McDonald’s Broke My Heart

[Music] Pushkin. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boom-dougle. "You got to get bruises, the guy's pregnant. They're worth all our kids. They don't get shit about it." Listen, anywhere you get podcasts and hear episodes early and add free with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Head to the Drilled Show page on Apple Podcasts or pushkin.fm/plus to sign up. Thanks for supporting this show. My parents didn't take us to fast food places when I was little. They thought they were an abomination. In any case, we didn't have a McDonald's back then in our little town. So it wasn't like I was confronted by the fact of French fries. They were some dimly understood concept. Something that people out there somewhere did to a potato that somehow implicated the French. [Music] Then one day after track practice, 13 years old, I went to my first McDonald's. Have you ever seen a puppy encounter snow for the first time? He burrows his nose into it with this look of perplexity and sheer delight because he can't understand where this white thing came from that is both fluffy and cold. It was like that for me. A slice of potato. Crispy on the outside yet somehow pillowy soft on the inside. Right then and there, I gave my heart to McDonald's. And then McDonald's broke it. [Music] My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history might podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. [Music] This week, I'm on a mission to understand why McDonald's betrayed me so many years ago. [Music] Our story begins in a non-descript office park in Foster City, California. It's just south of San Francisco, a place called Matson. Maybe the top food research and development house in the country, the Los Salimos of food science. I came here to walk back the cat as they say in the intelligence business. To figure out what happened on July 23rd, 1990, the day McDonald's changed the recipe of their fries forever and turned their backs on everything I once held dear. [Music] I'll go get another flight tomorrow and then I'm just going to take the temperature down the. I said to Matson, "Make me some fries the old way. Let's do a taste test." Modern fries versus original McDonald's fries. So we did. We ate them. Sat there in the Matson conference room in a Busswill food coma. These are, I'm going back to the Busswill. I have to say these are excellent. Those are King fries. Then we thought, "Let's call in some people too young to ever taste the old kind, just to make sure we weren't all dreaming, but this wasn't some middle-aged fantasy about how everything was better in the good old days." Do we have a millennial? We can grab right away. [Laughter] Quick before the fries get cold. We had the batches of fries in identical baskets. Identified only by number, 637, 128, and 75. We lined up the millennials. Start here. Go down the line. I want to know which one you like the best. Are we any old French fries? Yeah, this is the one we all French fries eating contest. We have three, just for the record. We have three millennials here. That's correct. 23, 28, 25 years of age. The food scientists of the future. They sample all three options. They all reach the same conclusion. I like this one. You like the first one? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Who's next? I also choose 637. I think I like. I'm kind of torn between 128 and 637. But I think I like. I think I like 637 slightly better. 637. 637. 637. I've had the great opportunity to make a lot of money and do something with it to help people. There was a time in America a generation ago when a man called Phil Sokoloff was a household name. My dad was just a very intense and he was a lovely person but very intense. That's Karen Javitch, Phil Sokoloff's daughter. It's hard to explain it. You have to experience it. I mean, the man that bought his business from him. Okay. My dad would talk a lot. This guy would sit with my dad for hours. And this wasn't a count and he knew so many people around Omaha. And he came to me. He said, "Your father is the most intense person I have ever met." Sokoloff started a business making corner bead, which is the metal bracing that you use when you install drywall. He noticed that it was really expensive. Decided he could make it cheaper. And he just found this niche that just happened to make a lot of money and he was very driven and he knew he'd make a lot of money. But once he made his money and then he sort of got tired of the business and he knew he wanted to try and do something to help people. Then Sokoloff had a heart attack. He was 43 years old. And he was in good shape. The only thing he did wrong was he didn't eat right and he had a high cholesterol. When you say he didn't eat well, what was he like before the. Yeah. He was thin. He always said he ate too much chili. He ate too much meat. Too many fats. And the high cholesterol, though, also is genetic. He had heart problems in his family. He was really shaken by this heart attack. Yeah. Oh, this totally devastated him. Never, ever expected this to happen. And when you're 43, you know, you think you're going to live forever. And this really changed his life totally. Sokoloff's doctors tell him his diet and his high cholesterol levels put him at risk for more heart attacks. So he decides to do something about it. Not just for himself, but for everyone. He starts a crusade. He wants to save America from saturated fat, the alleged culprit in high cholesterol. Sokoloff pays to have cholesterol tests for thousands of nebrascans. He goes to Capitol Hill and does the same thing for 10,000 people who work there, including 70 senators. He starts campaigns to get low fat milk in school lunches. He buys full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and The Washington Post with huge, scary headlines. One year, he buys a $2.5 million ad during the Super Bowl. He takes over a billboard in Times Square to say, "Cut fat, intake, and live longer." This campaign that he was involved in, he spent an enormous amount of his own money on this. Yeah, he really did. I'm not sure how much, whether it was 14, 15 million, I can't remember. Wow. Which 30 years ago was a lot of money. It still is. I remember it might not telling me. He's spending all of your inheritance. Sokoloff was unfilled on a hue. The nightly news. For most of us, cholesterol is a private affair. But Enorma Ha man has made it a public crusade and he is spending a personal fortune going after what he thinks are the fountains of fat in America. The fountains of fat. Sokoloff goes to the source. He finds a way to personally lobby the CEO of the Big Food Companies. Kellogg, Ralston Purina, Pillsbury. How on earth he got through no one seems to know. When he called up some of these executives at Big Food Companies, what was he saying to them? I mean, was he charming them? Was he brow-beating them? Was he, I'm just curious about what kind of conversations were going on? Yeah, I think it was that he was eventually brow-beating them. I hate to say that. I mean, I think he was charming at first, but then he got down to business. Like, you know, you need to take this product out of your cereal. Or I'm going to, you know, come forth with the big ad. You know, and he did it. And he got them to take the product out. I'm sure they're very surprised. They called him, you know, David and Goliath. He's a little David taking on these big food companies. He loved that, that they said that about him. Then it happens. And maybe it was inevitable. Phil Sarkalov goes after McDonald's, the biggest prize of them all. A full-page newspaper ad that ran in many parts of the country yesterday is giving new meaning to the term Big Mac attack. They've been cooking their fries in beeftallow, animal fat. Sarkalov decides they have to stop. The ad is headline the poisoning of America. And it accuses McDonald's of selling burgers and fries that are loaded with fat. McDonald's denies the charges in the ad, which it calls reckless, misleading and intended to scare, rather than informed. Sarkalov is all over the media. The lone guy from Omaha up against the mightiest fast food company in history. It's "Reverting Live" TV. Phil Sockeloff is the man who placed the addies in Nebraska Business Man and the president of his group which he calls the National Heart Savers Association. Here he is on Good Morning America. Also with us is Dick Starman, his senior vice president of McDonald's. Gentlemen, good morning to both of you. And we're really on the same side. We just go about it, definitely. There are the same side. Exactly. I don't want people to eat your hamburgers. They're too fat. But we're both concerned about diet and healthy foods. And Mighty McDonald's and the giant killer from Omaha are going at it to the nail. Sockeloff shouts, "That's not true. Your fries are cooked in animal fat. The McDonald's guy gets flustered, tries to say something. Sockeloff doesn't let them finish." It's vegetable and they are short. They are 9 to 95 percent beef teller. That's not going to be short. It's what we have now. They just took out chicken skin out of their chicken McNugget Three weeks ago. Tell them about egg McMuffins. Tell them about your beef teller and your french fries. And on it goes. McDonald's calls in lawyers. They send threatening letters to newspapers warning them not to run anymore of Sockeloff's ads. But that just winds up Sockeloff even more. He loves a good fight. So he runs another round of ads. And finally, McDonald's surrenders. July 23rd 1990. They quietly announce no more beef teller. Today we have more incentives for market solutions than ever. And emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions, colliding in one multinational boom doggle. "You got to get a bruise on the guy's credit. They're worth all my kids. They don't get f***** out of my name. This now?" Listen anywhere you get podcasts and hear episodes early and free with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Just recently, I got in contact with Dick Starman, the McDonald's executive who went toe-to-toe with Phil Sockeloff on network TV. I wanted to know what happened inside McDonald's headquarters after Sockeloff came at them. Did they have a picture of him with a bull's eye on it? How was it that a company making mass produced milk shakes, hamburgers, and deep fried potatoes was somehow sensitive to the charge that they were making unhealthy food? That kind of thing. He didn't want to talk. Maybe it's still a sore point after all these years. All we know is, McDonald's gave in. They followed. And once they followed, everyone else did too. When these announced they were going with a hundred percent corn oil, Burger King said they would switch to cotton seed and soybean. I look at my dad as being a powerful man. And it was like, whenever I was with him, I knew nothing bad would happen to me. He was just like, kept me safe. I think girls tend to think that about their dads anyway. But he was powerful. Because this has consequences for all of us, I feel I have to go back to the beginning. It all starts with a man named Ray Croc. He made his living selling the five spindle multi-mixer milkshake machine out of Chicago. And in 1954, he began hearing about a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California. This particular restaurant he was told had no fewer than eight of his machines in operation, meaning that it could make 40 milkshakes simultaneously. He couldn't believe that. He flew from Chicago to Los Angeles and drove to San Bernardino 60 miles away and sat in his car and just watched one happy customer after another drive up. He goes up to a blonde and a yellow convertible and says, "How often do you come here?" And she says, "Any time I'm in the neighborhood." He realizes people are addicted. The next morning, he goes back and sits inside the kitchen, watching every move everyone there makes. The griddle man, the food preparer, everything done with military precision. And suddenly he has this vision of restaurants just like this all around the world. So he asks the two brothers who own the place if he could buy their franchise rights. They say, "Yes." Their names, of course, Dick and Mac McDonald. Now why is Ray Croc so smitten with McDonald's? Not because of the burger. The burger is fine. But it's not any different from burgers anywhere else. It's because of the fries. Ray Croc can't believe how good they are. Golden brown, crispy on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside. Let me quote to you from Croc's autobiography, the Crucial Passage. To most people, a French fried potato is a pretty uninspiring object. It's fodder, something to kill time chewing between bites of hamburger and a lot of food. It's fodder, something to kill time chewing between bites of hamburger and swallows of milkshake. That's your ordinary French fry. The McDonald's French fry was in an entirely different league. They lavished attention on it. I didn't know it then, but one day I would too. The French fry would become almost sacrosanct to me. Its preparation are ritual to be followed religiously. The McDonald's brothers used top quality 8-ounce Idaho russets, pealed, soaked in cold water. Then deep-fried in something croc would come to call formula 47, which was a special beeftallon mix. [Music] Formula 47 was what's called a hard fat. Butter is a hard fat. Lard, which is pork fat, is a hard fat. Hard fats are saturated fats. At the time immemorial, practically every culture in the world has used hard fats for baking and cooking. For good reason. Hard fats are stable. They don't undergo strange chemical changes when they're heated. And they're thick and creamy, not oily and fluid, which makes a big difference. You put butter on a slice of bread. It stays nice and thick on the surface. You put vegetable oil on bread. And the next thing you know, your nice firm slices turn to mush. When the biscuit took saturated fat out of the creamy middle of the Oreo cookie, the R&D was like the Apollo space program. The greatest minds in food engineering had to sit down and try and figure out how to keep the white part from turning into a slippery, oily mess. When Ray Croc said that the French fry was sacrosanct to him, what he meant was that every element of its preparation was chosen for a reason. Chosen because it made for the optimal French fry experience. Croc has a line in his autobiography where he talks about how the Macdonalds brothers taught him never to cook French fries in fat. That had been previously used to cook anything else, like fried chicken. Any restaurant will deny it, he writes, but almost all of them do it. But Croc, he listened. And right from the beginning he put his foot down. There would be no cross contamination of the Macdonalds cooking oil. That's someone who truly cares about French fries. That's the legacy he created under the golden arches. And then, all of a sudden, this random guy from Omaha puts a gun to Macdonalds head and says, "Change or else." Macdonalds' challenge was to find a way to replace a hard fat with a liquid fat. And liquid fats are less than ideal in a deep fryer. That's problem number one. The first replacement oil Macdonalds experiments with is a cotton seed and corn oil blend. But that turns out to be really high in something called trans fat. And it's not long before everyone realizes that trans fats are way, way, way worse for you than animal fats. It's not even close. So in 2002, Macdonalds changes the oils again, cutting the trans fat in half. Six years later, they have to switch yet again, this time to get rid of all the trans fat. Then there's a problem that vegetable oils aren't nearly as stable as hard fats. All kinds of nasty things happen when you heat them up. The deep fryer suddenly becomes a kind of witch's cauldron, spewing dangerous elements. There's a big cloud of electrons there, and it can react with the oxygen that might be present in the oil or above the surface. Gerald McNeil. He's global vice president for fats, oil and nutrition for Lotus Crooklin, a big multinational. He's part of big cooking oil. And that would start degrading the oil very rapidly. And certainly the breakdown products have a lot of aldehydes as a byproduct. And aldehydes, they attack the proteins and DNA, you know, on their bodies. You don't really want to know what the current thinking is on aldehydes. Trust me. But in case you do, it's A-L-D-E-H-Y-D-E-S. Google that and the word scary. So while the big companies that are touting, probably unsaturated oils, and seeing they're healthy, well, as soon as you put them in a fryer, it's the last thing you want to eat. Crazy story is when around the industry, as the fast food chain struggle to figure out how to make these vegetable oil mixes work. Turns out that after a lot of frying, a kind of paint would form in the fryer. And what happens is it breaks down in the fryer, and then, you know, fumes come out and it goes all around the restaurant, let's say, in McDonald's. And this sort of thing, The purpose of the furniture is sticky because this stuff that they call a mist comes out because of the breakdown products. The mist gets on everything, including the uniforms of the Frey station workers, which creates a nightmare when the overalls have to be laundered. And when they went into the truck to go off to be cleaned, sometimes just by piling the coats on top of each other, those coats would spontaneously combust and go on fire. The breakdown products from the oil were highly flammable. They would spontaneously combust. The point is that this is not some trivial matter. It's not. If you order a Friday and a restaurant, you don't stipulate the medium in which you would like the egg to be cooked. It doesn't matter that much. A Friday egg is a Friday egg. But think for a moment about what a French fry is. You start with a potato, and a potato is basically starch and water, maybe 80% water. You plunge the potato into a vat of cooking oil, and the heat of the oil turns the water inside the potato into steam. That steam is the key to the fry. First, it makes the hard starch of the potato swell and soften, which is why the interior of a fry is so fluffy and light. At the same time, the steam rising from inside the fry keeps the cooking oil on the surface of the fry, instead of seeping into the middle. That's why a fry is brown and crisp on the outside. Elizabeth Rosen once wrote a great book called the Primal Cheeseburger, where she calls the French fry the "near perfect enactment of the enriching of a starch food with oil or fat." And she's absolutely right. You can add fat to potatoes without deep frying. That's called mashed potatoes. But at the end of the day, mashed potatoes are just mush. They don't have that crucial contrast between the fluffy and the crispy. The point is that the oil in which you deep fry the French fry is not incidental to the creation of the French fry. A French fry is by definition a potato derivative in which the water has been replaced with fat. The fat is as much a constituent of the French fry as the potato. So when you change the oil in a French fry from hard to liquid fat, from saturated to unsaturated, you change the French fry. In 1990, McDonald's started serving us a different product. That's why I had to go to the food scientist at Matson. So we're here in what we call the Matson Food Lab. And we are getting ready to fry some French fries. And so we have a standard. When you walk into Matson, you think you're at an accounting firm. There's a lot of beige carpeting in a big, bland conference room. Then you go down the corridor and you see lots of people in white coats. You turn a corner and start to smell all kinds of strange things. All of a sudden, you're in a big kitchen, but lots of little beakers and weapons grade appliances. On the day I was there, they were testing some plant-based milk prototypes. They had them all out on the counter in little cups. I got to sample them. There was one in particular with a nut flavor that was kind of fantastic. Carp fried and sour. And then beef tello. Matson agreed to stage a taste test for me. They were going to batch of frozen fries from the same suppliers at the fast food chains use. And they would cook them in vegetable oil just how they cooked the minimum McDonald's. They would also do a pre-1990 French fry. Cooked in something as close as they can find to Formula 47. So I would get a chance to compare the contemporary French fry with something no McDonald's customer has tasted in a generation. So we have a standard food service to bay fryer. Do you know what temperature we're frying at, by the way? 360, 350. And what we've done in advance of you coming here is we filled the bins with oil or tallow. That's Barb Stucky, co-president of Matson. I met her years ago when Matson was running a contest to create the world's healthiest cookie. Stucky's short, blonde hair, high energy. If she were a basketball player, they would say she's got a motor. Where did you get your tallow? And how did you choose your tallow? Very good question. We're going to taste some because we chose it because of the flavor. We wanted to kind of go back in time with you. So we tried to find the tallow that we thought had the beefiest flavor, which would be probably the closest thing to what McDonald's started with. So I sent Paulo to the local Mexican market right up the street. And we found a tallow there that has a really nice rich beefy flavor. Paulo is Paulo Beltran, who's going to be one of our fry chefs, along with another Matson specialist, Kathy Westfall. The fourth person in the room is Justin Schimmick, who runs the company along with Stucky. We've got an old school with our talent. Very old school, exactly. The plan is to use pre-frozen, russet, burbank potatoes. There are little lower in water content than other potato varieties, 77 to 80% water, which is a defense against sawginess, three batches. One batch fried twice in vegetable oils, just like the fries you get in McDonald's today. The second batch, a mix, fried once in vegetable oil, then a second time in beeftallow. And the third batch, old school, fried both times in beeftallow. The fries I tasted at 13. The ones that blew my mind. The first fry was three minutes. Yeah. It's hard to describe what the Matsonites are like. In one sense, they're foodies. Although that word suggests a kind of cyber-idic, slightly-deck-it-and-approach-to-food, smacking their lips and tucking into something fantastic, and telling you about that time they had barbecue and Kazakhstan that was out of this world. That's not how the Matsonites talk about food. They're dispassionate, objective, oddly specific. When Stucky, Shemek and I were treated back to the conference room to wait for the French-fais samples to be cooked, Stucky started talking about a restaurant she'd just eaten at. So I had a tomato soup last night that had rosemary in it, and the rosemary was so high, it tasted like a Christmas tree. The soup. And it was. I couldn't eat it. And all I could think was, if we were in the lab at the bench-top, all of my colleagues would have caught this. That the rosemary is too high. Wait, did you. Who are you having dinner with? You? France. Did any of them have the tomato soup? Yes. And did they think the rosemary was too high? I don't think so. It's just like. The rosemary was so high that it tasted like a Christmas tree. Like a Christmas tree. It's so great. We weren't sitting for more than a few minutes when the door to the conference room opened. Alright, let me look at this. Here we are. This is major excitement. The Matson chefs had the batches in identical metal mesh baskets. Each was identified only by number. 75, 128, 637. The taste test was blinded. We had no idea which fry was which. Okay. Right, I'm going to start with the. So, 637. Ooh. As a century professional, we're not supposed to give anything away. We're saying anything. I have a hard time giving this. That's him. I'm sorry, that's amazing. You're a bad, century professional. How is that not great? The baskets of fries were on the conference table in front of me. Everyone else had gathered around. These were people who make and consume some of the world's most exotic prepared foods for a living. You'd think they would be jaded, but they weren't. They were on it. And me? My head was spinning. I was in heaven. It was all I could do to keep the rigorous objectivity necessary for a valid blind taste test. What are you tasting with the first one? 637. Texturing 637 is shatteringly crisp. It's amazing. Perfect french fry texture. It's loud. The edge of it is crunchy. Crisp, but there is no hole in the middle, and it's nice and fluffy in the middle. They're like perfect french fries. And they have a lot of flavor. All right, 75. How do you feel with 75? Number two. Nobody was interested in 75. They were oily, not crispy. Almost sodden. Blonde. Just mac. All right, next one. The surface is really porous. There's a lot of oil squirts out when you bite into it. Three batches of fries prepared according to the same exacting specifications, but two were entirely forgotten. And we didn't have to be told what kind they were. They were what the fast food world has been passing off as a french fry for the past quarter century. But the third batch, 637, to die for. That was the old school fry, the kind of french fry that doesn't exist anymore. We have a big win for Tallow. That's what we're saying. There's so much going on here. Also look at the color difference. Bye! look like fries. My heart is full of sadness again to think about how many, how many millions and millions and millions of people around the world have never tasted that. That's when we brought in the millennials as a second opinion, but also as an act of mercy. Because they had no idea that this is what a french fry could be like. And it seemed unbearably cruel to deny them that privilege when a mound of 637 was just sitting there on the table. Can we agree that those are the best fries we tasted all afternoon? No, great. Yeah. We'll have more. Now, do I hate Phil Sokolov? I've thought a lot about this in the intervening years. And I've come to realize that I don't hate him for killing Formula 47. He could have bought a yacht and a big house in a gated community in Florida and played golf. And you know how I feel about golf. Instead, he took on McDonald's in an attempt to make the world a healthier, better place. My hat is off to him. It's really McDonald's that I blame. They were custodians of a french fry legacy. The fry was sacrosanct. Their own founder said so. And what did they do? They rolled over. Sold out their own heritage. As if how a french fry tastes was suddenly a secondary consideration. That's crazy. The only reason there was an argument about fries in the first place is that millions of people thought they were delicious. So what do we do? We made them not delicious. Wait a minute. I'm not done. It's worse than that. The original fries were sold in just one size, 2.4 ounces. You don't need any more fries than that. But nowadays, what's the large serving of fries at McDonald's? 5.9 ounces. More than twice as big as it used to be. So we've gone from the McDonald's Brothers original product, which gave us a modest amount of something to sublime, to a large amount of something that tastes like cardboard. Now remember going to McDonald's and having some french fries and going, oh these don't taste as good because my dad had them change the way they were made. That's absolutely incredible that he did that. He was made to do something huge. He did. He was amazing. He said that he got McDonald's to change the way they made fries and the fries didn't taste as good. What did he say when you said that to him? Did you ever say that to him? Yeah, he just laughed. He agreed. And he laughed. I mean, he did have a good sense of humor. I'm not surprised Phil Sarkaloff wasn't interested in the sensual aspects of the french fry. Of course not. He was a zealot, a man shaken by his brush with death. He nibbled on vegetables and maybe an occasional turkey sandwich. He saw his job as getting all of us to think about the nutritional consequences of what we put in our mouths. And for that, I think we are in his debt. But McDonald's should have stood up and pointed out what is lost when we define food so narrowly. The world's a bleak place when there's no room for pleasure. You know what one of the mats in millennials said after she had tasted a tallow fry for the first time? Thank you. Thank you for the delicious fries. Revisionist history is produced by Mia Lobal and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and C. O'Maramartina's White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer, original music by Luis Guerra, special thanks to Andrew Stelser, who came with me to Madsen. And as always, to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. While I still have you, I want to remind you that revisionist history has a website where we provide links to books, syn articles, and videos or relevance to the episodes. Please check it out at revisionisthistory.com. For this episode though, I want to give a special shout out to two people whose work helped me a lot. One is Gary Taubes, who has been writing really provocatively about what we eat and what it does to us for a very long time. His most recent book, which I loved, is the case against sugar. The other is Nina Tysholtz, whose fantastic book The Big Fat Surprise, Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, was of enormous help to me in researching this episode. Thank you Nina, thank you Gary, and to all those of you listening, I recommend those two authors to you wholeheartedly. Today we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions, colliding in one multinational boom-dougal. Listen anywhere you get podcasts and hear episodes early and add free with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Head to the Drilled Show page on Apple Podcasts or pushkin.fm/plus Thanks for supporting this show.