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Professor Steven Alvarez believes you can read a taco. Look at the meat, the spices, and the tortilla. Each ingredient has a story that unlocks something about Mexican and American history and culture. This idea is the basis for Steve’s “Taco Literacy” course at St. John’s University in New York City. This week, we go on an end-of-semester taco crawl with Steve’s class, hitting up some of his favorite regional taquerías. Turns out, you can judge a taco by its tortilla. //Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL).Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

TikTok is the wild west of the food media world. It’s less professionalized than Instagram and YouTube, and it holds the promise of virality from the very first time you post. So we wondered: What actually makes a food TikTok go viral? To find out, we consult Bettina Makalintal, a food journalist and culture critic, and Professor Emily Contois, who studies food on Instagram. Then we get advice from a TikTok star: Joanne Lee Molinaro, aka The Korean Vegan. Armed with tips and tricks from the experts — and a pecan pie — can Dan reverse engineer his own viral TikTok?If you’re the type who likes to flip to the end of the book first, you can watch Dan’s TikTok right here. //Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL).Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world. It has 500,000 food books alone. A library with that many books has a lot of librarians, with expertise in just about every region, culture, and period of history you can think of. Since 1949, the library’s cooking club has drawn on that diversity of knowledge to bring together foods from all over the world. But by the 2000s, the club had lost steam and was nearly defunct. Could librarian LaVerne Page and database specialist Shirley Loo save the club? Dan travels to the club’s annual holiday luncheon to find out — and to share some of his favorite librarian jokes. //Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL).Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

“So often when we talk about veganism, we don't imagine Black people,” says Bryant Terry, the James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, chef, and educator. But Bryant sees veganism as deeply rooted in Black communities and traditions. And, he points out, veganism is growing faster among Black Americans than among any other group. After publishing another popular vegan cookbook last year, Bryant just released a new book that he edited: Black Food, which includes recipes, playlists, art, poetry, and essays from more than 100 contributors. Bryant joins Dan to talk about the many influences that guided him towards veganism, what it took to get the wider publishing community to take his work seriously, and why Black Food will be his last book. //Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL).Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

We’re back with the latest on Cascatelli, the new pasta shape that Dan invented. Now that the chaos around Cascatelli’s launch has died down, Dan has to make some big decisions about what to do next — with help from his cousin Carrie and die maker Chris Maldari. Then while Sfoglini upgrades their factory and tries to get the pasta into stores and restaurants, Dan explores other opportunities. Can he land the kind of deal he’s hoping for? Plus: Dan puts his mom to work developing recipes for Cascatelli.Order your limited edition cascatelli gift box now at Sfoglini.com! And use The Fresh Market’s store locator to find cascatelli in a store near you. //Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL).Transcript available at  www.sporkful.com.

Patti LaBelle is not just a music icon, she’s also a food icon. She’s written best-selling cookbooks, hosted a food TV show, and even cooked for Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and Prince. Back in July, she released the 20th anniversary edition of her first cookbook, LaBelle Cuisine. She talks with Dan about touring the segregated South in the ‘60s, the viral video that made her sweet potato pie a Walmart sensation, and the one recipe in her cookbook that’s perfect for women going through menopause. Plus food writer Adrian Miller joins us to discuss why Patti’s sweet potato pie has particular significance in the Black community. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Pati Jinich has always had to move between worlds — as a Jew growing up in Mexico, and as a Mexican immigrant to the US, where she first worked as a policy analyst. “It wasn’t until I switched to cooking,” she tells us this week, “that I was finally able to make sense of all the pieces of myself.” Since that transition she’s spent a decade documenting Mexico’s vast and varied food cultures in her cookbooks, and on her PBS show Pati’s Mexican Table, which is watched by more than 65 million people around the world. Her new docu-series, La Frontera, is more political, examining the US-Mexico border, and the people who navigate the two worlds between it. It’s also her most personal work yet. She talks with Dan about why this show is so important to her. Plus she peers into his fridge over Zoom, and tells us about a deep fried quesadilla in Jalisco that she’ll never forget. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

A few months back, we got an email that set us off on an adventure. It came from Sara Bir, an author and recipe developer who’s obsessed with pawpaws, the largest fruit native to North America. “Pawpaws are tricky in the kitchen,” Sara wrote. “You can't buy them in stores. Occasionally they cause people to vomit. But pawpaws are truly beguiling, reminiscent of tropical fruit like mangoes and bananas.” With the help of her connections in the pawpaw dark web, Sara had identified one of the few pawpaw patches in the New York area. Can Dan and Sara find a pawpaw in the wild? And why does the pawpaw — also known as the poor man’s banana and hillbilly mango — inspire such a cultish following? // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Stanley Tucci nearly broke the internet last year when he made a Negroni on Instagram. But long before that, the award-winning actor built his career around his love of food. He created the iconic food film Big Night, he’s written best-selling cookbooks, and he eats his way through Italy in a new CNN series. Now he’s released a memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, which includes the revelation that a few years ago he battled oral cancer, which changed his relationship with food forever. He and Dan discuss that and much more, including the art of eating on camera. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

In the last 15 years, Nashville hot chicken has become a hot trend. But for decades before that, hot chicken was well known among Nashville’s Black community. For generations, you could only get it at the place where it was invented: Prince’s Hot Chicken. Now with attention from the likes of Beyoncé and Guy Fieri, Prince’s has gone from being a neighborhood institution to a Nashville landmark — and many imitators have come along. Dan travels to Nashville and speaks with André Prince Jeffries, who’s been running Prince’s for more than 40 years. She talks about Nashville’s history of segregation, serving members of the KKK, and the complicated racial dynamics behind this food trend. When white chefs and restaurateurs cash in on a dish created by Black people, who benefits? // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Chef Joe Flamm grew up in a big Italian family, where there was always sauce bubbling on the stove. The rule of the house was: if you walked in the kitchen, you stirred the sauce. Since then Joe has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants, won Season 15 of Top Chef, and now opened his first restaurant in Chicago, Rose Mary. It’s named after his two grandmothers and inspired by his Italian heritage. Like Dan, Joe has strong opinions about pasta, but he takes sauce just as seriously. Joe tells Dan why rigatoni carbonara will always win out over spaghetti carbonara, when it’s better to skip fresh pasta and go with the dried stuff, and the one thing you never want to do when saucing any kind of pasta. This episode is sponsored by Bertolli. Their new Bertolli d’Italia sauces are made in Italy, crafted with vine-ripened tomatoes under the Italian sun, finely-aged Italian cheeses, fresh cream, and Mediterranean olive oil. Find sauces, recipes and meal inspiration at bertolli.com/ditalia. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Since we first had Padma Lakshmi on The Sporkful in 2016, a lot has changed — in the world, and for her. She’s become a vocal activist, speaking out on immigration and women’s rights, and sharing more of her own personal experience in the process. She created and hosts a food travel show, Taste the Nation, that looks at the immigrant experience through the lens of food. She’s also just published her first children’s book, Tomatoes for Neela, all while continuing to host Top Chef. This week Padma reflects on the rejections she faced when pitching her show, the aspect of her work that she resents the most, and how she’s finally taken more control over her own career. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

For two decades, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos has been one of the most popular snacks in America. In recent years its legend has grown, as word spread that they were invented by Richard Montañez, a Mexican-American janitor at Frito-Lay who went on to become a company executive. The story made Montañez something of a Latino icon, with two memoirs and a soon-to-be-released biopic based on his life. But when a journalist at the L.A. Times started looking into this feel-good story, he found a very different tale. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Antoni Porowski wasn’t the obvious choice to be the food expert on Queer Eye — he’s not a chef and he has no formal culinary training. When the show debuted in 2018, many people asked, “Can this guy actually cook?” Not the most reassuring reaction for a person who already struggled with impostor syndrome. In the years since, he’s alternated between trying to prove his haters wrong, and trying to stop worrying about what others think. On the eve of his second cookbook coming out, where is he at with these internal battles? Antoni also reveals his struggles with body image, his secrets for a good salad, and his hot takes on pierogi. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Lindy West is a leading voice of the fat acceptance movement, a position that's earned her a lot of devoted fans — and a lot of enemies. Dan sits down with Lindy, author of the best seller Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, at a New York City diner, where they get into the issues that fat people face when eating in public. Lindy explains why she still feels the need to buy carrots at the grocery store when she’s picking up a cake, and discusses the assumptions strangers make when they see her with her “skinny, hot husband.” But it’s not all serious. Dan and Lindy geek out over the best way to make sandwiches at an airport lounge, and Lindy reveals her controversial theory about Lean Cuisine pizza. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL).

Jake Cohen didn’t care much about Jewish food when he went to culinary school and worked in high end restaurants. But when he met his future husband, Jake was introduced to the Middle Eastern Jewish recipes of his in-laws, like tahdig and kubbeh. Soon, he was mining his own family’s Eastern European Jewish recipes, and putting his spin on matzo ball soup and kasha varnishkes. Earlier this year Jake published his first cookbook, Jew-ish: Reinvented Recipes From A Modern Mensch, and he’s become a social media star. Ahead of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), Dan and Jake talk about the controversial ingredient Jake adds to tahdig, whether Rosh Hashanah brisket is overhyped, and why personality is so important in online food videos. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

“Literally all pasta shapes are wonderful except bucatini. Bucatini can go get effed.” Francis Lam’s strongly-worded tweet inspired Dan to organize a live event in 2018, where he, Francis (host of The Splendid Table), and Evan Kleiman (host of Good Food) could debate the merits of various pasta shapes. It was called “The Bucatini Dialogues” — and yes, it was the night when Dan first announced his intention to invent a new pasta shape. But now, for the first time, we’re airing the rest of that conversation. We cover a range of shapes and tackle the tough questions, like: Why would you ever use a penne without ridges? Is there a time and a place for overcooked pasta? And what’s the best approach to eating a bowl of ramen? // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

For the first 40 years of her life, Amy Pearl was a card-carrying member of the meat club; she literally had a credit card from the famous Brooklyn steakhouse Peter Luger. Then one day she ate a porterhouse steak, and nearly died. This week we join forces with our friends at Radiolab to tell the story of how Amy's mysterious allergy was identified by scientists. Plus, she tells us how the allergy has changed her relationship to food — and we find out if it’ll ever go away. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Does Ratatouille accurately portray restaurant critics? What’s the lamest food trope in cinema? And what’s Dan’s favorite eating scene from The Godfather? We’re talking food in movies this week, with Kristen Meinzer and Rafer Guzman, hosts of the podcast Movie Therapy (Kristen also co-hosts the podcast By The Book). Plus we hear from listeners looking for food-related movie recommendations, and life advice. Like Katrine in Denmark, who’s considering giving up a career in healthcare to organize gourmet fly fishing retreats. // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

Over the course of fifty years and a dozen books, Dr. Jessica B. Harris has uncovered the ways that West African food, and African American people, have fundamentally shaped American cuisine. In 2011, when she published her book High on the Hog, this idea had received little attention. Today it’s getting more recognition, including with a new Netflix series inspired by Dr. Harris’s book. We talk with her about her own journey in making these connections between West Africa and America, and she offers advice to the new generation of Black scholars and writers exploring these links: “Look ahead. What do you see ahead?” // Get 500+ more great Sporkful episodes from our catalog and lots of other Stitcher goodness when you sign up for Stitcher Premium: www.StitcherPremium.com/Sporkful (promo code: SPORKFUL). Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.