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Join us. that sells great coffee and helps Yemeni farmers but in the process of launching this company mocktar got caught in the crossfire of a civil war as i said this is a two -parter we're dropping a part one today part two for next friday's reheat so look as i said we take requests drop me a line to hello at sporkful .com let me know what episode you'd like us to reheat thanks so much and enjoy part one of our story I'll start with our fears, uh, we, our biggest fear is that we sell the copies at a lower price than what farmers can sell in Yemen.
And what's a bigger fear than that is people have given us much of their hope and for them to give hope in a country like Yemen, that's going through so much difficulty.
It's a difficult burden to carry.
This is Mokhtar Al -Khanshali.
He runs a a nonprofit that works with Yemeni coffee farmers.
He recorded this voice memo for us about a month ago, the night before Yemen's first ever national coffee auction.
He created this auction to let the country's top farmers sell directly to buyers, cutting out the middlemen, so that farmers keep more of the profits.
Mokhtar's been planning this for two years, in the midst of Yemen's civil war.
His hope for the auction?
We sell these coffees at ridiculous prices, prices that farmers in Yemen never thought they could reach. And this becomes a spark that really can ignite more work in the coffee sector.
But there's never been an auction like this in Yemen.
So Mokhtar doesn't really know what's going to happen.
We can't fail because if we fail for this, it means that people will feel that trying something new isn't going to work.
This is The Spork Fall.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Mokhtar Alkanshali is the founder of the coffee company Port of Mocha, which exports some of the highest rated coffees in the world, all from Yemen.
He's also the founder of the Mocha Institute, the nonprofit I mentioned that's setting up this national coffee auction.
We'll get back to the auction a little later, and we'll hear the story of how Mokhtar got to this point, which involves twists, turns, and more than one near -death experience.
But first, when he came into the studio, before we got to all that, We had to drink some coffee.
So what do you got here?
Walk me through the equipment that you brought.
I feel like a traveling salesman here.
This is my hand grinder.
I like grinding coffee with my hand because you just kind of feel the— and you can travel with it.
It's very small. And then I have just a normal V60 here, and then I have— V60?
Yeah. What's that? The V60 is a pour -over.
And you basically—you see people when they take those weird -looking swan -like kettles, Right, they pour the hot water in a sort of circular motion over the ground coffee.
Yeah, the more it seems like you're going to get hypnotized, the better.
Right, right. This is the kind of thing you see at these upscale coffee shops where all the baristas look like they're in Mumford & Sons.
Yeah, quote unquote hipster, and it is.
A lot of mustache wax in these places.
Mustache wax, sometimes man buns, but I took mine off today.
day. But for this is actually if you have Mokhtar was ready to show me how he makes his morning cup of coffee.
He lined up all his gear, brewed a cup, then remembered one other important piece of equipment he forgot to take out.
Something used by professionals to rate coffee.
I might have a spoon.
It carries a spoon.
Oh my gosh. He has a special taste in spoons.
And it's just like a normal spoon, but it has a little bit of dip.
It's like it's the size of a spoon, but it's the shape of a ladle.
And the spoon basically, you slurp the coffee very aggressively and then they spit it and they slurp and they spit and they write down their notes.
And like, it sounds, this is how it sounds usually.
Whoa. I've heard people sound like birds chirping.
Another person literally sounds like an F -18 just like taken off.
And then afterwards they start describing what they taste.
So one person was like, you know, I taste a hint of baby carrots.
The next person And she goes, no, it tastes, this one has the hint of like pink starburst. Oh, wow.
And the one that really lost me, he looked me in my eyes and he goes, this coffee is just too passive aggressive for me.
And I was like, yeah, totally, bro, it's totally passive aggressive.
I tried the coffee the old fashioned way, from a cup.
At first, I didn't know what to make of it because it was so mild and smooth, not strong or bitter like the coffee I'm used to.
It's like when you first drink straight liquor and you feel that burn in your throat, but then, hopefully at some point, you try really good liquor and it doesn't burn.
You're almost like, something's missing.
Where's the burn? That's how it felt drinking Mokhtar's coffee.
Like the first time I ever tasted a really smooth tequila.
I would have guessed that this coffee was weaker because it doesn't have that super bitter.
It's more tea -like.
Right, it is. It's almost like a coffee -tea hybrid, but it's much more floral and lighter without sacrificing the caffeine.
Well, this one actually has half the caffeine.
So caffeine is a chemical that plants make to kill insects.
And so the higher coffee is grown, the harsher and colder it is, and there's less insects.
So these coffees reach over 7 ,000 feet, which is ridiculous in Yemen.
And we have half the caffeine, but double the natural sugar is because caffeine tends to be very bitter.
Properly caffeinated, but not too caffeinated.
It was time to talk.
Mokhtar's parents were born and raised in Yemen.
Mokhtar grew up in Brooklyn.
Then when he was nine, the family moved to San Francisco.
Mokhtar struggled with the transition to the Bay Area.
By seventh grade, he was getting in trouble at home and in school.
And my family were just stressed out and they didn't know what to do with me because I was going down the wrong path in life.
And so when I was a teenager, their last resort was, OK, let's just take him to Yemen to his grandfather and let him live there and just see if he can be a better person.
So at age 12, Mokhtar was sent to live with his grandfather, Hamoud, who was a successful local businessman.
He really put me through it.
He took me and this kind of like arrogant, stubborn kid, and he put me through his educational program, if you want to say.
For example, he didn't put us in some fancy private school in Yemen.
He put us in this normal public school.
We had to walk 45 minutes each way in the dirt and gravel to school.
He made sure that we had this normal lifestyle there.
And that was really important for me.
Hamoud also put Mokhtar to work running errands, like cashing checks, big checks.
So when someone gives you like a $10 ,000 check to go cash, and in Yemen, the currency, when you convert $10 ,000, you literally get a freaking like a sack full of money.
Another errand Mokhtar was sent on, buy some stones for a house Hamoud was building for himself.
itself that meant taking a trip to the rock quarry Hamoud told him here's like 20 ,000 dollars go get these stones and bring sure they come from in this type of rock from this kind of space and I had to like find out the different scammers and what kind of what's the what are the fake rocks and what are those and and believe me I got scammed quite a bit and yeah I would go and I would come back with these three truckloads of stones and I felt like an amazing like person and a 12 year old kid doing in that?
No one has given me that kind of responsibility and that kind of trust growing up.
And for someone to do that, it made me feel like, it made me feel that, well, this person really thinks highly of me.
I don't want to lose that or betray that trust. It was in Yemen and his grandparents' family farm that Mokhtar first encountered a coffee tree.
The fruit on the tree is called the cherry, and it does look like a cherry.
The coffee bean is actually the seed inside the cherry.
And I would pick coffee cherries with my grandmother.
But the thing is, I didn't know those were coffee trees.
And for me, I assumed coffee was like this thing in Starbucks where you press the button and it just came out somehow.
While Mokhtar didn't make the connection between the cherries he was picking and the beverage he knew as coffee, the experience did plant itself in his memory.
He lived in Yemen for a year with his grandparents, went back to San Francisco, and returned to high school.
And then at some point, I decided I wanted to become a lawyer.
My parents obviously loved that idea.
when you're a child of an immigrant, you really have limited options and career paths.
And so it's either you become an engineer, a doctoral lawyer.
Right. That's pretty much like a friend of mine, he told his dad he wanted to be an actor.
I told him, in English beta, it's pronounced doctor.
And so I lived in this like lawyer, you know, I joined a speech and debate team.
I was a paralegal. And so I started being this kind of translator.
Groups like the ACLU would come to like Muslim community centers and spaces And I would just translate.
We would do New York Rights workshops and legal clinics.
And I liked this space I was in as a bridger.
Despite this interest in law, Mokhtar never finished college, never went to law school.
In his early 20s, he knew he wanted to do something that served a higher purpose.
He worked short stints at a nonprofit serving inner city kids and did policy work at the mayor's office.
But he didn't have a clear direction or career path.
He was living with his parents and working odd jobs to pay the bills, like as a doorman at a fancy building in San Francisco.
Then one day in 2013 while he was working at that building he got a text from a friend.
And so she texted me about the statue of a weird Yemeni man in front of my work that's drinking coffee.
This beautiful, masculine, handsome Arab man with a turban holding a cup of coffee to the sky.
The building across from us it's the Old Hills Brother Coffee Building.
This district near the ferry building was called the Coffee District.
So the Folgers family was there, the Hillsboroughs were there, and all these very important coffee dynasties started there because San Francisco was the most important port for coffee in the U .S. I walk into the lobby of this building, and in the lobby they have pictures of these signs that said, Arabian coffee, best in the world.
That night, Mokhtar told his mother about the statue, about learning that coffee came from the Arab world.
She laughed and said, didn't you know that your grandparents have coffee trees at their house?
Didn't you know we've been growing coffee in our family for hundreds of years?
Didn't you know that Yemen basically invented coffee?
Mokhtar did not know any of this.
So he went down a rabbit hole and found out that, according to legend, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia, where people chewed the beans and steeped them into a tea.
It was in Yemen that coffee was first brewed at the port of Mokka.
Sufi monks prepared it as part of their religious ceremonies.
Sufis were traveling monks, and wherever they went, they brought their coffee and brewing technique with them.
Over time, coffee spread across the Arab world.
By the 14th century, coffee was grown in many areas of Yemen, and it was all brought to the port of Mocha for processing and shipping.
That port was the hub of the global coffee trade.
Back then, Yemen's coffee plants were closely guarded and not for sale.
But a worker for the Dutch East India Company stole seedlings.
That set off a coffee boom among European powers.
They raced to plant it in their colonies around the world.
Learning all this led Mokhtar to the world of specialty coffee today, higher -end companies that buy top -quality coffee directly from farmers.
One company that kept coming up was Blue Bottle.
They had a shop near where he worked, so he walked in and checked out the menu.
There was a cup of coffee, it was $5, which I thought was really expensive for Ethiopian coffee.
And so I got this cup of coffee, and I had my first sip, and I remember tasting very pronounced flavors of blueberry.
And I was like, wow.
I went to the barista.
I'm like, hey, what kind of syrup?
Like, what did you add in here?
He goes, no, no, there's nothing in here.
I'm like, no, no, I'm tasting blueberries.
He goes, no, this is coffee when it's done the right way.
And he begins to tell me about their relationship with this community in Ethiopia.
And they pay the farmers more money and in exchange, the farmers can work on better quality and they roast it a certain way and they brew it a certain way.
He explained to me this whole thing.
I'm like, wow, this is awesome.
I had this trifecta of something that tastes delicious, there's a social impact around it, and it's something that connects me to my family's roots.
But Moktar couldn't find any specialty coffee coming from Yemen.
And I would ask seasoned coffee buyers and roasters, where can I get Yemen coffee?
Or what do you think about Yemen coffee?
And they would say things like, it's just really hard to get.
We don't know where it comes from because we can't go to that country.
it's very expensive and it has a lot of defects but the best cup of coffee that I had was like a Yemen coffee ten years ago or twenty years ago and I remember one of my friends Craig Holt and he said you know Mokhtar Yemen coffee it's like the Uncle Rodney of coffee I was like what does that mean it's like you know that one uncle that comes to holidays sometimes he's cool and normal and sometimes he's just too drunk you never know which uncle you're gonna get Today, most of the coffee Yemen exports is commodity coffee, not specialty coffee.
With commodity coffee, the price is set by global markets.
Farmers are incentivized to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible with very little regard for quality.
And they barely make enough to get by.
Saudi Arabia buys most of Yemen's commodity coffee.
Now, in Yemen and around the world, most coffee farms are still small, family -owned plots.
To get their product to a major export market, they have to send it through a lot of middlemen, and each one takes a cut.
Specialty coffee buyers, they don't buy the commodity stuff.
They seek out high -quality coffee and either buy direct from the farmer or through smaller cooperatives, and they pay a much higher price.
But very little direct buying was happening in Yemen.
As you heard, the quality was inconsistent, And getting to the coffee and getting it out was too hard for specialty companies.
The coffee regions were mountainous and remote.
There were tribal leaders and militias to deal with, and political instability there was growing.
In 2011, the U .S. State Department warned against traveling to Yemen and ordered non -essential diplomats to leave the country because of terrorist activity and civil unrest. Mokhtar looked at all these obstacles and saw an opportunity.
Like when he worked with the ACLU, he could be a bridge, connecting coffee farmers in Yemen to specialty buyers in the U .S. He could help these farmers and Yemen's economy and create a business for himself in the process.
But at that point, those vague goals were all he had.
Forget a business plan, he had never even been to a commercial coffee farm.
But he dove into the world of specialty coffee anyway, looking for anyone with a connection to Yemen.
That led him to Willem Boot, who runs a specialty coffee company and who had just written a report on the state of coffee in Yemen.
Willem agreed to work with Mokhtar as a consultant.
He would teach Mokhtar about the coffee business and how to source coffee in Yemen.
He goes, if you're going to do this, first you're going to become a coffee Q grader, which is our version of sommelier.
I'm like, sure. Then you're going to go to the Specialty Coffee Association World Conference that happens once a year.
It's kind of our coffee Olympics.
And I'm like, okay.
And then you're going to go with me to Yemen.
Because I'm going to go to Yemen this summer on this project.
And I'm like, holy crap.
Oh, sure. And I'm like, okay, I'm in.
No idea how I was going to fund this consultation project.
to ignore your house, you know, make this work.
But I can be as hard to explain this if I'm abroad, but here in the U .S. we have this art called Fake It Until You Make It.
Coming up, Mokhtar tries to fake it in Yemen.
He searches for the best coffee in the country and makes some progress.
But things get a lot harder and a lot more dangerous than he expected.
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Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat.
I'm Dan Pashman, and I have a very big, exciting announcement for you.
This past November, I took a group of Sporkful fans and some others on a special trip across Italy to eat pasta, to retrace many of the steps I took on my own research trip from my cookbook, and we had so much fun and ate so, so well.
We ate spaghetti alla Sassina in Bari.
We took a cooking class with Silvestro, Silva, Story, and Lecce.
We ate with Katie Parla in Rome.
home. And the folks at Culinary Backstreets who organized the tour, they added some stops that I didn't even know about that were new to me that were incredibly delicious and also fascinating.
Point is, it was so great, we're doing it again.
This November, we just opened up Spots, it's a small group, so space is limited.
Bottom line, come eat pasta with me in Italy.
For all the details, go to culinarybackstreets .com slash sporkful.
Okay, back to the story of Mokhtar Al -Khanshali After connecting with coffee expert Willem Boet Mokhtar started training to be a Q grader like a coffee sommelier so he could learn to taste the difference between good coffee and great coffee Meanwhile, there was a coffee conference coming up in Yemen that Willem was attending so Mokhtar bought a ticket In May of 2014, he flew to Yemen The first stop he made was at his grandfather's house and when he explained his big plans his grandfather had some advice Don't tell people you're a business person.
Don't tell people you have any money.
Just tell people you're a college student.
Why wouldn't you tell anybody that you have a business or have any money?
For many reasons. One, it's just never a good idea to let people know you have money.
Especially when you don't really have money.
So that was... And also, I think another reason is you don't want to give people hope.
And you don't want to lose your word to people.
So Mokhtar would use a cover story.
He was doing a report for college about Yemen's coffee industry.
The plan was to meet Willem Boot in the capital city of Sana 'a, attend the coffee conference, then tour coffee farms together, giving Mokhtar a chance to learn and make connections.
But very quickly, things went wrong.
Willem, he came with me to Yemen for two days.
He had to go back. The U .S. government forced him to go back because of the violence.
The day we arrived, a French engineer worker was shot in the head.
And things were very, very, like, just dicey.
and he had to leave, and so I was left alone.
Around this time, Al -Qaeda had gained power in parts of Yemen.
The group was blamed for a number of attacks against Westerners in the country, including the murder of that French contractor.
Willem came to Yemen as a guest of USAID, a branch of the U .S. government.
As violence increased, the U .S. said it could no longer guarantee his safety, and he had to leave. The State Department, meanwhile, was urging all Americans to leave. But Mokhtar decided to stay.
He was alone in Yemen with violence on the rise and without a coffee expert who was supposed to guide him.
But he wasn't at a total loss.
He spoke the language and he had experience making his way on his own in the country, as he had when his grandfather sent him on missions as a teenager.
He was able to connect with local coffee growers at the University of Sana 'a and took his first trip to a coffee collective in Yemen.
I didn't know anything about nature.
Like, all I knew about nature was probably Avatar.
tar and so I I went to this tree this coffee tree and I'm looking at it and I'm like wow like I'm having this moment like wow I'm in this village and like a few months ago I was on my couch on youtube looking at these these trees and now I'm here I'm having this I'm holding the leaves and and uh this farmer comes up to me he goes Moktar I'm sorry to bother you he goes um that's not a coffee tree the coffee trees are actually over there you know, and he, like, puts it somewhere else.
What was the state of a lot of those coffee beans?
They were just horrible.
Like, the way they stored it, they would keep the coffee cherries for sometimes years in these, like, storage rooms, and they would use it as kind of a currency.
On the rooftops, you see these coffees being dried, which looks pretty, but, like, there's dirt and gravel, chicken's poop.
Mokhtar still had a lot to learn, but he knew there shouldn't be chicken poop in the coffee.
He also knew from picking cherries with his grandmother other, the good ones, were bright red.
But these farmers were picking cherries in big bunches all at once, no matter their color.
So the coffee cherries, when they grow, they start green and then yellow.
And then when they become ripe, they become red.
It's sort of like a green banana.
If you ever tried a green banana, it's unripe, it doesn't taste sweet.
But when you have a ripe banana with those dots on it, how sweet it can be.
And so to just pick the ripe cherries, it's a lot lot more work to selectively pick.
There was no incentive for the farmers to do that extra work.
They weren't paid enough.
After searching and searching, Mokhtar found a few older farmers who did take that much care with their cherries, only picking them when they were perfectly ripe, even if it didn't make financial sense.
These farmers had coffee that looked beautiful.
But the problem was, the way the industry worked, their stuff would end up getting mixed into a giant batch with coffee from dozens of other farmers who didn't have the same quality.
All these beautiful gems get lost away, and that was just what was heartbreaking.
As I, every step along the route, I saw things that really were just made the coffee taste like crap.
So I told this farmer, I told her, Hey, if I paid you more money, could you just pick these ripe cherries?
And she looked at me and said, If you paid me more money, I could pick rainbow -colored cherries for you.
But Mokhtar didn't have more money to pay Yemeni farmers.
To get it, he first needed to prove to specialty buyers that Yemeni coffee was worth it.
They weren't going to pay top dollar for Uncle Rodney.
He spent three months visiting every one of the 32 coffee regions in Yemen.
He collected coffee samples from across the country and brought them back to Willem Boot in California.
Willem organized a tasting where he and other experts gathered around a room to taste each coffee with a spoon, just like the one Mokhtar showed me when he brewed me coffee.
They slurped up each one, making those loud screeching sounds that we heard Mokhtar make.
There were 21 samples.
Mokhtar hadn't tasted them himself yet, so he didn't know how it would go.
Tasters began. One tasted like armpit.
One had like wood taste, weird rubber.
It was just like disgusting.
I'm like every cup like, oh no. And these coffees, there were some that Willem called DOA, death on arrival.
They were horrible.
And out of the 21 samples I brought back, 19 failed basic standards.
They were just horrible.
horrible? And we went around the table.
We're tasting these coffees and you're supposed to have a poker face.
You're not supposed to like influence the person next to you.
After all those DOAs, Willem picked up his next sample and something changed.
I looked at Willem.
He had this kind of Mona Lisa smile.
Like a very subtle smirk.
It's like, was that a smile?
I don't know. Maybe it's good, is it bad?
I don't know. It was so different.
Mokhtar tried the same coffee that made Willem smile.
And I tasted passion fruit.
I'll never forget. Passion fruit and papaya and and banana, which I had never really had that kind of coffee before.
And I was like, wow, this is different.
So it's out of 100 points.
Anything above 80 is considered specialty.
You know, you'll find that at Starbucks, at Pete's.
85, 86, 87, you'll find that like higher end specialty coffee shops.
88, 89 is really rare coffee.
And 90 plus is like these unicorn coffees you'll find once in a lifetime.
Willem issued his verdict.
He gave it a 90 plus score, which is, he said this is one of the best coffees I've ever tasted.
That moment, what were you feeling?
I was excited because I was like, wow, this is not just me being proud of my culture, my family's homeland.
This is objectively real good coffee.
And maybe this could actually work.
Two of Moktar's coffees scored above a 90.
All those experts who had told him stories about a legendary cup of Yemeni coffee they had decades ago, this was what they were talking about.
out. This was proof that thanks to Yemen's elevation, unique microclimates, and rare coffee varietals, the country has some of the best coffee in the world.
It just has to be handled with care.
Based on those results, Mokhtar was able to raise funds from investors to start a coffee operation in Yemen.
In the fall of 2014, he returned to Yemen, once more against the advice of the U .S. State Department.
He spent the next few months talking to the coffee farmers at the collective, getting ready for the harvest season, making sure they were only picking the ripest red red cherries, promising to buy them all at a big premium.
He also set up a sorting and processing facility there.
His goal was to get enough of an operation going that he could bring samples to the big Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle in the spring.
It's the largest coffee trade show in North America, the Super Bowl of specialty coffee.
This is where he would show everyone how great Yemeni coffee is and hopefully line up his first sale.
But as the Coffee Expo approached, Yemen's civil war was intensifying.
To be honest, I had these, like, my therapist would call peculiar blind spots that we all have in life.
We create these kind of, this cognitive dissonance around certain things that we don't want to deal with.
I didn't want to see all the issues that were happening around me.
Like, there was a lot of violence, a lot of instability.
And I just had this mission, vision, and I kept doing it until one day, eventually, you know, that I had a rude awakening.
what was the rude awakening march 25th 2015 i woke up at two in the morning almost three in the morning and i heard i thought it was like a wedding going on sometimes in weddings in yemen they'll like you know have fireworks or even like shoot guns in the air but this was very loud i could feel like the earth shaking and i went outside and i saw what looked like laser beams being shot in the sky and those were anti -aircraft machine guns being shot out fighter jets over the the previous few months, the Houthis, a rebel group backed by Iran, had been gaining power, eventually taking over Yemen's
capital. Saudi Arabia is an adversary of Iran and didn't want the Houthis in power.
So the Saudis began a bombing campaign to try to push the Houthis out.
Mokhtar was caught in the crossfire.
So in my head, I kept trying to think, how am I going to go to this coffee conference in Seattle?
I mean, it's been now almost a year year and a half to almost two years of my life, I've taken money from investors.
I've given hope to farmers now.
I have employees now, like this whole thing now, this whole operation I've done.
And I needed to figure out how to make this work.
And so I reached out to the US government because there were other countries taking their citizens out, Russia and China, Pakistan, India.
And I remember reaching out to the US State Department and their response was, I'm sorry, sorry, we can't help you right now.
We can relay your messages to your loved ones via our website.
Mokhtar was one of hundreds of Americans stuck in Yemen.
The U .S. State Department said it gave citizens multiple warnings about leaving, and now it was too dangerous to evacuate them.
Meanwhile, the U .S. was allied with Saudi Arabia in this fight against the Houthis.
Later that year, the Obama administration sold $1 .3 billion worth of weapons to the Saudis.
The war in Yemen is still ongoing, and it's considered one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
And that was really, it really hurt, you know, because I knew like, especially in this conflict, those bombs were made here in the US, you know, and they were being supported by the US government.
Mokhtar tried to leave from the airport in Sana 'a, but the Saudis had bombed the runway.
He knew another Yemeni American, Samar Nasser, who was also stuck in Yemen.
She told him about a Greek ship leaving from Aden, an eight -hour drive south.
Mokhtar was hearing that Aden was an active war zone with intense fighting on the ground.
Towns along the way had been destroyed, but he thought it was his only way out.
And all I have with me are my coffee samples.
And I had $5 ,000 that I hid in my underwear and a .45 handgun.
He hired a driver and a bodyguard and they left for Aden.
When they got there, they were stopped by an armed group of resistance fighters.
These were local men who suspected that Mokhtar's driver and bodyguard were Houthis, fighting for the other side.
All three of them were blindfolded and taken to a local jail and it was a very difficult moment that i really can't speak a lot about but i ended up um you know it was it was i mean at one point i was i had my hands tied up behind my back and it was blindfolded and someone told me they were going to kill me today next week in the second and final part of our story mokhtar tries to keep himself and his dreams of a yemeni coffee company alive in the middle of a civil war quick note before we wrap up please make sure you connect to our show in the podcasting app app of your choice.
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Thanks. This show is produced by me along with senior producer Emma Morgenstern and producer Andres O 'Hara.
Our editor is Tracy Samuelson.
Additional editing by Devin DeComo.
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Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher.
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Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Doug Hastings in Seattle, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
We'll be right back.
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