Smart Mouth

Smart Mouth is a food history podcast hosted and produced by Katherine Spiers, and its method is easy to spot. Pick a dish, an ingredient or a place. Find out where it came from. Then say exactly where the information was found. That last step is what sets the show apart. Episodes end with Spiers reading out her sources and pointing to the show notes. The lists run from the LA Times and PBS to JSTOR Daily, the USDA and Madame Wu's website, which is now found on the Wayback Machine. Episodes take two forms. Guest episodes are relaxed conversations that wander off topic. Jon Kung, a restaurant chef turned TikTok cooking influencer with a cookbook called Kung Food, joins for 'Asian Chicken Salad with Jon Kung'. The talk turns to what third culture means, including speaking one way at home and another at school. Hanna Raskin runs a website called The Food Section, aimed at eaters across the American South, and she talks through the food of her town, Charleston, South Carolina. In 'Sesame Balls with Kat Lieu', a question about why cha siu bao was called humbow in Seattle leads to a theory that the name plays on the Cantonese word for hamburger. Spiers finds that more convincing than the explanations she had found online. 'Food Gifts with Elle Simone Scott' at one point drifts off into a shared love of a TV series. Solo episodes stick closer to the research. 'Hickory, Pecans, and Soup' explains that the pecan is a type of hickory, that hickory belongs to the walnut family, and that the word pecan comes from an Algonquin word. Spiers adds that as a West Coaster she has no fixed pronunciation. 'Raw Milk' is a rebuttal. She goes through what raw milk advocates say, points out that pasteurized milk has the same amount of vitamin B12 as raw milk, and calls one pitch obfuscating rather than an outright lie. Openings follow their own routine. Spiers thanks Patreon, PayPal and Venmo supporters by name and reads Apple reviews aloud, including one that called the show nerdy and awesome. She sometimes adds a follow-up on a food news story, such as David Chang's attempt to trademark chili crunch or Wendy's surge pricing plan. Table Cakes, a woman-owned podcast company based in Los Angeles, produces the show, and Mika Grimm is credited as engineer. For a first listen, 'Raw Milk' shows the research-and-rebuttal side, and the Kat Lieu episode shows how far the guest format can go on a single word.