You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (2024) s01e03 Episode Script
Episode 3
[tense ambient music playing]
[Daniel] During the pandemic,
I was at home a lot,
and I would draw a lot.
And I started drawing
sort of about this idea of
Eleven Madison Park
becoming fully plant-based.
This kind of seems
like another little celebration.
Just 'cause the celebration of the season
could be, like, the strawberry.
Different strawberries.
[Daniel] I communicated that to my team,
and we decided
that if we couldn't create an experience
that was on the level
that we'd had before,
that we wouldn't do it.
We will open the restaurant
and serve meat again.
[tense ambient music continues]
The morel could be a two-component, like
Could be a plate and a bite on the side.
Or it could be a bite and then the course.
[man] Maybe something like this
drops in the middle.
- [Daniel] To share?
- So you take the sauce, and, like
You, like, sauce the bread or something.
You know, like
I think if we serve this in the beginning,
that we wouldn't do the tonburi.
[Daniel] I felt that we had to elevate
plant-based eating
so that it can be more delicious
than anything we've known from the past.
I think it's a good start.
Aside from the core team
at Eleven Madison Park,
no one believed
that this actually would work.
You became
the best restaurant, uh, in New York,
and then it was
best restaurant in the world,
and then, uh,
you change your menu completely.
- [audience laughing]
- [Daniel laughs]
Who does that? And why would you do that?
What kind of insane human being are you?
[Daniel] It became world news.
But, I mean, it came from every angle.
[dramatic string music playing]
But for me, at that point,
it was so clear that we had to go all in.
[dramatic string music grows to crescendo]
I'm at a market.
This is my first time
shopping for and cooking vegan food.
[Carolyn] I need help,
and so my friend Ava
is going to help me
build my pantry of vegan stuff.
[Charlie] Made notes in my journal
about different things I wanted to eat
this week and in subsequent weeks.
[Carolyn] So, we're looking at mayonnaise.
[Ava] See there. Egg yolks.
- That means it's not vegan.
- [Carolyn] Oh, yeah. Oh.
[Ava] So you can't use this one.
The biggest challenge of doing
a human intervention nutrition study
is that you can't control everything.
This is an important crux in the study
because now they have to cook
on their own.
They have to buy their own food
and cook it.
Look at that. Beautiful.
Oh yeah.
Well, what if they're not
perfectly adherent?
[Pam] I found some
amazing tasting ground beef,
which is obviously plant-based
'cause it's vegan.
Ooh, look, there's also
some vegan chocolate-chip cookies.
I did get a couple snackies.
[Christopher]
You continually have to check in.
Making chia-seed pudding this morning.
[Christopher] They're gonna get asked
about their diet.
They're gonna get asked
about mental clarity.
[Wendy] I added some green beans
and leftover meatloaf turkey.
And they gotta poop for us, bleed for us
[Rosalyn] I did my blood sample today,
and I did my stool sample today.
and pee for us,
on top of everything else. Go team.
We are in our self-feeding mode.
And so, tonight, I decided that,
for dinner,
we were gonna have some, uh, chicken.
[insects chirping]
[Craig] This is the OG.
First chicken house I built.
[male producer] About how many chickens
do you think passed through here?
[Craig chuckles]
Let's see. 23 and a half years.
180,000 times 23 and a half.
Whatever that is. I'm no math whiz, man.
[chuckles] A lot.
[chickens clucking]
Just over four million chickens
in this one barn.
And I have four barns.
[unsettling ambient music playing]
I grew up right here on this family farm.
When I was a kid,
tobacco was the cash crop.
I'm not advocating for tobacco,
but that's just the way it was.
Tobacco, naturally, has faded,
and that's when
the industrial poultry came in.
They were courting farmers
to build houses to raise their birds.
If I remember correctly, the ad said,
"We need a few smart birds
to raise our birds."
And I was just ready to, you know,
put down some roots and raise a family
and raise a few chickens and die,
uh, you know.
I didn't want it to get
any more complicated than that,
but it just didn't work out that way.
The way the system works is,
they own the birds, they own the feed,
they own the medications
and all that stuff.
What I actually owned
was the land and the buildings.
If you walk into this barn, you're
probably gonna be overcome with ammonia.
You're gonna be probably pretty disgusted
by the dust and the feces
and the feathers flying around.
And you're gonna see a sea of white,
from wall to wall and from end to end.
You can't, logistically, hatch out
two million chicks a week
and all of them be healthy.
But I do know they have genetically bred
these birds for desirable traits,
mostly for to have a big breast.
The organs won't keep up
with the muscle growth.
The skeletal system
won't keep up with the muscle growth.
So you see a lot of heart attacks.
You see other issues.
You see a lot of birds that can't stand,
just that can't support their own weight.
It was like looking at two toothpicks
sticking out of a big grape.
I just think the bird is bred to suffer.
Um
They didn't ask me to do anything cruel.
Didn't have to.
Um, they crammed 30,000 chickens
into 20,000 square feet,
meaning it's 0.67 square foot per bird.
That is a sheet of notebook paper.
[chickens clucking]
They're crawling all over each other.
They're scratching each other
and opening up wounds.
Bam. Enter bacteria. You had issues.
[Cory] When you raise animals
in this unnatural way,
they're all crammed together,
if one animal gets sick,
it spreads throughout
these warehouses really quickly.
So they use antibiotics
in a prophylactic way,
to prevent diseases from happening.
[cows mooing]
[Valerie] Something the animal agriculture
industry figured out some time ago
is that if they give animals
low levels of antibiotics on the regular,
they get bigger faster.
It promotes growth.
It also compensates
for some of the truly filthy conditions,
with thousands, sometimes
hundreds of thousands of animals,
that are breeding grounds for disease.
More antibiotics are fed to farm animals
than are used in all of human medicine,
just to promote growth and prevent disease
in such a stressful,
unhygienic environment.
One of the side effects of giving animals
low levels of antibiotics in their feed,
or injected,
is that they become a breeding ground
for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Things that can cause infections
that are hard or impossible to treat.
[newsman] They now have strong evidence
of a dangerous strain of E. coli
that is now highly resistant
to antibiotic treatment.
[newswoman] At least two million Americans
get antibiotic-resistant infections
each year,
with 23,000 deaths.
We are continuing
to barrel towards a future
where a cut on your hand or an infection
from a routine dental procedure
could prove to be deadly
because there's very little
that we can do to treat that infection.
[Greger] How can you do surgery
without these life-saving, critical drugs
that are being squandered
just to make cheaper meat?
[Valerie] People deserve to know
what they're eating
and where it came from.
Cage-free doesn't mean
your eggs came from a field somewhere.
They likely came
from an industrial facility.
It just wasn't one where the hen
spent her entire life in a cage.
[Craig] You can't trust these labels.
If they got about this much room
to go outside in,
then that's free-range.
It's ridiculous.
[cold, unsettling music playing]
You know, when you see tumors,
and you see, like, bacterial infections,
and you come in here
and you pick up a thousand dead chicks,
and you can just smell it
all over your hand,
kind of dadgum
ruins your appetite for chicken.
So, yeah.
I never ate one chicken from down here,
and I do not eat CAFO chicken today.
[unsettling music swells, then fades]
[man] My name is Dan Holzer,
and I'm a food safety consultant.
Today, we're sending
three samples of raw chicken
to a lab to test for salmonella,
E. coli, and heavy metals.
All three chicken packages
were purchased at a local grocery store.
We're testing raw chicken
because more than one million people
in the United States get sick every year
from eating contaminated poultry.
FDA research shows
that 1 in every 25 packages of chicken
will test positive for salmonella.
One in every five packages of chicken
will test positive for E. coli.
No other food, including produce,
is allowed to go to a grocery store
carrying any pathogens.
The tolerance is zero, except for meat.
Today, we're going to coat
some pieces of chicken breast
with a product called Glo Germ.
The Glo Germ won't be visible to the eye,
but it will show up under a blacklight
if raw chicken residue
comes into contact with any surfaces.
The Glo Germ will show us
how we might move pathogens
around the kitchen unknowingly.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rosalyn] This recipe is so easy,
you could do it.
- All right, let's bring it out here.
- Oh. White meat.
Yes.
[both laugh]
All right. So first
we should wash our hands.
[Dan] I invited Carolyn and Rosalyn
to cook a chicken dinner,
but I didn't tell them it's a test
to see if they spread pathogens
around the kitchen.
[Rosalyn] So go ahead
and put the chicken in there.
- [Carolyn] All of it?
- [Rosalyn] Yes.
I'm gonna use pepper.
I need to wash my hands again.
Yeah, let's wash our hands,
and then get to the, uh, broccoli.
- [Carolyn] Soap again?
- [Rosalyn] Yes.
[Carolyn] Sorry. [chuckles]
Put some olive oil on it
and just roast it.
[Carolyn] Okay. I could eat
that whole bowl.
[Rosalyn] Okay.
[Carolyn] This doesn't have a cover.
Worst comes to worst,
we could do without a cover.
Oh, a pineapple cutting board!
This is so cute.
[sizzling]
[timer beeping]
- [Rosalyn] Oh, look at that.
- [Carolyn] Okay, this is done.
My name's Dan.
I'm a food-safety consultant.
Um, and we conducted some experiments
around the kitchen today
that you guys didn't know about.
- Mm.
- Ooh.
Um, we coated the chicken with a product
called Glo Germ before you cooked with it.
- "Glo Germ"?
- That's right.
And then we used a blacklight
- [light clicks]
- to trace it around the kitchen.
[Rosalyn] Oh.
- [twins gasp]
- [Dan] All right.
- See that?
- [Rosalyn] Whoa!
[Dan] Remember the pineapple?
Yes. The pineapple cutting board.
[both gasp]
- You touched it.
- I did.
- [Carolyn] You touched all over it.
- [Dan] Look at that.
- It's on the towel.
- [Rosalyn] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Dan] Wanna see your clean dishes?
[Carolyn] Ah!
- [Dan] See the plates there?
- [Rosalyn] Yes.
[Carolyn] Look at all this!
[Dan] Look at all that.
[eerie sting]
[Dan] During the backlight test,
we found that we moved potential pathogens
almost throughout the entire kitchen.
[Rosalyn] We touched everything,
including the ingredients,
the handles to all the cabinets, cutlery.
The gadgets and stuff
that we didn't even use
- Right. Right.
- we touched.
[Rosalyn] Help me make the jump
to then the pathogens.
We actually sent samples of the chicken
that you cooked with to a laboratory.
[Carolyn] Okay.
The particular sample of chicken
that you guys cooked with, um,
tested positive for E. coli.
- [Carolyn] Really?
- [Dan] Yes.
And this was just chicken
that was just bought from the store?
[Dan] That's correct.
- [Rosalyn] Wow.
- [Dan] We weren't gonna let you eat it.
When an animal is slaughtered
in a large slaughterhouse mechanically
[inhales deeply]
the contents of their digestive tract,
also known as poop,
can be spread around the room,
and can cross-contaminate other products
that weren't previously contaminated.
[tense music playing]
Many foodborne illnesses occur at home
because most people think
that the meat they buy is safe.
They don't know that they should assume
that all raw meat can make you sick
because it's legal
for up to 25% of chicken products
to hit grocery stores
with pathogens on them.
How can I ensure that I don't eat products
from a slaughterhouse?
I can't entirely trust where it's been.
I am probably
going to work less with meat.
[Rosalyn] Mm.
- [Wendy] Oh, it's a pickle.
- [Pam] Curried chilies. Have to get that.
- [Wendy] Where?
- [Pam] There. Curried chilies. The pickle.
Perky's takes me back
to a typical South African
- Yeah. Yes.
- take-out space.
It was kind of like walking
into a South African bodega.
It really took me back home.
Like, "Oh, whoa."
Obviously, I start getting these cravings
'cause I'm like, "Oh my goodness."
And we love that.
We grew up eating it with our eggs.
- [man] And they're nice and
- [Pam] And I can't have eggs.
But that's they'd be a good substitute
for, um, whatever vegan food you eat.
- Yes, yes. That's so true.
- 'Cause that's vegan as well.
We would boast about South African food
and how delicious
- And we wanted everybody to taste it.
- To taste it.
And it was like,
"Oh my God. It's the best food ever."
And my favorite is my mother's curry.
Mummy's chicken curry is the best.
My favorite South African food
has to be biltong.
[man] It's a South African dried beef.
It's been done
for over 400 years in South Africa.
- They basically invented jerky.
- Mm-hmm.
- It's jerky's, um, sexy cousin.
- Yes.
[man] And it's cured with salt and spices.
Uh, coriander, which is roasted,
which brings the flavor out of it.
People have a special spice.
So, not every biltong tastes the same.
- The process
- The process.
- It's not overly processed like jerky.
- [Pam] Well, it's not processed.
[Wendy] That's true. It's dried.
- And it's really tasty as well.
- Yeah.
[Pam] Again, South Africa's
a huge meat-eating country.
[female producer] If you had
to make biltong without beef,
how would you do it?
- I don't think
- [both laugh]
- I don't wanna go there.
- [both laugh]
Then it's just dried fruit
or dried vegetables.
- Curried fruits.
- Curried fruit. That's not biltong, guys.
Coriander-flavored fruits.
Yes, that's what it is. It's just No.
- Or broccoli.
- Yeah.
[both laugh]
Ah!
Come on, buddy. Come on.
Push, push, push, push, push!
[all panting]
[Nimai] Let's go, Charlie. [claps]
- Breathe in through your nose, Charlie.
- [inhales deeply]
In through your nose,
out through your mouth.
[Charlie] For me, this has been hard.
I've fallen behind
in my workouts big time.
[laughs]
It's been tough
since we've been doing this move,
and, uh, you know,
no no preschool, no daycare.
And I have to be a little bit quiet.
[whispers] Oh shit.
[Nimai] Charlie has moved
three times in four weeks.
[grunts]
Like, this I
Just to do push-ups is really hard.
[woman] I'm surprised
you can even do a push-up.
He has many other things
going on in his personal life
that's preventing him
from really giving this study
the attention it deserves.
Michael, who is on an omnivore diet,
seems to be much more invested
in this study than Charlie.
- Push through, push through.
- [exhaling]
Good job, guys. Good job.
So I'm interested to see
how the next two weeks
play out between these two.
All right. Catch your breath.
- We got three, two, one.
- [automated voice] Exercise.
[Nimai] And let's go.
[distant dog barking]
- [woman] Sweet potato everything is good.
- [John] It's so good.
- [woman] Can't go wrong.
- [John laughs] Yeah.
I'll just literally just put them here.
Let me get the seasonings out, actually.
So today, with my friend Kaela,
we're making a vegan meal,
which is a stuffed sweet potato
with onion and pepper fajitas,
as well as black beans,
and a kale salad mix
and Italian dressing.
[device beeping]
[John] Kaela grew up vegan
because of her parents.
I'm like, "Okay, well, can you help me
make a vegan meal, then?"
"You probably have plenty
of recipes to pull out of your book."
You know, as a kid, I didn't really think
I was missing out on anything.
Okay.
And then, as I got older,
it just feels like
there's more options now, like
- Oh yeah, right.
- More vegan options.
- [John] It's getting thrown out, right?
- [Kaela] I mean, if you wanna cut off
- [John] I'm learning as I go along.
- [Kaela] That's kinda what I do with it.
[John] You know,
I didn't eat vegan beforehand,
so what tips do you have for someone
in terms of cooking in the kitchen?
I would say start start off slow.
Definitely go on the internet,
see a bunch of recipes,
because the recipes are out there.
[food sizzling]
[woman] What you're doing
is using the same ingredients,
but changing the foundation of the meal.
For example,
if you have a nine-inch plate,
you might have bean stew, right?
Or a chili.
And that might be
about a third of your plate.
And then half of your plate
would be some form of vegetables.
Sautéed, in a salad, steamed.
And the other part
you want to be a whole grain.
Brown rice, black rice, wild rice,
quinoa, millet, bulgur.
You could have avocado, olives, right?
For healthy fats.
Use the oils,
use the spices that you already use,
when you're making plant-based foods.
It is very easy
to make the food taste delicious.
It looks like a garden.
It does, yeah. [chuckles]
[distant siren wailing]
[woman] The first time
I ever tried a tomato
that I grew myself, I was like,
"Wait, this is a whole other tomato."
Right.
"Like, it tastes different."
This is all poblano peppers.
Let's try some beans.
- [Jevon] How do we eat these?
- You just, like, eat it.
- The whole thing's good to eat?
- Yeah, you can eat it.
Except for, like, you know, the end.
It's just, like, fresh, you know?
[John] It is very fresh.
[woman and John laugh]
[woman] Those are all mustard greens.
- This is dinosaur kale.
- [Jevon] The texture is so interesting.
- So we could eat this?
- You could totally eat this.
- This is so cool. Just to, like
- [laughs]
- Like, just pick stuff and
- Right, it's like
This is like you're shopping
through the grocery store.
- [Danielle] List some favorite foods.
- Apricots.
- Cucumbers. Strawberries. I love salad.
- [Danielle] Cool.
- I'm a big salad fan.
- Beets.
[Jevon] Corn on the cob. Yams.
Perfect. I am, like,
thoroughly hungry now.
[all laugh]
[Danielle] What about
at a family gathering?
- Greens. Collard greens.
- [laughs]
- [Danielle] Okay. Okay.
- [twins laughing]
Now, what if I said to you,
what if you couldn't have
any of those ever again?
- [John] That would be devastating.
- That would be disappointing.
[people chattering]
[Tracye] The dietary guidelines
make it clear
that Americans should eat
more fruits and vegetables.
But what if you've been systematically
denied access to fruits and vegetables?
The majority of African Americans
are experiencing
the worst health outcomes, right,
because of food apartheid
in our communities.
[Cory] For communities
that are particularly marginalized,
because of that disinvestment,
you don't have supermarket chains
wanting to locate in those areas,
and access to healthy fresh foods
is very, very difficult to find.
[Tracye] So if we are living
in urban centers,
where most African Americans live
in the United States,
unless that area has been gentrified,
you're gonna find fast-food places,
you're gonna find corner stores.
[sizzling]
Foods we consume
in the Black community as soul food,
uh, it was the food
that our ancestors were compelled to eat.
It was the scraps, um,
from the slave owner's table.
The chitlins, uh, the fried food.
Uh, all of the food
that they had to find creative ways
to make it tasteful for your palate,
uh, so that you could stay alive.
[woman] And that's how a cuisine evolved
around taking things
that might not necessarily be
the most nutritious
or even culturally relevant.
So, while I embrace the term "soul food,"
because, to me, that was the resilience
of my ancestors taking what they had,
fast-forward into the future,
that food might have
some of the taste profiles,
but it's processed grains
and processed meats
and those type of things that are now
causing a lot of health problems.
More African Americans
were dying of Covid than anyone else.
It's because 300,000 of us
were already dying a year
of preventable,
diet-related chronic diseases.
The death and disability
from eating this food continues
decade after decade after decade.
[woman] Detroit is a majority Black city.
And so how are we supposed
to survive as a people
when we can't get access
to fresh, affordable,
high-quality collard greens, right?
Like, collard greens
being so culturally significant
to our households.
Following years of divestment
because of the white flight,
because of the collapse
of the automobile industry,
about 30% of Detroit's land is vacant.
[bright instrumental music playing]
So we grew food because we had to,
out of survival.
Gardens popping up everywhere.
Vacant lots, people's backyards,
people's front yards,
windowsills, rooftops.
Wherever you could
get access to grow food,
that's what happened.
Here at D-Town Farm,
we unapologetically focus
on culturally relevant crops
because this is what our people eat.
So, okra and collard greens
and watermelon and callaloo
and other foods.
[Tracye] The fastest growing
plant-based demographic in the country,
African Americans.
[Nezaa] I think of it
as a return to ancestral memory.
It's a part of our evolution.
Like, we evolved with these plants.
Part of us reclaiming plants in our diet,
and it's part of reaching to those things
that's going to help to protect us
against modern diseases and viruses
and all those type of things.
[Shakara] We consider this whole process
of land reclamation
to be a process of alchemy.
It's a transformation
of something that is minimal
into something
that is maximum and abundant.
[bright instrumental music continues]
[people chattering]
[people laughing]
[music fading]
[Pam] Where's the knife? Uh, there we go.
- [Wendy] What did you put? Garlic and
- Uh, garlic, cilantro, salt. That's it.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
- Ooh, smells nice.
- Uh, and onions.
I was always mindful
of the kind of meat that I eat, um,
and, you know, the eggs that I purchase.
And I would tell Wendy, like,
I'd rather pay more to buy free-range eggs
than, you know, buy the cheaper eggs.
Then I would say, "You know what?"
"Instead of eating steak once a week,
let's eat steak once a month
because it impacts the environment."
Just gonna warm it up.
I'm reading up on a lot of what goes on
in animal farming, fish farming.
In South Africa,
all our fish was actually
- Were caught.
- Were caught.
Very much the same way
that the meat and dairy companies
have sort of controlled the idea
of the American farmer,
you have the idea of a fisherman,
of a pole with a line
and a little hook on the end.
And you have an idea of the fish
who's swimming freely
and gets caught by this hook
and has a sort of graceful end
to their life.
But the truth could not be more different.
[seagulls squawking]
Truth is that 75%
of the global catch right now,
which is about 100 million tons,
a little more,
is caught by industrial fisheries.
It's massive nets
that sweep through and catch everything
in very unselective ways.
[tense ambient music playing]
There's also this issue of bycatch.
Other animals that are caught
and rarely accounted for.
[tense ambient music continues]
And there are 45,000 factory fishing boats
in operation around the world.
We are consuming wildlife from the ocean
on a scale that is unprecedented.
It's causing the elimination
not of just individual species
but whole ecosystems.
[Jennifer] A recent study has shown
that 82% of global fish populations
are depleted.
Fish farming offered a lot of promise.
They said, "We're going to farm fish,
and we're going to solve overfishing
because we'll create all these farm fish,
so consumers
don't have to buy the wild stuff."
[man] My name's Don Staniford.
I'm the director of Scamon Scotland
and campaign against salmon farming
not just in Scotland but around the world.
By the looks of it there,
tens of thousands farmed salmon
crammed in cages.
Maybe half a million,
a million fish on this site.
So wherever salmon farms go,
they're leaving
a lasting legacy of pollution
and pushing wild fish to extinction.
The king of fish
is the wild, majestic salmon.
Swims thousands of miles,
leaps up waterfalls.
If you look at a supermarket 50 years ago,
it was all wild fish.
It was all wild salmon.
Today, more than 50% of fish
in supermarkets globally is farmed.
There's farm-raised salmon,
and then there's wild-caught.
What's the difference?
- [birds squawking]
- [Big Ben tolls]
[Wendy] So, this is gonna be
an interesting excursion.
- [Pam] Yes.
- [Wendy laughs]
[Wendy] Pam and I went to the UK
to learn everything there is to know
about farmed salmon.
- [woman] Hello.
- [Pam] Hi.
[Wendy] As a chef, I want to know
what I'm feeding my customers.
Billingsgate Market in London
is an iconic, historic place.
It's supposed to serve
the best fish that the UK has to offer.
[Wendy] Looking for fresh.
- [Pam] You want fresh?
- [Wendy] Yeah.
- Do you have fresh salmon?
- [man] Salmon?
- Yeah, I'm trying to make a
- [man] Nice fresh one, yeah?
- [Wendy] Fresh?
- I wanna do a barbecue.
[man] Yeah, it's fresh.
And it's Is it wild
Is it, uh, wild-caught?
- Wild-caught, yeah?
- [man] Yes. It's raised in wild.
- [Wendy] What do you mean
- [man] Yeah, it's raised in the sea.
[Wendy] What does he mean "wild farm"?
[woman] Like, have you ever gutted a fish
and seen little fish and prawns inside it?
- I've never gutted a fish.
- [woman] Right.
Wild fish, you will find prawns
and baby fish and everything in there.
And farmed,
they're a bit cleaner, actually.
That's complete and utter bollocks.
I think if people realized
the full horrors behind salmon farming,
they would avoid it
like the proverbial plague.
[tense ambient music playing]
[woman] A salmon farm is
approximately the size
of a football field.
It's a series of nets.
And they pour in
hundreds of thousands of fish.
But they're the only farmers in the world
that never shovel their manure.
The sheer amount of waste,
in the order of tons per day,
is pouring out of these farms.
And because they're feedlots,
growing fish as fast as they can,
you know, as quickly as possible,
on a very unnatural diet,
disease just spreads incredibly rapidly,
whether it's parasites
viruses,
bacteria.
When I first began studying viruses
in salmon farms,
of course I couldn't go to the farms,
so I went to the supermarkets.
The fish they were selling
in the supermarkets were deformed,
they had big sores on them.
Over 98% of the samples
that I bought in supermarkets
and in sushi restaurants
were infected
with this piscine orthoreovirus,
this salmon blood virus.
People tell me that the viruses
in the fish can't affect humans,
but there has been no research on this.
And so all the pathogens
are leaving the farm too.
Wild salmon that used to come
into these beautiful, pristine little bays
were now literally swimming
into clouds of waste.
Excrement. Pathogens.
And so they were dying.
The destruction of wild salmon populations
that live near salmon farms
can be over 50%.
Wild salmon are a keystone species,
and their disappearance
has a devastating effect
on local economies
and the surrounding ecosystems.
[eagle calls]
There is nowhere in the world
that this industry has existed
that wild salmon have persisted. Nowhere.
[tense ambient music continues]
[music fades]
[Don] Towards the end
of the farming of salmon,
they can add this dye.
So the salmon farmers
use this as a color guide.
[Pam] Oh, wow.
[Don] Consumer research has shown
that people pay more for redder salmon.
So these salmon-farm companies
are trying to mask the color,
hide the fact that it's farmed,
and and ape and copy the pink,
the red flesh of the wild salmon.
- [man] Look how nice and red inside.
- Yeah.
[man] You're guaranteed to get a decent
color and a decent quality of fish.
Not only it's an artificial color,
it's been linked to human health problems.
- So some of this is, like, 20% fat.
- [Pam] Mm-hmm.
[Don] You can see the white lines.
The fat content of farmed salmon
can be over three times higher
than wild salmon.
It's like looking at Usain Bolt,
the athlete,
compared to some couch potato
who just sits there all day.
So this product is marketed as healthy,
it's marketed as responsible,
yet it's fattier than pizza,
it's fattier than bacon.
If you cook farmed salmon,
it's got so much fat,
you don't even need oil in the pan.
[Wendy] Look at that.
When I press it, oil's just oozing out.
[Don] And that's not good oils either.
That's omega-6s.
[woman] Because of the feed ingredients,
the fat will contain
fat soluble contaminants.
Those are the some of the pesticides.
Uh, dioxin, PCB, DDT.
And due to the high level of fat
contained in farmed salmon,
the contamination was higher
than what we found, uh, in the wild
all of wild seafood.
[sizzling]
The primary concern is cancer.
There's also metabolic disorders,
such as diabetes.
I can't feed that to my customers.
This is not supposed to happen.
It should be nice and solid.
[Don] I don't think
I'd like to eat either of those.
[Wendy] Of course not.
I mean, you can't eat diseased food.
[Don] So when you get farmed salmon,
you're not getting a bargain,
you're getting a health disaster,
an environmental disaster.
[unsettling ambient music playing]
It's basically elevated my disgust
for farmed salmon.
[unsettling ambient music continues]
- [music fades]
- [leaves tearing]
go outside and take care of it.
The cooking in the second half has been,
for me, really comfortable. Convenient.
- [Michael] I love the color and crunch.
- You dice it? I thought just thin slices?
[Michael] Yeah, it would just be ribbon
and then thrown into the salad.
Adds a little crunch and color.
[birds chirping]
One thing I was surprised by
over the course of the study
was how I just became inclined
to make these, like,
crudité, like, vegetable snacks.
'Cause, previously,
you know, I was so lazy.
I'd just reach into the fridge
and just grab a block of cheese,
some crackers, or some chips and salsa.
[child] I just want a little.
[Charlie] The cooking's been great
because we were making Korean rice bowls.
Then we were layering with pickled items.
I say "we" because my wife and I
kinda teamed up on it.
Grill this, grill that.
Toast buns.
Today, for the omnivore meal,
I'm gonna make a hamburger.
On top of that,
I'm putting some Gruyère cheese,
sauerkraut, some pickles,
tomato, and some purple onions.
It's gonna be a tall burger.
I'm going to make a veggie burger
with portobello mushroom.
We have so many tomatoes,
so I'm gonna make a caprese
without the mozzarella.
- [Michael] That salad looks great. Yeah.
- Look at the size of these!
We could have
the world's biggest caprese salad.
[humming]
[Charlie] Changing itself is hard,
but we also live in a culture
where there's a lot of meat products
or animal products in food.
So, like, one of the hardest things for me
was going to stores or restaurants
and being like, "Excuse me, I'm so sorry,
but does this have any butter in it?"
It's making me realize
how challenging it is,
for multiple reasons,
to switch to a vegan diet.
- [Michael] You got your vegan cheese.
- [Charlie] I don't think I'm gonna do it.
Provolone.
Okay. I don't even know how they
Oh, it says "provolone-style."
- Very small print.
- Yes.
[Charlie] Try it.
It can't be worse than a Kraft Single.
Well, they nailed the color.
Yeah, that's true.
[Miyoko] Taste is so important.
Food is not just to nourish the body,
food nourishes the soul.
In order to do so,
you have to romance people.
It has to be a language of love.
It has to be something
that makes people go,
"Oh my God, I can't wait
to get a fork and dig into that."
Come on, guys. It's time to go to work.
Come on in. Let's go.
I got into the business
of making vegan cheese
because it was the last thing
that I was able to give up
when I transitioned to vegan.
There are still the Kraft Single-type
of vegan cheese
out there in the marketplace,
but I don't think
that's gonna woo anybody.
I started Miyoko's Kitchen
really because I wanted to prove
that amazing vegan cheese
was indeed possible
that was rooted
in the flavors of tradition
but made from completely new,
innovative ingredients.
You can make cheese
out of all sorts of things
and provide the textural
and flavor profiles of cheese.
Cashews are an incredibly
environmentally friendly crop,
so we have used cashew nuts
since the very beginning.
Dairy cheese takes
800 to 1,000 gallons of water
for one pound of cheese.
To make our cashew cheese,
it takes about one quart
to three or four quarts.
That's about it.
What I tried to do was create a technology
that was a marriage
between traditional cheese-making,
using things like fermentation,
brining, aging,
inoculating with enzymes, yeast, etc.
to create a whole array of cheeses.
Yeah, let's take a look.
Oh, these are looking good.
We know how dairy behaves,
but we didn't know
how a sort of cashew base would behave
when it's exposed
to certain degrees of heat
or various combinations
with other ingredients.
The fact is
no one had ever done it before,
so in some ways I could say,
"Hey, we're writing the book
on making cheese out of cashews."
Let's just check this out.
Oh yeah. It's aging nicely.
Little crystal formations are beginning.
I wanted a cheese
that would truly impress.
Sorta like the Tesla model.
You launch with a sexy, high-end product,
capture people's imagination,
and then they're hooked.
[distant siren wailing]
[wings fluttering]
[sounds of traffic]
[man] There's pickled kohlrabi
in between the layers,
and then there's shiitake mushrooms
that are confited,
and then the morels
that have just been quickly sautéed
with a little bit of, uh, shallot butter.
[Daniel] I read a report
where it said, by 2050,
we will need three planets
if we continue to eat the way we eat.
I think, because Eleven Madison Park
had won all these awards,
because we are in New York City,
because our restaurant was famous,
there were very few places in the world
that could move the needle
as much as we could
towards eating plant-based.
I think the basil is sort of a surprising,
really beautiful aspect.
So if we would make that statement,
that would really, I think, send a signal.
You know, we had meat suppliers
reaching out to us
in really hateful language,
saying, "You're gonna regret this.
You're gonna fail."
"And if you're gonna have
to serve meat again,
I will never deliver meat
to you guys again."
I mean, it was, like, pretty harsh.
Unfortunately, the perception
is still that a piece of meat
is worth more than artichokes or beets.
So I think that has to shift.
So, like, if we can elevate
some of these ingredients,
then there must be value to it.
When you take a bite of something,
within three seconds,
you know, "This is delicious."
I care a lot about aesthetics,
and what I'm going for
is sort of this minimal
and effortless beauty.
I feel that our food
has to push certain boundaries,
but before the reopening,
there were fears.
I was fully prepared
to lose all of our stars.
They're still charging $335
for each person
to dine at this restaurant.
So it's, "How comfortable are we
paying this much for vegetables?"
[dramatic string music playing]
[Daniel] This hasn't been done before.
And there was no return back.
[dramatic string music continues]
[string music fades]
[Nimai] Wow, look at you all.
[woman] I can see differences
just looking at you.
Everybody feeling good?
- [Jevon] Yeah.
- [Wendy] Yeah.
- [Rosalyn] No.
- No?
- Oh, now you, yeah.
- Who's nervous? Anybody a little nervous?
Yeah? So pretty much everybody
but John and Jevon.
- Yeah.
- But look at them.
[Nimai] It is week eight.
We're gonna take
the final assessment times
for each one of the twins
We'll take you through
a quick warm up like last time,
so if you just wanna set your stuff down.
and then compare how much
they were able to improve their time
from the original baseline test.
This is round two
of the fitness assessment,
starting in three, two, one. Let's go.
Two, three, four
This is something that I personally
wanted to know for so long.
If somebody followed
the exact same training program,
but you gave them
different sources of fuel,
how would your body respond?
Twenty. All right, ten push-ups.
Will the plant-based twin
see better results?
Will the omnivorous twin
see better results?
- Ten sprints.
- [Bianca] Ten sprints.
- [Nimai] Let's go, let's go.
- [group cheering]
[Nimai] All right. One, two, three
[group] Twinning!
We're at week eight. This is it.
Twenty-one pairs have made it,
and we now get to find out
what were the fruits
of all their dietary labors.
There are significantly
different results already
between the vegan and omnivore groups.
[man] So 91.
- [Charlie] So I'm 84, you're 91?
- Yeah.
- That seems significant.
- [man] Omnivore.
- Yeah.
- [man] Right?
[automated voice]
We are going to do the same thing again.
Twins share the same DNA,
and so what is different?
It's primarily the food.
And so it's really exciting
to have twin studies
because we get to see
that it's about your greens,
not your genes.
But, much to my surprise,
something else was discovered.
[heart thumping]
[gentle electronic music playing]
[Daniel] During the pandemic,
I was at home a lot,
and I would draw a lot.
And I started drawing
sort of about this idea of
Eleven Madison Park
becoming fully plant-based.
This kind of seems
like another little celebration.
Just 'cause the celebration of the season
could be, like, the strawberry.
Different strawberries.
[Daniel] I communicated that to my team,
and we decided
that if we couldn't create an experience
that was on the level
that we'd had before,
that we wouldn't do it.
We will open the restaurant
and serve meat again.
[tense ambient music continues]
The morel could be a two-component, like
Could be a plate and a bite on the side.
Or it could be a bite and then the course.
[man] Maybe something like this
drops in the middle.
- [Daniel] To share?
- So you take the sauce, and, like
You, like, sauce the bread or something.
You know, like
I think if we serve this in the beginning,
that we wouldn't do the tonburi.
[Daniel] I felt that we had to elevate
plant-based eating
so that it can be more delicious
than anything we've known from the past.
I think it's a good start.
Aside from the core team
at Eleven Madison Park,
no one believed
that this actually would work.
You became
the best restaurant, uh, in New York,
and then it was
best restaurant in the world,
and then, uh,
you change your menu completely.
- [audience laughing]
- [Daniel laughs]
Who does that? And why would you do that?
What kind of insane human being are you?
[Daniel] It became world news.
But, I mean, it came from every angle.
[dramatic string music playing]
But for me, at that point,
it was so clear that we had to go all in.
[dramatic string music grows to crescendo]
I'm at a market.
This is my first time
shopping for and cooking vegan food.
[Carolyn] I need help,
and so my friend Ava
is going to help me
build my pantry of vegan stuff.
[Charlie] Made notes in my journal
about different things I wanted to eat
this week and in subsequent weeks.
[Carolyn] So, we're looking at mayonnaise.
[Ava] See there. Egg yolks.
- That means it's not vegan.
- [Carolyn] Oh, yeah. Oh.
[Ava] So you can't use this one.
The biggest challenge of doing
a human intervention nutrition study
is that you can't control everything.
This is an important crux in the study
because now they have to cook
on their own.
They have to buy their own food
and cook it.
Look at that. Beautiful.
Oh yeah.
Well, what if they're not
perfectly adherent?
[Pam] I found some
amazing tasting ground beef,
which is obviously plant-based
'cause it's vegan.
Ooh, look, there's also
some vegan chocolate-chip cookies.
I did get a couple snackies.
[Christopher]
You continually have to check in.
Making chia-seed pudding this morning.
[Christopher] They're gonna get asked
about their diet.
They're gonna get asked
about mental clarity.
[Wendy] I added some green beans
and leftover meatloaf turkey.
And they gotta poop for us, bleed for us
[Rosalyn] I did my blood sample today,
and I did my stool sample today.
and pee for us,
on top of everything else. Go team.
We are in our self-feeding mode.
And so, tonight, I decided that,
for dinner,
we were gonna have some, uh, chicken.
[insects chirping]
[Craig] This is the OG.
First chicken house I built.
[male producer] About how many chickens
do you think passed through here?
[Craig chuckles]
Let's see. 23 and a half years.
180,000 times 23 and a half.
Whatever that is. I'm no math whiz, man.
[chuckles] A lot.
[chickens clucking]
Just over four million chickens
in this one barn.
And I have four barns.
[unsettling ambient music playing]
I grew up right here on this family farm.
When I was a kid,
tobacco was the cash crop.
I'm not advocating for tobacco,
but that's just the way it was.
Tobacco, naturally, has faded,
and that's when
the industrial poultry came in.
They were courting farmers
to build houses to raise their birds.
If I remember correctly, the ad said,
"We need a few smart birds
to raise our birds."
And I was just ready to, you know,
put down some roots and raise a family
and raise a few chickens and die,
uh, you know.
I didn't want it to get
any more complicated than that,
but it just didn't work out that way.
The way the system works is,
they own the birds, they own the feed,
they own the medications
and all that stuff.
What I actually owned
was the land and the buildings.
If you walk into this barn, you're
probably gonna be overcome with ammonia.
You're gonna be probably pretty disgusted
by the dust and the feces
and the feathers flying around.
And you're gonna see a sea of white,
from wall to wall and from end to end.
You can't, logistically, hatch out
two million chicks a week
and all of them be healthy.
But I do know they have genetically bred
these birds for desirable traits,
mostly for to have a big breast.
The organs won't keep up
with the muscle growth.
The skeletal system
won't keep up with the muscle growth.
So you see a lot of heart attacks.
You see other issues.
You see a lot of birds that can't stand,
just that can't support their own weight.
It was like looking at two toothpicks
sticking out of a big grape.
I just think the bird is bred to suffer.
Um
They didn't ask me to do anything cruel.
Didn't have to.
Um, they crammed 30,000 chickens
into 20,000 square feet,
meaning it's 0.67 square foot per bird.
That is a sheet of notebook paper.
[chickens clucking]
They're crawling all over each other.
They're scratching each other
and opening up wounds.
Bam. Enter bacteria. You had issues.
[Cory] When you raise animals
in this unnatural way,
they're all crammed together,
if one animal gets sick,
it spreads throughout
these warehouses really quickly.
So they use antibiotics
in a prophylactic way,
to prevent diseases from happening.
[cows mooing]
[Valerie] Something the animal agriculture
industry figured out some time ago
is that if they give animals
low levels of antibiotics on the regular,
they get bigger faster.
It promotes growth.
It also compensates
for some of the truly filthy conditions,
with thousands, sometimes
hundreds of thousands of animals,
that are breeding grounds for disease.
More antibiotics are fed to farm animals
than are used in all of human medicine,
just to promote growth and prevent disease
in such a stressful,
unhygienic environment.
One of the side effects of giving animals
low levels of antibiotics in their feed,
or injected,
is that they become a breeding ground
for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Things that can cause infections
that are hard or impossible to treat.
[newsman] They now have strong evidence
of a dangerous strain of E. coli
that is now highly resistant
to antibiotic treatment.
[newswoman] At least two million Americans
get antibiotic-resistant infections
each year,
with 23,000 deaths.
We are continuing
to barrel towards a future
where a cut on your hand or an infection
from a routine dental procedure
could prove to be deadly
because there's very little
that we can do to treat that infection.
[Greger] How can you do surgery
without these life-saving, critical drugs
that are being squandered
just to make cheaper meat?
[Valerie] People deserve to know
what they're eating
and where it came from.
Cage-free doesn't mean
your eggs came from a field somewhere.
They likely came
from an industrial facility.
It just wasn't one where the hen
spent her entire life in a cage.
[Craig] You can't trust these labels.
If they got about this much room
to go outside in,
then that's free-range.
It's ridiculous.
[cold, unsettling music playing]
You know, when you see tumors,
and you see, like, bacterial infections,
and you come in here
and you pick up a thousand dead chicks,
and you can just smell it
all over your hand,
kind of dadgum
ruins your appetite for chicken.
So, yeah.
I never ate one chicken from down here,
and I do not eat CAFO chicken today.
[unsettling music swells, then fades]
[man] My name is Dan Holzer,
and I'm a food safety consultant.
Today, we're sending
three samples of raw chicken
to a lab to test for salmonella,
E. coli, and heavy metals.
All three chicken packages
were purchased at a local grocery store.
We're testing raw chicken
because more than one million people
in the United States get sick every year
from eating contaminated poultry.
FDA research shows
that 1 in every 25 packages of chicken
will test positive for salmonella.
One in every five packages of chicken
will test positive for E. coli.
No other food, including produce,
is allowed to go to a grocery store
carrying any pathogens.
The tolerance is zero, except for meat.
Today, we're going to coat
some pieces of chicken breast
with a product called Glo Germ.
The Glo Germ won't be visible to the eye,
but it will show up under a blacklight
if raw chicken residue
comes into contact with any surfaces.
The Glo Germ will show us
how we might move pathogens
around the kitchen unknowingly.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rosalyn] This recipe is so easy,
you could do it.
- All right, let's bring it out here.
- Oh. White meat.
Yes.
[both laugh]
All right. So first
we should wash our hands.
[Dan] I invited Carolyn and Rosalyn
to cook a chicken dinner,
but I didn't tell them it's a test
to see if they spread pathogens
around the kitchen.
[Rosalyn] So go ahead
and put the chicken in there.
- [Carolyn] All of it?
- [Rosalyn] Yes.
I'm gonna use pepper.
I need to wash my hands again.
Yeah, let's wash our hands,
and then get to the, uh, broccoli.
- [Carolyn] Soap again?
- [Rosalyn] Yes.
[Carolyn] Sorry. [chuckles]
Put some olive oil on it
and just roast it.
[Carolyn] Okay. I could eat
that whole bowl.
[Rosalyn] Okay.
[Carolyn] This doesn't have a cover.
Worst comes to worst,
we could do without a cover.
Oh, a pineapple cutting board!
This is so cute.
[sizzling]
[timer beeping]
- [Rosalyn] Oh, look at that.
- [Carolyn] Okay, this is done.
My name's Dan.
I'm a food-safety consultant.
Um, and we conducted some experiments
around the kitchen today
that you guys didn't know about.
- Mm.
- Ooh.
Um, we coated the chicken with a product
called Glo Germ before you cooked with it.
- "Glo Germ"?
- That's right.
And then we used a blacklight
- [light clicks]
- to trace it around the kitchen.
[Rosalyn] Oh.
- [twins gasp]
- [Dan] All right.
- See that?
- [Rosalyn] Whoa!
[Dan] Remember the pineapple?
Yes. The pineapple cutting board.
[both gasp]
- You touched it.
- I did.
- [Carolyn] You touched all over it.
- [Dan] Look at that.
- It's on the towel.
- [Rosalyn] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Dan] Wanna see your clean dishes?
[Carolyn] Ah!
- [Dan] See the plates there?
- [Rosalyn] Yes.
[Carolyn] Look at all this!
[Dan] Look at all that.
[eerie sting]
[Dan] During the backlight test,
we found that we moved potential pathogens
almost throughout the entire kitchen.
[Rosalyn] We touched everything,
including the ingredients,
the handles to all the cabinets, cutlery.
The gadgets and stuff
that we didn't even use
- Right. Right.
- we touched.
[Rosalyn] Help me make the jump
to then the pathogens.
We actually sent samples of the chicken
that you cooked with to a laboratory.
[Carolyn] Okay.
The particular sample of chicken
that you guys cooked with, um,
tested positive for E. coli.
- [Carolyn] Really?
- [Dan] Yes.
And this was just chicken
that was just bought from the store?
[Dan] That's correct.
- [Rosalyn] Wow.
- [Dan] We weren't gonna let you eat it.
When an animal is slaughtered
in a large slaughterhouse mechanically
[inhales deeply]
the contents of their digestive tract,
also known as poop,
can be spread around the room,
and can cross-contaminate other products
that weren't previously contaminated.
[tense music playing]
Many foodborne illnesses occur at home
because most people think
that the meat they buy is safe.
They don't know that they should assume
that all raw meat can make you sick
because it's legal
for up to 25% of chicken products
to hit grocery stores
with pathogens on them.
How can I ensure that I don't eat products
from a slaughterhouse?
I can't entirely trust where it's been.
I am probably
going to work less with meat.
[Rosalyn] Mm.
- [Wendy] Oh, it's a pickle.
- [Pam] Curried chilies. Have to get that.
- [Wendy] Where?
- [Pam] There. Curried chilies. The pickle.
Perky's takes me back
to a typical South African
- Yeah. Yes.
- take-out space.
It was kind of like walking
into a South African bodega.
It really took me back home.
Like, "Oh, whoa."
Obviously, I start getting these cravings
'cause I'm like, "Oh my goodness."
And we love that.
We grew up eating it with our eggs.
- [man] And they're nice and
- [Pam] And I can't have eggs.
But that's they'd be a good substitute
for, um, whatever vegan food you eat.
- Yes, yes. That's so true.
- 'Cause that's vegan as well.
We would boast about South African food
and how delicious
- And we wanted everybody to taste it.
- To taste it.
And it was like,
"Oh my God. It's the best food ever."
And my favorite is my mother's curry.
Mummy's chicken curry is the best.
My favorite South African food
has to be biltong.
[man] It's a South African dried beef.
It's been done
for over 400 years in South Africa.
- They basically invented jerky.
- Mm-hmm.
- It's jerky's, um, sexy cousin.
- Yes.
[man] And it's cured with salt and spices.
Uh, coriander, which is roasted,
which brings the flavor out of it.
People have a special spice.
So, not every biltong tastes the same.
- The process
- The process.
- It's not overly processed like jerky.
- [Pam] Well, it's not processed.
[Wendy] That's true. It's dried.
- And it's really tasty as well.
- Yeah.
[Pam] Again, South Africa's
a huge meat-eating country.
[female producer] If you had
to make biltong without beef,
how would you do it?
- I don't think
- [both laugh]
- I don't wanna go there.
- [both laugh]
Then it's just dried fruit
or dried vegetables.
- Curried fruits.
- Curried fruit. That's not biltong, guys.
Coriander-flavored fruits.
Yes, that's what it is. It's just No.
- Or broccoli.
- Yeah.
[both laugh]
Ah!
Come on, buddy. Come on.
Push, push, push, push, push!
[all panting]
[Nimai] Let's go, Charlie. [claps]
- Breathe in through your nose, Charlie.
- [inhales deeply]
In through your nose,
out through your mouth.
[Charlie] For me, this has been hard.
I've fallen behind
in my workouts big time.
[laughs]
It's been tough
since we've been doing this move,
and, uh, you know,
no no preschool, no daycare.
And I have to be a little bit quiet.
[whispers] Oh shit.
[Nimai] Charlie has moved
three times in four weeks.
[grunts]
Like, this I
Just to do push-ups is really hard.
[woman] I'm surprised
you can even do a push-up.
He has many other things
going on in his personal life
that's preventing him
from really giving this study
the attention it deserves.
Michael, who is on an omnivore diet,
seems to be much more invested
in this study than Charlie.
- Push through, push through.
- [exhaling]
Good job, guys. Good job.
So I'm interested to see
how the next two weeks
play out between these two.
All right. Catch your breath.
- We got three, two, one.
- [automated voice] Exercise.
[Nimai] And let's go.
[distant dog barking]
- [woman] Sweet potato everything is good.
- [John] It's so good.
- [woman] Can't go wrong.
- [John laughs] Yeah.
I'll just literally just put them here.
Let me get the seasonings out, actually.
So today, with my friend Kaela,
we're making a vegan meal,
which is a stuffed sweet potato
with onion and pepper fajitas,
as well as black beans,
and a kale salad mix
and Italian dressing.
[device beeping]
[John] Kaela grew up vegan
because of her parents.
I'm like, "Okay, well, can you help me
make a vegan meal, then?"
"You probably have plenty
of recipes to pull out of your book."
You know, as a kid, I didn't really think
I was missing out on anything.
Okay.
And then, as I got older,
it just feels like
there's more options now, like
- Oh yeah, right.
- More vegan options.
- [John] It's getting thrown out, right?
- [Kaela] I mean, if you wanna cut off
- [John] I'm learning as I go along.
- [Kaela] That's kinda what I do with it.
[John] You know,
I didn't eat vegan beforehand,
so what tips do you have for someone
in terms of cooking in the kitchen?
I would say start start off slow.
Definitely go on the internet,
see a bunch of recipes,
because the recipes are out there.
[food sizzling]
[woman] What you're doing
is using the same ingredients,
but changing the foundation of the meal.
For example,
if you have a nine-inch plate,
you might have bean stew, right?
Or a chili.
And that might be
about a third of your plate.
And then half of your plate
would be some form of vegetables.
Sautéed, in a salad, steamed.
And the other part
you want to be a whole grain.
Brown rice, black rice, wild rice,
quinoa, millet, bulgur.
You could have avocado, olives, right?
For healthy fats.
Use the oils,
use the spices that you already use,
when you're making plant-based foods.
It is very easy
to make the food taste delicious.
It looks like a garden.
It does, yeah. [chuckles]
[distant siren wailing]
[woman] The first time
I ever tried a tomato
that I grew myself, I was like,
"Wait, this is a whole other tomato."
Right.
"Like, it tastes different."
This is all poblano peppers.
Let's try some beans.
- [Jevon] How do we eat these?
- You just, like, eat it.
- The whole thing's good to eat?
- Yeah, you can eat it.
Except for, like, you know, the end.
It's just, like, fresh, you know?
[John] It is very fresh.
[woman and John laugh]
[woman] Those are all mustard greens.
- This is dinosaur kale.
- [Jevon] The texture is so interesting.
- So we could eat this?
- You could totally eat this.
- This is so cool. Just to, like
- [laughs]
- Like, just pick stuff and
- Right, it's like
This is like you're shopping
through the grocery store.
- [Danielle] List some favorite foods.
- Apricots.
- Cucumbers. Strawberries. I love salad.
- [Danielle] Cool.
- I'm a big salad fan.
- Beets.
[Jevon] Corn on the cob. Yams.
Perfect. I am, like,
thoroughly hungry now.
[all laugh]
[Danielle] What about
at a family gathering?
- Greens. Collard greens.
- [laughs]
- [Danielle] Okay. Okay.
- [twins laughing]
Now, what if I said to you,
what if you couldn't have
any of those ever again?
- [John] That would be devastating.
- That would be disappointing.
[people chattering]
[Tracye] The dietary guidelines
make it clear
that Americans should eat
more fruits and vegetables.
But what if you've been systematically
denied access to fruits and vegetables?
The majority of African Americans
are experiencing
the worst health outcomes, right,
because of food apartheid
in our communities.
[Cory] For communities
that are particularly marginalized,
because of that disinvestment,
you don't have supermarket chains
wanting to locate in those areas,
and access to healthy fresh foods
is very, very difficult to find.
[Tracye] So if we are living
in urban centers,
where most African Americans live
in the United States,
unless that area has been gentrified,
you're gonna find fast-food places,
you're gonna find corner stores.
[sizzling]
Foods we consume
in the Black community as soul food,
uh, it was the food
that our ancestors were compelled to eat.
It was the scraps, um,
from the slave owner's table.
The chitlins, uh, the fried food.
Uh, all of the food
that they had to find creative ways
to make it tasteful for your palate,
uh, so that you could stay alive.
[woman] And that's how a cuisine evolved
around taking things
that might not necessarily be
the most nutritious
or even culturally relevant.
So, while I embrace the term "soul food,"
because, to me, that was the resilience
of my ancestors taking what they had,
fast-forward into the future,
that food might have
some of the taste profiles,
but it's processed grains
and processed meats
and those type of things that are now
causing a lot of health problems.
More African Americans
were dying of Covid than anyone else.
It's because 300,000 of us
were already dying a year
of preventable,
diet-related chronic diseases.
The death and disability
from eating this food continues
decade after decade after decade.
[woman] Detroit is a majority Black city.
And so how are we supposed
to survive as a people
when we can't get access
to fresh, affordable,
high-quality collard greens, right?
Like, collard greens
being so culturally significant
to our households.
Following years of divestment
because of the white flight,
because of the collapse
of the automobile industry,
about 30% of Detroit's land is vacant.
[bright instrumental music playing]
So we grew food because we had to,
out of survival.
Gardens popping up everywhere.
Vacant lots, people's backyards,
people's front yards,
windowsills, rooftops.
Wherever you could
get access to grow food,
that's what happened.
Here at D-Town Farm,
we unapologetically focus
on culturally relevant crops
because this is what our people eat.
So, okra and collard greens
and watermelon and callaloo
and other foods.
[Tracye] The fastest growing
plant-based demographic in the country,
African Americans.
[Nezaa] I think of it
as a return to ancestral memory.
It's a part of our evolution.
Like, we evolved with these plants.
Part of us reclaiming plants in our diet,
and it's part of reaching to those things
that's going to help to protect us
against modern diseases and viruses
and all those type of things.
[Shakara] We consider this whole process
of land reclamation
to be a process of alchemy.
It's a transformation
of something that is minimal
into something
that is maximum and abundant.
[bright instrumental music continues]
[people chattering]
[people laughing]
[music fading]
[Pam] Where's the knife? Uh, there we go.
- [Wendy] What did you put? Garlic and
- Uh, garlic, cilantro, salt. That's it.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
- Ooh, smells nice.
- Uh, and onions.
I was always mindful
of the kind of meat that I eat, um,
and, you know, the eggs that I purchase.
And I would tell Wendy, like,
I'd rather pay more to buy free-range eggs
than, you know, buy the cheaper eggs.
Then I would say, "You know what?"
"Instead of eating steak once a week,
let's eat steak once a month
because it impacts the environment."
Just gonna warm it up.
I'm reading up on a lot of what goes on
in animal farming, fish farming.
In South Africa,
all our fish was actually
- Were caught.
- Were caught.
Very much the same way
that the meat and dairy companies
have sort of controlled the idea
of the American farmer,
you have the idea of a fisherman,
of a pole with a line
and a little hook on the end.
And you have an idea of the fish
who's swimming freely
and gets caught by this hook
and has a sort of graceful end
to their life.
But the truth could not be more different.
[seagulls squawking]
Truth is that 75%
of the global catch right now,
which is about 100 million tons,
a little more,
is caught by industrial fisheries.
It's massive nets
that sweep through and catch everything
in very unselective ways.
[tense ambient music playing]
There's also this issue of bycatch.
Other animals that are caught
and rarely accounted for.
[tense ambient music continues]
And there are 45,000 factory fishing boats
in operation around the world.
We are consuming wildlife from the ocean
on a scale that is unprecedented.
It's causing the elimination
not of just individual species
but whole ecosystems.
[Jennifer] A recent study has shown
that 82% of global fish populations
are depleted.
Fish farming offered a lot of promise.
They said, "We're going to farm fish,
and we're going to solve overfishing
because we'll create all these farm fish,
so consumers
don't have to buy the wild stuff."
[man] My name's Don Staniford.
I'm the director of Scamon Scotland
and campaign against salmon farming
not just in Scotland but around the world.
By the looks of it there,
tens of thousands farmed salmon
crammed in cages.
Maybe half a million,
a million fish on this site.
So wherever salmon farms go,
they're leaving
a lasting legacy of pollution
and pushing wild fish to extinction.
The king of fish
is the wild, majestic salmon.
Swims thousands of miles,
leaps up waterfalls.
If you look at a supermarket 50 years ago,
it was all wild fish.
It was all wild salmon.
Today, more than 50% of fish
in supermarkets globally is farmed.
There's farm-raised salmon,
and then there's wild-caught.
What's the difference?
- [birds squawking]
- [Big Ben tolls]
[Wendy] So, this is gonna be
an interesting excursion.
- [Pam] Yes.
- [Wendy laughs]
[Wendy] Pam and I went to the UK
to learn everything there is to know
about farmed salmon.
- [woman] Hello.
- [Pam] Hi.
[Wendy] As a chef, I want to know
what I'm feeding my customers.
Billingsgate Market in London
is an iconic, historic place.
It's supposed to serve
the best fish that the UK has to offer.
[Wendy] Looking for fresh.
- [Pam] You want fresh?
- [Wendy] Yeah.
- Do you have fresh salmon?
- [man] Salmon?
- Yeah, I'm trying to make a
- [man] Nice fresh one, yeah?
- [Wendy] Fresh?
- I wanna do a barbecue.
[man] Yeah, it's fresh.
And it's Is it wild
Is it, uh, wild-caught?
- Wild-caught, yeah?
- [man] Yes. It's raised in wild.
- [Wendy] What do you mean
- [man] Yeah, it's raised in the sea.
[Wendy] What does he mean "wild farm"?
[woman] Like, have you ever gutted a fish
and seen little fish and prawns inside it?
- I've never gutted a fish.
- [woman] Right.
Wild fish, you will find prawns
and baby fish and everything in there.
And farmed,
they're a bit cleaner, actually.
That's complete and utter bollocks.
I think if people realized
the full horrors behind salmon farming,
they would avoid it
like the proverbial plague.
[tense ambient music playing]
[woman] A salmon farm is
approximately the size
of a football field.
It's a series of nets.
And they pour in
hundreds of thousands of fish.
But they're the only farmers in the world
that never shovel their manure.
The sheer amount of waste,
in the order of tons per day,
is pouring out of these farms.
And because they're feedlots,
growing fish as fast as they can,
you know, as quickly as possible,
on a very unnatural diet,
disease just spreads incredibly rapidly,
whether it's parasites
viruses,
bacteria.
When I first began studying viruses
in salmon farms,
of course I couldn't go to the farms,
so I went to the supermarkets.
The fish they were selling
in the supermarkets were deformed,
they had big sores on them.
Over 98% of the samples
that I bought in supermarkets
and in sushi restaurants
were infected
with this piscine orthoreovirus,
this salmon blood virus.
People tell me that the viruses
in the fish can't affect humans,
but there has been no research on this.
And so all the pathogens
are leaving the farm too.
Wild salmon that used to come
into these beautiful, pristine little bays
were now literally swimming
into clouds of waste.
Excrement. Pathogens.
And so they were dying.
The destruction of wild salmon populations
that live near salmon farms
can be over 50%.
Wild salmon are a keystone species,
and their disappearance
has a devastating effect
on local economies
and the surrounding ecosystems.
[eagle calls]
There is nowhere in the world
that this industry has existed
that wild salmon have persisted. Nowhere.
[tense ambient music continues]
[music fades]
[Don] Towards the end
of the farming of salmon,
they can add this dye.
So the salmon farmers
use this as a color guide.
[Pam] Oh, wow.
[Don] Consumer research has shown
that people pay more for redder salmon.
So these salmon-farm companies
are trying to mask the color,
hide the fact that it's farmed,
and and ape and copy the pink,
the red flesh of the wild salmon.
- [man] Look how nice and red inside.
- Yeah.
[man] You're guaranteed to get a decent
color and a decent quality of fish.
Not only it's an artificial color,
it's been linked to human health problems.
- So some of this is, like, 20% fat.
- [Pam] Mm-hmm.
[Don] You can see the white lines.
The fat content of farmed salmon
can be over three times higher
than wild salmon.
It's like looking at Usain Bolt,
the athlete,
compared to some couch potato
who just sits there all day.
So this product is marketed as healthy,
it's marketed as responsible,
yet it's fattier than pizza,
it's fattier than bacon.
If you cook farmed salmon,
it's got so much fat,
you don't even need oil in the pan.
[Wendy] Look at that.
When I press it, oil's just oozing out.
[Don] And that's not good oils either.
That's omega-6s.
[woman] Because of the feed ingredients,
the fat will contain
fat soluble contaminants.
Those are the some of the pesticides.
Uh, dioxin, PCB, DDT.
And due to the high level of fat
contained in farmed salmon,
the contamination was higher
than what we found, uh, in the wild
all of wild seafood.
[sizzling]
The primary concern is cancer.
There's also metabolic disorders,
such as diabetes.
I can't feed that to my customers.
This is not supposed to happen.
It should be nice and solid.
[Don] I don't think
I'd like to eat either of those.
[Wendy] Of course not.
I mean, you can't eat diseased food.
[Don] So when you get farmed salmon,
you're not getting a bargain,
you're getting a health disaster,
an environmental disaster.
[unsettling ambient music playing]
It's basically elevated my disgust
for farmed salmon.
[unsettling ambient music continues]
- [music fades]
- [leaves tearing]
go outside and take care of it.
The cooking in the second half has been,
for me, really comfortable. Convenient.
- [Michael] I love the color and crunch.
- You dice it? I thought just thin slices?
[Michael] Yeah, it would just be ribbon
and then thrown into the salad.
Adds a little crunch and color.
[birds chirping]
One thing I was surprised by
over the course of the study
was how I just became inclined
to make these, like,
crudité, like, vegetable snacks.
'Cause, previously,
you know, I was so lazy.
I'd just reach into the fridge
and just grab a block of cheese,
some crackers, or some chips and salsa.
[child] I just want a little.
[Charlie] The cooking's been great
because we were making Korean rice bowls.
Then we were layering with pickled items.
I say "we" because my wife and I
kinda teamed up on it.
Grill this, grill that.
Toast buns.
Today, for the omnivore meal,
I'm gonna make a hamburger.
On top of that,
I'm putting some Gruyère cheese,
sauerkraut, some pickles,
tomato, and some purple onions.
It's gonna be a tall burger.
I'm going to make a veggie burger
with portobello mushroom.
We have so many tomatoes,
so I'm gonna make a caprese
without the mozzarella.
- [Michael] That salad looks great. Yeah.
- Look at the size of these!
We could have
the world's biggest caprese salad.
[humming]
[Charlie] Changing itself is hard,
but we also live in a culture
where there's a lot of meat products
or animal products in food.
So, like, one of the hardest things for me
was going to stores or restaurants
and being like, "Excuse me, I'm so sorry,
but does this have any butter in it?"
It's making me realize
how challenging it is,
for multiple reasons,
to switch to a vegan diet.
- [Michael] You got your vegan cheese.
- [Charlie] I don't think I'm gonna do it.
Provolone.
Okay. I don't even know how they
Oh, it says "provolone-style."
- Very small print.
- Yes.
[Charlie] Try it.
It can't be worse than a Kraft Single.
Well, they nailed the color.
Yeah, that's true.
[Miyoko] Taste is so important.
Food is not just to nourish the body,
food nourishes the soul.
In order to do so,
you have to romance people.
It has to be a language of love.
It has to be something
that makes people go,
"Oh my God, I can't wait
to get a fork and dig into that."
Come on, guys. It's time to go to work.
Come on in. Let's go.
I got into the business
of making vegan cheese
because it was the last thing
that I was able to give up
when I transitioned to vegan.
There are still the Kraft Single-type
of vegan cheese
out there in the marketplace,
but I don't think
that's gonna woo anybody.
I started Miyoko's Kitchen
really because I wanted to prove
that amazing vegan cheese
was indeed possible
that was rooted
in the flavors of tradition
but made from completely new,
innovative ingredients.
You can make cheese
out of all sorts of things
and provide the textural
and flavor profiles of cheese.
Cashews are an incredibly
environmentally friendly crop,
so we have used cashew nuts
since the very beginning.
Dairy cheese takes
800 to 1,000 gallons of water
for one pound of cheese.
To make our cashew cheese,
it takes about one quart
to three or four quarts.
That's about it.
What I tried to do was create a technology
that was a marriage
between traditional cheese-making,
using things like fermentation,
brining, aging,
inoculating with enzymes, yeast, etc.
to create a whole array of cheeses.
Yeah, let's take a look.
Oh, these are looking good.
We know how dairy behaves,
but we didn't know
how a sort of cashew base would behave
when it's exposed
to certain degrees of heat
or various combinations
with other ingredients.
The fact is
no one had ever done it before,
so in some ways I could say,
"Hey, we're writing the book
on making cheese out of cashews."
Let's just check this out.
Oh yeah. It's aging nicely.
Little crystal formations are beginning.
I wanted a cheese
that would truly impress.
Sorta like the Tesla model.
You launch with a sexy, high-end product,
capture people's imagination,
and then they're hooked.
[distant siren wailing]
[wings fluttering]
[sounds of traffic]
[man] There's pickled kohlrabi
in between the layers,
and then there's shiitake mushrooms
that are confited,
and then the morels
that have just been quickly sautéed
with a little bit of, uh, shallot butter.
[Daniel] I read a report
where it said, by 2050,
we will need three planets
if we continue to eat the way we eat.
I think, because Eleven Madison Park
had won all these awards,
because we are in New York City,
because our restaurant was famous,
there were very few places in the world
that could move the needle
as much as we could
towards eating plant-based.
I think the basil is sort of a surprising,
really beautiful aspect.
So if we would make that statement,
that would really, I think, send a signal.
You know, we had meat suppliers
reaching out to us
in really hateful language,
saying, "You're gonna regret this.
You're gonna fail."
"And if you're gonna have
to serve meat again,
I will never deliver meat
to you guys again."
I mean, it was, like, pretty harsh.
Unfortunately, the perception
is still that a piece of meat
is worth more than artichokes or beets.
So I think that has to shift.
So, like, if we can elevate
some of these ingredients,
then there must be value to it.
When you take a bite of something,
within three seconds,
you know, "This is delicious."
I care a lot about aesthetics,
and what I'm going for
is sort of this minimal
and effortless beauty.
I feel that our food
has to push certain boundaries,
but before the reopening,
there were fears.
I was fully prepared
to lose all of our stars.
They're still charging $335
for each person
to dine at this restaurant.
So it's, "How comfortable are we
paying this much for vegetables?"
[dramatic string music playing]
[Daniel] This hasn't been done before.
And there was no return back.
[dramatic string music continues]
[string music fades]
[Nimai] Wow, look at you all.
[woman] I can see differences
just looking at you.
Everybody feeling good?
- [Jevon] Yeah.
- [Wendy] Yeah.
- [Rosalyn] No.
- No?
- Oh, now you, yeah.
- Who's nervous? Anybody a little nervous?
Yeah? So pretty much everybody
but John and Jevon.
- Yeah.
- But look at them.
[Nimai] It is week eight.
We're gonna take
the final assessment times
for each one of the twins
We'll take you through
a quick warm up like last time,
so if you just wanna set your stuff down.
and then compare how much
they were able to improve their time
from the original baseline test.
This is round two
of the fitness assessment,
starting in three, two, one. Let's go.
Two, three, four
This is something that I personally
wanted to know for so long.
If somebody followed
the exact same training program,
but you gave them
different sources of fuel,
how would your body respond?
Twenty. All right, ten push-ups.
Will the plant-based twin
see better results?
Will the omnivorous twin
see better results?
- Ten sprints.
- [Bianca] Ten sprints.
- [Nimai] Let's go, let's go.
- [group cheering]
[Nimai] All right. One, two, three
[group] Twinning!
We're at week eight. This is it.
Twenty-one pairs have made it,
and we now get to find out
what were the fruits
of all their dietary labors.
There are significantly
different results already
between the vegan and omnivore groups.
[man] So 91.
- [Charlie] So I'm 84, you're 91?
- Yeah.
- That seems significant.
- [man] Omnivore.
- Yeah.
- [man] Right?
[automated voice]
We are going to do the same thing again.
Twins share the same DNA,
and so what is different?
It's primarily the food.
And so it's really exciting
to have twin studies
because we get to see
that it's about your greens,
not your genes.
But, much to my surprise,
something else was discovered.
[heart thumping]
[gentle electronic music playing]