Yeah.

And oh, you didn't want to be part of that, sweetie.

Well, um, so the four pillars were, again, I think I was, um, as I was trying to figure out this morass of here's all these ideas about how to eat better, and then anytime I went to scratch under the surface of one, it turned out like not only was it not new, [chuckles] mostly they had this moment in the '20s, and then they mostly weren't actually better, right? All the reasons that I'd been told about why they were better fell apart on very cursory kind of examination.

Um, which made me realize like, okay, actually I wasn't convinced by evidence that these things were better anyway.

So starting to look at, okay, where do these things come from? And, and so- Really to simplify it for myself, divide it into the things that I felt I was aspiring to.

The idea of sophistication or gourmetness, this idea that I had to know about fancy foods, um, had to know about French foods-

Hmm.

I thought that somewhere s- there were adults still in charge, and now I'm really feeling like maybe that's not the case.

So within that context, tell us a little bit about how you got into history and about what's happening in history now.

All right, so I got into history by an unusual route.

My first degree was in biology and biochemistry, and I had two years of that degree in a molecular genetics lab.

So weirdly for an historian, my first published work is on sequencing and structure mapping of RNA using the Maxim Gilbert technique.

So I didn't come into history straight, I guess I would say.

And I decided really partly based on that lab work experience that I didn't want to go to graduate school in that, but that I really did want to get a doctorate and try and have a research career.

And I simply basically jumped ship directly into history, which does mean I have huge gaps in my historical knowledge.

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