Dr. Kate Maddalena and Dr. Jeremy Tirrell on How the Gothic Explains Our Weird Rhetoric of Nutrition

Dr. Kate Maddalena and Dr. Jeremy Tirrell are the co-authors of the new book Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption, which examines the bizarre, often disgusting discourse around the strange things we put in our bodies in pursuit of fitter, healthier, more beautiful versions of ourselves. Framed through the lens of the Gothic, the grotesque has a certain appeal, and current advances in nutrition and medicine reveal humans as hybrids. From fecal transplants to probiotics to lab-grown meats, the boundaries between human and non-human have become ever blurrier. 

Use the promo code BAMA to get 30% of the book from the University of Alabama Press website. 

Find a transcript at Buzzsprout. Contact Ryan Weber at rw0019@uah.edu for more information about the show! 

Transcript

Introduction

Ryan Weber: Welcome to 10-Minute Tech Comm. I’m Ryan Weber from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Today, I have two guests who are addressing what they term an age of culinary high weirdness. In other words, we’re in an age where what was once considered fringe in terms of wellness and nutrition, has, thanks to social media and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, has bled into the mainstream. 

YouTube Clip: So yeah, you heard that right, 36 more cellular benefits to fatty 15 than omega 3s. That's huge. 

YouTube Clip: Overall, I'm very happy with my experience using Horse Boost. It helped me feel stronger, more energetic, and more confident in my daily life. 

YouTube Clip: Loaded with essential amino acids, vitamins, and the unique compound 10-hydroxy-2-desinoic acid, bee milk offers a treasure trove of goodness. Antioxidant, antimicrobial, and immunomodulatory properties, yes, it has it all.

YouTube Clip: If someone were to truly, objectively evaluate turmeric, okay, I don't think there's one condition, one health problem that you couldn't find some benefit from taking this right here. It's amazing.

Ryan: My guests look at claims like these from a rhetorical lens to find out why we’re talking about health and wellness in the way we are right now. First, we’ll introduce our co-authors. 

Kate Maddalena: I'm Kate Maddalena. I'm an associate professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga in the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology, and I teach media studies and rhetoric. 

Jeremy Tirrell: I'm Jeremy Terrell, and I'm an associate professor in the UNC Wilmington's Department of English. I'm in our professional and technical writing program. My primary research area is the intersection of technology, rhetoric, and writing, and I mostly teach courses that orbit around that area in rhetoric and design. 

Ryan: Dr. Maddalena and Dr. Tirrell are co-authors of Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption, which looks at our current era in terms of a rhetorical Gothic. That is, that which is revolting and appealing, that which is human and non-human, that which threatens the boundaries of what it means to be human, and how those things influence our current and longstanding approaches to health and wellness. I had a great time talking to them, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Interview

Ryan: Jeremy and Kate, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast to talk about Disgustatory! which I know has an exclamation point, and it's important for the listeners to understand that. It's a really fun book about rhetoric, about wellness, about the Gothic, really interesting writing, and what I wanted to kind of start out with is for you to kind of describe the rhetorical situation that you're talking about. You know, one of the things you write in your introduction is that “We are in a moment of culinary high weirdness.” So what is the sort of dietary and wellness situation that your book addresses? 

Jeremy: We’re always in moments of transition, right? I mean, it's kind of empty to say we're in a transition point. It's a question of what is the transition point we're in, right? And so one thing that kind of was exigent in this work is that there is now, coming out of particularly things like social media, there is now kind of unparalleled or different access to discourse, to affinity groups, you know, that are technologically mediated.

So previously, where these kinds of conversations might be quirky, where it's like, “Oh, my aunt is trying an all grapefruit diet, haha,” right? But now, I mean, you know, we start the book talking about Trump and hydroxychloroquine. We talk about ivermectin at the end, RFK pops up, as well as, you know, not only fitness and wellness influencers, but also moneyed elite who control a lot of our institutions, right? And so these things that used to be kind of quirky are now literally, you know, the levers of public health and wellness. And they are the resistance to it, right? They have the market cornered where, you know, public health is being determined by what were previously, only a few years ago, extreme ideas.

And the supposed alternative to that, that you would get, you know, the nostrums you would get from wellness influencers line up with them, right? And so we're in this moment where it's like both the mainstream and the alternative to the mainstream has a kind of similarity. And that similarity is opposed in many ways to what was conventional ideas about health and wellness only a handful of years ago. 

Kate: I totally agree. And the key word would be “high weirdness.” So like there are lows and highs of weirdness, and we're in a high of weirdness. Jeremy and I talk about this way too much, so we can't articulate a mainstream anymore. So I would say all the streams are high. The water's high in weirdness right now.

And it's because what we consider “mainstream,” scare quotes around mainstream or conventional is being challenged from multiple directions. 

Ryan: In the book, you sort of identify this turn as kind of around 2015, 2016 in a lot of ways, and then, you know, really exacerbated by COVID. You know, what sort of changed around that time?

Kate: I don't know if we can point to a causation. Like we're definitely, we're identifying trends. We don't necessarily see causes. The trend that our book answers and then describes is this correlation with the politics of the right and a wellness discourse that had been associated maybe with the left. I should say that we, Jeremy and I, had associated with a discourse of the left, the crunchy, is starting to coalesce with a politics of the right. 

And as we did our research, we realized that that isn't a new thing. That's a recurrent thing that's happened over throughout history in multiple places, but it was definitely happening in North America at that time. And we were alarmed by it as eaters of yogurt and practitioners of yoga. I mean, I'm a practitioner of yoga and an eater of yogurt. Kathleen Beaulieu at Yale calls this the crunchy to alt-right pipeline. So that trend. But we're not historians in that we don't necessarily point to a reason for it, like a causation. We point to a situation, I guess. We're rhetoricians. So we think of it as like, there's something, there's a rhetoric behind it. There's a suasory action happening here. 

Ryan: Well, that was one of the interesting things in your introduction. You frame this as stuff that was once kind of associated with sort of hippies on the left has migrated in some ways to people on the right. And even to the point where they're kind of taking the same products marketed in very different ways. And there's sort of multiple ways to kind of be on what used to be the fringe of health and wellness. You can approach it from several different political angles now.

Jeremy: Barbrook and Cameron talked about the Californian ideology, right? So it's like, and this has its roots. And, you know, in the intro, we do a bit of sort of historical narrative of, you know, it's like we've been in times of pandemic before, you know, like how Graham made his bones. He's like, this is a moral problem. You know, it's like God is punishing a stop drinking, which probably would have been a lot healthier because, you know, at the time, brewed beverages are going to be a lot safer when you're talking about waterborne illness. But he's like, you know, eat stuff that's not going to spirit up your loins and stick to the Bible and you'll be fine. Not true, but, you know, attracts a lot of followers. 

And I mean, that happened in COVID as well, right? And, you know, we're writing this before and during and after COVID. I mean, we're not through it yet. And also during political shifts, right? I mean, we're writing this first Trump administration, Biden administration, second Trump, we had to go back through and change former president to, you know, current or just delete it, right? And it's like those sorts of shifts were happening as we were writing this and watching. I mean, as Kate said, it's like we're constantly just texting each other. It's like, here's another one. And here's another one. Here's another one. It's like COVID was a time and still continues to be. It's like it's a time of desperation. And as we point out in the introduction, it's like these things, these cycles occur. And, you know, you can only kind of reflect, reflectively see them, where it's like desperation leads to whatever we've been doing, the status quo has failed us. So just start grabbing around for whatever is out there, right? And some of those and not even like individual ones, we can point to things like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, it's not the individual thing. It's like, you know, the loss of metanarrative writ large. It's like, well, then we’ve got to try everything else, right? That's where we are now because the, you know, the monolith has failed us.

Ryan: So one of the things you really bring to this analysis is the idea of the Gothic. And you use that to read a lot of this moment. So let's start. What is the Gothic? Let's start there. How do you define the Gothic? 

Jeremy: Yeah, it's a good question because, you know, it's one of those things that whatever I say here is going to be wrong, right? Like rhetoric, right? I mean, trying to define that as well. And we have a rhetorical Gothic. So, you know, we're doubly damned here. But we liked the Gothic. We saw it as productive because of the way it's more than just a literary genre, right? And, you know, many have, including those in Lit Credit, have talked about this. It's not just a genre. 

Devetak calls it, and he was coming out of 9-11, he calls it an aesthetics of unease, right, or unrest. It's like pervasive fear. For us, thinking about this in terms of rhetoric, it's like, well, is there, you know, a rhetorical Gothic? You know, we're seeing that there are forms of persuasion that pick up elements of this notion of dis-ease, right? So we see it as the thing that is a repellent appeal. It's appealing, not in spite of being disgusting, but because of that, right? You know, the repellent is also the attractive, right? And we talk about different folks, different thinkers who have touched upon this, right? So the Gothic for us is that. It's the repellent appeal. It's the destructive transformation, right? It's to be the most that you can be, you can't be human anymore. You have to be more than human. You have to be a monster to be better than a human, right? So that's the Gothic for us. You know, it's the appeals latent in that kind of darkness.

Kate: And I think, like, so if we're thinking of it pragmatically as what's new in the book or what the book offers is, it's definitely, we keep saying rhetoric. This is not literary studies, right? We're very based in rhetorical theory. And we're opening an analysis with the Gothic as a frame to texts that aren't necessarily considered by what would be a literary Gothic analysis. And then we also get pretty systematic with it too. So we offer a framework and we offer elements of that framework. And we don't mean it to be a comprehensive framework. Like we could add elements. In fact, Jeremy and I are talking about that all the time. We're like, oh, we need to add this piece.

One more thing to say is this all comes from, or the Gothic as a big theoretical concept, really comes from mid 19th century. And, you know, where the literary Gothic comes from, which is anxiety about technology. So there's the turn to machination and the machine and in the mid 1800s. And this is a continuation of that, those anxieties and attenuation and, and shifts too, but it's, we see it of a piece. 

Oh, those elements, the elements of our framework are quantification, hybridity, abjection, optimization, and regulation. So counting everything, the obsession with numbers, Lev Manovich would call it the shift from the narrative to the database. The fact that we have to make all our arguments with a logos that is mathematical, is quantification.

Hybridity is this idea that we can put things together that shouldn't naturally be put together to make new things and the anxiety around that. 

Abjection is a fun one. And it's my favorite. It's my favorite chapter that I got to work on. Abjection is the confusion of the inside and the outside of the body and where our bodies start. It's body horror, where our bodies start and other bodies begin and where our bodies end and the world begins. And we're confused about that. And rightly so, like science says, we're rightly confused about that. 

Optimization is the capitalist chapter where the drive to make everything productive and better all the time. And that becomes a huge theme in the book. The fact that we can't even like, even our health, even our being in our bodies can't just be, it has to be better all the time. 

Jeremy: You're not even allowed to take drugs anymore unless it's helping you be productive. You're not even allowed to get high. You gotta microdose. 

Kate: Right. Fitter, healthier, more productive. Yeah. And we work with, there are a lot of other folks in the psychedelic rhetoric space who are talking about what Jeremy just said, which is like, these aren't recreational drugs anymore. These are optimization drugs now. 

Ryan: Well, and there's your quantification too, right? Where it's, there's studies now about psilocybin and its positive productive effects. 

Kate: Oh, you can't talk about psilocybin as just a party drug anymore. And then just, just a party drug. Even that, that like diminutive language is part of this language. 

And then finally regulation, which is laws, rules-based code in codifying behavior and control. So those are the five, quantification, hybridity, abjection, optimization, and regulation. 

Ryan: Kate, you said that the abjection is your favorite. And I did want to talk about that chapter. So your chapter about abjection is about probiotics. And so you say that “the marketing for probiotics supplements that purport to stimulate the growth of beneficial microorganisms within the body employs Gothic rhetorics of abjection.” So how does this work? Take us through kind of how the Gothic rhetoric of abjection appears in this marketing.

Kate: Another theme of the whole book, but I think the probiotics chapter really gets at it. And it, it's gotten that in, in several other places too. Probiotic science is really promising. Around the time that you just mentioned, 2015, 2016, we are finding out that fecal transplants, like taking feces from someone else's body and putting it in a diseased body works to reestablish a new microbiome. We're finding out so much about the genetics of the microbiome and the microbiota in individual bodies. And we still are. So that moment marks that turn. I'm getting to my point is the science is really promising and real. And so like in the time from around 2010 to 2020, 10 years, fecal transplants become best practice to treat certain diseases in hospitals. And they're, they're like antibiotic resistant diseases. 

I'm saying this really, really it's real and successful. And then marketing takes that promise around the 2015s and marketing over promises. Right. And in some cases, like I'm even cautious to say “over promises,” because as I researched this chapter, the Bulgarian grandmothers who were studied in the 1970s, who made and ate yogurt and is the reason they are the people that we got kefir from that is like marketed to us in  whole foods all the time now, and I eat every day. It's good science. So if people are always asking me like, what's not bullshit. And I'm like, the probiotics thing probably isn't bullshit. Like the fact of probiotics and the microbiome, but a lot of the probiotics products that are being sold are bullshit. 

That was a really long, long preamble to answer your question. But the chapter uses Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, their concepts of abjection to describe advertising. Yes. So the specific advertising that we begin with is Jamie Lee Curtis's advertising of Activia. And she, she joked about 

Jeremy: Poop yogurt! 

Kate: Yeah. Poop yogurt! She basically was like, “I made my money on a couple of movies and then advertising yogurt that makes you shit. It jumpstarted my career again.” And it really did. Now she's, you know, she's doing amazing acting work too. But the way that that marketing, like needing to regulate, and this brings in another chapter regulation, but needing to control and take care of and regulate our poo. And then also this whole new way of orienting ourselves to health. 

Jamie Lorimer, an STS scholar calls it the probiotic turn, where previously the medical discourse and the marketing that was aligned with medical discourse was all antibiotic, like kill infection, infection bad, infection scary. And the probiotic orientation is basically like much differently, invite the right things to live on and in us because we're actually colonies of things. Open the windows of the hospital because the surfaces of the hospital need to be occupied by fungus and bacteria that stabilizes a population so that the antibiotic resistant bacteria can't overpopulate that space. All these kinds of things. So both the marketing and like Reddit discourse, just conversations of people trying to solve health problems, has to totally reorient itself around that. It's an uncomfortable reorientation, like talking about poo and talking about the fact that we need to not overly antibiotic ourselves. There's lots of humorous, interesting, and then in a lot of ways, really, really compelling and real conversations happening there. 

Ryan: You're saying that it's this swing away from purity, right? Of like, get all the microbes out of your body, get all the microbes out of the hospital to more towards this hybridity of like, you are this hybrid of all these different microbes. And then the fecal transplant seems like kind of the perfect example of like, where does your body end and someone else's body begin? That complicates that binary.

Kate: Yeah. And the 1850s through the 20th century attitude towards the body and the Gothic attitude, like the discussion of abjection is very much a horror discussion. And like Jeremy said early on, when we're thinking about these transformative rhetorics being the suasion, like we are prepared by body horror text to have these conversations. Like they're interesting conversations, but then like, oh, interesting twist to the plot. We need to, we actually need to like dive into some of that body horror and we're prepared for it by these discourses. 

Jeremy: The discourse we're having right now, we can't look away from the colonizing languages at the heart of that, right? You've got to get rid of the bad, wipe them out and colonize with the good. That's what we do, right? I mean, like that's bred into the Gothic as well, which, you know, as critics point out, has a kind of normalizing function where the idea is to get away from the weird and back to the status quo. In many ways, it's very conservative, right? It's not fantastic. It's something scary happens, then we get back to the normal way that things are good, even though the normal is monstrous for many folks, right? And so, yeah, I mean that discourse of, and, you know, this kind of manifests in our conclusion when we're bringing all these to bear on ivermectin, the discourses of colonization of the other are so woven into the Gothic.

Ryan: You've got another case. So you've got a case study for each of the five components, Kate, that you mentioned. But another one that you were talking about is sort of this paradox of lab-grown meat. Tell us how this paradox illustrates the Gothic. 

Jeremy: Yeah. And if Kate's favorite is probiotics, this one is my favorite. 

Kate: Those are the two best. Those are the two best chapters.

Jeremy: They're kind of the middle. So it hits this sort of high point. And then, yeah, I mean, like, interestingly, the regulation one, I think, is our most, like, rigorous and in some ways, like, methodologically sound, but it's also dry. And to me, it's like, because some of the chapters, like, tonally have a very sort of, it's like, you know, as we point out in the introductions, like, you can't talk about shit transplants without a little bit of a grin, right? They're very serious. People's lives have been saved and people who didn't do it lost their lives. But it is also funny in a certain way.

But, like, when we got to the regulation chapter, it was like, because a lot of it talks about eating disorders and spaces carved out on Reddit by primarily women who needed, like, safe spaces to talk about these really vulnerable things and how they become inevitably kind of, like, infested with predators. It feels like there's nothing freewheeling about this, right? Yeah. 

Ryan: It's not sort of funny. It doesn't lend itself to the same kind of jokes that the fecal transplant chapters do. 

Jeremy: Right. And, like, lab-grown meat, you know, I was able to work in Jeff Goldblum and The Fly, which I've been trying to talk about in scholarship for two decades, and I just can't find a spot. I got to talk about the video game Inside, which to me is one of the more significant cultural products of the last, you know, 10, 15 years. 

So for me, that's the high point chapter. The issue of, you know, the paradox of lab-grown meat, right? So, like, oxymoronically, because a lot of what the chapter is doing is rhetorically looking at, you know, that as a term and as a concept, right? And so, oxymoronically, it's yoking together growth, which we commonly associate with the natural, and the lab, which we commonly associate with a perversion of that growth, right? I mean, Gothicly Frankenstein, if nothing else, is about that, right? The hubris of a man aping creation. 

And so, you know, looking at that, we talk about lab-grown meat in terms of the Latourian hybridity of, you know, We Have Never Been Modern, that those sorts of things, like the oxymoron, they're not nullifying. They don't cancel each other out, or else they wouldn't do anything, right? But they are generative, which means the contradiction is doing something, right? So we bring in sort of the notion that primarily We Have Never Been Modern, that Latour talks about, you know, the contradiction, you know, they work not despite being irreconcilable, but because they are. We talk about the heterotopia from Foucault, and how it gets, by later commentators, gets turned toward the dark heterotopia. Foucault pointed out things like cemeteries, and the locations of death. This gets developed in this concept of the dark heterotopia that we pull in, and also Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, which he posits as kind of the shared materiality of things. 

So in the book itself, we kind of pull from those to analyze, like, what is lab-grown meat, right? Rhetorically, how is that constructed? That's sort of what that chapter aims to do, and it comes to this sort of culmination of it's, you know, this oxymoronic meal that offers us a kind of symbol that we can use to control our own hybridity, in that, looking at something like the Impossible Burger, you get to choose whether or not you eat that, right? But, you know, as the chapter kind of points out, it's like, some of that is kind of phatic, because you can say, “No, no, I'm all organic. I only grow things in my own garden. I don't touch any of this science stuff,” right? It's like, yeah, but all of that is a product of agriculture. The water, and the soil, and the air are all shared. The bad news is, we're all hybrid monsters. It's inescapable, right? And in fact, the pull to be pure, where it's like, “Well, I reject all of that. I'm a slow food person.” It's like, you're just part of the same binary. You're just the other side of it. You're not out of it, right? You're the token resistance that isn't actually resistance, because we're all there. It's too late.

Kate: And you're a great market. 

Jeremy: Yeah, we're all capitalist subjects, but yeah, you're right. I mean, I was just complaining to Ryan, I think, about how they're stuffing probiotics and fiber in soda now. I'm like, God, we don't have to, everything doesn't have to be everything. Just let me get a Royal Crown and get out of here. God, I don't even drink soda.

Ryan: I had, a couple of years ago, had wanted to make a joke about post-biotics, because there are prebiotics. And I was like, well, but that's a real thing. The reality is ahead of the joke, right? 

Kate: The reality being ahead of the joke with this stuff, just after we've been researching this for seven years, I will tell you, it always is. Like, if you think of something and you Google it, you're like, oh, there's, somebody's talking about this. I wanted to make sure that with the hybrid meat, when we talk about that chapter, that we make sure we mentioned the Gothicest thing about it. I mean, there's much, it might not be the Gothicest, but I think it is, is the cannibal question. Jeremy, can I say it? 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Kate: Like the implication, and this is one way that I sell the book to students, or I get excited with my students about this book. And I've had some students in my classes reading pieces of Jeremy's chapter on lab-grown meat, is that the definition of flesh, and this gets into the abjection chapter too, if we can grow any flesh from DNA, from genetic material, we can grow human flesh without killing someone to grow it. And would you eat it? Is the question for students always. And that's a class long question. It always produces excellent, deeply theoretical.

Ryan: It's a great ethical dilemma, right? That now is a real possibility. I don't think anyone is doing that, but you could do this, you could put that.

Kate: Someone is somewhere. 

Ryan: I guess that's true. There's always someone doing that. 

Jeremy: There was an influencer who ate her own cartilage. And the thing of it is, it's like, in a lot of the chapter talks about this, it's already unified in pigs. Pigs are human analogs historically. Going back to Homer. We cyclically unite them and divide them from us so that we can exploit them in different ways. Right now, with GalSafe pigs, pigs where they've removed alpha-gal, which is this sugar that's in a lot of mammals, and it makes xenotransplantation hard. It's like getting organs from other animals. Why doesn't that work? Big culprit is alpha-gal. You put that in us and our immune systems freak out, because we don't have it. Us and some other primates, but it's kind of rare. 

And so they knocked out alpha-gal in some pigs. And it turns out that if you ever heard of the red meat allergy you get from a tick bite. So those people can't eat red meat because of alpha-gal. Turns out, not only can you transplant those organs into people, but people who have the red meat allergy can eat that pig's flesh and it doesn't bother them, right? So it's like sometimes the pigs are us so we can get their organs. Sometimes there's something else so you don't have mortal trauma eating something that is partially human. And humans do this, right? I mean, it's like we cyclically say “You are us, you aren't us” so that we can do the things we want to them. 

Kate: And we feed them to themselves too. Like the pig analogy is a huge one. 

Ryan: Well, this is all really interesting. It's a super fun book. It's got a lot of jokes in it. I was very excited about the tone, the topic and everything. Anything you want to tell us? Kate, you mentioned the cannibal question to sell the book. Anything else you want to tell us to get people excited about reading it? 

Jeremy: As you said, like after all this that we talked about, the button is, it's actually a lot of fun! I mean, like the whole book is basically us just going, “Come on.” So yeah, I mean, tonally, we tried to engage with it in a way that is compelling, right? And I think to sell it in a certain way, it's like, I think it touches a lot of different areas. Where it's like your entryway in could be interested in the Gothic. It could be you're a science and technology rhetorician. It could be you're interested in health and wellness. 

Or I mean like Kate, and we make footnotes about this occasion, where it's like, yeah, we've done this. I mean, Kate was mentioning yogurt. I’ve pooped in a tube and sent it to someone to see what I can and can't eat, right? You would think we're kind of jaded where it's like, oh, this is BS. It's not. I'm eating turmeric right now. It's literally happening. Is it doing anything? I don't know, but I'm going to give it a couple decades. So it's like we're engaged with this. And these are compelling topics, if nothing else. And I think there's also kind of entry for other people to bring their own attention to it.

I mean, as Kate pointed out, those five chapters we had, that was just us identifying these aspects of a Gothic rhetoric. But there are countless others. And there are other ways to apply it, right? So it's not like it's comprehensive. It's look what we can do with what we've got. 

Ryan: Well, and that's something that comes up in the book, too, is you want a framework that other people can apply. So it's always exciting when you read a book like this to then think, all right, who's going to take this and run with it and see what comes next? 

Kate: I hope somebody does. That would be awesome. One more thing that I think we should mention, and maybe we have a little bit, we are really careful not to just call this a book about bullshit or a book about snake oils, even though snake oil is a thread through. The reason we're interested in this rhetorically and rhetorical context and analyzing this rhetorically, we find these suasory actions compelling ourselves, so we're not just calling bullshit. We are saying there's a lot going on here, and it comes from really real situations where people are trying to save their lives, where people are trying to live better, where the health care system has absolutely failed folks, and so there's more than just the BS and truth binary here. 

Ryan: Well, and I like that you make that very clear that it's not just sort of like this is bullshit, and this is real science, and I appreciate too that the book is not just like, ha ha, look at these weirdos doing this, because that's very easy to do. It's stuff that you say you've participated in, that we're all participating in. We're all trying to figure out how to be healthier and weller, and the things that we thought were, you know, solid science 20 years ago, you know, get turned on their head. That's scientific progress, and there's always this stuff on the margins that comes in and out. You've got a line that all science was citizen science before it becomes science. 

Kate: These kinds of conversations, conversations about the body and being well, are a point of contact between human beings, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. So this book is coming from, it begins and ends in the political context of now in North America, and Jeremy and I both are very frustrated by that context, and even sometimes terrified by it. And so I wonder if there's something here also where people can see that, if we can have conversations about wellness and the body, it's a boundary object, maybe. 

Ryan: Well, sure, if you've got people on the right and left both interested in the same alternative medicines, you know, it's a weird point of connection sometimes. 

Kate: I might be able to talk to my grandmother about yogurt. Like, maybe there's a place to get in here, a point of contact. It'll bring families together. 

Ryan: This is a book to read around the Thanksgiving table.

Kate: With your not-turkey. 

Ryan: Exactly, yeah. With your lab-grown turkey. Thank you very much. I really liked the book. I like what you're doing. I enjoyed talking with you today. 

Jeremy: Thank you so much. 

Kate: Thank you.