Copper & Heat Radio

Foam: Chef's Kiss? (w/ Geraldine DeRuiter)

Episode Summary

What does the popularity of culinary foam say about the types of food – and the kinds of chefs – we value?

Episode Notes

What does the popularity of culinary foam say about the types of food – and the kinds of chefs – we value?

When Geraldine DeRuiter wrote about her meal at “the worst Michelin starred restaurant, ever,” she didn’t expect to start a global controversy. The tasting menu she had at Bros, in Lecce, Italy, was a bizarre, avant garde dining experience, the pinnacle being the “Chef’s Kiss” dish, a plaster cast of a mouth with foam dripping out of it. What followed was a whole conversation online about the nature of food as art, the role of a chef, and the pretentiousness of fine dining. 

And as we dug in more, we started to see how the “Chef’s Kiss” was not just a ridiculous dish on a bizarre menu, but how foam was a metaphor for the flaws of fine dining and the toxicity of the “abusive genius” chef. 

You can find Geraldine (she/her):

Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

On her blog

Buy her book

 

To read more about the international culinary incident:

The Reels put out by Bros: 

More about foam:

Episode Transcription

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[00:00:41] Geraldine: Everyone wants to know about the foam mouth course. They brought out a ramekin and it was basically a sphere with a little concave portion and it is a mouth - it's like gaping open mouth that's looking at you and there's no eyeballs or anything. Just... it's like a sphere with a mouth.

[00:01:01] Katy: This is Geraldine.

[00:01:03] Geraldine: My name is Geraldine DeRuiter

[00:01:05] Katy: You may remember her from way back in season one, when we had a conversation about imposter syndrome after she won a James Beard award, the same year that we did,

[00:01:14] Geraldine: I am a food and travel blogger out of Seattle. And through a miraculous series of events, I keep going viral for writing posts about Italian who are assholes.

[00:01:29] Katy: The most recent of which on her blog, The Everywhereist is titled "Bros, Leche: We Eat at the Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant Ever."

[00:01:38] Geraldine: It was very strange, like, you know, those paintings that Hyon Bosch did of like limbo and purgatory where nothing makes sense. And there's like men with giant mouths and people marching out and other people are swallowing swords and like trees are on fire.

[00:01:57] It was a little bit like that, which is not what you're expecting from dinner. So $1,500 or 1300 Euros later, I wrote about the meal.

[00:02:08] And I found myself once again in the middle of a culinary incident that made headlines everywhere. This is becoming my story.

[00:02:36] (Copper & Heat intro theme plays)

[00:02:36] Katy: You're listening to Copper & Heat, the podcast exploring the unspoken rules and traditions of restaurants. I'm Katy Osuna.

[00:02:43] And in this episode, we're talking about foam.

[00:02:47] We're gonna get back to Geraldine's story about the foam mouth course. And as her blog says the worst Michelin meal ever, but I wanna take a second to introduce our producer, Rachel.

[00:02:59] Rachel: Hi. Hello,

[00:03:00] Katy: Who you'll be hearing from throughout the episode. Rachel's been with us since the very beginning of Copper & Heat as the storytelling extraordinaire. She's worked food jobs in the past, but is now in the arts nonprofit space, as well as being our other producer.

[00:03:18] (a musical transition)

[00:03:18] Katy: So I'm trying to remember. ..How we first saw Geraldine's blog post and like the whole foam mouth thing. And I don't remember exactly, but I do remember just watching everything go down on Twitter.

[00:03:32] Rachel: Yeah. Katy, I think you sent me the picture of the foam mouth first. Like I saw it from you and I had like a, I had a visceral reaction.

[00:03:41] Like it's just... seeing it and thinking of what it must be to have to lick that foam out of that mouth. Really got me. And I think that's why it was such a thing, right? It gets such a big response.

[00:03:55] Katy: It gets a huge response. And I mean, within the food world, it was just like a whole viral thing all over Twitter.

[00:04:03] But I mean, as somebody who is not in the restaurant industry, like why was this so baffling shocking, surprising to you. Like, why was this something we had to talk about?

[00:04:18] Rachel: I just don't understand how foam became the "it girl" of fine dining and how we got to the point where like a highly reg... like a Michelin starred restaurant is just serving a plaster cast with a foam, like it's performance art... but it's food?

[00:04:34] I don't know.

[00:04:35] Katy: Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I don't really understand where foam in its current iteration came from and like, why, why did it become this thing?

[00:04:48] Why? Just, why? Why is everybody doing

[00:04:51] Rachel: I think the answer for why foam is so... Was so in Vogue to understand that you have to start at its creation.

[00:05:01] So foam has been credited to what was the darling of molecular gastronomy. One of the restaurants that people... it's beloved. A lot of people have stories of crying at their meals. El Bulli, which, in its heyday was considered like the spot. Really innovative, really incredible. Ferran Adriá was the head chef there and culinary foam has been credited to him.

[00:05:28] And kind of the origin story, or the lore, who knows if it's true, is that one day Ferran, as a guy who like really likes to push the envelope and like, try to figure, you know, test the bounds. He had a crate tomatoes. He took a bike pump and put it into one of the tomatoes. And he pumps it up and keeps pumping it and pumping it and then it explodes. And then he like gets in the exploded tomato guts, like in there with his hands, digging around and finds like a little frothy piece of like the center of the tomato.

[00:06:01] And tries it and is like, "This is it. Like, this is so light. It barely exists. It's still very tomato-y. Like this is the thing I have to figure out how to get this on the plate for my diners." Then it goes to the kitchen of El Bulli. They develop it, they use siphons, they use stabilizers, they get through the process of actually being able to serve it.

[00:06:25] So Ferran Adriá came up with the idea, but certainly there was a lot of people in the kitchen who executed that.

[00:06:31] Katy: Right. Right.

[00:06:32] Rachel: And then they had foam.

[00:06:33] Katy: Wow. That's just so wild because like, okay. Molecular gastronomy. I know about molecular gastronomy. I know how it just kind of like took over fine dining and how it, I mean, still is sticking around. Whether people like to admit it or not. But putting air in food isn't even anything new, right? Like Ferran, he did, he did the thing, right? He made it popular and like swanky and fancy, but people were doing it before. Right?

[00:07:06] Rachel: Yeah, definitely. So from what I can tell, '94 was when this all kind of came about. So whip cream siphons, that was in cafes in '94. So even the technology there isn't entirely new.

[00:07:19] The earliest thing you can kind of equate it to in the 17th century, an unknown chef is credited for whipping up some eggs and making a meringue. Whipping 'em up, baking 'em, meringue. That's an aerated thing. Mouse, which literally translates from French to English as foam is an 18th century tradition. So whipping things, aerating things, trying to get that light, airy texture onto a plate isn't unique to culinary foam and it certainly wasn't invented in '94 by Ferran Adriá. It wasn't a unique idea. It has a lot of history, it's been done time and time again. The excitement and the trend, and kind of the hip factor that came with molecular astronomy and the way people are approaching and adding this like science element, I think changed the way that people approached food and kind of gave foam that hip credit.

[00:08:15] But even eventually Ferran is quoted as saying that he stopped serving foam at his restaurant, cause everybody else was doing it. And it became too much of a thing. And foam definitely took on a life of its own and like became, I don't know. As we're gonna talk about, like, it just became this thing, that, like I said earlier, the "it girl" and I think Geraldine's experience really is, like, that next step. It's already been pushing the edge of people's expectations of food. And now it's been turned into, like... it's been taken one step further, even more to the realm of ridiculousness.

[00:09:00] (upbeat musical transition)

[00:09:00] Geraldine: So we went to the restaurant, a couple things came out and it wasn't clear what they were. The, the staff would come out and they'd put something out and they were like, "This is a Porcini mushroom," and then they'd walk away. And I was like, well, obviously it's not a Porcini washer. It's a cracker in the shape of a Porcini mushroom.

[00:09:21] I would love some explanation as to what is, what, what is this? Like, is it a, a, some sort of patê? Is it a, a wafer? Like, how have you created this? Is there, you know, dehydrated Porcini powder that... I don't know. It's Porcini mushroom, walk away. Okay. Okay. And so it was a little bit like that, where it was like one word and then they leave and you're like...

[00:09:43] Is it a clue? Am I in an escape room? Do I need to like, figure out how this works?

[00:09:49] Katy: Geraldine and her friends have a truly baffling meal experience and she writes about it on her blog, The Everywhereist. And then it just goes absolutely viral with a story on the Today Show and a ton of other responses.

[00:10:06] Geraldine: For the most part, people were lovely, which is nice. When a post goes viral, you know, you just get the dredges of humanity that come out. When my Batali piece came out, I got death threats. I got rape threats. Everything under the sun. So this was not like that, even though it got more attention. The Italian press specifically was actually really lovely. A lot of Italians were like, "this isn't our cuisine. This is not a good reflection of, you know, either Puglian cuisine. It's not a good reflection of Lecce. It's not a good reflection of Italy." And some people were jerks. They were like, "Well, you don't understand the culture."

[00:10:49] And I'm like, I literally grew up speaking Italian. Like my grandparents are from Campania. This is my culture.

[00:10:57] Katy: What went really viral was an image of one of the courses. And the course was a plaster cast of a mouth filled with a citrus foam.

[00:11:10] Geraldine: Everyone's like, tell me about the foam mouth course. So what happened is they brought out a ramekin and it was basically a sphere with a, a little concave portion and it is a mouth. It's like a gaping open mouththat's looking at you. And there's no eyeballs or anything. Just, it's like a sphere with a mouth.

[00:11:32] So they bring it out and it's got foam inside and the guy puts it down and he goes "the citrus foam." And he puts it down and he's about to scamper off. And we're like, "Wait... There's no utensils." He goes, "Yes. This is the chef's kiss. You kiss the mouth to get the foam."

[00:11:48] And he walks away. The second I see this thing, I lose it. I am just... I almost fall out of my chair laughing. Because I've probably consumed about 40 calories at this point. And we're about like an hour in, and I'm now being told to make out with this plaster cast.

[00:12:08] But you're so hungry at this point. You're just like, (indistinguishable mouth sounds) just go for it.

[00:12:12] At the end of this, they pick up your ramekins and they turn it over and they tell you which chef you got. Because this is an actual plaster cast of either Isabella Potí or Floriano Pellegrino, the two chefs at Bros. And Pellegrino is the owner. The server was like, "Oh, lucky, you, you got Chef Isabella."

[00:12:39] And I'm like, "Ew, what kind of like weird sexist crap is that like, lucky me?"

[00:12:45] I spoke to a woman online who had the exact same tasting menu that I did like a month earlier, a few weeks earlier. She was like, everything you said was true. The meal was terrible, but when I had the chef's kiss, they blindfolded me for it.

[00:13:06] You have to sign a consent form for that, I feel like, like that's messed up! So that was one of the courses that really... yeah. Hit pretty hard.

[00:13:17] Katy: As the internet does, it took that image of the foam mouth and just ran wild with it.

[00:13:25] Geraldine: There were so many memes and so much artwork that emerged from the plaster cast of the mouth.

[00:13:33] And it became like this weird viral thing where people were putting it everywhere. People made comic strips with Snoopy. People were having it appear in random spots. They put it on the TIME Magazine person of the year. I had never seen anything like it,

[00:13:50] Katy: It became this viral joke, but also it was this metaphor for a bunch of the things that people found wrong with fine dining and chef Floriano's response to the article definitely didn't help.

[00:14:04] Geraldine: The first person I talked to about this was Randee Dawn from Today, the TV show, and they got the response from Floriano and it said, "Chef Floriano has the following reply, which he has requested to be printed in full." And any time anyone says that, you know what follows is going to be wildly entertaining.

[00:14:22] So it is a, like, three page response. And it goes into the nature of art and it says, "what is a man on a horse?" And it talks about how anyone can draw a man on a horse, but is it art? And they go through three iterations of a man on the horse from the very basic, which is actually a stock image drawing of a man on the horse, which you can get on a child's coloring page, which I find hilarious.

[00:14:56] And then the second one is a French artist, I can't remember the French artist's name, doing a painting of Napoleon I believe crossing the Alps. And the third one is an abstract modern painting of supposedly a man on a horse.

[00:15:13] Katy: Part of Floriano's response reads, "What is art? What if food? What is a chef? What is a client, what is good taste? What looks beautiful?

[00:15:30] What is a man on a horse?"

[00:15:33] Geraldine: And he talks about how, what he has created is art and how not everyone understands art. And it goes into a question of what even is food and, and it gets, it gets a little weird and esoteric. The very end of the response reads.

[00:15:55] "We thank Mrs. XXX, I don't remember her name, for making us get where we had not yet arrived. We are out of stock of limoniamo. Thank you very much."

[00:16:06] Katy: Limoniamo being the name of the plaster cast of the mouth that they are now selling on their website. I think this story is just it's particularly ridiculous, but Rachel, you are from the art world,

[00:16:21] Rachel: TM (Katy and Rachel laugh)

[00:16:22] Katy: I think that is one of the reasons why it was particularly interesting to you because it opened up this larger question of is food art?

[00:16:33] Rachel: Right. And I think too... is food art and then in the pursuit of art craft or fine dining, fine art - what is the benchmark? Is it just to evoke feelings? Like, is that the pursuit of art?

[00:16:50] Is it just to evoke something? You're gonna feel something when you're licking foam out of a mouth cast. That's gonna make you feel away.

[00:16:57] Katy: (gagging sound) That's gonna make me gag

[00:16:58] Rachel: or is there some other pursuit, right? Are you trying to make the most enjoyable version or recreate something? How did we get here? How did we get to the point where that is the cutting edge, like off avant garde... like Bros calls themselves an avant garde restaurant.

[00:17:16] Why is that the boundaries that we decided to push?

[00:17:20] Katy: Like you said, why is that what is consider valuable?

[00:17:25] Geraldine: His defense, of course, is if food is art then not everyone has to appreciate it. And if food is art, then you know, our obligation is, is merely to, to push the boundaries and to create art. And therefore, if you don't enjoy it that is not my problem because I have filled my obligation as an artist.

[00:17:43] And, you know, my conclusion to this has always been that food is more than art. Food has artistic components, but art, when we engage in it, you know, we like it or dislike it. It creates an emotional response. It has fulfilled the role that art needs to fill. We can walk away. You know, we've engaged in it and it's provoked us and it's created thought or it, it hasn't.

[00:18:13] And, and either way, you know, we have formed a relationship with a piece because not liking art is a response to art. Food has an obligation beyond that because you can't create something that is unappetizing. You can't create something that is inedible. You can't create something that someone is allergic to.

[00:18:38] Which several of the dishes caused an allergic reaction in my husband that he had previously told them, "Hey, these are the things I'm allergic to." I don't know what happened there. If it was a miscommunication, if it was lost in translation or what. But he had an allergic reaction to things. You can't do that with food and say, "Hey, you've misunderstood my art," right? The obligation of food is far beyond the obligation of art because it needs to satisfy, and it needs to really meet a need beyond the aesthetic.

[00:19:10] And if a chef merely regards himself as an artist and ignores his relationship with his patrons, then he has failed as a chef.

[00:19:22] (chill guitar musical transition)

[00:19:22] Katy: Why do you think that foam has become kind of like this... "look at us, we're fancy" calling card? I don't know if you've thought about this...

[00:19:30] Geraldine: No, I have! Oh, you don't think I've thought about foam?

[00:19:33] The epoch between 2010 and 2020. The middle of that. I don't know what that decade is called... the teens? Right in the middle there.

[00:19:40] Foam was everywhere.

[00:19:42] And I have thought a lot about it. And it is a little bit of metaphor. Like it is a fine dining in microcosm, right? Because it is completely insubstantial. Right? You blink and it's gone. Doesn't satisfy you at all. You have paid a ridiculous amount of money for it. Gotten like 15 calories out of it. It tasted nice. It requires a lot of skill to execute... I think? I don't know. I've never, you know, never actually made a foam. I think you just froth things up. Maybe it's not that hard.

[00:20:20] But I do think it is a way of imparting a pastiche of fanciness on things. That's what I think, because you're like, "Oh, it's there's truffle" or whatever. Like all these things that we think are fancy *poof* and there, we're fancy, we're fine dining.

[00:20:41] We put some foam on it. It's like the, "put a bird on it" for Portland. It's "put some foam on it" for fine dining. That's where we are. Yeah.

[00:20:50] Katy: A hundred percent. As Rachel and I were kind of like talking about this episode, cause like I worked at places that put foam on things and yeah, as we were talking about like people have been aerating food forever, like meringues and cakes. Foam is not anything new, technically. But somehow, because we've made it like molecular gastronomy... dudes in like the eighties and nineties, made it fancy.

[00:21:19] Geraldine: Yeah, yeah. No zabbaglione is foam, right? That's what this was, this was a zabaglione just served in a plaster cast. Right? It wasn't anything that unusual.

[00:21:35] I do think it is. Like, it's almost like a cheat. It's almost like this is our calling card. Like "Obviously we're fine dining. Did you see, we have foam? Did you not see?"

[00:21:47] It's interesting too, cuz it's not a main component, right, usually... of a dish. To have it be the entire entree is absolute bonkersness. And I don't think anybody, any guest is gonna be like, "Oh yeah, this is missing something. You know what? This needs foam, this needs some foam. Did you guys, can you just bring the foam? Can you send the foam guy out and just put a dollop of foam on here?"

[00:22:10] I mean, what the hell.

[00:22:17] (chill electronic organ music)

[00:22:17] Katy: They certainly got a lot of attention from this, not only from Geraldine's article, but just all the viral responses and all the articles and think pieces that were written about it. Not only does it blow up all over the internet, the New York Times and other media outlets get ahold of it. This article came out two, three weeks after Geraldine's blog posted and it was called "Of Mouth Molds and Michelin Stars: Chef Finds Fame after Epic Takedown."

[00:22:45] Geraldine: So a few days after my post went viral, I had someone reach out to me and say, "Hey, I worked with Floriano. He was super abusive." And I was like, "Okay, but I'm in the middle of this story. So I can't like, I am a part of this and I am not a what I would call a hard-news journalist, which I think is what you need."

[00:23:13] So I referred them to several news outlets that I trusted. There was one that was pursuing the story and then they unfortunately dropped it because they were like, "It's too international. We don't feel that our readers will be as interested in it."

[00:23:32] And then they ran a front page, glowing story about Floriano. And they make one mention of the abuse in which they don't talk to any of his victims. They don't pursue it. But they ask Floriano about it and he goes, "You can't believe everything you read."

[00:23:48] And when I talked to that reporter, the guy was coming for me. He was like, "Do you really speak Italian? Did you actually inform him of your allergies? Cuz they say you didn't. You have a James Beard award. What's that for?"

[00:24:06] And the resulting story is just this glowing piece about Floriano in which Floriano says had I behaved the way I did in a restaurant in New York, I would've been punched. Said that I was rude and disrespectful to the staff, which is really interesting because earlier he said he didn't remember me. Has no idea who I was. And yeah. Made a few other disparaging comments, which they published in full and then did not talk to the person who tweeted about how they had been forced to do pushups and run laps around the building when they had done something to upset Floriano in the kitchen.

[00:24:52] Once the New York times published that story and when I found out that they dropped the abuse story, that was a really demoralizing moment for me. Because I was like, there is no justice. Like the people who misbehave will not really face consequences for it. And it also was just, you know, prior to that, I was like, well, this guy's an egotistical jerk who can't cook, whatever, no big deal.

[00:25:24] And then I find out like he's abusive and toxic and it just was this dark undercurrent.

[00:25:31] Katy: This really speaks to the insidiousness of kind of glorifying that brand of the bad boy chef who doesn't give a fuck what anybody says. Everything that happened after the fact, like really speaks a lot to how they view themselves as like this avant garde restaurant that exists outside of society.

[00:25:57] Rachel: "Oh, you didn't like what we're doing? Well, fuck you. We're gonna run with it. And this is our brand now." They've wrapped this into the Bros branding, really. They had pictures of them and all their kitchen flipping off the camera. One of their press photos is their whole staff flipping off the camera.

[00:26:13] In one of their Reels that they did, Floriano does the same thing where it's like paparazzi and he's got his hood up and Floriano then is like flipping off people. Like it's become part of their thing.

[00:26:25] Geraldine: According to them they have definitely benefited from the press. There was, you know, that New York Times article said something like chef benefits from scathing review. The Italian press said something like, you know, Isabella Poti and Floriano Pellegrino have never been more famous or more rich. Later Floriano and Isabella did like a series of videos on their Instagram

[00:27:04] (various sounds of news Reels talking about Floriano coming our of his restaurant and asking the question "what is a man on a horse" talking about how there's a juicy culinary conflict heating up in Italy.)

[00:27:04] Geraldine: There are like Instagram news reels and it's them like, and again, they've got the, "what is a man on a horse" like story and it was kind of framed to be like the news story that's taken over the world. They had spliced video of me with like graphic sexual imagery of people like licking each other.

[00:27:37] I couldn't get Instagram to take it down. When I tweeted about it, Floriano created another video that was like, "You're a joke. And basically can't create any news on your own without me, you..." and I think he called me an effing boomer? I'm 41! I'm a Gen Xer at best.

[00:28:02] That was actually truly like a frightening moment because... yeah, it felt so invasive.

[00:28:11] It felt so invasive. It was so graphic. It was my image. It was so overtly hostile. And it was, "You had a bad experience at my restaurant and you wrote about it. And now this is what I'm going to do to you." And that is really like, that is terrifying.

[00:28:37] (chill bass guitar and woodblock music)

[00:28:37] Geraldine: I think the thing that goes along with this is this idea of the abusive genius that we forgive a lot of toxic behavior of, right? You know, we see it in Hollywood all the time. There's so many actors who are abusive. So many directors. We see it in artists. We see it in musicians. And I think with chefs, it's everywhere. Like the angry chef and it, for some reason, it's. So excused.

[00:29:07] Katy: What has been wild to me... and this is ... we can talk about this for days, I'm sure. But just like... First of all, the degradation of craft of like, oh, that that stuff doesn't really matter. Like, oh yeah, you can cook okay, but it's really valuable if we make it art.

[00:29:30] And I feel like there's kind of been that distinction for a long time between, like, food that is invaluable and just like, oh, it tastes good and your mom or your grandma can do it. And then there's fine dining, which is usually white dudes who are like fussing around and like pushing the boundaries and doing scientific stuff.

[00:29:53] And there's been that line. And so. I don't know. I don't what, this is like a really big question, but how do you see that saying where we are in the culinary world right now?

[00:30:07] Geraldine: I think the value is completely arbitrary, right? Like we've placed this arbitrary value on fine dining. And I've had this experience where a lot of times, you know, the joke that I always tell my husband is it's fine... Fine dining is... fine.

[00:30:35] Katy: What is valuable in the food space and how do we value the work that people do in the food space?

[00:30:44] Rachel: Yeah. And also who chooses that value? How do people, you know, how do consumers one day be like, okay, this meal, I'm gonna drop this amount for, but this [other thing] is too expensive. Like this is way beyond what I find is worth it to buy food.

[00:31:00] Katy: And there's a lot of those decisions that are made every day. And then, I mean, as we love to talk about, there's so many systems that the restaurant industry has been built on, and there's so much history and cultural context that plays into what we do and the decisions that consumers and restaurant owners and restaurant workers face every day.

[00:31:21] Rachel: Yeah. And I think also it's like a moment when the industry has had the opportunity to redefine in a lot of ways. So there's like a lot of thinking outside the box or just like people trying new things, which I think also kind of plays into like that.

[00:31:37] Do you think now is a time when people are like reassessing the value of their...or the approach or the way that they access their craft?

[00:31:47] Katy: Yeah. I think people that work in restaurants, people that work in food, a hundred percent are kind of reevaluating, like, is, is this worth it?

[00:31:58] Rachel: I feel like everyone is asking that like, is this really worth it? Are we truly right now?

[00:32:05] Katy: You're not wrong about that... yeah.

[00:32:10] And I think it's like, do I really wanna pour myself into this industry, into this craft? A lot of us are so passionate about it, but it's, it's come to the point where like, is it worth it if people don't value what we do.

[00:32:37] (fun upbeat rock music)

[00:32:37] Katy: You can find Geraldine on her blog, theeverywhereist.com and on all the social media platforms @theeverywhereist or @everywhereist. We'll drop some links to that in the show notes. Also, she is working on a new book

[00:32:47] Geraldine: and I talk about the Bros experience and I actually went to Copenhagen and I talked to a former chef who worked at Bros and she was very cool and I kind of wanted to focus on, you know who are the people who maybe don't get the attention that they deserve in the culinary industry and these like amazing chefs that don't get the spotlight as often as they should.

[00:33:20] So that's the book. It's not gonna be out for a while, cuz the path to publishing is long, so I'm still writing it. But that's where we are.

[00:33:29] You know, it's weird to be like, I'm an author and I'm still, I have so much imposter syndrome. Like when people ask what you do, I'm like, "I don't know. I don't really know.

[00:33:38] I don't, I'm not, I don't, I'm kind of in between projects." I'm like, no, like I have so much trouble saying I'm a writer and you would have to twist my arm to get me to say I'm a food writer.

[00:33:49] Katy: Mm...

[00:33:50] Geraldine: That's weird, right?

[00:33:51] Katy: You created a whole international culinary incident that you are indeed a culinary food writer.

[00:34:01] (Credits)

[00:34:01] Katy: If you wanna learn more about foam and the international culinary incidents started by Geraldine, we'll drop some more links in the show notes, too. Follow us in your favorite podcast app and find us on various social channels @copperandheat to keep up to date as we release all the new episodes throughout the season.

[00:34:19] And we always love hearing from you. So send us a message in our DMS or on our website.

[00:34:24] This episode was produced by me, Katy Osuna and Rachel Palmer. Scoring, sound design, and story editing was by Ricardo Osuna. Mixing and mastering was done by Adriene Lilly.

[00:34:37] Thanks so much for listening!