Alton Brown Reflects on Food, Mortality, and His Last Meal

Hello, I'm Alton Brown and apparently this is my last meal. Every person has exactly two things in common. We all got to eat and we're all going to die. Today's guest is a New York Times bestselling author, recipe developer, and legendary food television host whose show Good Eats taught a generation of home cooks the science behind their culinary endeavors. You can catch his Aonomous Cooking Show on YouTube and he wrote one of the hardest rap diss tracks of the 21st century. Alton Brown, welcome to the show. Wow, you knew about that track. That's that's amazing. When you said, "Now I own 20 restaurants and they are not unique, but it's hard to mine for diamonds when you open three a week."

Alton, who were you talking about? Freaking I love that song. Um, off of, you know, I don't think I was talking about any person in particular. I was talking about a genre of chef who open really great restaurants and then get really greedy, get bought in by groups and then have to spread like a virus and uh and inevitably uh something goes wrong and sometimes they end up on uh cruise ships and sometimes in airports. I have several photos standing in front of Bobby Fle on the side of his restaurant at the airport. I don't have pictures of he and I together, but if I stand just right, it's so realistic that I can pass that off as an actual photo

of me with Bobby Fle and have done so. They say you can even smell the ancho chili on his cutout at the restaurant. I'm surprised there's not an ancho chili cologne. I think you just made the next million-dollar product. I think No, not for me. Only it would only sell if it was Bobby Fle. Yours, I think, would just be scotch. Uh which No, no, I don't. You know what? I think mine would be uh something Mine might have to be stinkier. There's got to be something slightly rotten. Sorry, I'm just going to bring up I have a sidebar.

So, I have like this experiment drawer at home. It's like I let things just go and I keep like trying. It's like how long can I keep cooking this bacon and eating it and like enjoying it. And I've noticed that there's like a sweet spot of like especially if it's like artisal bacon, right? Where it'll look like oh that shit's gone bad, man. And then like 3 days later it gets good again. What do you think you're tapping into? I think that in the age before refrigeration when a lot of people died of food poisoning, so many of them. But, you know, like in England and my blood is almost completely um English. Um you know, you didn't eat

beef until you hung it and there were maggots on the outside of it. I mean, that was considered well, it's ready now, right? Sure. Yeah. And I think that we have robbed oursel from a whole bunch of flavors and aromomas by simply insisting everything be in a certain amount of what we like to call freshness. We dry age meat, but let me tell you, I've done some things with meat that I'm not proud of and didn't get sick and didn't die. Here are the potential flavors of a food through its life, right? And we like go for like this much of it, right? We say that it's because of

safety or we say that it's because it's a very narrow band, you know, and when you start to open it up and control aging, all kinds of foods get really interesting. I'd ask if you thought about your last meal before, but I know that a ton of people have come up to you in fan meet and greets and asked you about it before and you used to tell them it'd be duck fee because it takes 3 days. Haha. But now we're sort of asking you to really engage with it on I think a more visceral level. Do you think you're prepared for it? I wrote an essay um in my last book um that was about the five questions that I get constantly asked and I and one of them was what's your last meal and I answered it from a strictly

emotional level and it was all about um essentially being with my wife and I realized well if anybody's going to poison me it would be no I'm kidding generally the spouse but I realize generally I think that my list is far more based on um literary references that mean a lot to me or because I noticed after I kind of threw off the list and I started really looking at I'm like where did that come from? Cuz I didn't I'll be really honest. I kind of rush and roulette it. I didn't think about it much. I just did it. Sure. A lot of them have very specific references in um in either literature or movies or films and things. So we can go over those as we eat.

I It's almost like a broshock test, though. I love the fact that you sort of just rapid fired it and the ink blot spilled with like my parents fighting. I did and I shared it with my wife and she's like, "Who are you?" You know, I don't know that person at all. And I'm like, "Well, that's weird." Do you consider yourself like a bit of a proan person? Because I think when you're asked about your last meal, right, when you were writing your book, that was a very personal book and I imagine you were in a very specific

headsp space when you were writing very sentimental. That book ended up having a lot of emotional purge stuff in it. Um, and I think that led me to that. If I had been asked the question about a last meal separate from that book, yes, it wouldn't it wouldn't have been the right. It wouldn't have been the same answer. Well, I cannot wait to eat and mostly drink. You're eating with me. I'm eating it with you and I'm drinking it with you. Okay. And I'm going shot forshot, bar for bar. I think it's it's a very easygoing menu from a liquor standpoint. I mean, it's mostly wine.

We'll sip. We're not shooting. Blind space. There's no there no tequila shots. Of course. Get some as you'd like. You know, let's see where we go. You ready? Out. And for the first course of your final meal on Earth, we have the London Dry Gin Martini. We have the Marshallberg Farms Royal Oetric Caviar with some potato chips and some creme fresh. If you need backup caviar, we do have some Kuga right here just in case. We made the martini with beef eater gin and then we actually got a dry and a sweet Italian vermouth. And I know you're fond of caper berries as a garnish and so that is what we've chosen to use. Do we drink now or uh

Oh, we drink that. Well, we have the uh Shopan potato vodka. I've never chased a martini with vodka. I think it's probably better to chase the vodka. I've never had these things offered to me at the same time. Isn't it exciting though? It's very exciting to me. Is it overwhelming to you or this is Do you ever see the movie uh Moscow on the Hudson with Robin Williams who plays a Russian band member who defects to America when the band is touring and he goes into a grocery store in New York and sees that there's five different kinds of coffee and then passes out. So seeing all of these things together in one place is disorienting. I found that a great way to orient yourself uh is to

drink a shot of vodka. That tends to be how I orient myself in the world. This is a different I think chapan is a wonderful. It is potato based instead of grainbased which I People will tell me well that doesn't make any difference. I think it and since it's my last meal I get to say not going to shoot it. We're not shooting it. We're being very classy today. So this is from a sustainable caviar farm in North Carolina. Right. On the outer banks of North Carolina. Yeah. Do you put it on the chip? Do you go uh creme fresh or do you just shoot? Well, you know what? Ordinarily on the ship.

Well, it's my last. It's my last meal. You could have freaking leprosy and it wouldn't matter. And maybe I do. Who's to say? I've been peeling a lot more than I normally do. Why caviar? There are plenty of luxury items out there. Uh, and we do have more coming up on this, but do you think caviar is actually worth the price? Bad caviar isn't worth Mhm. Great caviar is worth whatever I have. I've only had full-on beluga a few times in my life. And it to me is when those little globes burst up against the roof of your mouth.

Can we say? You can say. Okay. Mhm. It's It's like I don't know how I would use that word. Can we talk about the word? I feel like I don't get to talk about the word a lot, but I like that the term was like very much a Victorian way to be polite around the idea of sexual climax. And it was a very like uh shrouded in propriety way to reach potential. You know what I mean? Gracious madam, I have arrived. Thank you. It was a little bumpy there on the approach, but we arrived just fine. I want to read you something because as I was thinking about why I actually did some of these things. Now, it is my

favorite food on earth before I had ever tasted caviar. Our English teacher made us read Brid's Head Revisited, which is really not something typically teenage boys go out of their way to read. Sure. There's this line, I wrote this down because it really got to me. Uh this character named Rex. Rex uh finally pulling the waiter aside and asking for more caviar, making a bowl with his giant hands, the best caviar he'd ever eaten, and then by God, he wanted his fill. And that really got to me like, what food could be so good that you were like, by God, I will have my fill. Cuz the whole thing is you can never have enough. You can never have enough uh

caviar um ever in any way. Yeah, but obviously that caveat is meant as like a metaphor for somebody who's trying to fill a hole within themselves that can obviously not be filled by even the most luxurious of the foods. And then no coward gets it right, who I studied in college. Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar. Never vulgar, never plentiful, always precious. So the fact that you can never have enough caviar is the whole point. Sure. And then there's the point that it comes from a dinosaur because most people agree that the sturgeon when you talk to oceanographers and paleontologist like this is a dinosaur. This is older than sharks. It has been alive unchanged for eons and

still mercs around in the depths. Have you ever like seen one? They're monsters. Yeah. You know, they're they're 12, 13, 14t long. And so there's something about being connected so eerily to a dinosaur like that. I find interesting going back to the term vulgar in that caviar should never be vulgar much like whit I think they're talking a lot about the context in which you eat foods right to eat it out of your hands is vulgar to eat that with the mother of pearl spoon we're adding all of these things to increase its sort of sacrality in a way and I think the martini is something that has this very sacred incantation oh yes to it you know what I mean and I know the martini had a very sacred place in

your life when you were a kid watching your dad make martinis he taught me how to make martinis by the time I was five there's a section of my new live show and I'm not just shilling the live show and even eating the val tickets on sale now that comes out of the fact that I realized that my entire culinary thing came out of my father teaching me how to make martinis. Um and then also as he started to make different drinks for me that did not have alcohol in them. All the crazy flavors he put together changed and opened up my brain and my pallet. He used to give you tastes of the martinis he was making it though.

Yes, he did. And he would say that one day you'll like this. And he said when? He said when you're a grown-up. when you're a grown-up, was there a point where you felt like you were finally a grown-up? The first thing I did when I turned uh drinking age in the state of Georgia, which had gone to 19 by the time uh well, I was 18, then I went to 19 and I kind of chased it. Then I went to 21. I got my only suit on and I went down um we have this very tall hotel in Georgia um in Atlanta, the Petri Plaza Hotel. Used to be the tallest hotel in the world and has a spinning restaurant on top which I thought was the pinnacle of class. And um I went for the express

purpose of getting a martini because I figured I'm grown up now. Yeah. And it was freaking disgusting. I hated it. And I left so disappointed. And I realized, well, I guess I'm not a grown-up. And I hated martinis till sometime around the year 2001 or 2002. Um I was in New York. I was working on I was on Food Network because I was there. I had a meeting with, I don't know, somebody at Food Network and it was very hot. I went into this bar because I felt the air conditioning coming out. It was like somewhere in Midtown. I'm wearing a suit and I'm sweating and I just walk into this place and I sit down and the bartender looked at me literally. Young fella, younger than me. He walked he looked at

me and he said, "You need a martini." And I went, "I do I?" And he's like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Okay." and he made me the martini right there and he put it in front of me and it was delicious. Oh my god, it was delicious. I stayed and had like three more. I don't even know how I got back to my hotel. But suddenly, and then of course I realized later that, you know, my dad had said, you know, when you're a grown-up, oh my god, but I'm not a grown-up now. I've made grown-up choices and decisions and mistakes, but I don't think of myself as a grown-up. Obviously, the martini didn't change. Surely it could have been made better, but I don't think it changed.

No, that wasn't it. It was my taste. It's my taste. Of course. Yeah. Well, do you think your taste change? Like I tend to be somebody who um with all due respect to all the food science that you taught me when I was watching your show growing up, I tend to see the poetry and things versus the science. Right. And you're right to do so. You are right Interesting. Despite the fact that one, we uh cook the French fries um to try and increase the uh starch retrogradation uh of it all by using your method of this. This is um this is my recipe from uh Everyday Cook. Yes. Yes, it is. Hell yeah, brother.

Did your taste change or did you enter a new era of your life where you finally felt like you were able to be your own person? These are little light out on the salt, but it's California. I understand. So, you know how bad I wanted to put a cigar at the end of this meal? I don't know if we have a cigar. We can probably go to Camel Crush somewhere. Listen, I've always said if I make it to 80 years old, I'm going to do a pack of camels a day and learn how to do heroin.

I mean like at that point I'm doing everything flying planes blindfolded I'm doing um so your question do you do you like anything that you would have either as a child or our tastes do change right cuz you're right we were born to taste things to keep us from eating poison yes but also I was somebody who was drinking black coffee by the time that I was 8 years old because I knew that I would have to grow very fast and I thought that was my gateway to doing so I've had to retach myself to find pleasure in certain things like a sweeter coffee because now I associate with infantilism in certain ways. So you used black coffee as armor 100%. Um but I very much spent a lot of time alone, spent a lot of time reading, spent a lot of time asking myself

questions. I get the sense that you were somewhat similar spending a lot of time alone. The fact that you have so many literary references seems to indicate that you were bouncing a lot of ideas off your own head and off the page. Everything um with me um came from my father dying sudden very suddenly at a at an early age. I was 10. You're 10? Wow. I was it was right um on the last day of sixth grade. Mine not his. he had graduated um and he died under very mysterious circumstances which I was left to grapple with um and never got answers uh for until fairly recently which has really me up good. Um it doesn't matter back when my father died it was before the day of or we're going

to get you therapy whatever it was like your dad's dad go play in the yard. Um, and so I discovered the TV show MASH, which ran through my entire teenage years. And the whole reason that I glombmed onto MASH, is because after a day of trauma, Hawkeye and his buddies would go back to their tent named the swamp and drink martinis as a defiant act against the lack of sophistication and reason and civility and humanity. And so I glombmed onto this as a symbol because of that. And because I was so desperate to keep my father alive and on stoal matters, Bond villains. I always wanted to be the villain, not Bond. But you had an interesting mix of role models to sort of fill that gap. Alton, do you know who I had?

Tell me. I want to hear this. I was a Latchki kid. My dad didn't pass till I was 19, but I didn't see my mom after I was 14. And schizophrenia really started to set when she was 10, but I was alone when she was 10 years old. No, sorry. When I was 10 years old. Yeah, I was going to say and that was normal. And she went deep. No, but I was uh at home uh and just watching network for 6, seven hours a day waiting for my dad to come back from his, you know, second or third job. And I had people like Rachel Ray and you and Clay being those um you know, you were the uh surrogate father. Uh, you're papa. Oh my god.

Are you going to take care of me when I'm old because my daughter's sure as hell not going to do that? Uh, we can find you a nice home. Uh, one of the real good ones. It's like a college. But actually, this isn't a laughing matter. I'm trying to trivialize it and haha it off so they don't have to delve in to the fact that you found um solace, connectivity, and home. 100%. Yeah. I internalized not the love of food, but I think the reciprocal of that as in I viewed food as something that could be neglected because I didn't grow up with anybody cooking for me. It was a really like forge for yourself if

you could find a dollar, go to the McDonald's and get, you know, a double cheeseburger. So for me, I saw other people with loving parents cooking for them and I was like, "Oh, that's something that I want at least if I'm watching." So it was aspirational from an emotional. It was emotionally. Absolutely. Yeah. Uh, but I snuck away and I was so afraid of burning the house down that I kept it on the lowest flame possible. It probably took me 20 minutes to cook this margarine logged grilled cheese. But I remember I want to know why. First off, why grilled cheese? One, it was probably all we had in the house, but two, it's I mean, grilled cheese is uh probably something that I saw another mom cook for their kid. It

was one of those it's one of those comfort foods. You know, I took grilled cheese sandwich off of my last meal list. No way. I thought that you would think it was too kitschy. You thought that I would think that thought I personally royal eye No. You interesting. No. I thought that you would think that it was too kitschy. Wait, so some amount of this last meal is meant to impress me in a way.

No, but it's meant to not embarrass me. What's the difference therein? And what would be the greatest embarrassment for you? Was it would it to be shown as plebeian? Look, when people live to be my age, we're supposed to be like guideposts of like sophistication. But the truth is, here's the reason is because grilled cheese sandwich hits too close to things I don't want to talk about. Uh that is a very and I only I went back and I looked at my original list which was extremely child-oriented. It was like develed ham and blah and I like oh my god what you want to drink Hawaiian why do you want Hawaiian punch?

You know I my first list was very nonaspirational. It is in fact the only food that I can think of and you may call me out on this. I may be wrong that absolutely never disappoints. It's up there. Melted cheese pulled out between the bread is food. Yeah, it is food. I didn't I did not want to deal with the vulnerability of talking about that food. For the second course, your final meal on earth, we have the Hokkaido uni gungaki. And then we have three cushi oysters. We have the junai sake. We also please no for me. Skirt yourself. I'll take it. We have the entire tray of Hokkaido uni for you to do what you would like. We have the forchome and the

vayon shabli. Then of course we have the junai sake. We could not um get the exact one that you wanted but with threeear age. Junai, you're free to leave if you'd like. I will eat the oysters if you go. This is extraordinary. What do you want to do first? I think I'd like to pour you some sake. I think that's uh that's probably the key. Have you spent time in Japan? I never have. I've never been, but I What the Oh, that you should pour the saki till it overflows in the table. And you have to pour it for whoever else is drinking it before yourself. You have got to go. You've got to go.

Pops. When are you taking me? Oh, you know what? You want to work this out? We'll work this out. I will take you to Japan and we'll do some shows there. Wonderful. Because the thing about Japanese culture and food is like whatever level it is, they strive for absolute perfection. I'm sorry, I can't take my eyes. So, you know, you take the spiniest mother freicker that ever lived, the sea urchin, and you go into it and you cut into it and you just take its gonads out. My daughter is an attorney, but um she was born the year that Good Eats came out, and she's often said she's one of two children. The first place that my

daughter ever went in her little bassinet was a sushi restaurant. The interesting thing about being a male and having a child is we don't connect with them immediately. We didn't carry them. Yeah. Right. So, we look for these signs of connectivity which typically have to do with consciousness. Right. And I was terrified because I wasn't getting them from my daughter. And we go to this sushi restaurant and we put her bassinet on the floor and I remember my daughter going like sniffing. Yeah. Alien from Alien. Yeah. Kind of like that. Um the first bite of solid food that my daughter had was sushi. That's crazy. And her whole life she was like she became a sushi fanatic.

So um when my daughter graduated from high school, I told her, "Zoe, I'm going to take you to Japan and for 10 days you can eat all the sushi you can hold. All of it. Everything you want." and she ate by herself $8,000 of sushi. So I'm like, I've gotten a guide that we're going to take us on this private uh tour through at 4 in the morning cuz that's when you got to go, right? We do all this stuff and then the guide says, "All right, I'm going to take you to the uni room. Be next to me. You're you're me and I'm I'm my daughter and I'm so proud of you for No, no, no, no.

Sorry. Um, so we walk into the door, right? And there are just skyscrapers of Hakkaido sushi and my daughter goes and we just stand there for a while and she's like, "Take me out of here. She can't be in there with all that all that." And so we leave and it was like this beautiful thing of like right and she's like dad take me someplace so I can the vulgar handful of caviar and in the old market it's completely ringed by sushi restaurants that only serve from like 5 to 7 in the morning. That's what they do because they're serving the workers. And u my daughter went and consumed approximately 17.4 lbs of it and that was the end of it. And now what's funny?

Oh that's good. Why you don't drink more? What I love about sake particularly, it's uh um almost all European wine in New World, it's like kind of framed by acid in a way that sake isn't. You know what I mean? You need to be quiet for a minute. Go ahead. Sh. It's I mean it's basically like and you know why that's important because it tastes like life. We have a rack of There's a little bit of toazu brushed on top. So that's a little bit of a bonito flake with a rice bin just to get some extra um umami a little bit of acid. Point sushi rice. Oh, and we got to get to the oysters. So these are cushi oysters and then on the left we have the vion shabli and then we have the uh forchome shabli.

I don't like wine snob terms. There's so much that goes on in the aroma and aroma goes directly to lyic system you know and so to me wine is mostly important because of its ability to connect to our emotions. You first. I take fundamental issue with that claim but I'll glad. All right. Go ahead. Um, what percentage of the world had grapes throughout a majority of humans? Yes, it is specific to each person. 100%. So, for me, I there's a specific type of restaurant that, God bless these people. I love them. But they have only become very popular because they serve a specific type of international

cuisine with European grapes. And I you are totally correct. Take issue with that. Look, I can talk culturally, puritanically about a very few foods. Yeah, most of them served by Tasty Freeze. Um, I am Appalachin trailer trash from a DNA level. My code of arms has a propane tank and crossed banjos. I grew up thinking wine is sophisticated. Mhm. Of course it is. So, automatically when I go out into the world, Yeah. I'm going to look to complete that equation. I'm going to look to affirm that.

Mhm. And for my personal taste buds, it turns out to be true 80% of the time. But part of that is because I'm looking for personal affirmation. Yeah. I'm an affluent, educated white person. Of course. My smell the chalk. Is that real? Is it honest? I don't freaking know yet. It's on your last I know this. I know that. I know this. I know that every culture that I have visited, there's been something to drink that made the food add a dimension. 100%. My personal thing with wine, I'm going to be honest with you, please.

I always wanted to be a yepy. I wanted to be a yuppy because when I was growing up, yepies were like we are the class that is beyond question, I think. So I automatically when I was old enough I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna start learning this." You know, I'm gonna smell this. This is my way into food. I wouldn't say your way into food. I would say your way into yourself. Feeling like you belong somewhere. It's funny that you reference yourself in the Food Network ecosystem as like a pool boy that they let in to service the club. Totally true. As opposed to your grandfather who wasn't He didn't drive BMWs. He was a

BMW mechanic. Totally true. That is totally true. In if the Food Network World were the movie Catty Shack, I would be Bill Murray. But wine, we all need a switchboard that allows us to identify across certain things. And mine started when I was way too young to drink wine. When did you first start writing in this notebook to I fill one of these a week. Oh my god. I have approximately 600 of these. Um because um to me um I have this thing that you haven't actually experienced something until you have reflected upon it.

Yeah. And so this particular thing comes from Hemingway. This and this comes from something I read long before I'd had this or this which is Hemingway in his book Movable Feast. As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste, the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell, and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. Almost everything in this meal I read before I tasted. What do you think that says about you? That's very interesting.

I've never heard anything like that before. I don't know. Um I can proper a hypothesis. Well, please do. To me, it says that you spend so much time living in your own head in the worlds that other people have created as opposed to the one that you physically inhabit. Oh, absolutely. Oh, duh. Well, no, not duh. Sorry. I don't mean to like duh you, but I agree. Yeah, I agree. Which technically means that my tastes are all performative. Yeah. Not technically, I'd say literally. Um but in this way that I think we all are literarily that's what he meant to say.

Um which means that I'm trying to align myself with the literature in which I find meaning. It feels tragic or comic which are so closely they're really the same. But also by the way Shaby tastes really good with oysters. It really does though. Do we need to know why? I'd say no. We don't. See we don't need to know why. You ready to move on to course number three? Yes I am. Let's do it. And for the third course of your final meal on earth, we have you notice how I'm stretching this meal out.

We have lamb sensers liver. On the outside is the amaroni. On the inside is the jabre shamber. So I have not had a bite of lamb in 25 years. Huh. I think lamb to be the best meat. I agree entirely, especially a chop like this. In 1997, I worked a lamb slaughter. I was in meat fabrication class and was given the opportunity to go work a lamb spring lamb slaughter. And I was like, if I don't do this, I'm going to be a hypocrite. Yeah. And so I did. I went and I spent three days killing the little lambsies. And I have

not actually put a bite of lamb into my mouth since that time. To me, eating this in part of a final meal is to admit the sacrificial role of all meat. It's a sacrifice. What does that mean in the long run? I don't know. We seared it, herb crusted it with a little bit of breadcrumb as well whole, and then carved it off the bone. Let it rest. Served it with a demi and a little bit of Bloomsdale spinach. Not the baby spinach. Adult spinach. Baby sheep. Adult spinach. The spinach. I'm not getting a goddamn spinach. I'm sitting here in front of three bones worth of lamb. Would you eat octopus? I know you made an octopus friend.

No. At the Aquarium of the Pacific in Monterey who reached in, took the pen. Can I get him out of your pocket? I will not eat octopus. But surely these are all the paradoxes that we live in. Like you could have No, because I never had a conversation with a lamb. I watched it put a tentacle up. It went around my wrist like this and it held for a few seconds. It let go and then it immediately with another arm reached up for the pin in my pocket which had been established from a previous visit. Iting remembered I was so messed up from that I like I said in my book I literally like excuse me everybody I need to go to the bathroom. went to the bathroom and cried like an actual baby for 20 minutes because that freaking animal remembered me. Yeah.

And it changed everything for me. Why do you have to bring up octopus and lamb at the same damn time? I think because you're reckoning with the morality of your decision to I think even we decide what we're willing to lust for. I agree entirely. I think that is um part of being human. I'm talking about the idea of decency. Also, this jav shimmer tent is rad, man. This rules. I like saying, you know what this wine tastes like? This wine tastes like wine, man. Tastes like Hey, tastes like wine. Really? Tastes like wine. And I don't need to go any further than that. I'm like, okay, premier crew, ground crew.

I've never had this wine before. I just I was curious whether you could get it or not. We got a good wine guy in the valley, dude. I know. You probably do. And I'm like, this is the first time I've actually had this. asked for it because I wanted it. Talking about the science and the poetry of this all food obviously the point is to nourish both emotionally and physically. The thing that you can't get through a screen is nourishment in that sense. Do you think that food media as a whole has completely divorced food from its primordial purpose?

Yes. Do you feel not only its primordial purpose, it's secondary and tertiary purposes? We have turned food into pornography. We really have. We basically just look and jerk. It's a bummer, dude. And we're doing it right now. We're creating the point. No, I know we're not because we're telling you because we're telling the truth through our experience. But the truth is that people look at food more than they experience food. Have you lately tried to ask someone to describe

what something tastes like to you, you will find no one can do it anymore? It's one of the things that when people say to me, "How do I get uh my kids to eat food?" M I'm like, "Okay, get them to explain to you what things taste like and get, you know, exchange that." One of the things my dad did with me when I was young was like anytime he put something in front of me, he would like, "Tell me what it tastes like." He would force me to articulate. We don't do that anymore because we have Instagram. We go and we post the picture. And so what we've learned is that connectivity of what does this taste like? What does this feel like?

What is this like? Let's use words to do this. And we have lost that. We no we have sacrificed that. We didn't lose it like you lost your car keys. We actually sacrificed it because images are everything now. I mean sacrifice implies that uh as an epiric victory something died for another thing to live. Do you think I mean like the fact that I was watching Good Eats and I was genuinely creating not only meaning for myself but I mean that this wouldn't exist without Good Eats and so many you know other of your contemporaries. Do you think that any of the things that have lived on are worth the things that we've lost?

Let me back up and say make a confession please. Other people that were making shows then knew what they were talking about. I was making shows as I was discovering what I was talking about. People have said to me, "Thank you so much for making Good Eats. It taught me how to cook." And I'm like, "Guess what? Good Eats taught me how to cook. I was learning how to cook while I was making the show. We went together. I worked in restaurants. I'm glad for working in restaurants. You know why? Because I was glad for the people I was working next to. I was glad for the experience of

being on the line because never in my life had I established trust and working on the line is about trust in a lot of ways. It's about are you do you have my back? Can I borrow your mis can I do this for you? Can blah. It's about that camaraderie. I think it's the trust that's forged in fire that can only be forged in that particular kind of fire as well. Well, we all like to talk about forged in fire like we're in Vietnam. We're not going to die. Sure. But I do think that there is something to be said for the camaraderie of the kitchen. It's forged in a hotter fire than being at a desk job doing data entry. I remember having this conversation several times with Bourdain. I'm like, where would you be if this whole

renegade kitchen thing hadn't have existed? That'd be nothing. Because without this whole there's there's the banking world and there's the blah world and there's the kitchen world, right? And he helped to, you know, define that. And I remember saying like, I hated it. I hated that life. I hated that world because it was it underpaid. It didn't take care of me. It sucked everything out of me. And he was like, yeah, but we belonged. We have a census taker's liver. Okay. Where did the liver actually come from? So, we got a calves liver. We believe this is the closest thing to an actual human liver. So, we've taken a cal's liver and we've uh seared it very

quickly. Try to leave a little bit of medium trace on a little bit of onions and fava beans. And this is a reference to the silence of the lambs as uh portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the movie, but another literary reference. There's something about liver. It tastes it hits close to home. I mean, it's literally visceral. I have never eaten a piece of liver that didn't say to me, "You have one of these." So yes, of course I referenced Hannibal Lecter, but the reason that I bring it up is because the difference between the book and the movie. Well, the book said Amaron, which is correct, and the movie that said Keiante, which is not correct, but familiar.

I've never had an Amiron. Oh, we have another dish. I'm wondering if you can place. This dish means a lot both you and I. Why do you? Oh, this is well done. Look at the viscosity. My best friend in the entire world of 20 plus years is a Gujarati Indian and his mother makes gadi and she makes it in gallon batches and would keep it in the fridge and he and I would just after basketball practice come home and microwave it out of the country croc margarine container and it opened up the doors of perception for me for a new world of food that exists.

Now why does kadi mean a lot to you? this idea that there was this soup, this yogurt-based soup that could so completely enclose an entire range of herbal majesty um was an absolute gamecher for me. So the Kotti um in this little you know little motel in South Carolina um was transformative for me because I had never been invited into a meal like that before. Do you know we're working on this TV show and we're all on motorcycles and we ride in to this little town of South Carolina. We're just looking for a place to stay, right? And I walk in and we're talking, me and the producer are talking to this guy, a really beautiful tall man with a mustache, Indian man. And we smell these aromomas. And I'm like, what? You know what's

what's going on here? And he literally looks at me and says, "Oh, my wife is making cotti. Please come join us." And it's not because the soup was so amazing, which it was. Yeah. It was the act of hospitality. They didn't know who I was. They weren't like, "Oh, Alton Brown, Food Network guy. Come in." No, they were just like, "Please join us for our dinner." And it was the first time in my life that I realized that what really makes food matter is sharing. Yeah. It doesn't matter what it is. If you have it and you offer it to me, then my job as a human is to say thank you and to take Alton, for the final course of your final meal on this mortal plane, we have

the pint of half and half, a perfect peach from the farmers market. A badass blue cheese. You can have all the Girl Scout cookies you want. So, this is a Rogue River blue cheese from Oregon, which I recognize from the leaves on the outer side. Yeah, the fig leaves that are soaked in perilicure. I think this is maybe my favorite cheese in the entire world. This is actually K's idea though to source this. So, this is a wonderful cheese. And then it was also his decision to poach a pear in pork because we thought that would actually set nicely against the lightness of the sotan to pair with the blue. Wow. Well, before I open the tube of Girl Scout cookies, which is the last barra, the peach peaches were my father's favorite fruit.

And the only time that I remember seeing a human adult like move into a transcendent state over food, which had a huge effect on me, um was watching my dad eat a Georgia peach. Now, I know these aren't from Georgia cuz I can tell by the variety. That's okay. Um there is some smell it first. Don't just eat it. This is the back of my wife's neck. When you love something in a kind of secret way, you find things that other people don't know. And I think that's the wonderful thing about food is it allows a uh um integration, a connectivity with the planet in a way that is singularly yours. You probably have these and I hope you do. and to amplify it. This particular surn I find the wonderful thing about this wine is that it turns peach up to 11 12 13.

It stretches it out. I taste angel and I taste devil. I smell the peach and I smell the wine and it almost feels like the same chemical compounds, but it's like this is this beautiful lifeaffffirming something that grows out of the ground to to nourish us. And then wine by definition, alcohol, a poison. And it's something that shuts off a part of your brain that gets you to make the rational choices. And I would argue with all due respect to my sober friends, it turns on the part of your brain that makes the human choices that makes the choices to smell the nape of your wife's neck and associate it with the bacterial funk of a ripe stone fruit where the ethyl esters are literally causing decomposition.

You said ethyl esters. They're so good. We're going to be friends. I think that what you're saying is the best of us rubs right up against the worst of us. Absolutely. That is what it is to be human. But this peach to me would be all like goodness. Mhm. If it wasn't for this wine, which isn't. Yeah. And that dichotomy, that juxaposition is really where we find the wrestling of what we are. And I dig that because we are effed up in so many ways. It's like would you know who you are without the disaster of it?

No. In a way that I um I almost have to stop myself from being incredibly grateful for the disasters. At least people have told me that I shouldn't be grateful for the disasters. Well, do you feel that's true? What do you feel? No. What I actually feel um I hear a lot of people saying things like you are who you are and you are successful um not because of the disasters but in spite of them and I simply don't believe in it. Nope. You are successful because of them. I agree with that. There is no in spite. I don't believe in spite of. Yeah. I believe in because of same and we can overcome it. We can I don't think I need to overcome it. I simply

need to be in it and be truthful to it and then try to move to a slightly different level. We are going to be friends. I got to go. We are. We're going to Japan next. I mean, if blue cheese isn't isn't a metaphor, man. It's funny when you taste something that's rotten against something that isn't. We couldn't get the Bowmore 21. We got the Bmore 18. You got the 18. I can't even get the 18. I've so enjoyed our time together.

This has been a dream. Really scotch is my particular ODV. Um, oh god, you can smell the casks. You can smell the bourbon. You can smell the cherry. That's the last thing I taste on this earth. Mhm. Okay, I'm setting that down so that I can eat my entire I remember being given my first um Girl Scout cookie by my mom and thinking this is everything that I want for the rest of my life. It was like literally it's like communion really. Um to this day, even though the recipe has changed many times. Mhm. This is my only connection left to childhood. Everything else is gone. Everything else has been changed, mutated. This is the only flavor that I can draw a direct

line back all the way to being like five. Yeah. I mean, has it changed a little bit, but not by much. Does that make you feel comforted? Does that make you feel nostalgic? Does that fill you with existential dread? Existential dread. Where you at with God these days? I'm like Isaac Newton. I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him. You know, I was like baptized as an adult full form, deep immersion, water submersion in front of a thousand people. I believe absolutely in God. I don't know how we find it. Look, there are people that believe that a trip is about the destination and there are people that believe that the trip is about striving for the trip. I would

like to think that God is about the striving of the trail, the journey. I may be wrong. I'm probably wrong. And I'm scared enough of going to hell to where I'm willing to say that. No, I totally am. Cuz I was capital Hell. They could Yes. capital Hell because I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition. So, it's like heaven doesn't sound very good, but hell sounds reallying awful. Truly the worst of both worlds that you the worst of both. It's like heaven I'm like what I'm going to sing for a million years. I don't want to like be in a choir for eternity singing to but hell bad.

Yeah, bad. I'd rather just die. Sure. Feeling that maybe I'd done in something worthwhile. Adam, what do you think happens when you die? Keanu Reeves said maybe people miss you. Yeah, I think that's about it. I think you're going to have a hell of a lot of people that miss you. I think some Girl Scouts are going to miss me because sales are going to go down when I die here. We have to chug our half and half. You're chugging it. Well, look. Two cookies. Okay. Jesus. Okay. Alotcha. They say in Italy.

Corona. It means to the boot. I have to make it to the airport. I'm just going to sleep in the office tonight. Al, you ready to move to the lightning round? Lightning round before I pass out. Jesus Christ. Who's the one person dead or alive you'd want to share your actual last meal with? Orson Wells. What song do you want to be played at your funeral? Oddly enough, it's Billy Joel's scenes from Italian restaurant. Who's your dream eulogizer?

Sylvia Pla. What's your biggest fear? Emptiness. What's your greatest regret in life? Being a shitty husband the first two times. Finally out. And are you happy? I am. You seem happy. I think you figured a lot of out in your life, man. That gives me a lot of hope. Really happy. I'm happy you've been here, man. if you want to deliver your last words to that camera right there. I'm actually hoping this is not my last meal because I'm going to the airport to get on an airplane if my last meal.

Well, you know what? If that's happening, if it is my last meal, I'm okay. I have shared honestly with the person who I will now call my friend. I did not lie. I'm good. You are good. I mean that in every sense of the word good. Thank you so much, Hen. Everybody, make sure to check out Alton Brown on YouTube. He's a YouTuber now. I don't know if you've heard. Oh, I know. And make sure you go to alton brown.com. You got a tour coming to town? Alton Brownlive.com. My new live tour, which is called u an evening of Alton Brown, not with Alton Brown. Um is playing in like 5,000 cities.

Hell yeah. Go see it. I saw him live like 15 years ago. It was red. Is that a great finish? We're out, BABY. LET'S GET HIS ASS TO THE AIRPORT. OH, there's a grilled cheese sandwich. Oh, we have a Somebody made a grilled cheese. It's the bonus round. Wait, wait, wait. No, you can't do that. I have to do one side of it. Go for it. Okay. No, you take one. How long? How far can we go? How far? Uh, follow at Mythical Kitchen for more Last Meals moments and be the first to know who our next guest is going to be.