Award-winning journalist, story collector and teller Michele Norris joins us for a wide-ranging discussion on women, race and identity - and how we often learn about it and see it play out in the kitchen. We chat about the podcast Your Mama's Kitchen, The Race Card Project and the power of curiosity.
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha. We're welcome to stuff I've never told you a production of iHeartRadio, and today we have an interview for you that we are so excited to share. As you know, we often nerd out, perhaps get nervous, fangirl over amazing women who have done amazing things, and this was one of those instances because we were fortunate enough to get to interview Michelle Norris. And I'm still like, we're recording this separately because she's really busy and was covering a hearing in Washington, DC in the middle like she was like, I gotta go to get to this hearing, right, And she took the time to talk with us, and it was amazing and it was an amazing conversation. We have so much more we wanted to talk about, didn't have the time. But hopefully, Samantha, you really you really put down the seeds.
I was really trying real hard. I'm like, I need this conversation to keep going, so I'm going to put a teaser out bait her hopefully and how she'll want to come back on. But you also did a good job with the mac and cheese, Like a we need to follow up with that anyway. Yeah, a teasers obviously.
Yes, you're gonna have to listen to learn about the mac and cheese. But Michelle Norris, if you don't know who she is, she has done amazing work. She was a correspondent for ABC News in the nineties and early two thousands. She got a Peabody for her coverage of nine to eleven. She was the first black woman to host NPR of All Things Considered. And she's done so much more than that. She's got the Race Card Project, which you can learn more about at the racecardproject dot com. She's got a book that came out called Our Hidden Conversations, What Americans Really think about race and Identity. She's got a memoir called The Grace of Silence. She has done so much. Really check her out, and she's really really she's just someone who's so curious. And even in this interview, we kept getting kind of caught in her interviewing us. And I grew up. My mom loves All Things Considered, and I kind of talk about it in this episode, but we would listen to it in the kitchen while we were cooking, and my mom when I was like key enough to interview Michelle Norris on other podcasts I do Saver and at the end, she did the thing she does, which is ask you a question, and I was talking about my mom and my mom's kitchen because this question just brings out so much in you. And my mom listened to that episode and was so moved by it and so like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that this person I was listening to in the kitchen is talking about my experience in the kitchen. It was really sweet. It was a very sweet thing. So I'm very moved by that. And we had a million things we wanted to talk about we didn't get to. I would say one of the things we didn't get to is that you can you can find her her book and read more about it. But her grandmother was someone who was one of the performers who went around and portrayed Aunt Jemima, who cooked and portrayed Aunt Jemima. It's really fascinating. But yeah, I mean, Samantha, I'm sure you could speak more to it, but it was difficult to limit our questions.
Right, there's so much she's doing so much. I think that's the bigger portion is like the amount of content she has is overwhelming, especially in the last year, like just in the last year alone, and we were trying to kind of just keep it in that realm because she also is a fabulous storyteller as she will say it, and a story collector. And I don't think there's any other way to describe her because like just me in a journalist, which is a big feat in it self, like all of that, that is not enough to describe her, Like it's not who she is what she does. So it was a phenomenal conversation and she does so well and giving intense questions but in the simplistic way that opens up so many doors and it was beautiful. Yeah, And we definitely were like, no, I'm not telling you this. You have to come back, because she was trying to interview flip the tables on us. One boy, she said, I'm sitting on my hands trying not to ask you more questions, follow up questions. I was like, no, ma'am, we're not doing this.
Yeah, And I think that's the the beauty of when a podcast is that what I personally think is at its best is that curiosity that like I want to know more, let me listen, tell the story, let me collect the story, let me tell the story, like all of those things. So with all of that, let us get in to our interview with Michelle Norris. So today we are so thrilled and excited to be joined by Michelle Norris. I'm honestly like, I'm so excited to talk with you. Can you introduce yourself to our audience?
Hi? Hello, First, Hello, Sam and Annie. So good to be with you, So good to be so excited. I am. My name is Michelle Norris. I am a storyteller and a story collector. I am a storyteller in that I am a longtime journalist. I am a senior contributing editor at MSNBC. Prior to that, I was a columnist at The Washington Post. I've worked. I worked for ten years as a host of a little show on UNPR called All Things Considered, and before that worked at ABC News and the Chicago La Times and The Washington Post earlier in my career. So longtime storyteller. For the last fifteen years, I've been a story collector. I run something called the Race Car Project, where I collectoes from people about race and identity that begin with just six words, so they start with a little microburst and they often grow into something bigger. And I now host a podcast called Your Mama's Kitchen where I collect stories from fairly famous people who tell me about how the kitchens that they grew up in shaped the people that they became. And the theory of the case there is that the kitchens are incubators. As Conan O'Brien said, it's like the kiln where the bricks are made. You learn about justice and generosity and grace and grievance and all kinds of things in the kitchen. A lot more goes on in a kitchen beyond nutrition.
Your podcasts and just the way you described your work and who you are the story collector, that's exactly the perfect description of what you do. It's not just a conversation, it's not just a podcast, it's not just a book. It seems that your work in its entirety, even though the basis and your education and your background is journalism, it is story collecting. It is storytelling, and you do a beautiful job and relaying different people's different backgrounds stories in such a way that you feel like you know these people, which really like tugs. I think I was gushing right before. I know I was gushing right before we got onto record about your ability to talk to people in such a way and ask the questions that are seemingly so simple, Like you literally said, give me six words about race, and you gave out postcards, and I, by the way, that format is so Roman romantic to me. It just got me. I was like, yes, and you're talking about how you put them in bibles. Don't think I didn't know what you were doing.
I love that you did that, but we should explain that.
We should.
I just so. I developed the race Card Project while I was on a thirty five city book tour, and I developed the Raskar project in part because I wrote a book about my family's complex racial legacy, called The Grace of Silence, and I knew I would be going out in the world talking to people about racing. I thought no one wanted to have that conversation. So the race Card Project was created to create an entry point with postcards. Just give me a postcard with your six words on it. And I had to figure out how to distribute the postcards. And so when I was traveling across the country, I was leaving in the back of airline, you know, little little marsupial pouch. I was leaving them in the airline pouch. I was leaving them. And restaurants, I was leaving them behind on tables and in hotels where the Bible comes in in the nightstand, you know, there's often a little Bible in the nightstand, And so I put postcards in the Bible. So I figured if somebody was like, you know, needing a good word, that they were trying to find them a palm, a psalm or proverb ye out would follow a postcard.
I mean, to be honest, in my mind, if I had found a postcard in the Bible, which I don't necessarily looked at them, but every now and then you're like, there it is. You're like, what are the Mormons want from me? Like what is the questions that the Mormons are asking me? But no, it was such a fascinating and amazing beginning. And like I said, I love like postcards. Those are so romantic, and I love that in general. But you have an amazing way of transforming people's stories into this beautiful, beautiful narrative where you just feel it, You feel where there's these where they people are coming from and the hurt or the beauty of finding themselves, Like, this's such an amazing thing. And you have taken that all the way from again postcards. Of course, you've been a journalist, you've done this. Now you're here in podcasting and you do the same thing. You do the same thing with that question, tell me about your mama's kitchen. So can you talk to us a little bit about this podcast and what it's about and how you got here?
Well, isn't it interesting? That's I was reminded when I was in San Antonio recently that even that question is six words, tell me about your mama's kitchen. I never put that put the two together. But the idea for the podcast grew out of my work in public radio. And you two live behind the microphone, so you understand that you want people to talk a little bit before you are off to the racist and you start recording your show, and it's something called a mic check. And at NPR, the standard question for the mic check was what did you have for breakfast? Samantha, what did you have for breakfast?
I haven't had breakfast coffee?
Okay, that's that's see, that's the issue, Ms Reese, what did you have for breakfast?
Coffee?
Okay, so no one talks it up, right. You never have the person who says, oh girl, I had French toast and it was dredged in eggs that were harvested down the road and it was dusted with cinnamon sugar, and I had it along with some beautifully scrambled eggs and some country fried bacon, and I had a glass of No one says that. They say coffee, they say nothing, they say toast, They say oah mill. And it's never enough time for people to talk. And so I started asking odd ball questions. Do you use paper or plastic when you go to the grocery store? What did you do for fun on a Saturday night? Tell me about your first summer job. What is your favorite pair of shoes? And why all of them were? You know, you'd learn something about someone and you would get them talking a lot more. But the one that was the gold the golden question was tell me about your mama's kitchen. Because people would go to a different place in their head and they would start talking, and even if it wasn't a good experience, you know, they just it just rendered the pot. It just got them loose limbed, and it made for a different conversation once we got into whatever we were talking about. I mean, even if we were talking about, you know, military expenditures, it was just a deeper, richer, better conversation because we loosened the guest up. And I always thought that that would be a great idea for a podcast, and then I wound up connecting with the good people at Higher Ground Media, which is the production company that is owned by Baraka Michelle Obama, and the light bulbs went off and we said, let's create a really wonderful podcast around this. And the theory of the case was that we become who we are in the kitchen. And it's interesting how we asked this question to all these different guests, same question, a bunch of different guests, and they it goes in completely different directions. You know, there's no there are a few redundancies, but even so there's difference even if the experience is similar. And so I know, it's an interesting experience for the listener. And it sure is a heck of a lot of fun from me to get to know people in a different way because often these are famous people. They've done lots of interviews, but we learned things that no one else has heard before because we're entering through a different door, right.
I mean, listening to Michelle Obama talking about how much she didn't like eggs, she like anything, Yes, I was like I would have not imagined.
And you know, and Missus Robinson, who's recently gone to glory and we both lost our moms right around this in the same week, actually right around the same time, was a tough cookie. I mean, she was a very you know, disciplined woman, but she indulged a little. Michelle Obama said, baby, if you want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, that's what we're going to give you. I Mean, the piece of that episode that I really appreciated was when she talked about her cousin who came who went off and came back with all these radical ideas about what a woman could and should do. And you also learn about those sort of smaller characters than someone life. She probably wound up having a really big influence on Michelle Obama and who she became and on how she saw the world. And you know, because Chicago is basically like being in the South. If you're on the South side of Chicago. It's you know, black people who all came from the South, brought Southern values, Southern ideas with them about all kinds of things, religion, gender, race, and then when people started to break out of those cocoons and explore bigger worlds and then bring those ideas back, they were not often met with an open, armed embrace. What'd you talk about, you know, trying to shake up the world order, you know, And that was she had never talked about that before, you know, And so it was really interesting and I spent you know, a lot of time with her. I've interviewed her over years. I've read her books, I've traveled with her on book tour, I've read a bunch of her interviews. And that was like new material that helped us understand her origin story.
I love that, Yeah, and I love that beginning you talked about feminism in the kitchen. You actually brought that up into it, and I was like, here we go, here we go, and talking about the growth of the matriarch and what feminism was then was just the mere fact that, yes, the household was run by women and there was no plan about But then you had the cousin coming in talk about a different narrative of like, no, I'm not coming here to serve you, this is not this is not happening. It was such an amazing conversation.
But all you can to understand that in a black household in the nineteen sixties, for a young women to come in and say I'm not here to serve you, thunderclass.
Was you know, it was a silent moment. Everybody is, what's going to happen here?
You know? But that that the theme comes up over and over and over again because for some of us at a certain age, feminism came along and changed the world underneath our mother's feet, I mean, the world shifted. They had made choices or choices were foisted upon them, and then suddenly things were different or there was the possibility of things being different. But there's a group of women that were sort of caught, you know, in the middle of seeing a possibility of change but not being able to execute on that because of where they were stuck, you know, in that timeline. But at the same time, we've also learned that for some women, the idea of feminism was interesting because the kitchen was their domain. And it was the one place where they could be fully in control, right, And in other spaces they couldn't, But the kitchen was one place where they could be in control. And then for some women, and I'm finding particularly for women of color, was a case where the idea of feminism not even you know, within the kitchen or outside of it, but the idea of feminism was interesting because in some spaces, particularly educated, when we were fighting to have a home and family, to have a home, family and work, to work outside the home, and for a lot of women of color or women who were of working class or lower it's like, well, we've been doing that all along, right, the struggle is real, but so is the juggle, right, you know we have we have already been doing this, and to be able to explore that through a child's eyes from someone who is now an adult has been really really interesting. I mean, Terry Jones, I don't know if you listen to that episode, but that was another example. She went to college and it blew her mind and she just thought, I am never going to be that person. I love my mom, but I am never going to be that person. I don't want to cook. And now she's a cook and fool she makes cakes on you know, all the time, but there was a she had to figure out, how do I do this without it being subservient, right, how do I do this on my own terms? And realizing that her mother had made a beautiful home for the family, but also realizing that wondering what kind of sacrifices that she made right, right in order to create that space, and if she had to subjugate her own ambitions right or sort of prestil twist herself to fit into a mold.
I mean, you definitely mentioned about having it all in that false narrative in itself, and how it can feel overwhelming in that whole level, like you do want to be the perfect cook and have the perfect home, And the narrative was for the longest time that if you're not doing these things, you're not fulfilling your role as a true woman and as a good woman, not having that perfect household as well as juggling the perfect job, and like rising up in that industry to make sure that you are showing that a woman can do this. Like all of these narratives.
I have two thoughts on that I am fascinated by old magazines, old emity magazines, old calls magazines, old and the idea of profect Who were these people who were who were like pushing the idea of perfection on women, Like you couldn't just serve jello. It had to come in a mold and it had to be topped. It had to be ambrosia, and it had to have like stuff on top of it. You couldn't just serve lemonade. It had to have like little throwing wedges of lemons with Maraschino cherries in it. I mean, who were these people who were forcing, you know, this idea of womanhood on I would love, you know, and not like I have all the time in the world, But part of me wants to go back and go inside those editorial pages. You know, you look at the editorial page, like who was this? How did they come up with his ideas? Did they live lives of perfections themselves? Or were were they doing this to moment they were going home and you know and eating boiled eggs for dinner because they you know, if you were doing this and you were a woman, you were working yourself and raising a family, or was there secretly a cabal of men you know, who were coming up with these ideas and forcing it on women, and then even into the nineteen seventies, I mean, Michelle Obama and I talked about this in her episode that Angelie ad that add about you can bring home the bacon. Yeah, fry it up in the pan and never let them forget you're a man. And when I was an NPR, I actually thought about doing this, and I because we considered all things, and I actually thought about doing it, and I just never have. And maybe after this conversation, I should actually go ahead and do it, because I actually wanted to find the person and talk to them who came up with that ad. Yes, you know, I wanted to actually talk to them. And it was at about perfume. It wasn't even about food. You know, it makes sense, and it's and she's got a trench coat on. You should go back and look at the you can find it on.
You know, you're talking about it. She has held this vague memory of the yes.
And she's you know, and that you take off and she's got like that Keana dress on, and you know, and then the idea is that she's frying at bacon. And I guess the implication is that the dress is going to come off and she's going to go, you know, make somebody happy. But she can do all that and still make bacon and still be perfect and smell good because she's bearing Anjuli.
Well, she don't smell at bacon. But yeah, we actually had a conversation because we had this similar with my partner's mother talking about how like southern magazines really messed her up and saying that she had to make the perfect Christmas or she was failing as a mother and a wife. Like she held that for the longest time. And I'm like, what is this culture that has done this thing? You are right as men and capitalism.
Like simple, Yeah, I mean I have I have theories about this. I think that you know, I think that they were just trying to figure out at a post war period how to create new roles for people exactly. And I think that that's why men were There was a whole culture of men mowing lawns. And I think it was frankly, get them out of the house. Yes, you know, go mow the lawn, Go do something, Go do something, just so you're not home like lording over everybody else.
And thanks break.
Maybe that's why fishing culture grew also, get out of the house.
Oh my gosh, I love this. I really want you to do this, becaure because I need to know. For me, the kitchen has always been kind of a fraught space of like, I enjoyed the time with my mom, but then like I guess the men in my family felt bad, and so they would come in and start talking to us, and I'm like, no, I don't want you to be in here. If you're not gonna help, like, then get out. But I actually do enjoy the cooking part with my mom, but it's also one of my earliest memories of getting really angry. So I'm like, I don't get what you're expect to do this. I don't understand it. And I feel like the kitchen, as you mentioned, it's been it's this space where you learn so much because it's the kitchen table is like a place where the bills are building up, or the homework is being done, or the arguments are being had or all of these things, and it's just when you look back at it, you're completely right. It makes so much sense. People have all these stories that maybe they're like, oh, I haven't thought about that in a long time because I wasn't processing it then, but now I am, and the kitchen has become a really political space. It is like one of the I've tried to get to the bottom of this, Michelle, is why do we still tell women to get back to the kitchen or go make a sandwich today?
Like?
Why is that still one of our biggest.
Yeah, you know we're talking right now, and there's actually a hearing going on in Washington, d C. Where Nominee is being questioned about, you know, getting reading the idea of women in combat and the idea that women should be moms and not in combat, as if you can't be both, you know both things. I think it's so interesting that you understood gender dynamics in your house at such an early age because of what happened in the kitchen. What did you learn about that? What did you divine from that?
At the time, I was very I just thought it was unfair. I remember thinking, like in a very childish I don't have like the understanding necessarily to define why, but I thought it was unfair because she would be like sitting down and my little brother would ask her, like, can you go get me something that he could have done. He could have just done it, but she would get up and do it, and she was like, no, it doesn't bother, It's easy. She wasn't upset by it. But II there was something in me that was like, I just don't like this. I don't get why he can't just do it. And I felt like I would have gotten up and done it. I wouldn't have asked her. And so there's just something in me that was like, I thought it was unfair, I guess.
And it's so deep because for some people it may be just a natural There are people who really get get great pleasure out of serving people, you know, and I totally understand that I probably fall within that category. Cooking is an act of love, you know, presenting a banquet to people as a act of love. But there also is an element of keeping the peace, you know, and there is an element of keeping up with the culture, you know, the cultural expectations, and then there's just you know, there's so much that goes into this. When I was writing my first book, I came upon this book about the Great Migration, but it was written through the prism of marriage and the pressures around people who were trying to figure out how to make it in new environments, who had fled, who were refugees from the Jim Crow South and brought all that trauma along with them because they had escaped terrorism. I mean, let's just be honest about that. They were they were running towards something better, but going out into the world and having to deal with all the outside pressures, particularly around race, and around finances and around inequality, and not ever being able to be fully who you who you have the potential to be because of the strictures that keep you from doing that, and the double strictures that keep you from doing that as a person of color and a woman of color. And then coming home, and the book talked about that home was often the one place. We talked about the kitchen being the one place where a woman had their you know, had full domain. Well, the home was the one place in a heteronormative marriage where the man had full domain. And so all the outside expectations, all the pressures would come home and you know, Nikki Giovanni and we just lost and that wonderful exchange with Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin where She's talking about fake it for me. Like you go out in the world and you smile and you figure out how to go along and get along because you have to go along, and you come home and you have the benefit of letting your hair down and being your full self and bringing all that anger home with you. But sometimes I wish you would just fake it for me, so I'm not the repository of all of that, you know, anger and frustration. And the kitchen was often you know, I imagine it probably played out in the bedroom, and it probably played out in the driveway, and it probably played out in the car on the way to church or whatever, but the kitchen was definitely a place where that played out. And as the kids, you know, you didn't see what happened in the kitchen. You maybe saw what happened in the front seat of the car, but you saw the back of their head, so you weren't seeing the sideways, glances, you know, and all the stuff that happens. But the kitchen is everything is on full display, so you're seeing, you know, everything, and it winds up being a certain kind of education for the family members who are in the kitchen, for the kids, for the mother in law, who's visiting for the neighbor, who's you know, checking everybody out, you know, and and the kind of inside voice outside voice. I mean, another thing that comes up in the episodes over and over and over again, regardless of what kind of kitchen we're talking about, is people talk about the mom phone voice. Do you know what I'm talking about? Your mom talking it and then you know, fussing at the kids speaking in a certain octave, and then the telephone rings Hello, all that just goes away, you know, like suddenly, you know, you better get yourself downstairs and get it together and get out the door. Hello. They just can switch it up, just.
Like, Yeah, I I have so many memories with the kitchen. When you were talking and asking about the kitchen and what it looked like, tell me about the setup of the kitchen, of your mama's kitchen, and I remembered immediately, like when I was young coming in. I was adopted at seven, so I was somewhat older learning English. But one of the things that I love to do. The way that my parents' kitchen was set up was the stove, uh and the oven were next to each other, but like had a little nook thing in between the dining room and the kitchen, so I could sit on the other side of the stove to watch my mother cook whatever it was cooking, and I would sit and have a conversation with her, whether I was singing to her about some made up song I had for the day, or telling her what happened at school, or to that she would she would listen, like you know, she'd do that, uh huh, uh huh. But I just remembered that memory so much because I was so they renovated it and they took that down and that was very hurt, like they did. But on top of that, that's also how my mom realized one time that she forgot me because I wasn't present while she was cooking, that she was supposed to pick me up somewhere. But all of those stories, it does feel like that kitchen is this moment of core memory of my childhood. Like my childhood was good. There was a lot of trauma, like most people, I think in general, but like there was a lot of trauma in trying to figure out my identity. But one of the things that I loved was feeling connected to my mother in that moment, to seeing her cooking and she wasn't she wasn't a bad cook, but she's cooked simply for four kids, very quickly. Whatever she had. So Hamburger Helper was always on the menu, Sloppy Joe's were on the menu, you know, stuff like that. And I had a weird relationship with that. I had to back and forth with that, But it was something about that the kitchen is like the heart of our home, and that's that familiarity of my mother. Like no, I didn't want anyone to ever touch me when I was sick except for my mom. I needed her to give me a hug. And that's that feel in that kitchen. Why do you think that it does belong to women like that? Why does it belong to the matriarch?
Well, you know, going back over centuries, this is the division of labor, you know, in gendered roles have been prescribed going back over centuries, you know, and there are aberrations to that. There are places where women do the hunting and gathering, but those are few and far between. So I think that it's something that is, you know, and I'm not sure that it's nature. I think that it's sort of decisions that were made about who was who was going to be viewed as strong and going to go out and fight wars and and hunt and gather, and who was going to like do the child rearing. Now, the child rearing is part of that, because women produce children and there's a certain point where they do have to quite literally feed a new human being with their bodies, and an out of that may have grown the expectation that they would that they would just be, you know, the person that would handle the kitchen handle the and you know, if you understand what life was like before there were stoves and refrigerators, you know the idea that women were doing this because they were the weaker sex. Well, I invite you to go out and gather water and carry you know, two buckets of water across a broom handle on your shoulder. That's the equivalent of like deadlifting, you know. I invite you to go out and use an axe to split wood and then carry all that wood into a cook stove and keep things going. I invite you to spend time with livestock. And so it's it's not necessarily that they were the weaker sex. There was an argument over time that women have been weaker of mind and you know, and then maybe that was an effort to keep them out of they didn't call it the workforce at that time, but to keep them away from life and letters. But this, this continued, and then there's a certain degree of social engineering that uh, you know, has happened over time and in capitalism. You know, there's a there's a book by Juju the Ship here. I can't remember the name of it, but she writes about the evolution of the kitchen and and how that was you know, aimed at at women and the lives that they led. And then there's cultural forces. So I can remember my own kitchen, but I could describe to you the Brady Bunch kitchen.
Mm hmm.
I remember where the oven was. I remember, you know, the color scheme. It looked like inside of a Burger King, kind of orange and brown. I remember Imber Laura Petrie's kitchen, you know, in the Dick Van Dyke Show. So there were all kinds of cultural clues. I can describe with great detail that fabulous kitchens that the Cosby's had, you know, with the big table in the center of the kitchen. I don't know if anybody in New York City has a kitchen that that's that is that large, but they managed to create a massive farmhouse style kitchen in a brownstone in New York City that you know that we all watched. Yeah, so there's there's no you know, easy answer to that, but there are a lot of ingredients that went into that stew. I'm kind of curious about life now because cooking, and I'd love to hear more from you because I'm older than both of you. Cooking has become it's something that we have to do to feed ourselves, but it's it's an obsession with I think millennials, and in a different kind of way, you know, Instagram shows us. There's a kind of afformative aspect of cooking. There's a kind of communal dinners. There is a greater interest in this, and I'm wondering if there's more gender parody because of that.
That's I mean again, Michelle, I wish we could just there's so many things we could talk about with this, because I think I was thinking about we've done episodes on like Betty Crocker and women kind of being alone in the kitchen and having this person that wasn't real but they really connected to because they felt so isolated. Yeah, and then that moved into like food shows, and then that moved into Instagram and social media, and from there it just there are so many issues to unpack because I do think it has become, at least in my friend group. I feel a lot of times it is more equitable cook king. There's still sort of lanes people seem to stay in, but there's also kind of there's the whole trad wife thing, which we've talked about before, and there's this food prep thing that I feel I don't think it's as prevalent now, but it got really out of hand.
For a while, it was still happening. It still happened, like preparing your meals for the week, and that little tiny container.
Of that I did, Oh I'm a I'm a fan of it for.
The whole I prepped for Sunday for the whole week.
It got out of hand, thought like.
People all excel based on that, like let me help you with this specific type of containent, like the capitalism that came from that came from that. It became such a thing and it had to be manly and or if you're not eating all proteins and you're not doing.
Oh, it's like, yeah, I mean I'm a big fan of the prepping. I did that for years when I was working. I would prep for the week and it would just I could cook so much faster. I would just spend Sunday watch something on you know, watch a great movie, listen to something, and just prep for the week. But I understand what you're saying that Instagram. I mean it's like the butter board. Remember for a while everyone was doing those butterboard Like nobody wants to spread butter on a wooden board. I mean, like like dip stuff into butter. I mean that's so things take off. But one of the reasons I asked the gender of question because you know, even though the world of the kitchen has been gendered toward women, if you look at celebrity chef culture, right, it's still so male. Yes, And I'm noticing if you're on Instagram, a lot of the most popular people on Instagram are who are cooking and doing that kind of performative cooking are also men. So but I wonder if that translates into people picking up the kind of the responsibility of cooking at home different to cook on Instagram with the right lighting and you know, the right angles and everything else. Something that can feel like drudgery, you know, because people you got to eat, so someone's got to cook. And when that happens, is there still the sort of what's for dinner culture as opposed to you know, what can we cook for dinner? The what's for dinner? What's for dinner is such a loaded question because it's the expectation that.
You were going to you're going to perhaps something.
The dinner, as opposed to let's talk about what we should have for dinner, right, because what's for dinner means it kind of means what are you serving me for dinner?
Exactly. I think we did talk about this in the line of that, yes, chefs is more dominated as a profession by men, but even still today women are more likely to be the home cooks. And you can even tell almost in the type of food being served that women are more like going to have a little homage to the old style or their family style versus like being the professional French cuisine like you see that line up. Still even though because it's just like in everything we talked about with brewing beer, it was that same mentality it used to be women who did that. Then it became profitable, so men started taking it.
I didn't know that that women used to they were the home Brewers.
Yeah, they were called witches sometimes.
Okay, learn something new.
You're interviewing us. This is not going.
I can't help it.
This is not the way it's not supposed to go. One of the things that I love about food in general. And again you spoke to me with your books as well as your questions and everything, because you did hit into like race identity in your book book you released uh last year and it's still going strong, and I was able to do it on audible not a sponsor ya, but that uh, it does so well. You bring in people. I almost it's almost like a podcast. I was like, WHOA, what's happening here? And then with the jazz transitions, I was like, yes, I I wanted to ask you about this.
Is the first music that came back with it. I was like.
The jazz transitions, I'm like, I see what she's doing. I see what she's trying to listen to. Being comfortable before we get like our hearts smashed. I'm fine. But the one of the things that that connection for me and finding my identity is not necessarily just cultural, but it's food. It's food based. I really have been triggered by food memories, like to the point that I would have like panic attacks. I'm like, oh no, this is too real to my pre adoption era, but really like taking it on and honing and all and realizing, no, these are things that I know. The memories that I have of my biological grandmother was that she owned the snack bar or a restaurant, and I remember distinctly smells from that, foods that I ate from that, and I can't like, I have discovered it as an adult and it has brought me into such a place that I'm like where am I Like, I feel like there are memories in the back of my head that I can't quite grasp onto, but I feel it. And this is this level of knowing that this is part of my identity and it's because of food, and obviously that connection is so deep. You were talking to Eric Nahm about this and his culture and trying to uh get that southern ga I love that was like from Atlanta. Yeah, where's the Yeah, you.
Should find him. I need to be friends.
But like the fact that he does have this connection of like being you know, a first generation with his mother who still has very very like dominance in the kitchen. But teaching that to him and learning that culture and learning his idea of being both about being from the US and then also being from current culture. It just spoke so much. Why do you think these types of conversations are so important to be had, especially when it comes to identity.
Well, because they help us understand ourselves and each other and our complex world. I you know, people say, oh, we've got to have a conversation about race, or we have to have a conversation about identity. I'd like us to get to a point where we can say, we get to have a conversation because you know, I just learned eighty five things about you and in that short exchange, you know, and if we kept going, because you know, I want to ask you, like when you discovered that you remembered I can't help myself, but you know when you realized, oh, I have that food memory. Were you in a market, you know, were you out in the world someplace? I mean our food memories the kitchen. I think the other reason that I think it's important for us to have these conversations because it's how we find each other, it's how we educate ourselves about each other, it's how we do self exploration. And it's because it's interesting, because people are very interesting and the kitchen is such a interesting space to do that. Also because the kitchen animates every single one of your senses. It's you know, it's all there. And so those early kitchen memories are not just about food. They're not just about nutrition, They're about emotion. Food is linked to emotion, the emotion of the event, the emotion behind who gave that to you, the emotion attached to where you were at in your life, the emotion around a memory that you just haven't had enough time to go back and explore. And so that's why it's it's you know, if we said, tell me about your your mama's dining room, a lot of stuff happens in the dining room, it would be a very different conversation than tell me about what happens in your kitchen.
It's true.
And I am sitting on my hands right now because I do want to ask you, like, what are you going to do to go back and and excavate and cultivate those memories and did your parents ever try to help you explore your culture through food?
You know, I want to hold on to that so that you have to come back. I'm gonna make you come back. I'm gonna make you get interested.
This is this is me, you know, conversation, I will interview the two of you.
Oh wow, I love that. Well, I also got I had the honor to talk to you on the other podcast I do Saver, which is about food. And one thing that we were talking about over there is that I think a lot of people make the mistake of divorcing food in the kitchen from everything it that like history and identity and gender dynamics and all of that stuff. What do you think, through your work and through doing this show, how do you think we can see all of that through those conversations and how does it shape us and to who we are when we become adults.
Well, I hope that when people hear these episodes that they wonder about their own lives. And we now are creating a space, and I know that people do because we've created a space where people can send their own audiograms or video messages to YMK at Higher Round Productions Dot com and you know, we listen to them tell their own stories. And so I hope that it's like the book. Also that if you read the book or listen to the book, if you listen to the podcast or eventually watch it, because we're going to be doing video episodes. Also now that you will have a greater curiosity about your own space, that you might pick up your phone and call your cousin. Do you remember? You know this, so you might if you're lucky enough to still have living parents, that you might want to talk to them, that you might sort of explore. Okay, is this why I keep a can of bacon grease next to the stove because my mom did or do I never ever, ever, ever ever want to do this because I don't want to do what my mom did. I don't want to actually follow that path. So I hope it leads to to exploration, you know, perhaps more listening of course, and more reading of you know, deeper exploration of the projects, but also a little bit of self self exploration. I think that's that is the highest compliment I get when people say, you know, it made me really think about my own space, and you know, now I want to go back and explore my own kitchen. And one of the things that we hear over and over again on the show is I've never said this before. I've never told anyone this before. We learn about things that people haven't talked about before. Conan O'Brien tell us this great story. It's one of the stories that really sticks with me. His mother, Conan O'Brien, the comedian late night host now head of Team Coco his podcast Empire and Really is an Empire, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and his mother. They have working classroots, and his mother did well in school and went off to fancy university and became one of the first women at a white shoe law firm in Boston, Massachusetts, and excelled there and did really well, and while at the same time raising like a passle of kids back home, you know, Irish Catholic family, and I imagine, I'm you know, the juggle for her must have been incredible, right, because the expectations, you know, for her to you know, maybe I don't know if she felt the expectation to be perfect, but there's a lot of months that had to be fed. While you also definitely had the expectation to be perfect in a law firm where there weren't a lot of other women. And he tells this great story about how she brought the kids to work and they got to see her office and how proud she was for them to see that. But he also remembered this story about how she was and he just recently lost both of his parents, and so it really means a lot to me that he shared the story with us that she was not allowed to be in the boardroom when they had meetings, lunch meetings with big clients, but she was so respected that they needed her close by, so she would eat at a card table outside the boardroom. And Conan is telling the story and it's and it's kind of funny. He's talking about, well, they're you know, lawsuit. I mean that would in today's environment, you probably couldn't do that. But he mentioned something that I've always thought of is that he said there were few people, few lawyers had such respect for her. I think her name is Ruth, that they would no, I'm good, I'm going to go and eat with her outside and if you need me, I'll be outside with her. And I love that he shared that story. I love that she shared it with him because she wanted him to know that the hill was pretty steep for her. And I think that she was conveying to him, at least the message I took from it, and I shared the story with my own kids who are adults. He said, be the person who gets up and goes and has has lunch with her, you know, because that's the real power. The people who were in the room excluding her, they think they have the power. The real power is to change the dynamic and be the person who gets up and says, you know, I'm good. I'm going to go out lunch with her if she's smart enough to be outside of the room, because we need her. She's the one who deserves to be in my She deserves my company, I deserve and I'm honored to be with her. You know. That's not a I don't. I don't think Conan's sharing that story in late night, you know. And and so I'm glad that we have an opportunity to mine those kinds of stories so that we understand a little bit about this person who makes us laugh, but also that we just are able to send those really little intimate moments out into the world to better understand our culture. I mean, right now, we do this with primarily people who have a certain amount of acclaim or their marquee figures. But that's why I wanted to open up the inbox because I much like I do with the Race Card Project and I did in the book Our Hidden Conversations, I want to hear from all kinds of people. I know someone, for instance, his mom had a kitchen and it was a stop in the Green Book, you know, the Green Book that people used when they traveled in the South as people of color, and they couldn't go and she had a stop in the Green Book on Memphis. I would love you know, I'm trying to get him to record his story because I mean imagine and he would help her peel potatoes and he would chop up stuff with her. And a lot of famous people went through Memphis and they couldn't go to restaurants or hotels, and so they'd wind up eating in her kitchen. And I think things like that probably happened all over the place.
Well this because this, Yeah, so I'm gonna have to tap in before you leave us, because you are a masterclass in interviewing and story collecting, which is why I love that title because being on a podcast, you know, and doing this interviewing is a skill, is a talent that is difficult to do sometimes, especially when trying to get that personal story, that depth that you want to see this person. So can you advise us, oh master interview in his story collecting, on how to do a good interview?
Well, I think curiosity is a superpower. Yeah, So you have to be curious. It helps to be informed, It helps to have an idea of an arc of the conversation, but to then have a complete willingness to throw that out the window. So you go where the story takes you. But I think a big part of it. And I'm going to be careful about how I say this because I don't want to impune anybody. But you know, we all listen to a lot of podcasts, we all watch a lot of interviews. I think one of the things that people sometimes lose track of is a good interviewer gets out of the way. You know, you're I'm there to make room for someone else to tell their story, and so I keep the balloon up in the air, but I try to recede. I try to pull back so they and the spaces and and to think about. You know, some of the best answers come from the oddest questions. I just I don't know why this came into my head, but I was interviewing Dave Brubeck, the jazz musician, and I was able to do it in person. And as I was talking to them, and I realized, you know, as you get older, your hands tighten up, you know. And I said, tell me about your hands. They said, no one has ever asked me that he's a pianist. You know, no one has ever. So, you know, to think about that sort of simple thing and sometimes those yield the best, the best answers, I mean, the crazy idea, tell me about your mom's kitchen, to go go where it sounds like star trek, to go where no man has gone.
But but you know.
Think of the questions that no one is asking.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for submit. I feel like you to like work advice.
Sorry, I had to get it while she was here. Yeah, this is invaluable.
Well, there's one other thing I would say is stop talking sometimes, you know, especially in a difficult moment, because if it's difficult, your instinct is to fill void with your voice, and sometimes it's hard to do, but that's be the one that wishes for It's like a game of chicken.
Well, thank you so much for being here. I it's amazing when you were talking about you know, quote unquote simple question that has so much to it. I've like honestly fighting back tears that Conan O'Brien story because you can relate so much to it and you can connect so much to it through these stories. And we got a little bit of a teaser for your next season of Your Mama's Kitchen, and I'm very, very excited. But is there anything that you want to tease or that you're excited about that's coming up?
Oh? With the first three episodes are just gold. It's Stephen and Ebbie Colbert and you know, in their partnership and they just love food and they're so funny and they're so funny together. Ina Garten, have you read her book?
Yeah?
I highly recommend it to be ready when the luck happens. She had a very I mean, for someone who brings so much joy to people, she had a very unhappy childhood and emotionally violent and sometimes physically violent. And she overcame that and she found someone who understood her, and she writes with clarity and honesty, and it's a great book and it's a great conversation. And she is someone who just broke molds and created new paths and I think people will really dig that. And we sat down with John Legend in his Creation House, Life Goals. He has a house that he and Chrissy don't live in, but it's where they create. She creates recipes, he creates music, and he too had a very difficult childhood that he's only now just starting to open up about. And so you understand not just John Legend as an artist. He is a beautiful man inside and out. I've got to know him over many years. But you understand that great, big heart of his, you know, because you realize that it was broken pretty early and he had to figure out how to put it back together. And it's almost like I can't remember the name of the art, but the Chinese principle of the break a piece of and then you put it back together, using gold to put the pieces back together. It's almost like that represents what happened to him. That is, his heart is stronger, his soul is richer, his life is stronger because of the brokenness. It's there's strength in that brokenness. And all of this talked about, you know, through the prism of the Kitchen and in every episode. I guess I should remind people that everyone we talk to gives us a delicious recipe. Yes, so it's going to be a great season. We also talked to Big Freda and Wendell Pierce and Susan Orlean and Lashana Lynch who is in Jamaican and lives in Britain, and she, you know, talked about life growing up there. It's good stuff. We serve up some delicious every week starting January twenty eighth, So pull up the seat and join us every week.
Yes, I heard there's mac and cheese involved, and I'm incredibly excited.
Yes, and he claims it's the best mac and cheese on the planet.
So I will be very happy to test that theory.
Maybe we should have a mac and cheese Sunday where we, like, everybody like we can, could we recruit you to do that. It's like in early February, everybody, everybody makes John Legends mac and cheese on an appointed Sunday, and then we all should we do.
That haven't you done all these recipes or or have you had favorites and any of these recipes?
I wrote test the recipes, and I do have a few favorites. Michelle Obama's red rice is a banger. Okay, is a banger. It is really good hot or cold that's worked its way into the rotation. Andy Garcia's pocacy took a lot of time. I mean it was a labor intensive, labor of love, but the results were crazy good. I mean, my family is like, and then you put raisins in there?
What what? Wait?
What? Yeah? But you put the raisins in and they stay and they stop up all the like the wine and the marinate and everything else, and they become these little flavor bombs. They reconstitute and turn into almost like grapes, and so they you know, they're dried up. I mean that's what they are, dried grapes, right, And they turned back into grapes, but the filling is got out of the marinate, and so when you bite them, this little explosion of deliciousness. So that that was a real winner. Abby Wombox mom makes this pasta dish, which my family really loves. There were the snow cookies that Nicole avant or that her mother makes were a big hit for the holidays. So yeah, the food has been the food has been spot on. For the mac and cheese. My son now makes the mac and cheese and our family, all my kids good and he has taken over the mac and cheese. So he's actually going to make the John Legend mac and cheese coming up. And I actually liked the idea, though I think I'm gonna we may need to run with that, is to like everyone do, because you remember Samin Nosraat did the big Lasagna where everyone made her lasagna during COVID at the same time, and that's the first time I made lasagnah is when I did that. And so her chicken soup also, she did a Persian chicken soup that was super lemonye like, like so much that your cheeks kind and she then layered it with a little bit of ghee. Hmm. Yeah. It's it's you know, it's winter and much of the country right now, and that's a that's a really good one for this time of the year.
I'm getting very hungry.
Yes, yes, one of the risk of the job of food journalists. Yeah, yes, well, I am so down for mac and cheese.
Let us know today, Okay, I'll let you know. We'll pick a Sunday, maybe like Super Bowl Sunday or right before super Bowl. But yeah, we definitely let's do that. Yeah, and I think John and Chrissy would probably we'll recruit them also, obviously.
Yes, we know you're so busy. I have so many other questions.
Would well, you know, maybe I'll come back one day.
Samantha has already laid the track.
I'm trying. I'm trying. Look, we have so many things to talk about. I'm just saying.
Because I feel like I wanted to talk about price dynamics because a lot of times I think when people talk about their mama's kitchen, there's always like she made this cast role that was just cans and stuff. But then there's also the very labor intensive things that takes so long. So yes, definitely please come back. Is there any where can the good listeners find you? Is there anything else you want to shout out?
Well, you know they can. They can find us wherever you your mama's kitchen, you can find wherever you listen to podcast. Our Hidden Conversations is sold in bookstores across America. It's still it's you know, was released a year ago, almost a year ago this week, and people are still finding it and elevating it. I always encourage people to listen as well as read it because you want to see it, because the pictures are beautiful, but the audio, many of the people are telling their own stories. So when you when Samuel said it felt like a podcast, it was meant to feel like a podcast. I mean, I really wanted to create a real experience. And if you've listened to this and you thought, you know, I have six words I want to send, you can find us at the Racecard Project dot com. You can send us your six words story. I am. I write columns for MSNBC, and I show up, you know, occasionally sharing my thoughts on air, so you can find me lots of different ways. I as what's the fake back to all fields? You know?
Yes, yes, well, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for being here.
I have love talking to both of you.
Thank you.
Hope we do it again, yes please.
And that brings us to the end of our interview with Michelle Norris. It was so delightful, if so lovely. Hopefully we're going to get to do this mac and cheese thing. I am so.
In Yeah, I don't think I'll be good at it. I might have to put my partner onto it, because he does a really good mac and cheese, except for I can't trust him because he likes to deviate the actual recipe and that drives me crazy, Like it's both good and bad.
I think that would be interesting to talk about though, because we kind of touched on that when she was talking about her son making the mac and cheese and like the yeah, the gender equity when it comes to social media and cooking, that would be interesting. If you made one and he made one.
Mine would stick to the recipe for like absolute I don't like my first time, especially making it something for the first time. I follow the recipe strictly, and then after that I'll see what I want to do.
But he all over the place, and I am like, what do I have?
I mean, And that's talent though, I've been talking about that, the talent of being able to create from what you have but actually make like intensive recipes with like oh I have these beans and this kind of protein, I'm gonna do this broth. Then maybe I could add this that's in it because I also was thinking about the fact that she had people coming on sharing family recipes. I'm like, I don't have everything I have either comes from another recipe or comes from my mom never teaching me something like even I don't know she could. She doesn't know how to do that. But most of her recipes, as I mentioned, it was like an easy to go box dinner or something that's just simple enough because she was feeding so many of us. But like, yeah, we don't have that.
Right, And honestly, if we had had more time, I would have loved to hear your conversation expand about because you have such an interesting like southern Korea.
Well, like I told you, Like in the interview, we talk about Eric Nahm, who is from He says Atlanta. I have a like he says, on the outskirts of Atlanta, but his mom cooks all Korean cuisine to the fact that she flies to Korea, gets supplies and comes back wow. But then he grew up in Atlanta and has his own style. That's both of those things. So I really love bad perspective, and I love that that's common enough because we also, like Edward Lee I was talking about the cooking show that's the Korean cooking show and he was on there. But he we went to his restaurant and I realized way later who he was. I was like, oh, because I was very critical at first. I was like, who is this dude? Combining Korean in Southern and DC. Who is this? And it turned out to be Edward Lee, who was from Kentucky. I was like, Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and I felt a certain way. I was like, who is this? Who's representing my life in a restaurant?
Well, that's the thing, uh is we talked about it in this episode, but all the histories and identity and all that stuff. But also like I do that too, where I'm like, who are you making this food? I'm just curious does it.
Come from your heart? Does it come from money? But yeah, so those are the conversations that man, I think there's so many subjects that we could come on to, and we were all because essentially she's not necessarily like a food journalist, like she's there for the stories and it happens to be about food, Like it's it's very interesting because I was talking if you get a chance listeners, and I think we probably should do her book as a book. Like I said, it's listening to it is a different, whole different scenario because she is doing interviews because she didn't want to tell their story for them, and so she had different actors or different people come in and represent their own six words story that interjects and then it's beautiful how she does it with her own research and work behind it, So definitely worth to listen. They do have in the audible or audio version the pictures that come with it, so they're also gorgeous. But I think I'm going to have to pick up that one up soon.
I think. So it's amazing how quickly she and the people she interviews will move you to tears. I could not describe.
Wow.
But there are stories we all can connect or relate to in some way that I think that's why they're so powerful. I would also say check out if you want to learn more about her history in food journalism or why she was interested in it, check out the episode I did over on Saver with Lauren interviewing Michelle Norris, because it was great. It was a great interview, but also, yeah, she's done all of these things. She's got the second season coming out out of Your Mama's Kitchen and it's really beautiful and it's amazing, so please check it out listeners, and if you would like to contact us. If you have any thoughts about Your Mama's Kitchen, you can contact Michelle she gave you the information, but you can also contact us if you would like. You can email us at Hello at Stuffmenever Told You dot com or Stuff Media mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. Both work. You can find us on Blue Sky at mom Stuff podcast or on Instagram and TikTok at stuff When Ever Told You. We're also on YouTube. We have a tea public store, and we have a book you can get wherever you get your books. Thanks as always too, our super producer Christina, our executive Bruce and Maya, and our contruger Joey. Thank you and thanks to you for listening Stuff One Never Told You Just Prediction by Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can check out your ieartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or reever you listen to your favorite show.