this opportunity to talk with you about it, you know.

And so I hope that what this can do is bring a lot of so much awareness and that I can be a part of that in any way. The COVID pandemic has created chaos and disrupted the supply chain all over the world. By all accounts, it's been a brutal year for the WFP.

But there have been a few bright spots. They managed to launch the largest humanitarian response in their history. I didn't win it. You won it. It's all of us.

Thank y'all. And last month, the staff was stunned, really stunned, to find out they'd been awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. It's the first time in my life I've been without words. Tell me about that moment when you found out. I was out in the middle of Niger and somebody just comes busting into our meeting said, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Peace Prize. And I'm like, well, yeah, wow, who won it? And they're like, we did. That was the greatest surprise in my life.

And wow, wow, wow. Of course, awards don't feed hungry people and celebrities don't solve world problems by themselves. But they can convince others to open their hearts and their pocketbooks. To Kate Hudson, that's the role of a lifetime. Is there any comparison between the satisfaction of playing a great role, doing a great movie, and the satisfaction that you get out of helping out with WFP? No. Oh, no. I can hear this.

Yes, ma'am. It's a totally different feeling when someone feels connected or happy based on something that you played. Then when you realize that you're helping someone just live.

And when you see someone suffering of something that is as simple as a little bit of food, it's just, you know, if you can help that, there's no greater kind of contribution, I think, than being able to at least try to help as many people as you can. The taste of mint livens up many a dish and some other products that might surprise you. Connor Knighton takes us to the source. In central Washington, farmers pay close attention to the constantly fluctuating price of oil. But the crude that they're concerned with isn't under the ground. It's on top of it, locked away by the The taste of mint livens up many a dish and some other products that might surprise you.

Connor Knighton takes us to the source. In central Washington, farmers pay close attention to the constantly fluctuating price of oil. But the crude that they're concerned with isn't under the ground. It's on top of it, locked away in fragrant fields of mint. The mint oil is stored on the underside of these leaves.

There's little glands or saclets, and that's what we're after. Kevin Gilbert is a third generation mint farmer. This is a crop you can raise a family on. Washington is the country's largest producer of mint, full of family farms like Gilbert's. But the crop isn't sold by the sprig.

It's sold by the barrel. So dollar wise, how much mint are we looking at right now? Oh, we've probably got over $50 million of mint oil sitting here in these walls. Craig St. Hilaire is the president of Labby Mint. Founded by peppermint farmer Jack Labby in 1971, Labby Mint now contracts with hundreds of farmers to distribute mint oil all around the world. If you've brushed your teeth with some of the name brand toothpaste or used the name brand mouthwashes or have consumed any confectionary product with a mint flavor in it, there's a very, very high chance that you've had Labby Mint oils in those products. Labby Mint's big customers include Colgate, Procter & Gamble, and Wrigley. Mint oil is used in everything from candy canes to aroma therapy treatments, and a little goes a long way.

It's very potent, yeah. So one barrel might flavor over five million sticks of chewing gum. Mint's natural flavor can vary wildly.

There are major differences between the two main species, peppermint produced from the plant Minthe piperita and spearmint, aka Minthe spicata, and subtle differences based on everything from where the mint was grown to when it was cut. Labby Mint has dedicated sniffers on staff to make sure each variety of mint is up to snuff. Our odor evaluators are really trained to be able to differentiate region, region, by region, and how close to the control does it come. Since mint oil is so concentrated, you need to dilute it if you want to taste it. We mix some into batches of plain toothpaste. I mean, I detect notes of toothpaste. I don't know if my palates are fine enough to appreciate the difference.

How would you describe this? What makes this unique? I like the Madras particulate. It tends to have a sweet characteristic as compared to some of the other peppermints. Of course, most people aren't mint aficionados, which is why the biggest threat to farmers like Kevin Gilbert is a cheaper type of mint known as Minthe arvensis that's primarily grown in India. While Labby Mint creates whatever blends customers request, including oils from foreign soils, St. Hilaire feels there's no place like home. We really love selling the American mint to customers.

We feel it is, and we know it is, the gold standard around the world. Somewhere over the rainbow is one heavenly cookie. Calafasane tells us about the art of the rainbow cookie. It's baking. It's what I do. It's what I love.

You want to get it into all the corners. Samantha Zola is obsessed. Rainbow cookies should be colorful. They should incorporate every color of the rainbow.

Three years ago, she started Zola Bakes, built on just one photogenic product. A stylish new take on an Italian-American green, white, and red favorite. The rainbow cookie, traditionally, it looks like the Italian flag, right?

Right, yes. But we decided to make a pink, orange, yellow cookie, a green, blue, and purple cookie. Zola grew up in New York, the world capital of rainbow cookies.

It's a very dense cake, which makes it seem like a cookie. While rainbow cookies are in supermarkets and Italian bakeries across the country, she sells hers online. I knew that we had something big, and it's just grown tremendously. Mainly through social media?

Just through social media. There was no electricity. About a hundred years ago, rainbow cookies were popularized at bakeries like this one. Ernest Lepore's great-grandfather and great-uncle opened Cafe Ferrara in New York's Little Italy in 1892. There was really no women allowed until like the 1920s or 30s. No women allowed to work here or to shop here? In the store, not even my grandmother, the daughter.

His grandmother may have had the last laugh. Today, Ferrara's traditional Italian flag rainbow cookie, which the bakery ships nationwide, is based on her recipe. I get to do old-school Italian. The cookie's intense almond flavor actually comes from apricot pits, ground up and cut with a bit of almond paste. We're going to use one of my grandfather's machines. Needs three. The recipe also includes food coloring.

This is the cool part. To make three thin cakes, which are compressed overnight, add apricot marmalade and some chocolate, and you've got a seven-layer cookie. We've got chocolate red, apricot white, apricot green chocolate.

Samantha Zola's version, nearly twice the price of Ferrara's, has six precise layers. I take a ruler and I make sure every cookie is exactly the same size. Were you like this all your life? Was your homework very neat? Yes. Each cookie is seven-eighths of an inch wide. There it is.

She uses pure almond paste, food coloring to create bright colors, layers in apricot or raspberry jams or hazelnut spread, and tops it off with white or dark chocolate. I like to make an S. It gives it a good drip on the side. Ready? Man down. The result... And you say two bites. Two bites. Two bites. You might call this America's founding liquor.

A toast to history now from Mo Rocca. It may come from an apple, but it's not apple juice. It smells appley. It also smells very strong.

It is under proof, so it is a bit strong. This is from the early... Lisa Laird Dunn runs Laird and Company in New Jersey, the oldest family of distillers in the country. Our first official record of sale is 1780. For nine generations, the Lairds have been making apple jack, which is another name for apple brandy. General George Washington and his troops were big fans of the stuff.

I do like to say that's what got them across the Delaware that cold Christmas Eve night, but you can't verify that, but I like the story anyway. 18th century America went ape for apple jack, in part because fresh water was so hard to come by. They started off their day with porridge over the fire, and then they pour some apple jack in it. I'm imagining apple jacks on my apple jacks.

Absolutely. Right, for breakfast. Early apple jack was made through a process called jacking. During the winter, barrels of low alcohol cider were left to freeze overnight. In the morning, the ice that formed would be chipped away. The liquid that remained was the highly alcoholic apple jack. It would get pretty potent, and it had some crazy names such as horn of gunpowder and mouth of bluefish quills. The drink of the common man, apple jack played a powerful role in politics.

1840 William Henry Harrison runs for president. Yes, he was dubbed the hard cider candidate. And that was meant as an insult at first, is that right?

It was, it was, but he took that as his rally call to the working class. This is where we age all of our apple brandy apple jack. From the look of this door, I feel like we're about to do something illegal. What way do you smell the aroma? Oh, I love this. Layard's aging room contains orchards worth of alcohol. It takes about 7,000 pounds of apples for one barrel. Now, while an apple just gets rotten with age, apple brandy blossoms over time. So this is aged minimum of three years. Oh, that goes right down. Kids, forget the red apple.

Bring that to your teacher. Absolutely. Despite these sobering times, the family is keeping spirits up. Lisa's son Gerard is already learning the ropes. The 10th generation of Layards to make apple jack. The Layard family, we drink our apple a day and we're all very healthy. I'm Jane Pauley. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. Hi, podcast peeps. It's me, Drew Barrymore.

Oh my goodness. I want to tell you about our new show. It's the Drew's News Podcast. And in each episode, me and a weekly guest are going to cover all the quirky, fun, inspiring, and informative stories that exist out in the world because, well, I need it.

And maybe you do too. From the newest interior design trend, Barbie Corps, to the right and wrong way to wash your armpits. Also, we're going to get into things that you just kind of won't believe and we're not able to do in daytime television. So watch out. Listen to Drew's News wherever you get your podcasts. It's your good news on the go.