You're listening to Ruthie's Table four in Partnership with Montclair. Across the garden from where a Surgeon General Viveq Muthee and I are sitting, people are having Sunday lunch in the River cafe. Walking into the room, you hear the rise and fall of conversation and laughter, friends and families connecting over food. At age thirty seven, Viveague was appointed as the youngest Surgeon General of the United States by President Obama and is now serving a second term with
President Biden. During COVID in his gap between terms as surgeon General, he might have researched illnesses, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, but instead he chose what he saw as another epidemic of our time, loneliness. His book Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, tackles loneliness as a condition seriously detrimental to the health of millions of people. He is a surgeon general who sees love as a foundation of policy making. How rare to hear
the word love as a solution to a diagnosis. He says food is an antidote to loneliness, believing loneliness is like hunger, and like thirst, I am privileged today to talk with and listen to the Surgeon General and to hear how as a doctor, a father, a husband, a child, and now my friend. Food is a connection and food is love.
I mean, it is.
Also why you're here, Snith, are you doing a conference? So it is a global concern.
Now, and it's actually why I find that this work around food to be so powerful, because I think that people like you, Ruthie, who have been so deeply immersed in not just the preparation of food, but food is
a cultural force. I think have long recognized that food has a power to bring us together, to put us in a place of ease where we can be more open and talk to one another, which is I think people like breaking bread with one another, and conversation happens differently over food than it does in a conference room. But I think that food is also, at its best,
you know, a force for love. And I feel that fundamentally, the question that's before us in society, not just in the US, but all over the world is do we want to be a society that's driven by fear and with all that comes with that anger, anxiety, insecurity, or do we want to be a society that's fueled by love and by all that comes with that, compassion and kindness and generosity and looking out for one another. And so that's ultimately what I hope that we can build
together as a world fueled empowered by love. And I think that's a world where we can build extraordinary things, where we can bring benefits to everyone, where we can overcome adversity no matter or what comes, and where we feel a sense of optimism and hope. It worries me greatly that as I travel that so many people feel pessimistic and anxious. But I also think that what gives us hope during hard trip is our connection to one another. And so that's what I want us to rebuild. You know,
in our lives. We have it within us. I think this is actually our true nature. It's a question of giving voice to it and coming together around that kind of society, and I think we can build it.
We will, Yeah, we will, thank you. So what we like to do is to read a recipe. And you chose the recipe of pumpkin soup. Yes, so would you like to read that recipe?
And you can read it any way you like.
Sure, So this is a recipe for pumpkin soup. And I chose pumpkin soup in part because I having grown up in Miami, Florida, where it's very warm, and then having subsequently moved to very cold weather places, I was always craving warmth, and soup was the easiest way for me to find them. And I love pumpkins part because
I love Halloween. So pumpkin soup three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, fifty grams of butter, two cloves sliced garlic, twenty sage leaves, a two kilogram pumpkin, peeled, seated, cut into large cubes, one potato, peeled and cubed, one red chili, one liter of chicken stock, two tablespoons of grated parmesan, and one tablespoon of crim fresh. Heat the olive oil and butter, Add garlic and sage, and fry for five minutes. Add the pumpkin and potato. Fry for one minute before
adding chili. Seasoning and season well with salt and pepper. Poor enough stock to cover the pumpkin and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for twenty minutes until the pumpkin is tender. Strain half of the stock from the pumpkin into a bowl and set aside. Pouring what is left into a food processor pulse until the mixture is very thick. Return the mixture to the pan and add strained stock and stir. Serve with parmesan and a drizzle of olive oil and crumbfresh on top.
Is something you could imagine eating and cutting.
Yes, in fact, I found myself getting hungry even though I had a whole meal after reading this recipe.
This is wonderful.
Yeah, So if we begin at the beginning, this is going to be a long, less conversation about life and work and loneliness and happiness food. Tell me about your family were Are they from India? Came to London to England.
Yeah, my family's originally from India. My mother is from Bangalore, a city in the south of India, and my father is from a small farming village about two hours outside of Bangalore, and they grew up in fairly modest households. My mother's family was, you know, middle class. My father, though, came from a poor farming community and his family did not have much at all in the way of resources.
Growing up. After they got married.
They moved to England and they lived here for seven years, in London for some part of that time, and then in other parts. They lived in Leeds, they lived in up North, in Huddersfield, which is actually where I was born and where my sister was born. They lived in Wales, Scotland, and then ultimately moved to Canada and then eventually to the US.
Did they bring the food of India with them? They did.
They've never They've never left the cuisine they grew up with behind, and they not only cooked and sought out that cuisine when they were in England, but even growing up. The aromas that I remember as a child are of the Indian food that my parents looked at home.
What was it like? Do you remember they?
You know, they had very different styles of cooking. So my mother was a primary cook, but my father cooked often and he brought great joy to cooking. So my mother her The hallmark of her food were it was simple but rich flavors. So she would only cook with a few ingredients, but she would somehow make all of them sing and people from the community would often come and ask her, how did you make that? How did I have the list of ingredients, but somehow I can't
get quite the same flavor out of it. And she would always say to me that one of her secrets was that was her intention when she cooked. She said she would think of the love that she wanted the food to represent, and the love she wanted to give to the person who enjoyed the food, and she would bring that into her mind and pour it into the food.
One of her ingredients.
Yes, love is one of her ingredients.
And my father was an incredibly creative cook. If my mother's a hallmark was simplicity, his was complexity. He had often many ingredients. And if you ask my father, how did you make that dish because it was so good, he'll have a hard time telling you because he doesn't quite remember the proportions. And this he doesn't measure. He just adds based on his instinct. But he so he's a creative cook, but an equally an equally talented one.
But did he cook on special occasions or did he just cook every day? Did he did he?
When we were growing up, he would cook on special occasions because he was he was working office. He was a doctor, and he initially worked in emergency rooms and in hospitals, then eventually set up his own clinic, you know, in Miami in nineteen eighty five, which he continues to work in until this day now alongside my sister who's also a primary.
Doctors in the family more than three three of us, yet the are just three of us in the nuclear family.
So we say my mother has is essentially close to a doctor herself because she she actually ran the medical practice that my father worked and she managed the whole operation, and because there was a small shop, it was just the two of them seeing patients. So a lot of times the patients would come and talk to her about what they were going through, and over time she came to sort of recognize various symptoms and be able to make diagnoses on the side. So it was very interesting.
But yeah, and.
When you went to Miami, did you live within a very Indian community or was it?
When we first got there, we didn't know many people who were Indian. The Indian community was still small, and over time is more as a Indian community grew, that became an important part of our experience. But initially it wasn't the case. And I think that's part of the reason why. I You know, I felt quite different as
a young person growing up. I didn't know a lot of people in those early years who ate the food that we ate, or had the customs that we had, or had names that sounded like ours, and I often felt like an outsider. And it's interesting. It's funny to know how these early experiences stick with you. And I still remember that feeling of what it felt like to be an outsider and do not feel like you belong.
And it's why I have found that in years since, I'm really sensitive to when other people feel like they're outsiders because I felt that and it doesn't feel good.
So did your sister experience that as well?
She did? Yeah, she did?
Your parents and your parents? Did your grandparents come with you at all?
Did they?
I wish they had? They did not.
They stayed in India, and I missed them a lot because when we were young, during holidays, during Christmas and Thanksgiving, people would go away and spend time with extended family.
They would come back with these wonderful.
Stories about their grandparents and about how Grandma gave them this, their Grandpa took them here, And I often wish that our grandparents were closer, but they came to visit a few times when we were younger, and I really treasured those times. Did they cook, yes, well, my grandmother would cook, my mother's mother and my father's mother had unfortunately passed away when he was young, when he was ten, but his father would actually cook his well because he had
been used to cooking for himself. And they all had their own styles, but the one thing that was common among all of them is there was a lot of joy when they were in the kitchen. They were cooking from a place of happiness. They knew they were going to be bringing happiness to people with the food. It wasn't functional, it wasn't ah.
Got to be on the table if you get the food out.
That's right, it was. There's some real joy.
Do you think that is specific to Indian cooking, that is more of a group activity or good question.
I think other cuisines, other cultures have that as well.
But I do worry that in modern living that we've gotten away from a lot of that, and that food preparation has become more functional than nurturing and therapeutic, and that old community style of sitting together and both making the food and consuming the food that I think there's I think some of that got lost, perhaps just as life structures change and in the interests of efficiency, or we can just get food delivered, or we can pop something in the microwave, and it does feel like it
saves time. But I think perhaps what may not have been as as deeply appreciated was how much was lost in terms of the community that's built. The relaxation also that comes when you're working with your hands and creating something beautiful in the form of food that others will enjoy.
People often say to me, how can you cook for one hundred and fifty people and in the restaurant when it's hard to give a dinner party at home for twelve people, I go, I can't do a dinner party for twelve people at home. It's so much easier doing it in a restaurant because you're collaborating, you know, you have you're cooking. It is that thing of cooking with other people, sharing a conversation, tasting each other's food, talking about what you're going to do, and that community.
Of working in a restaurant is so nice.
You know. I do, of course cook for twelve people at home, but it can be very solitary just being in the kitchen by yourself.
It can be yeah, And that's where I think doing it together, whether it's as family as friends, really makes a difference. Some of my best memories growing up or actually of all of us, my sister and I along with my both my parents actually cooking together. So when we would have guests over, that was it was stressful at times because we're going to get everything ready for the guests in time, et cetera. And but the fun
part was that we made things together. So one of my jobs was to make the list of items that we were going to cook that.
Day for shops going to shop or shop.
But actually for cooking also like the dishes that we were going to make. And then I would be, you know, a sous cheft for my mom and then she would help put things together. I would chop, I would you know, mix things together. I would watch things on the stove and roast vegetables or other ingredients and and when they were done, it was my job to check it off in the list. And I had to ultimately make sure that everything was checked off before the guests came.
So preparation for sure life maybe even to.
This day when I go home if we're going to have people over, and my mother still still turn to me and say, make the list, make the list.
So I make the list.
It's interesting what you said also about your grandparents, because people that we've talked to on the podcast, very often, if especially they've come from another country, from Ghana to London, or from China to London, from wherever they've traveled, they very often talk about their grandparents almost more than their parents, because sometimes the mother adapts, you know, the mother adapts
her cooking. The child only sometimes wants to eat the food of the culture he's moved to, but the grandmother clings to more to what you know, or the grandfather, i should say, from their country. Did your mother adapt or did she only cook Indian food? Did she ever make you hamburgers or meatballs in spaghetti.
Or was all the food of your home the food of India?
Yeah, you know, my mother still to this day primarily cooks Indian food, like and almost exclusively, I would say, so that is what we ate growing up. My father, on the other hand, has he still makes a lot of traditionally Indian food, but he does a lot of creative fusion food. So he has an Indian version of spaghetti that he.
Makes, and of other pastas well.
I don't know what he calls doesn't actually have a name, but when you eat it, you taste all of these flavorful Indian spices. And then he does other interesting things too, like he'll take jackfruit, which is I'm not sure if you've had it or not, but it's a fruit that grows in the tropics. When it's ripe, it's yellow and rubbery and very sweet. But in its raw form it can actually be used for savory dishes and it's quite tender.
It can actually mimic a steak. So he'll chop up, you know, raw jackfruit, and then he'll drop it into the pasta, and so it almost tastes like you're eating meat in the pasta, but it's all vegetables. So he'll do all of these crazy creative things.
Yeah, both of them sound like great cooks.
They are.
How did they work all day.
And then come home and did you sit with your sister every night around the table and your parents after a long day at school.
We did.
And the reason we did that was actually because my parents were insistent and that we always have dinner together every night. Sometimes my sister and I as kids growing up, we'd get annoyed, you know, we'd say, well, you know, our friends get to like sit in front of the TV during dinnertime, why can we do that? Or you know, why don't you guys have dinner. We're busy doing something, you know, we're reading this book. Well, we'll have dinner later.
But they were always insistent that we have to eat together, so much so that when I was in high school, Ruthie and when we you know, sometimes we had a lot of homework and I was in the middle of like writing an essay and I didn't want to stop exactly when dinner time was, and they would just they
would just wait for us. And I still feel guilty, and so I'm embarrassed to say this, but like I still remember many nights in high school where I was like stressed about an exam and I was late studying and I don't feel could quite break and they would stay up and just wait until and we would eat at nine or nine thirty or ten o'clock at night, but they would just wait because they wanted to have dinner together. Still can't believe I made them wait that long, so I probably didn't mind.
I think I can imagine waiting for my children to finish. I think, you know, they probably it was your sister as well, would.
You, yeah, study, Yeah, And we were in the same grade growing up, so we thankfully had a lot of the same assignments and everything.
So, but yeah, did.
You go to friends homes for dinner? Did you go to other people's houses for dinner?
We did, Yes, we went to other people's homes, and and that was always a real source of joy because it was it was always a family affair, and it was always always very informal. So it wasn't that there was a big long table and everyone would sit together around that table. Usually there was food that was made.
People would often bring food, almost public style. All the dishes would be laid out on a table and everyone would just noisily, messily grabl plate, you know, put food on it, and then go to various parts of the house in small groups and this and that. And as kids we were, you know, we would just all hang out in a room together and eat and play and it was fun. I really enjoyed it. It was community, it was food, It was entertainment.
Very evocative, very beautiful description of this life at home. Did that it was at a big break then when you went off to university, when you went to Harvard, was a shock to the system that suddenly you were away from that.
It was a shock.
It was actually extremely hard for me, and I struggled a lot, especially during my first semester away. I felt really lonely. I felt just really disconnected, and being a shy, introverted kid, I had a hard time just making friends off the bat, you know. It took me a while to get to know people, and so that was it was very hard. I remember coming home at the for the first time after enrolling in college during Christmas break, and I had my suitcase.
In my hand.
The door opened, I stepped in, I put my bags down, looked up at the ceiling of the house in which I had grown up, took a deep breath, and I said to my father, I feel like I've just been released from prison. And I had almost forgotten that I had said that until a few years ago. He reminded me, and if I brought back this flood of emotions of what it had felt like to be just separated from this love that had nurtured me for so long. And things got a bit better after that, as I was
able to make friends and build a community. But some years after, when I was in my residency training in my first year, when I was working you know, abobbly eighty ninety hundred hours a week, but seeing and working with patients who were going through some of the most difficult moments of their life, including people who are my age, you know at that time, young people in their twenties who were dealing with metasatic cancer and only had a
few months to live. I started reflecting then and thought to myself, I never want to lose my connection to my family. I want to make sure that every moment that I have that I'm spending it with family and friends, you know, whether that's vacation time, weekend time. I was like, I want to make that a priority. So after that, I started going home much more often to see my parents and to spend time with them, even if it
was just for a weekend. You know, it was worth it because I always remember those patients I cared for, are those young patients, and this reminds me that we never we all don't know how much time we have, and I want to make sure I'm spending that time with the people the time I have with the people that I love.
Did you know The River Cafe has a shop. It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, Linden Napkins Kitchen, were toat bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at Shopthrivercafe.
Dot co dot uk.
When you were growing up, you describe always eating at home and cooking at home in the community of home. But what would you go to restaurants in Miami?
Would that be?
We would from time to time.
It's interesting, I do I remember that my parents because they liked spicy food in particular, and some stories I can tell you about spice and my father and the crazy yes he makes. He makes a series of different hot sauces from different types of peppers, including some are from habanero peppers, some are from special Jamaican hot peppers, some are from ghost peppers. He's like extremely spicy saw so much so that when he makes them, we all have to leave the house.
When he makes the.
Sauce in the kitchen, we have to step outside because and he wears something that's equivalent to a gas mask when he makes it, because the fumes there's so incredibly overpowering. But once he's made it and put it in a bottle, you add a little bit to your food, it tastes incredible as long as you can tolerate the spice. So but you know, and I generally like, I eat a lot of spice, but that level of spice is even hard for me to tolerate.
Would he find a restaurant that could serve him the.
Equivalent, so we would always be on the lookout for them, And so I remember many times going to Chinese restaurants, for example, and he would ask them like, can you make it spicy? And there was always a cadence to this conversation. First question, can you make it spicy? They would say yes, Second question, how spicy can you make it? They would say, well, we have a five star scale and we can make it one to five. Then the third question would say can you make seven stars? Can
you do get six? And then they would get scared because they didn't want something to happen against you. But then he would go through trying to convince him that he really could take the spice. So generally, when we went out to eat, it was often with in restaurants where they hope people could make the food spicy, Chinese restaurants, Thai restaurants, you know, food food cuisines of that sort.
And when you were in university, did you do what was the food like? There was that a shock as well, just sitting down to the kind of food they serve at school.
Did you go out?
It was?
I actually lost a lot of weight in college. You know, I think I'm a fairly normal weight now, but I actually, if you can picture this, I weighed forty pounds less when I was in college.
Did anybody notice?
I mean, did anybody notice that there was a student in his freshman year homesick and losing weight and lonely.
Do you think was there any.
You know, no one ever asked me that question. Outside of my family, I don't think anyone noticed, you know, And but it was it was painful to my family. See, they were there, they clearly knew something was wrong. I wasn't feeling happy.
Et cetera.
But yeah, what I used to do is because I missed the food of home. Also is I had a little packet of spicy powder that I would take with me to the dining hall and I would sprinkle it on on everything, anything and everything you'd find.
I would just like spice it up.
And so even people who didn't know me knew that I was I was a kid with the spicy powder.
You know who.
I have a friend who travels with chili's.
Yeah, she always travels with some chili that she can put on yeah food. I don't know whether she's afraid of having inconsequential food or whether she just loves it with spicy but.
Well, I learned that actually from my parents, because when we would go out to restaurants I couldn't make food spicy, sometimes they'd be really disappointed. So they would always have their own like powder that they would add to it. I remember a few times going out at that time with his kids. We loved pizza and we wanted to eat pizza, and we didn't make pizza at home, but we always wanted to go to pizza Hut or something.
So sometimes they would be grudgingly go and they would dutifully bring the spicy powder and sprinkle it all over the pizza so that they looked like red pizza.
You know, you were in Harvard and Boston and Cambridge. Did you have lobsters or did you try the local food from the cake?
I had some of the local some of the Italian food I had in the North End.
Was that a revelation or had you had it Miami?
It was? It was much better in the North End.
I think the limited past side I had in Miami was it wasn't as authentic, you know, as what the North Ends was. So that was that was quite quite extraordinary. And then the pastries also, like the Italian pastries, were just incredible. I had never had anything like that before.
I don't know. Indian desserts are they quite saying the right?
So some of them are dairy based, yeah, and a lot of them are not. The Indian sweets tend to be tend to be quite rich, you know, and and also quite sweet as well, which is why some people love them.
Some people really don't like them.
Do you like them?
I do?
I mean, look, I have like thirty two sweet teeth, so I have. I just love the love desserts, which is part of the reason I try to eat them very sparingly, because otherwise I would just eat dessert all day long. But I used to when I was growing up, I would I learned to make one of the sweets in particular that became.
So it was.
It goes by different names, but in our family we called it k City bath, and it's also called Shida and other parts of India. But it's a very it's sort of my mom's type of dessert. It's very simple in terms of the ingredients and involved. Basically, what you do is you take a pen, you put let's say two cups of cream of wheat or something equivalent to that. You roast that with some clarified butter or ghee, and you put some raisins in there to roast as well.
So you're roasting that for a while until you start to smell like the wheat, you know, sort of aroma cum come to your nose, and once it's slightly brown, then what you do is that you actually add You
can add a couple of things. You can start by adding a little bit of sugar, right about a quarter a cup or a half cup of sugar, just to do you start to see a glisten in the sugar melt, and then what I used to do is I would actually slice bananas and add them to that as well, and then you crush cardamom, you know, with the mortar pestle, and then you sprinkle the cardameom on top, and then you mix it all together and then let the water
evaporate until you have something that's very silky smooth, and you just the combination of the sugar, the fruit and the cardamom really brings the dessert to life. So I used to make that, you know, when I was growing up. Yeah, I just made it a couple of weeks ago.
From my kids, it seemed very like recent, I was the way you were describing it. Was it something that's just always stayed in your mid It's.
Always seen in my head, Like I made it two weeks ago for the first time in probably ten years, and it brought back all these wonderful memories.
Yeah.
Do you cook at home now?
Now?
Very little, you know, which I regret. I used to cook a fair amount up until I finished my medical training and then and then it just sort of fell off.
I did you cook when you were doing your medical education?
Yeah?
Did you have a family then or you I did not, so put everything into your studies.
Yeah, I got married later in life when I was thirty eight years old. In fact, I got married and then now I have two wonderful kids. But in those days, I was a bachelor doing my own thing in the kitchen.
What did you study in medicine? What was your specialty?
So I ended up studying internal medicine, which is the care of adults. And I ended up specializing in hospital based medicine. So when people are admitted to them there's sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, then I was the doctor who would take care of them there.
So that that's that's the And.
Yeah, grueling.
Now would you would you be working again?
I'm thinking about how you did you did you manage to cook?
You said you did cook when you were I.
Did cook, yeah, but it wasn't I mean I had to like cook a bunch of food and then like eat it over several days because there wasn't Sometimes you would come home at three in the morning and then you'd have to leave two hours later, five in the morning to go and start the next days run. So
there wasn't a lot of time to cook. So I would try to cook in advance, you know, and have some food, but sometimes it wasn't easy, and so I ended up having to eat out or eat in the hospital cafeteria a lot, which was we could talk.
About hospital food. Yeah, that is such an issue now. The way we feed our children and the way we feed sick people in our society, I think tells us about.
How we care for people.
You know.
I think it's very astutely said, and I think you're right. I think one thing, if you look at the list of medicines that we prescribe, there's one thing that's missing from that list, and it's food, right, because food is medicine and food helps us heal in many direct and indirect ways. Yet somehow it does feel that the food we give people in hospitals, and the food that we
even give kids in school. I think about the cafeteria, you know, in my school growing up, and like what we used to eat, and it's not the kind of I think food we would want to give children and give people who are ill if we fully understood just how powerful food is in healing and how vital it
is for our well being in sustenance. And I do worry that what has happened in part over the years, is that we've allowed and I'm you know, my primary experiences with the United States, but I do think sadly this is happening in many other parts of the modernized world. I do think we've allowed our food supply to become poisoned in a sense by food that are overly processed and that are filled with excessive amounts of salt and sugar, and we've gotten away from, I think, some of the
healthier food that we all need. And it starts really early, you know. I think if children had the opportunity to experience healthy food, I meanly, I think it would make a big difference. And I do believe, just from a moral perspective, that no child should ever have to go hungry, no child should ever have to eat food that is
bad for them just to survive. Yet that is a reality that so many families are living right now, and I do think it comes from just a failure from a policy perspective to understand the vital importance of healthy food in raising our children and making sure that society is healthy and whole.
And it's interesting to think of how that happened and when that happened, you know, the path to not being concerned about feeding our children.
I think that the paradoxes that we've somehow made unhealthy food cheap and made healthy food expensive, which has put health out of the reach of so many people in society, And that is what we have to flip because if we don't do that, then I worry that this rise in chronic illness that we're seeing heart disease, diabetes, cancer, significant amount of which is driven by diet, that we'll see those trends continue unless we manage to get back to the root of what's driving it, which is in
large part our diet.
And so you're going from describing being the person that people met in hospital and working with patients, and how did that segue from that until how do you become a surgeon general? You know, people who are listening who might not know whether the two words surgeon general comes from, can you.
Tell us absolutely well? In the United States, the position of surgeon General is designated to be an individual who's sometimes informally called the nation's doctor, but whose responsibility is twofold and one is to make sure that the public has the best possible information about health. So that they can make good decisions for themselves and their families. And the second is to oversee one of our eight uniformed services in the US government, which is called a US
Public Health Service Commission CORPS. People are familiar with the Army, the Navy, the Air Force. Well, one of our services is the Public Health Service as well, and we focus entirely on protecting the health of people, not just in the United States, but also extending that mission outside the US as well. So those are the responsibilities I have as Surgeon General.
And how did you go from being a doctor in a hospital to being the Surgeon General.
Well, you know, I don't entirely know, to be honest with you, and I'll tell you how it happened. But after I finished my medical training, I was teaching at a hospital. I was practicing medicine and caring for patients. I was doing that for a good chunk of my time. And then on the side, I was actually building a technology company that I I hope would help to accelerate medical research to help bring treatments and cures to people
more effectively. And I was I had gotten involved probably in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight I think around that timeframe also in health policy work. So I was doing that hodgepodge of things like that, you know, at the time, but never actually thought of working in government.
But then one day I happened to be, you know, actually picking up my dry cleaning that day from the dry cleaners, and my hands were full, and my phone rank and it was a two to two area code, which is the Washington d C. I lived in Boston at the time, and I didn't recognize the number, so I didn't pick it up. But then finally I decided, let me just take the number, and that happened to be a call from the White House at that time, asking if I'd be interested in being considered for this position.
And what I came to understand later is that the President Obama and his team, we're looking to modernize the Office of the Surgeon General. They recognized this was a new age that we were coming in to where people receive their information differently, they learned about health issues differently, and there's a whole new dimension of health threats that we were facing, including the operate epidemic and the fentanyl crisis. So anyway, they seem to think that I might be
a good fit for that role. So they reached out at that time and that's how the whole journey began.
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Thank you.
When you had that break between being surgeon General with President Obama and then now your position with President Biden, tell me what did you do and how did that lead to your interest in loneliness.
Well, to be honest with you, Ruthie, I was quite lost in the beginning.
And I you know, I was.
Coming off of serving as Surgeon General for about two and a half years or so, and my identity had become wrapped up in that role, and I was abruptly as civilian again and trying to figure out a bunch of questions. And one of the things I was struggling with in the process was that I had really lost any sense of community during those few years that I
served in government. I had largely you know, I sort of told myself, I think a familiar story that many people tell themselves, perhaps when they have jobs for a short period of time, which is I got to put everything I have into this job, and I'll have time
to do the right catch up with life afterward. And as a result, I had not caught up with friends, I had not kept up with even family members at times, and when I was with my parents or my wife or you know, my sister, I was distracted often, you know, I was going through my inbox, trying to clear out messages, keeping up with the news that was relevant to my work, and that just led to this real profound sense of isolation and loneliness when I came out, and so I
struggled with that for quite a bit of time. And in the process, one of the things that I was digging into was recognizing that that experience of loneliness that I was having, that it wasn't unique to me. I was like reflecting more and more on conversations I had had even when I was in office. The social connection that I was missing and that I found was missing for so many others was not just a good feeling. It was actually something that was really vital to our
physical health and our mental health. And it's why, well, ultimately, when I wrote about loneliness, it was about that profound health impact around the recognition that when we struggle with being disconnected from one another, that actually has an impact on our mortality. And the mortality impact actually of loneliness and isolation are similar to the mortality impact we see with smoking, and even greater than that which we see
with obesity. So this is a real issue, but it's also one that's deeply felt, and I certainly felt it
a lot during that time. So coming back the second time to serve felt very different than the first time, in part because the country in the world was in a very different place with COVID, but also because I realized I really wanted to focus in on this deeper mental health crisis that was running under the surface and that was impacting so much of our lives, and that was particularly impacting kids with rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.
That we're all going in the wrong direction. And so that has been really where I have focused much of my time these last three years, is on addressing loneliness, understanding the deeper roots of this mental health crisis, and thinking about and honesty in a very personal context, not just in terms of me, butters of my own kids. You know, my kids are now six and seven, and I want them to grow up in a world where they feel happy they don't, where they feel connected to
other people, where they feel connected to other cultures. And I want them to know that if they mess up or do something wrong, that they are people who will forgive them, men who will lift them up.
And I want to know.
That they will do that for other people as well. But that means creating a world that's more kind and compassionate, more forgiving and understanding, more connected and invested in one another. But that's ultimately I think the work that I feel is really essential for us to do.
Now, would you also add trust to that?
If you have trust, then you trust that there will be that support system or that people are not there to do you harm that you then might accept more.
Yes, that is the right word trust.
Yeah.
And the thing is trust trust can't be manufactured, and it also doesn't come about overnight. It comes through relationship, right. It's like when we get to know people and understand them, then we come to trust them. And when we trust people, we can also tolerate disagreement because we recognize that that we're more than our opinion on a single issue, Right, that there's something deeper that binds us together common hopes
and dreams, or shared humanity. But when that gets lost, when we can't see each other as human beings, but we only see each other as posts that we that we write on social media, or as positions on a particular controversial issue, then it becomes very hard to build trust. It becomes hard then to move together in the face
of adversity. And that's why a key part of not just preparing for better health, but also preparing for the next pandemic has to involve rebuilding our ties with one another and the trust that we have in society.
One of my favorite stories is of they were looking into a happy community and happiness factors, and it was this town in Denmark, and they interviewed people about why they were happy, and it was to do with trust. And they told the story about a Danish woman who had which I remember, had taken her baby to New York and she went inside to my Balthazar, one of the cafes there, and left the baby outside in a pram and she went in to eat because that's what
she would do in her town in Denmark. You know, she thought that actually that's what they would do. They would leave the baby outside, you know, but she.
Was able to watch it. And she was arrested for.
You know, being whatever you call irresponsible towards an infant because she'd left a baby outside, you know. But that was to do with trust. And I think that what you're doing is so you know, so inspiring and so important, and you are actually in a position to make change.
People were saying in the River Cafe, thank you, So as an American, I would add myself to those thanks and to ask you as our last question, if food is something that helps loneliness, if food is the way you cook for your own children and the experience of taking them places. Food is also comfort, So what would be your comfort food search?
In general?
I comfort food.
Well, there is a it's something my mother makes and it's a particular.
A dish.
It's almost like a spicy broth water that's called russam sam and traditionally you would mix it with rice to eat it. And it's beautiful, spicy, flavorful as curry leaves in it, as pepper, has all kinds of spices and very ripe tomatoes. But you can also pour it in a cup and drink it, and when I do that, I feel like it's almost like an elixir that I'm having. It sort of fills me with warmth literally, but also
with these beautiful memories I have of my mother. You know, I had a professor once who said to me, he said love. He said, food is not the calories you put in your body. Food is the love your mother gave you as a child. And I have thought about that so often because that's what to me makes comfort food comfort food. It's the food that reminds me of love. Thank you, Thank you so.
Much, Rudy.
You'll see you again very soon.
I hope, so I as well have this love.
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table for in partnership with Montclair.
Ruthie's Table four is produced by Atamei Studios for iHeartRadio.
It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers and it's produced by William Lensky. This episode was edited by Julia Johnson and mixed by Nigel Appleton.
Our executive producers are Faye Stewart and Zad Rogers. Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore and our production coordinator is Bella Selini. Thank you to everyone at the River Cafe for your help in making this episode.