I'm Christopher Kimball and this is a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Today we're re-releasing a selection of our, well, corkiest interviews. Think Flutes Made of Carrots, Baby Food for Adults, and a competition over Jell-O-Moles. There once was a large orange aspic whose sagging was really quite drastic. The diners all giggled as it joggled and jiggled, but that aspic proved rather elastic. Throughout the years we've heard some of the strangest stories in all of food. Up first, Susanna Gartmeyer and Jürgen Berlakovic are two members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. Instead of Flutes, Violins, and Drums, they prefer carrots, leeks, and tomatoes. This song is from the orchestra's album Onion Noise. Susanna and Jürgen, welcome to Milk Street. Hello, hello Chris. Hello Chris. So let's start at the beginning. Could you explain the basic concept of what is a vegetable orchestra? Well, we restrict ourselves to playing music on instruments built out of vegetables. And we do that since 26 years. Our concert day looks quite different to other orchestras or bands. In the morning we get our vegetables and then it takes a few hours to build all the instruments because our aim is to build as much instruments of fresh vegetables as we can. And afterwards we have to do a soundcheck and the soundcheck is also something that takes quite a long time because we attend people on stage. Then we have our concert in the evening and after the concert we serve soup but we don't serve the soup of the instruments. We cook the soup during the whole process, during the day with fresh vegetables. And the audience comes on stage or just to the stage and we serve the soup and talk with them and that's always a nice ending. So I read that you've created over 150 different types of instruments. So just explain the Leak violin to people because I think people have a hard time understanding that concept. Well, it might have happened that you have a sack full of Leak and they will rub against each other and they will make some squeaking sounds. But if you put a little bit of water on the Leak you can really play a very nice squeaking sound. It can get melody like a little bit. You write or someone said if we need a pumpkin that has to sound just right they'll go back to the storeroom 20 times until they find the right one. So part of the process is selecting just the right vegetable, just the right leeks, just the right pumpkin to get the sound you want. Yeah, sure. I mean the pumpkin for example, the best it sounds when it already starts to rot inside a little bit because then it has a little bit of a hole and it has a perfect sound body for the bass sound. So how do you, I looked at your website and you had a Q&A section and one of the questions was how long does it take to prepare a vegetable instrument? You noted that it took zero minutes to prepare the tomato. What do you do with the tomato? The tomato was our first instrument and there is one composition that is called automatic and we put two tomatoes together. How do you say that? We clap our hands but we have tomatoes in our hands. And the sound changes very much in the time from very dry to very juicy. It's a nice piece. So are these mostly percussion like sounds? In other words, if you made a flute out of a carrot for example or a carrot xylophone or a radish bass flute, could you actually create individual notes that could be part of a composition? Well, relatively. We can play very short melodies and things like that and we can tune them. We can tune carrot xylophones for instance, pretty exactly. That doesn't mean that they will sound like that one hour later because one of the problems with carrots is that they dry out while they dry out. They change the pitches. But when you build a carrot flute for instance, you can play it more or less like a flute or a recorder and also other instruments have the possibility to play little melodies and little tones. We did this piece. It's half of the people are playing flutes and the other people are playing instruments that we call frogs. The sound that frogs make. Oh, the croaking of frogs. Croaking. So it really depends on the vegetables that we have, which one happens to work best for the croaking sound. For example, it can be parsley. Rubbed together can make a very special sound also quite deep. This whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, like a frog. Would you say that what you do is inspired by any particular period of Austrian art or musical genre? Yes, for sure. On one hand, most of the people in the orchestra in one or the other way come from artistic fields that dealt with avant-garde approaches and approaches how experimental music is made and the history of experimental music. So I think most of us would agree that one approach is musique concrète because that is something that's very obvious in our way that we just use more or less the idea of everyday sounds in our day, everyday objects, like vegetables and just to try to build music out of that. That's for sure one approach. And I think another approach simply due to the fact that we just started around in the end of the 90s and in the end of the 90s, abstract electronic music became very popular because laptops were affordable and a lot of people started to produce very strange digital and electronic sounds. And that is also something that inspired us to try that but not with digital means but by organic means. And also since we're in Austria and living in Vienna, all of us, we have this very big orchestral tradition here. And that's actually how we started. It was like a comment on a classical orchestra to come on stage with vegetables. And then it developed from there. Do you ever sit there during a performance and think to yourself, I've always people who came here and paid to listen to us play vegetables. Is it just a wonderful feeling once in a while to think you live in a world where you can have a vegetable orchestra? Or is it just something you do? In my case, I'm always extremely happy because I see that a lot of different people come to our concerts, young, old, and also a lot of people who have very different musical tastes. Yes, there's a very nice moment that happens at very many concerts. People can't imagine how it is because they read vegetable orchestras. Sometimes they even think it's a comedy show. They come there with the wish to be entertained and to laugh. They start to laugh when we play because it's going to be funny and then they realize, oh, it's not funny. They really mean it serious. And that's a very nice moment when people start to listen and also start to take it serious as music. Susanna, Jürgen, this was fabulous. I need to attend one of your concerts. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. It was great. That was Susanna Gartmeier and Jürgen Berlakovic of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. Coming up a tour through history's greatest food failures. I'm Christopher Kimball and you're listening to a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Right now we're revisiting my interview with Dr. Samuel West. He's a psychologist and also curator of the Museum of Failure. Dr. West, welcome back to Milk Street. Thank you very much. You were on a few years ago to discuss the Disgusting Food Museum. Now we're talking about the Museum of Failure, which I think is equally interesting. Before we get to some food examples, I love products to fail because of a complete lack of cultural understanding. And I think the Harley-Davidson Cologne, the hot road cologne. I mean, who could possibly sit in a conference room and go, the one thing that Harley-Davidson stands for is cologne. The smelling good. That didn't go over too well. Well, that was an example of Hubris, corporate Hubris, and where Harley-Davidson with their massive brand recognition said, hey, let's start making all kinds of bullshit items. And the cologne was one of those where they just slapped their logo on something. They had Barbie doll clothing. They had Christmas decorations. They had all kinds of official Harley merch. And what happened was it alienated the bad boy, free rider, aesthetic. So they made a lot of money on those merch enterprises for sure, but they were short-lived. Well, it's totally antithetical to the whole notion of running a Harley. Exactly. Okay, let's get to food. So there's some great examples of big companies trying to increase market share by, of course, coming up with new products. One example is the McDonald's Arch Deluxe hamburger. Yeah. So what problem was that product actually trying to solve? Well, McDonald's was struggling with their image of being only for kids, because they made a big deal out of, you know, celebrate your birthday McDonald's. There's the Ronald McDonald clown, and there's a happy meal and everything. So McDonald's like, we got to attract some adults. So they launched the McDonald's Arch Deluxe, which was a burger for adults. It starts with a full quarter pound of beef with fresh toppings, our chef sauce on a bakery soft roll. McDonald's Arch Deluxe. If it were any more grown up, we'd need to check your ID. It's McDonald's with a grown up taste. When I see it today, I'm like, okay, there's nothing that spectacular about the burger. It's just, it was bigger and more expensive than their other burgers. And that was one of the defining characteristics that it was a luxury burger that was more expensive. The problem was twofold. One was that people associated McDonald's with cheap food, and going to McDonald's to buy a luxury burger just didn't strike anybody's interest. That's one problem. The other problem was the advertising campaign, which was awful. Yeah. You see images of kids tasting this Arch Deluxe, which looks like a beautiful burger, by the way. And they take it and they bite it and they go yuck. And they start to make vomit faces and stuff. And they're like, this is an adult burger, it's not a kids burger. And it's just, there's something about seeing kids not like the burger. Like, well, I don't want to try it either, you know? I mean, yeah, and they spent $300 million. $300 million on market research. In, you know, 30 years ago. Crystal Pepsi. I didn't even remember Crystal Pepsi. What? How old are you? Old enough to remember Crystal Pepsi. Yeah. So what was the concept of Crystal Pepsi? Why was it intriguing? So today it's sugar that's the bad guy. At the time there in the 90s, back then it was artificial colors that was the bad guy. So anything that was clear, anything that was without added colors was considered pure and healthy. So Pepsi launched Crystal Pepsi, which is a clear soda. It looks like water. And it tastes like cola. Great idea at the time because that's what was in, that was in fashion. And what happened was they launched it and it turned out pretty good. People actually thought it was interesting. Let me stop you. You wrote, in the Super Bowl commercial, they sold afterwards $474 million. Yes, that's good. So the launch, and this is really interesting. Some of these products have brilliant launches, but then die a horrible death. But it started out well, right? So the short version of that story is that they initially did very well, but then people lost interest. And actually Crystal Pepsi doesn't taste that great. That's one version of the story. The other one is far more interesting where the success of Crystal Pepsi alarmed Coke. And Coke is like, oh, we want part of this action too. So they created a Kamikaze product. Now, a Kamikaze product is a product that's created and launched to kill the competitor's product. So Coca-Cola launched Tab Clear. So Tab was their worst, like their trash brand. So they took that, created Tab Clear, did a heavy launch, and put it right beside Crystal Pepsi in every supermarket. Like they went all out. And Tab Clear was intentionally horrible. Hence Kamikaze. Yeah, so people would be like, oh, wow, in a supermarket, they go, look at this. There's some clear sodas. This is awesome. They'd buy the Pepsi and the Tab, they'd taste the Tab, go yuck, and say, clear sodas are nothing for me. Isn't it brilliant? No, I mean, New Coke was idiotic, but Tab Clear's brilliant. It was absolutely brilliant, absolutely. So here's one that I guess may not be true. But you mentioned, I just got to mention this one, Colgate Beef Lasagna. Now, I think Colgate said they never have any record of doing this, but anyway, I just had to mention it. All right, so I have some updates on this. So the Colgate Beef Lasagna, I found it when we did the research for the museum in 2016-17. And I was like, this is fascinating, but I couldn't find anything online. And it was just too good of a, I mean, this is too interesting to not include it in the museum of failure. And then it's in the museum, and then we got a whole bunch of publicity, and then Colgate, their lawyers, contacted me and said, you know, we have no recollection of a Colgate Beef Lasagna. And then a year ago, some investigative journalist contacted me and was doing a story on this, and dug much deeper than I did, and found that Colgate did indeed have kitchen entrees in the 19- and I can't remember if it was 50s or 60s, but they actually tried and launched a series of kitchen entrees, and it wasn't Beef Lasagna, it was crab meat and dehydrated chicken. Oh my God, even worse. Even worse, yeah. So when Colgate's saying, when their lawyer says, we have no recollection of a Colgate Beef Lasagna, he's right. But you didn't say anything about crab meat. And speaking of really dumb extensions, Gerber singles for grown-ups. Yeah. Gerber, they had the baby food, a big respected brand, and they decided that maybe more than just babies would like to eat food out of a jar. So- Tiny little portions. They had a series of dinners for one in a jar. It's in the same size or slightly larger than the baby food jars, but it's the same jars. They had beef were gone, they had mashed fish dish, and it was baby food, but catered to adults. And the thing about it is the idea of it is just crazy, right? But then also the name of it, singles, you're a single person, you're so- Not only are you single, you can't find a partner, but you also like to eat your dinner from a jar. Sometimes, and I think in recent years, I love the fact, people think that technology will sell a product when it actually makes the whole experience much more expensive and incredibly stupid and much worse. A great example is the Juicero 2016. So this device was a pretty big tabletop device, it's really heavy. So what it is, you buy exclusively via subscription, you buy diced fruits and vegetables in different mixes, right? So it looks like a blood bag at the hospital, like it's a bag. It does. It does. Yeah, so you get these sent home, and inside the bag, it's the chopped fruit, right, or vegetables. And then you take it and you put it into the machine, and it scans the barcode, and it's connected to Wi-Fi, and it won't press it if the best before date has passed. And then what it does, and this is amazing, it's so powerful, so it presses the juice and the minerals and vitamins and all the goodness out of the fruits and vegetables into your glass that's underneath the device. What is this? It's a Juicero. I don't, I'm sorry, I don't know what that word means. It's a new word. What's Juicero? Okay, define it for me. Juicero, the best juice ever. What comes out of the Juicero is so fresh that it shouldn't even be called juice. It should just be called, I don't know, squashed produce, because that's what it is. Our founder, Doug, is straight up made of juice. Literally, there's juice in my veins. And that sounds amazing, and people bought it. There's a lot of people who bought it, so it was quite popular, and 700 bucks is quite a lot of money. And then you still had to pay like, eight to fifteen dollars for each glass of juice, each packet, until somebody on YouTube showed that you could just press the juice with your hand. I love that. Whoops. Oops. So, finally, life saver holes. I mean, I just like, I wish I had been in that meeting. People go like, well, they're these holes. What if we sold the holes? You know, it's like, the whole point of the life saver is sort of that mouth feel, right? With the circle, the life saver shape. And the hole is just a little piece of candy. Yeah, so just like you can buy donut holes at the donut shop, they thought like, we'll do life saver holes. Life savers holes. The huge taste of life savers candy. In tiny, delicious little bites. Life savers holes can. Get what you've been missing. And it wasn't a failure, sort of marketing or concept wise, but the plastic packaging itself, you couldn't store and dispense these life saver holes in any feasible way. I think that might be just an excuse because it might have been a bad idea from the start. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you had a Pez dispenser, right? Yeah. I mean, Pez is a great example of the most horrific candy in the world, but the dispenser makes it cool. It was created to help people stop smoking. What? Yeah, the original, the whole thing about the package is kind of like a cigarette and the feeder thing. And only later did they make it into children like Mickey Mouse heads and whatever. Originally, it was like you want to stop smoking and you have to fidget with something. So you open the Pez and you get one of those and you don't have to smoke. Well, there's another category, products that failed at one thing that became super successful. You put Excel that others. By putting a Mickey Mouse head on top of it. Dr. West, it's always a pleasure. I love the Museum of Failure. I just love failure, but these are just wonderful examples. Thank you. That was Dr. Samuel West, curator of the Museum of Failure. The museum has been on tour since 2017 in various cities around the world. It's currently on display in Paris. You know, I love failure, especially when the people who failed persevered and then went on to great success. People such as Elvis, who was told to go back to truck driving after singing Blue Moon of Kentucky at the Grand Old Opry. Henry Ford, who's first two automobile companies failed. And Oprah Winfrey, who was fired from an early job as a television news anchor. So it makes me think that failure is essential for success. And I think this is especially true in the kitchen. Up next, another quirky food moment. We meet the winner of the Best Jiggle Award. I'm Christopher Kimball, and this is a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Our quirky food hour wouldn't be complete without this next story. Emily Wallace and Kate Medley are the creators behind a Jell-O mold exhibit, the affectionately dubbed Oh, Moldy Night. Kate and Emily, welcome to Milk Street. We're glad to be here. Yeah, thanks so much. So both of you have worked now on this whole issue of Jell-O, the history of gelatin. Maybe we could go back to the beginning. So gelatin was made from calves feet, among other things. And it wasn't until about the mid-19th century that a real gelatin product was invented. But they were still using the boiling the calves feet method well into the 1800s, right? That's our understanding, Chris, that it was sort of born out of this tradition of decadence and royalty, because it did demand such time and expense. And then it wasn't until the late 1800s and early 1900s that it was somewhat democratized by way of a cough syrup maker named Pearl B. Waite, who made a mixture of gelatin and sugar and named that Jell-O. So then what happened? So now we have Jell-O. It comes in a box. What did Americans do with that? I mean, I think a little bit of everything. In the South, I think our experience was that congealed salads saw a huge rise as that, as a salad, as a vegetable dish. Could you explain that? Because I've seen the same thing at Church Suppers in Vermont for years. How did Jell-O with celery in it or whatever it's got, how did that become a salad? You'd have to ask my mother or many, many mothers and grandmothers in the South. But growing up in Mississippi, I can count the times on one hand in the 80s that we had a green salad to proceed a fancy meal. It was almost always a congealed salad. And the one that my mother would always make was orange and had canned mandarin oranges in it and marshmallows in it. Yeah, but my mom still makes some mandarin orange salad is what she calls it. So tell us about O. Moldy Night, the Jell-O exhibition, how it got started and talk about some of the sample molds. Yeah, just about a year ago with another friend and colleague, Kate Alaya, we put together an exhibit that was a, that was a pop-up art show of about 40 entries of molded foods. Some of them were very appealing as you really want to eat them. Some of them were a little bit less appealing. Just talk about the visuals here. What were the ones you guys really liked a lot visually? One I loved in name and sort of visually was called Bo Jell-O, which took its cue from a southern fried chicken chain, Bojangles, and featured as the base sweet tea and then fried chicken tenders inside and then had piping of Bojangles mashed potatoes around the edge. It was pretty inspired. Did some of these really taste great too? Yeah, I mean they, they kind of ran the gamut. Some of them tasted terrible, but a lot of them tasted great. Like what was your favorite, a couple of your favorites? I mean the Jell-O Gen-Fizz was awesome. Oh. The Lady Edison Pork Jelly, which visually somewhat resembled a brain, was definitely a crowd favorite taste-wise. Yeah, same. There was one that was shaped like a boot that was, it was all made out of the crushed pineapple and sort of other fruits that it really sort of harkened back to what I grew up with. So what were one or two of the ones that looked better than they tasted? I have to go in the record and say this. I'm just kidding. Bo Jell-O was beautiful. I mean it was one of my favorite molds, but it required a lot of gelatin to make the chicken tenders stay upright in the- So it had that sort of nasty, bitter flavor? Yeah, and also a chicken tender and a congealed salad is not that great. As it turns out. Yeah. Who would have thought? Right. So where are we headed with Jell-O these days? Are gelatin sales falling or is the South still making lots of Jell-O salads and Vermont churches? It's a great question. When we put together this art show, we didn't know if a dozen people would show up or 25. We were surprised to have about 500 people show up, which, you know, I'm going to go out on a limb and say Jell-O's coming back. So anything else you loved or interesting entries in the exhibit? There was one particularly interesting entry from a woman named Ginger Wag, who is a performance artist based in Carburetor, North Carolina. And so she was the mold and she draped her body in sheets of fruit leather, apple flavor, if memory serves. And she stood on that pedestal all night, encouraging people to pull the sheets of fruit leather off of her body and taste them. I will say from an official capacity, we were lucky our very newly elected mayor of Durham, Steve Shull, agreed to be one of the judges for the event. And it was so funny the night before Kate received a couple of emails from him where he had stayed up late writing limericks about Jell-O. Do you have any of the limericks? I brought one. Okay. So this is from Mayor Steve Shull, who was one of three judges for what we called the shimmies. There once was a large orange aspic whose sagging was really quite drastic. The diners all giggled as it joggled and jiggled, but that aspic proved rather elastic. Well, at least that's a good use of the time of an elected official though, right? And it could be worse. Right? And it was like one of the first things he did in office. So these were the shimmy awards in what were the different categories and what won? The best in show was called the crown molding. We had the best jiggle the judges went around and kind of poked each mold. It was called the back that aspic award. We went to Debbie Moose who created what she called the wobbly White House. So it was a very unstable White House made of gelatin. We had the My Jell-O Americans Choice Award and that went to a musician and folklorist, Sarah Bell, who recreated Ophelia drowning out of aspic. Wow. It was crazy. I had all these delicate herbs and flowers around it. Really stunning. I mean, I saw a woman cry by it. I'm not kidding. No, wait, wait, wait, wait. One of the people who came to the awards was actually crying next to us. She teared up. I saw it happen. So this is like the world's nightmare buffet, right? Because once you start cutting into these things, things got messy pretty quickly. I mean, it probably was kind of a mess by the time the night was over, right? They had to have the carpets professionally cleaned the next day. I was going to say. We haven't been invited back yet, but we're holding out hope. Well, are the shimmies now going to be an annual event? I think it's fabulous. There's been a lot of requests for that. There seems to be a lot of interest in seeing the shimmies go down again. But I will say part of the magic of this whole event, Chris, was conjuring it up and not really knowing what to expect. Right. And all of these people really taking a chance on this pretty wacky concept and really over-delivering it every turn. It was pretty magical. Kate and Emily, thank you. Oh, Moldy Night, the Jello exhibition was a huge success. And one person actually cried. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. That was Emily Wallace and Kate Middly, host of the Jello exhibit, Oh, Moldy Night in Durham, North Carolina. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode. To hear more than 300 episodes of our show, please go to MilkStreetRadio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And please be sure to come back on Friday, May 8th, for this week's brand new episode. You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back later this week with more food stories and thanks as always for listening. Additional editing by Sydney Lewis. Audio mixing by Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Theme music by Tubebub Crew. Additional music by George Brendel Eggloff. Christopher Kimball's Milk Street radio is distributed by PRX. From PRX.
