This Actor Dives Deep Into Food Production And Politics

And I've got another great book for you to read, it's called From Scratch. It's a book about sort of where food comes from, not only the compelling interconnectedness of the supply chain, but also where the food itself is sort of produced and harvested. But this isn't just a book about food or about the journey through the infrastructure that helps produce it. It's a remarkable story told by somebody who's an incredible storyteller. David Moskow is an actor, he is a writer, show host, also the author. Some folks may remember him from his acting days when he was in the movie Big playing the young Tom Hanks. We'll talk about that in a second. But David, where did you develop this love of food and traveling to discover it? Wow, well, I love to eat. My mom is an incredible cook growing up and I was sort of her sous chef. And then I had this epiphany, it was actually around the 2016 election. And I was sitting in a Korean barbecue joint out here in LA and I looked back into the back of the kitchen and there was a Mexican guy making food. And I thought about how important Central Americans are, they're the backbone of American food industry. And it was pretty crazy that the Republicans were going after and demonizing sort of particularly Mexicans but immigrants. And I said, you know what would be cool is to make a documentary about how tacos are made and how margaritas are made, right? Margaritas is the number one cocktail in America and tacos are second or third in the fast food world. And I just thought that it would be really neat to go to Oaxaca and work with subsistence corn farmers, make masa, make its taco. And then show the hard work that goes on behind the scenes and how we're all sort of tied through food. And then that, in Hollywood you have dreams of movies and that gets shelved. But it turned into a television show called From Scratch that was on A&E channel, our history channel, and then a book came out of it. And the book was, when you're doing something on cable, you don't necessarily always get a chance to ask really deep questions. And when you run into some interesting things, you kind of have to put them to the side. And a book felt like a really neat place to do a deeper dive on some of these things. And that deeper dive includes sort of where things are going well in terms of food supply. And I was fascinated, you write about sort of the oyster harvesting off of the coast of Long Island and how that's essentially making up or starting to make up for sort of the terrible situation that involves shellfish in the Mediterranean. Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, so oysters collapsed. The oyster industry in New York collapsed around the middle 1900s. The water became too polluted. Also, they were competing with, when refrigerated train cars came around, you could then transport cattle. And it was a lot cheaper to raise 500 pounds of protein than the three years it took to raise three ounces of protein. So the oysters kind of got shelved. But since pollution has started to reverse, and we realize there's a lot of health benefits with oysters, zinc, particularly during COVID. Oysters would have been an incredible healthy alternative to beef. And also they do a wonderful job of cleaning the water themselves. So I talk about how the revitalization of the New York oyster is a wonderful thing. There's a billion oyster project that's going on in New York Harbor, which they're hoping to, New York was the home of the greatest oysters in the world. I mean, people came from all over the world. They had oysters that were the size of babies. And when new immigrants came to America, they could actually feed themselves down at the shore for free. They would go down and harvest. And hopefully this organization, the Billion Oyster Project, is going to bring that back, which will clean up New York Harbor as well. Interestingly- You travel to something like 20 countries. I was fascinated to read about you, I guess, milking a water buffalo to make a mozzarella for cheese on pizza in Italy. Was there anything about any of these experiences that surprised you or that stood out? Oh, yeah, I mean, every day it's a bucket list. Every day you're in awe of the work that these people, that the food producers do. I mean, the water buffalo, I'm making mozzarella, buffalo mozzarella in Italy to make one of the best pizzas in the world is in Naples at Damichelli. And so what I do is I first go to the chef, we make the meal, and then I harvest all the ingredients and try and reproduce it. So I go to this water buffalo farm, and they have Mozart playing because the buffaloes produce more milk when listening, when comfortable. And they have these huge massage parlors for them that they can walk through. But traumatizingly, the best way to milk a water buffalo is to get right behind it, lift the tail and milk exactly where your face does not wanna be. But I managed, I came away unscathed and made some incredible pizza. Well, it's quite a sacrifice that you made for that. A lot of people are gonna wonder about the impact of climate, the climate crisis, climate change. How has that affected what you saw? Well, that was one of the big things that we were coming face to face with during the making of the show. And in the book, the book is called From Scratch, Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, Foraging, and Fishing on a Fragile Planet. And that really, I started out looking at the ties that bind communities through food. It takes 61 people to make a pizza. So even if you think that you've done it all on your own, if you're eating a slice of pizza, you really haven't, right? So that was how I started. And then throughout the journey, I realized that food producers really are at the front lines of global climate change and the fights around social and economic justice. We were in the South China Sea, or we were shooting in the Philippines, so they call it the Philippine Sea. And we went out to get fish for patis, which is fish sauce. It's a foundational Filipino ingredient. And we couldn't catch any fish. And I asked why? And on the TV side, we're like, my gosh, we're not gonna catch any fish. But I asked the fisherman why. And he said, we have to go out longer and further than we've ever had. I get one-tenth of what my dad got, and my dad got one-tenth of what his father got. And it turns out that the South China Sea has lost 70% of its fish in the last 20 years. And there's all this territorial dispute that's going on. I mean, China's building islands closer and closer to the Philippines to enlarge their territory. And it's all for fish. And unless people can reach across the territorial boundaries and say, I know you think this is yours, and I think it's mine. But there's not gonna be any fish here unless we come up with a solution. And you see that in the Mediterranean as well. There's 28 countries which has been hammering the Mediterranean for 10,000 years, and it's empty. We went to go harvest shellfish there. We went to look for octopus there. And again and again, we walked away. I mean, one of the things I had to do is if I don't get what the chef asked for, I bring him a butternut squash and I say, hey, can we use this instead? And that happened one too many times out there on the road. David, I don't mean to get all Larry King-like on you, but I gotta ask. I mean, you hit it big when you were very young as the young Tom Hanks and big. I know that it can be challenging for a lot of people who have success early on in their life to either replicate that success or feel like they have to and find some sort of meaning later on. So the two questions out of this was how did you manage to do it? And secondly, what was it like working with Tom Hanks? Oh, well, Tom is amazing. He took me and my friends out. I mean, the first time I met him, he was handed a video recorder and he took me and my friends out to the park and just recorded us playing. And then would be like, here's a ball, you try and stop him from getting the ball. And then he would record it and all of these things ended up entering into the movie. And not even me, when we're watching the film, I'll be like, that's Ernest that he's doing right there, who was my best friend at the time. So it was amazing and to have that be the first project. When you're in sort of a classic like that, it just is a gift for your whole life. Working in any career, I imagine for 30 years is you have to find new things that keep it fresh. And so I love creative people. I love to facilitate creators. So I started producing on the side, I started writing. And then when I had my son, I wanted to find, I guess, more meaning in it. Acting sometimes can be a selfish job. And I wanted to see how I could leave the world better for my kid. And projects like this that have sort of meaning, a deeper meaning, I think, became more important for me. So is there a follow up to this particular project? Or are there other sort of genres you want to explore that may be related to either climate crisis or just how sort of vulnerable we may all be? Yeah, so the television show is going to have a spinoff. This is about food. We walk back how food is made. The next one is gonna be about home. So if I have to make a faucet, I am going to mine iron, smelt steel, make a mold. If I'm gonna do the floor, I'll harvest bamboo and walk it all back. And again, we'll be looking at sort of the hard work that our construction workers and the people who bring us materials. I think as a city person who never knew how any of this stuff was done, again, I say I look in awe and learning about sort of how things are made. And we're gonna look at sort of the future, kind of we're gonna make sea plastic countertops. We're gonna try and do alternative insulation. We're gonna look at things that were done in the past. We may have sheep wool insulation. So it's gonna be, construction is the second worst polluter. So we'll try and see who's doing good things that we can learn from. And then we're gonna write a book on that. David Moskow, the book is From Scratch. And I just wanna add real quick, sorry. I co-wrote this with my father who was a writer on the show, John Moskow. So- Well, congratulations to both of you, not only on the book, but also on the successes that you've had. And to be able to find meaning when you've had such a remarkable career already, to find meaning in some of these new projects, particularly when you have kids, I know firsthand is so important and so valuable. David, thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you, David.