What’s the secret to shedding fat as a foodie who refuses to sacrifice joy or flavor?
This week’s guest changed the way we think about food and mom and pop businesses in America. He’s a legend in journalism and beloved in the food world, saving countless independent restaurants from certain destruction.
As the creator of the beloved TV series Diners, Drive‑Ins and Dives and many others, a producer for Good Morning America and network news, and the author of Food Americana, two‑time Emmy winner David Page has covered serious ground throughout his 55‑year career. You’re going to dig this one.
You’ll discover:
Please take a quick second to make sure you’re subscribed to the Abel James Show wherever you listen to podcasts, and to stay up-to-date you can sign up for my newsletter at AbelJames.com.
You can also join Substack as a free or paid member for ad-free episodes of this show, to comment on each episode, and to hit me up in the DMs. Join in the fun at abeljames.substack.com. And if you’re feeling generous, write a quick review for the Abel James Show on Apple or Spotify. You rock.
This episode is brought to you by:
Peluva - Visit Peluva.com and use the code WILD for 15% off your first pair
Troscriptions - Go to troscriptions.com/WILD or enter WILD at checkout for 10% off your first order
Manukora Honey - Go to MANUKORA.com/WILD to save 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts
This week’s guest changed the way we think about food and mom and pop businesses in America. He’s a legend in journalism and beloved in the food world, saving countless independent restaurants from certain destruction.
As the creator of the beloved TV series Diners, Drive‑Ins and Dives and many others, a producer for Good Morning America and network news, and the author of Food Americana, two‑time Emmy winner David Page has covered serious ground throughout his 55‑year career. You’re going to dig this one.
You’ll discover:
- Why “giving a shit” is the secret to success
- Why offal and haggis deserve a spot on your menu
- How reality TV and the internet destroyed truth (and what to do about it)
- And much more…
- Substack at Culinary Characters Unlocked
- Download and listen to the Culinary Characters Unlocked podcast on Spotify, YouTube, Apple or wherever you go for podcasts
- Grab Food Americana by David Page on Amazon
Please take a quick second to make sure you’re subscribed to the Abel James Show wherever you listen to podcasts, and to stay up-to-date you can sign up for my newsletter at AbelJames.com.
You can also join Substack as a free or paid member for ad-free episodes of this show, to comment on each episode, and to hit me up in the DMs. Join in the fun at abeljames.substack.com. And if you’re feeling generous, write a quick review for the Abel James Show on Apple or Spotify. You rock.
This episode is brought to you by:
Peluva - Visit Peluva.com and use the code WILD for 15% off your first pair
Troscriptions - Go to troscriptions.com/WILD or enter WILD at checkout for 10% off your first order
Manukora Honey - Go to MANUKORA.com/WILD to save 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts
[00:00:01]
Abel James:
Hey, all. This is Abel James, and thanks so much for joining us on the show. What's the secret to losing weight as a foodie who refuses to sacrifice joy or flavor? This week's guest changed the way that we think about food and mom and pop businesses in America. He's a legend in journalism and beloved in the food world, saving countless independent restaurants from certain destruction. As the creator of the beloved TV show Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives and many others, to producer of Good Morning America and Network News, to author of Food Americana, two time Emmy Award winner David Page, has covered some serious ground in his fifty plus year career. I think you're really gonna enjoy this episode. Quick plug before we get to the interview, please make sure that you're subscribed to the Abel James Show wherever you get your podcast. For the latest updates and goings on in Austin, Texas and beyond, be sure to sign up for my newsletter at abeljames.com.
You can also join my Substack at ablejames.substack.com to comment on posts, get ad free versions of this show, and also shoot me a DM. That's at a b e l james dot substack dot com. Look forward to seeing you there. Alright. On this episode with the legendary David Page, you're about to discover why giving a shit is the secret to success, why awful and haggis deserve a spot on your menu, how reality TV and the Internet destroyed truth and what to do about it, and much more. Alright. Let's go meet David. Welcome back, folks. Two time Emmy winner David Page changed the world of food television by creating, developing, and executive producing the groundbreaking show Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives.
Before that, as a network news producer based in London, Frankfurt, and Budapest, he traveled Europe, Africa, and The Middle East covering some of the biggest stories in the world and developing a passion for some of the world's most incredible food. David is also author of the delightful book Food Americana, where he explores the world of burgers, barbecue, ice cream, and other American favorites. Thanks so much for joining us today, David. It's an honor to have you here. Well, thanks so much for having me. So I've been a fan, from afar of your work for many years. As we were saying before I started recording, I think you've done an incredible service to the world of food and and largely culture as well, not just in America, but but really everywhere. But what was it about covering some of these very important and and thought of as important things, in the world of news to transitioning to the world that is sometimes thought of as more frivolous or entertainment based, the world of food? But as you mentioned in your work, it's really a gateway to culture. So how did you make that transition?
[00:28:28] David Page:
Well, several questions in there. Number one, storytelling is storytelling. Okay? Number two, I approach what I do as a continuation of journalism. It's got to be accurate. It's got to be fair. It's got to be correct. You have to find out what the facts are and go with them. I mean, that was a standard I applied to Diners, Drive ins, and Dives, which frankly confused the network because, you know, I I had an executive tell me on more than one occasions to fake something, and I said, no. I'm not gonna do that. You know, when when I went overseas I'm not sure anyone uses the term anymore. When I went overseas, initially, after years as a local reporter and producer, domestically, The assignment came kind of as a surprise to me. I had never considered living elsewhere.
And, frankly, while I was arguably reasonably well educated, it occurred to me there was a whole lot I simply did not know about the places I was now being sent, and this was pre Internet. You couldn't just Google Czechoslovakia. And I found out pretty quickly that one of the ways to begin, I say begin because how how do you understand another culture, but to begin to understand another culture and another country's history is through their food because it's reflective. Cuisines, which by the way, are for the most part certain area.
Cuisines reflect what the reality was and to some extent still is in a particular place. I mean, when I lived in Frankfurt, Germany, at the time, West Germany, on the rare day off, I I would drive at a very high rate of speed down the Autobahn to Strasbourg to have a dish called chacrut. Well, Strasbourg's in France. Chacrut is a German dish, but it's reflective of the fact that that city went back and forth in terms of who owned it between Germany and France repeatedly. When I went to to Italy, to, let's say, Tuscany, and, the foods centered to a great extent around wild boar, that reflects the fact that that area had long been poor.
And if you wanted to eat meat, you had to kill it yourself. And wild boar ran relatively rampant, so that was available to you. I used food. Well, I used it to eat and enjoy, but it it became for me indicative of so much more about the cultures I was working in. Of course, there was the time, my first trip to Austria, we finished, because of the time difference. You you would send your story to nightly news at, you know, around midnight, European time. We finished up, and I asked the the Austrian drivers, who were working with us. I said, hey, guys. Take me to to your favorite restaurant. So they took me to a Texas ribs joint. No way.
Yeah. Not not a particularly good Texas ribs joint either.
[00:31:45] Abel James:
Sometimes that says a lot, but it's incredible what a food or or a type of food or cuisine can say. Like, the first time I went to to Hawaii and saw and experienced what they did with spam, my mind was completely blown because what But you you know the history of that, of course. Yeah. Maybe you could share it quickly. But a lot of people don't know the history of some of these incredible foods. That's one of the things I love about your book as you really dig in.
[00:32:09] David Page:
Before easy cargo transportation of food by airplane, you couldn't send stuff to Hawaii or Guam, which is another place that's big on spam, that would spoil. And, look, spam doesn't spoil. It apparently has the half life of a nuclear isotope. So spam became a a popular utilitarian dish in Hawaii, and now, of course, there's spam musubi. That's the most famous dish. It's basically a sort of a a sushi roll, but using spam instead of fish. And, by the way, you don't have to have fish for it to be sushi. But and the same situation in Guam. You know? Far away, how do you get food there? Well, the spam traveled. Yeah. Spam traveled. By by the way, you know, you talk about local culture and and what's available.
I don't particularly enjoy most Hawaiian cuisine because it's tremendously bland. And it's with the addition influences from Japan mostly and soy sauce and mirin, it it's become less bland over the years. But traditionally, native Hawaiian dishes like kalua pork are tremendously bland because there was only one seasoning, and that was sea salt extracted on the rocks from the ocean. There was nothing else. There was no pepper. You know? So and that's a reflection of the life that that native Hawaiians were living.
[00:33:32] Abel James:
And speaking of bland, I mean, especially in as Westerners, modern Westerners, we don't eat ancestrally as as much as other cultures might with these traditions of eating kind of foods that would be considered strange, you know, stinking fermented fish. What were some that stuck out to you in your travels?
[00:33:50] David Page:
Well, look. The whole category of offal, the whole category of eating the whole animal has always fascinated me because we're one of the few cultures that doesn't. And to some extent, I think that reflects the fact that certainly post World War two, we went through a a very lengthy period of of time of of thinking that we were, as a society, really well off. Now those generalizations applied only to white people, which is a whole other I mean, black veterans didn't qualify for the GI bill, for Christ's sake. So we've we're big to throw stuff out.
Other cuisines, other cultures are not, and to a great extent, take great pride and pleasure in using every part of the animal. I mean, you know, you talk to some chefs and chefs who are into, what's called nose to tail cooking, and and they'll often talk to you about a respect for the animal when you kill it, and that it is disrespectful to kill an animal and then throw half of it away. Also, look, the eating of awful, it was, for the most part, traditionally, it was not ever considered, in most cultures, a different class of food. It was just something you did with the food. And you'll also see that the poorer the culture or the poorer the section of the culture, the more inventive they would get in using all parts of the animal. I mean, I'm New York Jewish. I love a dish called kishka, which having to watch my weight and and keep diabetes at bay, I I don't get to eat very often. But, basically, it is an intestine stuffed with a combination of fat, spices, and grains.
Well, that's no different than haggis in in Scottish culture, and I'm sure I could come up with 30 or 40 other similar dishes, which were created to provide the most calories for the lowest investment for people before they went out to till their fields in the morning. And by the way, it may sound disgusting to you, but there's nothing better than haggis. I bizarrely enough, when I was working out of the NBC London Bureau and I, for a time, was the producer assigned to the Northern Ireland beat at the time of The Troubles, as they called it, you know, serious sectarian violence, I would fly from Gatwick Airport to Belfast, Northern Ireland on, I think it was a Northern Irish airline at six in the morning.
And for some reason, breakfast was a Scottish dish. Break remember when airlines serve food? For some reason, the little thing that they would put on on your tray table was haggis, and I loved it. Now, there are many who consider me nuts, but but I absolutely, I loved it.
[00:37:01] Abel James:
It's one of those things where it's off putting at first. There are smells that are that we don't recognize and certainly wouldn't associate with with things that taste good. But once you do taste something like that, especially a few times, it seems like your your brain, your smells line up with the rest of your system, and it kinda gets that memo that, oh, I do like this. Also, let's face it. There are many
[00:37:22] David Page:
foods that serve as a flavor delivery system that by themselves don't offer very much and are prized either because of the flavors you add to them or because of texture. One of the things we as Americans don't get into is texture. Chinese cuisines with an s because China's a huge country with multiple cuisines. But Chinese cuisines tend to prize texture. My wife, daughter, and I were in Hong Kong for the Olympic games. I wasn't working, back back when the games were in Beijing. My daughter was not at Olympic level, but she was a competitive equestrian at the time, and we wanted to see the equestrian games, which were held in Hong Kong, not Beijing, ostensibly to include Hong Kong in the games. But realistically, no one was bringing a million dollar horse into Mainland China, given concerns about contagious illness for the animals. So they held those in Hong Kong. And I managed to convince the concierge at our hotel that I really wanted to eat a meal like a local, and they never believe westerners when you make that argument, but I finally got through to him and he directed me to a place. And going into it reminded me of visiting Mott Street in Chinatown in New York with my grandfather because you go downstairs and you end up, you know, it's it's subterranean. Anyway, we go downstairs. We go it's a huge room, and it's just filled with communal tables.
And best I can tell, we're the only non Asians in the place. And we have to make you know, there's no one greeting you, so we we find a spot at a table. And it basically turns out to be like a dim sum restaurant. Not like it. I guess a dim sum restaurant. Servers going around with what appear to be bamboo steam baskets, and you just you stop them, and you you get what you want. And it was a fascinating experience because when we finally got someone's attention, the first thing that happened is they brought over for each of us a bowl with water in it, tepid water, and some utensils, chopsticks and a soup spoon, which by looking around, I realized we were supposed to wash in the water. So the only sanitation going on here was wash your stuff into anyway. And so we're pointing and stuff's alright. It's all good.
And then I point to a server to to her basket, and from behind me, an elderly gentleman, no one has spoken to us, and, certainly, I've heard no English, but this guy behind us pipes up, that not for you. So, of course, I had to try it. It was duck foot, which has a texture. It's chewy, not a lot of flavor, but, I survived.
[00:40:13] Abel James:
Yeah. We've had plenty of chicken feet because we used Well, another another food of poverty.
[00:40:19] David Page:
Yeah. No. I mean, there's there's a great story about the sundae bird in American southern African American culture. The chicken would tend to be served on a sundae to a great extent because it was not a cheap food. And if you had chickens and you were raising them, the argument always was, well, I can't kill something that's laying eggs. So chicken was served on Sunday. And I'm pointing with very broad brushes here. Please understand that. And the preacher would be hosted on a rotating basis by various members of the congregation. So when the preacher came over, he was offered the first option at what he wanted from the bird, and then mom and dad would get theirs. And by the time he got down, you know, to the fifth kid, it was chicken feet and wings.
So learn to love them.
[00:41:15] Abel James:
And there's something to it. I mean, it's one of the most powerful sources of collagen, which now people are spending umpteen billion dollars on supplements to get when Of course. When you Well, look. We're trying to
[00:41:27] David Page:
I used to say about making TV news. By being there with your camera, you're distorting reality. Your job in the edit room was to return the perception of reality to what you distorted by your presence. We do kind of the same thing with our food system these days. We've taken everything out, and now we're looking for ways to put it back in. I mean, all of these supposedly good for you food products, you know, with probiotics or prebiotics or this, that, or the other thing. You know, first of all, so many of them don't have enough of anything to matter. But secondly, you know, it's almost I'll be straight out politically. Look. I'm to the left of Genghis Khan. I'm not a Trump supporter. I can't stand Bobby Kennedy. But there are a few things that the Maha movement says, even if it doesn't do. John Oliver, last night, several weeks ago when this airs, did a segment on the the false promises of Maha.
But the argument being made there, which is that honest whole food is better for you than crap, is kinda hard to dispute.
[00:42:45] Abel James:
Yeah. That's one of the things that I take issue with slightly, even if I agree with a lot of the things that are being said with the political spin now, is that these didn't used to be political conversations. This used to be something that was more just like it's the right of people to be able to eat real food that comes from the natural world that's unadulterated. And then
[00:43:04] David Page:
what complicated Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. It's been a long time since available food in The United States was, for the most part, what you're talking about. True. And its beginnings were probably more benign than you wanna think. I mean, there's a great book I read years ago called Paradox of Plenty by a Canadian academic that talks about how so much of our processed food system grew out of the euphoria of the post World War two years where everything modern and new seemed like it had to be better for us. So, you know, I'm I'm sure the intent well, the intent on the part of consumers was there. Once Campbell's realized that they could sell you a soup in a can, they were gonna sell you a soup in a can, but that's a different story.
[00:43:54] Abel James:
There's another kind of principle that seems to apply or or a cycle that kicks in over time with food where, like in the fifties, you talk about ice cream in the book and how, at first, it was quite natural and and made from, you know, cream and simple ingredients. But then over time, they added more air, and they realized that they could reduce the butter fat. They could increase the the volume that they're making while also increasing profit margins, that that whole thing. And then it kinda gets carried away. People lose the idea of what ice cream is. Then Ben and Jerry's comes in and says, let's return to nature. Let's let's make stuff that actually tastes good. I don't care about about the butter fat percent. And this is back in the seventies. But then nature wins again. And so we see this kind of nature run goes out of favor, comes back into favor.
[00:44:39] David Page:
Look. What happened is economic. They're they're it's like owning a designer bag. Having the interest or the money to buy what has become a super premium product makes you hip and cool. So ice cream has stratified into, you know, everyday ice cream. The stuff below it, which is often not ice cream, ice cream is defined, I think it's 10% butterfat minimum. It might be 10 and a half. Below that, it's frozen dairy dessert. And the higher you go in butterfat, theoretically, the better the ice cream, although that's not true. You get to a point where you don't wanna be eating a stick of butter. And by the way, there there's nothing wrong with a mister softy that takes you back to your childhood that isn't ice cream. It's less than 10%, and it's obviously some it's not a great thing, but it fulfills a particular need for you. What what Ben and Jerry's did, though, was they really invented invented is the wrong word. They were the first to widely publicize and widely market the add ins, concept.
My recollection is that Steve Harrell at his ice cream store in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is now owned by his ex wife, Judy Harrell, that he was probably the first to say, hey, why don't I chop up some stuff and put it in the ice cream? That's how that whole market grew. And what people don't realize is that one of the two, either Ben or Jerry, who did I talk to? I think I talked to Jerry, so it was Ben who had didn't have a good sense of smell, which translated into he didn't have a good sense of taste. So they over flavored things to his satisfaction, which is why Ben and Jerry's became such an explosion of flavors.
[00:46:41] Abel James:
Isn't that interesting? Yeah. The cherry Garcia is is very cherry forward. Yeah. And I'm not a I'm not a cherry guy, so it's it's not my favorite. Yeah. Well well, let's talk about barbecue a little bit next because this is near and dear to my heart. Being in Central Texas. You talk about Franklin's barbecue and how that kind of took off around 02/2009. I moved here in 02/2008, so I was here witnessing that and standing in the long lines back then as well. What was that phenomenon in barbecue, and where has it taken us?
[00:47:10] David Page:
Well, let me admit one thing. I've never eaten at Franklin's, so I will assume that it's as wonderful as they say. He hit at the right moment when what I discussed with Super Premium ice cream began really to explode, which is, you know, I'm hip and cool if I know the hippest, coolest food item. And he caught a wave. A, he's very talented at making barbecue. B, he changed the definition of what traditional barbecue was. Barbecue in Texas, it's very different in Texas than than it is in in the Southeast. Barbecue in Texas, began as a way to use bad cuts and meat that was going bad.
There were Czech and German immigrants living in Central Texas, and and some of them were butchers. And they had to come up with a way to to to get value out of tough cuts and and meat that was kinda closing in on its its death date. And that really spurred the the Central Texas barbecue movement, which was to do the best out of product. What Franklin did is he started using prime beef, which kind of changes the definition of the product in the first place. And, okay, that that's fine. Although barbecue in Austin, is now, you know, $36.40 bucks a pound for brisket. Yeah. Okay.
That redefined things. It all and others had to to follow suit. I mean, Louie Miller's Barbecue and Taylor, which has been in the Texas monthly top 50 forever, and to which I have been. I shot diners there. I've stayed in touch with the family. I included them in my book. They, for a while, had to move to prime beef to stay competitive. I think they're back to choice now. But, you know, is it cheating? I don't know. I interviewed in fact, an episode of Culinary Characters Unlocked featured Ali Clem, who owns Law Barbecue in Austin, which holds a Michelin star.
Ali uses, choice beef. She frankly told me that she finds Prime too fatty to get the proper distribution of the flavor of the fat through the meat they make because they don't do a twelve hour cook. They're pretty fast. They only cook for six and a half hours. Oh, wow. Yeah. And she says the the the fat distribution, simply ends up better with choice because if they're using prime, you still have globs of white fat in in the finished product.
[00:50:16] Abel James:
Well, there are so many different factors and variables at play. You kinda have to have your own little secret technique, but I wanted to ask you about some of those secrets that might be in your bag of tricks because one one repeating theme that I saw through, especially the barbecue section of your book is that the secret is that there are no shortcuts. There may be, like, a special technique that they use. There are no look. There are no shortcuts. On the other hand, there are multiple techniques.
[00:50:43] David Page:
Traditionally, if you're painting with the broadest brush, you define barbecue as something cooked low and slow, which it probably still is in most places, except go to Memphis. The most celebrated ribs in Memphis are arguably at the rendezvous, and they cook them. And by the way, low and slow over indirect heat. They cook them, fast in what used to be a coal chute over direct flame. So, you know, whatever works works. Everyone's got their own technique, and the the the result is is what matters. Personally, you know, I I don't care how you make it. I I care what it tastes like.
[00:51:27] Abel James:
And is that the trick to Diners, Drive ins, and Dives? Like, what what were the if you could pull the best practices from, like, the best
[00:51:36] David Page:
Giving a shit. Is it? What's that? It's giving a shit. It's all about the passion and the care and the desire to please people that motivates the owner. Good food only comes from people who wanna make people happy by serving them good food. If you open a restaurant with your eye on the profits, not the product, well, I'd like to think you're gonna fail. You may not. There's an awful lot of crappy food being served out there. But really good food comes from people who care about making really good food.
[00:52:17] Abel James:
What about the business of that? How do you or how have you seen people maintain that passion
[00:52:22] David Page:
over the life cycle of business? Well, it's it's hard. And, look, if you can't maintain the passion, you're gonna go out of business, or you're gonna start making crappy product, in which case, depending upon the audience you can attract, you may or may not go out of business. But it's an unforgiving business. The profit margin in restaurants is tiny, and the pressures on independent restaurateurs are the most extreme. Unlike a chain, which which can strike a deal with food suppliers, the independent guy has very little opportunity to be in an advantageous position. And you're seeing it look, you've been seeing it over the last few years. Certainly, COVID, took an awful lot of independent mom and pop restaurants out of business.
Now you're seeing another wave of economic difficulty for restaurants, which is being exacerbated by the economy. You're seeing a terrible summer for restaurants in Miami, with predictions that some of of their traditional summer slump is gonna turn into shutdowns. It's a hell of a business. And and look, one of the things I was proudest of in in the the early years of Diners, which is when I was with it producing the show, is that and this wasn't why we did the show, but we saved a lot of small business I bet. Yeah. That were gonna go I remember we were attending a horse show in Lexington, Kentucky that my daughter was competing at, and I said, hey. Let's go to this barbecue joint that was on the show. And I made the mistake of introducing myself, and they went batshit. And they wouldn't let us pay, which is embarrassing, and they kept bringing food to the table, and they became friends. Although, frankly, at future horse shows, I had to be real careful about how often we would eat there because they wouldn't let us pay.
But they explained they were on the verge of bankruptcy when we put them on the show, and then that all of a sudden, they had customers, and they opened a second location. So I guess we did a, you know, our little small part toward helping save restaurants. That's a tough business.
[00:54:32] Abel James:
How did you identify them, at least at the beginning, in a sea of just kind of mediocre or struggling?
[00:54:39] David Page:
Well, if and this was the Internet was not a thing yet. So we did this the old fashioned way. We reported it. I would pick an air and look. All of the making of television has a major financial component, which is you can only shoot what you can afford to shoot. So we attempted we didn't just attempt. We did. Every time we went out to shoot, I looked for a place that gave us access to multiple locations, multiple places, so that for the cost of one set of travel expenses, I could produce segments that would appear in multiple shows and show us going everywhere. Okay. Cool. So, you know, I was better off picking Louisville, Kentucky because it also gave me Cincinnati, Ohio, that sort of thing. So the first thing we would do is pick where we're going or wanted to go. There were a few places that just didn't have the quality of restaurant we needed.
Then I would have my people start making phone calls. We would call the local food critics in both the newspaper and especially the city and regional magazines, and especially the alternative newspapers that existed, and get recommendations. If we knew anybody who lived in a particular place, we talked to them. Then we would talk to the owners of these restaurants, and we would interrogate them mercilessly. Look. I I live in a tourist area on the Jersey Shore. There's a very famous pancake joint here that I would not put on the show because when we dug into it, it turns out they're buying a boxed pancake mix. If you're gonna be on my show for making pancakes, you better be what Mickey's Diner was in Saint Paul, and they've since closed. But they made their mix from scratch.
Okay. Now you can be on the show as as a pancake making place. And we were very good at at figuring out what was good and what wasn't. And still, 5% of the time when we got to the location and after the first season, I was not traveling. Producers and crews were going out. I was back in home base putting the show together. But I would get a phone call 5% of the time from Guy telling me, no. This isn't good. And I say leave. Apologize and leave. And the network, first of all, didn't know about it. Secondly, this had not been budgeted for, so I ate those costs.
And when they finally found out, they thought I was crazy because they didn't give a shit. But I did. It had to be real, and it had to be good.
[00:58:32] Abel James:
It seems to me, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but the the giving a shit about the show actually is what has made that so enduring too because it's not like Yeah. Well, I I don't know what they do now. I mean, I did 11 and left. But It's been, like, twenty years. Right? So, like Yeah. It's fifteen, twenty, something like that. That doesn't happen without you building a great foundation is what I meant. Thank you. Yeah.
[00:58:55] David Page:
I was lucky in that I've been in this business for fifty years. Actually, fifty five years now. I'm 70. I started at 15 at a little local radio station, WCAT, the kitty cat with the thousand watt meow in Orange, Massachusetts. Anyway, I've been doing this for fifty five years. This was the first thing that I got to do that was totally my vision. Now, yeah, there was some network interference now and then, but they didn't know what they were doing, and they didn't care. You know? So I got to make the show I wanted to make, and and then I left, for reasons not to be gone gone into here, legally.
But, you know, when you can't do things the way you want to do them, you have choices to make. Anyway, so for me, it was an opportunity to leave it all on the table, and I was very proud that we did that. Look. I held the scripts to the same standard I held the scripts to when I was the senior investigator producer of 2020 in charge of investigations. I mean, it had to be true. It had to be provable. It had to be a fact. And, again, the network thought it was crazy, but that's okay. It was my show.
[01:00:14] Abel James:
Where do you see that approach now? Like, the obsession with finding the actual truth and doing the work and the investigation when, as you say, like, the networks or the social media companies these days don't care about that. They they would much Well, look, this is a much broader conversation, but,
[01:00:33] David Page:
I think the quality of most journalism, most storytelling in the country has gone into the toilet. Not because, in many cases, of a conspiracy, just because, well, a number of factors have come into play. A, look, every major media outlet is owned by a massive corporation, and their, concern is is money. And by the way, there are some journalistic organizations in my view that are doing a hell of a job in fighting the good fight, The New York Times. And despite being owned by root Rupert Murdoch, The Wall Street Journal, which he keeps around as his prestige property. But The Times is able to do that only because, under Robert Thompson, who was the publisher and now runs CNN less effectively, he came up with a way to to monetize the times by embracing what's online, by embracing verticals of particular, content, by embracing saleable items, like sports content through The Athletic, so that The Times is financially healthy.
Secondarily, you know, this is gonna sound pompous, but I came of age, my influences to get into journalism were literally Woodward, Bernstein, and Watergate. It was a different time. So there was a real motivation to do this kind of work. And there was an understanding that there was a hierarchy, that you started out at WCAT in Orange, Massachusetts, and then you worked your way up step by step through local journalism. And when you had finally earned your stripes, when you had made the mistakes, when you had learned the hard way, if you were lucky, you would get a shot at going national. Now, the path is you get an internship or a production assistant job, and next thing you know, you're on the desk, and next thing you know, you're a producer, and you're making idiotic mistakes, not because you're evil, but because you don't know any better. I mean, most of and I I'm talking about straight news operations here or operations that claim to be straight news.
Most of their fuck ups are ineptitude, not bias. Now there's bias that people have to fight. Look, as I said, I'm gonna left at Trotsky, and I was always very proud of the fact that that did not appear in my reporting. I'm a committed well, until Netanyahu, Israel's supporting Jew. I have real problems with what the government of that country is doing now, but I I I'm still a big supporter of Israel. But I also was one of the lead producers on a documentary that back in '87, twenty years after the six day war, that severely questioned the morality of the way Israel was dealing with its occupation. The fact is you gotta leave your own feelings on the table. I I don't know that the current generation of journalists, for the most part, feels that way or or ever learned that.
I think that we're in a time that is driven by social media where everyone, who's young anyway, has grown up thinking that whatever you believe, you ought to say, and you ought to say it as publicly as possible. And if you ever change your opinions, you shouldn't admit that. So, you know, we're we're not in a good storytelling place. Does that end up reflected in reality? Well, yeah, reality television has screwed everything. I mean, there's a thing called the Frankenbite where reality producers proudly take half of this sentence and half of this sentence and put it together and make someone say something they didn't say. When I was starting diners, I had hired a woman with a reality background to be my senior producer. And before we even got on the air, I caught her trying to make a Frankenbite out of something. I said, we simply don't do that. She called me up at home that night, obviously, after many drinks, and raged on about how stupid I was and and how I I didn't have a clue.
And I told her I accept her resignation. She called the next day to try to retract it, but I'm not someone like that's not gonna work for me on a show that that is supposedly factual. But, no, reality has has been a death knell to so much of storytelling and to so much of the public's perception about whether or not to believe what they see, which and by the way, believing what you see is is now a whole other problem because with AI, who the hell knows what you're seeing? You know, it used to be as a producer, you know, when I was on my first foreign assignment and and my first assignment as leading things, although I really relied on a correspondent, Ike Siemens, who knew what he was doing because I didn't, but, in Grenada, an invasion in was it 8384 that that Reagan staged supposedly to save American medical students, but really to deflect attention from the fact that, we just allowed the US marine barracks in Lebanon to be blown up by some terrorists. Anyway, I bought footage from a local hotel owner of helicopters, American helicopters attacking at the beginning of the invasion, which was exclusive at the time. And I think I paid him, like, $200, and then after the fact, he got upset, and NBC paid him more. But the point is that was when I put that on the air, people believed it to be true.
It was. But if someone put video up today of helicopters supposedly staging an attack, who the hell knows? It's interesting that the one bright light, beyond the few institutions that are still doing it well, and they've cut the money off to PBS, so they've got problems, is this thing called Substack, which is independent publishing. Basically, you get a website, you say what you want. I I've got a Substack in conjunction with my podcast. And what you're seeing is you're seeing as journalists lose their jobs with traditional organizations, like Jim Acosta at CNN, whether you liked him or not, They're turning to Substack. They're not getting a job at another company.
They're taking their own audience with them. Now the danger of this is that you have to have your own audience. You can't just be a journeyman covering stuff, which means you have to make a name for yourself, which can lead to people only pursuing the more extreme positions and the more titillating stories. On the other hand, like Robert Reich, the labor secretary under Clinton, who is a noted liberal thinker, has a fascinating substack in which comes out, I think, every day. My substack comes out once a week, which I find to be terrific and well worth reading.
So that is becoming a platform with its good side and bad side for independent journalistic voices. I don't think that anyone on Substack is gonna change the political, future of the country.
[01:08:00] Abel James:
Who knows? In a few years, if people completely lose trust with getting their entertainment and infotainment from other sources, we only really need one for most of us to use.
[01:08:10] David Page:
Well, but see, people only that's the problem. People only read what or very few people read anymore. People only view something that supports their position, which is why I assiduously read The Wall Street Journal every day. Its editorial position is way to the right of me. Now, I'm not a Fox viewer because I think Fox is full of shit. I just think they lie, and and there's no point. That's not the other side. The other side was the John Oliver show I just finished watching, in which he acknowledged there are some good ideas coming out of the Maha movement. He eviscerated it for what on balance seems to be their horseshit factor. But you have to acknowledge
[01:09:04] Abel James:
not everything is is black and white. We we only have a few minutes left, so I do wanna make sure we cover off on this too. Being a foodie, but also, keeping your your health biomarkers in line, what has that been like for you over the years, and and and where are you now? It's been tough, and it took a a death scare to get me there. Look. I have fought my weight
[01:09:25] David Page:
my entire life. I have two issues. One, I do believe that there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to being overweight, and I have that from family history. Number two, I'm prone to excess. You know, I just food was fun. So was booze. So I have fought this battle my whole life. There have been periods of time where I managed to be successful and then would backslide. It wasn't until my doctor said to me of my latest blood sugar readings, I give up. You you I my doctor said that? Yeah. She said, you're, I give up. You're not listening to me. Now, this is she never gave me understandable or good advice about the issue, but the bottom line was I had been prediabetic.
She never, because most doctors don't know, she never really explained the science of diabetes and what I could or couldn't eat, etcetera, etcetera, but she said, I give up. I'm sending you to an endocrinologist. I had, at that point, spiked a blood sugar reading of two fifty six and an a one c of eight something. So I went to an endocrinologist who specialized in diabetes, and she looped in a nutritionist who specialized in diabetes. And not to give away the end of the story, but my blood sugar is now a 100, and my a one c is five three. So Incredible. But it took I finally got scared.
And I'm not ashamed to say medication played a big part. I'm on Ozempic. Now Ozempic is not a panacea. Ozempic will deal with appetite. It will not deal with all of the other reasons someone like me turns to food. Boredom, emotion, excess. My initial use of Ozempic, coupled with a dietitian who put me on a very strict regimen, no calorie counting. You can have two meals a day and two snacks. The snack, you should eat around noon, then have a snack around three, then eat around six, have a snack around nine. There's a loaded number of things you can have for a snack. There was a particular kind of chocolate covered ice cream bar that was okay with him. And that was great. I lost a ton of weight because I had been ordered to be restrictive.
When I got to the point where my weight was pretty well down, now I'm dealing with my emotions. Now I'm having to exercise self control to not snack for no reason. The amount I eat anymore, my my Ozempic works. I I don't need massive meals. I still need meals. But what's happened is I'm back to calorie counting and have been for months. Because at this point, I I'm not just relying on Ozempic to cut down my appetite, and I have so much weight to lose that it's gonna work. Now I'm a calorie counter again. Only now it really matters to me for two reasons. Number one, I'm feeling much better, and as I age, that matters. I'm 70.
And number two, I I don't wanna die of diabetes. So that that's a strong motivation.
[01:12:45] Abel James:
Yeah. And then what does the day to day look look like in terms of exercising your own willpower or making the sit the decision yay or nay whether it's food or booze?
[01:12:54] David Page:
Well, first of all, I stopped drinking entirely because it it's just it's wasted calories. What's the what's the fucking point? So that helps. Number two, as my endocrinologist said, you could cheat sometimes. So if on a given day, I do exceed a calorie count, I don't kill myself, but I sure as hell watch the next day. And it's it's constant awareness. You know, we we had a day planned out of the house yesterday that was gonna include lunch out. I looked at that menu, and I figured out ahead of time what I could eat and what modifications I would need to make.
It's look. It's it's like running a restaurant. You gotta care. Thank god I finally care.
[01:13:40] Abel James:
Yeah. It's worth it. And you still can't have your fun from time to time. You just have to kinda dose it out appropriately. Last night, we went ahead some, for the first time, we had heard about this this mochi homemade from scratch ice cream place, and it just has all these kind of, like,
[01:13:58] David Page:
incredible desserts. Now this is rice based Asian ice cream. Correct?
[01:14:02] Abel James:
How was it? It was absolutely fantastic. It was the best ice cream and and the best treats, honestly, I'd had for a long time. We have a really high like, we're not gonna splurge on Dunkin' Donuts or something that's just kinda, like, junky. We're gonna save it for the real stuff, and this just floored me. It, like, made my whole week absolutely fantastic. But you don't have to, like, order everything and eat it all for that to happen. Right? And you can't then
[01:14:28] David Page:
do it again Yeah. The next day. That's the trick. Look. It's a matter of averages. Yeah. K? I weigh myself every day. Some would say I shouldn't do that. I should weigh myself once a week, but I weigh myself every day. I keep a very close eye on it. And a cheat can't become a trend is what it boils down to. But if you've cheated and enjoyed it, great. You enjoyed it. You know, what what I don't like is people who have never had a weight problem telling me that, okay. You can have ice cream, but only a really little portion. Fuck you. That, I'm not gonna do that. I'm I'm not going to take the treat and make it not a treat.
[01:15:09] Abel James:
It's yeah. It's riding the gas and the brake at the same time. I I can't do that either.
[01:15:15] David Page:
The first real cheat early on in my losing weight, getting healthy. We went to visit some friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor, Michigan has a place called Zingerman's Deli. Zingerman's Deli is arguably the finest deli on earth even though it's not in New York or California. They make their own rye bread. At that point, I was not eating any bread whatsoever, but I was not gonna go to Anarbor, Michigan and not have a pastrami on Ryan Zimmerman's, which kicked my blood sugar up from right after lunch from a 100 to a 165. And you know what? I planned on it, and it was damn good. Yeah.
[01:16:03] Abel James:
I mean, pastrami on rye rye is not something that you could just kind of sub in with a cucumber sandwich.
[01:16:11] David Page:
You you can't. And and you know what? It may the reason I say it may be the best selling in the country is because they make their own rye bread, and Katz's in New York doesn't, and they admit that they buy second rate rye for price reasons. Mhmm.
[01:16:22] Abel James:
Once again, they're giving a shit. It matters. David, this has been so much fun. What is the best place for people to find your work, your substack, and your book?
[01:16:31] David Page:
Well, go on Substack. It's Culinary Characters Unlocked. The podcast, please not just sign up at download because my ad rates depend on downloads. It's Culinary Characters Unlocked on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, any place you go. And the book, Food Americana, is available on Amazon, so go grab a copy.
[01:16:51] Abel James:
Fantastic.
[01:16:52] David Page:
David, thank you for the work that you do in the world. Fantastic. Oh, that's so that's so kind of you. Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure.
[01:17:05] Abel James:
Hey. Abel here one more time. And if you believe in our mission to create a world where health is the norm, not sickness, here are a few things you can do to help keep this show coming your way. Click like, subscribe, and leave a quick review wherever you listen to or watch your podcasts. You can also subscribe to my new Substack channel for an ad free version of this show in video and audio. That's at ablejames.substack.com. You can also find me on Twitter or x, YouTube, as well as fountain f m, where you can leave a little crypto in the tip jar. And if you can think of someone you care about who might learn from or enjoy this show, please take a quick moment to share it with them. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.
Hey, all. This is Abel James, and thanks so much for joining us on the show. What's the secret to losing weight as a foodie who refuses to sacrifice joy or flavor? This week's guest changed the way that we think about food and mom and pop businesses in America. He's a legend in journalism and beloved in the food world, saving countless independent restaurants from certain destruction. As the creator of the beloved TV show Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives and many others, to producer of Good Morning America and Network News, to author of Food Americana, two time Emmy Award winner David Page, has covered some serious ground in his fifty plus year career. I think you're really gonna enjoy this episode. Quick plug before we get to the interview, please make sure that you're subscribed to the Abel James Show wherever you get your podcast. For the latest updates and goings on in Austin, Texas and beyond, be sure to sign up for my newsletter at abeljames.com.
You can also join my Substack at ablejames.substack.com to comment on posts, get ad free versions of this show, and also shoot me a DM. That's at a b e l james dot substack dot com. Look forward to seeing you there. Alright. On this episode with the legendary David Page, you're about to discover why giving a shit is the secret to success, why awful and haggis deserve a spot on your menu, how reality TV and the Internet destroyed truth and what to do about it, and much more. Alright. Let's go meet David. Welcome back, folks. Two time Emmy winner David Page changed the world of food television by creating, developing, and executive producing the groundbreaking show Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives.
Before that, as a network news producer based in London, Frankfurt, and Budapest, he traveled Europe, Africa, and The Middle East covering some of the biggest stories in the world and developing a passion for some of the world's most incredible food. David is also author of the delightful book Food Americana, where he explores the world of burgers, barbecue, ice cream, and other American favorites. Thanks so much for joining us today, David. It's an honor to have you here. Well, thanks so much for having me. So I've been a fan, from afar of your work for many years. As we were saying before I started recording, I think you've done an incredible service to the world of food and and largely culture as well, not just in America, but but really everywhere. But what was it about covering some of these very important and and thought of as important things, in the world of news to transitioning to the world that is sometimes thought of as more frivolous or entertainment based, the world of food? But as you mentioned in your work, it's really a gateway to culture. So how did you make that transition?
[00:28:28] David Page:
Well, several questions in there. Number one, storytelling is storytelling. Okay? Number two, I approach what I do as a continuation of journalism. It's got to be accurate. It's got to be fair. It's got to be correct. You have to find out what the facts are and go with them. I mean, that was a standard I applied to Diners, Drive ins, and Dives, which frankly confused the network because, you know, I I had an executive tell me on more than one occasions to fake something, and I said, no. I'm not gonna do that. You know, when when I went overseas I'm not sure anyone uses the term anymore. When I went overseas, initially, after years as a local reporter and producer, domestically, The assignment came kind of as a surprise to me. I had never considered living elsewhere.
And, frankly, while I was arguably reasonably well educated, it occurred to me there was a whole lot I simply did not know about the places I was now being sent, and this was pre Internet. You couldn't just Google Czechoslovakia. And I found out pretty quickly that one of the ways to begin, I say begin because how how do you understand another culture, but to begin to understand another culture and another country's history is through their food because it's reflective. Cuisines, which by the way, are for the most part certain area.
Cuisines reflect what the reality was and to some extent still is in a particular place. I mean, when I lived in Frankfurt, Germany, at the time, West Germany, on the rare day off, I I would drive at a very high rate of speed down the Autobahn to Strasbourg to have a dish called chacrut. Well, Strasbourg's in France. Chacrut is a German dish, but it's reflective of the fact that that city went back and forth in terms of who owned it between Germany and France repeatedly. When I went to to Italy, to, let's say, Tuscany, and, the foods centered to a great extent around wild boar, that reflects the fact that that area had long been poor.
And if you wanted to eat meat, you had to kill it yourself. And wild boar ran relatively rampant, so that was available to you. I used food. Well, I used it to eat and enjoy, but it it became for me indicative of so much more about the cultures I was working in. Of course, there was the time, my first trip to Austria, we finished, because of the time difference. You you would send your story to nightly news at, you know, around midnight, European time. We finished up, and I asked the the Austrian drivers, who were working with us. I said, hey, guys. Take me to to your favorite restaurant. So they took me to a Texas ribs joint. No way.
Yeah. Not not a particularly good Texas ribs joint either.
[00:31:45] Abel James:
Sometimes that says a lot, but it's incredible what a food or or a type of food or cuisine can say. Like, the first time I went to to Hawaii and saw and experienced what they did with spam, my mind was completely blown because what But you you know the history of that, of course. Yeah. Maybe you could share it quickly. But a lot of people don't know the history of some of these incredible foods. That's one of the things I love about your book as you really dig in.
[00:32:09] David Page:
Before easy cargo transportation of food by airplane, you couldn't send stuff to Hawaii or Guam, which is another place that's big on spam, that would spoil. And, look, spam doesn't spoil. It apparently has the half life of a nuclear isotope. So spam became a a popular utilitarian dish in Hawaii, and now, of course, there's spam musubi. That's the most famous dish. It's basically a sort of a a sushi roll, but using spam instead of fish. And, by the way, you don't have to have fish for it to be sushi. But and the same situation in Guam. You know? Far away, how do you get food there? Well, the spam traveled. Yeah. Spam traveled. By by the way, you know, you talk about local culture and and what's available.
I don't particularly enjoy most Hawaiian cuisine because it's tremendously bland. And it's with the addition influences from Japan mostly and soy sauce and mirin, it it's become less bland over the years. But traditionally, native Hawaiian dishes like kalua pork are tremendously bland because there was only one seasoning, and that was sea salt extracted on the rocks from the ocean. There was nothing else. There was no pepper. You know? So and that's a reflection of the life that that native Hawaiians were living.
[00:33:32] Abel James:
And speaking of bland, I mean, especially in as Westerners, modern Westerners, we don't eat ancestrally as as much as other cultures might with these traditions of eating kind of foods that would be considered strange, you know, stinking fermented fish. What were some that stuck out to you in your travels?
[00:33:50] David Page:
Well, look. The whole category of offal, the whole category of eating the whole animal has always fascinated me because we're one of the few cultures that doesn't. And to some extent, I think that reflects the fact that certainly post World War two, we went through a a very lengthy period of of time of of thinking that we were, as a society, really well off. Now those generalizations applied only to white people, which is a whole other I mean, black veterans didn't qualify for the GI bill, for Christ's sake. So we've we're big to throw stuff out.
Other cuisines, other cultures are not, and to a great extent, take great pride and pleasure in using every part of the animal. I mean, you know, you talk to some chefs and chefs who are into, what's called nose to tail cooking, and and they'll often talk to you about a respect for the animal when you kill it, and that it is disrespectful to kill an animal and then throw half of it away. Also, look, the eating of awful, it was, for the most part, traditionally, it was not ever considered, in most cultures, a different class of food. It was just something you did with the food. And you'll also see that the poorer the culture or the poorer the section of the culture, the more inventive they would get in using all parts of the animal. I mean, I'm New York Jewish. I love a dish called kishka, which having to watch my weight and and keep diabetes at bay, I I don't get to eat very often. But, basically, it is an intestine stuffed with a combination of fat, spices, and grains.
Well, that's no different than haggis in in Scottish culture, and I'm sure I could come up with 30 or 40 other similar dishes, which were created to provide the most calories for the lowest investment for people before they went out to till their fields in the morning. And by the way, it may sound disgusting to you, but there's nothing better than haggis. I bizarrely enough, when I was working out of the NBC London Bureau and I, for a time, was the producer assigned to the Northern Ireland beat at the time of The Troubles, as they called it, you know, serious sectarian violence, I would fly from Gatwick Airport to Belfast, Northern Ireland on, I think it was a Northern Irish airline at six in the morning.
And for some reason, breakfast was a Scottish dish. Break remember when airlines serve food? For some reason, the little thing that they would put on on your tray table was haggis, and I loved it. Now, there are many who consider me nuts, but but I absolutely, I loved it.
[00:37:01] Abel James:
It's one of those things where it's off putting at first. There are smells that are that we don't recognize and certainly wouldn't associate with with things that taste good. But once you do taste something like that, especially a few times, it seems like your your brain, your smells line up with the rest of your system, and it kinda gets that memo that, oh, I do like this. Also, let's face it. There are many
[00:37:22] David Page:
foods that serve as a flavor delivery system that by themselves don't offer very much and are prized either because of the flavors you add to them or because of texture. One of the things we as Americans don't get into is texture. Chinese cuisines with an s because China's a huge country with multiple cuisines. But Chinese cuisines tend to prize texture. My wife, daughter, and I were in Hong Kong for the Olympic games. I wasn't working, back back when the games were in Beijing. My daughter was not at Olympic level, but she was a competitive equestrian at the time, and we wanted to see the equestrian games, which were held in Hong Kong, not Beijing, ostensibly to include Hong Kong in the games. But realistically, no one was bringing a million dollar horse into Mainland China, given concerns about contagious illness for the animals. So they held those in Hong Kong. And I managed to convince the concierge at our hotel that I really wanted to eat a meal like a local, and they never believe westerners when you make that argument, but I finally got through to him and he directed me to a place. And going into it reminded me of visiting Mott Street in Chinatown in New York with my grandfather because you go downstairs and you end up, you know, it's it's subterranean. Anyway, we go downstairs. We go it's a huge room, and it's just filled with communal tables.
And best I can tell, we're the only non Asians in the place. And we have to make you know, there's no one greeting you, so we we find a spot at a table. And it basically turns out to be like a dim sum restaurant. Not like it. I guess a dim sum restaurant. Servers going around with what appear to be bamboo steam baskets, and you just you stop them, and you you get what you want. And it was a fascinating experience because when we finally got someone's attention, the first thing that happened is they brought over for each of us a bowl with water in it, tepid water, and some utensils, chopsticks and a soup spoon, which by looking around, I realized we were supposed to wash in the water. So the only sanitation going on here was wash your stuff into anyway. And so we're pointing and stuff's alright. It's all good.
And then I point to a server to to her basket, and from behind me, an elderly gentleman, no one has spoken to us, and, certainly, I've heard no English, but this guy behind us pipes up, that not for you. So, of course, I had to try it. It was duck foot, which has a texture. It's chewy, not a lot of flavor, but, I survived.
[00:40:13] Abel James:
Yeah. We've had plenty of chicken feet because we used Well, another another food of poverty.
[00:40:19] David Page:
Yeah. No. I mean, there's there's a great story about the sundae bird in American southern African American culture. The chicken would tend to be served on a sundae to a great extent because it was not a cheap food. And if you had chickens and you were raising them, the argument always was, well, I can't kill something that's laying eggs. So chicken was served on Sunday. And I'm pointing with very broad brushes here. Please understand that. And the preacher would be hosted on a rotating basis by various members of the congregation. So when the preacher came over, he was offered the first option at what he wanted from the bird, and then mom and dad would get theirs. And by the time he got down, you know, to the fifth kid, it was chicken feet and wings.
So learn to love them.
[00:41:15] Abel James:
And there's something to it. I mean, it's one of the most powerful sources of collagen, which now people are spending umpteen billion dollars on supplements to get when Of course. When you Well, look. We're trying to
[00:41:27] David Page:
I used to say about making TV news. By being there with your camera, you're distorting reality. Your job in the edit room was to return the perception of reality to what you distorted by your presence. We do kind of the same thing with our food system these days. We've taken everything out, and now we're looking for ways to put it back in. I mean, all of these supposedly good for you food products, you know, with probiotics or prebiotics or this, that, or the other thing. You know, first of all, so many of them don't have enough of anything to matter. But secondly, you know, it's almost I'll be straight out politically. Look. I'm to the left of Genghis Khan. I'm not a Trump supporter. I can't stand Bobby Kennedy. But there are a few things that the Maha movement says, even if it doesn't do. John Oliver, last night, several weeks ago when this airs, did a segment on the the false promises of Maha.
But the argument being made there, which is that honest whole food is better for you than crap, is kinda hard to dispute.
[00:42:45] Abel James:
Yeah. That's one of the things that I take issue with slightly, even if I agree with a lot of the things that are being said with the political spin now, is that these didn't used to be political conversations. This used to be something that was more just like it's the right of people to be able to eat real food that comes from the natural world that's unadulterated. And then
[00:43:04] David Page:
what complicated Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. It's been a long time since available food in The United States was, for the most part, what you're talking about. True. And its beginnings were probably more benign than you wanna think. I mean, there's a great book I read years ago called Paradox of Plenty by a Canadian academic that talks about how so much of our processed food system grew out of the euphoria of the post World War two years where everything modern and new seemed like it had to be better for us. So, you know, I'm I'm sure the intent well, the intent on the part of consumers was there. Once Campbell's realized that they could sell you a soup in a can, they were gonna sell you a soup in a can, but that's a different story.
[00:43:54] Abel James:
There's another kind of principle that seems to apply or or a cycle that kicks in over time with food where, like in the fifties, you talk about ice cream in the book and how, at first, it was quite natural and and made from, you know, cream and simple ingredients. But then over time, they added more air, and they realized that they could reduce the butter fat. They could increase the the volume that they're making while also increasing profit margins, that that whole thing. And then it kinda gets carried away. People lose the idea of what ice cream is. Then Ben and Jerry's comes in and says, let's return to nature. Let's let's make stuff that actually tastes good. I don't care about about the butter fat percent. And this is back in the seventies. But then nature wins again. And so we see this kind of nature run goes out of favor, comes back into favor.
[00:44:39] David Page:
Look. What happened is economic. They're they're it's like owning a designer bag. Having the interest or the money to buy what has become a super premium product makes you hip and cool. So ice cream has stratified into, you know, everyday ice cream. The stuff below it, which is often not ice cream, ice cream is defined, I think it's 10% butterfat minimum. It might be 10 and a half. Below that, it's frozen dairy dessert. And the higher you go in butterfat, theoretically, the better the ice cream, although that's not true. You get to a point where you don't wanna be eating a stick of butter. And by the way, there there's nothing wrong with a mister softy that takes you back to your childhood that isn't ice cream. It's less than 10%, and it's obviously some it's not a great thing, but it fulfills a particular need for you. What what Ben and Jerry's did, though, was they really invented invented is the wrong word. They were the first to widely publicize and widely market the add ins, concept.
My recollection is that Steve Harrell at his ice cream store in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is now owned by his ex wife, Judy Harrell, that he was probably the first to say, hey, why don't I chop up some stuff and put it in the ice cream? That's how that whole market grew. And what people don't realize is that one of the two, either Ben or Jerry, who did I talk to? I think I talked to Jerry, so it was Ben who had didn't have a good sense of smell, which translated into he didn't have a good sense of taste. So they over flavored things to his satisfaction, which is why Ben and Jerry's became such an explosion of flavors.
[00:46:41] Abel James:
Isn't that interesting? Yeah. The cherry Garcia is is very cherry forward. Yeah. And I'm not a I'm not a cherry guy, so it's it's not my favorite. Yeah. Well well, let's talk about barbecue a little bit next because this is near and dear to my heart. Being in Central Texas. You talk about Franklin's barbecue and how that kind of took off around 02/2009. I moved here in 02/2008, so I was here witnessing that and standing in the long lines back then as well. What was that phenomenon in barbecue, and where has it taken us?
[00:47:10] David Page:
Well, let me admit one thing. I've never eaten at Franklin's, so I will assume that it's as wonderful as they say. He hit at the right moment when what I discussed with Super Premium ice cream began really to explode, which is, you know, I'm hip and cool if I know the hippest, coolest food item. And he caught a wave. A, he's very talented at making barbecue. B, he changed the definition of what traditional barbecue was. Barbecue in Texas, it's very different in Texas than than it is in in the Southeast. Barbecue in Texas, began as a way to use bad cuts and meat that was going bad.
There were Czech and German immigrants living in Central Texas, and and some of them were butchers. And they had to come up with a way to to to get value out of tough cuts and and meat that was kinda closing in on its its death date. And that really spurred the the Central Texas barbecue movement, which was to do the best out of product. What Franklin did is he started using prime beef, which kind of changes the definition of the product in the first place. And, okay, that that's fine. Although barbecue in Austin, is now, you know, $36.40 bucks a pound for brisket. Yeah. Okay.
That redefined things. It all and others had to to follow suit. I mean, Louie Miller's Barbecue and Taylor, which has been in the Texas monthly top 50 forever, and to which I have been. I shot diners there. I've stayed in touch with the family. I included them in my book. They, for a while, had to move to prime beef to stay competitive. I think they're back to choice now. But, you know, is it cheating? I don't know. I interviewed in fact, an episode of Culinary Characters Unlocked featured Ali Clem, who owns Law Barbecue in Austin, which holds a Michelin star.
Ali uses, choice beef. She frankly told me that she finds Prime too fatty to get the proper distribution of the flavor of the fat through the meat they make because they don't do a twelve hour cook. They're pretty fast. They only cook for six and a half hours. Oh, wow. Yeah. And she says the the the fat distribution, simply ends up better with choice because if they're using prime, you still have globs of white fat in in the finished product.
[00:50:16] Abel James:
Well, there are so many different factors and variables at play. You kinda have to have your own little secret technique, but I wanted to ask you about some of those secrets that might be in your bag of tricks because one one repeating theme that I saw through, especially the barbecue section of your book is that the secret is that there are no shortcuts. There may be, like, a special technique that they use. There are no look. There are no shortcuts. On the other hand, there are multiple techniques.
[00:50:43] David Page:
Traditionally, if you're painting with the broadest brush, you define barbecue as something cooked low and slow, which it probably still is in most places, except go to Memphis. The most celebrated ribs in Memphis are arguably at the rendezvous, and they cook them. And by the way, low and slow over indirect heat. They cook them, fast in what used to be a coal chute over direct flame. So, you know, whatever works works. Everyone's got their own technique, and the the the result is is what matters. Personally, you know, I I don't care how you make it. I I care what it tastes like.
[00:51:27] Abel James:
And is that the trick to Diners, Drive ins, and Dives? Like, what what were the if you could pull the best practices from, like, the best
[00:51:36] David Page:
Giving a shit. Is it? What's that? It's giving a shit. It's all about the passion and the care and the desire to please people that motivates the owner. Good food only comes from people who wanna make people happy by serving them good food. If you open a restaurant with your eye on the profits, not the product, well, I'd like to think you're gonna fail. You may not. There's an awful lot of crappy food being served out there. But really good food comes from people who care about making really good food.
[00:52:17] Abel James:
What about the business of that? How do you or how have you seen people maintain that passion
[00:52:22] David Page:
over the life cycle of business? Well, it's it's hard. And, look, if you can't maintain the passion, you're gonna go out of business, or you're gonna start making crappy product, in which case, depending upon the audience you can attract, you may or may not go out of business. But it's an unforgiving business. The profit margin in restaurants is tiny, and the pressures on independent restaurateurs are the most extreme. Unlike a chain, which which can strike a deal with food suppliers, the independent guy has very little opportunity to be in an advantageous position. And you're seeing it look, you've been seeing it over the last few years. Certainly, COVID, took an awful lot of independent mom and pop restaurants out of business.
Now you're seeing another wave of economic difficulty for restaurants, which is being exacerbated by the economy. You're seeing a terrible summer for restaurants in Miami, with predictions that some of of their traditional summer slump is gonna turn into shutdowns. It's a hell of a business. And and look, one of the things I was proudest of in in the the early years of Diners, which is when I was with it producing the show, is that and this wasn't why we did the show, but we saved a lot of small business I bet. Yeah. That were gonna go I remember we were attending a horse show in Lexington, Kentucky that my daughter was competing at, and I said, hey. Let's go to this barbecue joint that was on the show. And I made the mistake of introducing myself, and they went batshit. And they wouldn't let us pay, which is embarrassing, and they kept bringing food to the table, and they became friends. Although, frankly, at future horse shows, I had to be real careful about how often we would eat there because they wouldn't let us pay.
But they explained they were on the verge of bankruptcy when we put them on the show, and then that all of a sudden, they had customers, and they opened a second location. So I guess we did a, you know, our little small part toward helping save restaurants. That's a tough business.
[00:54:32] Abel James:
How did you identify them, at least at the beginning, in a sea of just kind of mediocre or struggling?
[00:54:39] David Page:
Well, if and this was the Internet was not a thing yet. So we did this the old fashioned way. We reported it. I would pick an air and look. All of the making of television has a major financial component, which is you can only shoot what you can afford to shoot. So we attempted we didn't just attempt. We did. Every time we went out to shoot, I looked for a place that gave us access to multiple locations, multiple places, so that for the cost of one set of travel expenses, I could produce segments that would appear in multiple shows and show us going everywhere. Okay. Cool. So, you know, I was better off picking Louisville, Kentucky because it also gave me Cincinnati, Ohio, that sort of thing. So the first thing we would do is pick where we're going or wanted to go. There were a few places that just didn't have the quality of restaurant we needed.
Then I would have my people start making phone calls. We would call the local food critics in both the newspaper and especially the city and regional magazines, and especially the alternative newspapers that existed, and get recommendations. If we knew anybody who lived in a particular place, we talked to them. Then we would talk to the owners of these restaurants, and we would interrogate them mercilessly. Look. I I live in a tourist area on the Jersey Shore. There's a very famous pancake joint here that I would not put on the show because when we dug into it, it turns out they're buying a boxed pancake mix. If you're gonna be on my show for making pancakes, you better be what Mickey's Diner was in Saint Paul, and they've since closed. But they made their mix from scratch.
Okay. Now you can be on the show as as a pancake making place. And we were very good at at figuring out what was good and what wasn't. And still, 5% of the time when we got to the location and after the first season, I was not traveling. Producers and crews were going out. I was back in home base putting the show together. But I would get a phone call 5% of the time from Guy telling me, no. This isn't good. And I say leave. Apologize and leave. And the network, first of all, didn't know about it. Secondly, this had not been budgeted for, so I ate those costs.
And when they finally found out, they thought I was crazy because they didn't give a shit. But I did. It had to be real, and it had to be good.
[00:58:32] Abel James:
It seems to me, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but the the giving a shit about the show actually is what has made that so enduring too because it's not like Yeah. Well, I I don't know what they do now. I mean, I did 11 and left. But It's been, like, twenty years. Right? So, like Yeah. It's fifteen, twenty, something like that. That doesn't happen without you building a great foundation is what I meant. Thank you. Yeah.
[00:58:55] David Page:
I was lucky in that I've been in this business for fifty years. Actually, fifty five years now. I'm 70. I started at 15 at a little local radio station, WCAT, the kitty cat with the thousand watt meow in Orange, Massachusetts. Anyway, I've been doing this for fifty five years. This was the first thing that I got to do that was totally my vision. Now, yeah, there was some network interference now and then, but they didn't know what they were doing, and they didn't care. You know? So I got to make the show I wanted to make, and and then I left, for reasons not to be gone gone into here, legally.
But, you know, when you can't do things the way you want to do them, you have choices to make. Anyway, so for me, it was an opportunity to leave it all on the table, and I was very proud that we did that. Look. I held the scripts to the same standard I held the scripts to when I was the senior investigator producer of 2020 in charge of investigations. I mean, it had to be true. It had to be provable. It had to be a fact. And, again, the network thought it was crazy, but that's okay. It was my show.
[01:00:14] Abel James:
Where do you see that approach now? Like, the obsession with finding the actual truth and doing the work and the investigation when, as you say, like, the networks or the social media companies these days don't care about that. They they would much Well, look, this is a much broader conversation, but,
[01:00:33] David Page:
I think the quality of most journalism, most storytelling in the country has gone into the toilet. Not because, in many cases, of a conspiracy, just because, well, a number of factors have come into play. A, look, every major media outlet is owned by a massive corporation, and their, concern is is money. And by the way, there are some journalistic organizations in my view that are doing a hell of a job in fighting the good fight, The New York Times. And despite being owned by root Rupert Murdoch, The Wall Street Journal, which he keeps around as his prestige property. But The Times is able to do that only because, under Robert Thompson, who was the publisher and now runs CNN less effectively, he came up with a way to to monetize the times by embracing what's online, by embracing verticals of particular, content, by embracing saleable items, like sports content through The Athletic, so that The Times is financially healthy.
Secondarily, you know, this is gonna sound pompous, but I came of age, my influences to get into journalism were literally Woodward, Bernstein, and Watergate. It was a different time. So there was a real motivation to do this kind of work. And there was an understanding that there was a hierarchy, that you started out at WCAT in Orange, Massachusetts, and then you worked your way up step by step through local journalism. And when you had finally earned your stripes, when you had made the mistakes, when you had learned the hard way, if you were lucky, you would get a shot at going national. Now, the path is you get an internship or a production assistant job, and next thing you know, you're on the desk, and next thing you know, you're a producer, and you're making idiotic mistakes, not because you're evil, but because you don't know any better. I mean, most of and I I'm talking about straight news operations here or operations that claim to be straight news.
Most of their fuck ups are ineptitude, not bias. Now there's bias that people have to fight. Look, as I said, I'm gonna left at Trotsky, and I was always very proud of the fact that that did not appear in my reporting. I'm a committed well, until Netanyahu, Israel's supporting Jew. I have real problems with what the government of that country is doing now, but I I I'm still a big supporter of Israel. But I also was one of the lead producers on a documentary that back in '87, twenty years after the six day war, that severely questioned the morality of the way Israel was dealing with its occupation. The fact is you gotta leave your own feelings on the table. I I don't know that the current generation of journalists, for the most part, feels that way or or ever learned that.
I think that we're in a time that is driven by social media where everyone, who's young anyway, has grown up thinking that whatever you believe, you ought to say, and you ought to say it as publicly as possible. And if you ever change your opinions, you shouldn't admit that. So, you know, we're we're not in a good storytelling place. Does that end up reflected in reality? Well, yeah, reality television has screwed everything. I mean, there's a thing called the Frankenbite where reality producers proudly take half of this sentence and half of this sentence and put it together and make someone say something they didn't say. When I was starting diners, I had hired a woman with a reality background to be my senior producer. And before we even got on the air, I caught her trying to make a Frankenbite out of something. I said, we simply don't do that. She called me up at home that night, obviously, after many drinks, and raged on about how stupid I was and and how I I didn't have a clue.
And I told her I accept her resignation. She called the next day to try to retract it, but I'm not someone like that's not gonna work for me on a show that that is supposedly factual. But, no, reality has has been a death knell to so much of storytelling and to so much of the public's perception about whether or not to believe what they see, which and by the way, believing what you see is is now a whole other problem because with AI, who the hell knows what you're seeing? You know, it used to be as a producer, you know, when I was on my first foreign assignment and and my first assignment as leading things, although I really relied on a correspondent, Ike Siemens, who knew what he was doing because I didn't, but, in Grenada, an invasion in was it 8384 that that Reagan staged supposedly to save American medical students, but really to deflect attention from the fact that, we just allowed the US marine barracks in Lebanon to be blown up by some terrorists. Anyway, I bought footage from a local hotel owner of helicopters, American helicopters attacking at the beginning of the invasion, which was exclusive at the time. And I think I paid him, like, $200, and then after the fact, he got upset, and NBC paid him more. But the point is that was when I put that on the air, people believed it to be true.
It was. But if someone put video up today of helicopters supposedly staging an attack, who the hell knows? It's interesting that the one bright light, beyond the few institutions that are still doing it well, and they've cut the money off to PBS, so they've got problems, is this thing called Substack, which is independent publishing. Basically, you get a website, you say what you want. I I've got a Substack in conjunction with my podcast. And what you're seeing is you're seeing as journalists lose their jobs with traditional organizations, like Jim Acosta at CNN, whether you liked him or not, They're turning to Substack. They're not getting a job at another company.
They're taking their own audience with them. Now the danger of this is that you have to have your own audience. You can't just be a journeyman covering stuff, which means you have to make a name for yourself, which can lead to people only pursuing the more extreme positions and the more titillating stories. On the other hand, like Robert Reich, the labor secretary under Clinton, who is a noted liberal thinker, has a fascinating substack in which comes out, I think, every day. My substack comes out once a week, which I find to be terrific and well worth reading.
So that is becoming a platform with its good side and bad side for independent journalistic voices. I don't think that anyone on Substack is gonna change the political, future of the country.
[01:08:00] Abel James:
Who knows? In a few years, if people completely lose trust with getting their entertainment and infotainment from other sources, we only really need one for most of us to use.
[01:08:10] David Page:
Well, but see, people only that's the problem. People only read what or very few people read anymore. People only view something that supports their position, which is why I assiduously read The Wall Street Journal every day. Its editorial position is way to the right of me. Now, I'm not a Fox viewer because I think Fox is full of shit. I just think they lie, and and there's no point. That's not the other side. The other side was the John Oliver show I just finished watching, in which he acknowledged there are some good ideas coming out of the Maha movement. He eviscerated it for what on balance seems to be their horseshit factor. But you have to acknowledge
[01:09:04] Abel James:
not everything is is black and white. We we only have a few minutes left, so I do wanna make sure we cover off on this too. Being a foodie, but also, keeping your your health biomarkers in line, what has that been like for you over the years, and and and where are you now? It's been tough, and it took a a death scare to get me there. Look. I have fought my weight
[01:09:25] David Page:
my entire life. I have two issues. One, I do believe that there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to being overweight, and I have that from family history. Number two, I'm prone to excess. You know, I just food was fun. So was booze. So I have fought this battle my whole life. There have been periods of time where I managed to be successful and then would backslide. It wasn't until my doctor said to me of my latest blood sugar readings, I give up. You you I my doctor said that? Yeah. She said, you're, I give up. You're not listening to me. Now, this is she never gave me understandable or good advice about the issue, but the bottom line was I had been prediabetic.
She never, because most doctors don't know, she never really explained the science of diabetes and what I could or couldn't eat, etcetera, etcetera, but she said, I give up. I'm sending you to an endocrinologist. I had, at that point, spiked a blood sugar reading of two fifty six and an a one c of eight something. So I went to an endocrinologist who specialized in diabetes, and she looped in a nutritionist who specialized in diabetes. And not to give away the end of the story, but my blood sugar is now a 100, and my a one c is five three. So Incredible. But it took I finally got scared.
And I'm not ashamed to say medication played a big part. I'm on Ozempic. Now Ozempic is not a panacea. Ozempic will deal with appetite. It will not deal with all of the other reasons someone like me turns to food. Boredom, emotion, excess. My initial use of Ozempic, coupled with a dietitian who put me on a very strict regimen, no calorie counting. You can have two meals a day and two snacks. The snack, you should eat around noon, then have a snack around three, then eat around six, have a snack around nine. There's a loaded number of things you can have for a snack. There was a particular kind of chocolate covered ice cream bar that was okay with him. And that was great. I lost a ton of weight because I had been ordered to be restrictive.
When I got to the point where my weight was pretty well down, now I'm dealing with my emotions. Now I'm having to exercise self control to not snack for no reason. The amount I eat anymore, my my Ozempic works. I I don't need massive meals. I still need meals. But what's happened is I'm back to calorie counting and have been for months. Because at this point, I I'm not just relying on Ozempic to cut down my appetite, and I have so much weight to lose that it's gonna work. Now I'm a calorie counter again. Only now it really matters to me for two reasons. Number one, I'm feeling much better, and as I age, that matters. I'm 70.
And number two, I I don't wanna die of diabetes. So that that's a strong motivation.
[01:12:45] Abel James:
Yeah. And then what does the day to day look look like in terms of exercising your own willpower or making the sit the decision yay or nay whether it's food or booze?
[01:12:54] David Page:
Well, first of all, I stopped drinking entirely because it it's just it's wasted calories. What's the what's the fucking point? So that helps. Number two, as my endocrinologist said, you could cheat sometimes. So if on a given day, I do exceed a calorie count, I don't kill myself, but I sure as hell watch the next day. And it's it's constant awareness. You know, we we had a day planned out of the house yesterday that was gonna include lunch out. I looked at that menu, and I figured out ahead of time what I could eat and what modifications I would need to make.
It's look. It's it's like running a restaurant. You gotta care. Thank god I finally care.
[01:13:40] Abel James:
Yeah. It's worth it. And you still can't have your fun from time to time. You just have to kinda dose it out appropriately. Last night, we went ahead some, for the first time, we had heard about this this mochi homemade from scratch ice cream place, and it just has all these kind of, like,
[01:13:58] David Page:
incredible desserts. Now this is rice based Asian ice cream. Correct?
[01:14:02] Abel James:
How was it? It was absolutely fantastic. It was the best ice cream and and the best treats, honestly, I'd had for a long time. We have a really high like, we're not gonna splurge on Dunkin' Donuts or something that's just kinda, like, junky. We're gonna save it for the real stuff, and this just floored me. It, like, made my whole week absolutely fantastic. But you don't have to, like, order everything and eat it all for that to happen. Right? And you can't then
[01:14:28] David Page:
do it again Yeah. The next day. That's the trick. Look. It's a matter of averages. Yeah. K? I weigh myself every day. Some would say I shouldn't do that. I should weigh myself once a week, but I weigh myself every day. I keep a very close eye on it. And a cheat can't become a trend is what it boils down to. But if you've cheated and enjoyed it, great. You enjoyed it. You know, what what I don't like is people who have never had a weight problem telling me that, okay. You can have ice cream, but only a really little portion. Fuck you. That, I'm not gonna do that. I'm I'm not going to take the treat and make it not a treat.
[01:15:09] Abel James:
It's yeah. It's riding the gas and the brake at the same time. I I can't do that either.
[01:15:15] David Page:
The first real cheat early on in my losing weight, getting healthy. We went to visit some friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor, Michigan has a place called Zingerman's Deli. Zingerman's Deli is arguably the finest deli on earth even though it's not in New York or California. They make their own rye bread. At that point, I was not eating any bread whatsoever, but I was not gonna go to Anarbor, Michigan and not have a pastrami on Ryan Zimmerman's, which kicked my blood sugar up from right after lunch from a 100 to a 165. And you know what? I planned on it, and it was damn good. Yeah.
[01:16:03] Abel James:
I mean, pastrami on rye rye is not something that you could just kind of sub in with a cucumber sandwich.
[01:16:11] David Page:
You you can't. And and you know what? It may the reason I say it may be the best selling in the country is because they make their own rye bread, and Katz's in New York doesn't, and they admit that they buy second rate rye for price reasons. Mhmm.
[01:16:22] Abel James:
Once again, they're giving a shit. It matters. David, this has been so much fun. What is the best place for people to find your work, your substack, and your book?
[01:16:31] David Page:
Well, go on Substack. It's Culinary Characters Unlocked. The podcast, please not just sign up at download because my ad rates depend on downloads. It's Culinary Characters Unlocked on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, any place you go. And the book, Food Americana, is available on Amazon, so go grab a copy.
[01:16:51] Abel James:
Fantastic.
[01:16:52] David Page:
David, thank you for the work that you do in the world. Fantastic. Oh, that's so that's so kind of you. Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure.
[01:17:05] Abel James:
Hey. Abel here one more time. And if you believe in our mission to create a world where health is the norm, not sickness, here are a few things you can do to help keep this show coming your way. Click like, subscribe, and leave a quick review wherever you listen to or watch your podcasts. You can also subscribe to my new Substack channel for an ad free version of this show in video and audio. That's at ablejames.substack.com. You can also find me on Twitter or x, YouTube, as well as fountain f m, where you can leave a little crypto in the tip jar. And if you can think of someone you care about who might learn from or enjoy this show, please take a quick moment to share it with them. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.
Introduction to Abel James and David Page
David Page's Journey from Journalism to Food
Cultural Insights Through Food
The Art of Eating the Whole Animal
The Evolution of Processed Food
The Barbecue Revolution in Texas
The Passion Behind Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives
Challenges in Modern Journalism
Balancing Foodie Life with Health
Final Thoughts and Farewell
