This episode contains explicit language.
Arby's steak nuggets?
Not gonna try them.
No, you're not gonna try them?
Steak isn't something you just eat loose like dice.
It's funny, there's a psychological thing because, in theory, why should it be so different from chicken nuggets?
But it feels different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like beef fingers.
We used to have those.
I don't know if you went to public school, but in Birmingham public schools beef fingers were a staple.
Really?
Yeah.
Chicken fingers with beef.
Well, you have chicken fried steak.
Yeah, but that's shaped different, and it makes sense.
When you cut it into strips, psychologically, your mind says chicken.
Yeah.
That's right.
And like beef finger, like that sounds weird.
Chicken fried steak, mmm.
Same gravy to dip it in, too.
The weird thing is that neither chickens nor cows have fingers.
No.
I'm going to Raising Cane's after this.
This is The Sporkful.
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.
I've been a fan of Roy Wood Jr.'
's comedy for years.
I've been to his stand-up shows, and I always loved watching him on The Daily Show.
These days, he's hosting Have I Got News For You, a comedy and current events show on CNN.
Roy has long used humor to discuss topical issues and to get at deeper truths.
Here's a clip from his most recent stand-up special, Lonely Flowers.
Well, we had to know it was coming.
You had to know the militias was coming.
You knew it was coming.
It's America.
What we do in America?
You have progress...
Then you have backlash.
That's the cycle of this country.
Progress, then backlash.
You knew the militias was coming.
Just look at the last four, five years.
You can't have the first black woman vice president, the first black woman Supreme Court justice and the first black woman mermaid.
It was too much.
And they couldn't handle it.
That mermaid, that's the one that broke them, that damn mermaid.
When they did that little mermaid remake, they was like, oh.
Back in 2019, I had Roy on The Sporkful for the first time.
We talked about his various jobs in food service and his strategy for getting extra sauce packets at McDonald's.
We also touched on his relationship with his father.
Now that relationship is a focal point of his new memoir.
We'll get to that.
But, as I was reminded when Roy joined me again in the studio recently, he's a person with many strong opinions about food.
I am a guy that lives in a pocket that I hope never changes.
Like, When places close or take things off the menu, my world is devastated.
I don't know how to replace this spot.
Like what?
What's something that you lost recently?
I'll tell you one that hurts the most.
Early 2000s, TGI Fridays had the Oreo Madness Ice Cream Sundae.
Two large Oreo cookies.
Ice cream sandwich with Oreo cookie as the sandwich base.
They took it away.
And then it came back years later, and they put it back on the menu.
And I go back and order it again, and it's not the same.
What was different?
It's no longer one big Oreo.
It's crumbled up Oreos compressed to make the Oreo cookie bread part of the thing.
Of the sandwich.
Yeah, and for whatever reason, whole Oreo crispier than multiple crushed Oreos.
So it's softer.
So it doesn't have the same snap in the bite.
The freshness of the cookie is compromised because you have crumbled it.
So more air can permeate through the entire thing.
And now it's soft and it sucks.
And little stuff like that will just devastate my life.
So if you want the giant chocolate cookie, like a giant version of that chocolate cookie that it was made with Yeah, I don't know where you get that.
I do not know.
I do not know, but TGI Fridays knows.
Call that person back, because this new cartel you're buying your drugs from stepped on.
And they have released so many different variations of Oreos in the last year, so many different flavors of fillings.
There's a Selena Gomez Oreo.
If you go to H Mart there's all kind of different Asian-inspired flavors of Oreos that they don't even have in America.
Oh, I did that as a joke once at the Daily Show.
I went to...
Was it Thailand?
I did a bunch of U.S.
I did some shows for the troops.
Man, I came back to work.
We had like the daily show.
They have like a little snack area with cookies and little, you know, just nicknames.
Just you graze and nibble whatever's on the table today.
And I laid out wasabi flavored Oreos and hot wing flavored Oreos.
And when I left work, they were still there.
Maybe four cookies from each package.
And even those were halved.
As I said, Roy has a new memoir out called The Man of Many Fathers.
It's about his complicated relationship with his own father and how he thinks about that now that he has a son of his own.
A lot of the most powerful scenes in the book involve mealtime.
Roy was born in New York.
His parents separated when he was one.
Roy and his mother moved to Memphis.
He writes that when he was young, the meal he remembers most with his mom was breakfast.
They ate together most mornings, but it wasn't around a table.
Breakfast was eaten in the car, specifically in his mom's 1975 Old Mobile Cutlass Supreme.
Like a lot of cars from that era, there was no center console between the two front seats.
It was just one large bench in the front with room for three.
So Roy would use the extra space between him and his mother to fix breakfast on the way to school.
My mom whipping the wheel, and I'm either working...
A biscuit.
If we did something at the house, usually it's hot dogs.
Hot dogs were the quickest and most convenient thing to prepare in the morning.
And I would have hot dog and fruit.
And I know that sounds weird.
But in my mom's brain, I think it was meat, bread, same as a sausage biscuit.
Right.
And then you'd have an orange or apple juice.
But it wasn't all just handheld foods like hot dogs for breakfast.
These car meals sometimes involved plates and cutlery.
There's certain stuff that you think you can't eat while you drive, but the secret is prep.
And so you do the Eggo waffles, you butter and syrup them up.
And my mom usually do three waffles.
I do two.
And you put five waffles on a plate, prep them, chop them up real good transfer it to a paper plate.
Two forks.
I am the center console.
And keep in mind, we're violating probably every child seatbelt law, every motor vehicle.
You're too young to be up front.
Hey, me and my mom's got to eat, bro.
Sorry.
I'd load the fork.
And she periodically reached for the fork while she's driving, never take her eyes off the road.
And that was the system.
Same game with hot dogs.
And, you know, I was always like her little helper, right?
Roy was a latchkey kid, making his own dinner many nights.
He and friends also snuck into neighbors' yards to pull fruit off trees, which sometimes got them in trouble.
In the summer, he would stay with his grandmother in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
But the summer after third grade, when his mom picked him up from his grandma's house, everything changed.
We leave Clarksdale to head back to what I thought was back to Memphis.
Same as always, wrong straight to Birmingham.
And I'm looking at like I'm literally looking out the window and I'm not seeing my usual landmarks.
Where are we going?
Yeah, we're going to stay with your daddy.
We're going to move in with your daddy.
What?
Roy's mom had decided to move them from Memphis to Birmingham to live with Roy's father, all without telling Roy beforehand.
The whole time I'm thinking my toys are still in Memphis, and I was just...
The ride there, I was just furious.
I was crying.
I was just third grade.
I was inconsolable, man.
Everything you've known is just ripped away from you.
She stops for gas, and she comes back out with a hot dog.
Two hot dogs, actually, wrapped up.
As Roy's mom pulled out of the gas station, she asked him to unwrap hers and give it to her with a few napkins, the same way he used to hand her breakfast when they were on the way to school.
And just for a minute, I was like, all right, I'll stop crying.
So, I don't know, it just still kind of reinforced, like, yeah, I'm pissed at you.
But yes, of course, I'll still give you a hot dog with a napkin and still be the teammate.
Like, we're still a team.
But yeah, I didn't like that.
I didn't like that one bit.
In the summer of 1986, Roy and his mother moved in with his father.
Technically, Roy's parents were still married, even though they'd been living in different cities for years.
Roy's father was much older.
He was 63 when Roy was born.
He was a highly respected journalist who worked his whole career in radio news.
He was as relevant a journalist as any journalist that you can name today.
Most of the stations my pops worked at.
He was the first black hire at pretty much all of these spots.
And they thought he was white, but his voice was just so booming.
They're like, ah, we gotta hire him.
It's too good.
It's too good.
We'll just take the hit in the ratings.
Hire the black guy.
Just don't let him do any station events.
Here's Roy Wood Sr speaking in 1994, describing a job interview he once had.
That was supposed to happen over breakfast.
When I knocked on the door, he says, come in, the door is open.
And Mr. Dean must have changed three colors of red quicker than you can say hello, Mr. Dean.
And he says, I'm sorry, I had no idea that you were a Negro.
And I said, well, Mr. Dean, Negro or not, you and I had a breakfast engagement and I'm hungry.
And so you know, over the decades my dad built a reputation with the black community as being a journalist who covered a lot of black issues and conflict and using his show as a pulpit for so many different public figures national public figures of that time to come on his various shows.
You know, he was embedded in in the riots in Soweto, in South Africa.
He was in Zimbabwe during their civil war.
Like, legitimate war zones.
Vietnam, like, you name it.
As well as some of the major hot spots during the civil rights era.
All of the hot spots.
He was at everything.
All of them.
Detroit, especially the 60s.
And so he goes to Chicago, and he co-found something called the National Black Network.
And NBN was first of its kind in that...
It was a collective of black news reporters doing stories that would be syndicated back out to black news stations across the country, informing black people nationally about issues relevant to the black community.
So his voice was in pretty much every black household, you know, in those days.
Like for, whatever you believe, Lester Holt or Brian Gumbel, whatever esteemed picture of journalism you think.
You know he was that.
So in the mid-80s, when Roy moved to Birmingham as a third grader, he saw his dad not just as his father but as a public figure.
People could recognize his voice before they even turned around.
And so, yeah, he had a lot of respect.
He was highly respected in the community.
And anywhere we went, you know, I mean, the only thing my pops paid for was gas and maybe groceries.
What was he like personally?
Yeah, I mean, personally, a little absent.
You know, like my pops had, I have two younger half-brothers, so my pops spent a lot.
He had a second family.
So half the time, my dad was at the house.
He was over at their house.
And to be honest, it was weird moving to Birmingham because I still didn't see him as much.
My parents were still married, even though my pops had the second family.
And so there's a little bit of tension with that.
And so you know him and my mom.
It was never anything that became like a domestic dispute by definition, but it was not a good relationship.
You can have this person that everybody loves, but even if he's nice to me, you're not nice to my mom.
So it creates this weird energy between me and him.
My parents had a bit of an understanding.
You also have to remember, my mom was very headstrong.
She was a very strong woman.
And I think that she had made peace with the fact that this was a marriage that wasn't going to work.
But being a single mom in Memphis versus me moving to Birmingham, I could stay in a separate room.
My son has a father to body slam him when he starts, you know, becoming a little mouthy, which I was.
I was starting to become a handful for my mom to handle on her own.
So...
I think she looked at the arrangement as a way to continue her education grad school, law school, which she did and used that as a leverage to have the money that she needs to finally leave this situation.
Roy's father had children with other women before he met Roy's mother.
Then he also had the second family while married to Roy's mother.
Roy Sr. spent a lot of time with his second family.
So Roy's parents lived separate lives, sleeping in separate bedrooms, not seeing each other all that much.
Except for Sundays.
They spent Sunday breakfast together and Roy's father always read the paper, showing Roy all the different sections and commenting on the news.
Sometimes Roy's parents would debate different news topics.
His mom was in law school and would push back against his dad's opinions.
Roy writes in his memoir, quote, They were intellectuals who made each other better.
But I think that's what also drove my father crazy.
The silly lies he told other women simply did not work on my mother.
While this new book is the first time Roy's talked openly about his parents in such detail, his relationship with his father did come up the last time he and I talked.
I have a clip I want to play for you.
This is from 2019, the first time you joined me here on The Sporkful.
Okay.
We were talking about your dad and food and a few different things.
I asked you if your dad ever cooked for you, and you said no, he didn't.
And then you went on to say this
My dad's thing was groceries.
You know, my dad...
He's the one who taught me about doing the math on half gallons versus gallons of milk and figuring out what's the better value.
I learned a lot of those strategies from my father.
But then my father also, damn, I never thought about that.
My father also if he was on some asshole shit for a week or two or a month or two.
When he finally came back to the house like there'd be days, my dad just wouldn't come home.
He'd be wherever.
And when he came back to the house that first day, back in the house it was a trunk full of groceries from Piggly Wiggly.
And it had all of my favorite food, snacks.
Trunk was filled to the brim with just junk food.
And that made everything okay.
Like you know, in that moment I didn't.
I didn't that.
It was emotional bribery, it was bribe with food to forget what had happened.
That was cool, he was the coolest person.
Yeah daddy brother dad, root beer, yeah.
And then you get older, you go wait a minute.
Right motherfucker, you was, that was a bribe.
So what's real after that?
What's real on some trust shit?
Who's real?
So now, as a 40-year-old father, I know that if I do something with my child and I feel bad about what happened, I will never bribe him.
I'll never bribe my way back into his heart.
I always remember that moment from our conversation because part of what I appreciated about it was it felt like you were kind of having this realization in the moment as we were talking.
And now you have this book out and And it seems like a lot of what you were processing in that moment is also what you're trying to process in this book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I already had those conflictions swirling because my son had been born three years prior.
With my son, I would just apologize like, hey, I'm sorry.
Here's where I messed up.
What can I do next time?
Do a legitimate debriefing.
Now it takes a couple of days to get to the root of all of that.
You know, in terms of what a tough conversation is.
But yeah yeah, I definitely that, definitely.
That clip was definitely a moment of discovery like in real time.
I mean you talk about sort of the emotional bribery of food in that moment but, like what was the larger thing that you were starting to understand as you were thinking all that through, how that relationship affected me and how can I identify how it affected me negatively to make sure that I don't corrode or pollute the relationship with my son based on stuff that I haven't thought through or dealt with or have a fuller understanding of?
I think that a lot of us, as adults, are still dealing with some damage and whether or not you want to deal with that fine, but then sometimes, Because you haven't dealt with your own shit, now you're polluting the relationship with your child.
In a lot of cases, unknowingly.
And I didn't want that.
Coming up, Roy talks about how he was finally able to get close to his father.
And he tells me about the one meal he made his dad that he can't stop thinking about.
Stick around.
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Yummy.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Last week on the show, Colorado-style pizza.
What's that?
You never heard of it?
Well, you're not alone.
Denver reporter Paul Caroli spent six years trying to uncover the story of how Colorado-style pizza was invented and why more people don't know about it.
We hear the tale of his quest and try to answer the biggest question of all.
Does this pizza even qualify as its own regional style, alongside New York slices, Chicago deep dish and the rest?
In our episode, Paul goes looking for answers.
Can you tell me the origin story of Colorado style pizza?
The origin story of Colorado style pizza.
All right.
This is going to be hard with the microphone this close because I have to lay back and get nothing.
You know, a really comfortable position to start thinking about that.
I'll give you the real story, not the happy story, okay?
This is an epic episode full of twists and turns.
It's so much fun.
Don't miss it.
It's up now.
All right, back to Roy Wood Jr., whose new memoir is The Man of Many Fathers.
In the winter of 1994, when Roy turned 16, he got his driver's license.
And with that license came a change in his relationship with his father.
Roy desperately wanted to drive his father's prized Lincoln Continental and spent months begging him to drive it just once.
Then, to Roy's shock, his father said yes.
Roy would later realize this was because his father wasn't well, was sometimes too tired to drive himself.
So he let Roy drive him around on errands.
He went to the grocery store, the pawn shop, or to his father's speaking engagements.
We felt close.
I felt close.
The only time I felt close to him was in the car.
It's the only time I had his undivided attention.
In the house, you have two TVs going.
He's constantly consuming media.
My dad was a media.
He would have loved these times to just have a news feed in your phone and just swipe.
Swipe and notifications and five streaming channels and picture and picture.
He'd have lost his mind.
And then when we were outside of the car, people wanted to talk and he liked talking.
But in the car, I got your ass.
Sometimes we didn't talk about nothing.
But it was just being there, just being in that space.
Roy writes that at one point he asked to change shifts at his job at a hospital cafeteria so he'd be free to drive his dad more often.
But he never told his father he did that.
In hindsight, yeah, I just wanted to be around my dad.
But I didn't know how to verbalize that.
It's just, this is the thing I would rather do.
So let me pick up second shift instead of first shift.
And that just became the way it went.
I would drive him to the radio station.
Sometimes I would go inside and listen.
Other times I'd stay in the car, play my Game Boy.
Sometimes I would just drive around the corner of some corner store, get a bunch of candy and just sit in the car just gorging myself on Laffy Taffys.
Roy and his dad didn't sit down for meals on these trips.
They usually picked up fast food or snacks.
But Roy Sr. was particular.
He always wanted to stop at Hardee's.
Yeah, Hardee's, that was his spot.
Hardee's.
And Fifth Avenue bars, those were his two things.
Those were his snacks, yeah.
And I found Fifth Avenue's to be such an eclectic it's just a Butterfinger that went to grad school.
That's really all a Fifth Avenue is.
It's all eclectic and classy.
It is funny that candy bars back then had this very fancy, even like, you know.
Fifth Avenue, literally.
There's also like a hundred grand, a hundred grand bar.
Yes, yes.
Even like, you know, the peanut guy had his top hat and his cane.
A lot of the early branding made it sound like these candies were so high class.
This is aristocratic candy.
It's like, oh, it's not for me then.
I want some knickers.
On these car rides for the first time in Roy's life, his father was speaking to him like a man.
These rides with his dad had a big impact on Roy, but they didn't last long.
Within a few months, Roy learned that his father had prostate cancer.
He'd been diagnosed years ago, and it had returned.
That summer, something happened that really changed their relationship.
Roy Sr. discovered that someone had taken his Lincoln Continental out and scratched it.
Roy knew it was a relative who was staying with him at the time, but Roy's father blamed Roy for it.
He never forgave him, and things were never the same between them.
I asked Roy to read a section from his book about something that happened soon after that, during that final rocky period in their relationship.
One night, about a month before he died, I walked into the living room and my father was on the couch going through his usual routine.
Local news, international news, bill of fortune, jeopardy.
I sat down near him and started watching the news.
I didn't say anything to him.
He didn't say anything to me.
We just sat there in silence, watching TV together.
About an hour into this, he gathered up enough courage to ask me to make him a baked potato.
I obliged.
I got up wrapped a baked potato in a soaking wet paper towel, threw it in the microwave and boom baked potato.
I plated it, added some butter and sour cream and brought the little food tray over to the couch and set it there.
I returned to my original perch and continued to watch television in silence.
When Jeopardy finished, my father mumbled, you can come get this.
I turned around, and he was sliding the plate in my direction.
He'd taken two, maybe three bites of the potato.
His appetite was pretty much nonexistent at this point and he was mostly drinking Ensure for nutrients.
But for him to have eaten anything, I guess, was good.
As I came over to get the potato, my father looked me in the eyes and said, I did okay, didn't I?
And I said, yeah, you did the best you could.
He smiled and patted me on the hand and thanked me for the potato.
Now, as we hear that story today, the meaning of that exchange may be clear, but to 16-year-old you it wasn't exactly clear.
No.
No, I didn't grasp at the time that, and he's going, I did okay, didn't I?
Roy thought his father was saying I did okay eating the baked potato even though I don't have much appetite, right?
Roy didn't think much about this exchange until a month later, when his father died.
At the funeral, his half-sister approached him and said Just so you know, Daddy loved you and Daddy did the best he could.
And that's when the light bulb went off.
I didn't grasp it.
He was asking me to assess his job as a father.
That's what the question was.
I was literally standing at the grave, and I'm like, oh, shit.
That was my window to ask him all of the why were you like this as a father questions.
And I missed it.
I just didn't know.
Turns out there was a lot Roy didn't know about his father.
In 2021, Roy went on the PBS show Finding Your Roots and learned that his grandfather, his father's father, had basically been disappeared when the family was living in Georgia.
It was most likely a race-related murder, and the body was never found.
Roy Sr. was just four years old at the time.
All I knew was that my grandparents was dead before I was born.
My pops never talked about his parents.
And how could you expect, hey, tell me about your dad.
You only did know he disappeared.
You want to Have a seat at the table, Pops.
Dust off that trauma for me and give it an old share.
There was one more section of the book I wanted Roy to read.
The dedication in the front, where he addresses his father and reflects on being a father now.
Trying to raise a child before healing your inner child is a motherfucker.
I've tried to pass down the best of you and discard the rest.
Thank you for trying.
Your son.
Are you still angry that he escaped accountability?
I'm not angry.
Being mad at him does not help me raise my child.
So I have to let go of that.
Anger is not a sustainable emotion to have growth in your life.
Just me saying thanks for trying.
Establishes where he is now, in my level of degrees of anger or whatever.
And so that way you, the reader can absorb this also with grace.
You don't know what not having a man in your life would have ever done or how that would have changed him.
So the idea of, well, how do I, what do I do to work through everything me and my daddy?
I can't worry about that.
I got to let that go.
Let's talk about fatherhood today.
Okay.
And your son, how old is your son now?
He's nine.
So he's like, because the last time I talked to you, he was what, three?
Yeah, three.
So now he's... He's a sentient being.
He has opinions and favorites and likes and dislikes.
Stuff he wants to do and not do, and he is adamant.
It sounds like he's got your mother's head strong.
Yes, yes he does.
What do you cook for him these days?
You know, I'm kind of a... roasting chicken kind of guy.
I want to do some lasagna and brownies at some point.
Lasagna's a lot of work.
I know.
It's a pain in the ass.
It's an all day thing and I can't wait.
I've never done it before.
I got one of those pans where it's only edges.
Oh, the little maze.
Yeah, buddy.
You have to enjoy the process.
It's a lot of work yeah, and you got to make a big one because you want to have those leftovers, because you don't want to do all that work, and it's gone.
What i do all that for, yeah?
Yeah, i'll give you a quick tip.
If you have leftover lasagna, slice up a slice that's, you know, inch inch and a half thick.
Throw it in a frying pan with the cut, the open side of lasagna down and some oil okay, and it will turn like golden brown and crispy.
Then you flip to the other side and you reheat it that way and you get crispy edges and golden brown, cheesy toastiness.
It's like lasagna fingers.
Yeah.
All right, I can do that.
That's right.
That sounds more appetizing than beef fingers.
Yeah, no, I'm not an extensive cook.
His mother is way more amazing in the kitchen than me.
She's baking shit from scratch and me and him are like doing stovetop burgers and roasting chicken.
But you know what?
I love to cook for my kids and with my kids when they're in the right mood, when I have some time, when I'm cooking something that I think they'll want to do with me.
I don't think it really matters what you're making.
What matters is that you're cooking for him.
At some point, I think, he will come to recognize the amount of care that goes into you cooking for him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think the kids will piece it together.
So that's why I'm not that panicked about him needing to go to therapy.
If he does, it won't be because I wasn't there.
Right, right.
You ever make him a baked potato?
No, he's not a big baked potato.
He likes fries and steak.
We'll cut fries and like roast potatoes.
You know what I mean?
I don't know the word.
Like roasted potato wedges or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, we'll do that.
Like some air fry convection oven type situation.
But no, I like baked potatoes.
It's every now and then I'll stare at one and think about my pops.
I'm like, man, these were pretty good.
Let's see where he digs these.
I don't do them in the microwave, though.
That's just barbaric.
You've gotten high class on us, Roy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But in those days, yeah, I was stabbing the holes.
Wet towel.
Rough it up.
Basically super steaming it.
But yeah, I think it's the moments of You know, we do puzzles and do Legos.
And like there's these more quiet moments like that that my son and I share that, I think, are like really to me special.
You know, but it's not always cooking.
Is it, like, a memorable meal you've shared together?
No, not yet.
But I'll tell you one I'm looking forward to.
Either in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, there's a Japa dog cart.
It's a Japanese-style hot dog food cart.
And it's the best hot dog I've ever had.
I think I'll take them to the one on the Santa Monica Pier, because there's rides and there's other stuff to do.
But Kobe beef, there's seaweed, they put the sauteed onions on it, Japanese mayo.
Like a Kewpie mayo.
Yeah, it's halfway to Miracle Whip.
Yeah, it's really good.
Yeah, it's very good.
They toast the bun and, I don't know, just sit on the pier and talk.
I think some of the best meals are the simplest ones.
For whatever moments my mother and I had with hot dogs, I think this is the perfect upgrade.
Because I've got money now.
I can have an $8 hot dog.
No more Oscar Myers.
Is that not the sign of growth in life?
Yeah, you're moving on up.
You give your kids the experiences you didn't get to have.
So if my mom and I had hot dogs and bonded, then my son and I were doing Kobe beef.
Like a couple of gentlemen.
Yeah.
That's Roy Wood Jr.
His new book is The Man of Many Fathers.
He's also the host of the CNN show Have I Got News For You, which features comedians Michael Ian Black and Amber Ruffin?
And of course, Roy is always doing stand up all over the country.
You can find his dates at RoyWoodJr.com.
And hey, if you want to win a copy of Roy's book, sign up for our newsletter by December 8th.
We are giving away one copy of the book to one of our lucky newsletter subscribers today.
And if you're already a newsletter subscriber, you are already entered to win.
So you want to be on that list because even if you don't win this time, you might win next time.
We're always giving cool stuff away.
So sign up right now at sporkful.com slash newsletter.
Must be in the U.S. to win.
Audio of Roy Wood Sr. in this episode came from the Birmingham Black Radio Museum.
Next week on the show, how does a traumatic brain injury affect the way you cook and eat?
I talk with filmmaker Cheryl Green about what it means to live with an invisible disability, how it affects your cooking and why asking for help can be a beautiful thing.
While you wait for that one, check out last week's show.
Did we discover a new regional style of pizza?
Denver reporter Paul Caroli thinks he might have, and he goes on a multi-year quest to find out.
That one's up now.
Check it out.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
Right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
It was edited by Camille Stanley.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Our interns are Morgan Johnson and Jasmine Sutherland.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcast.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Amanda, from Binghamton, New York, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
