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This is a graveyard — historic Rose Hill Cemetery in my city of Macon, Georgia. I love
this place. Every time I come here, I come away renewed in my faith in science — or,
let's say trust. Renewed in my trust in science. I'll tell you why I am renewed in that here
before we're done.
I make videos about food and cooking, and in that pursuit I often consult science and
scientists on common questions like — Is it safe to cook with Teflon? Why are some
people more or less sensitive to spicy foods? Does alcohol really burn off when you cook
it? Why do pizza steels make crispier, browner pizza than pizza stones? Is dietary fat actually
bad for you? Is MSG actually bad for you? Why does boxed cake taste so different from
scratch cake? Should you wash meat before you cook it?
And most times when I do this, I get somebody asking me why I am so willing to accept the
scientific consensus. Sure, most people who study these things might believe that eating
a big chip of Teflon would do nothing bad to you, it would just pass through your system
— but what if they're wrong? You can always find a dissenting opinion, and the scientific
consensus has a history of being wrong.
I'm not just talking about super-old stuff like geocentrism or classical elements theory
— that's the idea all matter is composed of some ratio of air, earth, fire and water,
easily disproven in the 18th century because that's not how any of this works.
I'm not just talking about that stuff. Modern science has a history of getting things wrong
too, like drugs that we thought were safe until it turned out they weren't. A classic
case would be Thalidomide. Thalidomide is a popular drug to this day, used to treat
cancer and skin problems and other things. In the 1950s, it was marketed as a morning
sickness drug — which, it turned out, was causing terrible birth defects — birth defects
in as many as 20,000 children all around the world. That crisis led to many of the pharmaceutical
industry regulations that we now take for granted today.
In food we have the great 20th century fat fallacy. When I was a little kid and my dad
was about the age that I am now — maybe a little bit older — he went to the doctor
and his doctor said, "You've got high cholesterol. If you don't take down your saturated fat
intake you're gonna have a heart attack and you're gonna die."
So we stopped eating butter at home. We started eating margarin instead, and we stopped eating
steak so often, and when we did have steak, it was these super-lean cuts of sirloin that
my dad would get, which, by the way Brits, when Americans talk about a sirloin, that's
part of what you call the rump. What you call a sirloin is what we generally call the strip
steak, but anyways.
Medical science regarded butter and red meat as the great dietary evils until it turned
out that the butter substitutes we were using with trans fats in them were actually way
worse for us, and then just now, in the last few months, new research has come out indicating
that the links between red meat and cancer and heart disease are far more tenuous than
what was commonly believed.
As published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, "The magnitude of association between red
and processed meat consumption and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes
is very small, and the evidence is of low certainty."
We shouldn't be mad about this. Science is an iterative process. Research builds upon
research that builds upon research. We gradually learn more and more and we get smarter and
smarter and smarter. And if we're smarter now, that necessarily means that we were dumber
before, and when you're dumber, you're more likely to get things wrong.
And of course, not all the mistakes are innocent. Science is susceptible to manipulation. The
Australian obstetrician William McBride was widely credited with figuring out that Thalidomide
causes birth defects. It was a actually a midwife he worked with named Pat Sparrow who
first made the connection — that's a fact that he conveniently omitted, but anyways.
20 years after that, Dr. McBride tried for a comeback hit, when he published a 1981 paper
linking another morning sickness drug with birth defects — Debendox. Turned out he
deliberately falsified his data, and that drug remains in use today under different
names, and it is widely considered safe and effective.
And of course, money influences science. The person perhaps most singularly responsible
for linking fat consumption with heart disease was Dr. D. Mark Hegsted, a nutritionist at
Harvard. In 2016, Hegsted was named in the Journal of the American Medical Association
as being among those researchers who were paid by the sugar industry. They were paid
to find something, anything other than sugar to blame for heart disease.
So with all its flaw, why am I so willing to accept the scientific consensus and to
pass it on to you? Because it's the best we've got. Because it's simply illogical to go with
anything else. Science represents the best available knowledge we have at any given moment.
I'm not qualified to question the scientific consensus, and you probably aren't either.
This is not a super-comfortable argument for me to make, because I'm generally down with
questioning authority and encouraging other people to question authority. But I try to
only question things that I have grounds or qualifications to question.
In the journalism world that I come from, there's a guy named David Folkenflik. He's
a reporter for NPR — that's the nominally "public" public radio network that we have
here in the United States. Anyway, David coined this term that he calls an "earned opinion."
In the mid-to-late 20th century, it was pretty much common practice that mainstream reporters
in the United States would keep their opinions to themselves. They would only say facts.
Now we've gotten into a period where things are very, very different, and we could argue
all day about whether that's a good thing, but all David was trying to say was that,
like, Look, if we're going to say what we think instead of just what we know, let's
reserve that for when we have earned the opinion — when it's a story that we have put a ton
of work into and we've really learned the facts, and we've done all the investigation
— really, what we think kinda matters. We've earned it. That's an earned opinion.
A few years ago I tried to augment David's coinage by coining the antonym — asshole
opinions. I call them asshole opinions not just because they are so often voiced by people
who are themselves assholes, but also because asshole opinions are like assholes in the
sense that everybody has one.
If you've been researching a scientific topic for years and you think that the scientific
consensus has it wrong, you've earned that opinion. And if it's about food, I want to
hear that opinion. I want to put it into a video, although I will tell my audience that
it's a minority opinion so they can contextualize it as such. But if all you've done is just
spent a couple hours listening to some fringe theorist rant on Joe Rogan's show, then you've
not earned an opinion. That there's an asshole opinion you've got there.
I think sometimes that when people say they don't believe the scientific consensus, what's
really going on is that they're just opposed to what people want to do in response to that
consensus. The giant example would be climate change, right? There remains scientific consensus
that the planet it getting warmer and that human activity is a significant causal factor.
You might disagree with that, but unless you are an accomplished climatologist, I don't
really care what your opinion is. YOU shouldn't care what your opinion is. It's an asshole
opinion!
And maybe, deep down inside, you know that. You know that the science is there. You're
just opposed to the politics that flow from the science. But if we accept that scientific
consensus — that the planet is getting warmer and that we're causing it to some extent — it
does not necessarily follow that we should all just push our cars into the sea and start
weaving baskets in vegan-agrarian communes. I mean, that might actually be the best response,
but there are other conceivable responses as well, like trying to eat less beef and
dairy. Beef might not be all that bad for you after all, but cow farts still account
for a substantial chunk of human-caused warming, says science. Or another response could be
to do absolutely nothing about your carbon footprint and just rely on science to provide
technological solutions to climate change. For what it's worth, that's really the only
thing I have hope for anymore, not that you should care about my opinion because my opinion
doesn't matter. I haven't earned it.
Maybe you think you have earned your opinion — not through rigorous scholarship, perhaps,
but maybe through good ol' fashioned common sense. I don't need any of that fancy book
learning — I've got common sense. The problem with that is that science has proven, time
and time again, that reality is weird. What is true, what is empirically true, is often
really different from what common sense would predict. A perfect example in the food world
is the searing myth.
In 1847, German chemist Justus von Liebig wrote that you can mitigate moisture loss
when cooking meat by quickly cooking the exterior surface. "[T]he albumen immediately coagulates
from the surface inwards, and in this state forms a crust or shell [...]. The flesh retains
its juiciness."
I think part of the reason why that myth persists to this day is that it just makes sense — common
sense. For millennia, doctors have stopped bleeding by cauterizing wounds, right? You
apply a lot of intense heat, and that coagulates the blood coming out of the blood vessels,
and the bleeding stops. It makes sense that the same thing would basically happen with
muscle tissue when you cook it — except it just doesn't.
You can disprove this notion empirically, as people have been doing since not long after
Escoffier popularized von Lieberg's myth. You take two steaks, you weigh them, you sear
one of them, you cook them both to the same internal temperature and then you weigh them
again. Searing does not seal in juices — it just doesn't.
Common sense is great when it's the best you've got, and it often is. Science has not addressed
every single question you might have in your life. But when there is some science to a
question that you have, that's gonna be your best bet, and not the common sense. This brings
us back to why I'm talking to you from this historic cemetery — Rose Hill Cemetery in
Macon, Georgia. I love this place. If you like that Southern gothic vibe, come walk
around here. It goes on forever. Look around for a while, and you'll start to notice a
lot of very small grave markers.
This little lamb is Carrie Burke, died 1867, 11 months old. Here's little Charlie Sasnett,
died 1883, he wasn't quite two. Martha Winship, 1881, she lived a week.
Look at all the dead children. They're everywhere, and this was the fancy cemetery in the 19th
century. Macon's elite families are buried here. Many of them would have been slave-owners.
They had the best food, shelter and sanitation and even they couldn't save their babies.
The near-global collapse of infant and childhood mortality rates over the last century was
achieved by science. Science saved the babies. I want to make every anti-vaxxer walk around
this place with me for a few hours.
Here's one grave marker for two sisters — Annie and Fannie. They each lived a year and they
were born three years apart. They never met. That kind of thing almost never happens anymore
to families with access to modern medicine.
Without science, my first son would have lived about a minute. He couldn't breath when he
came out. I would have set him under one of these little stone cradles and that would
have been the end of his story. But thanks to science, he's five and he's making pancakes
with me. That is why I believe in science. If you've got something better to which you'd
like to entrust your children, do let me know about it.
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Also in the description is a link to another video that I made here in Rose Hill Cemetery
— me and a former student of mine named Burgess Brown. The Allman Brothers Band used
hang out and write songs in this cemetery, and they wrote a beautiful tune called "Little
Martha" that may have been inspired by little Martha Ellis's grave, here. We arranged the
piece for string quartet and we shot a performance of it right here. I hope that you'll have
a look and listen — I'm Really proud of that one.