Stephen Satterfield wants his meals to match his ideals (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Before I moved to Los Angeles, I had never eaten Armenian food before. In fact, I would've been hard-pressed to even tell you what an example of Armenian food was. But then I moved here, a city with a large thriving Armenian population, and a friend took me to this restaurant called Zhengyalov Hatz.

It's the name of the restaurant. It's also the name of the only thing they serve at this restaurant. And a zhengyalov hatz is a kind of griddled flatbread that's filled with all sorts of minced greens and herbs. You walk in, and since they only serve one thing, the only question they ask you is how many? I loved it. I loved it instantly as soon as I walked in.

And then I tasted one of these zhengyalov hatz, and it was the subtle, delicious combination of flavors that I had never had before. And look, it's not like I can say that I've been to Armenia now; I haven’t. But I definitely feel a sensory connection to the place and to the culinary tradition that I never did before I ate my first hatz.

To me, that is the power and the magic of food. Today's guest, Stephen Satterfield, is the host of Netflix's High on the Hog. For that show and for his other work as a food writer and documentarian, he has searched out and reported food stories all over the world. And as someone who got his start studying wine, here's one of those moments from his travels that most stuck with him.

[00:01:18] Stephen Satterfield:
I think one of my, sort of the most colorful moments was in the Republic of Georgia. I was there working on this mini-doc called Wild Grapes, where we were looking for the origins of the oldest grapevine in the world that was still producing wine. I met this really great winemaker, Giorgi Natenadze, and he took me to this vine in this village that was hundreds of years old.

It looked like a tree. We got to drink wine from that vine. That was like a moment of real euphoria for me, and I've gotten to do lots of other cool stuff since then. But, you know, as a, as a som once and forever, that was a pretty unbelievable moment.

[00:02:09] Chris Duffy:
Stephen connects that pleasure of drinking and eating with a deep sense of responsibility for showing the full story behind the meals we eat. In today's episode, Stephen shares with us how he uses food and drink as an entry point to understand the stories and systems behind what we put on our plates. That can lead us to a more meaningful approach to the ingredients we use, how we cook, and the way we share our meals and traditions with each other.

But before we get into all that, a quick ad. Don't go anywhere.

[BREAK]

[00:02:39] Chris Duffy:
Today we're talking about food with Stephen Satterfield.

[00:02:43] Stephen Satterfield:
Hello, I am Steven Satterfield. I am the host of Netflix's High on the Hog, and the founder of the food media company Whetstone. I am in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm working on a book. So I'm in this, like, mountain house, not where I would ordinarily be. And, um, I love the songbirds, but I'm just realizing… I hope y'all love it too. Anyways…

[00:03:07] Chris Duffy:
We love it. It's great. We were talking about that. So, what is Whetstone, for people who aren't familiar?

[00:03:13] Stephen Satterfield:
Whetstone is a print magazine and media company dedicated to global food origins and culture.

[00:03:23] Chris Duffy:
Many people have a, a passion for food, but not so many people dig into it as deeply, and even fewer make it their life's work. So how did you realize that this was gonna be what you spent your life doing?

[00:03:36] Stephen Satterfield:
You know, I was around food early in life. My dad is a great cook. My grandmother—my maternal grandmother, my dad's mother-in-law—they used to cook together, which is, um, for whatever people think or sort of giggle about the relationships between in-laws… And in my family's case, it was a kind of sweet thing for us to get to bear witness to. And then when I was a teenager, the Food Network was really had come into prominence.

So in like the late 1990s, early 2000s, I think watching food on television as like a, a matter of culture and art and exploration was really compelling for me. And when I left high school in Atlanta, I decided to just pick a point on a map that was very far away from where I was. I did that. I, I moved to Oregon, to the University of Oregon. I ended up moving to Portland, enrolling in culinary school as a teenager.

I thought I would be the next, like, Emeril Lagasse or Jacques Pépin or something like that. But then I quickly realized cooking for friends and for yourself and for leisure is hardly the same as doing it for a vocation. So then I transitioned into the hospitality program at, at my culinary school. The first class I ever took was a introduction to wine studies class and, um, I fell in love with wine on the spot. I was nineteen. Two years later, I had become a sommelier.

[00:05:19] Chris Duffy:
Do you remember the wine that did it for you? The first wine that you tasted where you're like, “I'm going to become a sommelier”?

[00:05:24] Stephen Satterfield:
Well, I had been curious about wine. So I had a friend, one of my best friends in high school, his dad was a real gourmand, like their family were, like, serious gourmands.

His dad had a wine cellar. And I remember going over to their house for dinner and uh, just being kind of in awe with how long he'd spent in the cellar. Like, I was like, “What the hell is he doing down there and looking for?” And then, you know, he marched back up with his two special Bordeauxs and I, I wanted to understand what he understood.

You know, I wanted to make sense of the pleasure that he was able to get out of the bottles and just what went into the whole realm of discernment, you know, of quality of price. Surely, they cost a lot of money. And so that was planted in my head. And so when I, when I showed up at this wine class kind of accidentally, I was like, “Oh. This is dope. I'm gonna be able to answer that question I had, like, a few years ago in high school.”

But because I was in Oregon—geography is a huge part of wine—I had very close proximity to the Willamette Valley, which is basically, strictly speaking, kind of like Burg-Burgundy for the US. They're both on about the 45th parallel.

You know, they're both kind of damp, and, uh, get lots of rain throughout the year. And, um, I got to see wine not as wine as a luxury item, but I got to see it in the vineyard. I got to see it as an agricultural product, and that made it feel very accessible to me. Um, so yeah, that was, like, the beginning of my journey, and um, that was almost 20 years ago. Yeah, it continues to be my greatest joy in life.

[00:07:26] Chris Duffy:
Is that when you started getting interested in food origins?

[00:07:29] Stephen Satterfield:
Not instantly, but it came through that thinking. So when my, you know, peers were studying, I don't know, whatever people study in college—business, philosophy, psychology, whatever—I was learning viticulture. I was learning enology. I was learning about winemaking grapes. I was learning foremost and primarily about geography.

So much of what you learn as a sommelier can be distilled down to where something came from, the origins of the grape, and that becomes the central story. You know, I started to see some, I thought, not-so-subtle parallels between geography and, and terroir as we call it, and our own human origins and the stories that we tell about ourselves and the assumptions that people make about us when we tell them where we've originated.

I actually ended up being kind of disillusioned with the wine industry. There wasn't a whole lot of rigorous thought around land other than if the vineyards were of distinction. I started a nonprofit organization called the International Society of Africans in Wine trying to just learn the history of wine in Africa, the role of African diasporic people with relationship to wine, because, you know, I wanted to kind of look for my own reflection in this industry that it was hard for me to find.

And where we ended up landing with it was, um, we basically were helping black vintners get their wines exported into the US and then we would create marketing campaigns on their behalf. So, I was kind of radicalized with this worldview of being deeply dedicated to food and wine, but only to the degree that I could use it as a way to talk about things that were more real, more meaningful, more substantive than just, like, what pairs with what or trying to memorize a bunch of vineyards.

[00:09:58] Chris Duffy:
At least for me, when I first think about, like, fine wine and, you know, high-end restaurants, those are not issues that I, I think are kind of like, uh, please forgive the, I don't know another way to say this, so forgive the horrible pun, but like on the plate of what, uh, those kind of institutions deal with. I don't, I don't think about, you know, a restaurant as dealing with like origins and justice and history, and you've really changed my mind about that.

So I, I wonder, was that something that was always on the table for you, or did you o—did you start to figure that out?

[00:10:30] Stephen Satterfield:
Well, thank you for your openness. I grew up around a lot of Black people and not a lot of money, but I was also, you know, around a lot of mixed communities and around a lot of wealthy white people.

I have always had to, whether or not I wanted to be very much aware of my presence as a minority in white spaces or, or even mixed spaces. The main thing that it did was to make me feel a sense of obligation for people like me who would come behind me to feel more ease in those spaces. And that felt very, like, innate to me.

It felt very obvious to me that if I could make things more useful for people coming behind me, like, that's what I should do. You know, I also feel like that's part of the legacy of being born in as a Black person in Atlanta. You know, we have a very proud tradition of making life better, not just for Black people, but in helping reach our democratic ideals and best potential as a nation.

Like, the Voting Rights Act, for instance. Right? That makes us all more free and, and that makes our aspirations to be democratic, like able to be fulfilled, right? And then to your point around fine dining, it's a very astute observation. I had the same epiphany actually, when I had first started this nonprofit, and I realized that I was able to get folks to listen to me talk about topics like apartheid or slavery or you know, disenfranchisement, et cetera, because our point of entry into this portal was about wine.

And so we start off with, “We’re doing a tasting. Oh, this is delicious. Where does it come from? Oh, it comes from South Africa. What parts of South Africa have you been? Do you know the history?” And now in this amount of time, I've gotten them into a space through something pleasurable.

Now, we can talk about things that could otherwise create discomfort and because of the, the whole way in which analyzing wine has been set up to be kind of matter of fact and to come through this kind of prism of assessment of, you know, place and elevation and soil and human inputs and et cetera, I tended to use this same matter of fact analytical way about talking about who works the land, who harvested those grapes actually, you know what the labor force actually looked like.

These are just facts that we could talk about and people, to my surprise, they received them like that, and that was enlightening for me because then I realized that food and wine have a unique capacity as a means of both garnering power or disarming power.

[00:14:11] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna talk much more about that unique power that food and wine have right after this.

[BREAK]

[00:14:26] Chris Duffy:
We’re talking with Stephen Satterfield about how food and wine can be entry points into a much deeper discussion about power, history, and culture. And Stephen, do you feel like if you have a meal where there isn't this engagement with the people behind the scenes and the history of the ingredients, do you feel like that maybe is a, a missed opportunity every time?

[00:14:45] Stephen Satterfield:
No. I mean, that feels a little brutal to me.

[00:14:49] Chris Duffy:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:51] Stephen Satterfield:
I do want people always thinking more seriously about food, their food choices, thinking about them as a political act, as a means of voting each and every day, as a means of either strengthening or, you know, destabilizing communities. So I, I do want people to kind of, um, share this analysis and how they think about their food. But I also realize that because of the demands of capitalism and the ways in which our food system is set up, um, it's not always possible for our ideals to match our meals.

A lot of it has to do with accessibility for people. And, um, a lot of the things that I am an advocate for are not possible as wholesale, you know, kind of lifestyle changes and choices.

By the way, for myself included, you know, as someone who travels and goes to give talks and works on productions, like sometimes we just need calories to keep it moving. That being said, I do hope that we are, are reaching a kind of groundswell of consciousness around where people are starting to look at origins and providence as a means of our own kind of familial and community sustainability.

And I think that's one thing in particular with the onset of COVID and, and watching the kind of instability at, at grocery stores and the various scares due to supply chain shortages and things like that, I think it really is clarifying for people about what does it mean to have access to food really, you know, when, especially when shit hits the fan.

[00:16:57] Chris Duffy:
Well, so I, I’m curious about that. You know, talking about the accessibility piece, talking about actionable, practical things that people can do, what are some practical things that people listening should do to be more thoughtful about this and to start to affect change in, in the food industry?

[00:17:11] Stephen Satterfield:
Well, the first thing that you can do is you can support a local farmer or a local farm. You can do that at a, if you're able to go to a farmer's market or if there's a CSA, because, you know, shopping from basically the person who grew the food or one, one step away is a very disruptive thing to do for our collective health.

It's because the sugar lives everywhere, in everything we drink, every granola bar, every fruit, juice, everything. And this, it's subsidized through lobbyists, i.e. through our own tax dollars. The agricultural industry, the dairy industry more broadly. We don't really understand that we're paying for those subsidies down the line with our hospital bills, with the care or lack thereof that we receive through these really bloated networks when no one, of course, wants to pick up the bill.

And so, I really believe that things that we can do to interrupt that cycle are actually really powerful. And they not only do that, they keep money inside of our local community. So not only is there the health benefit, there's tighter loops around the community benefit. It's even more profound to look at supporting Black farmers.

This is a land loss story. This becomes a story about economic health, community health, financial health, and it all tracks when you look at income disparity and, and wealth disparity among Black folks. Um, it's honestly as bad as it was since Reconstruction.

So, food is related to everything. It is a powerful means of, of organizing ourselves. It’s a, it's a powerful means of intersectional organizing. Again, because we can all gather around our own traditions, it is a way for us to better understand ourselves, where we've come from. Because the story of food is the story of people, the story of humans. And as we see ourselves in history, then we are more able, in my opinion, to make rooms, room for others in history and in society.

Because the, the trouble that we've gotten into around story is that the story is owned by whoever's telling the story. And when that person's telling the story, and they omit or forget others, people who are central in the making of whatever the tale is that's being told, then that type of erasure has real material consequences in the world.

[00:20:13] Chris Duffy:
This feels like a, a perfect segue into your work on High on the Hog, and I think that one of the really powerful parts of the documentary series High on the Hog is going back and seeing these huge contributions and the actual history of African-American cuisine in the United States and globally. It seems like telling that story really ties in with what you're talking about here, of maybe being able to walk back some of that erasure and put some representation there and show people the actual history so that we can change things going forward.

[00:20:45] Stephen Satterfield:
You nailed it. I mean, that's what, that's really the work, you know, is correcting the historical record and also the history lives. History is alive. And so the problem with talking about history like it's over is that it makes us feel like we solved everything that was problematic from a historical context.

This is why what's happening in Florida and the schools there and not being able to have access to books that can teach us our history is, um, really dangerous, and it's being done with a lot of intention because of the implications of, you know, omissions of certain people and events in history. And you can see the ways in which the omission of the, of the people and the events can now be used to tell a new kind of story with new heroes who do virtuous things and not be distracted by all of the naysayers and skeptics and negative people who want to make you feel differently about the heroic people and events and these permitted works.

[00:22:06] Chris Duffy:
You worked on the Netflix documentary series High on the Hog. Uh, for people who aren't familiar with that, what’s that?

[00:22:11] Stephen Satterfield:
So, High on the Hog—Netflix docu-series based on a book by Dr. Jessica B. Harris of the same title, High on the Hog. It is a book that tells the story of African-American people through food. And so we begin in Benin, west Africa. We make a voyage to the new world at a point of entry in Charleston, South Carolina.

From there, we move to Virginia in Monticello, where we talk about the US presidents and their role both in the, the slave trade, but also in the culinary history of the country as well. And then the fourth episode finishes with our emancipation in Texas for a Juneteenth celebration. That's where the show picks up for the second season.

[00:23:14] Chris Duffy:
Oh yes. I'm so excited about this. Tell me what's going on at the second season. I can’t wait.

[00:23:16] Stephen Satterfield:
Yeah, well, we're kind of carrying on that journey and so we're where we've left off, and if folks don't know about Juneteenth, this is a holiday from Texas where the last enslaved African-Americans found out through a mandate signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, I believe in January, the news finally traveled to Texas, and so upon emancipation, we now celebrate this holiday every year on June the nineteenth.

And for the purposes of our story in High on the Hog, that's where the first season kind of caps, and now we're moving into the second season into a place about migration and what happens when free Black folks are on the move. So, we talk about the historical period of reconstruction, about the great migration, about Jim Crow, about the Civil Rights era, and we kind of bring it home to modern day.

[00:24:31] Chris Duffy:
I found a lot of joy in language and in words and phrases. Not even just professionally, just personally. I, I love to kind of collect. “Okay, that's an interesting little idiom. That's a fun word and a phrase.” And I think something that's very fascinating as an English speaker is how there are so many other languages that have kind of been subsumed into English.

When you, when you start to look at where the words come from, you discover it's from everywhere. You know, just a small example, right, is like you look at the word banana. Oh, where did banana come from? Oh, that's a word from Senegalese Wolof.

You look at, you know, phrases that we use, they’re from France, they're from Germany, they're from all these different places. And it strikes me that you seem like you feel a similar joy in identifying the food origins and how these pieces that we take for granted actually come from all over the place and, and the stories behind them. Is, is that true? And if so, I wonder if you could maybe tell me something that's kind of delighted you when you've learned about it.

[00:25:30] Stephen Satterfield:
I think in another world, I would've loved to have been, like, a linguist and, and really studied words for the same reason. It's just so revelatory, you know? I mean, as far as origins, like just to stay with the banana, the thing about bananas that a lot of folks in the US miss is that we have one shitty banana, the Cavendish.

It is ubiquitous, it's fibrous, it's bland, it's crappy. It's ugly. And yet, this is what we think about when we think about bananas. Mind you, there's hundreds of varieties of bananas all over the world, and we are subject to this one banana that was cultivated in some aristocratic garden in England hundreds of years ago. Bradford's Hardiness.

And now it's giving all bananas a horrible reputation. You know, not to mention all of the diseases that the monocropping has caused. You know, looking at something like the banana, we can learn about everything from, like, the actual origins, we can learn about capitalism, we can learn about agriculture, we can learn about the, the British monarchy.

We could actually even talk about the U—the United Fruit Company and you know, Panamanians and Ecuadorians who lost their lives in building up this banana industry and the creation of the Panama Canal and the roles that bananas played in that. So you're looking at movement of people, of plants, of information, of ideas, of technology and food gets us there always. Food gets us there every time, as, as the origins of language can also answer a lot of questions too.

[00:27:31] Chris Duffy:
I love that. It's also when I moved to Los Angeles and a neighbor had a banana tree and gave me one of their apple bananas, and I tried it and I said, like, “I can't even believe! This is the best banana I've ever had.”

And they were like, “Oh yeah. That's because you're eating the worst ba—you’re eating a banana that its only qualification is that it ships well. That’s it. That's why we eat that banana.” And then I had an apple banana, and now I'm like constantly knocking on their door like, “You got any more apple bananas? Any apple bananas?” Right?

[00:27:55] Stephen Satterfield:
Yeah. See the, the beauties of, uh, supporting local food systems.

[00:28:00] Chris Duffy:
Uh-huh.

[00:28:00] Stephen Satterfield:
They support you too.

[00:28:03] Chris Duffy:
Well, Stephen Satterfield, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you for making the time to be here and can't wait to see what comes next with High on the Hog and Whetsone and all of your other projects. I will be watching and cheering you on.

[00:28:12] Stephen Satterfield:
Thank you very much, Chris. I appreciate it.

[00:28:17] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you to today's guest, Stephen Satterfield. He is the host of Netflix's High on the Hog and the founder of Whetstone Media. That's W H E T S T O N E Media. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED Side by Anna Phelan, Whitney Pennington Rodgers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who are collectively outraged about the fact that we are all eating the worst of the bananas. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Erica Yuen, who feel that it is important for you to know that the quote-unquote “best banana” is a subjective statement and not an objective fact.

On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who are equally excited to dive into history and to eat delicious food. Morgan Flannery, Rosalind Tordesillas, and Jocelyn Gonzales.

And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. We will be back next week with another delicious episode of How to Be a Better Human.