Theres a group of people called the aymara who have lived for time immemorial in what is now peru in theandes. And they are, its a tough life wherethey live and the part of the reason is that not a lot grows their. One of the things that does grow there is potatoes. But these are notyour Grocery Store potatoes. These are small, wild andtoxic potatoes. Toxic in the sense that not theyre going to kill you but they will make you vomit, give you diarrhea. Basically make you never want to eat another potato as long as you live. And you cant just boil them. That will destroy the toxins. And they are not environmental contaminants. The toxins are made by the potatoes themselves. Why would a potato or any other plant make a poison . Basically to protect itself. The potato is the plants Energy Storage thing. And it doesnt want humans or any other animals digging up its Energy Stores and eating them makes them toxic to protect itself they are the potato plants batteries. They are stealing the potato plants batteries and just like you dont want to eat a duracell. We have to do something to those toxic batteries before we eat and so the aymara came up with this incredibly ingenious way to both freezedried and detoxify the potatoes at the same time. So what they ended up with was perfectly safe to eat, detoxified potatoes that could fit in storage for up to 20 years. And they didnt taste good, but it doesnt really matter what it tastes like as long as you know youve got food for the winter. So the length to which ancient societies would go, and they are not unique. Theres all kinds of other societies inventing their own ingenious Processing Techniques. The length to which we would go to do that is cool to me. So processing, not new and not clearly defined. Can i ask a question . Since she is in honor of this ,. For those theflaming hot cheetos . The most important question, crunchy or classic crust . Its a tossup between flaming hot and classic. The pumps for me dont rate. I think if im feeling spicy its flaming hot all the way and today im feeling a bit spicy. This is my question. So this does not resemble anything that comes out of the ground or off a tree. But its delicious. Explain to me how do they change. Is it all just created inthe laboratory . What do they do . Tos are a great example of modernday ingenuity. What they do is basically you start with most of the chitos cornmeal. Which is corn. And corn mill if youveever had it by itself is really bland. And it doesnt resemble, its not crunchy. It doesnt resemble a cheeto at all and what they will do is they will take the cornmeal and combine it with flavorings which, and i emailed cheetos and said can you please tell me what your flavoringingredients are and they wrote me back with a very polite no. But they mix the flavorings andthe cornmeal and they will pass it through whats called an extruder. If you picture a wine corkscrew and then you picture all the negative space around a wine corkscrew , if that were also solid. So you would have a cylinder with a corkscrew shape worn out and an actualcorkscrew. They basically have a long tube thats like that and they feed the cornmeal into this thing which spins continuously. And the cornmeal makes its way through the corkscrew all the way to the end and as you can imagine, its winding its way between the corkscrew and the other part, the negative part of the corkscrew and during this part is creating, theres a lot of friction and a lot of heat because its spinning really fast. What that does is it boils the residual water in the cheeto slurry. And the water doesnt have a ton of places to go because youre in an constrained environment because it pops up the cornmeal and by the time it comes out the other end of the extruderyouve got these very puppy , crispy, sort of ask half crispy snacks and thenthey deepfried them. So everything is better deepfried. Even extruded cornmeal snacks and theextruder is used in all kinds of other stuff. Its like a passing Food Processing technique that is fairly recent. This is not something the aymara were doing in peru 2000 years ago. So this is highly processed. You would call this highly processed. Theres no question about that, just because were using upand doing the corkscrew type of thing. And you include it in your book. I did not try it but you included a recipe for homemade diy chitos. I did not invent this recipe. I was chatting with ken all, whos a professor of food history and the day after i chatted with him we were talking about what does it mean for food to be processed and he said i made some cheetos in my kitchen yesterday and i said what do you mean youmade cheetos . He said i basically took some noodles, dehydrated them, spray them with oil and put them in the microwave. And that kind of recreated this basically deep frying and popping up the water in the noodle at the same time and says i sprinkled them with so roger powder and i had homemade cheetos and it was an interesting point because what he was saying was does my doing that still count as making these foods processed . Is the cheeto version thati made at home does that count as processed food or is it only if it comes in a bag and was made in a factory . That was an interesting question. What do yousay, processed yes, sir no . Thats a tough one. My training in a ischemistry background , anyone else would probably say no but to me the cheeto made in a factory and the cheeto you made at home as long as youre using roughly the same ingredients and the same process they are roughly the same in terms of processing. The factory is just a much more gigantic version of your kitchen. Now if the ingredients are really different. If theres things that are added to the cheetos made in a factory that would never use at home we could be talking aboutdifferent levels of processing. Im glad to say that because there are so many chemicals. If i were to do this at home with cornmeal and sriracha sauce, there is sulfate, monosodium glutamate. So this all must be bad for you, right . This is what i think of as processed food. This has none of the ingredients. This is an interesting one. You will get people onboth sides of this debate. Especially folks who are trying to sell you Natural Organic quote unquote healthier foodswill say things like what you just said. Make sure you can pronounce the ingredients. Make sure there arent that many of them on thelabel. If its something your grandmother wouldnt recognize as food to eat. That kind of thing. And i have a little bit of a skeptical view of that kind of thing. One of the things i did in the book is i was like okay, let me just invent processing scale and the way im going to do this is count the number of ingredients in everything and count the number of syllables in every single ingredient and add those twonumbers up. And if you do that for skittles you get like 109 i think or Something Like that. And i thought okay, what if you do that for coffee or an apple or lettuce or anything that you considerto be natural . And i was like well, copy, 2 syllables and i was like well, theres lots of stuff in copy that just doesnt have an ingredientslabel. Theres all kinds of aromatic acids and different compounds so i looked up how many different chemicals are there in a cup of coffee . And it looks like pushing 1000. In copy. Yes. Thats only the ones weve been able to recognize and isolate and determine what they are. If you think about it coffee is a living thing. Its a cell. It has dna, it has proteins, it has a cell wall and all kinds of stuff that is chemically very complex and then you start roasting it and pouring oiland water on it , youregoing to add a whole layer of chemical complexity. If i did my made up processed food scale on coffee you might get a number like 5000 if you add up all the syllables of everything in their. So thats when i kind of came down onthe side of look , yes it can be intimidating to read these ingredients labels. Yes it does seem overwhelming but if i think about the true ingredients of what are in all the stuff thats considered natural, that would be off thecharts. So thats when i was like okay, im not going to view it as this framework of if i cant pronounce it then it must be bad for you. There must be Something Else that will tell you about the health of these things. If theyre not chemicals, youre saying number of chemicals or readability of the ingredients list does not necessarily correlate with being bad for us or being unhealthy. Or the source of mechanical or artificial things that were doing to it because the peruvians that are doing the fancy potato thing, is that much different then shooting a bunch of cornmeal through thecorkscrew. So how do you figure out, what do you do then . Does that mean i can eat cheetos all day long . Ive certainly increased my cheeto and all processed Food Consumption since doing thebook. Thats a good question. Figuring out is something, how healthy or unhealthy is something for you is a hard thing to do and i think most people, certainly i when i first started this not realize how difficult it is to dothis. If you really want to get accurate picture of how good or bad something is for you, ideally in an ideal world you would take a large group of people. You would split them upinto two groups. You would banish each groupto their own desert island. You would feed one group this thing that you think is good or bad and you would make sure that the other group doesnt have any of that same thing. And then you would follow them for like 30 years to see does one group have more Heart Disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. No big deal. Obviously that is not doable. Thats not something were going to spend taxpayer dollars on and itshighly unethical. So you have to resort to other measures that are debatable. And these other measures basically are okay, if you cant banish people to desert islands and force them to eat a specific diet, if youre only allowed to just track what people are eating normally and then correlate or associate the longterm consumption of a particular food with a bad health outcome, then you start getting into what i learned were your waters in terms of being able to pin a bad Health Effect or good Health Effect on a particular food. And theres the last third of the book is really where i delveddeeply into that. More deeply than i ever thought i was going to. But yes, bottom line is it can be tricky and it makes me. Whenever you read a headline on the news about eggs linked to 27 percent increase in Heart Disease risk i read those headlines and i go well, maybe but also maybe not. Im going to follow up with a few questions but getting back to the book, one thing that struck me is how funny it was. And it was. I did not expect to be laughing out loud when youre teaching me chemistry and reading chemistry in college that was not my thing and yet here i was laughing about it. So im curious, did you have to work hard to make all of this chemistry and all this scientific stuff funny or did you haveto work hard . You know its funny, someone once told me if you stop trying to be funny you will be a lot funnier. Which was a funny thing to say ironically. But yes, some of the stuff , some of the stuff in the book just is objectively funny and doesnt need my help. One of the Processing Techniques was used in olden days and might still be used today is theres a native american group, peoples in what is now Northern California who are ingeniously would make candy out of the. [bleep] of an insect called in a bid. And aphids are these days agricultural pests. Little guys, super small. You would hardly noticethem if you werent looking for them. You can gather their. [bleep] you can gather their poop, not fresh. It has to dry on the plants first but once it does dry and by the way, what theyre eating is plant sent and plant sap is very sweet so what theyre pooping is also very sweet. So you can gather their. [bleep] and make it into candy. That kind of thing is both ingenious and also funny and it doesnt need my help to make it any funnier. But there were some parts where ive thrown in a joke and then id have my partner julia read and then if she liked half chuckled id be like okay thats good. And if she rolled her eyes i would say im putting this joke. The julia and ex. Did your editor ever come back and say george, no. Yes actually. The book had a lot of your letter words it when my first draft and he cut 99percent of those. Four letter words can be funny, that was in the book of humor. Sometimes humor and also sometimes just to be oh my god, this is incredible. Sometimes in the serviceof that. You also illustrated your own book. And i have to say, that was kind of brave. I dont think youre going to quit your day job and become an illustrator. Did you consider farming it out . What was the thought process there . I did consider farming it out. So actually the show on the National Geographic that was illustrated by someone whos super talented and my first thought was im just going to have brett do the illustrations for the book and every time you do an illustration you have to that it for accuracy and make sure that its right and it fits well with the narrative. And i think there were Something Like 50 or so odd illustrations in the book that was going to be a lot. And i would sketch out versions of them just so i could see them in the flow of the manuscript and i am a terrible artist. But it ended up just working because the style of the book is very informal and the style of theillustrations are also very informal. Im not getting paid any money from apple for saying this but i actually did most of the illustrations in keynotewhich is their powerpoint alternative. Very nice, okay. It did have a bit of a homegrown look to it. Thats a kind way of saying they were terrible. Mabel was my favorite. Mabel was i think the little insect that we were talking about. I love that you gave her a name as well. What was your book writing process then . Kind of regimented sitdown, eight hours a day, words come pouring forth . I sat down on a monday and then wrote continuously until that friday. My editor didnt change a single word. Everything was pure gold start to finish. No, i think theres not one single thing in the book that survived from my first draft. In terms of the process, it really was quite regimented and i think stephen king has good advice on this. He says i sit down at my computer and i dont stop until i have whatever my goal is for the day and your goal can start low and progress as you become more practiced. And it doesnt matter how good or bad the words are, youre going to have days where everything you write is terrible and youre going to have days where you overshoot your goal and its pretty good. I think the key is consistency. So i would get up at 5 30 or six and write for a couple of hours before going to my day job and i would write for a couple of hours in the evening and then weekends, i would write eight hours a day both days on the weekends and that got to be as you can imagine kind of crazy. So. That explains a lot about the style of the book. Feverish, exactly as i was working on deadline and trying to get it out on time. And then my employer finally was like you can take some time off and focus on this if you want and your job will still be here when you get back which was very generous so i did take a sixmonth sabbatical to finish up the book. And during that period it really was like a 10 hour day but only monday through friday. Its important to give yourself that time off and stop, recharge, do other things, relax so that was helpful. Soundtrack . Did youlisten to music . Actually, Porter Robinson as some great writing out. Its very electronic dance type style. And also ran attack as some great writing music. Its not something now i listen to it and i associated with work so i dont ever listen to it when im not writing or working in some way but basically things without lyrics or with subtle lyrics. Do you have a playlist . I can make it public. Thats a good idea. Put it in the comments on this because that sounds fascinating. When you read it now areyou excited about it . I have two reactions. One is like i cannot believe that i actually wrote a book. Thats my main reaction. And by the way, i should shout out i interviewed a lot of people for this book. You being one of them. And i there are probably areas in their that we try to make things as factually accurate as possible but there would be 100 times as many errors without the 80 or so people who i interviewed and sent excerpts of the book to read and made sure that thescience did actually represent well. So that was a huge, huge help so officiallyregina thank you. But now i completely forgot your question. When you read it you laugh now and mark. Im one of those people who read it and i like oh, i should have written this differently i should have changed this sentence. And it was my editor who said he actually sat me down not physically over email he said george, i know when writers are tweaking things to the point of like past, hes basically like youre ready to give birth to yourbook now. Its been theright amount of time. I think its ready. Stop tweaking it. Just its time. And i think thats a really important thing because you could be writing the same book your entire life and tweaking it until it was perfect, every single word was right but at some point you have to put it out into the world and see what happens. How many scientists, 80 . Thats a lot of people. I was impressed how well you got the statistics part right which is what you and i talked about so there was a lot of attention to detail and that terrifying to put a book about science out there what if there are errors . This is something i thought a lot about. Theres two types of error. Theres a one plus one equals three error and theres a one plus one equals tomatoes ever. One plus one equals three is your gardenvariety typo. You Say Something is six millimeters when you mean its six nanometers. Is that wrong . Yes. Is it a huge deal in the history of science and mark know. Then there are other errors where if you make them, you could risk having someone the wrong impression about something in a way that would make themchange their behavior. There i think thats a much more seriouserror. So for example if you only focus on one perspective and dont take a moment to think wait a second, what if this could be wrong. Let me talk to some people on the other side of the fence and think what they think. If you dont do that i think you risk your book being very onesided and like painting too rosy a picture or two negative of a picture. And there you could, there i think its much more dangerous, even th