The cult of abusive chefs

Summary

Podcast Summary: Today, Explained – "The Cult of Abusive Chefs"

Date: March 20, 2026
Hosts: Sean Rameswaram, Noel King
Guests: Stephanie Breijo (LA Times), Helen Rosner (The New Yorker)

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the world of high-end restaurants, focusing on acclaimed chef Rene Redzepi of Noma, and the storm of abuse allegations resurfacing as Noma launches a $1,500-per-diner pop-up in Los Angeles. The show explores the enduring culture of abuse and toxicity in fine dining, why such behavior persists, the industry's reckoning with its past, and the public's role in both enabling and challenging these practices.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rene Redzepi and Noma’s Legacy

• Noma, previously in Copenhagen, is labeled "the most acclaimed restaurant in the history of food," famous for pioneering new Nordic cuisine with foraged, unusual ingredients.
• Redzepi's return with a pricey LA pop-up reignited longstanding allegations of workplace abuse.

Memorable Quote:

• "He is the final boss of fine dining chefs. I mean, he is." — Stephanie Breijo (02:21)
• "He led NOMA to a three Michelin star ranking. He's been knighted... This is a very influential figure in the culinary world." — Stephanie Breijo (03:41)

2. Allegations of Abuse at Noma ([03:52 – 06:49])

• Abuse allegations have circulated for years, but a recent New York Times investigation brought raw, first-hand accounts from 35+ former staff to light, including:
  • Physical abuse (punching, jabbing with a barbecue fork)
  • Psychological torment and humiliation
  • Threats (including deportation), body shaming

Notable Quotes & Testimonies:

• "NOMA destroyed my passion for the industry." — Anonymous former staff, quoted by Stephanie Breijo (04:17)
• "He crouched under a table in the kitchen and was jabbing staff in the legs with a barbecue fork when diners wouldn't be able to see it." — Stephanie Breijo (05:35)

3. Redzepi’s Response: Apologies and Stepping Away ([07:57 – 09:27])

• Redzepi has previously acknowledged his anger issues (2015 Lucky Peach essay), and a docu-style video apology addressed to staff recently surfaced.
• He announced he would "step away" from Noma, giving the restaurant over to his team, though with some ambiguity about his future.

Quote:

• "I'm sorry everyone is in this situation. I really, really am." — Rene Redzepi, addressed to staff (08:54)
• "This is your restaurant now, each and every one of you." — Rene Redzepi (09:14)
• "For me, I'm going in to planning the next phase." — Rene Redzepi (09:19)

4. Industry Reactions & The Broader Kitchen Culture ([09:27 – 10:56])

• Mixed feelings from fellow chefs: Some condemn, others are conflicted due to past positive experiences.
• Points to systemic issues in restaurant culture, not just a “bad apple” scenario.

Quote:

• "We literally are, like, putting these people at God tier level, because what they do in the kitchen, and they're exploiting people and they're abusing people." — Helen Rosner (10:23)

5. Public Response: Accountability & Cognitive Dissonance ([11:06 – 12:06], [15:29 – 26:04])

• Despite controversy, Noma’s pop-up is fully booked ($1,500 per seat).
• Diners rationalize attendance: "These are allegations of abuse that had occurred in the past. He's apologized. One diner said, 'I follow a lot of sports teams and they have problematic players. So why is fine dining different?'"
• The episode questions if the audience is complicit: “Do we like our chefs with a side of intensity?”

6. Helen Rosner on Why This Story Resonates ([15:29 – 21:15])

• Noma’s influence makes its reckoning headline news; it's a blueprint for global fine dining.
• Fine dining’s military-style "brigade system" structure (inspired by French kitchens) fosters hierarchy and harsh discipline.
• Abuse isn't limited to Noma; it's embedded in restaurant traditions.

Quote:

• "The whole idea of everybody saying, yes, chef in unison, yes, chef, sounds like military call and response. Because it is, because that's what it's modeled on." — Helen Rosner (20:01)

7. Reckoning and Change? ([21:15 – end])

• Recurring cycles of culinary industry's "reckoning" (e.g., Batali, Barbara Lynch) with incremental but incomplete progress after movements like MeToo.
• Greater worker empowerment and public awareness, but cultural remnants persist: many still defend abuse as a "cost" of excellence.
• Rosner challenges the myth that abuse breeds better food:
  • "You don't need to be an art monster to make art. Right? ... I don't think that kitchens need to be nightmarish in order for them to produce thrilling food." — Helen Rosner (25:07)

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Notable Moments & Timestamps

• 02:21 – Stephanie Breijo calls Redzepi "the final boss of fine dining."
• 03:49 – Sean Rames: "And he's been accused of some ish."
• 04:17-04:26 – Reading of anonymous testimonials from former Noma staff: "NOMA destroyed my passion... broke me in so many ways."
• 05:30 – Specific allegations of physical abuse.
• 06:49 – Redzepi's own words from a 2015 essay on his anger issues.
• 08:54 – Redzepi's apology video quote.
• 09:34 – Industry's conflicted reaction—chefs struggle to reconcile current culture with past allegations.
• 10:23 – Helen Rosner on cult-like chef adulation.
• 15:49 – Rosner explains Noma’s influence and "sense of place."
• 20:01 – Helen Rosner on origins and consequences of kitchen hierarchy.
• 23:37 – Discussion of audience complicity and glamorization of abusive kitchens (e.g., "The Bear").
• 25:07 – Rosner refutes the “abuse breeds excellence” myth.

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Conclusion

The episode provides a sobering look at the longstanding, systemic toxicity in elite kitchens, questioning not just individual accountability but the entire culture of fine dining, and the role that diners, the media, and the industry play in perpetuating abusive environments. The narrative challenges the rationalizations, the myths of the "tortured chef," and asks if true change is possible—without losing what makes restaurant culture, and its food, transformative.

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For Further Reading:

• Stephanie Breijo’s coverage at latimes.com/food
• Helen Rosner’s writing at The New Yorker

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Summary prepared by Today, Explained Podcast Summarizer.

Transcript

[Sean Rames]

Loyal listeners of today explained from Vox will know that Noma out in Copenhagen was maybe the most acclaimed restaurant in the history of food until it announced its closure in 2023. We covered the story back when the restaurant's lead chef, Rene Redzepi, said fine dining had become unsustainable. But now Redzepi is back. He's got a pop up restaurant in Los angeles for just 16 weeks. If you're willing to fork over $1,500 per diner, have that Noma experience without even having to travel to Copenhagen, What a deal. Everyone must be super stoked, right? Of course not. Old allegations of abuse are raining on Noma's parade. We're going to talk about the cult of the abusive chef on the show today.

[Barb]

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[Sean Rames]

No.

[Barb]

50 of them and designed before 9.

[Stephanie Breijo]

My head hurts.

[Barb]

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[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

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[Stephanie Breijo]

Sweet.

[Barb]

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[Helen Rosner]

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[Helen Rosner]

Yes, Chef.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

Yes, Chef.

Yes, Chef. No, Chef

[Sean Rames]

today, explained Sean Ramis from here with Stephanie Brejo. She's a reporter for the Los Angeles Times food section. And there's one big story in Food world right now. Rene Redzepi, the top chef of top Chefs.

[Stephanie Breijo]

He is the final boss of fine dining chefs. I mean, he is.

[Sean Rames]

He is the bowser.

[Stephanie Breijo]

He is the bowser.

[Barb]

Peaches, peaches, peaches, peaches, peaches.

[Stephanie Breijo]

I mean, he is. He is one of the most famous chefs in the world. Like, indisputably, he's entirely influential. Flowers, moss, ants.

[Sponsor Voice]

Not exactly what you might expect to

[Stephanie Breijo]

find on your plate. Unless, of course, you're at Noma and

[Sean Rames]

they even use the Brain of reindeers to create this omelette.

[Stephanie Breijo]

He sort of proliferated new Nordic cuisine in terms of how much foraging and fermenting sort of came to the forefront in the last 20 or so years of fine dining.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

I remember the first time I went for it. I'll never forget that sensation of suddenly realizing what I was surrounded by. I was like, oh shit, I'm actually standing in the middle of all this food.

[Stephanie Breijo]

He's now, you know, influenced multiple generations of chefs at this point over the last couple of decades.

[Barb]

And so the question, how does this nice down to earth guy rise to the top of the food world all while presenting things that no one could possibly think would taste that good?

[Helen Rosner]

Rene Redzepi, you know, the words genius I think would not be inappropriate here.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

He's just one of those people.

[Stephanie Breijo]

He led NOMA to a three Michelin star ranking. He's been knighted by, you know, the Queen of Denmark. This is a very influential figure in the culinary world.

[Sean Rames]

And he's been accused of some ish.

[Stephanie Breijo]

Yeah, there, there are a lot of allegations and I should say that a number of them sort of started trickling out a few years ago. But in February, a former NOMA staff member, he was the former head of the fermentation lab. His name is Jason Ignacio White. He began posting Instagram, you know, screenshots basically of these anonymous, allegedly former NOMA staff and interns who were sharing their stories. NOMA destroyed my passion for the industry.

[Helen Rosner]

NOMA broke me in so many ways.

[Sean Rames]

Everyone told me to just look away.

[Stephanie Breijo]

And he was also talking about his own experience alleging abuse specifically mostly under Rene Red Zeppe.

[Sean Rames]

For over two decades, the culture surrounding Rene Red Zeppe and NOMA has been celebrated without confronting the true harm countless workers have experienced behind the curtains.

[Stephanie Breijo]

Earlier this month, there was a years long report from the New York Times from reporter Julia Moskin, who had spoken to, over the course of years, 35 former NOMA staff. And at this point, those are some of the most raw and visceral and detailed allegations of abuse that we've ever heard coming out of noma. So all of this sort of escalated and Jason Ignacio White, the former fermentation lead who was posting to Instagram, decided to stage protests. He's joined up with a worker advocacy nonprofit and they have been out there pretty much every day of this pop

[Helen Rosner]

up,

[Stephanie Breijo]

no scars for a news. So Rene Redzepi specifically is. He's being accused of a lot of things ranging from, you know, physical abuse to psychological torment. In the New York Times article, He is reported to have marched his workers outside into the cold and punched them in the ribs. At one point, someone said that he crouched under, you know, a table in the kitchen and was jabbing stuff staff in the legs with a barbecue fork when diners wouldn't be able to see it. You know, he was threatening deportation at one point, alleged body shaming. Just general psychological torment beneath the glamour and stars.

[Sean Rames]

Workers being pushed beyond their limits, workers being punched and choked, workers being humiliated

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

and dreams being broken.

[Stephanie Breijo]

And I should say that these allegations in the New York Times article are culled from reports from, you know, 2009 to 2017. So that is also another layer of this, is that a lot of these allegations stem from years ago. And, you know, there are a number of NOMA apologists and sympathizers who say, well, this happened years ago and they've since changed their ways. Rene Redzepi himself has been open about his, you know, anger issues. He wrote an essay about it for a food magazine called lucky peach in 2015.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

And then one day, the lid came flying off. The smallest transgression sent me into an absolute rage. Why the hell have you not picked the time correctly? Why have you overcooked the fish? What is wrong with you? Suddenly I was going crazy about someone's mise en place or some small thing. They said wrong. This was how I had been taught to cook. And it was the only way I knew to get a message through. I can't say that it didn't work. For a time, NOMA has succeeded beyond whatever I could have imagined for it.

[Stephanie Breijo]

But there was also, you know, a 2008 documentary called Noma at Boiling Point that really discusses his. His anger in the kitchen. It shows him berating his staff. You know, these are things that have been discussed. And I think right now there's a reforming the restaurant industry. And can a person change? Can the industry change? Can a restaurant change? Can that hostility and that sort of ambience of hostility and fear ever really change?

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

Is the middle right there?

[Sean Rames]

Yes, sir.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

So you know that the middle is right there. Shut up and just fucking let me be finished. I'm gonna go crazy on you. Okay? What is it you don't understand? First you finish the fucking dishes. Is that clear?

[Sean Rames]

Yes, sir. Wow. So Red Zeppe has responded to his behavior before. Is he having to respond to his behavior again?

[Stephanie Breijo]

Yeah. Yes, yes, and yes. So some of these allegations more vaguely were covered a few years ago. He, quote, unquote, stepped away from the restaurant's day to day activities, quote, Unquote, day to day activities. Of course, he's still involved. He was still here in Los Angeles helping to lead, you know, the pop up here when this came out. On the evening of the protest, sort of late afternoon, early evening, he released a statement saying that he, in fact, would now be leaving Noma. You know, again using the word stepping away. He not only released a statement, but he released a video that has also somewhat been controversial because it's like a docu style sort of video of him addressing the staff.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

I'm sorry, everyone is in this situation. I really, really am.

[Stephanie Breijo]

And he explains that, you know, all of this is happening and it must be very hard for the staff. And he apologized to his staff, and he said he would be stepping away because there's too much attention on him

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

because it's so much focused on me, I have to remove myself.

[Stephanie Breijo]

And he's sort of giving the restaurant over to his staff at this point.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

This is your restaurant now, each and every one of you.

[Stephanie Breijo]

But then at the end, he says,

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

for me, I'm going in to planning the next phase.

[Stephanie Breijo]

So there's a lot of, you know, curiosity and confusion as to what that next phase also means.

[Sean Rames]

And meantime, how's the restaurant world responding to maybe their, you know, most accomplished chef being a total arse?

[Stephanie Breijo]

You know, there are a lot of chefs that I've spoken to who, you know, of course, condemn this, but they feel torn because they knew him personally, or maybe they've worked with Noma, they've traveled to Copenhagen in the last few years. One chef told me that, you know, he's trying to square what he saw in the kitchen there, which he felt was a very welcoming and nurturing atmosphere, with, of course, these allegations of, you know, apparently what the kitchen culture there was like, you know, years ago. So. And then, of course, there are chefs who are outright, you know, outcrying and saying, this is never acceptable. We should never have, you know, put any chef on a pedestal. I don't really think that this is the time to be making excuses for apologizing for enabling or uplifting people who've had such abusive pasts.

[Helen Rosner]

Like, we literally are, like, putting these people at God tier level, because what they do in the kitchen, and they're

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

exploiting people and they're abusing people, and they're getting.

[Stephanie Breijo]

But it is bigger than just Renee Redzepi as well. This is not just Redzepi and Noma. This is addressing an entire kitchen culture that for years has been, you know, rife with stress and high tempers. And cramped situations and sometimes it can become a powder keg. But there are a number of voices who have, you know, tried to change that culture over the last few years, especially as conversations like this have been coming to light.

[Sean Rames]

With all that said, with all the blowback and the protests and reactions from around the restaurant world, how's it looking? Can I get a reservation for next week?

[Stephanie Breijo]

You very much cannot. So I know it's really heartbreaking, but

[Sean Rames]

it's, I guess I'll have to keep my fifteen hundred dollars.

[Stephanie Breijo]

I know, put it into anything else at this point. You know, I spoke with Pablo Soto, the head Che of Noma, and he said they're fully booked up for the 16 week run, so there are no seats. And I have in fact spoken to a few diners who had reservations and planned on keeping them because they said these are allegations of abuse that had occurred in the past. He's apologized. One diner said, you know, I follow a lot of sports teams and they have problematic players. So why is fine dining different? Why morally would this not be in the same vein? So it's been again a range of of responses from chefs from the dining community, from diners themselves. I think I've heard it all at this point.

[Sean Rames]

Stephanie Brejo read her [e-mail] food so are we the problem? Do we like our chefs with a side of intensity? We're going to ask a food critic When TODAY Explained. His backup.

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[Sean Rames]

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[Stephanie Breijo]

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[Sean Rames]

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[Helen Rosner]

Just walk away.

[Sean Rames]

Renee Helen Rosner, you're a staff writer at the New Yorker. You're the restaurant critic. You write their Food Scene column. Why do you think this story about Rene Redzepi is getting such a big reaction? Like, we know that chefs like him and even him have been accused of very bad behavior before.

[Helen Rosner]

NOMA is quite simply the most important restaurant in the world, which sounds like a big hyperbolic thing to say, but it is the truth. I think that there is no single restaurant on the planet that is as influential for the fine dining scene that is as contributive to this sort of trickle down of trend and philosophy and the way of thinking and the way of doing business. Rene Redzepi is the face and avatar of this restaurant that any chef, any chef, any cook in the entire world is aware of and almost certainly is in some way modeling themselves on.

[Sean Rames]

And for all my Del Taco heads, like, in the audience, can you just explain why it's so important?

[Helen Rosner]

Noma is to maybe oversimplify it, a restaurant in Copenhagen in Denmark that was opened in the early 2000s by chef Rene Redzepi with Klaus Meyer, who's no longer affiliated with it, and sort of took a couple years to find its footing. But when it really burst onto the international fine dining scene, what Noma was doing was a type of cooking that was really rooted in a phrase that they used that has now become kind of a cliche in the culinary world. But it's because Noma made it a cliche. And that phrase is sense of place.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

People that are into food, I think they need to try this. You know, they need to see how. How we express our nature on a plate.

[Helen Rosner]

And what Redzepi was doing was a lot of foraging, a lot of going out and finding ingredients. Plants, animals, funguses, insects. It, at this point has become almost a joke, this idea of, like, you know, a few ants and a piece of moss plated on a piece of driftwood and a rock that you found and then calling it, like, the Sense of the Sea. But what Noma did was actually quite revolutionary and, like, a lot of silly seeming descriptions of art when you were actually experiencing it, in its execution, it was pretty extraordinary and transportive.

[Sean Rames]

And this is why people would pay, like, $1,500 to go to this la popup.

[Helen Rosner]

Well, yeah, you know, it's the kind of thing where I think from the outside, you might think of it as pretentious. But I genuinely think, and I've eaten it Noma twice, that I wouldn't call it pretentious, because I don't think it was pretense. I think that Redzepi and the team that he cultivated believed quite passionately in the innovation and the creation and exploration that they were doing. They communicated it to diners with extraordinary clarity. It was, I think, by any metric of art, successful art.

[Sean Rames]

I want to go now. Open it back up. No, we'll get to that. Okay. A lot of chefs, as you well know, and as we established early in the show, spent their time at NOMA as interns or kitchen staff. It was this, you know, resume builder for a long time. I, like, read sometimes when I'm, like, going to a new restaurant. It's like this guy was at noma one time, and it's like, oh, okay, now I guess I gotta go there. When those chefs left Noma, did they take its toxic culture with them?

[Helen Rosner]

That's hard to say. I think that the idea of a restaurant kitchen as a particularly toxic workplace predates NOMA and is certainly not exclusive to Noma. You know, like, we see, like, the bear exploring the really sort of darker, more painful side of it.

[Kitchen Staff / Voice Actor]

You think you're so tough. Yeah. Why don't you say this? Say, yes, Chef, I'm so tough. Yes, Chef, I'm so tough. Say fucking yes, Chef, I'm so tough. Yes, Chef, I'm so tough. You are not tough. You are bullshit. You are talentless. Say fucking. Hands.

Hands.

[Helen Rosner]

We see a sort of semi glorification of it in the work of Anthony Bourdain, where he had a very conflicted relationship to it. Like, he reveled in the kind of pirate shipness of cooking. And he also, you know, later in his career, as he achieved more and more fame, looked on it with a lot of skepticism and was like, you know, we don't have to make being an abusive dick an essential part of our professional identities as cooks. The model of fine dining is rooted in what's called the brigade system, which comes out of French fine dining and is modeled on military hierarchy. So you have people who are each in charge of their own stations. This is things like the sous chef, who is the number two to the chef de cuisine. Chef just means chief, Right? Like, the chef de cuisine is the head of the kitchen. The sous chef is the assistant to that. And then you have chefs who are in charge of different stations. The garde manger is the person who's in charge of salads and raw vegetables. The saucier is in charge of sauces and things like that. This system is modeled on the French military.

[Sean Rames]

Wow.

[Helen Rosner]

And it's called the brigade system. I mean, it's right there. And, you know, as a system, it's something that is not in universal adoption across fine dining, but it is kind of the substrate on which fine dining is built. And the whole idea of everybody saying, yes, chef in unison, yes, Chef, sounds like military call and response. Because it is, because that's what it's modeled on. And, you know, historically, this is certainly less, very much less the case in the last couple of decades. But historically, restaurant work was not something you went into if you were upper class. It wasn't something you went into aspirationally. It was. It was an industry that took all comers and that didn't do background checks and that, you know, if you could just walk into a room and if you could scrub a dish, you'd have a job. So discipline, compliance, not talking back, not pushing back, not making any ripples became the way that these restaurants would function. And they were, you know, multimodal beasts with dozens of people running around trying to execute tons of dishes all the time for a demanding clientele. And that kind of rigidity in structure certainly can produce a certain kind of product, but it also creates and enforces a certain kind of mindset, both in the people who are receiving the orders and the people who are giving them.

[Sean Rames]

If I'm not mistaken, there was supposed to have been, like a huge reckoning in the restaurant industry. Mario Batali, Barbara lynch, some other lesser known chefs who were accused of being toxic or harassers or whatever it might have been.

[Helen Rosner]

Yeah.

[Sean Rames]

Do we learn anything from it? Cause it feels like, I mean, this is old behavior, but we're still like, trying to move past it.

[Helen Rosner]

You know, I think that the restaurant industry is sort of in a perpetual state of reckoning and is also kind of at all times trying to figure out what it is and if it is even a coherent industry at all or just kind of a loose consortium of individual businesses.

[Sean Rames]

Fair.

[Helen Rosner]

You know, I think that the MeToo movement and that era of workers feeling empowered to speak out was pretty extraordinary. And if it didn't massively, dramatically shift the way that business is done in the restaurants, it certainly moved the needle a little bit. And so what we have seen over the last few years is a much stronger, much more focused culture of workers standing up for themselves. And I think that part of what makes this NOMA story really interesting and really complicated is that the abuses that were outlined in this blockbuster New York Times report took place between 2009 and 2017, nearly a decade ago. And that doesn't minimize their horror. That doesn't minimize the nature of the abuse, but it does, I think, tell us something. That this took place in a slightly different social environment, in an environment where people who were coming to noma, who were seeking out proximity to the creativity, the innovation, the excitement, the prestige, might not have felt as confident as people now might be to push back or to say no or to intervene or to leave and say something immediately in public. You know, the way that the landscape has shifted, I think, is also that consumers, people are more receptive to hearing these stories that unfortunately, tragically, heartbreakingly, the comment section on any of these Instagram posts, I saw this in the comments on My own article that I wrote about this for the New Yorker are overrun with people who are defending the actions that Red Zeppe is accused of. Wow. Not just saying it didn't happen, but saying that that's just the cost of being in a kitchen.

[Sean Rames]

This is something I want to ask you about, because my favorite episodes of the Bear are the ones where are screaming at each other and, like, on the cusp of killing each other. And then you look at this NOMA popup in Los Angeles. Even after all this controversy, all this, you know, journalism and protests, we heard that you can't make a reservation there because it's fully booked at $1,500 a person. Is this something that we're okay with? To some degree?

[Helen Rosner]

I think it's impossible to overestimate people's capacity for cognitive dissonance. I think that there are lots of people who think that this kind of accountability culture has gone too far. Right. Like, you know, what accountability culture? Honestly, like, I don't actually see meaningful consequences for virtually anybody who gets in the crossfires or this sort of thing. But, like, you know, you brought up Mario Batali when he stepped away from his restaurants in, what was it, 2018. For a lot of people, several of those restaurants remained open even though Batali wasn't involved in them anymore. For a lot of people, those restaurants became toxic. I didn't go back to Babo, which was his flagship, but there also is a not insignificant portion of people who went to those restaurants. Even harder just to stick it to the folks who had the audacity to speak up, who had the audacity to complain. And I think that that's. That's a remnant of an earlier culture that has not died yet. I don't think that being an asshole to your employees makes the food taste better. You don't need to be an art monster to make art. Right? Like, I think you don't need to be a jerk in order to be successful. You don't need to have people fear you in order to have them follow you. I do think it's an easy way to get them to follow you. I think it's a cheat sheet. I think that it is a shortcut to create an environment of intensity and leadership. Leadership and scare quotes. But I don't think that kitchens need to be nightmarish in order for them to produce thrilling food. I don't think it's possible to come up with, like, one universal law that tells us what's going to make a restaurant good and what's going to make a restaurant bad, with the exception of the fact that being an abusive workplace does not mean your food is going to be good.

[Sean Rames]

Helen Rosner writes for the New Yorker. Abhishai Artsy producers for Today Explained, Jolie Myers edits, David Tadashore and Patrick Boyd mix, Andrea Lopez crusado fact checks. The rest of the kitchen staff is Noel King, Miranda Kennedy, Miles, Bryan, Hadi Mwagdi, Peter Balanon Rosen, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wesinger, Adriana Aspuru and Dustin Desoto. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder, Eid Mubarak, t' Aminah Al Sadi Today Explained is distributed by wnyc. The show is a part of Vox.