Julia Child Was a B.A.M.F.

Think Julia Child was just a chef? Have we got a half hour for you!  Julia Child lived an incredible life filled with international espionage, steamy romance and revolutionary ideas - in addition to creating a new TV genre, inventing foodie culture and teaching us how to make boeuf bourguignon. In this bonus episode, we’re going to tell you about her truly unique life, why she was a trailblazer in the kitchen and why we're still talking about her today.  And of course, her penchant for blow torches. Listen, subscribe and Bon Apetit!

It's a GIVEAWAY! We're giving away a mini snack box from YumDay at the end of March. Visit us here to enter. 

Take our Listener Survey to help us get ready for Season 2! Drop your info here and we'll send you the survey.

For more great content about the stories & foods we talk about on the show (plus a peek BTS) connect with us at @FoodDayPod on Instagram & Twitter,  join our Facebook Group & check out our webpage.  Access the transcript here. 

Transcript

ANNA 0:00:02  
How you doing Lia?

LIA 0:00:04 
I'm doing alright. How about you, Anna?

ANNA 0:00:06
Hanging in there. Hanging in there. Lots going on, and I know the people listening might be thinking, no, but seriously, aren't they on a break... Why do they keep showing up in my feed? And here's the thing: we are, we're working diligently to prep for Season 2. Wink, wink. Hint, hint. And other fun stuff that we're bringing you, but it came to our attention that not everyone is aware of Julia Child's Bada**ery...

MUSIC 

ANNA 0:00:46 
People know she was a cook, they know she had a show, they know Meryl Streep played her, all of which is impressive, but her bada**ery is so far beyond that and people don't know about it, and we just couldn't let that lie.

LIA 0:00:57 
We have to make sure people know about this, that people know about Julia because she was the GOAT.

ANNA 0:01:05 
More like the escarGOAT! That one it feels good. Yes, it's Women's History Month, for God's sakes.

LIA 0:01:23 
Right.

ANNA 0:01:24 
So that's what we're doing today. We're gonna tell you all the juicy details about Julia Child's life, I promise you. It is impressive. It is worth listening to. She's amazing. And if you already know a lot of the stuff, just hang out, we're funny.

LIA 0:01:42
We are. Did you not just hear that escarGOAT pun?

ANNA 0:01:49 
So I'm gonna tell you about Julia Child's life, but first, what are we gonna do, miss Lia.

LIA 0:01:53 
We're gonna do a little housekeeping, and one of the first things I want to remind folks, I wanna remind our listeners is that we have a giveaway guys.

ANNA 0:02:07 
Snacks! Snacks! Snacks!

LIA 0:02:08 
That's right. Yumday is giving away a Mini Snack Pack, if you sign up for our every day is a food day mailing list, and you can do that by going to Yumday.co/podcast, sign up for our mailing list. You wanna be on this list because it will let you know when our next season drops when you get fun exclusive content like this, and just all kinds of good stuff, and once a month we'll be randomly drawing from our set of new mailing list subscribers and awarding someone, a very lucky listener with a mini snack pack.

ANNA 0:02:41  
Yay! So when is that drawing for the mini-stack pack this month?

LIA 0:02:45 
That will be at the end of March sometime?

ANNA 0:02:52 
Late March.

LIA 0:02:52 
Late March. But you can keep up with that if you also make sure to follow us on Instagram at Food Day pod.

ANNA 0:03:00
Yeah, Instagram is really where you can keep up with us most. The other thing is, we wanna hear from you, so we created a listener survey, it would take you like five, ten minutes. We wanna know a little bit more about you, we wanna know what you think about the show, what you would like us to be doing on the show, if you participate in our social media, all that kind of stuff, it will really, really help us bring you the show and the content that you want. So again, if you go to yumday.co/podcast, drop in your email and we will send you the link to that survey and we will love you forever. We already do.

LIA 0:03:38 
And then while you're also on the website, you might notice there's a little button there that says “Buy me a Coffee,” now you guys know that Every Day is a Food Day is an independent Podcast run by two incredible women.

ANNA 0:03:54  
Amazing women.

LIA 0:03:56 
We do this all on our own. It is a labor of love, and we love to put the work into it and to make a production that is wonderful, high quality, and tells really awesome, compelling stories. 

ANNA 0:04:10 
You can just donate 5 bucks, 10 bucks, make it recurring, one time, whatever you feel like it, but we wanna keep making the show and producing this awesome content for you, so if you would like to pitch in and help us do that. We would greatly appreciate that. We'll still make stuff for you either way...

LIA 0:04:24 
Like season two.

ANNA 0:04:26 
Like Season Two. Season two is coming up. I think we have scheduled the day after this episode airs, is our first recording sesh. 

LIA 0:04:34 
Yeah. 

ANNA 0:04:35 
For season 2. 

LIA 0:04:36 
The food topics, the themes.

ANNA 0:04:39 
Man, we put our thinking caps on... We're really excited.

LIA 0:04:43 
They're awesome.

ANNA 0:04:44 
I'm a little worried though, Lia because our last season, we started with an election day and we ended with a violent insurrection, and I just... I don't know if we could make a great season again without the backdrop of the daily assault on our democracy, and uncertain future, it's just like... I don't even know what the President did today.

LIA 0:05:07 
You know what, I don't know either.

ANNA 0:05:10 
So I'm a little worried that this is terrible, maybe that's sort of societal trauma, the threat of the end of our democracy was like Our Dumbo's feather.

LIA 0:05:23
We can't let it go. How do we fly?

ANNA 0:05:25 
How do we even fly without it? 

LIA 0:05:28  
We cannot fly without that…

ANNA 0:05:30
So to sum up, really yumday.co/podcast is our sort of central hub, so you can go there, you can enter for the giveaway, sign up for awesome mailing list when you drop your email, we'll send you a link to the listener survey to really help us out and you could buy a coffee if you feel like it, and season 2 is coming up so stay tuned.

ANNA 0:05:53 
Should we talk about Julia?

LIA 0:05:54  
Yes, we should... Oh, that was nice.

ANNA 0:05:57 
Thanks, I was practicing. I'm no Meryl Streep. But I can still do Julia. I'm gonna tell you guys a bit about her crazy life, and then Lia's gonna take over and she's gonna tell you more about her, show her impact, like why she was so revolutionary in the way she approached food, and why we're still talking about her today. You ready?

LIA 0:06:20 
I'm ready. Let's talk about Julia.

MUSIC STING

ANNA 0:06:27 
Julia was born in 1912. Just next door to me in Pasadena, California. She was born Julia McWilliams. She loved food from a young age because she was a big girl, she grew to be six foot two, and so she was always hungry, and I saw her in an interview talking about how when she was growing up, she thought that being healthy was not what you ate, it was how much you ate, and so the more you ate, the healthier you were, and I also believe that philosophy...

LIA 0:06:58
Right.

ANNA 0:06:59 
I'm so healthy.

LIA 0:07:01 
Is that not true?

ANNA 0:07:05 
She attended Smith College in Massachusetts where she studied history and unsurprisingly was a basketball star.

LIA 0:07:10  
Baller!

ANNA 0:07:11 
Julia was a baller. It was a while before she got into food, I think people think that was her whole life, she didn't actually really start her food career until she was in her late 30s.

LIA 0:07:22 
Right.

ANNA 0:07:23 
Right. So before then, she did a couple of things. First, she was an advertising manager at a furniture store in New York City until she was 28 years old. She walked off the job after having a fight with management after she made what she described as a tactical error, and I don't know what that means, and I wish I did, I don't know what a tactical furniture advertising error is, but I'm sure whatever she did was amazing.

LIA 0:07:54 
It had to be.

ANNA 0:07:55 
So she left that gig around 1942, which was when the US had just entered World War II, she was 29 years old, and she wanted to serve her country, she wanted to enlist. So she applied to the women's Army Corps, but they had a maximum height of six feet.

LIA 0:08:12 
What?

ANNA 0:08:14 
Yeah, she was too tall for the Army.

LIA 0:08:17
No.

ANNA 0:08:18 
So instead... But I could just imagine this, she's like total for the tents, she'd be out there in her little uniform, would just come up to her knees. Poor Julia. So instead, she was one of 4500 women who joined the OSS, and the OSS was the Office of Strategic Services, which eventually became the CIA. And she joined the secret intelligence division. So basically what I'm saying people is Julia Child was a freaking spy. 

ANNA & LIA 0:08:57
Dun Dun Dun!

ANNA 0:09:00  
No joke. Julia Child was a spy, and we only learned this recently because the CIA had sealed these records for decades, so it was public knowledge that she had gone into World War II, but it wasn't public knowledge, what she had done there specifically until like 15 years ago, they unsealed all these files. And let me tell you what she was up to... Oh, by the way, the notes from her original interview to join the OSS said, “Good impression. Pleasant, alert, capable, very tall.”

LIA 0:09:39 
That's interesting that they didn't have a height Max there, right. Cuz you could say that maybe she sticks out a little more...

ANNA 0:09:49 
You mean... Yeah, she would stand out if she was a spy. This 6 foot two white woman over here in China.

LIA 0:09:55 
Exactly.

ANNA 0:09:56 
Blended right in. She started out in clerical work, a lot of the women there did, but it was basically data entry, it was totally mind-numbing. She applied for a transfer. The department she got transferred to was called the emergency sea rescue equipment department, it was a World War, the world is covered in a lot of water, and so we fought a lot of this war at sea. So, she started doing things that were like rescue kits that were survival kits for scuba divers or sailors who might go overboard and things like that. But she was put on a very interesting project to solve a problem. We were putting a lot of explosives in the water, we were doing that to target the German U-boats, but they had a problem, and the problem was Sharks. 

LIA 0:10:47 
Sharks, man.

ANNA 0:10:49 
Sharks, sharks are dicks. Sharks would swim too close to the bombs or bump into the bombs, which detonated them, which meant that they wouldn't hit their targets right? Then they couldn't hit the German U-boats because the sharks had blown them up, which to me, there's only one conclusion to make there, which is that the sharks were working with the German...

LIA 0:11:11 
Obvs. Yeah.

ANNA 0:11:13 
So you think sharks were bad, did you know they were Nazis? Sharks were part of the Axis powers. F****** sharks, man.

LIA 0:11:23
Can't trust them.

ANNA 0:11:25 
Can't trust those sharks. So she joined the team that was tasked with solving this problem with figuring out how to keep the sharks away from the underwater explosives.

LIA 0:11:36 
Wow.

ANNA 0:11:37 
Right? You show up to work one day. They're like, So you got a job for you... We need you to shark-proof our bombs.

LIA 0:11:47 
Yeah, so how do you feel about sharks and bombs...

ANNA 0:11:52 
We know you've been doing data entry for like a year, but if you could fix the sharks and bombs problem... That'd be great, right?

LIA 0:11:59 
Yeah, that'd be great.

ANNA 0:12:02 
Yeah. We might need you to come in on Saturday. So Julia was tasked with finding a way to keep the sharks away from the explosives and she really sunk her teeth into the project…

LIA 0:12:12 
Laughs

ANNA 0:12:15 
She invented a Shark Repellent. It was a substance that materials could be treated with that would keep the sharks away. And she did this by mixing all these different materials together of chemicals, organic materials, building materials, and basically cooking.

LIA 0:12:34  
Yeah.

ANNA 0:12:34 
This shark repellent up and you guys, the shark repellent that Julia Child invented is still used to this day...

LIA 0:12:46 
No way.

ANNA 0:12:48  
In fact, it's even used by NASA, because you know when spaceships come back into the atmosphere and they do the splashdown...

LIA 0:12:54 
Yeah, when they like land.

ANNA 0:12:57 
So they treat the spaceships with this shark repellent so when they land in the water they don’t get attacked by sharks.

LIA 0:13:06 
I never thought about that.

ANNA 0:13:08 
You just spent like nine months on the space station, you're like you've made it...

LIA 0:13:12 
You're like, I'm home!

ANNA 0:13:17 
Open up the door to the capsule, shark.

LIA 0:13:20 
F****** sharks.

ANNA 0:13:22 
F****** sharks, man. Then she got moved to Asia. She got stationed in what is now Sri Lanka and China. She served as the chief of the OSS registry, handling secret correspondence about military operations and invasions on the Pacific war front, she had top security clearance. And for her work, she received the emblem of meritorious civilian service.

LIA 0:13:48  
Wow.

ANNA 0:13:49 
That sounds regal as f***.

LIA 0:13:50 
That sounds very regal. She was a boss. The chief.

ANNA 0:13:54 
She was a literal actual boss. And while she was stationed in Asia, she met a man named Paul Child. He was also in the OSS and they became friends. Paul was kind of a proto foodie, he loved food, he would take Julia to all the markets and look at all the ingredients, all the like holes in the wall, really taught her to love and appreciate food, and she was on board for that. And... Of course, they fell in love. They got married in 1946 and get this, talk about being a bada**. The day before their wedding. They got into a really bad car accident.

LIA 0:14:34 
Oh, Woah.

0:14:37 ANNA: 
But they weren't gonna let that deter from getting married, so they got married on crutches. You can see the wedding pictures, and she's got like this thick bandage over her head, and he's kind of in a cast, and they were on crutches and they were just like, No, this is our day.

LIA 0:14:53  
That's so sweet. 

ANNA 0:14:56 
I know! They have a really famous and lauded partnership, they were married almost 50 years till his death in 1994. They loved Valentine's days. So they would throw Valentine's day parties. He was a photographer. Every year, they would make a Valentine's day card. They would send to all their friends and family, and if the movie Julie and Julia, is to be believed. They were Horny.

LIA 0:15:16 
Yeah, they were.

ANNA 0:15:19 
I don't know why, but as something about Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep going at each other, that makes me a little uncomfortable. Like I'm really glad Paul and Julia, we're so into this, and I like seeing a very tall, large woman, who’s bigger than her partner being portrayed as sexy, but like Meryl and Stanley are national treasures. And it makes me a little uncomfortable. Anyway, that's my issue. 

LIA 0:15:48 
I'll never watch the movie the same way again.

ANNA 0:15:53 
It will make you change the way you look at lunch breaks. I'll tell you that much, they may have invented Afternoon Delight. After World War II, they moved to Paris where Paul was stationed at the US Embassy, and Julia was bored. She wanted a career, she wanted to do something she didn't wanna keep working for the government, she'd already solved shark attacks.

LIA 0:16:18
Right. 

ANNA 0:16:19 
She tried a bunch of things, but she really loved food and wanted to be a better cook, so she enrolled in the Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute in France. And again, when we were talking about Quebec in the Maple Syrup Episode... I am not going to try to pronounce any of these things in French, and that's my gift to you. She was one of the first women and the first Americans to study there.

LIA 0:16:42 
Le cordon bleu.

ANNA 0:16:43 
You know where I had the best cordon bleu ever?

LIA 0:16:45 
Where?

ANNA 0:16:46 
Disneyland.

LIA 0:16:47 
Really?

ANNA 0:16:48 
Yes, they're the Blue Bayou restaurant that's like inside the pirates of the Caribbean. They served a cordon bleu. It's the best one I ever had. I feel trashy just saying that.

LIA 0:16:58 
At least you didn't say Arbys. I mean, they had the meat, but.

ANNA 0:17:09 
Actually, a meat-stuffed meat is right up their alley.

LIA 0:17:13 
Yeah, that's true.

ANNA 0:17:14 
They probably have something equivalent to the cordon bleu, but instead, it's called like The Meat Envelope.

LIA 0:17:19
Yeah.

ANNA 0:17:21 
She joined a women's cooking circle. And met two women who would become her lifelong collaborators, their names were Simone Beck and Louisette Bartol, and they wanted to teach other women how to cook these meals, so they started teaching lessons out of Julia's apartment, but there were no French cookbooks in English. So it was really hard to teach these French recipes when they were in France. Simon and Louisette had the idea to write a comprehensive cookbook on French cuisine in English, aimed at middle-class home chefs, or as they called it, “the servantless American Cook.” And they wanted Julia to come on board to help write it in English and make it appealing to an American audience. After living in Paris for several years, they moved back to the US. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they bought a house, and in their new house, Paul completely rebuilt the kitchen so that the cabinets and pots and pans and the stove burners would all be at a good height for Julia. Because they were built for an average-sized woman, but she was so tall. 

LIA 0:18:27 
That is so sweet. 

ANNA 0:18:29 
That is love, people. 

LIA 0:18:30 
That is. 

ANNA 0:18:32 
That is love. So in 1961, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” was released, it was two volumes, over 700 pages, and it laid out French cooking in a step-by-step process, so anybody could do it or at least try.

LIA 0:18:49 
Yeah.

ANNA 0:18:50
And I wanna point out in 1961, remember in the Chili episode, we talked about Zephyr Wright. In 1961 was when the Kennedys came into the White House and hired chef Verdon.

LIA 0:19:00 
Yeah.

ANNA 0:19:01 
So, it was in the Zeitgeist. When she was doing the promotional tour for the book, she did some spots on Boston Public TV, did some little like cooking demonstration spots, and the station got such a response, so many calls, so many letters, they loved Julia so much, that public television gave her her own show. The French chef with Julia Child was the first nationwide cooking show, and it premiered in 1963, so look, people... I know we got whole networks now. We got whole networks.

LIA 0:19:40 
Right.

ANNA 0:19:41
Netflix is chock-full of them. But this was the first nationwide cooking show.

THE FRENCH CHEF MUSIC

CLIP 0:19:52
Julia Child: This is Julia Child. Welcome to the French Chef, and see you next time. Bon Apetit.

LIA 0:20:00 
So Julia’s show, The French Chef, premiered in February of 1963 and was broadcast by WGBH, Boston’s public television station. It was the first nationwide cooking show, so Julia really pioneered this whole genre of food and cooking television. I mean, she was the first television educator to win an Emmy, which is amazing! The show also stood out because of the subject — which was French cooking. Most people considered French food as more of a fine dining thing, and not so much something that home cooks could create. But Julia was able to teach people — in a very entertaining way — that they could recreate the recipes from her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in their own kitchens. The first episode of The French Chef was all about Boeuf Bourguignon — I mean, talk about ambitious! Like, seriously, you’re telling me that I can learn to make Boeuf Bourguignon — a fancy French beef stew braised in red wine — in 30 minutes? And yeah, Julia showed us how to do that! In addition to going through the recipe, Julia would cover technique. So she’d talk about how to choose the proper cuts of meats for a dish, how cook the meat (so that it doesn’t get stringy!), how to braise and saute vegetables, how to make broth — and then she would explain how you could use these techniques to make other delicious dishes. And she covered a LOT of dishes during the 10 years that the show ran on the air. She showed us casseroles, French omelets, dishes like coq au vin, crepes, veal, soufflés, desserts, pates, and even aspics — and if you don’t know what aspics are, they’re basically meat jelly. And Julia did all of this in a very fun and vibrant way — and in a very real and raw way because the show was pretty much unedited. They basically taped it in real-time and took it straight to air, and because of that, we get to see Julia make mistakes, cook through it, and be silly and playful with the food.

ANNA 0:21:58 
It is always wonderful to watch somebody do what they really love.

LIA 0:22:03 
Yeah, she loved it.

ANNA 0:22:04 
Even if you don't care about cooking, seriously watch an episode of The French Chefs, watch some clips. She's so happy.

LIA 0:22:11 
She is happy.

ANNA 0:22:12  
Like, she is so happy. It's so wonderful to watch. We'll post some of our favorite clips of the French Chef and of Julia on Instagram, so you guys can see it.

LIA 0:22:20
What the show really did was tell home cooks that you can make French food, you can create fine dining experiences, and you can play and experiment in the kitchen. The French Chef made cooking so accessible, especially during this time in the mid-60s to early 70s when a lot of folks were turning towards fast food, frozen foods, and quick, easy, convenient meals. I love that Julia shows us what food could be, and that cooking could be a pleasure and not a chore. I also love that The French Chef shows us a woman who is cooking as a professional — as an expert — and not a woman who is a housewife cooking out of duty. And how can we not appreciate the fact that Julia jokes around in the kitchen? She makes it a fun place to be! There’s an episode where she’s doing a Frenchy-take on lasagna, and as she’s slicing onions, she looks at the camera and says, “Fingers are not a part of this lasagna recipe.” She was a riot! She played with her food, she made ingredients dance on the counter. And she made it totally okay to make mistakes while cooking. Julia said to never apologize. She messed up on air, she burned food, she tried to flip a potato pancake and it landed all over the stove. Today you wouldn’t see that on a cooking show because it would be edited out. But Julia taught us that if you flip a potato pancake and mess up, you can just pick up the pieces of it when you’re by yourself in the kitchen because who else will be there to see it anyway?

ANNA 0:23:46 
Did Julia invent the Five-second rule?

LIA 0:23:48 
I think she did. I really think she did.

ANNA 0:23:51 
I believe it.

LIA 0:23:52  
So she had two pieces of advice that she used to give when something would not work right. The first is just like, just have the courage of your convictions. And if you do make a mistake, this is like a super great tip, she says you haven't lost anything because you can always turn it into something else, so with the potato pancake, when it fell into little pieces, she was just like, “we'll pretend that this was supposed to be a baked potato dish.”

ANNA 0:24:18 
That's so great.

LIA 0:24:19 
Yeah, I mean, those are the tips, the rules from Julia that I live by as a home cook in the kitchen, you know. No matter what happens, you don't apologize, you can always turn something into something else. And then she really just, you know, encouraged people to learn how to cook, try new recipes, learn from your mistakes and just have fun.

CLIP 0:24:38
Julia Child: Now one thing I think all people are just so scared of any recipe they see that says sugar, syrup, or caramel. And they go, “Oh! I wont do anything like that.” And that is, I think one of those awful American syndrome of fear of failure. And if you’re gunna have a sense of fear of failure you’re just never going to learn how to cook because cooking is, well a lot of it is one failure after another and thats how you learn. So you have to develop what the French call “Je mon futile mon” I don't care what happens. Things can fall, omelettes can go all over the stove. I’m gunna learn I shall overcome, that sort of Women’s liberation and I mean, everything like that. If you’re not going to be ready to fail, you are not going to learn how to cook. That’s what that little lecture is all about. But, nobody, for one thing, nobody knows exactly what you intend, so you can serve them one of your failures and they maybe think that’s what you intended. So in other words, learn how to make sugar syrup.

LIA 0:25:46 
What was awesome is she presented, you know, cooking as like this process and this science in her cookbook, but was great about Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the format of it was a little bit new for a cookbook. It was like a two-column format with the ingredients and the descriptions actually side by side together, because she didn't want people to get overwhelmed with, like a full-on ingredient list and then skip to the instructions, so she encouraged you to just read the whole recipe together and then just take it piece by piece. And another thing that she said and recommended is that she believed that every woman should have a blow torch, so ladies, I mean, I have a blow torch, /I know you have a blow torch.

ANNA 0:26:27 
/Get out there and get your blowtorch, ladies. I do have a blowtorch.

LIA 0:26:30  
You have a blow torch. 

ANNA 0:26:32
So for cooking and whatever else comes up. It's handy.

LIA 0:26:36 
You never know when you need to weld stuff together...

ANNA 0:26:39 
Yeah, you might need to brule, might need to scare somebody. You may need to light some candles, whatevs. It's efficient.

LIA 0:26:48  
Exactly. Well, I love that overall, Julia just empowered women through cooking, you know, she was known to have urged the Culinary Institute of America to admit more women into their professional, you know, programs, so she had a ton of impact on the culture, on getting more women into cooking as a profession. And she really just started, you know, all kinds of movements to make the kitchen... Make cooking, make food and beverage more inclusive, which is really awesome. We've said this so many times before in past episodes, but this idea of women owning their domain was so important, if, you know, you were in the kitchen, if that was what you were doing at home, then own it, there's so much power in your space.

ANNA 0:27:31 
Yeah, I read a quote from a different chef that said she “turned cooking from drudgery into a joy.”

LIA 0:27:38 
Exactly.

ANNA 0:27:39 
So I know she received a lot of accolades, a lot of memorializations. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

LIA 0:27:46 
Yeah, in 2000, the Smithsonian Museum for American history moved her whole kitchen into the permanent exhibits, and she received the Legion of Honor from France. She has doctorates from a bunch of universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Anna's Alma Mater, Brown.

ANNA 0:28:06 
Brown University.

LIA 0:28:07 
Yeah.

ANNA 0:28:08 
Awesome.

LIA 0:28:10 
And in 2003, she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, she passed away at the age of 91, but what a long and fruitful life.

ANNA 0:28:19 
Right? 

LIA 0:28:20 
And then Julia, a memoir was published posthumously in 2006 is called My Life in France. And then, of course, I think most of us are familiar with Julie and Julia, the movie with Julia played by Meryl Streep, who was nominated for an Oscar for that performance.

ANNA 0:28:37  
I mean, what a life. What a life. Seriously. Alright, so to recap, Julia Child was a basketball star in her youth, a spy, invented shark repellent, won a medal of distinction from the OSS, decided she wanted to cook, so she went to one of the most famous cooking schools in the world, wrote probably the most successful and impactful American cookbook ever, intended a whole TV genre, sparked several culinary movements and foodie culture in general, won 3 Emmys, a million honors, and then after she died, they put our kitchen in the Smithsonian and was played in her biopic by Meryl Streep who got an Oscar nomination. So in conclusion, Julia Child. Was a freaking bada**. And I think that we are part of the continuation of her legacy, right. To me, she really made food a thing that you could think about and enjoy and express and use as a hobby, and, that there was more to it than just the making it in the eating it.

LIA 0:29:43 
Yeah, it was a true science and art, it was fun, you learned. You can reach out to different people through your food, and she just had such a good time.

ANNA 0:29:53 
All you need is butter.

LIA 0:29:54 
You need butter, and if you don't have butter, use cream. That's why she always seemed to say. Fat is good. Put it in your food.

ANNA 0:30:04
Yeah, I think there was a bit of a backlash by health people, but you know what? She lived to be 91. So leave her alone. She was a bada**. We're keeping the spirit alive with what we're doing, what we're doing on the show, and the story must be told, and now all of you listening, now you know what a bada** Julia Child was.

MUSIC 

ANNA 0:30:27 
Thank you for joining us for this special episode of Every Day is a Food Day. 

LIA 0:30:31 
And don't forget, you can always keep up with us on Instagram and Twitter at FoodDaypod. You can join our Facebook group, and you can also check out our website at yumday.co/podcast.

ANNA 0:30:44  
Every day as a Food Day is a production of Yumday and Van Valin productions. It was created and hosted by Lia Ballentine and Anna Van Valin. This episode is edited by Emma Massey and our social media marketing intern is Elaine Oh.

LIA 0:30:57 
Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And please leave us a rating and review on Apple podcast. See you next time, and Bon Apetit!