Food is Life with Soleil Ho

the link in the show notes. It's a good list of organizations helping restaurants, workers and farmers in this tough time. If you have the ability, consider donating. Here's the show Growing up, I really dreaded Sunday mornings. It was church day, and church day meant the following Number one, having to wear pantyhose that chafed my inner thighs and made them red hot, and be number two having to listen to grown ups talk for hours on end about stuff that

didn't make any sense. Number three sitting still while the pastor gave a sermon. He was the most boring grown up of them all. And number four all this while having access to literally zero snacks. The only thing that Redeemed Sundays was Red Lobster because when church was finally over, my grandfather would pile all of us into the dark blue station wagon, the one with little silver specks in the paint. My grandfather was the breadwinner of the family.

He had been a bodybuilder in his twenties and was still pumping iron three or four times a week even then. Well into his fifties. He was the head miss at a factory, a union job. He worked long hours with other men who were big and strong like him. I remember how we'd puff out his chest when we rolled up into Red Lobster for lunch. He grow up super poor, and the idea of being able to pay for seven

people's worth of seafood was a big fucking deal. My grandmother loved being the fancy lady at his side who never had to reach for her purse. When my grandpa was around, she would do her hair up in curlers on Saturday night and pick out her special Sunday outfit. Yes it was for the church people, but really it was in case we ran into anyone she knew at Red Lobster, so she could show off her family well

fed and well dressed for my grandma and grandpa. Being able to go out to eat meant something really special and really specific. It meant making it in the best damn country in the world. As far as they were concerned. They had come to this country with only two dollars in their pockets, and there they were eating crab melts. They were giving their family something better than they had

growing up. For that too, or three hours at red Lobster, because trust me, we stretched out lunch, we could leave all our troubles at home and laugh and eat until we were stuffed and alive with the American dream. I'm Virgie Tovar, and this is Rebel Eaters Club. We've talked a lot about the private and intimate side of food, but my guess today will walk us from the intimacy of home to the public domain, where food takes on yet another dimension. So Lah is the restaurant critic at

the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm delighted that I even got to choose a snack that's such an upgrade from the usual choice. Taught me that when it comes to eating out, there's a way more to it than meets the eye. So La, do you want to tell us the snack that you chose. Right in front of us is a yellow package of saki eka, which is prepared shredded squid.

You often find this in Asian grocery stores, and this was the snack that I would always gravitate to when I was a kid and we were going grocery shopping. I would grab it and just you know, just throw it in the shopping cart without asking. Yeah. So to this day, I love it. It's just squid jerky, sometimes cold fish jerky, sometimes spicy, sometimes not. But it just tastes like really sweet and savory and salty, and it's so chewy. You really have to work on it. Yeah,

do you want to do the honors? Okay? So, and there's like a bloom of fermented squid smell that flies out at you once you open the bag. So perfect. I put way too much in my mouth just now because I'm so excited. M Yeah, it's gone that like that taste of the sea. M m. But it's so mummy. It just makes you salivate. No, thank you for bringing this for me. Um, thank you for opening up the package.

So it was so beautiful and it's delicious. Um. Okay, so we can keep snacking on this delicious, stringy, bloomy aromatic treat um. In the meanwhile, though, I need to know who are you? Who you are? Who is so late? Sure? Um? I am a restaurant critic. My pronounced are she her hers? And I work for the San Francisco Chronicle. Um. I started the job about a year ago, so I'm fairly new to the restaurant critic world. But previously I had a podcast called Racist Sandwich, which was all about how

food intersected with race and class and gender. And I was a freelance writer. I would do things once in a while as befit in my mood, but my main gig was cooking and working in the restaurant world. I'm gonna ask you about a million questions. I remember someone I was dating brought it up. We were driving somewhere and he was like, Oh, did you hear that there's

this new restaurant critic for the Chronicle? And she really made a splash, and she sort of a little bit talked about how she wasn't interested in reviewing and revering places like Chapennice and it's just like and he was like, I think it's right up your alley, and I would just want of the things to like, wait, had this

thirty minute conversation about that. This is when you know you've succeeded when like people can have a thirty minute conversation about something that you did through hearsay and it's stimulating. So can you talk about that? Like what what is your day to day life like? As a restaurant critic, I read a lot of Yelp, which is funny because you know, I'm not supposed to write Yelp reviews basically

because that's not the style that I do. But it is interesting to me to see what's coming up, what's interesting, like what's new, A lot of research because there are more than seven thousand restaurants in San Francisco alone, right and there are three hundred and sixty five days in a year, so really need to choose wisely what's happening here. Often when I go out, it's for dinner, and so I'm probably going out to eat maybe like five times a week minimum, and I usually if I have to

make reservations, I'll make it under a fake name. The anonymity part is just for me to help workers be less stressed at least in the lead up, and just to help me avoid some awkwardness because it gets off word sometimes, can I ask about your methodology as a restaurant critic? Sure? So when I started the job, you know, I was always criticizing the food media from the outside.

I was always talking about how you know, like even for something that is so light as a genre, you know, people don't really take it seriously, it can still perpetuate colonial ideas like fat shaming, ideas like there are really serious things that we engage with through food media, even if we don't acknowledge it, right through othering of other people's cuisines, through talking about food and gendered ways, like all kinds of really below the waves kind of stuff.

And So when I got this job, which was very unlikely to me that I got this job, but I did, I realized, Okay, here's my chance. I have a much bigger platform. Here's a chance to really engage with those things that I was so worried about and worked up about when I was on the outside. And here's how to put it in practice. Right, So, how do you write about food and restaurants in a way that acknowledges

that there are more than two genders. For instance, how do you write about restaurants in a way that doesn't otherize people who didn't grow up eating mashed potatoes? Right? You know what I mean? The La Times is food critic Patricia Scarsega just released a newsletter about how the La Times Food section will no longer italicize foreign words. And she used foreign in quotes. She's of Mexican descent, and so she was talking a lot about like, who is being made to feel foreign just so you can

italicize words because it's your style or whatever. And I thought that was really interesting. When I first started the job, I wrote a whole list of words that I wasn't going to use, you know, in my writing, which I ask what they are? Yeah, it was a little indulgent, but I wanted to also introduce myself, you know, because I was kind of an unknown quantity for a lot of people who subscribe to the chronicle. The words included things like ethnic for instance, like what is ethnic cuisine?

What do you imagine Do you imagine a French beastro Spanish top us or do you imagine like you know, Indonesian food or Indian food? Um, like crack I don't use that phrase addictive. I don't use that phrase guilt. I don't use any sort of language of guilt when I talk about food. Oh yes, basic right, um, you know, but we get pitched on it all the time, right as like writers, you know, the guilt free Pasta for

twenty right, all that stuff. It's just no No. I was reading the piece that you did on the SF restaurant La Colonial? Am I saying that correctly? I don't know. We're not French? Yes, oh my god. I always in my regular life I intentionally consistently mess up French, like

I'll say frights instead of free any who whatever. Anyway, all that to say, you know, in that piece, you're kind of talking about these restaurants that are romanticizing eras that are in fact very violent, and the allure of the restaurant from the person who is dining is that you are the person in power in that experience, right yeah.

I think it A good place to start is thinking about, in any context, who is doing the serving and who's being served, and in what ways are those demographics whatever normalized, and well, in what way are they normalizing hierarchies that are present in that context, right, So when I think about a restaurant like Colonial, which is essentially caused playing French colonial Indo China, which was what they called Indo China, like Vietnam a Cambodia, you know, the glory days before

the revolution, before the uprising, before the French got kicked out. Place you're you're prompted to take on the positionality of the colony um. You know, you are in a place that is kind of rustic, lots of mahogany everywhere, the people serving you are mainly people of color. The furniture is of that era, and it's just this moment of peace where everything is so secure, locked in, you know, before everything's upended by revolution war. And to me, that's

so troubling. Pleasure is really troubling. And maybe that has a lot to do with me and my shit. But any time I feel like you are asked to or you're lulled into this sense of complacency of just accepting stimuli, I feel suspicious, you know, because that's when you're the

most susceptible to ideology. And restaurants are that place for a lot of people where our senses of gender are reinforced right, Like there are many restaurants still to this day where women, if they are in mixed company, they receive menus that don't have prices on them, and so many people um realize, you know, their bodies don't fit the restaurant, either the chairs or the floor plan or whatever,

and they're treated like furniture. Um. So they're not only sensitive places of pleasure, but they're also places where who gets to feel pleasure? You know, there's there are assumptions based on who they are, like what you bring to the place, so you know, they're not ideologically empty places. Restaurants, you know, for for many people with power, pleasure is derived from hierarchy, and it's derived from people being in the places that they're supposed to be. And sometimes that

means not in your presence. Yes, yes, well I'm just

letting that soakin um. Yes. On the other hand, recently I went to a restaurant in the mission for the first time called Prubetsu, which is Tomorrow for Bonapati essentially, and it is a Guamanian restaurant, and the chefs are really clear about how colonialism informs the food that they serve because Guam, you know, has been colonized, taken over whatever occupied by the US, Spanish, Japanese, and had a lot of influence from the Philippines and China as well.

So the food that they make, you know, the tomorrow, like the indigenous people, is very much you know, full of spam and like Chinese vegetables and um like sausages and like all kinds of things from all of these people. Yes, Vietnamese food is a similar thing. Filipino food is a very very similar thing. Um, Indigenous American food is similar. Has a lot of those sorts of you know, like with fry, bread, those those hallmarks of this is what we received and this is what we're going to do

with it, you know, this is how we survive. In that way, I find those stories so empowering and so interesting. You know that even when you are in this kind of culture that is treating you as something to be trampled underfoot, you will still find ways to make something beautiful and sustaining and fulfilling for you and your family or your loved ones. And in that way, you know, you can, even under conditions of extreme darress, like create

something amazing. And I just love that. So for me, every article that I write or every review is an opportunity to really think about that and wrestle with that and try to change things just slightly. And that's the sphere that I can influence as a food writer. I can't influence everything and everyone all at once, but if I can change this little thing, I can maybe die happy. So Lay is a radical presence in the food media world for a lot of reasons. For one, she shifts

the perspective of the critic. There's this concept I first learned about in graduate school. It's called positionality. It's the acknowledgement that who you are influences how what you think. Food media has for a long time been dominated by wealthy white men's voices. As a result, we've been taught to think about food the way they think about food, as if their positionality is the default way of seeing

the world. But most of us aren't wealthy white men, and acknowledging that frees us up to see that every single dish has a history and a context and that those things matter. That seems pretty obvious to me, but that simple acknowledgement is immediately seen as political. And what Soleah is doing writing about how colonialism has affected Guamanian food, for example, makes some people feel very uncomfortable. More on

that after the break. We're back. Before the break, we were talking about how so Late is disrupting business as usual with her food writing. There's a there's a perception that I'm bringing politics into the genre, but the reality is politics have always been present, just in ways that we're acknowledged as you know, um as nail sticking out

of the board in the same way. Yeah, I would also say that a lot of people kind of consider my you know, my positionality as inherently radical, right, um, and you hinted at that, But I think that what is more interesting. I think because you can be like me, and you can look like me, and you can you know, want to have sex with people that I want to have sex with, but you might want to just uphold the old ways of doing things anyway, you know what

I mean. So for me, I'm always wrestling with like, how do I maintain my politics, maintain like the way that I see the process and technique going and the way it should go, while also not resting on my identity as like the inherently interesting thing about me, because that's also the critique that I get from people who are in bad faith, but also there's a hint of truth there who say, like I'm a diversity hire, you know, and I don't ever want to pretend or to just

kind of shrug backwards into that, you know what I mean? Yeah, I didn't know what you mean. Can we go back into your background, like what was food like growing up for you? So my family is Vietnamese. They're Vietnamese refugees. I'm the first of the first generation to be born

in the US. My grandmother raised me when I was very young in Illinois, where my family was put and then my mom moved my sister in nyat to New York to go into fashion, which was very exciting, and she was a single mom for most of the time, and a lot of our meals we were like simple, like TV dinner type things. But then like once in a while, it would be delivery, because you know in

New York we lived in Manhattan. Yeah, everybody delivered. McDonald's delivered in the nineties, which is you know nothing now, everyone did not know that. That's amazing. Continue there's a number you could call that would route you to the nearest McDonald's and it was two and two, three through seven fast and they actually remembered our orders after a while, which is really embarrassing. When my mom was your order, I think I would get like a cheeseburger happy meal.

My sister would get the chicken nuggets. And so every time we would do what, my mom would fan out the menus. Was there were physical menus back then, yes, and she would ask to do you guys want Indian, Chinese tie Vietnamese? Like what do you want? My palette was developed from that. You know. It wasn't just American or Vietnamese, but it was all of this stuff because I wanted to try you know, m Pollock paneer or you know, a burrito or all this stuff. It was

really cool in that way. Was food. Was there a point where food became fraught for you? Hmmmm? I can't think of the point. My mom was always on a diet like my whole life, and she would joke that we did it to her pregnancy. You know, she was always trying to lose that weight and she was always

much smaller than me. And so the point at which I outpaced her in size, that's when I was like, oh, should I be worried about this, you know, right, And she never compelled me to go on a diet or anything like that, right, But it was more just the I was in a typical family where talking about weight was kind of a constant thing. Yeah, it was just

a way for people to make fun of you. So yeah, that was that was That was a contradictory, like weird part of my upbringing that I think a lot of people probably couldn't relate to where you're just people are always talking about fat people, and you're always afraid of fat people, like the specter of fatness is always chasing you, um, and as they give you like that second helping of noodles or whatever, Yes, just like whatever, guys. And so you realize over time like that, this isn't about food.

I luckily kind of escaped any sort of disordered feeling about food because it was my primary thing of interest besides video games. So if I lost that, I don't know what else I would have. I think I tried to go on a diet once and I was just like a total failure because like I didn't want to do it, couldn't do it. Yeah, I mean they pretty

they suck pretty bad. Yeah, yeah they do. You know, you're like, you literally have a person's salaries worth of that's your budget for eating for the year, right, So you have this incredible array of food experiences. Many of them are sort of in these traditionally referred to as like fine dining establishments. Can you kind of talk about the role of fat phobia and food anxiety in those spaces. It's really interesting when people who are you know, trying

to insult me or whatever, because that happens. You know, people get really heated over restaurant reviews. You know, they talk about my weight, which is just like funny to me because like, what do you expect, yes, when you eat for a living, like you're not going to be Gwyneth Paltrow. Well, I mean, but there is this kind of mythology because our idea of a foodie is a thin person, right. Our idea of sort of somebody who's like this aspirational gourmand is consistently i mean not only

like assist ender man, but also a thin person. And I kind of want to unpack that. Yeah, yeah, well, I think it's a the perception of the restaurant critic or the foodie or whatever is that they are an expert, and when you're an expert, you don't consume to excess, right, And like when you have a body that's larger, that is a symbol of excess, right, right, it's a symbol that of you not having control, whereas like expertise is the ultimate control. Yes, so like how do you square

that circle? Oh? Sleigh? Yes? Yes, I think it's also kind of a function of do you are you willing to respect a fat person? For a lot of people who don't think very hard about it, probably not right, you know, right, like you're the fat person. It's a joke. They're not someone you listen to. But you know, it takes a lot of work to to taste all this food, to eat all this who would actually like think deep thoughts about it beyond I had the steak it was

too salty, you know what I mean? Yes, you're not just taking one bite and like Okay, that was pretty good and then like move on, right, you know, like that is a very shallow way of engaging, and you don't you also wouldn't trust someone who only ordered one thing and left and then like wrote a whole article about it, right, right, it's real work, It's a real job. Yes, So for someone to insult me based on how I

look or whatever, it's just completely like what do you try? Like, it's nonsensical, you know, insult me for what I do. My emergence as someone who became interested in food in a nerdy way was highly connected with my experience a fat phobia essentially, Right, Like, I'm in high school, I'm horny, I'm a nerd. I desperately want a boyfriend, and no one will date me because I'm a fat pariah. Right, And I turned to you know, a phone personal service. Essentially,

I started talking to older businessmen. All that to say, Right, Like, my first experiences going on dates were actually at fine dining establishments in San Francisco. Food became a site or a location of a lot of tension for me because I saw I began to see not only these people, like these white businessmen, as these sort of heroic figures because I could tell from how they were being treated

by others that they were respected. In my mind, there's a sort of cross wiring that occurred around like white masculinity, fine dining, getting away from my roots. Do you know what I'm talking about? That kind of like circuitry that begins to occur. Yes, it's called ideology. I mean, do you have experience with this? I'm just curious, like what is your wiring? Like, oh god, that's a hell of a question. I think a lot of the way I think has very much been informed by m really not

liking myself. And I still don't really like myself. I never really like myself. I dissociate constantly, you know, And it's a very exercised muscle, my ability to kind of feel like an alien. And in later life I've been able to use that to my advantage as an analytical kind of mode. Yes, I relate, Yeah, and I think it also made me feel very judgmental, but so like trying to figure out, okay, where what's the line between my personal sense of pettiness and actually rigorous kind of

study and thinking about how things are connected. You know, for me, that's been my struggle and also like why would I be judgmental if I'm shit? You know, Like that doesn't make any sense, right, See, this is me

talking to the therapist. I don't have thank you. But the thing is, there's so much that is kind of pulled into that because there's like, you know, me being the child of refugees who don't really belong and also not being able to speak to them in Vietnamese and not feeling like I belong with my family either, and I'm being the only out queer person in my family,

like all of this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I kind of I want to talk about this theme of belonging because I mean, I've I've been talking to people, I've been thinking a lot and hearing a lot of stories about how food can be this locus of alienation or of belonging, or of faking it or you know what I mean, or or of feeling like you're passing, or and it has all of these meanings. What is it? What does it have for you? I love food, I

love eating food, I love like tasting new things. At the same time, it's a reminder that pleasure hides so many things behind it. So for me, it's it's an embodiment of that anxiety of just like, I can't trust this feeling of good because there's always something behind it, which is true though yeah it's not just paranoia, it's so true, right, But it's like the privilege is really

then not having to have that thought. Yes, I find it really fascinating as a food critic because you know, the things that a food critic is thought to like are very much, you know, demographically based, right to say it nicely, So the things that I like are very different, right, and like it is a lot of people's jobs to figure out what I like me personally, right, what I enjoy, And so often when I see a dissonance in that,

I'm just like, oh wow, this is so interesting. When they try to appeal to me as if I were an old white man, I'm just like WHOA. The easy example is like when I went to the Friends Laundry, right, yeah, and the chef owner, Thomas Keller, took me and my friend, a colleague, to on a tour. He showed us the wine room where they have like the tens of thousand bottles of wine, and I was like, oh wow, that's cool.

It's a lot. Then then in the wine room there's this humid or, and then like they offered me a cigar, but I've never smoked a cigar in my life, and I was like what what, Like, first of all, I think of them as really gross, and when anyone smokes a cigar in near me, I'm just like what what are you? So, I'm like a political cartoon, like what

is this? I would never offer anyone a cigar unless I knew for a fact like oh yeah, this guy cigar freak just had a baby, like yeah, let's do it, you know, but like yes, So it was very much that felt like an imposition that was strange, like are you are you? Are you offering this to someone who's not here, like a ghost that's hovering behind me? Like

what is this? Yes? You know what I mean? And that way, I felt like they were trying to appeal to someone that I wasn't, Like I don't know, I don't even know if this is a question, but I'm kind of thinking about like this idea of you being a tastemaker, you do you your relationship to food has this entire this utility that's really fascinating. Well yeah, in a lot of ways, I'm I am trying to change

other people's relationships to food. Yes, you know, we know that taste isn't universal when we think about cilantro people for instance, yes, for them, they taste soap, so not why taste is very much personal? Like for so many people, taste is a personality whether you're talking about Star Wars or Italian wine or you know, anything else. Right, And

that's when things get dangerous. I think any sort of critique of that thing is going to drive you into a rage, you know, because that is an attack on you personally. So that's one aspect of it that I've experienced this year. Yes, you represent to maybe the person who's been reading the San Francisco Chronicle for a long time, in reading the food section, and you know you represent, would you call it a threat to their worldview? Or like,

what would you call that? I think for some yes, I think that's the only reason why people would send hate mail. Right. It's like, oh, obviously they feel threatened, or they're scared, or they feel a violent objection to like whatever I'm doing. That's the explanation that I have, at least, because you've invested so much money and time and travel or whatever in developing your sense of taste. If the person who is a tastemaker doesn't care about some or all of those things, then where does that

leave you? And you know, I think anyone who tries to kind of shake the foundation of like, for instance, like French food being superior or American food being superior whatever to the mongrel race food of brown people. You know that's going to be seen as an attack, Yes, well, I mean right, it seems to maybe to the average person, it would seem kind of extreme for someone to write hate mail to a restaurant critic. Yeah, you would think, but they all claim to be normal people, right right.

I guess like this is sort of a theoretical accidental question, but those are my favorite What are you coming for? What do they feel like you're coming for when they're writing this mail to you? Oh God, I don't know. I mean I think there's a portion of it that is like a generational kind of conflict. I think where I am just another millennial coming for boomers. Yes, or I'm just a hater and they can't abide that. Although why are you reading a restaurant review if you don't

want to read any criticism of anything? Right? And you know, for me to talk about things that are facts, like colonialism, to use the word white, they're seen as like extremely radical. You know, sure it's inherently political, but everything is. If I can change the way people think about, for instance, Vietnamese food and like why why we consume it, why it looks the way it does, all of that stuff, and maybe the next time they get abund me they

think about it. They think about colonialism, they think about like, oh wow, like the resilience of these people for making this kind of food under the feet of French colonizer. That's so interesting to me. That's that's really important, you know, yes, totally. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, and thanks for all the squid. Recently, I went into this little book shop down the street from my house. I was looking for a gift from my boyfriend's niece, Adeline.

Adeline has long hair down to or waist, loves the movie Frozen, and pronounces my name Vogie. She was turning four and we wanted to find her something for the burgeoning feminist. And as I was browsing, I picked up a book called Frybread, a Native American family story by Kevin Noble Millard. It goes, frybread is food, frybread is time, frybread is sound, frybread is us. And then there's this page frybread is history, the long Walk, the stolen land,

strangers in our own world. With unknown food. We made new recipes from what we had, and I stood there in the shop thinking about frybread and so Leah and I felt so grateful. But this beautiful little book summed up everything I hope to get at in Rebel Eaters Club. I've spent this entire season talking with amazing people about food from different perspectives. Mia and I talked about how food is family. Bailey and I talked about how food is healing. Deb and I talked about how food is fun.

Chef Fresh and I talked about how food is land. Shay and I talked about how food is comfort, and so Lay and I talked about how food is political. The food we have access to and how we prepare it has a history, sometimes a violent one, of turning wars, struggle, famine, resiliency, and hope into craft into something nourishing, celebratory, connective, delicious. I hope this season of Rebel Eaters Club so far has helped you see food as more than calories or

a commodity. We've talked about diet culture too, that thing that gets in the way of under standing how complicated and powerful food is. It takes away to healing, the fun and the potential that can come from our relationships with ourselves too, and with each other. I hope this season of Rebel Eaters Club has helped you begin the

breakup with diet culture. It is long overdue, girl, because we are masses of stardust who have the limitless capacity to experience and share pleasure, connection, healing, delight, difficulty, and comfort, all on a full stomach. For this week's prompt, write a contract with your inner rebel eater. Maybe you have some thoughts about how you'd like to change your relationship to food, but you haven't put them into practice yet. Maybe you've decided to stop using moralized language around food.

Maybe you've realize that commenting on your weight is not a practice that works anymore. Write these things down. This can be a living document. It can be a contract with yourself that you look back on and add to whenever you want. If you want to show your thoughts, you can send them to us at Rebel Eaters Club at gmail dot com or leave us a voicemail at eight six two two three one five three eight six,

and your story could make it onto the show. When you're done, don't forget to give yourself the merit badge you earned the food is life badge. You can print it out on our website, Rebel Eatersclub dot com and show us what you're eating. Tag us on social with hashtag Rebel Eaters Club, or at transmitter pods. We'll be back next week with an episode recorded live at our San Francisco launch event and more of your voicemails. I wanted to share this one this week from Jordan in

New Jersey. I just finished listening to the episode with Chef Fresh, who I love just they just have such a wonderful story and it really made me think about a lot. I'm reflecting on my current challenge with food right now, which is what is good nutrition separate from diet culture? Like what is my truth about my body

separate from diet culture? Like I don't fucking know what to be eating without thinking what is going to make me fat and what it's going to be make in And that fucking sends me off because it's just been ruling my whole life and I hate it, and so like that's my breakup letter, Like that's the one I want to write because most of my life, like diet culture and white supremacy and colonialism and capitalism have been like writing the narrative of what my truth is around

my body. I will happily hear the next podcast when it comes out. Thanks much. Rubel Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media, the podcast company that's like finding a stash of chocolate that you forgot you saved for yourself. I'm Virgie Tovar. The show is produced by Lacy Roberts and Jordan Bailey. Our editor is Sarah Knicks.

Gretta Cohen as our executive producer. Like what you hear on the show and want to sponsor us, Send us a note at Rubbel Eaters Club at gmail dot com and let us know and please head to your favorite podcast app and give us a review. It will help us grow the club. See you next week.