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I definitely felt like I was being shown the man behind the curtain.
I felt like I was talking to somebody who was telling me that they knew what really happened to JFK or where the aliens are.
Nobody's been hiding this information.
Nobody's been conspiring with this information.
But somehow, we just missed it.
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.
Today we have an episode I am very excited to share from our old friends at Decoder Ring.
In case you don't know, Decoder Ring is Slate's podcast about cracking cultural mysteries, hosted by the great Willa Paskin.
Now, I love Decoder Ring.
It's an excellent show.
And we've teamed up with them in the past for an episode about hydration.
Today we're collaborating with them again for this episode called How the Jalapeno Lost Its Heat.
For more than a century, Americans have been obsessed with Mexican food and ultimately have changed it.
Willa speaks with Dallas -based food critic Brian Reinhardt, who fell in love with spicy Mexican cuisine as a teenager and also started to notice that the jalapenos he'd buy in the grocery store were less and less hot.
Turns out this is a real mystery.
Let's see if they can crack it.
Now, if you're listening to this episode, I hope you'll check out more Dakota Ring episodes, food mysteries, all kinds of stories, like how did a made -up fruit, the blue raspberry, take over the candy aisle?
And why are leftover containers like Tupperware so trendy?
Dakota Ring has episodes about the tooth fairy, ice cream trucks, plus one about the children's book if you give a mouse a cookie and how it collided with the culture wars.
Make sure to follow Decoder Ring wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, here's Willa Paskin.
Brian Reinhart is a food writer.
And when he was growing up in southern Indiana, he remembers that there was a way people talked about one particular cuisine, Mexican food.
The perception I always had, what people told me because they were Midwestern people was, was, oh, well, you've got to be careful with Mexican food because so much of it is so spicy.
And those peppers, you've got to watch out for because they'll light you up every time.
One winter, Brian's family went on vacation to San Antonio, and Brian finally got to eat the real thing.
It was a revelation.
It was December 27th, and we were sitting out on the river walk.
It was 70 degrees outside, and we were calling home saying, yeah, we're having enchiladas, and we're sitting outside, and there are all these, you know, ducks floating across the water and we're enjoying everything.
And all the people at home were saying, well, there's two feet of snow outside and we're all miserable.
So we all started lobbying my dad saying, can you get a job down here?
Brian's family, lured in part by the taste of good Mexican food, moved to Texas when he was in high school.
I moved down the week I turned 16.
So then visiting with friends and going out and everything turned into Mexican food or barbecue.
Q. Brian's interest in food grew as he got older, and eventually he began writing about it professionally.
For the past two years, he's been a food critic at Dallas's D Magazine.
He eats out in restaurants 200 times a year, but he and his girlfriend also cook at home, often Mexican food, often with hot peppers, some of which they grow in their own backyard. We've got some kind of bells.
This year, we're growing shishito peppers for the first time.
We love fish peppers.
They're They're very tiny and they have racing stripes.
They're beautiful. One kind of hot pepper Brian doesn't grow, though, is the jalapeno, a chili originally cultivated in Veracruz, Mexico.
He shops for those at the supermarket.
And a little while ago, he started to notice something.
I kept buying jalapenos at the grocery store.
And then more and more frequently, it just tasted like a bell pepper.
There was almost nothing to it.
It was a very simple, straightforward pepper flavor.
In jalapeno after jalapeno, it seemed to Brian like the spice was gone.
And at first he thought it was just him.
Maybe I've become conditioned because now I eat Serrano peppers and now I cook with habanero peppers sometimes.
And maybe I've just developed a greater heat tolerance.
And then finally it started to get to the point where I felt like I must be going crazy.
And then I started asking people, have you had this experience with jalapenos also?
I'd be cooking, and I'd hold one up, and I'd say, what's wrong with these things?
Have you noticed this?
And more and more people started saying, yeah, they're basically, there's nothing to them.
And then I said, you know what we can do?
And I pulled out my phone, I texted, I think, like four or five different chefs all at once.
The answers came back quickly.
The first one was, yes, definitely.
They're less hot than they used to be.
The second one was, I tell my cooks, my hands must be too sweet because I can't make the salsa hot enough anymore.
It wasn't just the taste that seemed different.
Some people noticed that jalapenos looked different, too.
I mean, you can just look at old menus and cartoon -type imagery where jalapenos used to have a big bend, like almost a 90 -degree twist in the middle.
But now most of the jalapenos at the store are straight.
Like, what did you think was going on?
I think my working theory was jalapeno growing operations were prioritizing growing them properly, keeping them happy compared to us at home where maybe we go out of town for a weekend and we forget about them.
And then we come back and they've been completely neglected and they become spicier because of that.
Right. So you took what you knew to that, like peppers are spicier under stress and where you're like, these are the most well -taken care of peppers.
So they're not that spicy.
Yeah. We need a farm to just treat their peppers like absolute garbage.
Just leave them for months and months and come back to them and say oh my gosh I forgot we had these and then sell them.
Ryan knew that if he was going to figure out the truth he needed to run his theory by an expert.
He immediately thought of New Mexico State University which is a whole institute dedicated to chili peppers.
He picked out one of their faculty members dialed her up and told her everything you've just heard. And she started off very kindly and she said I've heard these these complaints before.
You're not the first. And I felt really good for a moment.
And then she said, but it goes a lot deeper and there's a lot better explanation available for you.
And then she said, the peppers are designed that way.
And I said, excuse me?
And she said, well, it's completely on purpose.
And that's when the story of the great chili pepper conspiracy really started to unfold.
The shiny, dark green jalapeno is the workhorse of hot peppers.
They're in hot sauces, enchiladas, and salsas.
They're canned, pickled, fresh, and smoked into chipotles.
And they outsell all other hot peppers in the United States.
But these everyday chilies are a scientific and sociological marvel.
A complicated testament to the American love affair with Mexican food sitting right there on the grocery store shelf.
In today's episode, we're going to tell the decades -long saga of the jalapeño and its fluctuating spice levels.
It's a story about how this one pepper helped American palates progress from mild to medium to hot and then couldn't keep up.
So to test out his theory, Brian Reinhart had called an expert at New Mexico State University.
Someone named Stephanie Walker because she had been the chair of the Chili Pepper Conference.
Yes, I became a lot of calls about jalapenos lately.
We called Dr. Stephanie Walker, too.
She's a professor and extension vegetable specialist, and she got back to us during a break from planting.
This is the time of year where we're putting our various chili experiments in the field.
Turns out, like Brian, Stephanie wasn't born with spice in her life.
I didn't know anything about chili peppers or heat.
When we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, when I was starting middle school, I started eating chili.
chili. I developed a love for it.
And then I actually, after I got my bachelor's degree, I went to work in a chili pepper processing facility.
And that's where I really fell in love with chili peppers.
So have jalapenos gotten less spicy?
So in my opinion, yes.
And to really understand why, I asked Stephanie to start at the beginning.
What is the thing that makes chili spicy?
Oh, capsaicin. Capsaicin and very closely related chemicals are only made in members of the capsicum genus.
So chili peppers are very unique in having that type of pungency that you experience when you eat chili peppers.
I actually am really interested in like how jalapenos But maybe more largely like chili peppers grow And also how they're bred Like how do we have all these different kinds of chili peppers to begin with?
Are they just naturally occurring or some of them?
Oh, actually they've been created by humans So the original chili pepper, it's called the mother of all chili peppers Is the chiltepin type So they're very small, usually round or slightly elongated peppers That grow in bushes dishes and even though the heat kind of evolved in chili peppers to dissuade mammals from eating them human mammals discovered they love this heat sensation so so humans then started the selecting process so this goes back thousands of years and just through humans actively selecting we have the vast array of chili pepper varieties that we see today.
And that vast array of different human Human -selected breeds of peppers is what Stephanie emphasized to Brian.
The point she made to me was the jalapeno is a family.
There are so many different varieties of jalapeno. It is not just a pepper.
And humans are still actively selecting when it comes to chili pepper varieties.
In fact, it's key to what's happened to the jalapeno. In the early 1980s, demand for Mexican food was growing all over America.
Sales at Mexican restaurants had doubled in just a few years, but consumer tastes varied widely.
Even though there's a lot of folks out there who love very, very hot jalapenos, there's a lot who don't like hot foods.
Companies wanted to be able to sell products at every level of spice.
But there was this big problem, one Stephanie is very familiar with because she was working at a chili pepper processor back then.
A big issue was predicting heat level.
For chili peppers, predicting pungency is hard. So the pungency level of a different chili pepper variety is based on genetics, but also the environment.
When we did vats of salsa, we wanted to have it mild, medium, or hot.
And if you happen to get like a load of jalapenos that was extra hot, we might mislabel a whole day's run of medium or mild salsa.
So we actually had a program where our field department would go out and pre -sample fields before they were harvested so we could get a good idea, how hot are these peppers?
How do we need to adjust the formulation?
Will we make mild, medium or hot salsa?
And we discovered it didn't work.
The chili peppers was just too unpredictable.
But there is a more predictable substance, an extract called oleoresin capsaicin.
Which is pure capsaicin extracted from hot chili peppers, basically.
And then it's just like a liquid that you can...
Very, very dangerous liquid.
Yeah, the ingredient buckets have the skull and crossbones on it.
Yeah, it's like pure, pure heat.
So it's, yeah, you don't want to mess with it.
Oleoresin capsaicin is the active ingredient in pepper spray.
It makes it possible to take something mild and make it spicy.
Whereas you can never take something spicy and make it mild.
It's just like salt.
You can add more, but you can't take any away.
So a mild jalapeno, from the manufacturer's perspective, is actually a lot more versatile than a spicy one.
And so as Brian Reinhart learned, companies thought growing a mild pepper could solve their problem.
Okay, well, if we can find a way to make sure that they're all mild, then we can choose the spice level.
So as this problem became more widely known in the industry, agriculture departments and breeders started working on how can we standardize the jalapeno pepper and get something that hits all the attributes that we want.
And one of the people they called was a chili expert named Dr. Benigno Villalon, who goes by Ben, among other names.
You know, they called me Dr. Pepper, you know, so I was the man for the job.
Ben's 88. He was raised on a vegetable farm in South Texas, and he has degrees in plant breeding, genetics and pathology.
He also worked at Texas A &M for 30 years.
And that's where he was when the salsa industry reached out.
They came to me, Pace Foods, Olalpaso, La Victoria and all of the big guys.
In the 70s, Ben had been trying to breed a virus -resistant bell pepper by crossing it with different peppers, including jalapenos.
After a lot of crossbreeding, he realized he'd inadvertently created a low -heat jalapeno. get back to the jalapeno flavor.
It's not an easy thing to do because every pepper, no matter what it is, has its own flavor profile.
And they said that they wanted it because customers said that they didn't want spice?
That's right. People don't like to get their mouth burned and all that kind of stuff.
And so they said, why don't you release a mild jalapeno?
And so a couple of years later, we did.
That low -heat pepper was released in the early 1980s as the TAM jalapeno. TAM stands for Texas A &M.
And it seemed to do exactly what the processing plants wanted.
It was controllably, mildly hot.
It was resistant to bugs.
It didn't develop kind of gnarly black spots.
And it wasn't so curved.
It's a glorious little invention.
It was a huge, huge help to industry.
Because suddenly you could get jalapenos, you could predict what the formulation was going to be.
They were able to give you the mild, medium, and hot salsa.
And that's when the salsa industries really started booming.
Their sales went up, not only for the processing industry, but the fresh market also.
By 1990, the United States outsold ketchup 2 to 1 with the mild salsa.
Things kicked up even more in the early 2000s, when the Tam 2 came out.
An even milder, more predictable pepper developed by Ben's successor at Texas A &M.
60 % of jalapenos go to processing plants, so that's what farmers prioritize.
And so mild jalapenos became the dominant crop.
So useful for mass -produced salsa, they've trickled into the produce aisle too.
And this seems to be happening more and more, according both to Brian's taste buds and even to those of Ben Villalon, the man who created the mild jalapeno in the first place.
I don't like the ones at the store because they're hybrids, and a lot of them don't have any heat at all.
You don't like the ones at the store?
No, because they don't even have flavors.
I asked Brian how he felt when Stephanie explained that his experience was the result of a deliberate, decades -long effort to grow milder jalapenos.
I definitely felt like I was being shown the man behind the curtain.
I felt like I was talking to somebody who was telling me that they knew what really happened to JFK or where the aliens are.
Nobody's been hiding this information.
Nobody's been conspiring with this information.
But somehow, we just missed it.
And maybe part of the reason we missed it is because it's not the first time something like this has happened.
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Welcome back to the Sporkful.
I'm Dan Paschman. Hey, last week on the show, we did one of our salad spinners and we covered a lot of ground.
I chatted with Dina Shanker from Bloomberg and Mamrie Hart, a comedian who just released a cookbook called All I Think About Is Food, which obviously makes her an ideal guest. Now, in this salad spinner, we covered RFK Jr.'s war against food dyes.
We asked why Americans are tipping less.
And we discussed the rise of rip and dip bagels, a new trend where people tear off a piece of bagel and swipe it through a whole bunch of cream cheese.
My guests had some thoughts.
I do think there is something about you can have variation.
I would like to try a couple different cream cheeses, but they would not go well together stacked.
Right. I want a little sauce buffet.
You're really going to do a big deep dip.
You're getting like a tablespoon of cream cheese in each bite.
Talk about a bad ratio.
Right, that's a bad ratio, and it's also like you're disrespecting the bagel.
100%. But this is America, And if I want that much, I should be given that option.
Dip less. Also covered in this episode, the rise of tiny cocktails and what happens when the vibes of a restaurant are better than the food.
This episode is fast. It's fun.
You're going to love it.
Check it out wherever you got this one.
All right. Let's get back to our episode with Dakota Ring.
Here again is Willa Paskin.
What's happened to the jalapeno has happened before.
In fact, it's happened over and over again.
First and foremost, Americans have been obsessed with Mexican food from the moment they encountered it.
Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for The L .A.
Times and the author of Taco USA, How Mexican Food Conquered America.
Mexican food first starts getting into the American consciousness really in the 1880s, but explodes in the 1890s.
And you had two dishes in particular that made it happen.
One of them were tamales.
Tamales are, of course, the quintessential Mexican food.
On the other hand, you have chile con carne.
In the plazas of San Antonio, women known as chili queens opened all -night open -air restaurants serving up bowlfuls as guitars played.
And tamale street vendors hawked their wares all over cities like San Francisco.
And Americans were just so enticed by the scene of it.
More importantly, they were enticed by the food.
And the American media got curious about them.
And so you started seeing these dispatches in publications like The Atlantic, like Harper's Weekly.
How are they describing them?
Like, what are they saying about them?
They always, they always end up obsessing on the spice.
You have these stereotypes like that.
It tastes like the fires of hell, but they're not disparaging it.
They're not disparaging it.
They are praising it, but warning people in advance.
Hey, this is going to be hot.
The dishes became even more well -known after the 1893 Chicago World Fair.
And that's arguably where Mexican food had its nationwide debut.
The city of Chicago is awash with tamale vendors.
Chicago's also the meatpacking capital of the United States.
It's also the canning capital.
So as this is happening, these big companies, they get the brilliant idea of packing tamales in a can and packing chile con carne in a can.
They then spread around the rest of the United States and Americans gobbled it up.
There's a man made famous by his hot tamales.
So those were the two first famous dishes that Americans got obsessed over, and then every decade, everything that I just told you repeats.
Every decade, you have Americans, quote -unquote, discovering something at a restaurant and travel somewhere.
They become obsessed with it.
Entrepreneurs then spread it around the rest of the United States.
Americans love it, eat it to the point where it becomes assimilated into the American diet.
And then Americans say, OK, what's next?
I want something more, quote unquote, authentic.
It happens almost every decade.
It happens in the 1900s with chili powder, in the 1920s with rice and beans, Then entrepreneurs sell the country on margaritas and fajitas, and especially on tacos.
Watch us make your food up fresh at Taco Bell, Taco Bell.
Can you feel your taste buds tingle?
Taco Bell, Taco Bell.
And onward and onward, it has been a slow but steady march of Mexican food conquering American palates and stomachs.
When the food or the dish or the ingredient becomes so omnipresent, does there start to be this conversation about it's not as good?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's partly true, though.
And a lot of this does have to do with the mass production of the cuisine.
I mean, look, when you're going to mass produce anything, you have to sacrifice certain attributes.
You have to commodify everything.
So people who grow ingredients or Mexican food in the United States have always modified their flavor so they could become more popular.
You're talking about jalapenos right now.
But in Mexico, remember, tequila can only come from five states in Mexico.
It's a protected designation.
Well, the 1940s, these tequila producers realized, hey, Americans are starting to come to Mexico in record numbers.
They're liking our tequila, but they find it too harsh.
harsh. Let's change the recipe.
So they changed the recipe to make it more palatable to Americans.
And we all know what happened with tequila becomes a huge, huge sensation to the point now, of course, where you're getting the same tequila companies.
Now you have tequila companies saying we need we need to make tequila for Mexicans.
And of course, the Americans don't don't want the Americanized tequila anymore.
They want the Mexicanized tequila.
Well, I mean, it sounds like there's this kind of paradox, right?
Like there's this growing taste for spiciness or for tequila, for something, and then it starts to take off.
And then this businesses are like, oh, we actually need to get even bigger.
So we have to standardize even more.
And then it does get bigger and it is really popular, but it opens up space for certain consumers to be like, no, no, we want like the first thing.
You mentioned paradox.
That's the best way of putting it.
The American consumer at first, they want something that's watered down.
They accept it. you have an entire industry being created to match what they wanted originally.
But then the American gets inured to that modified flavor profile.
And then that's when they want more.
But by then, it's too late.
And that's the story of jalapenos too.
In the latter part of the 20th century, Americans became interested in salsas and the peppers that go into them.
The Jalapeno immediately resonated with American palates.
The name itself is just so intriguing.
Jalapeno? Jalapeno?
You know, the American just gets so intrigued by foreign words.
And Jalapeno? I mean, God, you want to talk about a Mexican word, try Jalapeno. The J is pronounced like a J.
Then you have the little tilde, of course, on top.
The little squiggly thing in the end, which turns into an ñ, and then if you really want to go deep track, Jalapeno refers to the town of Jalapa in the state of Veracruz.
And Jalapa, just to confuse Americans more, is with an X.
So it's just the name itself is so intriguing.
And this is all, by the way, before you actually taste it.
And then you taste it.
I mean, you have to put yourself in the mindset of Americans in the 60s and 70s when Mexican food is still not where it is today.
Of course, they're going to get intrigued.
And they wanted it in their salsas and hot sauces, as long as it wasn't too hot.
So breeders developed mild peppers for processors.
And suddenly, they were everywhere.
Paste -thick and chunky salsa puts only fresh jalapenos in every jar.
For that bold taste born in San Antonio.
This dust made in New York City.
New York City! But as non -Mexicans ate more and more of this stuff, their palates changed in turn.
There was a point where Americans or non -Mexicans could not stand heat at all.
But yes, as the decades have gone on, Americans have gotten a tolerance for salsa spice and Americans are starting to escalate their heat to the point now, of course, where we have the hot ones and you have kids just loving all of it.
And adults, too, for that matter.
Americans, more than anything.
You don't see Mexicans doing these contests where like, oh, I'm going to eat 15 Carolina Reapers at once.
What you just ate is the hottest, most disgusting hot sauce in the world.
That's such an American thing.
It's kind of funny and kind of pathetic, too.
I feel like I'm going to die.
I know. Get it. This is the actor Jennifer Lawrence on the popular YouTube show Hot Ones, where guests eat increasingly spicy hot stuff.
I don't know what to, nothing helps.
I know, I know. Is my face okay?
That is just masochism.
I don't want that. that do you have you noticed that jalapenos in particular have gotten mild like no because for me the jalapeno was never spicy to begin with the hottest jalapenos are not that hot but so jalapenos historically at least in my family you would use them for the flavor a good jalapeno has a good verdant uh flavor to it very fresh very invigorating flavor the way other chiles don't have but there's nothing wrong with putting a little bit of spice into it i i'll i do not take a little bottle of hot sauce with me to diners but i do take a big huge serrano i just went i just ate out
a french bistro the other day and i'm like what was it i had a croque ma damn yesterday french i love french food they're not gonna have any heat i need a little bit of heat so i whipped out my serrano my friend who was with me he didn't blink because he knows who i am but the waitress comes in she's like oh did we give you one i'm like no and she was impressed she's like okay do you like do you ask for a knife like what do you do with it or you just oh with with for a A chile de serrano?
Hell no. It's called a chile de mordida, a biting chili.
So you get it, you eat it, and you eat it like a carrot.
That's, oh my God, cutting it up into small little pieces.
That's fun. I mean, you do that, but no, no, no. If you're gonna bring a chile, you eat it así de mordida, like biting, and it was freaking good.
And the owners of the restaurant, they would be amused, and I told them, look, your food's absolutely amazing.
Don't get me wrong.
It was super, super good, but I still need some spice, you know?
I'm a Mexican. For Gustavo, what's happened to Mexican food over and over again is on the whole a good thing, because even imperfect Mexican food can bring people together.
I can tell you how loathe Mexicans have always been and how loathe Mexican food was.
But now you have kids growing up, your kids growing up with good hot sauces, you know, people in Southern California, in the American Southwest, in Colorado, white kids growing up with Mexican food as part of their mother's milk, so to speak, and growing up with Mexicans.
It does make relationships better between Mexicans and Americans.
So I do remain optimistic that Americans will all eventually become Mexicans.
If you go to a supermarket basically anywhere in America at this point, there is an aisle where there will be salsa.
Lots and lots and lots of salsa.
A bounty of options.
And many of these options are only possible because of the existence of a mild jalapeno. But the rub is that this same jalapeno is in another part of the grocery store, the produce aisle, keeping us from having options in our cooking.
Brian Reinhart again.
I think the issue is not so much that the tam pepper exists.
I think that the failing came at the marketplace when they took over and we didn't really understand what was happening.
We didn't understand that a certain amount of choice was going away or that even that there is another kind of jalapeno available at this point.
That was certainly not their intention.
They didn't mean to dominate the market in that way.
They didn't intend for us all to forget that another kind of pepper existed.
For me, I mean, I'm lucky.
I can always just go out to our own fields and harvest jalapenos if I wish to get the heat level I want.
Dr. Stephanie Walker, the pepper expert again.
But yeah, if you're just at the mercy of grocery stores or even farmer's markets, it's going to be harder to get exactly what you may want.
If you go to a grocery store and you are in the aisle, can you just eyeball them and be like, I know.
No, no. No, you can't.
So there's no hope for the rest of us either.
No, you can't. Stephanie hopes we're on the cusp of an heirloom pepper movement, like what's happened with tomatoes.
The grocery store just used to sell generic red softballs, but now you can get colorful, wrinkly, tasty heirloom tomatoes in every shape and size in markets and restaurants and even plant them in your own garden.
If you want a good hot jalapeno, buy some of these heirloom varieties, you know, plant your own.
If you're a chef and want a predictable heat, a predictable flavor in your peppers, for goodness sakes, don't just say, I want, you know, mild peppers, I want hot peppers.
You know, get to know these varieties because these are, as with wine grapes, as with heirloom apples, They're very unique, and we need to celebrate this amazing germplasm and hope that we keep it available.
In the meantime, you can just do what Dr. Ben Villalon, a .k .a.
Dr. Pepper, the one who created the first mild jalapeno does, and make a different choice at the market.
I go for the Serrano at the supermarket because they're hot.
And if the day ever comes when your Serrano peppers start to taste different, Well, maybe it's not just you.
Our thanks to Willa Paskin and the whole Decoder Ring crew.
If you're looking for more food mysteries from Decoder Ring, check out their episode on the rise of the blue raspberry.
They also did a great episode on how Tupperware became a household name.
Make sure you subscribe to Decoder Ring wherever you get your podcasts.
Next week on the show, I talk with comedian Sebastian Maniscalco.
he tells me about going from torching hams to earn a little extra cash to selling out madison square garden many times over plus he shares his rules for being a good dinner party guest that's next week well i wait for that one check out last week's show our salad spinner with reporter dina shanker and comedian mamrie hart we get into the new rules on tipping the rise of tiny cocktails and why people are now ripping and dipping their bagels that one's up now check it out this episode was produced by evan chung dakota ring supervising producer dakota ring is produced Produced by Willa Paskin, Katie
Shepard, and Max Friedman.
Merit Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app 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 app by going to SiriusXM .com slash Sporkful.
The Sporkful is produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O 'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O 'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Stephanie in Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
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