Okay.

Well, I don't know in the 90s if you remember this brand called Crybaby, which is like one of the first crazy sour brands.

And so a lot of the millennials who are now having kids are having these nostalgia things.

Moments for their candy because, you know, suddenly they're adulting and it's scary and they want to go back to childhood.

So they go back to their childhood candy.

Okay.

And Cry Baby was a big brand in the 90s.

Sure.

Thank you so much.

All right.

We ready? Sure enough.

Okay.

Well, first of all, I just feel like we need to thank Danny and this crew for the, I mean, they're like the hardest working people, right? I mean, I know someone said they came in last night and Danny was taking a little nap in the green room.

And I mean, she's like the hardest working girl in show business.

So I really appreciate the space to have it and to have this conversation.

All

Hi.

I know.

Marion, we were going to do a duet, Islands in the Stream, but we couldn't figure out the choreography, so the number's off.

I'm sorry.

So the first time I interviewed Marion, I was... a younger food reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, and I was all sort of hyped up on my new beat, and McDonald's had just taken trans fat out of its frying medium, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna call Mary Nestle, you know, I was all excited about this, and I expected her to say, yes, this is a great breakthrough, life is changing, things are gonna be better, and she said, McDonald's gets a lot of credit for doing what it should have been doing a long time ago.

And then she said, but super-sized French fries will still have 610 calories.

So I was like, all right.

I

Sit down.

Of course, uh, the red M&M and the yellow M&M were sort of the glitzy stars and then we had Mrs.

Brown who had some heels on.

She was kind of a corporate boss lady M&M.

Yes, you're naked.

My shell is brown.

It just looks like my milk chocolate is showing.

It's a high yielding, high oleic, TSWV-resistant runner type cultivar.

I remember doing stories on that

... all these, these groups that came up, you know, before there was a cure for AIDS or at least a prevention.

People with HIV would have wasting disease.

N-no matter what they ate, they would...

And so the idea was to try to keep people at least nourished enough or from this, a-and keep them alive till there was a cure.

A cure, I'll use that, largely.

So these groups like God's Love We Deliver and Community Servings started as a way to help our brothers and sisters who had HIV back in the day.

Mm-hmm

Right, right.

So, uh, but if you drill down on that, there's this other kind of interesting trend happening, which is thinking about, um, neurodivergent food.

So, we started to see a real rise in ASMR videos.

Those are the videos where you might hear somebody tearing up a package or chewing a certain way or eating something crunchy, uh, in a special kinda microphone.

And for some people, that gives them a, a really pleasing sensation.

And so, this idea of sound and how that affects how you experience food is big.

People are also feeling like they want their senses engaged in other ways too, that they wanna hear more, they wanna feel more, they want more or less crunch.

Really?

(laughs)

... people melting gummies into, you know ...

I mean, it, it just, the, the things that they can do, uh, on the internet, uh, these days is amazing.

So you don't want to be distracted by the food fads 'cause those, those come and go.

Um, right now there's a thing where p- there's a, kind of a really creamy, buttery cheese called butterkase, and everybody is stuffing it into s- baked sweet potatoes for lunch, and it's, like, the big thing, and people will show their lun- you know, and they have the What I Ate Today videos, and so ...

Anyway, so there's a million food fads.

Very different than trends, which is what sociologists will look at or what, you know, people in, uh, who write, like, write about food think about, and these are, um, uh, longer-tailed f- ways that we eat, things, uh, things that we're eating and interested in that maybe say something larger about how we're living or are gonna have, they're gonna stick around for a little, more sea change ways in which we eat.

Yes (laughs).