On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Mississippi is enacting a law that could sanction anti-LGBT discrimination. Can the state’s most prominent chef and cultural ambassador help keep his adoptive home from repeating its ugly past?

Last month, Mississippi arrived in Manhattan. The initial meeting place was Butter, a Midtown restaurant where the booths are lined with dark leather and polished wood, the ceilings are high and the lights dim. The first to arrive was John Currence, dressed in chef’s whites and a ball cap that read “Make Cornbread, Not War.” In the morning hours, he sautéed okra in a low, wide pot until the tough, green hulls were ready to be stewed with tomatoes and chicken stock. He let a pot of field peas simmer for hours, slowly growing thick with smoky pork fat.

For the past 35 years, Mississippi has been hosting a Saturday summer picnic in Central Park, a small affair of white tents and fried catfish and country music meant to promote the culture and heritage of the great, misunderstood state of Mississippi. Over the years, it has grown into a somewhat official pilgrimage. Every governor of the state has attended. This year, the Mississippi Development Authority hosted events stretching over three days including an exhibition of emerging artists at the National Arts Club and a night of short films in Brooklyn. Currence was here to cook not one, but two very different meals.

This morning’s private luncheon, held annually, was largely aimed at attracting what are known as “site selectors,” corporate employees typically based in New York who determine where their companies should place their next manufacturing plant, call center, or distribution warehouse. With an unemployment rate tied for fourth highest in the nation, Mississippi needs those jobs. They began to arrive around 11, in sharp, black suits, and were one-by-one greeted by the name-tagged executive team of the Mississippi Development Agency — here was the “Director of Tourism” and there was the “Chief Marketing Officer” and so on — and a glass of sweet tea.

As Currence began sending out boards of pimiento cheese sandwiches spiked with Tabasco and deviled eggs garnished with bright orange bursts of trout roe to the dining room, a black car escorted by a New York State Trooper arrived outside. As he walked in, Gov. Phil Bryant waved to the crowd, now about 60 in number, and took a seat.

Brent Christensen, executive director of the MDA, turned on a microphone, made a few small introductions to the room, bowed his head, and said a prayer: “Bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and us to thy service. Amen.”

When Christensen raised his head, it was time to introduce the chef who had flown in to Mississippi to cook this meal. He said a few polite words about Currence’s celebrated restaurants in Oxford, about his James Beard Award, about how happy they were to have him. Currence was called in from the kitchen and the crowd clapped politely in return. The mood remained polite, perhaps because of what Christensen politely left unsaid.

This spring, a Mississippi state senator and Baptist pastor named Phillip Gandy sponsored Senate Bill №2681, better known as the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The bill called for something simple, adding the words “In God We Trust” to the state seal, but also for something harder to understand: “to provide that state action shall not substantially burden a person’s right to the exercise of religion.” Some say the bill simply protects freedom of speech. Others have suggested that it could sanction religiously oriented discrimination, namely that a Christian business would no longer need to serve gay customers. Unlike similar legislation in Arizona, which was vetoed under intense scrutiny, the bill passed in Mississippi with little national notice. Bryant gathered lawmakers’ who sponsored the bill for a small private signing ceremony with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank that “believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large.” The bill will go into effect on July 1, 2014 — the day before the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

Of the many Mississippians who voiced opposition to the act, Currence has been among the most prominent. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “The law sends a terrible message about the state of consciousness in the state of Mississippi. We are not going to sit idly by and watch Jim Crow get revived in our state.”

Of course, people who speak out openly against the governor’s policies aren’t typically hired to cook for him. Currence had been booked months before Bryant signed the bill. Currence considered cancelling, but then he and another chef, Kelly English of Memphis, hatched a plan they thought would get more attention: On Thursday, they would prepare this luncheon for the governor and on Friday they would hold a protest dinner called the Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table. The ploy was simple. The same weekend that the state’s ambassadors would be wining and dining in New York, Currence would be there to send a message.

The response from the governor’s office was swift. The morning the news broke about the Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table, Currence said, “I got a phone call, a dressing down by the governor’s office — they wanted to know why I would embarrass the governor like this. And then it fucking dawned on me: You assholes don’t fucking talk to me like a sixth-grader in the principal’s office, I’m a 50-year-old man. More to the point, I’m on the right fucking side of this thing. All you assholes have to do is come to dinner.”

Currence extended an offer to the governor: If the bill wasn’t about discrimination, if it was simply about protecting freedom of speech, then all the governor had to do was come to the Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table. “Just show up,” Currence said. “Show the world that we’re not going to accept discrimination on any level. That’s all you have to do. Just show up.” If this weekend was about sending a message to the rest of the world about Mississippi, then why not that message? The governor declined, but Currence promised to save him a chair, anyway.

Both the offices of Gov. Bryant and the MDA declined to comment for this story, but it is not hard to imagine what was in their minds as Christensen finished his prayer and invited Currence out into the dining room to say a few words about the food. Would he bring up the bill? Would he raise his voice at the governor? Would he say those two words — “Jim Crow” — that so many in Mississippi would like to never talk about again?

Currence walked up to the microphone and described the menu that they would be eating. Behind the scenes, even that had been a battle. Currence had wanted to serve a family-style meal of summer vegetables, to push the metaphor of sharing, of communal plates. In the bickering that followed his stand against the bill, his idea for the meal got axed. “The menu ended up getting dumbed down to plates of fried chicken and sides,” he said. Currence didn’t talk about that, nor did he mention the bill. He talked instead about his grandparents’ Sunday supper table. His voice was nervous and he stumbled over a few of his words. He apologized for rambling about the food. He said, “I hope you’re going to enjoy it. Thank you for having me,” and walked back into the kitchen.

After the fried chicken was served, Bryant picked up the microphone and gave a pitch to the site selectors in the room, listing the companies that have moved operations to the state: Toyota, Nissan, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. (“I tell people that a man’s going to go Mars one day and he’s gonna have to pass through Hancock County to get there.”) By the end, the pitch started to resemble something closer to pleading. “If you need tickets just call me, I’ll get you there. We’ll send a plane or a helicopter. People come from all around the world to see what Mississippi’s all about and they like what they see and they’re buying into it.”

It is still unclear what kind of an economic impact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act could have on Mississippi. Before Jan Brewer vetoed similar legislation in Arizona this spring, companies as large as Delta, Marriott, and AT&T threatened to relocate their business from the state. While those same companies operate in Mississippi, they’ve yet to threaten Mississippi with a similar boycott. When contacted for comment, AT&T spokesperson Kim Allen wrote, “AT&T is proud to work in Mississippi. We do not believe that Senate Bill 2681 will have an impact on how we do business in the state. The Governor and legislative leaders worked hard to ensure this legislation mirrors national law to protect the individual religious freedom of Mississippians of all faiths from government interference.” (Delta and Marriott have not yet responded to a request for comment.)

If that was the kind of protest that Currence wanted to support, talking about discrimination at this luncheon could have been an opportune forum. Instead, he held his tongue. It is, perhaps, the decision of a person stuck between loving a place and fighting to change it.

Later on, I asked Currence why he hadn’t said anything, why he hadn’t mentioned the act or the Welcome Table dinner. “Had I felt like being there and facing off with the governor would have made a positive difference, I would have,” Currence said. “I had a job to do. I did it.”

Currence is 49 years old. His hair is mostly gone. In the past five years, he has been hospitalized with pancreatitis twice. The meniscus in his left knee is torn. One doctor has suggested surgery, but Currence is hoping that it will heal. Standing in the heat of the kitchen line, streaks of sweat stream down his face. His body is evidence of what a lifetime of work in a kitchen will do to someone.

Currence was not born or raised in Mississippi, but down the river in New Orleans. His father made his living in the oil business, first as a landman, then running supply boats to offshore oil rigs. It was on one of those boats that Currence had his first kitchen gig. He bounced around colleges in North Carolina and Virginia, more interested in being the lead singer of a band, Chapter Two, than finishing his degree or holding a steady job. Eventually the band broke up and he found himself washing dishes in the back of a restaurant called Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C. Currence had come to Chapel Hill in 1986 looking for a music scene that exploded in Athens, Ga., instead. What he did find was Bill Neal, a temperamental self-taught chef who was doing something very few other chefs were doing at the time: taking Southern food seriously.

“There wasn’t a moment of being around Bill that you didn’t realize you were in the presence of someone important,” Currence said. “Everything he did was way beyond his years.”

Neal’s first book, Southern Cooking, had just been published by UNC Press. The New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne visited Crook’s Corner not long after and came back to tell the world about Neal’s shrimp and grits. At a time when Southern food was largely considered to be unsophisticated, provincial cuisine, Neal engaged deeply with the Western European, African, and native American traditions that he described as “meeting, clashing, and ultimately melding into” what we know as Southern food. In other words, Neal wrote of and cooked a deeply international, deeply complicated food shaped by the beauty of an agricultural region and the horror of the Atlantic slave trade, a food that borrows a palate from Sierra Leone as much as Lyon, France. It was out of this spirit — both of academic rigor and pride for the region’s food — that Currence began his culinary education.

After cutting his teeth under Neal, Currence returned to New Orleans to work as the sous chef of Gautreau’s. Currence mostly remembers that time as a haze of long hours and bourbon, but also as the turning point in his career. “There was this moment of rapture after service one night, drunk and stoned, I was sitting in the dining room and I realized, ‘This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life.’”

Three years later, he was lured by an old friend to Oxford, Miss., a place that he hardly knew, with the idea that a little university town with no culinary scene to speak of might be an easier place to make his mark than in the packed, competitive French Quarter. In 1992, he opened City Grocery on the town square.

Oxford occupies a violent place in the history of the civil rights movement. In October 1962, James Meredith became the first African-American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Riots broke out. White supremacists and segregationists drove in to join the fight. National Guard and U.S. marshals were called in to keep the peace and protect Meredith, who endured ceaseless torments. The campus became a battleground of Molotov cocktails and rifle fire. Hundreds were injured and two were killed. If you know where to look, you can still find a few bullet holes on campus.

Oxford is now a town that prides itself as an epicenter of culture, where the literary pedigree stretches from William Faulkner to Barry Hannah to Donna Tartt to Jesmyn Ward; where the local record label, Fat Possum, puts out records by R.L. Burnside and the Black Keys; where the bookstore, Square Books, is the biggest destination. Today, Oxford is considered one of the state’s most liberal enclaves, a place that Dwight Gardner now calls “America’s best small city.” In a list of the country’s most desirable college towns, Travel + Leisure quoted one resident as saying, “I was surprised to learn Mississippi could be so progressive.”

In the 20-odd years since Currence arrived, his restaurants have become the culinary complement to that culture in Oxford. He owns five restaurants in the city. A sixth just opened in Birmingham, Ala. His menus explore Southern food as a diverse, international set of traditions continuing to be shaped by immigrants today. While City Grocery still serves the shrimp and grits Currence once learned to make in North Carolina, his chef du cuisine Vish Bhatt is just as likely to be serving shrimp saganaki or catfish kathi rolls down the street at Snack Bar. The work hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2009, he was named the Best Chef in the South by the James Beard Foundation. While his success has coincided with the rise of Southern food’s stature, Currence has become known for complicating the kitschy and oversimplified image that folks like Paula Deen have been selling.

“The American South is where American food as we know it came from,” Anthony Bourdain told me. “It has angered me, as it has angered Currence, to see it dumbed down and represented as this novelty state fair food. Guys like John Currence, Ed Lee, and Sean Brock are at the forefront of a very interesting place in history. They’re asking these questions: What were we? What was American food? What was Southern food? And what can Southern food be in the future?”

The Southern food resurrection coincided with the ascent of celebrity chefs as part of pop culture. Historically, our image of a chef has been hidden away in a closed kitchen, drinking and swearing with cooks like a captain among sailors. In this era of celebrity chef, they are among television’s most common talking heads. They are flown around from fundraiser to festival to award show. They check in with their kitchens via text message. Such is the life of an ambassador, a person who is so often away from his home that he becomes a representative of a place more than a person in it.

“The dirty little secret is that you get completely pulled away from doing what you love when you become successful,” Currence said. “But if you’re given this little bit of attention, you have a responsibility to use it.”

So, in between shooting episodes of Top Chef Masters and flying around the country to sell copies of his cookbook, he’s written about the need for immigration reform and a clearer path to citizenship. He opened a barbecue joint that donates all proceeds to Mississippi-based nonprofits. He’s become deeply involved with the Southern Foodways Alliance, an Oxford-based nonprofit led by writer John T. Edge.

In the face of an increasingly clichéd and narrow understanding of Southern food, the SFA holds symposiums and produces books and documentaries that insist the story of Southern food is an inclusive one, that one cannot understand a fried shrimp po’ boy without talking about the Vietnamese immigrants in south Louisiana who do much of the shrimp boating these days, that a soul food joint serving $5 plates of collards and black-eyed peas and cornbread can be as important of a culinary destination as any restaurant that John Currence will ever open. The phrase embroidered on Currence’s hat, “Make Cornbread, Not War,” is the SFA’s unofficial motto. In other words, Currence has tried to be a good citizen and ambassador of Mississippi and has found more than a few neighbors who are doing the exact same thing.

Yet, Currence feels that the state today is largely misunderstood. Not long after moving to Oxford, he said, “I noticed that whenever Mississippi made it to the national news, the backdrop behind the talking head was always a Klan hood or a rebel flag or a burning cross. The whole state just became this stock footage, this convenient repository for the nation’s racial guilt.”

If that perception of Mississippi’s reputation seems paranoid, consider Currence’s most recent television appearance on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Before Edge and Currence led the cameras to Mississippi’s historic eateries, Bourdain opined about his perceptions from outside of the state: “Much of Mississippi history is ugly, from slavery, which was pretty much the backbone, the foundation of industry here from the get-go, to Jim Crow, lynchings to church burnings,” he said. “That was all I knew. And it hadn’t occurred to me to look further.”

Not everyone was pleased with the show. “Somebody in town came up to me after that show aired and asked me, ‘Why keep talking about it?’” Currence told me. “‘How many times do we have to have this conversation?’ I told him, ‘Well, you know what? We have to have it forever.’”

Trying to inform that conversation with an understanding of Mississippi today is a complicated balance that troubles even Mississippi’s most sympathetic supporters. After the episode aired, Edge, who might be the most articulate observer of Southern food today, wrote a column for the Oxford American that criticized himself for not pushing Bourdain’s cameras on the immigrant chefs whom he sees as redefining the region’s food.

“I didn’t complicate anyone’s idea of anything,” Edge wrote. “Instead, when the cameras turned my way, I reflexively dug into our troubled past and served Bourdain warmed-over neckbones and rice, instead of focusing some of the attention on a bright and curried future.” The Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act could endanger that bright future. At the heart of the bill is a broad, noble-sounding statement that “state action shall not substantially burden a person’s right to the exercise of religion.”

The phrasing isn’t exactly new. In 1993, President Clinton signed the first Religious Freedom Restoration Act, largely in response to concerns that the federal government could interfere with Native American rights to sacred land and peyote use, stating, “governments should not substantially burden religious exercise without compelling justification.” A few years later, when a Supreme Court case curtailed the federal legislation, a number of states began ratifying similar legislation at the state level. Mississippi is the 19th to pass some version of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

What’s new is the push from conservative groups to get these acts into state law with the language tweaked to be as broad as possible. Over the past couple of years, similar legislation has been proposed in more than a dozen states and largely failed. The problem with the act’s noble-sounding language is that defining a “burden” to one’s religious practice is a legally vague territory that usually requires a court to sort out. To Eunice Rho, Advocacy and Policy Council for the ACLU, that’s exactly the point. “The supporters of this law are trying to open the door for as many legal challenges as possible on the question of burden of religious practice,” she said.

Supporters like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council have been quick to illustrate what they think could constitute a burden: a “wedding vendor” who does not want to do business with a same-sex couple, an employer who does not want to cover the insurance costs of birth control for employees. As the recent decision in Burrell v. Hobby Lobby shows, the Supreme Court apparently agrees with him to some degree.

While the federal Civil Rights Act and Housing Discrimination Act protect most individuals from that kind of discrimination, sexual orientation is not among their criteria. Many states have resolved that problem by passing laws that protect gay and lesbian individuals from workplace and housing discrimination, but Mississippi has not. Those with the least protections against status-based discrimination may be affected most. “Is the government telling you that you can’t discriminate against a customer a substantial burden to your religious practice?” Rho asked.

All of which is to say that the law creates a kind of open-ended interpretation that leads down a rabbit hole of potential discrimination. Could it be a burden upon a lunch counter to serve fried chicken to a lesbian couple? Could it be a burden upon one’s religion to serve a Muslim customer who prefers a plate without bacon? Could it be a burden upon a landlord to lease an apartment to a gay couple? Or, for that matter, an unwed mother? These questions might seem more absurd in a place where the violent history of state-sanctioned discrimination didn’t feel so recent, a place where so many people have worked to end exactly that.

But, Currence suggests, the threat of a major company leaving the state could be the thing that changes lawmakers’ minds. “Nothing finer could happen at this point than a big guy standing up and saying that they would take their business elsewhere,” he says. “That’s a game of chicken, and when the big guys start threatening, the chickenshit politicians are going to crater every time.”

Whether the law actually has popular support is up for debate. For someone like Currence, who plays an essential role in supporting a culture that the state can be proud of and brings in outsiders and admirers like Bourdain to try to better understand the place, this act seems to evoke a kind of anxiety, the possibility that the place might not be so misunderstood, that the past isn’t as far away as he would like it to be.

The next day, Currence arrived at City Grit, a converted schoolhouse in SoHo. The kitchen, originally designed to serve children lunch in the cafeteria, has been retooled for multicourse prix fixe affairs. In the dining rooms, once used as classrooms, elaborate menus are drawn on the chalkboards and the desks have been replaced by long, communal tables.

Around 10 a.m., other chefs began to trickle in. Aside from Currence and English, there was Art Smith, who spent 10 years as Oprah’s personal chef before opening Table Fifty-Two in Chicago; Virginia Willis, the cookbook author from Atlanta; Bill Smith, the chef who took over Crook’s Corner when Bill Neal died; Aarón Sánchez, the macho guest judge of Food Network’s Chopped; Jamie Bissonnette, the spectacled chef of Toro, perhaps New York’s hottest new restaurant; Bryan Petroff, the charming, shorter half of Big Gay Ice Cream. Among them, there were about a half-dozen James Beard awards and enough tattoos to cover a milk cow.

They set to doing what we hear celebrity chefs never do anymore: cook. Willis rolled out little angel biscuits while Bill Smith stirred a shellfish stew to pour over them. English braised rabbit legs and Art Smith chopped collards to lay under them. Currence floated around, lending a hand here, stirring a pot there. As the air grew thick with the scent of shrimp shells and pork stock, the conversation turned to politics.

Every chef in the room had some little political project going. In February, when a state senator in Tennessee, Brian Kelsey, proposed legislation referred to as the “Turn Away the Gays” bill, English, who owns two restaurants in Memphis, had been quick to step up against it. Along with a campaign of petitions, English put out a statement: “The offer is on the table: I will host a political fundraiser for this guy’s opponent in the next election. What a piece of garbage.” Kelsey withdrew his sponsorship of the bill only days later, effectively killing it.

Bill Smith talked about the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina last year. The state, which has seen an influx of Republican legislators after a contested redistricting, has been pushing through laws at the forefront of the conservative agenda: restricting abortion rights, complicating voter registration laws, cutting social programs. In response, hundreds of protesters have been arrested for peacefully entering the legislature to stop the proceedings. Smith, well-known as both the chef of Crook’s Corner and founder of the rock venue Cat’s Cradle, decided to join in. “It was funny,” he said. “I had to put on my best suit and clear my schedule for the week so I could get arrested.”

Art Smith, who recently adopted four children with his husband of five years, talked of a recent coup. At a James Beard event, he had asked Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago, to do something to acknowledge LGBT parents. Emanuel responded by announcing that June 20 would be Parents Equality Day in Chicago. He said all of this in the most casual way, speaking of “Rahm” as one might an old friend.

“You have Rahm Emanuel’s ear?” I asked.

Art smiled and said, “I have something better — his stomach.”

Standing around and listening to this kitchen talk, an update of Percy Shelley’s defense of poets came to mind. Could it be that chefs are now the unacknowledged legislators of the world? That may be a stretch, but chefs do have a kind of access that other celebrities don’t necessarily have when it comes to courting politics. A songwriter might have a crowded club of fans to yell opinions at nightly. An actress might have tabloid cameras asking her for quotes. But a chef has a restaurant, a place where politicians and business leaders and powerful folks go. A table at a restaurant is a place where business, pleasure, and politics can mix as easily as dry vermouth and gin.

By 7:00, the food was ready and the 80 guests began to arrive at a leisurely pace, mingling around City Grit’s classrooms and ogling the chalkboards. One woman introduced herself as Miss Ole Miss 1967. When Morgan Freeman arrived, the rest of the room tried not to turn and stare. Freeman, who lives in Charleston, Miss., and owns a blues club in Clarksdale, has dabbled in politics himself, including a failed campaign to have the Confederate battle flag removed from the Mississippi state flag. Later on, he mingled about the room, taking pictures with whoever asked. Stickers with the slogan “I AM MISSISSIPPI, I DON’T DISCRIMINATE” were distributed all around. The logo for the night’s event, a Mississippi state flag crossed with a pride flag, was drawn in great detail on the dining room’s chalkboard. It had to be explained to a few diners that the logo was based on the Mississippi state flag, that the official flag actually still contains a Confederate saltire. Eventually, everyone found a seat at the table.

Before the food was served, the chefs gathered in the dining room to say a few words. Art Smith thanked all of the sous chefs who had helped. Petroff explained that the dessert was named for Stormé DeLarverie, the New Orleans-born bouncer who, according to some accounts, threw the first punch in the Stonewall riots. Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign explained a little about Project One America, the Southern-focused LGBT rights campaign that would benefit from this dinner. Currence spoke with more confidence than he did at Butter. He ended with a simple message: “Mississippi will not sit quietly and allow discrimination to return to the state.”

More than once, Currence told me, “I guarantee that the majority of people in Mississippi want nothing to do with discrimination.” It may be true. Cities across the state have passed resolutions distancing themselves from the measure, reaffirming anti-discrimination protections for everyone in the city, including the LGBT community. Hundreds of business owners have started a sticker campaign that lets customers know, “If you’re buying, we’re selling.”

When Currence first took a stand on the issue, he was afraid of a backlash. “I didn’t know if there would be shit spray-painted on the side of my house and whether it would have an effect on business,” he said. But that fear has abated. “A day doesn’t pass that I don’t hear something positive from someone.”

The image of a shared table is a powerful one in American history. It is a symbol of crossing difference, of bridging culture through the simple fellowship of food. Currence came to New York do just that, to send a message, to invoke a symbol, to set a shared table. In the end, that’s all one chef can do. After the table is set, the people sitting at it are the ones who make the decisions.

Bryant never arrived to take the seat that had been saved for him.

On Saturday, Mississippi had its picnic in Central Park. On a strip of asphalt running between Sheep’s Meadow and the Naumberg Bandshell, a row of white tents offered trinkets of the state’s affections: sticks of lip balm branded with the state logo, tote bags printed with Tennessee Williams’ face, brochures encouraging visits to Corinth and Clarksdale, round stickers emblazed with “Ole Miss” and “Hotty Toddy.” The line for plates of fried catfish and coleslaw stretched for several minutes. Children put their toes on a line, trying to win a watermelon-seed-spitting contest sponsored by Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco. Nearby, people mingled on picnic blankets, drinking beer from coolers and talking about college baseball. On a small stage, Marty Stuart arrived with a band of men in blue Nudie suits and sang “Tempted” for whoever would listen.

Somewhere in the air, Currence was headed back to Mississippi on a plane. Down on the ground, you could hear a quiet message, maybe a plea, to come stay awhile, to listen to some music, to eat some food, to try to better understand the great, misunderstood state of Mississippi.

A couple weeks later, just before the law went into effect, I asked Currence what it would take to make him move his business out of the state. “You mean something that’s ugly enough to say, ‘Fuck it? Let’s fold up shop and get out of here?’” He paused for a long time. “I’m too deeply rooted. My instinct is to stand up and fight rather than run away. I can’t imagine saying, ‘Fuck it.’ It’s not that simple for me.” ●

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Wary of a holiday that celebrates one group of people who seized land from another, I learned to love Thanksgiving only when our friends created an Arabized version of it. Now, as the Middle East falls into further turmoil, even that is threatened.

By Zaina Arafat

In 2003 — eight months after Iraq, 25 months after Afghanistan — I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of some Syrian friends in Washington, D.C., where I grew up. Ringing the bell, I recognized the 2003 Ministry of Sound compilation blaring from the stereo. Mona opened the door dressed in skinny Diesel jeans and a black halter with “Bebe” written across the front in sequins. Her hair fell in tightly curled springs; smoke from a cigarette balanced between her fingers haloed her.

“Habibti, where the fuck have you been?” she asked, referring to my late arrival, though it’s the norm among Arabs. She kissed me three times — twice on my left cheek, once on my right — and I followed her inside, into an Ottoman-themed living room filled with imported furniture and smoke, tumblers of Black Label and Grey Goose martinis, and men in Salvatore Ferragamo loafers and women whose spiked Stuart Weitzmans heels sunk into the rug.

“Zanzoun!” they cried. My nickname, like most Arabic nicknames, is longer than my actual name.

I made my way around the room, giving three kisses to the Lebanese and Syrians, and two kisses to the Jordanians, Egyptians, Iranians, and Palestinians — among them, my mother and brother, who’d arrived before me. Ammo Bassam, the father of one of my closest Syrian friends, pulled me in for a hug.

“Come here,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to the laptop. Ammo Bassam was always equipped with the designer tech products and the best Western music preferences of the over-40 set. “You can practically keep these speakers in your back pocket,” he said, picking up and twisting around a new Bang & Olufsen speaker. “You can throw an instant party on the Metro!”

He DJ’ed, and the hired bartender poured drinks from behind a makeshift table covered with a white cloth. Before long, toasted pumpkin-seed shells called bizir littered the floor and we were dancing on the sofas. Mona didn’t serve the turkey until 9:30, when Ammo Bassam finally called to her, urging her to beckon us to the dining room already: “Yalla, ya Mona.” In the kitchen, lentils and rice drizzled with ground beef, pine nuts, and pomegranate seeds flanked the turkey and spilled out from inside it. Yogurt was poured into bowls and placed beside the stack of dinner plates; mulukhiya, a vegetable that exists only overseas and in the freezers of Middle Eastern and North African supermarkets, sat steaming in a ceramic dish and was served like soup beside the turkey.

My brother stood behind me in the plate line, grimacing. The more American of the two of us, he’s always craved traditional Thanksgiving dinners — cranberry sauce, regular stuffing, channel-switching between the Macy’s parade and football, naps. That’s what our Thanksgivings looked like when we were kids: our parents attempting to provide us with a sense of belonging to a culture that was still a novelty to them.

I’d always felt ambivalent toward the holiday, not wanting, as a Palestinian, to indulge in a celebration of the dispossession of one population for the gain of another. Though we didn’t learn it this way in school, the first “Thanksgiving” was declared in 1637 by Massachusetts Colony Gov. John Winthrop, and it celebrated the return of armed colonial volunteers who’d journeyed from what is now Mystic, Conn., and killed 700 Native Americans of the Pequot — men, women, and children. Each year, a group called the United American Indians of New England meet at Plymouth Rock on Cole’s Hill and stand at the feet of a statue of Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag; they call the holiday a day of mourning. A day that one community celebrates and another community mourns too closely resembles May 15, Israel’s Independence Day and the Palestinian Nakba, “day of the catastrophe.” They’re both days that look starkly different depending on where you stand, how you narrow your eyes, what you choose to see, and how you choose to relate to them.

After dinner, no pumpkin pies appeared, just chocolate cake and knafeh, a Palestinian dessert consisting of melted cheese, sugar-infused syrup, and pastry dough. Arabic coffee bubbled on the stove and was served in hourglass-shaped, handleless cups. The men lit cigars; the women kept on with their cigarettes. Mona pulled the bar’s tablecloth over her head and did her impersonation of a traditionally overbearing Syrian mother. “Allo?” she screeched into a pretend phone. “Mu ma’aul keef inti mitjawez!” (“It’s unbelievable that someone agreed to marry you!”) Around midnight, the young people left to continue the party on K Street, ricocheting between nightclubs until dawn.

As Middle Easterners living in the U.S., some of us immigrants, others, first-generation Arab-Americans, we mostly appreciate and enjoy our dual ethnic and cultural status. Spending summers in the Middle East and hearing stories of my parents’ experience growing up in Palestine, working in Saudi Arabia, and studying in Egypt and Jordan have left me with an acute awareness of the luxuries that come with living in America. The freedom to criticize government officials without fear of consequences, meritocracy, the ability to buy anything online — you need an Aramex account to order Amazon products in the Middle East, and books can’t be delivered to your Kindle — the right to vote, the right to choose.

And yet, despite the fact that this country is predicated upon assimilation, a self-proclaimed melting pot, we stand out. As a child I was made starkly aware of our nonconformity when my friends would come over and wonder why my parents were going out to dinner at 9 p.m. — on a Tuesday. Why wasn’t my mother wearing ass-flattening mom pants, but rather, wearing formfitting leather Moschino ones? Why did she drive a two-seater soft-top? Why did my father call me “Daddy” and speak to me half in English, half in Arabic? Why did my parents have only travel-size toothpastes?

Both my generation and that of my parents longed to fit in while simultaneously craving home. We miss the intimacy and informality of Arab society, we miss 50-cent oil-soaked bags of falafel, the lyrical voice of the Aadan that sounds five times daily. We miss the lack of anonymity, suffocating as a lack of it can be. Our mutual longing transcends national boundaries, arbitrary distinctions established by British and French colonialists, and unites us here in the U.S., our adopted homeland, as does a shared culture and language. Superficial differences between Lebanese and Syrians, Jordanians and Palestinians, even Arabs and Persians, pale when compared with the far greater differences between each of us and the greater American population. From one another’s waving limbs and shaking hips, we take hits of back home. The sum of our parts has always allowed us to revel in our Otherness; together, we act as a collective whole, organizing midweek dinners, Sunday brunches, fundraisers for the disenfranchised in our native countries. That night, we mixed home with here to create a hybridized holiday, one that lasted the duration of an evening.

We called our Arabized version of the holiday Club Thanksgiving, and we made a tradition of it, returning each year to Mona’s house. Though every November I seemed to be living in a different city — first Boston, then New York, and finally Iowa City — I made a point of going home to attend.

Last November, though, my mother told me Club Thanksgiving was not happening. She said no one was really in the mood. I’d already booked a ticket.

“So what will we do for Thanksgiving this year then?” I asked her, surprised at how disappointed I was.

“Rania’s in-laws are in town from Iran,” she said, speaking of a Lebanese friend who was also a regular attendee of Club Thanksgiving. “She invited us to come.” We went. It was fine. Turkey was served at 7. I met people who worked at the United Nations. I took down their email addresses and made professional connections. I did not dance.

The following Sunday, before I flew back to Iowa, my mother and I went to brunch at Peacock Café in Georgetown. For as long as I can remember, Peacock’s been the place to go should you find yourself wanting to run into every Arab in Washington on a Sunday afternoon; patrons spill out of the main dining room and onto sidewalk tables, and Bellinis and French kisses are served alongside walnut pancakes. All of Prospect Street becomes Gemmayze Street in Beirut, and you can hear Arabic from Zara’s Georgetown location three doors down. But on that particular day, the tables were sparsely filled, and the clientele was largely Caucasian.

“How come no one goes to Peacock anymore?” I asked my mother as we sat amid unfamiliar faces, waiting for our food.

“People aren’t going out as much,” she answered, “because of Syria.” I remembered then that most our friends were in fact Syrian. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered this; admittedly, and perhaps Orientalist-ly, I often lumped us all together as Arabs, a Gamal Abdel Nasser–era, pan-Arab mentality that had somehow made its way to the present. As I kept pressing, my mother admitted that Syrians weren’t just staying in, they were intentionally avoiding one another.

“It’s complicated,” my mother said — an understatement. “Some people are upset with Ammo Bassam.”

If our club had had a president — or rather, a benevolent dictator — it was Ammo Bassam. He was the most fluent in the English language and American culture, the one who went by Bob at work, the most willing to leave the old world behind. He was also the one who preferred that Assad’s government remain intact, especially when compared with the alternative. Corrupt and inflexible as it was, Assad’s regime provided stability in a country that, if left to its own devices, would be overrun by sectarian groups vying for power. “Just look at Iraq,” I heard him say earlier that year, as he snuck away to talk politics at his daughter’s graduation party. While no one missed Saddam, his deposition as president proved that Iraq was an anarchic mess of sectarian rivalries without him. For Ammo Bassam, Bashar Assad, like Saddam Hussein, was the lesser of two evils. And at the very least, Bashar was better than Hafez, his father and predecessor.

Other Syrians felt differently, including Mona. Though the situation in Syria had devolved into a tragic and lawless civil war, one that left any conscious human feeling sickened and saddened, it didn’t mean that maintaining the status quo, the dictatorial regime, was the best solution. The regime needed to go. “We’re gonna live under these fucking assholes forever?” she asked, sitting cross-legged on her couch the last time I saw her, newspaper pages scattered on the carpet and a cold cup of coffee serving as her ashtray.

During that trip, I went to get my hair cut by my Lebanese stylist, Paul. When I was in high school and college, his jokes usually poked fun at Syrians, because until April 2005, Syria maintained a military presence in Lebanon. Then, fueled by the Cedar Revolution following Prime Minister Hariri’s assassination, the Syrians were forced to withdraw and Paul took to telling jokes about Israel instead, one of the indirect forces that led to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Now as Paul trimmed my split ends, I noticed his jokes had reverted back to Syrians. He was upset that Syria’s internal conflict was spilling into Lebanon, landing in the receptacle of Hezbollah and ripping apart the fragile, still-fluid fabric of Lebanese society. They weren’t even jokes anymore, really, just slander.

“What hurts more?” he asked. “When your enemy hurts you” — Israel, a country whose citizens are forbidden from entering Lebanon — “or your brother?” In this case, I gathered that Syria was Big Brother, Hassan Nasrallah the loudspeaker for Syrian interests.

In the chair beside me sat Rania. “Yee,” she said, clicking her tongue. “They’re our brothers now?”

She laughed along to his barbs, but with reservation, an awareness that her family was still back there (unlike his, which had relocated to Virginia). Again and again that weekend, I saw that what had come to be viewed as a proxy war between the Iran-backed regime and the Saudi-backed rebels was now being exported to the U.S. in the form of a cold proxy war between different members of the Syrian-American community.

The détente continued into this year. Granted, I’ve been away from Washington, but I can tell from the missing pictures on Instagram and Facebook, from the missing late-night texts from the D.C. Arab crew, the typo-filled questioning of when I was next coming home, followed by the long lines of X’s and O’s, the fact that my mother was tucked in bed most nights by the time I called after teaching. I was almost afraid to ask about the status of Club Thanksgiving, but I needed to know whether or not to book a ticket home.

As a Palestinian, I’ve experienced similar cold wars here in the States, between the one-staters and the two-staters, between those who believe in engagement and negotiated solutions, and those who think we shouldn’t concede anything, that we should accept nothing less than everything. At times, it felt like D.C. Palestinians had recreated the schism between Fatah and Hamas, though without the corruption and rockets. I was born into this system, I inherited it, I’m used to it. And yet, seeing it happen between others, here, in this somewhat neutral territory, amplified my sadness. Especially when considering the hope that first accompanied the wave of revolutions that has changed the political, economic, and social landscape of the Middle East, for the better. Or so we initially thought.

This past summer, I sat in my grandmother’s apartment in Shmeisani, an older neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, where approximately half of my extended family lives, the other half divided between the West Bank and the U.S. I watched grainy loops on Al Arabiya of loud explosions and subsequently shelled buildings, jean-clad youths wielding machine guns, protesters carrying coffins shrouded in flags, stone-faced newscasters. What I found most interesting — and disheartening — was that until words were displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, it was nearly impossible to tell which country the footage was coming from. Each reel could’ve been from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. Gaza, the West Bank. Israel. Or, of course, forgotten Iraq. All of these places were imploding, all were equally likely sites of violence, civil and sectarian strife.

The day before our American Independence Day, I watched crowds flood Tahrir Square in Egypt once again, this time to oust their new, democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president, undoing a revolution that had taken place less than two years prior, in which a 20-year dictator was forced to resign. At that time, I’d updated my Facebook profile picture with an image from the same square, a screenshot with a ticker across the bottom that read, “Revolution in Egypt Leads to Resignation of Hosni Mubarak.”

Every social and family outing inevitably digressed into a head-shaking, finger-pointing discussion about how the region was crumbling around us, Jordan being one of the few seemingly safe places, although small, pro-democracy demonstrations were popping up like whack-a-moles around downtown Amman and causing much alarm. In discussing the events, no one used the term credited to an American professor and Middle East commentator, “Arab Spring,” which has seasoned into an Arab winter. Instead we just called it “the situation,” indistinguishable from the terminology used to describe past “situations” in the Middle East. We had theories for who was to blame. The Saudis, for training and funding the Syrian rebels, which in turn led to instability in Lebanon due to the Hezbollah-Iran-Assad tripartite. The Iranians, for bolstering the Assad regime and its suppression capabilities. The U.S., for trying to force democracy on Arab countries in a one-size-fits-all approach, before they were ready for it and in negligence of the nuances that characterized each country’s political, social, and religious landscape, for not allowing them to grow into democracy naturally, as other countries had done.

One morning last week, I read, two bombs went off at the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon, killing 23 people. In Egypt, police fired tear gas into Tahrir Square to dispel anti-army demonstrators. Jordan remains strained by influxes of Syrian refugees whom its economy can’t accommodate. The Israeli occupation remains in tact. The international community is debating the best way to dispose of Syrian chemical weapons, which killed 1,429 civilians — 426 of them children — this past August. Club Thanksgiving is tentatively back on. Monday we’ll begin negotiating who’s bringing what and who’s making the playlist.

I imagine our conversation this year will resemble the discourse elsewhere. I imagine it will be slightly elevated. It may extend beyond Apple gadgets and designer clothes, beyond superficial and arbitrary distinctions, to more significant happenings. After her Syrian-mother skit, Mona will hopefully impersonate the traditional tyrant on his way out, laid bare before the world and exposed for who he is. We may turn down the speakers and take a moment to recognize that, contrary to how it may have once seemed, to how we often are collectively perceived, ours isn’t a society that’s doomed to dictatorship. Our despots aren’t forever. We will mourn the loss of over 115,000 Syrians, we will pray for those still there, either because of the inability or refusal to leave their homeland. We will give thanks for the good fortune of having thanks to give.

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

The Problem With Being Palestinian On Thanksgiving was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mix precocious 10-year-olds with a famously volatile host and add large knives and open flames. How MasterChef Junior’s recipe for trainwreck TV instead became a heartwarming twist on the cooking competition show.

The 12-year-old boy standing in front of Gordon Ramsay has just started to cry. He’s wearing a floral bow tie, a plaid collared shirt tucked neatly into slim black jeans, and a bright white apron tied at the waist with his name embroidered on it in all caps, “LOGAN,” along with the logo of the show on which he is one of the final eight contestants, MasterChef Junior. His two front teeth are gapped, and his sandy blond hair is parted way over on one side. When he grows up, Logan wants to be an oceanographer, an astronaut, a chef, and a garbageman. The restaurant he plans to open someday will be called “O’s Underwater Bistro” and it will have special bubbles, some “executive bubbles” and some “romantic bubbles,” where customers will dine floating around underwater separate from the main restaurant, like in submarines.

But today, Logan has overcooked and underseasoned the rice in what he says would be the signature dish at his underwater bistro. The 82-pound, 4-foot-11-inch boy from Memphis, who, unlike some of the other contestants, can actually see over the cooking counters on the MasterChef set, has had one hour to create this dish, presumably without any adult assistance. And though his perfectly seared steak has “nice char and color,” the plate overall is too simple — lackluster, Ramsay says. As the British celebrity chef tells Logan that “the judges have come to expect more from you, young man,” a tear so giant that even I can see it from behind the cameras 30 feet away drops off Logan’s cheek and hits the floor. The boy’s shoulders curve forward, his head drops, and he’s sobbing.

Producers backstage stop whispering into their mics. The cameramen are still and tense. No one likes to see a child cry. But then Ramsay, who has seven Michelin stars, 25 restaurants, and a reputation for calling the cooks on his TV shows things like “miserable wee bitch” and “you fucking donkey” does something unexpected: He steps forward, hugs the child, and tells him it’s going to be OK, that he did his best. When Logan returns to his station, no longer crying, the other children comfort him and tell him he’s a great cook.

In spring 2013, when Fox announced it was going to air a kid-centric spin-off of its amateur cooking competition MasterChef with 8- to 13-year-olds, it sounded horribly annoying — like a desperate attempt to revive a played-out format. The built-in precociousness of the concept was off-putting: 12-year-olds talking about Sriracha foam. And who wants to watch kids being mean to one another or judges hurting their feelings? “Fox’s Junior MasterChef to find newer, younger chefs to disappoint Gordon Ramsay,” wrote the AV Club.

But when the show debuted last fall, it was absolutely delightful. Now, three episodes into its second season, it’s still so good. MasterChef Junior’s first season was the highest-rated broadcast show in its Friday evening time slot among adults 18 to 49. It performed especially well in DVR and got good reviews. This season it is upgraded to a coveted Tuesday evening spot and averages a solid 5.3 million total viewers.

Seeing Ramsay’s gentler, helpful side is reason alone to watch. But the kids are the real stars because they (and the producers in the control room) turn the reality cooking show on its head by making it more heartwarming than cutthroat — they actually are here to make friends. They are more than happy to lend one another ingredients and help during the challenges. They often cry when anyone is sent home because they are sad for their friend. They release piercing screams of delight when a food for the next challenge is revealed (“Yaaaay! Pancakes!”), and collapse on the floor with relief when they aren’t sent home. And there is a visual spectacle: They have to jump to reach ingredients in the pantry and stand on boxes to cook at the counters; the scale is off. Meanwhile, the dishes they make are very impressive and just messy enough to be believable. Basically, everything they do and say is ridiculous, and yet it makes so much more sense than what adults do on television.

While we may know better than to believe everything we see on reality TV, the question remains: Are these kids as good as they seem? And if not, would that make the show any less fun?

Like many of our reality shows, MasterChef is a European export. The adult version is based on a BBC show that initially ran from 1990 to 2001, and the brand was exported globally. More than 40 countries have adapted the show — there’s a MasterChef Italia, MasterChef Pakistan, MasterChef China, and more. The kid spin-off was first introduced in 1994 in the U.K. and has been produced in 15 different countries.

Even so, the American show’s executive producers Robin Ashbrook and Adeline Ramage Rooney, who also produce on the adult version, say they had a hard time getting Fox to sign on for Junior.

The not-distant memory of CBS’s failure with Kid Nation must have been a consideration. The 2007 show put 40 children ages 8 to 15 in a New Mexico ghost town and asked them to create a viable society without adult supervision, then was canceled amid allegations of child abuse, child labor law disputes, and a New York Times article about the insane contracts the parents signed. That same year, Bravo ordered eight episodes of Top Chef Junior with 13- to 16-year-olds, which never aired. (Bravo did not respond to a request for an explanation why.)

“You could go to anybody in the world and go, ‘Right, so we’ve got Gordon Ramsay,’ and they’d go, ‘But he shouts at people,’” Ashbrook says. “And you’d say, ‘And we’ve got this show with ovens and knives and hot dishes — and then we’re going to do it with kids.’ So on that pitch you’d be like, ‘You’re fucking out of your mind.’”

In 2012, while taping the third season of adult MasterChef, Ashbrook and Rooney taped a mystery box challenge with a group of kids — each got a box with the same surprise ingredients and had to create a dish. They sent the tape to Fox. It worked.

When the casting call went out, the press was especially critical that the kids would be as young as 8. But Rooney says having younger kids for MasterChef Junior was essential.

“Once you get to 14 to 17, they might be more skilled, but they’ve also kind of shut down a lot more,” she says. “So they’re not as good for TV, frankly.”

The rest of the show is almost identical to the adult version of MasterChef, which just aired its fifth season. The other two judges are New York restaurateur and winemaker Joe Bastianich and Chicago chef Graham Elliot. The set’s the same, the format’s the same, and the production, editing, and culinary team are almost exactly the same.

“We want it to be a show that is co-viewed with parents and that our Hell’s Kitchen fans would watch, so we didn’t want to neuter Gordon,” Rooney says, referring to one of Ramsay’s other four shows currently on Fox in which he verbally abuses aspiring chefs cooking in competition for a job at one of his restaurants.

The Gordon Ramsay who appears on MasterChef Junior is a completely different judge — helpful, goofy, and sweet — so that you start to understand why some of the people who work for him show an irrational-seeming loyalty in the face of his insulting tirades and long list of scandals.

“Firm but fair. I liken it to a soccer coach,” Ramsay says of his attitude toward the kids on the show. “If you want your child to succeed — a ballerina, become the next basketball superstar, or play for the Dodgers — then you will push them.”

The eight kids who remain in the competition on Episode 4 in Season 2 stand in a row in front of a stage where the three judges are also standing in a row. They’re on a set on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles where they’ve been staying at a nearby hotel with their parents for the first two weeks of the three-and-a-half-week production. They’re ready to find out what the first challenge of the episode will be.

Ramsay’s voice has more bravado and is much louder than the other judges’. He wanders around set with an enormous, devious presence that makes even off-camera moments feel like reality TV.

A production guy coming from the behind-the-scenes kitchen rolls a cart near the set and tells me to be careful, please don’t put your coffee on this. Covered by a cloche, this plate is handed to the judges a minute later when they announce the challenge.

“There is one ingredient that every chef relies on,” Ramsay says. His voice rises with booming excitement to build the moment where he lifts the cloche: “It’s simple. It’s glorious. And delicious! It is an…egg.”

“Duuuuuuuh,” says Oona, an extremely bright 9-year-old with big eyes and dark hair pulled into messy pigtails. Oona’s favorite TV show of all time is Alton Brown’s Good Eats; she’s seen every single episode and most of them several times over. Oona’s dad, a Yale Law School professor, says he wasn’t inclined to let her watch MasterChef Junior when the show first came out: “My picture of reality TV was snarky adults saying mean things to each other,” he says. “We didn’t want her to see that.” But the show wasn’t that, so he and his wife agreed to let her watch it.

Bastianich, the third judge, begins to describe the sunny-side-up hero egg: “Notice there are no brown edges, there are no wobbly whites,” he says. “They’re not snotty or runny.” The words “snotty” and “runny” are too much for some of the kids, and they burst into giggles.

Then there is a confusing silence for a minute or two. The judges have earpieces to receive stage directions during taping from producers in the control room who tell them what to redo. By now, the kids are used to these awkward pauses, but they are kids: They have a hard time standing still. Actually, so does Gordon Ramsay. Similarities between the celeb chef and the children are shockingly clear in person: They love to make trouble, they have scary amounts of energy, they get bored easily, and they throw temper tantrums.

All of a sudden the judges are alert again and Elliot starts talking: “You will have 10 minutes to make us as many perfect, sunny-side-up eggs as you can,” he says. “At your stations you will find everything you need: oil, butter, and a whole lot of eggs. You’ll have eight pans, which I highly recommend you use simultaneously. Every perfectly fried sunny-side-up egg that we decide is good enough will give you a huge advantage in the upcoming challenge.”

Then, it seems like it’s go time: The cameras start moving and the kids begin to run to their stations. But the producers yell, “Can I have the kids back up at the front?” and the judges take a break. What the kids will do between finding out the details of their challenge and 20 minutes later when they start cooking eggs I don’t know, because Ramsay wants to chat backstage in another room and ushers me away.

Gordon Ramsay is worth $47 million, according to Forbes. In addition to owning restaurants all over the world, he’s produced and starred in 23 television shows since 1999. He’s published 27 books, has a line of tableware with WWRD (Waterford, Wedgewood, Royal Doulton), and has so much energy that you feel rushed to keep up with the cadence of his speech and under pressure to keep his attention. His attention is actually impossible for anyone to keep most of the time. Even his own thoughts don’t keep his attention long enough for him to properly finish them.

“I absolutely 100% categorically submerge myself in the, you know, I don’t give a shit what’s going on outside, there could be a crisis — last week we got a stupid lawsuit issued over a total ridiculous, ridiculous place, there’s a big conference call tonight where we are putting the defense together. It’s just if there’s one thing that always puts me off about working over here [in the U.S.] it’s that the more popular and the more famous you become then the more litigious and the more small excuse people take as advantage to sue…”

The way Ramsay talks is part of his manic power. He has the same force to his speech as on television, but without an editor to cut it and make it coherent. He spits out raw quotes that apart might be worth something, but together become extremely confusing.

“…so that’s one thing I’ve learned over the last decade. In terms of everyone says hey and of course the British press ‘he’s been sued again, that’s 14 times in 7 different countries!’ It’s a joke. Whatever crap’s going on there, when I walk in here and I’m with these guys, they’ve got me 100% because it is so important; look at the sort of rip-offs already in terms of Food Network and Bravo now, and the amount of people that try to imitate, and you’ve got that sugarcoating ass-kissy, let’s get all gooey and this is real — this is seriously real.”

He says he is involved in every aspect of the show, including casting, to identify the kids coming from desperate stage moms who aren’t really passionate about cooking. He was not fazed by initial skepticism about his working with children. “I’m a father of four and there’s no script for being a parent.” He talks about his own children a lot; they are between the ages of 12 and 16 and they are all over his Instagram feed amid pictures of him getting in race cars, getting on helicopters, and training for the Ironman.

The kid contestants idolize Ramsay. Logan, for example, says Ramsay’s opinion is the only one that matters during judging. Logan’s mom tells him to try to not look so pitiful during taping that he gives her a heart attack every time he looks at the camera. Logan says he’s probably just bored because judging takes so long.

“He’s the best chef out of all three of them,” says Sam, a blond 9-year-old contestant from Reseda, California, who has a Skrillex-like hairstyle. Sam says he knows Ramsay’s the best chef because “he’s done so many TV shows and so many things like that, and you can see he looks so good as a chef.”

“Bless him,” Ramsay says about Sam when tell I him this later on. “I mean, that’s a bit of a wrong interpretation. There needs to be an actual passion there, and that’s what we weed out very quickly.”

After this quick break, 10 minutes are set on the MasterChef clock, which hangs high in the middle of the room. The kids run to their stations and begin furiously cracking eggs into pans.

Ramsay, Bastianich, and Elliot stand on the stage, still being filmed, talking about the best techniques for making eggs. Bastianich suggests frying two eggs in one pan; Ramsay is horrified and pokes fun at him. Ramsay explains that the most important element here is actually the butter: You have to baste the eggs, spoon hot butter over the whites to cook the tops faster. Crack the egg low near the pan so the yolk doesn’t break; bring the plate close to the pan so you don’t have to walk around with an egg on your spatula.

“Four minutes gone!” yells Ramsay toward the kids. “Six minutes remaining! Speed up, guys, multitask.”

I’m standing near supervising culinary producer Sandee Birdsong, who is watching the kids closely and also has an earpiece and microphone to communicate with producers during taping. A former contestant on Top Chef, Birdsong is now also that show’s supervising culinary producer, and her job is to oversee all the food on the show — order equipment and ingredients, create and test challenges, and train the kids. After a minute or two she says quietly into the microphone, “Turn the heat down, all the kids are burning the eggs’ edges.”

A minute later, Elliot says to the kids from the judges podium, “Guys, make sure you don’t get your heat too high, we don’t want any brown edges, control that pan.”

Birdsong and her culinary team of as many as 26 people teach the kids cooking classes in between episodes, walking them through the techniques they need to succeed and giving them safety training. The MasterChef classroom is identical to the set — same ovens, same food processors — so the contestants can get familiar with the equipment. The culinary team squeezes in as many classes for the kids as they can given the short amount of time children are legally allowed to be on the Paramount lot every day. “The kids are here to learn as much as they can the whole time,” she says.

Birdsong says she doesn’t teach the kids exactly what to do for a challenge, but rather shows them a basic and (most importantly) the fastest way to accomplish things like make a sauce or filet a fish. There are lots of different ways to make a piecrust, for example, but one way is probably best when you’re racing the clock. The kids have the option of writing down and memorizing anything from class.

“We teach a very basic application that works in our environment and that’s what they tend to stay with, and it’s their choice if they go off that mark [during a challenge],” she says, adding that the adults who receive the same classes are more likely to revert to their personal cooking methods.

Halfway through the egg challenge, Ramsay takes an interest in Abby, the youngest contestant at 8, who’s got her pan too hot and is still struggling to get a single egg fried and on a plate. Abby, who’s from Winchester, Virginia, still has a sweet baby-talk quality to her voice and is impossibly adorable. In Episode 2, while watching the other kids race to cook pancakes, she screamed nearly every time a pancake was flipped over and at one point nearly collapsed from excitement. “Take the pan to the plate, young lady,” Ramsay tells her.

She yells back, clearly stressed: “IT’S NOT READY.”

When time’s up, the judges all count down the last 10 seconds together.

The kids raise their hands in surrender and stop cooking.

“Who’s feeling good, guys?” Ramsay asks, cheerfully. No one raises a hand. The kids’ mood is total frustration. “Aw, come on, no one?”

A producer hollers from the side, “Let’s do the last five seconds again, guys,” and on cue the kids pretend to plate eggs and run around while someone counts, “Five, four, three, two, one.”

Then the kid chefs are shuffled out of the room for a break. Instead of the judges going to inspect the eggs, Rooney emerges from the greenroom and walks station to station to see who cooked the most eggs.

After the numbers are calculated, Birdsong, Elliot, Bastianich, and Rooney sit at a table offset discussing how to make the next challenge work. As it turns out, the number of eggs each kid cooked in this first challenge will determine the number of ingredients he or she will be allowed to use to cook a signature dish. Little Abby, sure to be an audience favorite, has successfully fried only two eggs in 10 minutes.

The lights on the set go dim; the pans and eggs and dishes are being cleared away. Out of the blue, Gordon Ramsay makes an announcement:

“The lady from BuzzFeed is going to do the egg challenge.” The cameramen, producers, and crew are as surprised as I am. “Lights up, please, thank you,” he hollers at no one in particular.

The kids aren’t present and the cameras aren’t rolling. And though I’ve been hanging around the set of his show for two days, I don’t think I’ve done anything to make him want to actively embarrass me. We had so far spoken innocuously about this show and his own children. I had not even asked him about the time he fat-shamed a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen, nor the time he tricked vegetarians into eating meat, nor about his allegedly showing up with a camera crew without permission at the wedding of his now-estranged mentor Marco Pierre White. I did not ask if he actually hired someone to film his father-in-law (and former business partner) having an affair, or if any of those things make him feel any doubt that he should be a role model for children.

But Ramsay’s probably just bored; he doesn’t want me or anyone getting too comfortable, and he knows this will be fun. And he does not know, thank god, that I attended culinary school. In theory I should be decent at this. But I’m not. I can’t be relied on to do anything quickly — not cooking, writing, thinking, or any kind of thing. I accidentally set my course book on fire more than once.

Ramsay abruptly starts singing “If I Could Turn Back Time” and rushing the producers to bring over the pans, oil, eggs, and butter. “Get the clock ready. You have five minutes. Are you ready? Five minutes, I want to see how many you can do. Your time starts now.”

“I’m shaking,” I say.

“And begin!”

I start cracking eggs into the pans without remembering to turn on the heat under any of the pans.

“Turn the gas on first, young lady! Fifteen seconds gone! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Thirty seconds gone.”

“Shit!”

“Please no cursing, Emily. Forty seconds gone.”

“OK, OK.”

“Darling, you gotta go faster, I am starving. Coming up to one minute gone. If an 8-year-old can do it, I’m sure a 22-year-old can do it.”

I am 31.

But there is a crowd of about 20 people from the crew watching, taking photos with their phones, and laughing.

“Emily, I’m begging you, turn the fucking gas on.”

“No cursing, Chef,” I say.

“Coming up to two minutes gone. EMILY, PLEASE,” he yells. I am still not even finished cracking all eight eggs into all eight pans because I have apparently forgotten how to crack eggs, what to do with the shells, how to pan, what are eggs.

“What if I just throw one of these raw eggs at you,” is for some reason my response.

“Please, Emily, don’t waste time. I’ve got your editor on the phone, he’s live and he’s not impressed.”

I consider telling him that my editor is a woman. I don’t really want to embarrass him and make him yell even more. Or do I?

“My editor is a woman,” I say, cringing.

“Well, she’s not very happy. We’re Skyping her straight after this. I BEG YOU, GET ONE FUCKING EGG ON THE PLATE, PLEASE.”

I remember I should throw some butter in there and baste.

“Nice, that’s lovely. Butter, butter, butter,” he says three times rhythmically. I’m reminded of the way he also offhandedly said, “To the bar. The bar, the bar, the bar,” three times earlier in the day.

“Seventy-five seconds to go!” he yells.

This is the part where, if you’re a real cook, your brain turns off and your muscles remember and everything’s familiar so you can work like a machine. You can rhythmically baste, tilt, scoop, and plate along a row over and over with movements so efficient that 75 seconds is the perfect amount of time to plate eight sunny-side-up eggs. But the kids don’t have that muscle memory, how could they, and neither do I. No one is magically a master chef. It takes practice.

Ramsay, I’ve realized by now, needs to yell the whole time and doesn’t like silence, so he says, “Coming up to 60 seconds to go! EMILY, PLEASE.”

I get an egg on the plate.

“ONE EGG, YAY!!!!!!” he says sarcastically. “Last minute!”

The rest of the eggs just haven’t finished cooking. I have spent most of my five minutes fumbling with the heat and running back and forth between my two ranges of four eggs each.

The entire production crew of MasterChef Junior counts down my last 10 seconds.

“One egg. You are as good as Abby,” he says.

Abby, he reminds me, is 8 years old.

“I snuck some of your frosting one time,” Abby says to Samuel, a jaunty 12-year-old who talks like he’s doing an impression of an adult on a cooking show. To me, she adds, “I wanted to see if it was good because he wasn’t called for the top three in the cupcake challenge.” She is wearing tiny glasses, head-to-toe pink and purple with ruffles, polka dots, and tiny sparkly shoes.

The kids are sitting (sort of — Oona is bad at sitting) at a table in a break room in a building separate from the set. This is where their parents hang out during episode tapings.

Noticeably quiet during breaks is Sean, an Asian-American 12-year-old from Santa Ana, California, with thick glasses, braces, and a big smile when he lets it show. Sean has won the most challenges, and the other kids think he’s the best cook because, as one of them says, “He’s been cooking every night for two years.” Sean is quick to correct him: He cooks only three times a week. His dream is to be a restaurant owner and an interior designer because he “spends half his time on Pinterest looking at home decor.”

The kids are, in fact, really sweet to each other. And the adults encourage that.

“We really try to stay away from that side of the reality world of, like, ‘Come on, really tell us who you don’t like,’” says Elliot the next day. “‘This one said this about you, you should really say…’ There’s nothing like that. You ask, ‘Who do you think is the best? Who do you not want in here?’ And almost 90% of the time it’s, ‘I like everybody, they’re all good.’”

Ten-year-old Josh, who has long hair and a crackly voice that sounds a little like Jonathan Taylor Thomas, offers a story about how Ramsay helped him roll out a piecrust because he couldn’t do it fast enough. While Ramsay’s helping him didn’t appear in the final episode, the producers did include another special moment: Josh, seeming very, very concerned, says he really hoped he wouldn’t get sent home for his Key lime pie because that would ruin his feelings about Key lime pie.

Oona hollers loudly so she can be heard over the other kids who have all started talking vaguely about piecrust at once: “Half a cup of butter and 2½ cups of flour and 2 tablespoons of sour cream.” She is the only one who offers specifics, and that ratio would probably work. Oona had never made a pie before she got to MasterChef; she learned in Birdsong’s classes.

When I ask about burns, almost all of the kids eagerly and immediately shove their forearms toward me to show off burn marks. Some got these during the show; some were earned while cooking at home. Like line cooks, the kids are very proud of their burns.

“In this next challenge we want all of you to dream big and imagine owning and running your own restaurant,” says Ramsay to the kids, now back on camera. “Excited?”

“Yes, Chef!” The kids know to yell in response.

Oona’s signature dish at her someday restaurant (which will only serve “well-to-do people”) will be scallops two ways: scallop crudo with a yuzu ponzu sauce and crispy wontons, plus seared scallops with a soy foam and a ginger scallion oil.

But Oona’s only fried four eggs, the judges point out, so now what?

“I’m just going to do the seared scallops because that shows more skill…or I’ll… I don’t know,” Oona says, smiling without a trace of the worry an adult in her position would show.

Later, Ramsay tells me that he helps them before they kick off the pantry run and cooking, “just to stop them from panicking.”

“She needs to understand that you got four ingredients, so it’s scallops, cauliflower, grapefruit, and I think orange segments,” Ramsay says. “So the cauliflower puree, Oona wants cream in there. There’s no greater way to do a cauliflower puree than to take the florets, blanch them in rapidly boiling water, get them just cooked, take them out, blend them, and add the water they were cooked in back to it. So those kind of techniques is what I need to step in and say, ‘Get concerned but don’t get upset.’”

Before they film the pantry run, there’s an off-camera “culinary pause” and Birdsong goes from kid to kid asking them exactly what ingredients they are going to get and what they will plate. She’s writing it down and either giving them advice or just flat-out telling them what to do. The producers are getting impatient — they need to make this quick — but Birdsong is determined to make sure the kids know what they are doing.

“What’s your starch going to be?” she asks one of them.

“Do I have to have a starch?” he says.

Sean, who has successfully fried the most eggs with his 10, is playing the hand-slap game with Logan while Birdsong tries to get them to focus.

The PR person trailing me is looking around for a senior production person to say if it’s OK that I am watching this happen.

Once the clock starts, the kids have an hour to cook. Bastianich immediately goes over to Abby, who has only two ingredients: salmon and asparagus.

“We never cook for them,” Gordon says later, adding that there was a moment in another challenge when he helped Abby cut butternut squash because he felt she was about to slice her hand open. “We help, we advise … my job is to protect them, health and safety.”

While most of the kids specified that their restaurants would be expensive and serve “rich people,” “fancy people,” or “investment bankers,” Abby wants her “restaurant-slash-vet’s clinic to be a good restaurant and serve healthy food.” And it will be called Horses and Courses.

“Um, how about getting a pan out so we can start thinking about this?” Bastianich says to Abby, who, if she wins, says she will give the $100,000 prize money to charity after she buys a horse. “How are you going to do the asparagus?”

“I’m gonna sauté and boil them,” she says.

“That’s a good idea, boil them first so you know they’re cooked then sauté them with oil and salt and pepper to give them a little flavor … Oops, they’re too long to fit in that pan…”

One of the kids cuts herself and two medics rush in with Band-Aids and antiseptic.

Birdsong and the other producers say they take every precaution to keep the kids safe and reassure the parents with fully trained medics always on site, knife and open-flame safety classes, and judges who will step in to help. But at the same time, the episodes definitely play with the peril of kids fumbling with giant food processors stored on high-up shelves and handling knives as big as their arms. Because that’s the rule: Treat them the same as the adults.

“I mean, obviously we all cringe every once in a while when they’re holding the knife wrong or they grab something and it’s hot or they’re fixing to do something and it’s scary,” she says, “but we’re there, and [the parents] know we’re there.” The judges will intervene and help, Ramsay says, if they see a child doing something that seems too dangerous.

The most common injuries, Birdsong says, are small burns, because the kids often forget when they pull something out of their oven and put it on the counter that it’s still hot and touch it later. She trains them to put a towel on any hot pans as a reminder.

Adaiah hollers that she needs an adult to open a jar for her. That’s allowed, and a culinary producer steps in. But when Samuel asks if he can go back in the pantry because he got a wrong ingredient or something, it’s not.

“They try to break the rules when they can,” Birdsong says. She is always impressed with how much they are capable of in technical classes and during taping. “It’s easy because they’re kids, so they learn quick. They respond, too, if I told them to do something right — now they’ll remember that forever.”

Oona is blending her cauliflower puree nearby and Birdsong silently motions to her, mock-sprinkling her hand, giving her the universal symbol for “don’t forget to salt.”

“She had extra time, so she did make her scallops two ways,” whispers a producer into her earpiece microphone, talking about Oona. “She just didn’t make the foam.”

There’s not really a sense of last-minute panic that the TV show conveys as the kids begin to plate. They’ve been able to finish. This, too, is part of Birdsong’s job: The producers rely on her to design challenges that are as short and as hard as possible so that “the hands-up moment is really a hands-up moment,” she says. And she tests the timed challenges before each taping the exact same way for the kids and the adult contestants “because the kids are just as good as the adults.”

The kids finish cooking and the PR person who trailed me while I was there asks me to step out of the building with him. This was quite obviously a pivotal moment and I wanted to see how the judging went down, so I asked why I had to leave, and he said that they didn’t want the show “to get overexposed.”

Optimistically, what was happening was that the judges and producers were looking at the kids’ plates and figuring out who would win and who would go home, and maybe cleaning them up…a little.

After about 25 minutes I’m let back inside; the judging portion has started.

Birdsong is now holding a piece of paper with quickly sketched drawings of all eight kids’ plates on it, and as one of the kids places his plate in front of the judges, I hear Birdsong say into her mic, “That plate needs a spin.”

Seeing those sketches, I think of the extra kitchen I had seen backstage, the one where a small staff of busy adults was talking about tempura batter recipes from various L.A. restaurants. Could they possibly cook all the food after Birdsong talks to the kids before the pantry run, just in case?

“Oh, no way, we wouldn’t be able to do that,” says Birdsong. “We have someone from legal at every single production day and they would not allow something like that to happen. We’re governed by that.” Birdsong says the parents are also introduced to the legal team and can at any point during taping ask to speak to them.

Even so, I wanted to go and look in that kitchen, see how busy they had been while the kids had been cooking, and what was in their trash. But I couldn’t: The PR person babysitting me was going to shepherd me to the next interview then directly to my car in the parking lot.

After the judging, little Logan in his bow tie with his underseasoned rice is safe. But two other contestants are sent home. The producers intentionally send kids home in pairs to make it easier on them.

In one episode, a girl who was sobbing when she’s told she’s being eliminated is five minutes later smiling and says, “I am sad I have to leave but I’m excited to go home and see my dad and my dog.”

I sit down with Elliot and Bastianich on some couches near the set. Taping is done for the day. They look exhausted. Elliot wipes his face, forces a cheerful mood, and tries to be friendly. Bastianich doesn’t look up from his cell phone.

“What you just saw was challenging, goddamnit,” says Bastianich. “Sending these kids home is horrible; it’s hard.”

I ask point-blank if anything is done to the food before the judges judge it.

“No,” says Bastianich, still on his phone. “It is what it is.”

He seems relieved for Abby, who was not sent home. “You know, whether she cooked that salmon perfectly by accident or not, but she cooked it better than a 12-year-old boy did.”

I ask if they think all of the kids will really become chefs one day. They say no, of course not all of them, and they’re not trying to push restaurant work on them. This gets Bastianich’s attention.

“I think the more relevant question is the 6 million kids and adults who are watching,” he says, seizing an opportunity to give a positive spin and talk about something he’s proud of. “What message does that send to them, because that’s the greater impact, right? I think it’s a very positive one. We think that this is the cure, not the problem, for food-related issues in our society — whether it’s childhood obesity, whatever — knowing about the food, how to cook it, how to source it, how to manage it, is a very positive message that these kids launch for everyone else.”

A few months later I reach out to Jack, a contestant from Season 1, and ask his mom if I could visit them at home. I want to see how well he can actually cook.

A 12-year-old seventh-grader now, Jack was 10 when he taped the show in 2013 and ended up an audience favorite because of his New York accent, the colorful Hawaiian shirts he wore on every episode, and his maniac chopping skills.

At his neighbor’s beautiful, two-story home in Far Rockaway, New York (their house is under construction, his mom says), Jack is going to sear a thick steak with a coffee and cacao powder rub and roast some butternut squash.

“I’m going to try to cook it medium rare, so it’s a nice brown on the outside but pink to red color in the middle, because I feel like it allows the beef’s natural flavors to shine through,” he says.

Will he use a thermometer?

“I just go by touch,” he says, pointing out the “nice brown color” that’s developing as he sears not just two sides but every surface of the steak, standing it up vertically and letting it rest on the side of the pan, which most adults would not think to do.

“I actually prefer it on the pan than cooked on the grill,” he says. “It tastes more elegant.”

It’s been two and a half years since Jack taped MasterChef Junior and he’s still obsessed with cooking, though he also plays tennis, the trombone, and the piano, and says he’s into wrestling. He still has his adorable smile but is in the middle of a preteen growth spurt; something about the ratio of his calves to his feet gives away that he might be a lot taller very soon.

Jack holds the knife properly; he’s stacking parsley leaves one on top of the other, rolling them into a cigar shape then slicing through the roll for a proper chiffonade. This technique is something I couldn’t tell if the kids I saw during the taping were doing because I couldn’t get close enough. Unlike Alexander, the 13-year-old who won the first season, Jack has not been staging at restaurants like Del Posto and Lure Fishbar.

My paranoia about the realness of the show is fading. This child is a very good cook.

The major thing he learned on MasterChef, he says, was time management. “I learned that you should always heat up your pan before you heat up the oil, because if you don’t then the oil can burn on you. That was big.”

Jack starts to loosen up, talking about cooking with a lot of authority, and I realize he narrates each step like a TV personality. “So we’re just going to let this [steak] sit here for a little longer, to let it cook a little bit, and then we’ll put it on here [a cutting board] to rest…”

Then all of a sudden he’s a kid again: “…Umm, so, because if you didn’t let it rest once you put it on the plate it just sort of, like, all the blood just, like, squirts out and it looks all red on your plate and everything is ruined and it’s horrible and you’re like, ‘No!’ But when you cut the filet mignon on the board, all the blood comes out on the plate so when you put it on your real plate, then it looks perfect.”

He, like Oona, learned most of what he knows about cooking from television. “One day I just turned on the TV and Chopped happened to be on there and I didn’t feel like getting the remote and changing it to cartoons, so I just kept watching Chopped.” So basically, food TV is responsible not only for breeding the next stars of food TV, but also, maybe, causing children who might otherwise beg for processed fast food to want to help cook dinner from scratch.

After carefully examining his steak to find the grain, Jack slices it to reveal a perfect medium-rare. He plates slices artfully next to his cubed butternut squash then wipes the sides of the plate like a cook at the pass. ●

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Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

Behind The Scenes Of The Cutest Cooking Show On Television was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hotter and less predictable temperatures mean that much of the world’s premium wine regions are now under threat and new ones are emerging. How the wine industry is — and isn’t — reacting says a lot about the future of agriculture.

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com on November 20, 2014.

“All the grapes were ripening at once,” Wendy Cameron recalls of the harvest that was the wake-up call.

Cameron is head winemaker at Brown Brothers, one of Australia’s largest and oldest wine producers. In her 16 years there, Cameron had seen changes — hotter summers, harvest dates inching earlier. While heat waves aren’t unheard of in Australia, the one they had during the late summer of 2008 was unlike anything she’d ever seen: It was over 105 degrees for 10 days straight.

You can’t just leave ripe grapes on the vine — their sugars will get too high, yielding wines that are too alcoholic. Too much sun exposure can also affect flavor, and eventually grapes will begin to raisin. Everything had to be harvested at once, Cameron knew, but they only had so many employees. The winery was designed to handle a limited amount of production at a time. They didn’t have enough refrigerators. They didn’t have enough water. (Water prices had tripled over the past year.) Those were taxing, frightening days, and Cameron says they got through it pretty well, all things considered. But it made her wonder about the future of Australian wine and whether the vineyards would remain cool enough to survive.

Two years later, in 2010, Brown Brothers’ chief executive Ross Brown announced the purchase of a large vineyard in Tasmania, an island 150 miles off the southern coast of Australia. Long thought to be too cold to make quality wine, that too had been changing in recent years. “’We want to position ourselves to combat global warming,” Brown said at the time of the sale, a statement that garnered headlines — and upset many.

“I know Ross got some calls that were utterly scathing,” Cameron says. Others, especially others in the wine business who’d likewise seen the writing on the wall, praised his candor, albeit quietly. “People said, ‘Wow. I can’t believe you’ve done that, it’s so progressive and forward and good on you.’”

“Climate change isn’t a straight line,” Cameron says. “It goes up and down. There were a couple of years there where, certainly as an industry, we had a bit of a taste of what it might be like. The Brown Brothers have just celebrated their 125-year anniversary. My job is to give them the right information so we can be viable in another 125 years.”

The question is how difficult a task that will be, not only in Australia and other hotter wine-producing regions, like southern Italy, Spain, and California’s Central Valley, but throughout the wine world. A splashy, controversial study published last year by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that in major wine-producing regions, the area suitable for viticulture — wine-grape growing — is threatened. By 2050, such terrain will decrease by between 19% and 62%, under a business-as-usual carbon emissions scenario, and between 25% and 73% if carbon emissions increase, which some argue is more likely. The U.S. government’s 2014 National Climate Assessment, which lays out in spectacular detail and no uncertain terms what our country should anticipate in terms of climate change, summarizes American wine’s situation thusly: “The area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest quality wines is projected to decline by more than 50% by late this century.”

The story of how wine will react to climate change is one small but telling piece of the larger one of how agriculture as a whole will endure. But researchers are looking at wine specifically because for this slow-moving, climate-sensitive industry, anticipating how to properly adapt will be a particular challenge.

You can’t just move Napa or Bordeaux a few hundred miles north. Even a small change in overall temperature, or increased instances of extreme weather, will throw wrenches into the hard-won understanding producers have of their grapes, land, and climate — and of how to coax from that combination the best possible beverage. It’s not all bad news: A changing climate means that colder regions like Tasmania — and England, Scandinavia, and British Columbia — now have shots at becoming major wine players like never before. Will these new wine regions actually be able to replace the ones that have been cultivated for decades and in some cases centuries? Or will fine wine be something we lose to climate change?

“We chose wine because it’s a canary in the coal mine,” says Rebecca Shaw, who co-authored the PNAS paper. Shaw is the associate vice president and senior lead scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. She and her collaborators, most of them academics, sought to understand how agriculture at large will adapt to climate change. We’re chatting in a conference room in the EDF’s downtown San Francisco 28th-floor offices. The Bay Bridge looms in the window behind us, defogging itself over the course of our conversation.

On a map, the world’s wine regions are particular little bands that fall in between the 30th and 50th parallels, the majority in highly biodiverse Mediterranean climates. This is because, as crops go, quality wine grape vines are super finicky. They need a cold — but not too cold — winter. They need a mostly frost-free spring during which their buds can safely emerge. They need a long, sunny growing season and eventual temperatures that are fairly warm — but not so hot that the grapes will sunburn or ripen too quickly. They need a fluctuation between daytime and nighttime temperatures, which enable the development of compounds that eventually become the complex flavors in a fine wine. Wine grapes are prima donnas; you don’t give them exactly what they demand, they don’t perform. Complicating things further, there are many different kinds of wine grapes, called varietals, like chardonnay, merlot, or riesling, which are even more particular about where and under which conditions they’ll best grow. Go over a certain threshold of temperature? You can’t grow pinot noir. Go under? You can’t ripen cabernet sauvignon.

This fussiness also makes wine grapes especially useful for gathering data about weather: Each vine is like a remote sensor out in a field, and the behavior of wines across a region can paint a picture as to a given season’s weather. European vintners have been keeping records for about a thousand years, which is one way climatologists have learned about Europe’s historical climate, including the Little Ice Age that struck the continent between 200 and 700 years ago.

Figuring out which grapes perform best where is painstakingly slow: It takes five to seven years for a newly planted vineyard to begin producing grapes suitable for winemaking. It takes years more still before vines produce good or, with luck, great — or, with further luck, excellent — fruit. The best fine wine, and certainly the world’s most expensive wines, come from regions or even individual rows of vines that have been cultivated for so long, whose behaviors are so well understood, that extremely high-quality grapes — and therefore extremely high-quality wines — are more or less guaranteed. (Certain European wine regions are steeped in so much tradition they’re recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.) In Europe, the identity of a wine is so tied to a fixed place that the wines themselves are named after where they’re made: Chianti is from Chianti, Champagne from Champagne. (If Americans played by the same rules, we’d call Napa Valley wines Napas.)

Worldwide, winemakers aspire to create wines that best express the personality of a given area’s climate and weather, a concept called terroir, or the taste of the place. A given wine is thought of as an expression of a given geography’s climate; much the way that you can’t make New York bagels in Iowa, the idea is you can’t make a Burgundy anywhere but.

Shaw says that’s the other reason they chose to focus on wine — people care about where their wines originate. “No one cares about where their corn comes from, nobody cares about where their wheat comes from,” she says. Wine consumers — especially in America, where wine is often believed to be snobby, unapproachable, or expensive — tend to be conservative in their selections and have internalized the idea that some wines from some places are better bets than others. Chances are, even if you prefer boxed wine over bottled, you might scoff at a wine from New Jersey.

In their study, Shaw explains, they wanted to look at the extent to which the wine industry would have to move poleward — further south in the Southern Hemisphere, further north in the Northern Hemisphere — as a result of the changing climate, and then what the impact would be upon that movement on existent ecosystems. What is the potential conservation impact of vineyards being planted in Tasmania, or British Columbia, or England? Their paper specifically mentioned the potential effects upon a giant panda habitat in China and in the Yukon-Yellowstone corridor. “Bid adieu to Bordeaux, but also, quite possibly, a hello to Chateau Yellowstone,” the The Guardian quipped in response.

Shaw expresses frustration that many in the press were distracted by the detail in their report about the pandas and missed the bigger stakes. “One of the major focuses of our work is to feed the planet without killing it,” she says. “How does agriculture need to change? What are the incentives that need to be put in place that won’t undermine the long-term sustainability and don’t create more environmental harm?”

Wine isn’t actually food, though. Especially if we’re talking about fine wine, it’s a luxury.

“Wine is food to many cultures,” she responds, adding that most crops both deliver sustenance and are meaningful culturally. Corn is meaningful. Rice is meaningful. Humans have been cultivating wine for 8,000 years. “You can get into an argument about what’s food and what’s necessary and what’s not necessary,” she says. “The bottom line is wine is a very, very important part of many, many cultures.”

There’s a touch of emotion in her voice as she says this. We could live in a world without wine, of course, but would we want to?

This year has been one of the driest in California’s history, and on the radio, there’s no end to the talk about the low snowpack, the parched reservoirs, the depleted Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Though it’s late February, the hillsides are tawny, not green. When I drive to Wine Country, many are quick to offer their opinions that the drought isn’t caused by global warming. Strolling through his blocks of chardonnay, one grizzled grower in Sonoma, who declines to be interviewed when he learns my line of questioning, whistles dismissively, “I guess everybody has to do something.”

In Napa, I meet with David Graves, who co-owns a winery called Saintsbury. Graves and his business partner met while graduate students at UC Davis in the late ’70s — Graves’ background is in biology — and have been making climate-sensitive pinot noir and chardonnay here since 1981. The vineyard is gorgeous in the misty morning; blackbirds alight above the rows.

He is jolly and peppers his speech with quotes and anecdotes and jokes. Steel tanks loom overhead and two dogs pace around a tennis ball by our feet. We’re talking about how grape growers and winemakers have to be risk-averse given that they get only a single shot each year to make do with what that year’s weather produced. “If I were going to culinary school, if my sauce curdles, it doesn’t cost a year’s wages to do it again,” he says.

He recalls once visiting a cousin who’s a brewer. His cousin excused himself for a moment — someone had added too much water to a batch of beer and rather than boil it down, elected to just throw it all out and start again. Graves laughs: “I said, ‘This is a dream!’”

It’s vital, in other words, that Graves understand what’s happening in his vineyard, which he says isn’t warming.

Some researchers, in particular a Southern Oregon University climatologist named Gregory Jones, argue that Napa has been experiencing overall increased temperatures. In the ’80s and early ’90s, long before there was scientific consensus concerning climate change, Jones was looking at the question of how it might affect wine-grape growing. (Jones had done his dissertation in Bordeaux, and his family owns a winery in Oregon.) “I didn’t think we really knew enough about the basics,” he explains over the phone.

To Jones, it wasn’t hard to see that warming had already been affecting wine: “If you go back to Burgundy 10 years ago or Germany 10 years ago, they’d have one good vintage in eight or nine or ten. It was because they were variable and much colder,” he says. “And today they have seven or eight or nine good vintages in 10.” This matches what he’s witnessed in Oregon: “In my region, 50 years ago it was difficult because there was too much frost and a longer growing season. Bingo — we can do it.” Another way to trace climate change’s effect on wine already, Jones argues, is the increased alcohol levels in wines around the world — warmer years mean more sugar in the berries, as they’re sometimes called, which means more alcohol in the wine. (Others would argue that it’s simply become fashionable to make more alcoholic wines.)

David Graves, convinced he hasn’t seen a warming trend, partnered with a climate researcher named Dan Cayan at University of California, San Diego, and a trade group called the Napa Valley Vintners, which represents about 400 of Napa’s wineries. The data they gathered was more localized than Jones’. Their study, which hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that the warming trend in most non-urban parts of Napa Valley over the last 60 to 80 years has been “significantly less” than what Jones had claimed. (I later ask Cayan about the fact that it hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal. “That’s partly my own fault for being a slacker,” he says, adding that there is additional work they are doing, in terms of sourcing and then cleaning up the data they’re gathering.)

“I really, really don’t want to give aid and comfort to climate-change denialists,” Graves says. All they wanted to do was shrink the proverbial pixel size: “Let’s get the resolution so we’re not in a grid that’s a hundred kilometers by a hundred kilometers, we’re in a grid that’s five kilometers by five kilometers. And ultimately that really matters because that could be the difference between you growing pinot noir and syrah.”

Graves says, in fact, he’s seen a cooling trend in his vineyard in recent years; whether that’s a short-term thing, he doesn’t know. And it’s true that the world will not warm uniformly. Some areas will encounter colder temperatures, or wetter ones, or extreme weather like heat waves or hail. Ultimately the scariest thing for grape growers and wine makers is uncertainty or large variation year to year. Graves and the polite Napa Valley Vintners representative I sit down with later that day say they don’t plan to use the data they’ve collected to model Napa’s future; climate modeling is expensive.

But it’s also not hard to intuit why producers and the NVV might not want more press about how their $50 billion valley, the crown jewel of American wine, is screwed. What they seem to want is a little impossible: to acknowledge that climate change is real, but that somehow they will be unaffected. (And on some level, isn’t that what we all want?)

Gregory Jones thinks people are simply afraid of speaking publicly, lest they inspire backlash like Ross Brown did after his Tasmanian purchase: “I’ve had conversations with the biggest winemakers in Napa,” he says. “I don’t have conversations with them at their front door, I have conservations at their back door.”

Regardless, there is a generally split opinion between what researchers and what industry professionals are saying (or are willing to say). Many took issue with the PNAS estimate — a potential 25% to 73% loss — when it was a published and covered in the mainstream press. As pre-eminent wine writer Jancis Robinson says over email, “I think those proportions are way too high, but I have certainly witnessed considerable changes.”

Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford professor who studies climate and food security and who has published several papers about climate change’s effects on wine, says there are a few big things we can take away: “I’m confident that we’ll see increasing temperatures in the areas that are currently the high-value, high-quality growing regions.” He goes on, “I’m impressed with human ingenuity and the ability of humans to succeed in a variety of environments.”

Worldwide, grape growers and winemakers are already adapting, as they always have, to a given year or month or day’s varying demands and challenges. There are things they can do in the case of really hot weather. They’re managing canopies to increase air circulation around berries. They’re spraying vines with what’s basically wine-grape sunscreen. They’re in some cases going to turn to technology — remote sensors or drones to help monitor vineyards and use water resources more intelligently, or even cloud seeding to artificially create rain. In some cases, they are starting to replant vineyards to varietals that they anticipate will better handle the increased temperatures to come.

Many of the biggest players in American wine are starting to look into what their options will be as things worsen. One of the largest domestic producers, Constellation, has partnered with a research extension of the University of California system to identify less commonly known varietals that are more suitable to a hotter, drier climate, especially in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where much of our supermarket wine originates. There are rumors of others — the largest producer, Gallo, and another giant, Bronco, which sells two-buck Chuck — experimenting with varietal cultivation and genetic modification to the same end. (Neither company responded to interview requests.) Inexpensive mass-market wines are also going to be less susceptible to climate change because they’re already so loaded up with additives, like powdered tannins, a super-concentrated grape juice called Mega Purple that adds color, and what’s essentially liquified oak chips. (And bottles aren’t labeled with ingredients, meaning consumers are often unaware of whether their wines are natural or full of additives.) These wines are less about terroir and more about drinkability attained as cheaply as possible.

Throughout the world, some big producers are looking into and purchasing sites in cooler areas, as Brown Brothers did in Tasmania. J. Barrie Graham, a banker with experience in financing and advising Northern California wineries, says no one was thinking or talking about global warming seven or eight years ago when making long-term financial decisions. “I would say now it’s a very common discussion.”

For now, David Graves says he’s not doing anything significant to react to potential changes in climate in southern Napa: “In the 25-year time frame, I’m ready to say probably we’re not going to see a radical change.” He adds that there are other potential changes that could threaten Californian wine — first among them the scarcity of water, changing consumer tastes, and changes in immigration that will affect California wine’s primarily Hispanic labor force. He then sighs. “Beyond that, from, say, 2040 on? All bets are off.”

“I’m reminded of two things,” he says. “One is that Harry Truman famously said he wanted a one-armed economist so the economist couldn’t say ‘on the other hand.’” His loud laugh echoes through the high winery roof: “The other thing is what Keynes is reputed to have said: ‘In the long run we’re all dead.’”

Nowhere is the story of what is going to happen to viticulture if nothing is done to curb climate change more starkly painted than in Europe. Europe is the world capital of wine, home to France, Italy, and Spain, the world’s first three largest producers, respectively. (The U.S. is fourth.) Most — and some would argue all — of the world’s best wines are produced there. In many European nations, laws govern which varietals can be grown where, at what density vines can be planted, whether irrigation is allowed, whether the addition of sugar is allowed — it goes on and on. Additives? Out of the question. Such laws seek to protect regional products but may end up having the opposite effect.

A much-repeated example is that in Burgundy, France, growers grow pinot noir as their red grape. If pinot noir is no longer optimal in Burgundy, growers won’t be able to switch their vineyards over to different red grapes and sell them as anything but cheap table wines — forgoing the hundreds or thousands of dollars that fine Burgundies can fetch. “As one of my colleagues in Germany likes to say, ‘Europeans are growing grapes and making wine in a cage,’” Gregory Jones says.

Jean-Marc Touzard, economist and research director at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, says they’ve observed the effects of climate change on wine since the 1980s. For example, “The vine matures faster because of higher temperatures. In Languedoc Roussillon, the harvest used to be in September, now it’s at the end of August.” Hotter, more compressed growing seasons have also affected the wines themselves — acidity is lower; sugar and therefore alcohol are higher. Flavor profiles are changing.

That said, Touzard argues that the laws are starting to evolve, offering the example that in some southern growing regions, they now allow irrigation — “under certain date restrictions” — something that before would have been unheard of in French wine. It’s of course debatable whether this change, which to an outsider may sound insignificant, is enough.

Two things are clear: In France and around the world, it’s going to be the small producers, the ones with fewer resources to purchase new vineyard sites, or replant, or survive a few bad years, that are at greatest risk. In Europe especially, these are sometimes single-man operations. They make a handicraft. A wine blogger I speak with, Bertrand Celce, travels to France (and elsewhere) discovering and documenting the efforts of such producers. He says some grape growers he’s encountering certainly are pessimistic. Wet conditions, for example, means an increased instance of disease, something such producers — who don’t use herbicides — have limited means to combat.

“The problem is they have to do more work,” Celse says. “They have smaller surfaces, but they tend to have little employment.” If the case study of American Prohibition serves as an example, the end result of global warming will be a wine scene that is more homogenous in terms of style, and owned by fewer, richer players. Eventually, when the best wines in the world become more scarce, the bottles remaining will become even more valuable, meaning fine wine will be even more of a luxury commodity than it already is.

And yet, in more northern parts of Europe, in countries that have never been viable for commercial viticulture — and perhaps have long envied their neighbors — some see an opportunity.

The fall day I visit Denbies Wine Estate, in Surrey, England, is comically beautiful: blue skies punctuated by clouds fluffy as sheep. The parking lot is full. I am made to follow a flock of mostly gray-haired, mostly British couples as they’re led into an octagonal movie theater where a loud video explains the winemaking process, then down a corridor past the winery itself. The guide is chirpy and her rather unnecessary-seeming headset malfunctions. At the end of the tour we are poured three wines and shepherded into a gift shop where the women browse tea towels and Christmas ornaments with furrowed brows and the men stand about with hands in pockets. What’s most remarkable, to me, aren’t the wines but the fact that this is the sort of bustling touristy affair I’d expect to find in Napa or Mendoza.

Victor Maguire is courteous and wry and leads me on a tour of the estate in a sputtering Land Rover. He’s worked at Denbies, which was founded in the late ’80s and is one of the largest vineyards in the country, for nearly a decade. While grapevines have been cultivated in England for a millennium, the practice has always been marginal, a cottage industry. The problem had always been it was a little too cold, a little too wet, for a consistently good crop.

But in the last few decades, England has witnessed something fairly spectacular: the first real emergence of a commercial wine culture. New wine regions often make their name on a particular wine or two, and England’s is sparkling wine. We are geographically not all so far from Champagne, and the soils here are very similar. Climate change means that England will become “increasingly more ideal than Champagne” for sparkling wine, Maguire says.

As numerous people in the English wine industry point out during my visit, sparkling wine was most likely invented here, in 1662. The producers of Champagne then began replicating the process, which they dubbed the méthode champenoise, or Champagne method. There is some perhaps perverse excitement, then, at notion that the French are at risk of losing their viticulture and the English might take up that mantle. (The English have wanted this for some time: When he financed his settlement at Jamestown, King James sent along French vignerons and required each homesteader to carry with him several cuttings of French wine grapes to plant, hoping his new colony would crush the French wine industry. This project failed, and the Virginians soon instead became all about tobacco.)

The day before, I visited a shop in London that sells only English spirits and wine — a whole wall of them. There are 400 vineyards in the country — though many fewer wineries — and perhaps more importantly, English producers are being recognized internationally for their quality: Four won gold medals at the International Wine Challenge this year. And indeed, some of the sparkling wines I tasted were superb.

As Maguire grips the Land Rover’s steering wheel and we wend through the rows, I ask him what he thinks of the possible effects of climate change on French wine. He pauses. “There is a school of thought that Champagne in 50 years will not have the ideal climate,” Maguire says judiciously, with a small smile. He then talks more freely about the hard weather France has seen of late. This year, for the third vintage in a row, for example, Burgundy lost a significant portion of its crop to hail, and the Languedoc was hit by the worst flooding in 60 years.

“It’s happening already, and we know that the continental growing and ripening seasons are becoming more compressed,” he says.

Harvest is underway at Denbies. We pass a group of laborers as they relax and lunch in the sunshine. But isn’t it a bad thing, I ask, if we lose French wine?

“I don’t think we’re losing France,” he replies. “I think they’ll have to learn to compensate.” He adds, “I think it’s great that English wine now has a place in the European arena.”

The problem, though, is that England or Tasmania is probably not going to be able to ever reach the level of output as the great traditional wine regions of the world. There’s the additional problem of styles. As wine writer Jancis Robinson points out to me, these newer regions “make completely different sorts of wine. Cool-climate wines are very different in style from those produced in the hot, dry regions under threat.” The latter produce larger-bodied reds. Most importantly, though, whereas the French or the Italians or the Spanish have been perfecting what they do for centuries — and wine is an integral part of each of those cultures — these new wine regions are in their relative infancies. People are still figuring out what works best and where, and that trial and error can take lifetimes.

If all of New York bagels were about to disappear forever, how much of a silver lining would it be if there were new opportunities for bagels in Des Moines? Especially if in this metaphor, there were bagel shops that had been perfecting their crafts for not just decades but in some cases centuries? This is the scariest part of global warming: the fact that we won’t be able to undo the damage done, that we won’t be able to extricate Venice, or New Orleans, from the sea. Their disappearance will be a net loss, regardless of what mountainside civilizations will someday rise.

Maybe we aren’t afraid enough. Or maybe we are too afraid. Maybe it’s just wine.

We turn another corner. Robust rows, their berries full and heavy, surround us. Maguire stomps his foot on the break and we lurch to a halt. His mouth falls open.

“The fruit looks spectacularly good!” he exclaims. “I’ve never seen it look so good!” ●

Marie Telling assisted with reporting in French.

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On his tiny family farm, Neal Carter invented an apple he thinks can help improve global health, minimize food waste, and change the agricultural landscape forever. But will anyone actually eat it?

By Stephanie M. Lee

On a cloudless September morning, the world’s most infamous apple farmer sat down at a table and carved into a $5 million Golden Delicious.

Harvest had arrived early here in the verdant Okanagan Valley, 50 miles north of the British Columbia border, and fat, shiny apples were practically tumbling off their branches. But the apple Neal Carter was neatly slicing into here on his awning-covered, plant-lined patio wasn’t one of the ones his family orchard sells to distributors around the world — in fact, it wasn’t one any grocery shopper has encountered before.

This apple had been carefully grown somewhere in Washington state, the result of millions of dollars and two decades of labor. Break apart its unremarkable surface to reveal its flesh, wait long enough, and you’ll see what’s different: It remains pure white. It doesn’t start to brown right after you take a bite and leave it on the kitchen counter. In fact, it doesn’t start to brown until it molds or rots. It doesn’t bruise, either. Through a feat of genetic engineering, Carter’s apples hold on indefinitely to the pearly-white insides that inspired their name — the Arctic.

The Arctic was conceived by Carter’s company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, which he runs with his wife, Louisa, and four other full-time employees, newly under the umbrella of a large biotech company that bought it this year. It’s an intended solution to what Carter sees as two interrelated problems: First, millions of pounds of perfectly good apples get dumped every year because they look a little too bruised or brown, the victims of an instinctive human aversion to fruits and vegetables that aren’t smooth, shiny, and symmetrical. And at the same time, North American consumers, accustomed to 100-calorie packs and grab-and-go everything, have developed an impatience for food that can’t be quickly eaten. “An apple’s not convenient enough,” Carter, 58, with reddish hair graying at the temples, told me. “That’s the truth. The whole apple is too much of a commitment in today’s world.”

Taken together, these two trends mean that while apple consumption has flatlined in the United States for decades, a staggering amount of apples go wasted. That’s an obvious problem for apple farmers, but it’s also a problem for an increasingly crowded world, and a nation in which only 13% of Americans eat their recommended daily servings of fruit. The way Carter sees it, the Arctic is a solution to all that: nutritious, attractive, always ready to eat, sliced, dried, juiced, whole. Natural.

It’s an innocuous-enough-sounding answer to a very real question, presented by an eminently likable guy running a small family business. But the race to create the world’s most convenient apple — a race that fundamentally blurs the distinction between natural and unnatural — won’t be won without a fight, and getting to the Arctic was far from easy. Browning is a natural and common mechanism in fruit, one that has evolved over millennia; counteracting it isn’t exactly like flipping a switch. And even if the science had been simple, Carter would still have had to contend with forces arguably stronger: a vocal movement against genetically modified organisms in general and the Arctic in particular, and a slew of competitors also hoping to make the apple more attractive to consumers. All of this was made harder by his total budget of roughly $5 million for the whole project, a tiny fraction of what biotech-food giants would spend on a single crop.

Even though there’s no evidence that the Arctic is unsafe for consumption — and leading scientific bodies and loads of studies have concluded that genetically modified foods are as safe as conventionally bred foods — will people want to eat an apple they know is engineered not to brown? Will people accept food visibly changed by technology? Up until now, genetic engineering’s benefits may have seemed abstract to the average consumer. Though GM corn, soybean, and canola make their way into animal feed and all kinds of processed foods, only small amounts of a few such crops (papaya, sweet corn, zucchini, squash) are actually eaten directly by humans. So while many people eat genetically modified foods all the time, they’re rarely forced to look at them, to really consider the engineering that went into giving their food the properties it has.

The Arctic will change that. If consumers do embrace Carter’s invention, it’ll be an indication that they may also be ready for other kinds of GM foods in the works, like heart-healthy purple tomatoes and cancer-fighting pink pineapples. If they don’t, it’ll be 19 years of work and millions of dollars down the drain for a product that consumers are afraid to buy.

The Arctic won approval in the U.S. and Canada this spring, but it won’t roll into supermarkets for a few years. So I drove to British Columbia to be among the first people in the world to try one. My host smashed an Arctic Golden Delicious against its regular counterpart, carved them into identical pieces, and waited.

In the mid-’70s — long before the Arctic and the outcry against it — Carter took a year off from the University of British Columbia to travel with his brother around rural parts of the developing world. In Egypt, Carter watched workers use crude machines to scoop water out of the Nile and pour it into an irrigation ditch. That’s a lot of work, he thought. Don’t these guys know there’s a pump?

The experience would spark in him a lifelong interest in solving world problems with agricultural ingenuity. He returned home, daunted at the challenges farmers face in producing food for a population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The crisis of insufficient and unequally distributed food and water is becoming acute since most of the world’s available farmable land is already being farmed, and rivers, lakes, and inland seas are disappearing. Soils are eroding. Climate change is wreaking havoc on temperatures and rainfall patterns.

Whether genetically modified crops have improved yields is debatable, but Carter and other experts believe they can be a — even if not the — solution. And they see genetic engineering as the latest iteration of a process that started thousands of years ago, when farmers began selectively breeding plants and animals for traits such as faster growth or bigger seeds. Apples in particular have been transformed dramatically by commercial cultivation and serendipitous acts of nature over the last two millennia. The apples grocery store shoppers pluck off shelves in 2015 are vastly different from the ones first discovered in Kazakhstan, or even the ones grown by Johnny Appleseed in the 19th century.

“Can we afford to not embrace a life-saving technology like agricultural biotechnology?” Carter asked in a 2012 TEDx Talk. Plant genomics research “is leading us to be able to develop new crops that meet real-world problems like drought, saline soils, poor water quality, and many, many more … This is a huge challenge and biotech crops are leading the way and allowing us to address it.”

In 1982, Carter graduated with a bio-resource engineering degree and married Louisa, a forestry major. He joined Agrodev, an international agricultural development company that helps farmers adopt new technologies and build infrastructure. The two eventually settled in Summerland, a tiny, lakeside British Columbia town filled with wineries, and started their own orchard. By 1995, Agrodev was thinking about agricultural technologies of its own, so Carter went looking for ideas at the government-run Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland. There he met David Lane, a cherry and apple breeder newly in charge of crop biotechnology projects.

Lane had an idea on his mind. A team of Australian scientists had recently identified the biological process behind browning in potatoes, and Lane suspected the same force was at work in apples. In intact apple cells, enzymes called polyphenol oxidases, or PPO, stay separate from compounds called phenols. But as soon as a knife rips through the skin, as soon as air starts rushing in, the cell walls break down, the compounds mix, and the flesh deepens into shades of caramel. (This ancient process evolved so the flesh would release the seeds and allow them to propagate, Amit Dhingra, a Washington State University horticultural genomicist, told me.)

If there were a way to tone down PPO, Lane thought, it could plausibly slow or stop the browning process. No one knew how to do this, but Carter wanted to try. “If you’re a grower, you would understand immediately the amount of apples that are tossed out because of superficial scuff marks,” he said. “So there’s a huge cost to the grower, packer, shipper, retailer, processor, all the way down the value chain, and then, ultimately, I think most consumers understand the ‘yuck’ factor around apples going brown.”

They certainly do. In the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, more fruits and vegetables are lost or wasted than consumed across the supply chain, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. A study in the Journal of Consumer Affairs estimated that $15 billion in fresh and processed fruit was lost from the U.S. food supply in 2008 — about $9 billion at the consumer level and the rest at the retail level. Apples, the second-most consumed fresh fruit in the U.S. behind bananas, make up a good chunk of that waste: an estimated 1.3 billion pounds every year, or a $1.4 billion loss, with a sizable yet unknown portion due to off-coloring or soft spots.

Dave Henze of Holtzinger Fruit Company, which packs and ships apples from mostly family-owned and independent growers in Washington, estimates that bruising and browning force him to dump about 5% of his supply, or 2 million pounds, every year. “A lot of apples aren’t packed because maybe they don’t have the right shape or right color, but they’re a perfectly good eating apple,” he said. Some get juiced or sliced, but “there’s a huge amount of food that is thrown away or not used.”

Soon after Carter and Lane met, Agrodev lost interest in potato-browning. But Carter wouldn’t give up on apples. He licensed the Australian scientists’ technology, raised money from family and friends, got a grant from the Canadian government, and rented lab space in the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre. Now, looking back on November 1996, Carter can only describe himself as “naïve as hell.”

“David [Lane] made it all sound like it was going to be a lot easier than it was,” he recalled. “Classic scientist, right? ‘Oh yeah, two years and all this is done.’”

Long before the genetically engineered apple, there was a genetically engineered tomato. The Flavr Savr ripened more slowly, lasted longer, and in 1994, became the first commercially grown food with a genetic change that U.S. customers could see and feel. Since then, GMOs — mostly designed by agricultural behemoths like Monsanto and beloved by farmers for their ability to fight off pests, diseases, and drought in the field — have quickly and aggressively entered our food supply. Today, about 90% of all corn, soybeans, and cotton grown in the U.S. is genetically modified.

But as GMOs have grown pervasive, their opposition has become organized and vocal. Monsanto in particular became a high-profile symbol when it engineered some of its first crops to resist a weed killer it also made, which critics say forced farmers to buy its products, endangered the environment, and ultimately didn’t solve the problem it promised to solve: Weeds are now becoming immune to that weed killer. Activists stage worldwide rallies against Monsanto and protest in stores believed to carry its products. In 1999, scientists developed “Golden Rice” to counter vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness in up to half a million children in developing countries every year. Despite studies finding that the nutrient-rich rice is safe and boosts health, activists have destroyed a field trial in the Philippines, filed to block all field tests and feeding studies, and helped keep it off the market 16 years after its invention. In 2005, two organic food retailers launched the Non-GMO Project, which has gone on to label nearly 35,000 products as “GMO-free.” And in 2012, Canadian researchers, in the face of protests, gave up on genetically modifying pigs to produce less environmentally harmful manure.

Buoyed partly by a rising appetite, at least in certain circles, for food perceived or marketed as “natural” — locally grown, minimally processed, organic — supermarkets and manufacturers including Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods, General Mills, and Chipotle have banned or restricted GMOs. State and national legislators have passed or tried to pass GMO-labeling laws; Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont all require some form of GMO labeling. Earlier this year, the White House announced it would re-evaluate its regulatory process for bioengineered crops.

As the GMO debate raged on, Carter and his handful of scientists plugged away. They dabbled in peaches, apricots, cherries, and pears, but ultimately, their budget forced them to focus on just two Arctic varieties, one sweet and the other tart: the Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. “Neal never gave up, ever,” Louisa said.

Until its sale, Okanagan Specialty Fruits was a tiny operation, unlike the mega-corporations that spend an estimated $136 million on developing and getting approval for just one GMO. And in many ways, it still is. Headquarters is essentially the Carters’ home, where family and work are indistinguishable. Over lunch, I sat with Louisa, 57, the co-founder and chief financial officer, and Joel, their 28-year-old son who helps part-time, in their kitchen as they chatted about the work left to do and an upcoming wedding. Apple-shaped magnets pinned family photos to the fridge, next to biotech-themed magnetic poetry (“agriculture and genetically modified biotechnology is exciting research”) and a political cartoon poking fun at the Arctic. A running tally of the harvest was scribbled on the chalkboard near the home office where Carter can be found when not in the fields. Carter estimates he’s worked 60 to 80 hours a week for the last 20 years. “Other people might say, ‘If you work out the net-present value of what we put in and what’s going on, we better quit,’” Lane said. “But not Neal.”

Petunias set Carter’s breakthrough in motion.

In the late 1980s, a biologist tried to darken purple petunias with an extra copy of the pigmentation gene — but the flowers bloomed white. Something had made the genes cancel, rather than enhance, each other.

The underlying biology, unlocked by Nobel Prize–winning scientists in 1998, involves how genes are regulated in plants and animals. Messenger RNA instructs the cell to create proteins, the building blocks of tissues and organs. It turns out there’s a natural mechanism — RNA interference, as it’s called — that can silence those instruction-carrying molecules. Carter’s team made copies of the browning-controlling genes, slightly modified such that they would trigger RNA interference, and stuck them into the apple genome. As counterintuitive as it sounds, the extra set of genes ultimately prevents the original genes from being expressed.

It’s an elegant solution. But the science wasn’t always clear, and the company ditched hundreds of test fruit before the Arctic Golden Delicious, №743, and the Arctic Granny Smith, №784, in 2004. Carter says Arctics can last up to four weeks with refrigeration, though they still mold and decay eventually. In September, he and I were munching slices of apples that’d been picked the previous fall, cut in January, dried, and never refrigerated. He showed off photos of Arctics ground into neon-bright juices and smoothies.

Carter talks about farming the way kindergarten teachers talk about graduation day. “You see something grow all season long — and boom, there it is, a bin full of apples heading to be packed and off to the marketplace,” he told me. “You get a sense you’re contributing.”

Here on his orchard, clad in a blue fleece and square glasses, Carter looks and acts more like an earnest dad than a mad scientist. But if anything can make a Bond villain out of an apple farmer, it might be the pitched, protracted, and at times deeply personal battle over GMOs. As the Carters planted trees and tinkered with seeds, they increasingly bumped up against a movement that was suspicious not just of GMOs, but of the Arctic in particular.

In 1999, protesters chopped down 652 of the Carters’ personal, non-Arctic trees. In 2006, the Carters changed the name from Okanagan Biotechnology Inc. to Okanagan Specialty Fruits in anticipation of criticism (“We realized the ‘biotech’ handle was a tough one,” Carter said). But the vitriol was unleashed in full view when the company submitted requests to four regulatory agencies in the U.S. and Canada to approve the apple for sale.

“This is ridiculous. Fruit is supposed to brown and go bad, it is part of life,” read one of more than 178,000 letters, most negative, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 2012 to 2014. “To change the apple from how it was intended to be could change the way the apple affects us down the road and the harmful effects might not be seen for a couple generations or more.” “Genetically modified food is poison and the biggest threat to our health on this planet! No to GMO apples!!!!!!!” More than 461,000 people also signed anti-Arctic petitions to the USDA in late 2013 and 2014.

Outside the biotech industry’s Chicago convention in 2013, a protester in a gas mask dropped apples into a cart as another tipped it over, yelling, “They put poison on those apples!” Anti-GMO sites disseminated images of apples with syringes and fangs. In a “fact sheet” for the public, Friends of the Earth warned, “From apple pie to baby’s first applesauce and the apple in your child’s lunchbox, apples are a core part of a natural, healthy diet. However, apples are about to become not-so-natural, and consumers, especially parents and other caregivers, may soon want to think twice about that apple a day.” Food and Water Watch warned of danger to the Rosh Hashanah custom of dipping apples in honey. “By next year, something could be sadly amiss with our annual tradition. Our apples could be genetically engineered and our honey could be somewhat endangered.” The U.S. Apple Association’s current stance on the Arctic is that “the choice, very simply, is up to consumers.”

Okanagan Specialty Fruits goes on the offensive by regularly talking to the media, blogging, and answering commenters’ questions. Even in defending its existence to a skeptical public, the company is relentlessly cheerful. “Yesterday we used cookie cutters to make some apple fish, stick those in some blue jello!” Carter joked on Reddit.

But these efforts do little to appease opponents’ criticism. “It’s clever marketing to use the word ‘Arctic’ for white and pure,” Martha Crouch, a biologist and consultant for the anti-GMO group Center for Food Safety, told me. “But in fact … it’s deceptive.”

Now that the apples have been approved, the biggest threat to the Arctic is a consumer boycott, whether formal or informal. “We know it’s not a health concern of any kind,” said Mark Powers, vice president of the Northwest Horticultural Council, which represents the Pacific Northwest fruit tree industry. “It really comes down to perception and marketability.” It’s also unclear whether farmers will want to grow Arctics; they may have problems growing or sending them to countries that restrict GMOs, like parts of the European Union and Japan. Okanagan Specialty Fruits says it’s heard from many interested growers, but won’t name them due to their fear of industry pushback.

Tim Dressel, a fourth-generation apple farmer in New Paltz, New York, told me, “GMO science, despite what a lot of people think, is a really amazing technology … and certainly not something to be afraid of per se. But with the general attitude towards GMOs right now, bringing apples into the mix is not necessarily something we need to do, especially for something that is only strictly a cosmetic issue.”

Indeed, how big a deal is browning, really? “As if this was a huge societal problem that needed to be solved,” Crouch said, laughing. She and her organization argue that all that time and money would be better spent on educating people to stop wasting food and keep produce fresh in old-fashioned ways.

But then again, maybe not. After all, browning and bruising aren’t problems just in apples. In 2008, American retailers and consumers were throwing out 3.7 billion pounds of fresh potatoes a year, a $1.8 billion loss. That spurred J.R. Simplot, one of the nation’s largest privately held companies, to create the Innate potato. Much like the Arctic, the Innate’s bruising-controlling enzyme is turned off. Also much like the Arctic, it’s faced protests as it’s won regulatory approvals over the last year. But Simplot sensed a need. “The number-one consumer complaint for fresh potatoes is bruising,” spokesman Doug Cole told me.

Carter isn’t the only one working on inventing a more attractive apple: Over the last 15 years, while Okanagan Specialty Fruits was quietly working on the Arctic, sliced, preserved apples turned into a multimillion-dollar industry. And for Carter, that’s a problem.

Sterile, just shy of freezing, and alive with the roar of a hundred machines, the 60,000-square-foot Crunch Pak factory feels like a comically large operating room for apples. Red, green, and gold orbs bob through chutes of water, march into slicing machines, and plop onto conveyor belts in the form of crescent-shaped chunks. Inspectors in masks, gloves, and smocks then send them to their final destinations: laser-perforated plastic bags and lunch trays sold across America.

If the Arctic is gunning to be the most convenient, easiest-to-eat, longest-lasting apple around, Crunch Pak, the nation’s largest provider of sliced apples, seems like a good place to check out the competition. Located in the sunbaked Wenatchee Valley in Central Washington, it chops up 6 million slices a day.

My guide, the friendly and fast-talking Marketing Director Tony Freytag, founded Crunch Pak with two apple growers in 2000. Early pioneers in the apple-slice business, the trio initially thought, “It’s going to be hard enough to sell this idea because people are going to say, ‘It’s just an apple,’” Freytag recalled. “But we saw where convenience was going.”

It was a prescient observation. American apple consumption has dropped off significantly in the last three decades, from an average of 20 pounds per person per year between 1986 and 1991 to just 16 between 2006 and 2011. Meanwhile, other produce transformed into ultra-convenient forms skyrocketed in popularity. In 1986, a California farmer cut up ugly, broken carrots and single-handedly launched the baby carrot craze. Earthbound Farm in California pioneered bagged lettuce in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Apples missed that wave.

Crunch Pak’s apple slices aren’t genetically modified. But they’re not entirely natural, either. Their magic ingredient is NatureSeal, a proprietary powder of calcium salts and vitamin C invented in the late 1990s. Mixed with water and sprayed on produce, it extends the shelf life of sliced fruits for at least three weeks with refrigeration before they start browning. And it’s been a blockbuster: Crunch Pak’s slices have been sold in virtually every major supermarket — Wal-Mart, Kroger, Target, Sam’s Club, Costco, Publix, Safeway, Albertson’s — and fast-food joints like Carl’s Jr., Arby’s, Chick-fil-A, and Denny’s. The privately held company says it racks up in sales in the low nine digits.

The day of my visit was especially busy due to the harvest, so the 800,000 pounds of apples sliced that week were fresh off the fields. But otherwise, Crunch Pak relies on a lot of fruit that was picked up to a year prior, Freytag told me. Harvest happens but once a year, and the industry has devoted almost unbelievable time and effort to stretching out that supply for as long as possible to meet never-ending consumer demand. “The goal is,” Freytag said, “if you eat something in July, it’s going to be just as good as if you ate it in October right after you harvested it.”

A ripening apple takes in oxygen and gives off carbon dioxide. To slow that process, growers and pickers put them in controlled atmosphere storage rooms, the fruit equivalent of hibernation caves, until the time comes to be sliced or shipped to retailers. The temperature is almost freezing, the oxygen severely reduced, the humidity relatively high; a human couldn’t breathe. Even this setup alone can’t feed appetites year-round, which is why retailers import apples from countries like New Zealand and Chile, whose harvest happens during North America’s off-season.

The Crunch Pak factory is to Carter’s farm as Disneyland is to a jungle gym. It is an elaborate and precise operation manned by 900 employees, 24 hours a day, six days a week. Computers and cameras vigilantly monitor every condition, from temperature to humidity to contamination, to spot any risk of spoiling and bruising.

All this chilling, slicing, spraying, bagging, and shipping make the definition of “fresh” a little awkward. “You would never think to go to your refrigerator and slice an apple and cut it up in pieces and put it in a baggie and come back in 10 days and say ‘I’ll have that,’” Freytag admitted. “That’s not a visual that we want.”

Refrigeration and preservatives aside, pre-manufactured slices can seem silly. How hard is eating an apple out of your hand — or slicing it yourself? Isn’t pre-slicing rewarding laziness? “Slicing up apples and putting them in plastic bags to turn them into a fast-food item seems to be going in the wrong direction to me,” Crouch, of the Center for Food Safety, said, “rather than helping people reconnect with whole foods.”

But in some cases, the alternative might be eating little or no fresh fruit at all. When Cornell University researchers visited upstate New York schools, they learned that braces and small mouths aren’t ideal for chomping into whole fruit; teenage girls said doing so was “unattractive,” according to their 2013 study. So they gave fruit slicers to eight elementary schools, and on average they sold 60% more apples. The experiment was repeated at three middle schools, where average daily apple sales went up 71% compared to non-slicing schools. Significantly more students also actually ate the apples, instead of throwing them away. The stark results prodded the Wayne Central School District, which participated in the study, to start offering sliced apples full-time to its 2,300 students.

In a way, a Crunch Pak slice and an Okanagan Arctic are mirror images. The first comes off the tree “natural,” then is subjected to a battery of chemicals and machines designed to make it more palatable. The second grows with its engineering already built in, and then can be eaten plain. But both companies are rivals in the race to make apples convenient and fresh for as long as possible, and both approaches are fundamentally similar: They’re complicated, expensive inventions used by humans to wrest control of nature, united by the underlying principle that rather than adapt American eating habits to the fruit we have, we should adapt the fruit to the eating habits we have.

Back on the Carters’ Summerland patio, I found myself reaching right over the normal, slightly browned Golden Delicious slices to snatch a white Arctic, succumbing to some deep preference for whatever looked freshest, prettiest — and easiest.

“Most people don’t really recognize that fact, but there’s a lot of people who will only eat an apple after it’s sliced,” Carter said, watching me nibble on one slender piece after another. Otherwise, “you’ve got to get that knife out, that cutting board out, slice it up, deal with the core. People say, ‘I’m going to buy grapes or something else I can just pop in my mouth.’ Those are the guys we’re going after.”

You might call the other threat to the Arctic the accidental Arctics. These are a handful of apple varieties, crossbred in recent years, that somehow ended up with lowered PPO. There’s the RubyFrost, the Eden, and the big golden Opal, which is not-so-subtly advertised as a “non-GMO apple” that “naturally doesn’t brown,” and “the first U.S. apple variety to be verified by the Non-GMO Project.” Not surprisingly, Carter isn’t a fan of these newcomers. He doubts they’re actually non-browning. He calls the Opal “not a terribly good eating apple” and points out that his technology can transform any (tasty) variety.

But to those concerned about genetic engineering, these apples may sound like ideal alternatives.

GMO opponents like the fact that non-browning apples such as the Opal were created through the marriage of two familiar fruits — not by a gene-silencing technique like RNA interference, which they worry could change the genes of someone who eats food altered by it.

Those making this argument often cite a 2011 study in Cell Research. A team led by Nanjing University in China reported finding bits of rice RNA in the blood of men, women, and mice, which was surprising: Never before had these types of molecules been found to survive digestion and cross into the bloodstream. Even more alarming, the scientists reported a sign of bodily change and perhaps harm: One molecule appeared to shut down a gene involved in removing unhealthy cholesterol.

The study never mentions GM crops. Nevertheless, activists interpreted it to mean that the same kind of genetic engineering behind the Arctic could allow small RNA molecules to manipulate human gene expression in potentially harmful ways. A dozen environmental and consumer organizations cited the paper in asking corporations like Burger King, Subway, and Baskin Robbins to boycott Arctics. Baby-food maker Gerber, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s responded to say they had no plans to use them.

Yet many biologists derided that reaction as overly cautious at best and alarmist at worst. Attempts at replication of the study showed no more than trace amounts of RNAs in the blood of monkeys, mice, honeybees, and athletes, even after they ate food chock-full of those molecules. Some other, controversial studies argue that small plant RNAs, somewhat similar in function to the ones that suppress browning in the Arctic, may affect various species’ physiology under specific conditions. “Of all the different genetic modification strategies you can use, RNA interference is probably the one that has the potential to be the safest and most specific,” said Kenneth Witwer, a Johns Hopkins University molecular biologist who was among those who failed to replicate the findings, adding, “The weight of the evidence in the field is that this is not a phenomenon we have to worry about.”

Perhaps the more significant point is that no technology is risk-free. Even crossbreeding, the classic agricultural practice, is unpredictable because genes are transferred at random. “If you cross two red apples, you can get some yellow apples just because there’s dominant genes and recessive genes,” said Susan Brown, who leads Cornell University’s apple-breeding program. She recently crossed two breeds, certain she’d get extra flavor. “I ended up with a lot of progeny that tasted like soap.”

In the late 1960s, a research team crossbred the Lenape potato, only to discover it was genetically predisposed to produce a lot of an alkaloid called solanine — a natural defense mechanism that, in large doses, can kill humans. Celery naturally contains psoralens, irritant chemicals that ward off pests and diseases. But grocery store workers have experienced skin rashes after handling celery bred to have increased psoralens.

GMO critics take issue with how the U.S. and Canada evaluate the safety of GMOs for consumption: by the product, not the process by which it’s made. Developers are asked to identify the new genetic traits; new toxins, allergens, or proteins; and nutritional changes. If regulators conclude that food from the new plant variety will be as safe as food from conventionally bred varieties, as in the Arctic’s case, the crop is approved.

It’s true the system is set up to catch established, not unknown, toxins and allergens — and, again, no technology is risk-free. But genetic engineering introduces relatively few proteins compared to other methods of producing new traits. And after two decades, there hasn’t been any credible evidence to suggest that GMOs harm human health.

Okanagan Specialty Fruits likely wouldn’t have existed if not for the Carters’ siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends, like Carter’s former Agrodev boss and local growers — the bulk of the company’s roughly 45 shareholders. But that support came with a unique pressure. “It put some responsibility on my shoulders, because they’re not rich people,” Carter said. When he felt pessimistic at times, he’d suggest that they hold off on investing; they’d respond, “No, no, no, Neal, we trust you; you’re going to get this done,” he recalled.

In the winter and spring, when regulatory approvals seemed all but sure, Carter began to realize that, as much money and effort as his little company had poured into the first 19 years, their resources would almost certainly not be enough to get the Arctic to growers around the world, advertise it, and sell it. He began talking to Intrexon, a $4.5 billion synthetic biology company with an eclectic set of businesses that engineer cow reproductive technologies, fast-growing fish, and disease-curbing mosquitoes. The team hadn’t necessarily been looking to sell, but they realized that doing so could finally reward their investors, some of whom had died over the years. In February, two weeks after the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the Arctic, Intrexon bought Okanagan Specialty Fruits for $41 million.

For an operation that from the start prided itself on being tiny and beholden to no one, the sale to a big biotech corporation seemed like quite a change. “Okanagan Specialty Fruits is a small, grower-led company with just seven employees, which often makes us seem like a small fish in a very big pond,” it blogged in 2013, referring to bioengineered food giants like Monsanto, Syngenta, and Bayer. Two years later, Carter told me that despite the sale, “We still have the same team in place. We’re still doing all the same things.”

Intrexon is not Monsanto. Still, CEO Randal Kirk sees it as building a brighter, more efficient world in which food is either ultra-unique (the Arctic) or ultra-cheap (salmon that grow in half the time). “I don’t think our size or our capital should be counted against us by virtue of those facts alone,” he said in an interview. “I would simply ask people eventually to judge us according to what we do, what we offer. In the case of the Arctic apple, I think everybody who has tried it has liked it, and that encourages us greatly.”

Under Intrexon’s wing, Okanagan Specialty Fruits is beginning to distribute saplings to growers. Next, its scientists are considering using their technology to alter other apple varieties, or turn off browning in pears and cherries, or make peaches resist diseases. The possibilities are many. After all these years in the field, it’s almost time for Carter to think about projects besides the Arctic. But for now, he’s just happy to finally start sending Arctics on their way to grocers, restaurants, and homes. “Does it taste like a GM food?” he asked me outside his house that day, the last slivers of the Arctic still pale in the summer sun. “Really. Can you distinguish it?” And the truth was, no. It tasted sweet, tender, and crisp. It tasted like an apple. ●

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

Say Hello To The Apple That Never Browns was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Once derided as a pricey fad, Nathan Myhrvold’s $625 Modernist Cuisine volumes have rewritten restaurant meals worldwide in the last five years.

By Dan Vergano

The most important cookbook of this century has been called “mere sensationalism”, a “40-pound” monster”, and the work of “cerebral nimrods who live in a la-la land of gels and immersion circulators.”

Tomorrow, it might also explain that daring nosh added to your Thanksgiving: the Korean barbecue chicken wings, the whipped foam soufflé, or the Baked Alaska crisped with a blowtorch.

Published in 2011, millionaire scientist Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine lifted the lid on the secret world of experimental gastronomy to reveal the secrets of low temperature cooking, high pressure crockpots, and the chemistry of the perfect pot roast. Lavishly illustrated, the 2,843 pages of the five tomes were priced at $625 a set, and came with a ring binder of recipes.

“In the dance of cook and eater, some cooks have some new moves,” wrote the New Yorker’s John Lanchester, on the book’s publication. But even the kindest critics wondered if the books would sell, or if the notion of experimental testing in the kitchen with fancy new gadgets would catch on.

A year later, the book had reportedly sold at least 45,000 copies and netted $20 million in sales. Myhrvold, a Microsoft millionaire and a trained chef, had rolled the dice to produce the cook books he wanted, working with a team of chefs over three years of experimentation.

“I’m thrilled with how Modernist Cuisine turned out,” Myhrvold told BuzzFeed News by email. “When I published the book, there was no way to do market research on how our book would be received as there was nothing like it to reference.”

At the time the book came out, the “eat local” movement was ascendant in culinary circles and Myhrvold’s project was often seen as its polar opposite, a coolly rational attempt to to take the guesswork out of cooking. But he said that the book’s true aim was to inject more creativity into cooking.

“My goal in writing Modernist Cuisine was to help readers understand the science of cooking and then to apply this knowledge to making great food,” Myrhvold said. “When people understand the science, that actually gets the creative juices going.”

Physicist and food researcher Peter Barham of the United Kingdom’s University of Bristol told BuzzFeed News the book’s exotica — caramelizing with a blowtorch — overshadowed Modernist Cuisine’s most notable achievement: It compiled extensive experimentation into one source. Ingredients were blended and measured down to the hundredth of a milligram. “What they showed people was how to use new tools and ideas taken from top restaurants and let anyone pretty much do it.”

“Plenty of restaurants have two copies, one dirty in the kitchen and one clean in the back for study,” Barham added. “The reference (cooking) temperatures and times in the books alone make them invaluable.”

The book did well enough that Myhrvold, has assembled another team to tackle baking in a sequel that will publish next year, Modernist Cuisine’s Melissa Lukach told BuzzFeed News. The same sort of exhaustive research on breads and pastries is promised. “We’re going to answer the question of whether it is the water that explains New York’s bagels,” she promised.

Outside of restaurants, “There is certainly a lot of momentum with research that investigates multi-sensory interactions in foods,” John Prescott, the editor of the scientific journal Food Quality and Preference told BuzzFeed News by email. A scientific journal, Flavour, is devoted entirely to the topic.

Within academic labs investigating flavors, Prescott said, Modernist Cuisine doesn’t play a big role. “Certainly it’s considered a mammoth effort; it doesn’t have an impact on science though.”

But for cooks at home, “This is the sort of idea that will filter down to everyday food over time — as a trivial example, consider that foams have crept into menus even at local restaurants,” Prescott said.

“At high end restaurants, we continue to see stronger influences, new cooking techniques and a general openness to science-based ideas.”

Check out more articles on BuzzFeed.com!

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

Nathan Myhrvold’s Scientific Cuisine Is Still Cooking was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whether she’s comfortable with it or not, the Barefoot Contessa star has one of the most devoted fandoms among cookbook giants. An unprecedented look inside her picture-perfect empire.

I have been inside the barn, the barn, and I can tell you this: Inside, it was beautiful. I didn’t grow up with religious institutions, really, but there was something about the space that was, assuredly, holy. When I first entered it, I leaned back, mouth agape, and took in the ceilings, which were painted white and bisected by big, beautiful, old-looking beams, and there were little windows up near the top through which daylight streamed. The day was also beautiful. Eighties. Low humidity. The traffic going into East Hampton on this late August weekday morning was trucks, mostly pickup trucks, with saplings in their beds, and mowers.

The floor inside the kitchen side of the barn was blonde wood and also beautiful. I’d heard about them before, these floors. People who entered the barn were to be aware of the floors and very careful upon them. Crews, especially photo crews or video crews — and there are lots of crews that go in and out of the barn, given that they film the show there, and photograph the books — are instructed that if any equipment touches the floor, it should be placed upon blankets. Again, this morning, we were reminded of the blankets. They were beautiful too — white and cozy. I imagine to fall into them would be like leaping atop a Great Pyrenees.

She entered. Her shirt today was blue. Her hair had been blow-dried — she later told me it’s one of her luxuries, getting her hair blow-dried whenever she can. Her face had been done. She approached us, and to me it felt awkward and this made sense: I assume it must always be awkward, uncomfortable, bothersome even, having people in your beautiful barn, setting up their equipment on your beautiful blonde floor. Which isn’t to say she wasn’t gracious; she absolutely was. She approached me and the photo crew and shook each of our hands. She smiled. She was, obviously, nice.

She began to talk about the barn, which has been around for nine or so years now. Before that, they shot the show in her actual house. We could see it through the French windows across a green lawn, the iconic shingle-style farmhouse. She described how they’d film the show for six weeks at a time, two times a year, and during that period she and Jeffrey would be stuffed upstairs. She said if they’d gone on doing it that way, her husband was going to divorce her. She laughed and everyone else laughed and she clarified the divorce thing was a joke. Everybody nodded. Of course the idea of divorcing Jeffrey was a joke.

She talked about how she bought the land where the barn was built after eyeing it for years. When they finally bought it, she said, “Jeffrey said he thought I was going to build a little cottage. One day an enormous hole appeared!” She laughed and we laughed. She leaned back to admire the ceiling and so we all did too, looking again at the whiteness, the beams, the light.

But she had already pivoted, away, to the kitchen, assessing everything that her assistant had set out on the countertop — a magnificent countertop. There was a deep, wide sink in the center and two large cutting boards on each side of it. There were containers of wooden spoons and spatulas. Kale that her assistant had begun to prep. A bowl of eggs, a bowl of garlic, another of long shallots. Everything was tidy, and accessible, and abundant.

The object she had picked up first, though, was perhaps the least fancy-seeming thing in the space: It was the carafe from the white, well-worn coffeemaker. She flipped on the tap and filled it with water. It didn’t really seem to matter that this was the task she was doing. Object in hand, in her kitchen, she seemed to relax.

The coffeemaker was soon hissing, and a pitcher of milk had appeared by its side. Ina eyed and grabbed a silver tray from a shelf and set several white mugs on it. On the previously emailed schedule for the day was a 10:30 meeting, during which it was noted there would be coffee and scones. The scones had already been set out, and Ina Garten herself, it seemed, was the one making the coffee. That morning, I recall I felt pleasure that she made her own coffee. That she was a person just like you or me.

Ina Garten likes to say that what she likes about her life is that every day she wakes up and she gets to recipe-test with her assistants, whom she adores. There are two: The first, named Barbara, is closer to Ina’s own age (Ina is 68), and was out of town that day; the second, Lidey, is 25.

Lidey stood a head and a half taller than Ina. She was lanky and thin and blonde and immensely likable. She seemed green but very competent. Lidey, who’d been with Ina for three years, was not a professional chef; that wouldn’t be the point. Part of why Lidey was brought on, in fact, was because Barbara had worked with Ina for so many years, she’d gotten too good at cooking her recipes.

Today they were testing a Waldorf salad, one that will likely appear in Ina’s 2018 book (not to be confused with her latest, Cooking for Jeffrey, which published in late October). This was, Ina and Lidey guessed aloud to each other, the fifth or sixth time they’d tested this Waldorf salad. Each woman set herself behind one of the great cutting boards and began prepping various ingredients, referencing a printout of the recipe.

Lidey was working with the frisée, and Ina, looking up, realized Lidey didn’t know how to properly prep it. She joined Lidey at her station. Taking the vegetable from her, Ina explained that the white core is hidden, that you have to turn the plant inside out before you cut out the root. She flipped it, like a ballerina removing a tutu over her head, and then, with a paring knife, de-stemmed it. “I know how to use frisée because I’ve done it before,” Ina said, “but Lidey hasn’t used it, so now I know what questions she has about frisée.”

She took a Sharpie and made a note on the recipe page. Other notes were added as they worked: Ina, for example, would have never thought to tell the people at home to grate the apple only right before you’re going to serve the salad. Lidey set down the apple she’d begun grating, asked why, and Ina replied that it would brown. I knew this already. Perhaps Ina herself had taught me that fact; like a lot of people, I’ve spent untold hours of my life watching Ina Garten on television. But I held my tongue.

The CD player had gotten to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and Ina beckoned someone to turn up the music, saying, “I need tunes to cook.” Lidey toasted Marcona almonds and arranged bacon on a rack on a sheet pan. Ina weighed and then seasoned two chicken breasts and put them on another sheet pan. She spoke about how she had streamlined this recipe, so all three trays could go in the oven at the same temperature. Ina Garten’s recipes are never needlessly fussy. She doesn’t use techniques or ingredients she feels will alienate home cooks (as she likes to say, “It’s not some octopus eyeballs with seafoam”). She focuses on simple, quality ingredients, and strives to make everything as flavorful as possible. Her own recipe books, the dog-eared row of them, were in her kitchen. I later remarked to her how lovely that was to see, that she cooked from her own books, and she answered that of course she does. “But remember, I’ve written a thousand recipes,” she said. “Maybe 850 recipes. I can’t possibly know how much thyme goes into each one. I follow the recipe every single time I make a recipe. I don’t just throw things in.” Ina Garten uses her recipes for the same reason a lot of us do: They work.

Before she departed the room, Ina pointed to three white timers, indicating to Lidey: chicken, bacon, nuts. “How bad could this be?” she asked, and I felt my pulse quicken at hearing an actual quintessential Ina Garten rhetorical question in the flesh. Ina then walked away, telling Lidey she’d like her to make the eggs by herself, to make sure the instructions make sense.

Lidey had been a senior at Bowdoin in 2013 when she’d dreamed up this idea of working for Ina Garten. A good friend’s father is Ina’s attorney. We talked about the Hamptons, about what it’s like living there as a young person — she has a cottage nearby — especially during the 10 months of the year when there aren’t tourists in town. She got a Welsh terrier she named Winkie, which helps, she said. She took up bridge. We talked about the biggest things she’d learned since coming to work for Ina, like having an oven thermometer, like paying attention to timers. Panic flashed through her blue eyes as she said this, and she shot a quick look at the white row of them.

The other main room in the barn resembled a living room. The floor was stone and there was a great hearth. Again, white fluffy rugs were about. On each wall was an enormous library of books, almost entirely cookbooks. They were orderly, but they also seemed handled often. Post-its poked out of their pages.

In the middle of the room were two puffy orange sofas facing each other, with a puffy orange ottoman between them. Ina figured out which sofa I should sit on and chose a wooden chair for herself. It looked antique, delicate and unusual — its back tall and tapered. When I asked where it was from, she said she believed Belgium. She remarked about how comfortable it was and implored me to sit on it. She rose and I got up and sat on it. “Isn’t it comfortable?” she said, and I had to agree: For an upright old wooden chair it was astonishingly comfortable. We returned to our places and she put her feet up on the ottoman. She wore little slippers.

The first thing we talked about was how loyal her employees tend to be — how her other assistant Barbara worked for her for years, and how a bunch of Barbara’s family worked for her too, back when she had the store. (I later asked to interview Barbara and was declined.) “You’re loyal to people,” I said. She replied, “Good people. Good people. If you’re not really good, you’re off the bus.”

And then we talked about Cooking for Jeffrey. It is her 10th cookbook, and, unlike her previous ones, it incorporates many photos of the two of them, and single-page essays about phases in their marriage, steps in a myth many fans have memorized: Ina met Jeffrey when she was very young, just 16. She was visiting her brother at Dartmouth College, walking across campus. He saw her, figured out who she was, and got in touch. During their courtship she mailed him brownies. They married when she was 20. There’s a photo of them on their wedding day at the beginning of the book; they’re cherubic. They lived in North Carolina. He was in the Army and served in the Vietnam War. It was during a camping trip one summer in Europe — especially in France — when Ina really began to fall in love with food, with cooking from quality ingredients. Back home, she bought Julia Child’s book and started cooking through it.

They lived in DC. He worked in the White House; so did she, for four years, drafting policy papers on nuclear energy out of the Office of Management and Budget. It was a job she described as exciting the first year, and less so the second when she realized she was working on all the same papers again, and even less so the third. She was nearly 30 and she realized she wanted something else. That’s when she saw the listing in the New York Times for the Barefoot Contessa food store for sale in Westhampton Beach — a place she’d never been — and they drove out and saw the 400-square-foot space. For fun, as she tells it, they put in a low offer (she’d been renovating and selling houses some in DC), and to their surprise, the owner called the next day and said it was hers. (“O.M.G.,” she wrote in Cooking for Jeffrey, “I just bought a business!”)

She ran it for 20 years — eventually moving to a larger East Hampton location. In 1999, she sold it to the chef and the manager, and kept an office above the store as she figured out what to do next. She considered the stock market. She considered real estate. While she passed the time, she wrote a cookbook — something Jeffrey suggested she do — called The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. It was a best-seller, and it was followed by another nine best-sellers. (Cooking for Jeffrey is currently topping the New York Times list.) There are 11 million copies of her books in print, and then of course there’s the Barefoot Contessa television show, which has aired on Food Network since 2002. She has over a million followers on Facebook and is approaching that on Instagram. When we talked through her biography, I asked Ina if, when she wrote that first book, she ever imagined she’d become a celebrity.

“Well, I don’t know that I am,” she said.

“You definitely are,” I said.

“I never imagined that I’d be writing 10 cookbooks, for sure.”

I asked Ina what had inspired her to make Cooking for Jeffrey more personal than her previous cookbooks. That first one was about the store, and then there were books about things like parties, going back to basics, dining family-style, making things ahead, Paris, simplicity.

“It’s such a love letter,” I remarked.

“It is. I meant it that way,” she said.

“How did you decide to turn more that way?”

“I think he’s remarkable,” she said. “He’s a really important part of my career. How many people get to be married to the dean of the business school at Yale who gives you such good advice but doesn’t impose himself on you?” She described how he’d come to her on occasion with three ideas of things she could do, and before he could even describe all of them, she’d be off and running with the first. “He’s an incredibly kind and generous guy,” she said. I had already asked Ina’s publicists if I could interview Jeffrey but was turned down. Fans won’t be surprised that he wasn’t home in East Hampton when I was there. Much of the copy in her books and action on the show is focused around the activity of making Jeffrey dinner when he gets home from New Haven (or wherever) on Friday nights. That, or cooking for her (occasionally gay male) neighbors, which perhaps contributes to her considerable number of fans who are gay men.

A profile of Jeffrey Garten in Johns Hopkins Magazine this spring titled “Jeffrey Garten Is a Financier, Academic, and Author — and Yes, He’s Married to the Barefoot Contessa” described him:

He knows a thing or two about world affairs. He’s a former U.S. Army paratrooper who’s held senior positions in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations. He first wrote reports on developing countries for then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and he later represented U.S. economic interests in emerging markets like India, Brazil, and China. As a vice president and later managing director at Lehman Brothers, he specialized in debt restructuring in Latin America and built up Lehman’s investment banking business in Asia, which involved restructuring some of the world’s largest shipping companies. To complete his career trifecta, Garten entered academia in the mid-1990s and managed to turn around the moribund business school at Yale, where he still teaches. He’s also a businessman who co-founded an international consulting firm.

His sixth book was published this year by HarperCollins. It’s called From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives. Those lives include Genghis Khan, John D. Rockefeller, Margaret Thatcher, and Andrew Grove, a Hungarian Jew who fled Nazi oppression and immigrated to the US and became the CEO of Intel. (I later asked Ina whether her husband was in the CIA — something another journalist had joked about before. “No, of course he isn’t,” she said. “Jeffrey’s had such extraordinary jobs that I think people wonder how he got there. Funny explanation is ‘Everybody knows he’s in the CIA.’ And if he is I don’t know about it.”)

I asked Ina if she’d asked Jeffrey’s permission to write a book about the two of them, about their lives.

“He’s the most supportive person I’ve ever known in my life,” she answered. “I don’t think I ever asked his opinion. I probably just said, ‘This is the next book.’”

“Has he read it and such? Has he seen it?” I asked. I had an advance copy of it and was thinking specifically of a page toward the end called “Jeffrey’s all-time favorite dinners.”

“I don’t think he has yet,” she said. “I think he’ll wait until the book comes out.”

I asked how she starts a book, and she said each begins with her sitting down and thinking of, say, 75 or 100 recipes — things she’d like to eat. And it’ll be flexible. “I’ll go to a restaurant and say, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting, figs and prosciutto. I think I’ll make a pizza with figs and prosciutto,’’’ she explained. “I’ll read everything that I can from people whose work that I admire about pizza with figs and prosciutto, and then I’ll put them all away and make my own.” As she said this, the walls on either side of us, all those cookbooks, seemed to lean toward us, as if wondering who were the ones she respected.

She recalled that before she wrote the first book, she’d thought her publisher should hire a writer — but they insisted she do it. She’d thought it would be a really solitary process, making cookbooks, but it’s not; it’s very collaborative. Photo shoots are fun. And she doesn’t make the food look better for pictures; “no motor oil” is the phrase I’ve heard her say. I asked how she found writing itself.

“It’s pure torture. It’s never gotten easier. It’s just excruciating.”

We talked about Instagram. Lidey was the one who convinced her to do it, actually by just setting up an account and showing Ina what it would look like. That’s how Ina came around, and she now posts things as well (though sometimes because Lidey prompts her to). I asked Ina if she looked at Instagram herself.

“It’s the first thing that I do when I wake up in the morning,” she answered.

“Who do you follow?” I asked.

“Who do I follow?” She sort of laughed. “Taylor Swift?” I’d read before that she and Taylor Swift were friends of some kind.

“Are you internet friends or real-life friends?” I asked.

“I’ve had the unbelievable good fortune of meeting her a few times,” Ina said. “I think there’s nobody I admire more. She’s an extraordinarily talented, creative, principled woman. I just adore her.” She talked about how they met, which was at a Food Network photo shoot where celebrities got to pair up with their favorite Food Network stars, and Ina was excited Taylor chose her. “It was really sweet. She said, ‘I follow very few people, and you’re one of them.’ I said, ‘I follow very few people, and you’re one of them.’”

We talked about the others she followed — a friend who’s a stylist and photographer. Accounts that post paintings — old paintings, new paintings. A landscape architect who posts photos of gardens from around the world.

“Beautiful things,” I remarked.

“I like to see beautiful things,” she said. She added that she followed National Geographic and Danny Meyer. “I follow anything Danny Meyer does because I adore Danny Meyer.”

“Family and friends as well?” I asked.

“Interesting,” she said. “I follow winkiethewelsh and lideylikes.”

We talked about how else she spends her time online: She reads the New York Times. She reads New Yorker stories sometimes there, but prefers magazines in print. Books she reads both in print and digitally.

I asked about something I’d always found intriguing: When Ina and Jeffrey were living briefly in North Carolina while he was still in the Army, she had gotten her pilot’s license. I asked how she thought to do that: “My roommate in college was an aerospace engineer. She had a pilot’s license. So I always thought it was very cool.” She repeated a detail I’d read before, which was that back then, in the ’70s, they had to work to find an instructor in that state willing to teach a woman.

“What do you feel that women of your generation understand that maybe those of mine don’t?” I asked her.

“How different it was,” she said.

“How so?” I said.

“I grew up in an era when I wanted to fly an airplane and they wouldn’t find a woman who’d teach women to fly,” she answered. “I think women in your generation don’t realize how different it is now than it was then. Starting with a woman being a candidate for president.”

“How does that make you feel?” I asked her.

“It’s great. To me she’s a person who’s a candidate for president who happens to be a woman.”

I’d been thinking a lot about the similarities between Ina and Hillary, and I mentioned to Ina that they were born the same year. “The scrutiny she gets that’s so much higher than it’d be for a male candidate of the equivalent resume,” I said.

“Of course, of course,” she said.

I asked if she felt she was scrutinized more than a powerful man in her position would be, and she answered, “I work for myself, so it’s different. But I do know that there is a group of men — I don’t want to make a generalization — that don’t like successful women. That is changing, but it’s changing slowly. She has been incredibly tough standing up to that. And I admire her tenacity and her drive. And her interest. I think she’s just remarkable. Because nobody that’s not that strong could have put up with all that she’s put up with this year.” I asked if she wanted to say anything on record about Donald Trump and she declined.

The room’s lighting was soft. On a table by the door with a lamp sat a single photograph in a black frame, of Jeffrey, wearing sunglasses, smiling. There was a well-tended ficus tree and a sculpture. Outside the French windows was a smaller lawn, with a hedge and a large gurgling fountain. Ina wondered aloud whether lunch shouldn’t be served out there, but Lidey, passing through, informed Ina that it wasn’t shady outside. Ina resolved that lunch would be served inside. I had noticed Ina’s CDs by her cookbooks, a Taylor Swift album displayed. Before long, it was Taylor’s voice echoing through the barn.

Ina often says that those who come to eat with her are her actual friends. Today’s two guests certainly seemed friendly with her, or at least very glad for her hospitality, but they also were here on business. They’d done some shooting for Ina, time lapses of recipes set to a jaunty tune everyone seemed a bit sick of, ones that were later released on Instagram. Ina had already seen the videos, and as they began to play, it was clear she was pleased, generally, with the edits.

A video then played in which Ina appeared more, and a sound leapt from her, a displeased sound, when she saw herself walking through frame. (I later asked her about something I’d heard, which is that she’s never seen her own show, that she doesn’t watch it at all. “Oh god,” she said, seeming to shudder. “Have you ever?” I asked, and again she sort of viscerally reacted to the idea of it. “Oh no,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Oh, I just think if I had to watch the show, I’d never do it again. I just don’t understand it. I’m glad people like it. But I just can’t. Watching myself on TV.”)

The lunch guests next showed slightly longer videos, ones that included Ina talking. Ina stood, placing her hands over her hair and ears, and walked back to the kitchen. The rest of us continued sitting, tentatively, watching the videos that were still being screened. Ina began moving dishes from the sink to the dishwasher and running the disposal.

Jeffrey appeared in a few of the videos, in one boasting that he often meets people who introduce themselves as her greatest fan and he says no, he is her number one fan. In another, she and Jeffrey eat a panna cotta topped with caramel and rum. As he removes the spoon from his lips, Jeffrey says that it was the best dessert he’s ever had. It sounded like a totally genuine statement.

The Waldorf salad was served for lunch, on placemats, which Ina at first decided against, and then decided in favor of. Lidey quickly set those, along with white plates and napkins and forks, and produced chilled bottles of Pellegrino. Everyone paused once the table and the salad had been set, realizing Ina probably had an opinion about where everybody should sit. Ina pointed to each chair and said a name. She put herself in the center, facing away from the kitchen, toward the windows and her home, the green lawn, the lavender wafting in the breeze. A man appeared now and again on a mower. The meal was convivial. There was laughter. It was off the record.

Afterward, Ina realized aloud that she didn’t have any dessert planned. In the kitchen, she removed four panna cottas from the fridge. She heated caramel sauce in an instant on the stove and atop it splashed some rum. She sprinkled a little sea salt on each and put them into our hands.

It’s not unusual, I don’t think, to meet someone famous and realize that she is different from what you’d expected she’d be. I puzzled for days and weeks after I drove away from East Hampton over what exactly had been different about Ina Garten than whatever my expectations had been. One phrase she’d said played over and over in my head. I had been asking her about what parts of her life she chooses to let the public see and what parts she doesn’t. She said she doesn’t think of it that way. “I think I am who you think I am,” she said. I wondered who exactly I thought Ina Garten was. She didn’t consider herself a celebrity; she considered herself a cookbook author — that was where her energy actually went. And so I cooked as much as I could of Cooking for Jeffrey.

I made the maple-roasted carrot salad (“This may be my favorite salad ever,” Ina had commented in the recipe’s notes); it was delicious. I made the also delicious kale salad with pancetta and pecorino. (“Okay,” Ina had written, “I know there is a rebellion against kale going on. I’m not suggesting you eat it every day but it has great flavor and it’s also so good for you.”) Feeling glamorous, I made the arugula with prosciutto and burrata and served it for lunch, outside, on the terrace. I made the roast chicken with radishes — an utter revelation. Ina noted that she’d once seen a French woman serve roast chicken with radishes decades ago and the idea had stayed with her ever since. I honestly had no idea a radish could be roasted, let alone taste as exceptional as these ones now did. My Jeffrey, like Ina’s Jeffrey, really loves chicken, and he was really all right with living this way.

On a Friday, I made my Jeffrey the challah with saffron. Ina described how challah was one of the first things she cooked Jeffrey when they were first married. I admittedly might have messed up when I was counting the number of cups of flour I put into the bowl, and the thing came out rather gargantuan and heavy, though still tasty enough. My Jeffrey came home late and had to be on the phone for work for a long while anyway. As he talked, we sat at the counter, cutting off and stuffing into our mouths slab after slab and drinking a bottle of cheap red wine.

Over Labor Day weekend, I made us the orecchiette with farm stand pasta sauce and the fresh peach cobbler, both of which included the (I think) obnoxious step of having to plunge orbs into boiling water and then an ice bath, and imperfectly peel away their skins. Both were good, if a lot of work. “I freeze it in quarts and serve it all winter,” Ina wrote of the tomato sauce, so I did the same. The next morning I made the zucchini and leek frittata, which was garnished with zucchini flowers. I tried to imagine keeping this up, being the kind of person who placed zucchini flowers on top of a frittata.

For a dinner party, I made herb-and-apple bread pudding, sautéed shredded Brussels sprouts, and two of the (divine) skillet-roasted lemon chickens. For dessert, I made her raspberry roasted applesauce, a spectacular concoction that involved putting lots of specific kinds of apples and two packages of raspberries with a big blob of butter and cinnamon and brown sugar in a Dutch oven for a while, and then whisking the entire thing pink. “A scoop of cold vanilla ice cream melting into a bowl of warm homemade applesauce is my idea of heaven,” she’d written. And it really was.

I had people over to watch the final presidential debate, producing a spread of butternut squash hummus and English oat crackers — “I made these crackers from scratch!” I squawked — and the Parmesan and chipotle popcorn. I then left town for the weekend and my Jeffrey texted that he was subsisting almost entirely on hummus and oat crackers and he couldn’t be happier.

I made the chipotle smashed sweet potatoes, I made the brisket with onions and leeks, I made a bunch of the roasted broccolini. I made the astonishingly good crusty baked shells and cauliflower, a dish that called for her homemade ricotta. I found that ricotta, as Ina had promised, is very simple to make. I made the fig and goat cheese bruschetta. “It may be the best thing I’ve ever made!” Ina had written. I wasn’t as big a fan of this one, which I admitted to Ina when we spoke again on the phone. The recipe had called for what felt like a lot of sugar to me. I sheepishly told Ina I’m not a huge sweets person, but added that a friend who’d tried the dish with me, someone who is, had raved about it. “The thing about that is the vanilla has a bitter taste to it, so the vanilla really takes down the flavor of the sugar and the fig,” she said, and I nodded into the phone, even if I didn’t agree. During that conversation, I asked Ina what she ate when she went on the road. “You can find apples and raisins and nuts,” she said, adding, “Every hotel has a good chef salad.” She mentioned she was traveling the next day, to Washington, DC, for an event “Mrs. Obama” was hosting — during which they taped an hourlong episode for the show’s new season.

I tried, when cooking these recipes, to best model Ina’s behavior. I measured carefully. I weighed things, having found a scale my Jeffrey owned in our kitchen cabinet. I bought an oven thermometer and observed how cold my oven apparently always was. Cooking the recipes surely became one of the ways I dealt with the election’s stress.

As I did, I thought about the Contessa brand, and what it promotes as virtuous — comfort, simplicity, quality. I thought a lot about Jeffrey, about the adoration of Jeffrey, and what that is all about. “It adds to his mystique,” she said when I asked about the attention he attracts. “I think he’s extraordinary. He’s an extraordinary man and he deserves all of the praise anybody could give him.”

I thought a lot about this particular kind of feminism in which women can be successful in our own right, but are more successful when we’re paired with, and serving, powerful men. Like a lot of women in this country, I had supposed throughout my lifetime that we were marching forever toward greater gender equality. As I cooked these recipes this fall, I did not know that I was living through what might have been a high-water mark.

I thought about the whiteness of her sensibility — her heeding, generally, to European and American culinary traditions, albeit with the occasional recipe for vegetable sushi, or roasted salmon tacos. (In East Hampton, we talked about Thailand — she’d stayed in Bangkok one summer when Jeffrey was in the Army. I’d asked whether she liked the food. “I’m not that crazy — I dunno,” she said. “I didn’t know to understand Thai food at the time. Not that I do now. It was fun. We had fun.”)

I thought a lot, too, about who her recipes are for — which is to say, who they are accessible to. I wondered a lot about people who loved Ina’s recipes and could not afford, say, syrupy aged balsamic vinegar, saffron threads, dry sherry. Ina often says that her recipes are made of “ingredients you can get at a grocery store,” and there is a question as to who “you” is in a sentence like this, and also which grocery store.

Through these months, there was one recipe in the book that I found myself avoiding, even though it coursed through so many of her others. It was for homemade chicken stock, and it appears in all the books except the first one and Parties! I’d read through all 10 books in order, marveling at how consistent everything was through the 17 years she’s published them — the copy, the photos, her tastes.

I’ve always considered chicken stock to be freebie food that you make from boiling carcasses and vegetable leavings. In what I felt were lean times, I’ve certainly filled old yogurt containers with stock and put them in my freezer and felt a sense of pride. But Ina’s stock is something else. It calls for three 5-pound roasting chickens, and then celery and parsnips and onions and prescriptive numbers of sprigs of dill and parsley and thyme. The chickens alone would run me $30, and then there was the problem that I didn’t have a pot as large the 16- to 20-quart one she’d called for. I read through the hundreds of five-star reviews of the recipe on the Food Network site. Some home cooks also admitted to being disturbed by its cost, explaining the ways they modified it to make it more affordable. Many insisted they followed it to the letter. I tried making a batch that was a third of the size, using only one chicken. I felt rancid guilt as I tossed an entire besotted carcass — all taste boiled out of it, its texture tough — into the trash. I didn’t even have the heart to taste the pathetic amount of genuine Ina Garten stock I made from it; I set the two containers in my freezer.

And then the day of the election came. Taylor Swift, who’d been silent on the topic until that point, had the most-liked Instagram that day — one with an American flag emoji, and a command to vote. And that day, of course, white people — including a majority of the white women who voted — elected Donald Trump president. During the week that followed, I wrote to Ina’s publicist asking for 15 more minutes on the phone. I explained that we’d chatted plenty about the election and, given this outcome, I was curious to hear her thoughts about how people should proceed, especially as many will return home, and sit around Thanksgiving tables, perhaps over Ina Garten recipes, and face relatives who voted the other way. Her publicist said Ina was on a book tour. I pushed back. I got my answer: “Ina prefers not to comment about the election, and we ask that there is no reference to her having been asked.”

Though it was November, the world remained eerily warm. I nonetheless defrosted the farm stand pasta sauce and served it atop orecchiette. I ate it with a friend — who’s queer and Muslim — and we laughed, in a way, about the unknown to come. And it’s true that there is a comfort to food such as this, to meals such as these. And it’s true, I guess, that we should find comfort in such meals while we can. It’s also true that, in this time especially, it is more tempting and perhaps more insidious than ever to hide in bowls of steaming food, or on Instagram, in spaces and images unmarred by whatever is next to come.

She was born Ina Rosenberg, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her grandparents emigrated, she’d told me, from “Eastern Europe. Ukraine, Poland.” They came to America and eventually owned a candy store. When Ina was 5, her family moved to Connecticut. Her father was a doctor. Her mother did all the cooking; it was the ’50s. “You had lamb chops on Tuesday and chicken on Thursday,” Ina said of the food in her childhood home. She wasn’t allowed in the kitchen, she said; she was told to study.

I asked that day back in August whether her family had been observant.

“Mildly,” she said. “Kind of — we observed the holidays and we had Passover and stuff like that.”

I asked her whether she, as a child, believed in God, or whatever parts of Judaism she’d been exposed to.

“I don’t know how to answer that. I’m Jewish. I’m very happy to be Jewish. But my life doesn’t revolve around it. I think culturally more than religiously.”

On the recipe for kasha varnishkes with wild mushrooms in the new book, Ina had written, “Jeffrey loves when I make traditional Jewish dishes.” I tried to ask about that — about whether it was meaningful to preserve this cuisine. “I think I do that with Italian things and French things,” she said.

Ina had brought up her grandparents’ candy store in relation to the moment in her own biography when she bought the store called the Barefoot Contessa all those decades ago. She recalled how her parents had reacted to that news: “When I left the White House to buy what they thought of as a grocery store, they were like, ‘Really? It’s going in the wrong direction?’” The store already bore that name; its previous owner had liked the 1954 film, which stars Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. It’s always been curious to me that the Barefoot Contessa name, the one attached to her brand and her books and her show, doesn’t actually have anything to do with her. It sounds vaguely Italian. It has a whimsy. Plenty of people I’ve chatted with thought that was her name. That she was the Contessa. I’d heard her say that she hadn’t ever seen the movie, though in late October, when I saw her interviewed on stage by Tina Fey in Brooklyn, she said she finally had. “I actually saw it quite recently,” she said. “It’s quite a dark movie.”

The house that night was packed. Voracious. I saw Lidey in the crowd before we entered, and a grinning young man recognized her and asked for a photo. Two middle-aged women walking to their seats by me clutched each other and squealed, “I’m so excited!”

Ina was in purple that evening, Tina in blue, and the house absolutely lost it when they emerged. Tina was, clearly, beyond honored to be sharing the stage with Ina Garten. “I’ve learned so much from trying to cook your recipes,” she said right off. “I’ve never had as much of a visceral freak-out from people in my life as when they heard I was doing this. You are more popular than Tom Hanks and Blue Ivy combined.” Ina beamed and laughed nervously, and the crowd went wild.

Ina had previously explained to me that she can’t fathom standing alone on a stage and just speaking to people. Once, she said, she had to speak by herself for 90 seconds: “I was terrified. I rehearsed it for weeks.” But then she had been talking to her friend Mel Brooks, who told her he was going to be interviewed on a stage by someone, and she thought that was a fabulous idea. That’s how she’s done it since: 90 minutes on a stage — 60 minutes of interviewing, and then 30 of audience questions. She used to do signings but stopped those because, she felt, people would wait for three hours and then get only 15 seconds with her. “And the second thing that happened is in that 15 seconds they were turned around to take a selfie. They didn’t even have a conversation with me.” This new arrangement — an interview, pre-signed books for sale in the lobby — was more satisfying for everyone, she thought.

Tina’s first question that night was about Jeffrey. She remarked how “foxy” he looked on the cover of the book. Ina continued to nervously laugh. They talked through the myth — meeting Jeffrey at 16, the wedding, the camping trip. “It’s so charming and now it’s probably illegal,” Tina quipped. They talked about what they stress-ate during the debates. Tina eventually used the phrase “my Jeffrey” to refer to her own husband. Tina also spoke about how Ina and Jeffrey seemed to have the “ideal” relationship “in part because he’s gone Monday through Friday.” Tina asked Ina about her decision to make this book all about him.

“Cooking for him really created my career,” Ina responded. “He’s why I have this amazing life that I have. I wanted it to be a love letter to him.”

I wrote it down and noticed it was the same phrase I’d said to her a few months before.

“What are you most proud of?” Tina asked.

“I think the thing I love is when people stop me and then proceed to say I’ve taught them how to cook,” she said. “It’s an unintended consequence and the thing I love the most.” She beamed, and the applause was laced with cheers and screams.

It was the audience’s turn to ask her questions now; the room was electric. Ina reiterated instructions we’d already been given, that only a few people were to wait at the mics at a time. Her concern, it seemed, was that a line of people would block others of us from being able to see. Everyone followed obediently.

“I’m one of the 600 gay men here this evening,” said one of the first people to ask a question. It would become a running joke, as man after man who came to the mic identified himself as gay, the house laughing and happy. “How do you feel about being a gay icon?” one asked.

“I don’t know,” Ina smiled. “It’s very nice.”

Those who approached the mics were practically bowing. One audience member stated that being here tonight was his partner’s surprise birthday present; another said it was their mother’s 70th birthday this evening. Somebody asked a question about how Ina and Jeffrey deal with issues in their marriage.

“We don’t have dogs and cats and kids and things that make it messy,” Ina said lightheartedly, before answering, “We don’t have issues.”

Ina now mentioned that Jeffrey was here, actually. Everybody tittered and seemed to crane forward, wondering if she meant he was in the front rows. She beckoned him from the wing. The house was already howling, and the man himself walked out — Jeffrey. He embraced his wife and sat beside her, and at that point the room, its pitch, seemed to explode. ●

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At Home With Ina Garten was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The 73-year-old has said for decades that Bill Clinton raped her. Today, she’s a thorn in the side of progressives, including Hillary Clinton, who say rape victims have the right to be believed — and a gift for Donald Trump.

VAN BUREN, Arkansas — Juanita Broaddrick joined Twitter in 2009. The 73-year-old retired nursing home operator from Van Buren, Arkansas, tweeted a few times about the weather, Weight Watchers, and drinking coffee on her porch, then abandoned the service until fall 2015, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made a series of statements that enraged her.

In September, Clinton tweeted that every sexual assault survivor had “the right to be believed.” In November, she reiterated that “every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” The following month, she was asked at a campaign event whether the handful of women who’ve accused her husband, former President Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and assault — Juanita Broaddrick included — deserved to be “believed” as well.

“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence,” Clinton replied with a smile that was just one awkward beat too slow.

Broaddrick oozes genuine, sweet-as-sweet-tea Southern hospitality, but she went “ballistic” when she heard Clinton’s statements on sexual assault, she recently told me. It had been years since Broaddrick had spoken publicly about the Clintons. Sitting at home, alone and fuming, Broaddrick thought to herself, What can I say to make this believable to people, that this really happened to me? She signed back in to her dormant Twitter and started typing. In January, one tweet went viral: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73….it never goes away.”

Broaddrick claims Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, when he was Arkansas’ attorney general, during what she thought would be a morning business meeting. As with many rape allegations, there is no way to definitively prove what happened, especially since Broaddrick didn’t speak out for decades. Through a lawyer in 1999, Bill Clinton denied assaulting Broaddrick and has never been charged. (A spokesperson declined to comment further to BuzzFeed News.) But contrary to what Hillary Clinton alluded to last fall, there is no concrete “evidence” that discredits Broaddrick’s rape claims. Her allegations have long been an inconvenience for Democrats — and an extremely convenient cause for Republicans to champion.

“Women know that this is an unfair attack on Hillary, and that’s why it continues to exist in this small corner of the right-wing media world.”

The current ’90s nostalgia isn’t all Friends reruns, chokers, and Pokémon. We’re also relitigating the decade and reconsidering scandals with 21st-century hindsight. Our understanding of sexual misconduct has evolved, thanks to the record number of women who are speaking out about it. From college campuses to the military and the workplace, sexual assault survivors are forcing rapists, and the institutions that protect them, to be held accountable. They’re also dispelling pervasive myths about who “perfect” rape victims are and how they should behave.

Looking back, it seems that O.J. Simpson got away with not just murder, but also domestic violence. The sexual harassment allegations Anita Hill made about Judge Clarence Thomas would likely derail a Supreme Court nomination today — and the accuser wouldn’t be brushed aside as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” In the ’90s, the media called Monica Lewinsky a “tramp”; now, she’s a celebrated anti-bullying spokeswoman. Bill Cosby is no longer “America’s Dad” but a “probable sexual predator.”

Juanita Broaddrick seems primed for the same modern reassessment. But the political implications of her claims are too disastrous for liberal politicians and pundits — the people who typically support self-declared rape survivors — to rally around her, especially this close to election day. That means only Clinton-hating conservatives are visibly incensed by her claims, and the more that they amplify Broaddrick’s story, the more skeptical progressives become.

“Women know that this is an unfair attack on Hillary, and that’s why it continues to exist in this small corner of the right-wing media world,” said Marcy Stech, vice president of communications at the political action committee Emily’s List.

Broaddrick has repeatedly said that she’s not politically motivated. She insists she has no plans to join Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign and says she’s only voting for him because she doesn’t want the man she claims raped her — and the woman she believes enabled him — back in the White House. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 for the same reason, she said.

“For somebody to choose to make me valid…that’s nice.”

But even if Broaddrick doesn’t want to admit it, she’s become increasingly cozy with conservatives as election day draws nearer. She used to tweet mostly about her own story and other sexual assault–related issues; these days, her feeds are filled with outlandish Clinton conspiracy theories and angry posts about Benghazi. She may have once donated more than $1,000 to Obama, but now she retweets criticism about him and his wife.

Broaddrick’s move to the right damages her mainstream credibility. Liberals may not want to call her a liar, but they don’t understand why she has to back Trump, either, especially since his party has been mostly absent from — if not antagonistic toward — the ongoing national conversation on sexual violence. But the progressives who started that conversation aren’t eager to include Broaddrick in it. The right-wingers may have an agenda, but at least they tell Broaddrick they believe her. That’s all she’s ever wanted.

“People saying that they’re sorry is very respectful,” Broaddrick told me, “but when somebody says, ‘I believe you,’ that probably does me the most good, because I want to be believed. It’s a hard thing to come forward and talk about. And for somebody to choose to make me valid…that’s nice.”

The other women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct — such as Gennifer Flowers (adultery), Paula Jones (sexual harassment), Kathleen Willey (unwanted groping), and, of course, Monica Lewinsky (more high-stakes adultery) — have sought celebrity, financial settlements, or book deals. Broaddrick hasn’t. When not living in the shadow of the most powerful political couple in recent history, she’s enjoyed privacy and comfort. She made good money as a nursing home administrator and now lives the dream retiree life, complete with indoor tennis sessions (her Twitter handle is @atensnut, or “a tennis nut”) and the occasional European cruise.

Van Buren, a town of 23,000 near the Oklahoma border, isn’t fancy, and Broaddrick’s colonial-style mansion would stand out if it weren’t hidden from view. Her 23-acre ranch is a sharp, secluded turn off of a main road with a church, an auto shop, and a smattering of fast-food restaurants.

When I visited, Broaddrick greeted me from her sweeping front porch in rolled-up jeans and a blue and yellow tank top, quickly ushering me out of the 90-degree heat and into one of her living room’s many squishy chairs. Her 13-year-old grandson, Ridge, took a break from painting the fence (Broaddrick pays him $10 an hour) to give me a tour of the property on their camouflage-colored four-wheeler.

Broaddrick first told Ridge her story about the Clintons this year, after he overheard some confusing adult conversations and filled in the gaps with Google.

“It was hard. I almost cried,” Broaddrick said. “He said, ‘I know what happened. I know what Mr. Clinton did to you.’ And I said, ‘Well good, I’m glad you finally know, because it’s been something I’ve dreaded having you find out.’”

Now Ridge is also on Twitter, where he is as precocious and earnest as he is in real life, and hopes to help his grandma “spread the word about Hillary&Bill Clinton from a kids/teens point of view.” So far, that involves making a lot of anti-Hillary memes.

Ridge and I bumped along past blackberry bushes, a lily-padded pond, a trampoline, and a tree house. The house also has a long, shady driveway and is surrounded by an electric fence. Broaddrick sleeps with her bedroom door locked. She wears a baseball cap when she runs errands, although she isn’t sure if her neighbors know, or care, about her past. She didn’t think her longtime ladies’ church potluck group knew, either. Then, one night earlier this year, when Broaddrick was back in the headlines, the women stood up and clapped for her when she walked into their weekly Thursday dinner.

“I found out they all knew, but they would never say anything to me,” Broaddrick said. “I just bawled like a baby.”

The story she has told for decades goes like this:

Broaddrick, then 35, first met Bill Clinton when he was 31 and the attorney general of Arkansas, during a campaign stop he made at her nursing home. They discussed her business and his campaign — Broaddrick wasn’t much into politics, but she had recently started volunteering for him with a friend — and Clinton told Broaddrick to call his office if she was ever in nearby Little Rock. A few weeks later, she did just that while attending a nursing seminar there. They arranged to meet one morning in the coffee shop in the hotel where the seminar was held. At the last second, Clinton called up to Broaddrick’s room and asked if they could meet there instead, since there were reporters in the lobby below. She said yes. Minutes after entering her room, he tried to kiss her, she says, biting her upper lip, hard.

Shocked, Broaddrick says, she resisted Clinton, even telling him she was not only married, but having an affair with another man (who would later become her second husband). He ignored her, she says, and pushed her on the bed and raped her. Afterward, she says, he put his sunglasses on and told her to get some ice for her swollen lips before leaving the room.

“There was no remorse,” Broaddrick told me. “He acted like it was an everyday occurrence. He was not the least bit apologetic. It was just unreal.” She rushed to the door and locked it, she says, afraid that someone would come back in to kill her.

Two of Broaddrick’s friends who had also attended the nursing conference found Broaddrick in tears, her lips swollen and blue. She told them what had happened but made them swear not to tell anyone else. She was scared of retaliation, didn’t think anyone would believe her, and blamed herself for allowing Clinton to come up to her room.

“I had never known anybody that had been raped,” she told me. “I could not imagine anybody that could get in that situation and not get out of it.”

Soon after, Broaddrick says, she ran into Hillary Clinton at a political rally Broaddrick had promised friends she would attend. Hillary shook her hand and thanked her for everything she had done for Bill. To Broaddrick, the gesture felt like a threat to stay silent. As attorney general and later governor, Bill Clinton was “the main person that regulated my business and my income,” Broaddrick said. “After she said what she did to me, I just thought, I will keep quiet.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign declined to comment to BuzzFeed News but has in the past denounced attempts to connect Hillary to the allegations against Bill, saying that she “has spent her whole life standing up for women, and charges to the contrary are grossly unfair and untrue.”

Broaddrick says Bill Clinton called her a few times after the assault but she never picked up. Aside from a letter his governor’s office sent her when she won a nursing home award in 1984 — Clinton scrawled “I admire you very much” on the bottom — the next time she heard from him was in 1991, when, she claims, he confronted her in person to apologize. She wondered what had caused the change of heart. Soon after, he announced he was running for president.

Despite Broaddrick’s attempts to keep her story within her small circle of friends, word traveled through Arkansas’ small-world political circles. State Republicans who opposed Clinton tried to convince Broaddrick to go public. Lawyers for Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who sued Clinton for sexual harassment, sent private investigators to Broaddrick’s door in 1997.

“It’s just that was a long time ago and I don’t want to relive it,” she told them, according to a public transcript (they recorded her without her knowledge). “You can’t get to him, and I’m not going to ruin my good name to do it.”

When Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed her, Broaddrick signed an affidavit denying that Clinton had ever raped her. It was her decision to do so. “I did not want to get involved, and I signed it hoping to stay out of it,” she told me. The next year, Clinton was on trial for impeachment for allegedly obstructing justice during the Jones case. Federal prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation team reached out to Broaddrick to ask whether Clinton had forced her to file a false affidavit. Broaddrick was afraid of lying to a federal grand jury, she says. After Starr gave her immunity from prosecution for perjury, she decided it was time to tell the full truth.

Broaddrick still desperately wanted to stay anonymous, but Jones’ lawyers used her name in a 1998 court filing. As Clinton’s impeachment trial loomed closer, reporters started staking out her house and tabloids printed vicious rumors about her family. Broaddrick agreed to sit down for a television interview with NBC News’ Lisa Myers on Dateline. She also hoped to help impeach Clinton.

But the meticulously fact-checked Dateline report didn’t run until two weeks after the impeachment trial, in which Clinton was acquitted. Starr found Broaddrick’s rape claims inconclusive — the statute of limitations on them had passed decades before — and didn’t include them in the report, although he allowed Republicans to hear them.

NBC has said the 35 days it took to vet the segment were standard. Myers, who said she had never fought so hard to get something on the air, explained the delay to Broaddrick this way: “The good news is you’re credible. The bad news is you’re very credible.”

Myers, now retired and living in Florida, has stayed in touch with Broaddrick ever since.

“No one can objectively look at Juanita’s story and not be troubled,” she told me. “One of the things that makes her so credible is who she is — open, straightforward, seemingly guileless.”

When the segment finally aired, it didn’t make much of a splash. Maybe it’s because NBC ran it opposite the Grammy Awards. Maybe it’s because Americans had Clinton scandal fatigue. Or maybe it’s because, in the ’90s, an extramarital affair was one thing, but “date rape” — the then-newly popularized term for rape victims who know the person who attacked them — was another. Today, there’s less stigma about rape and many more victims who go public with their stories. These accounts are often complex, but reporters are no longer as nervous about covering stories without clear evidence or answers. That wasn’t the case back then. Much of the post-Dateline news coverage focused more on why NBC took so long to run the interview than on Broaddrick’s rape claims.

“No one can objectively look at Juanita’s story and not be troubled.”

Or maybe nothing happened because even people who did believe Broaddrick didn’t know what to do about it. About a third of all Americans believed Broaddrick’s allegations, according to a 1999 CNN poll, but two-thirds thought the media should stop pursuing the story. It was decades too late for Broaddrick to press charges. The impeachment trial was over. The Clinton camp flatly denied the assault. It was devastating to have spoken out without making any impact, Broaddrick said. She retreated from public view afterward, declining most interviews.

Life wasn’t awful — Broaddrick was surrounded by family and grew her nursing home business into a successful multi-facility enterprise. But the alleged rape and its decades-long aftermath was still “a horrible stain on my life,” Broaddrick said. There were little things, like having to switch church services because her pastor blessed the president by name. And then there were big ones.

Broaddrick said she is still afraid of enclosed spaces, from the backseats of cars to the last row in an airplane. After the alleged assault, she stopped meeting with men alone in her office. And she credits her 2004 divorce from her second husband to Clinton, too.

Her husband didn’t want her to talk to Dateline, she says, and she felt he always blamed her for letting Clinton come up to her room.

“Clinton was always just right there,” she said. “He was always there between us.”

Drinking iced tea at Broaddrick’s spotless kitchen counter, she and I talked about how the dialogue surrounding sexual assault has evolved. (Ridge was also there, and offered that “all kids know, if you were to force something like that [sex], you’re pretty much evil.”)

Broaddrick credited the shift to women, such as Bill Cosby’s accusers, who have been brave enough to accuse powerful men and the social media platforms that enable them to do so on their own terms. On Twitter, Broaddrick is overwhelmed by support from rape survivors, she said.

“I can’t imagine being something that inspires them,” she said. “I haven’t got there yet.”

In the ’70s, she said, no one talked about rape. Women thanked Broaddrick for telling her story on Dateline in 1999, but weren’t explicit. Now, teenagers describe their sexual assaults to her in private messages.

Broaddrick estimates that about 80% of the people who message her online lack a political agenda and are simply concerned with her well-being. She acknowledged that might be wishful thinking, though.

“I’m really putting myself out there,” she said, “so I may be gullible in wanting their sympathy.”

 — @atensnut

It only takes a quick click to determine that most of the people who tweet at Broaddrick also happen to be rabid Clinton-haters. It’s true that their messages are often sincere: “God bless you! No one should have had to go through what you did.” But their social media profiles are unabashedly #NeverHillary. (That message was from PatriotTrumpet, whose Twitter bio reads: “I will vote for the GOP nominee because the alternative is unthinkable.”)

There’s a thin line between validation and appropriation. It’s undeniable that Broaddrick’s decision to speak out this year is a godsend for conservatives trying to convince women voters that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is the female-friendly candidate. Trump regularly makes sexist comments, has been accused of sexual harassment and assault, and is often dismissive of women who make sexual misconduct allegations. Yet he’s called Bill Clinton “the worst abuser of women in the history of politics” and Hillary an “enabler” because “she treated these women horribly” — Broaddrick most of all. In May, he used a heart-wrenching audio clip of Broaddrick’s voice in an anti-Hillary ad.

“He starts to bite on my top lip and I try to pull away from him,” says Broaddrick — the clip is from the 1999 Dateline interview — who audibly tears up while Bill smokes a cigar in the background.

Trump’s campaign did not ask for permission to use Broaddrick’s voice in his ad, she said.

“I was really hurt,” she said. “You take the most awful part of my Dateline interview, where I’m crying, trying to relate what had happened to me, and put that in a campaign ad? I thought it was very tasteless.”

“I can’t imagine being something that inspires them,” she said. “I haven’t got there yet.”

But on the radio in May, Broaddrick said while the clip was “painful to hear,” she wasn’t “unhappy” and she thought the use of her voice was “important.” She didn’t tweet angrily about Trump, either, as she did about Hillary last January.

I spoke to Broaddrick one afternoon recently while she was driving to see Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. She hadn’t heard of it until her Twitter followers told her she was one of its stars. “I would have appreciated a heads-up,” she told me. She texted me afterward, saying, “Was hard to see my crying anguished face on that large screen … I don’t know why but I wanted to sink down and not be seen when it came on :(” She still gave the movie three “thumbs-up” emojis on Twitter.

In theory, partisan politics shouldn’t play a role in determining whether an alleged rape victim deserves to be heard. But lately, right-wing news outlets and conservative politicians with awful track records on women’s issues have treated Broaddrick’s story with the sensitivity of a Feministing blogger.

Ann Coulter, who once said rape isn’t actually rape unless the victim has been “hit on the head with a brick,” tweeted in May: “BREAKING NEWS: BILL COSBY ORDERED TO STAND TRIAL FOR RAPE. Courage, Juanita, justice is coming.” Breitbart, which often criticizes other outlets for credulously reporting on public rape accusations, has written more than 30 favorable stories about Broaddrick this year alone. The National Review, which has run pieces about how rape accusations ruin lives and why believing the pop star Kesha’s rape claims is akin to “Stalinist finger-pointing,” published a piece calling Broaddrick’s allegations “credible” and “serious” despite a lack of formal charges or physical evidence.

“The unwillingness of rape victims to admit their assault is a well-known phenomenon,” the author wrote.

Their argument is that Broaddrick’s story is so solid that, as conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote earlier this year, one “need not be a ‘believe all rape allegations’ absolutist to find her claim persuasive.” In fact, Broaddrick’s story, like many rape claims, is not clear-cut. Why did Broaddrick take so long to speak out? Why did she lie in her affidavit for Paula Jones’ lawyers? Why did Ken Starr find her claims “inconclusive”?

Progressive news outlets and politicians with victim-centered approaches have transformed the national conversation on sexual violence by allowing rape accusations that wouldn’t necessarily hold up in court to nevertheless be aired in public: The logic seems to be that if a woman is willing to risk the consequences of coming forward, her accusations are worthy of consideration.

It’s not so for Broaddrick. Clinton supporters are most dubious of Broaddrick’s claim that Hillary meant to threaten her into silence when she shook her hand a few weeks after the alleged rape. Nearly every Democratic operative and liberal pundit I spoke to pointed out that Broaddrick only made her allegations against Hillary public in 2000, when Hillary was running for Senate for the first time. Broaddrick told Dateline that the Clintons had never threatened her and didn’t appear to tell Starr’s investigative team, either, since he didn’t note any obstruction of justice related to her in his report.

Joe Conason, a liberal political commentator who has written books defending the Clinton legacy, believes there’s an “apparent contradiction” between what Broaddrick says happened now, what she told NBC in 1999, and what she may have told Ken Starr’s investigators.

“I don’t think we will ever know with certainty what happened between Bill Clinton and Ms. Broaddrick,” Conason said. “But having said firmly that no one close to him ever tried to intimidate her, she changed her story to insist that Hillary did.”

Broaddrick said that NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell repeatedly questioned her about the interaction during a phone interview in January. Later, NBC officials abandoned the interview because, a spokesperson said, there was nothing new to report. Mitchell later called Broaddrick’s accusation “discredited and long-denied” on the air.

Broaddrick was furious. In July, Broaddrick’s son, a lawyer, pressured NBC into removing the word “discredited” from the clip.

“While questions have been raised about her account, upon review, on May 19, we removed that word,” an editor’s note now reads.

 — @atensnut

It’s certainly reasonable to doubt Hillary threatened Broaddrick — it’s not abnormal for a politician’s wife to shake people’s hands on the campaign trail — but it’s not quite fair to say Broaddrick’s account of the interaction hasn’t been consistent. Starr’s investigation was limited to whether Bill Clinton had obstructed justice — investigators wanted to know whether anyone had forced Broaddrick to file a false affidavit in the 1998 Paula Jones civil suit. That’s what Broaddrick discussed on Dateline as well, and in both cases, she said she had made that decision herself. Broaddrick said she did mention the alleged 1978 Hillary handshake to Dateline but that it was cut. Myers confirmed the anecdote wasn’t included for a variety of reasons, including that Hillary was not a politician at the time.

At home in her spacious living room, Broaddrick admitted to me that she has no way of knowing what, exactly, Hillary knew at the time about the alleged assault.

“When you look back over almost 38 years, some of the anger fades, the fear fades, and you think, I hope she didn’t know,” Broaddrick said.

“When you look back over almost 38 years, some of the anger fades, the fear fades, and you think, I hope she didn’t know.”

But she is adamant that she felt threatened that day, and often describes the interaction as premeditated and sinister in interviews with conservative websites. She doesn’t understand why they’re the only ones who believe that Hillary wanted her to stay silent.

“I just wish some of the people who are high on the list of supporting victims would come forward and say, ‘Yes, I believe her,” Broaddrick said. “But they won’t even say they’re sorry for me. They just say, ‘It’s not Hillary’s fault.’”

It’s no longer acceptable — in progressive circles, at least — to condemn a woman for her husband’s misdeeds. Broaddrick presents a dilemma for those inclined to support survivors of sexual assault: Can you believe a woman’s story, on principle, but reject the way she decides to tell it?

Many liberals scoff at the notion that Hillary Clinton played a role in a cover-up, or that she should be to blame at all. In their view, Hillary Clinton has suffered through enough sexism.

“With this more feminist era also comes heightened attention to how women are charged with keeping and controlling men, blamed for their bad behavior while getting no credit for their quiet work in the background,” said Jill Filipovic, a columnist who often writes about gender and politics. The only reason this story is being retold “is because Hillary is now running for president,” she said.

“I suspect using Broaddrick’s claims to try to puncture Hillary Clinton’s feminist bona fides — and make no mistake, that is how they are being used and how they will be used — will badly backfire, since it plays into a lot of the same stereotypes feminists reject.”

On August 8 — the day Trump suggested “Second Amendment people” could take action against Hillary Clinton — Broaddrick hosted an “Ask Me Anything” on a Trump subreddit.

Broaddrick repeatedly told me that she’s only voting for Trump because she is anti-Hillary. She supported Obama in 2008 for the same reason, she said, and didn’t feel the need to vote at all in 2012. Broaddrick also insisted that she had no plans to work for Trump’s campaign. I asked her if she worried that answering questions on a subreddit “for serious supporters” of Trump would give people the wrong idea.

“Yes I do and I hope to convey the message that I am not politically motivated except for wanting to help defeat HRC,” she texted me. Broaddrick did explain just that to the redditors, writing that she only “came forward because of Hillary’s statement that all victims should come forward.”

But when one redditor thanked Broaddrick for “standing strong for victims of sexual assault” before asking nicely if she would “accept an invite from Mr. Trump if he offered to let you speak and talk about the Clintons and how they treated you,” Broaddrick said she would “have to think about it.”

“Not out of the question,” Broaddrick wrote.

Another redditor pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign website appeared to have made some edits to its “campus sexual assault” page. Last winter, website archives show, a September 14, 2015, quote from Hillary ran across the top:

“I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault: Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed, and we’re with you.”

In February, shortly after Broaddrick’s viral tweet made headlines, the line “you have the right to be believed” was cut from the text. A video of the full remarks, that line included, is currently on the page. The Clinton campaign declined to comment on the change.

Trump, on the other hand, may have used Broaddrick’s voice in an ad without her permission, but he’s also done more to help her heal than any other presidential candidate.

Before this year, Broaddrick had a tough time saying the word “rape” out loud, she said. Then, in January, Trump used the word to describe her claims on The Sean Hannity Show. Afterward, Broaddrick realized she “can’t skirt around it anymore,” she said. “That’s the correct terminology.”

That Donald Trump is the one encouraging a self-described rape victim to take back control by telling her story is another bizarre chapter for Juanita Broaddrick. She’s the first to agree “bizarre” is the right word to describe the last four decades.

“I can understand your perplexity about it,” she said to me recently. “My life has been complicated.” ●

Check out more articles on BuzzFeed.com!

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

Juanita Broaddrick Wants To Be Believed was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Aram Roston and Daniel Wagner

On a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue separating the White House from the Capitol looms an architectural treasure and a prized jewel of the federal government’s real estate portfolio. The palatial, neo-Romanesque Old Post Office was built in 1899. Since then, its clock tower has been an iconic part of the Washington, D.C., skyline, visible from miles away.

These days the building is a vast construction site, ringed by scaffolding, where trucks come and go as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters redo the interior. But Donald Trump chose to hold an event there on March 21. Striding to a podium set in front of two American flags and decorated with a “Trump Hotels” sign, the candidate talked of GOP efforts to thwart his momentum. First, however, he called everyone’s attention to the Old Post Office itself, which will be the site of Trump’s newest hotel. “It’s going to be amazing,” he said. “It’s a great thing for the country. It’s a great thing for Washington.”

View this image ›

Atrium of the Post Office Building in June 1914. Library of Congress

Winning control of this magnificent, taxpayer-owned building — long coveted by developers and by one of Washington’s most notoriously corrupt lobbyists — was a remarkable coup for Trump. It is unusual for someone to personally profit from such a prominent contract with the government while at the same time seeking to win that government’s highest office. (A charity tied to Hillary Clinton received approximately $7 million in federal grants since 2010, according to federal spending data, but that money does not add to Clinton’s personal wealth.)

Steven L. Schooner, a professor of contracting law at The George Washington University Law School who has monitored the transaction, said Trump’s deal is “at a minimum a conflict of interest, that a presidential candidate or president could personally benefit or lose sums of money on this scale based on a contractual relation with the federal government.”

Schooner said the particular circumstances of Trump’s deal, which transfers control of the building for 60 years, are unique. “There is nothing normal about this,” he said.

The decision to award the contract to Trump was announced in 2012 with considerable fanfare, but the details of how he actually won the bid — beating out teams that included major hotel chains and then locking in near-total control of the landmark — have remained largely unknown. A spokesperson for the federal agency that handled the transaction, the General Services Administration, or GSA, called it “one of the most highly scrutinized deals” the agency has ever done, but it has kept many details hidden, heavily redacting the property’s lease and refusing to release Trump’s initial proposal. Officials declined BuzzFeed News’ requests for interviews about how the deal was struck and did not respond to questions in time for publication.

It is “a conflict of interest that a presidential candidate or president could personally benefit … on this scale based on a contractual relation with the federal government.”

Six insiders who were involved in the project, working either for Trump or for the government, discussed the details with BuzzFeed News. They spoke on the condition that they remain unnamed, some for fear of lawsuits, some because they are not allowed to speak publicly.

Trump won the bid largely because of two grand promises, three of the sources said.

Trump promised to employ the architect who had, over decades, championed the building’s careful, historic restoration. And he promised the involvement of a multibillion-dollar real estate investment firm with a rock-solid financial reputation.

After Trump’s team got the nod from the GSA, however, it reversed itself on both these promises.

It announced that the architect would no longer be involved. And it informed the government that it would no longer be working with the real estate investment firm. To finance the construction, Trump borrowed $170 million from a bank, putting the federal lease on the property up as collateral.

According to a former member of his team, “The Trump people said all the right things” in the early stages. “He never intended to stick with it. He thought, ‘Well, let’s get to the next phase and then we’ll do what we want to do.’”

Several sources said the GSA decided to proceed with the deal, despite all the changes, in part because it feared the political fallout.

In response to questions about the bidding process, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., issued a statement to BuzzFeed News calling the chance to work on the building “an honor.” As for changes announced after bidding closed, the statement said: “As with any project of this size and timeline, there were some necessary agreed-to adjustments along the way, but come September — ahead of schedule — everyone will be able to see the results of all our hard work and this highly effective public-private collaboration.”

Trump promised to use a particular architect and to partner with a rock-solid investment firm. After winning the bid, he reversed himself on both.

Meanwhile, Trump’s firm has applied for a $32 million federal subsidy, in the form of a tax credit, which could help cover its investment in the taxpayer-owned building.

But insiders said that Trump’s company has pushed the government to accept design and decorative changes that run counter to the principles of historic preservation, which are the basis on which he applied for a tax subsidy. For example, Trump is covering century-old marble floors with carpeting and concealing historic wood and marble walls with drapery. And he has asked to festoon the grand lobby with gold leaf.

A Trump executive who spoke on behalf of the developer’s organization on the condition that he not be named said none of these issues are substantial, and that government agencies have all signed off on the plans.

For now, the most glaring visual element of all may be the large blue sign hanging on the construction fence. Right in the middle of a fierce presidential campaign, on taxpayer property, its huge white letters make a bold proclamation about the future: “Coming 2016 TRUMP.”

The Trump executive said the sign went up before Trump’s presidential campaign was launched, but conceded that it has since taken on another layer of meaning. “At the end of the day, people can interpret it any way they want,” he said.

Trump speaks to the media during a news conference at the construction site of the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C., March 21, 2016. Jim Bourg / Reuters

The White Elephant in the Room

As beautiful as the Old Post Office is, it was for many decades a burden, its space underused and its upkeep expensive. In the 1960s, the GSA, which controls the building, pushed to raze it.

The building survived partly due to the crusading efforts of an architect named Arthur Cotton Moore, a member of the old D.C. establishment whose family went back in the city for generations. As the Washington Post put it in an editorial in 1977 celebrating the building, Moore “played a large role in persuading the government that the hulking Post Office is a community treasure.” He won a competition to renovate the building, its first reincarnation.

The building remained alluring to developers. In 2005, the GSA’s former chief of staff was arrested by the FBI in a major corruption probe. Prosecutors say he accepted an opulent golf trip to Scotland’s famous St. Andrews golf course from Jack Abramoff, a larger-than-life Republican lobbyist. Abramoff represented a Native American tribe that was interested in turning the Old Post Office into a luxury hotel. (Abramoff, who later pleaded guilty to corruption-related charges, was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the 2010 film Casino Jack.)

In 2008, Congress passed a law to encourage the GSA to redevelop the building again, and in 2011, the agency solicited proposals from private companies. It was a huge opportunity for developers, who jostled to submit their bids, forming teams for hotel projects.

At his office in Washington, Moore, still working as an architect at 76 years old, was impassioned about a possible new phase for the landmark that had been his personal crusade.

Having previously met Ivanka Trump, Donald’s daughter, Moore decided to invite the Trumps to join his bid to take this legendary building to the next level, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Ivanka, 29 years old at the time, had the title of executive vice president of development and acquisitions at her father’s business empire. Sources said she immediately warmed to the idea of winning control of the landmark, located just blocks from the White House. It was she, these sources say, who first brought the deal to her father.

She quickly took charge of the Old Post Office project, representing the Trump Organization at key presentations and Capitol Hill meetings. Leading the high-profile hotel effort was an early, public vote of confidence from her father, foreshadowing the prominent role she now plays in his campaign.

When the GSA made its call for proposals, Donald Trump was discussing the possibility (later rejected) of a presidential run against Barack Obama. Trump incorporated a company in Delaware, called Trump Old Post Office LLC, and his team worked with Moore on their proposal, which was selected as one of 10 finalists.

Neither the GSA nor Trump has released that proposal in full, but some facts about it were made public, and sources have described it to BuzzFeed News.

Many projects bearing Donald Trump’s name are his in name only. It’s a key element of his business: Builders pay hefty sums to associate themselves with the Trump brand, but they do all the building and they assume all the risk. Examples range from the Trump International Golf Club in Puerto Rico to the Trump International Hotel and Tower Fort Lauderdale. But in the case of the Old Post Office hotel, which would feature a spa, fine dining spots, and high-end stores, the Trumps wanted to actually run the show.

Design was a big part of the GSA’s review process, accounting for 35% of a bidder’s score. Partnering with Moore, whose credibility was unimpeachable, and who had virtually invented the concept of renovating and rehabilitating the building, gave Trump a tremendous advantage.

To finance the construction, Trump borrowed $170 million from a bank, putting the federal lease on the property up as collateral.

Financing was the second big arena in which bidders had to prove themselves. They needed to show the GSA not just that they had the resources to pull off a project of this scale, but also that they would provide a healthy return to the government. But several of Trump’s companies had suffered highly publicized bankruptcies.

The Trump group teamed up with a partner that had very deep pockets: Colony Capital, one of the biggest real estate funds in the world, which, as of last year, had $28 billion in assets under management.

During his campaign appearance at the Old Post Office, Trump said, “They brought it down to 10 finalists, and we got it, I think because of the strength of our financial statement and because of the fact — they wanted to make sure it got built.” And Colony Capital was a big part of that.

“They are a very credible group that we got involved,” said the Trump executive.

Trump committed to a minimum rent to the government of $3 million, three sources say. And on top of that, he repeatedly pledged that no matter what problems arose, his group could finance the deal and make the project a success, two former members of his team recalled.

In February 2012, the government announced that Trump had won the competition. Trump’s proposal “represented the strongest development team, best long term potential for the local community, and most consistent stream of revenue for the Federal Government,” the agency’s official announcement said.

Trump was customarily exuberant: “We will build the greatest hotel that Washington has ever seen,” he told the Washington Post. “There will never have been a comparable hotel to what we’re going to do with the Old Post Office.”

“Are they going to tart the thing up?”

Behind the scenes, some top officials had been skeptical of Trump’s track record and commitment to historic preservation.

“Are they going to tart the thing up? How do you maintain the dignity of the building?” one former GSA official recalled wondering.

The former official recalled a meeting between government officials, Ivanka Trump, and others shortly after Trump won the bidding. Officials said they were concerned about the company’s history of bankruptcies and contentious dealings, and she tried to reassure them. Her goal was to “make us feel like you don’t have to feel worried that you’ve hired Trump,” according to the former official, who had direct knowledge of the meeting. To build confidence, he said, Ivanka agreed to all of the government’s requests, including those about historic detailing.

The GSA raised one concern in particular, about what’s known as “re-trading the deal.” That’s when a developer agrees to one set of terms, but tries to reopen negotiations after the project is too far along to halt. That was something the GSA let Ivanka Trump know it would not tolerate.

The Trump executive, speaking on behalf of the company, said that he attended all the meetings and does not recall any communication that sounded “that threatening.”

Ivanka’s Baby Daughter

After the government announced Trump had won the bid, a competing team, backed by Hilton Hotels, protested, citing the developer’s past corporate bankruptcies. The GSA, batting away the complaint, defended its selection in part by citing Trump’s architect. “Mr. Moore’s experience with the Old Post Office dates back to the early 1970s when he first proposed that the building become a hotel,” a GSA official wrote to the Hilton team.

But in September 2012, it was reported that Moore would be taking an indefinite “medical leave of absence.” Moore, who was central to the Trump proposal, was off the project.

Moore was by then 77 years old, so few questions were asked. But the health problem was never specified. The Trump executive now says that Moore “didn’t have the resources” to complete the project, but that he parted amicably.

“Are they going to tart the thing up? How do you maintain the dignity of the building?” one former government official recalled wondering.

One person recalled seeing him weeks later, working on another project and apparently in fine health. Moore did not return repeated calls for comment.

Moore’s replacement was Beyer Blinder Belle, a celebrated firm that had distinguished itself with major renovations, including Grand Central Station and the Cooper Hewitt museum, both in New York. The firm did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Then the Trumps revealed another big change: Colony Capital, the huge equity firm backing their bid, was leaving the team.

The Trump executive said the Trumps were concerned that Colony Capital might seek to cash out within a few years. The Trumps wanted full ownership for the long haul. A second source confirmed this account, and added that the Trumps said they were so enthralled by the Old Post Office that they hoped Ivanka’s baby daughter would one day run it.

The Trump executive said Colony Capital’s departure was handled “very amicably.” And he emphasized that the GSA signed off on the deal. BuzzFeed News made numerous attempts to reach Colony for this story, but the company’s outside PR firm said no one was available to comment.

Two prominent features of Trump’s original winning proposal had been changed. The Trump executive downplayed their significance: “Some minor things did change over time,” he said. But a former top GSA official who was involved said the public might wonder if Trump’s team pulled a bait and switch. “Those are completely fair questions,” he said. “Those are reasonable questions to ask.”

Another former agency official said that if the changes had happened on his watch, he would have said, “Whoa, let’s talk about this.”

At this point in the process, experts said, the GSA could still have abandoned Trump and selected another developer. No lease had yet been signed — negotiations on the terms of the complex, 700-page lease took more than a year — and no money had changed hands.

But the agency had recently been weakened by a scandal involving lavish spending at its conferences. A single GSA event at a posh Nevada resort had cost taxpayers over $822,000, including $79,000 for light refreshments and breakfast, according to investigators, who called it “excessive” and “wasteful.”

Two GSA officials were forced out, including the head of the Public Buildings Service, which oversaw the Old Post Office building. The agency was eager to avoid further controversy, two former GSA officials said, and picking a fight with Donald Trump would certainly cause a storm.

Despite the pressure, a third former GSA official said the message from leadership was “to ‘do the right thing,’ not ‘get it done.’”

But the momentum, explained one insider with deep knowledge of the GSA’s decision-making, was to move the deal forward: “You don’t want to reverse yardage.”

The $170 Million Loan

In August 2013, 18 months after the GSA tapped Trump as its preferred developer, the parties finally agreed on a 60-year lease.

According to a redacted version released to the public, the lease required Trump to put down a security deposit of $4 million, not in cash but in a letter of credit. Trump himself was listed as the personal guarantor of the project, records indicate, signing a $40 million guaranty. (The GSA has redacted his name from the lease, but in separate records he is clearly listed as the guarantor.) The $40 million guaranty can be reduced based on how much equity Trump contributes to the project, the GSA said in a report on it to Congress.

A side agreement attached to the lease makes it clear that “Donald J. Trump and/or Ivanka Trump (acting singularly)” would be the “designated representatives and points of contact” to the GSA in connection with the project. It’s unclear if Donald Trump’s role as a key point of contact changed once he became an official presidential candidate, or how it might change if he were to become the leader of the federal government.

Once the hotel was up and running, Trump promised to pay a base rent of $3 million a year, plus an additional amount that would depend on a formula that the government has refused to release and that the Trump executive declined to discuss.

The Trumps said they were so enthralled by the Old Post Office that they hoped Ivanka’s baby daughter would one day run it.

As for Trump’s business partners and financial backers, the GSA has refused to reveal the investors in Trump Old Post Office LLC, redacting what appear to be more than 50 names on documents related to the deal that the agency has made public.

Trump made one more major financial deal on the hotel. A year after signing the lease with the federal government, he put that very lease up as collateral to secure a $170 million construction loan from Deutsche Bank. If Trump doesn’t finish his hotel or if he defaults on payments, the bank could take over the lease, according to the terms of the loan, just as a bank would take over the mortgage on a home when the owner falls behind on payments.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment. The executive speaking on behalf of the Trump Organization said the plan was always to get a large bank loan for construction, regardless of Colony’s involvement.

In the end, from the public records that are available, Trump appears to have invested little of his personal fortune on the deal.

The total cost, according to records submitted by Trump to the National Capital Planning Commission, is about $196 million. Trump is borrowing $170 million of that from Deutsche Bank, records show, leaving unmet costs of $26 million.

But Trump has applied for a federal tax credit aimed at encouraging preservation of historic sites. According to documents filed with the National Park Service, the rehabilitation will cost an estimated $160 million. The value of the tax subsidy to Trump could be 20% of that, or $32 million, more than enough to cover the project’s unmet costs.

The Trump Organization executive declined to provide financial details, saying only that Trump-owned entities have “invested over $40 million of equity” to develop the project. (In a financial disclosure filed last July, Donald Trump valued his stake in the hotel development company at between $5 million and $25 million.)

B Christopher / Alamy

Julia Schmalz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Trump Presidential Ballroom

To win the preservation tax credit and to comply with the terms of the Old Post Office deal, Trump would have to meet the basic standard for rehabilitating historic landmarks: retaining the original building’s “fabric” — its character and materials.

At first, there were a lot of “seemingly strong and sincere comments from Ivanka” that the Trumps intended to preserve the building’s historical features, said a source who witnessed the conversations. But soon, contentious debate flared up between historic preservationists and the new Trump designers. “They were doing things to the building that were inappropriate” and “inconsistent with the fabric of the building,” said another source who worked for the Trump team.

This source said that when it came to preservation, the Trump team had a doctrine: “Their motto,” he said, “is ‘Apologize, do not ask.’”

Another insider agreed, and said the Trump’s strategy was “We’ll agree to all of this, because seriously, when we get into the details of the actual construction, who’s going to be there knowing whether we actually used authentic this or original that?”

These participants said the Trump team steamrolled the preservationists.

In the interior corridors, the lower part of the walls were originally decorated with a distinctive, dark marble wainscoting, richly flecked and threaded with white. The frames around the doors and windows were dark natural wood. But Donald Trump, according to a source, disliked the look of the corridors and wanted to rip the old materials out.

After intense arguments, his team pushed a solution that some preservationists loathed: covering much of the marble and plaster with drapery.

Covering up original architectural details violates basic precepts of preservation, said one insider who worked on the hotel project. But, he said, at least Trump was blocked from carrying out his original proposal — destroying the marble and wood altogether. Another insider said the draperies were a useful compromise.

When it comes to historic preservation, one source said, “Their motto is ‘Apologize, do not ask.’”

The floor of the corridors was white marble dating back to the building’s grand opening. Trump disliked them as well, calling them “too old,” and at first he wanted to rip them up, according to a source who worked on Trump’s team and was familiar with the project’s design. But then Trump decided to just cover them with carpeting. To some preservationists, that’s like carpeting over the floor of the Jefferson Memorial.

In 2012 and 2013, government agencies involved in the project’s design fought back against the effort to carpet over the historic marble floors. The eventual compromise was to partially cover the corridors: The minutes from a November 2013 meeting show that “the design exposing more marble on the edges was deemed acceptable.”

Yet five months later, in a new proposal for the tax credit signed by Ivanka Trump, the borders were gone: The white marble tile would be covered, borders and all, just as Trump had initially wanted it.

“Whatever you see is new,” said the Trump team member familiar with the design.

Trump’s properties are famous for their glitz — an aesthetic that clashed with the more stately design of the Old Post Office. “He wants to use gold on everything,” said this member of Trump’s team, but in the building’s original design, “there was never any gold.”

Hany Hassan, the architect who succeeded Arthur Cotton Moore, submitted five pages of renderings of what the lobby would look like, all labeled “Interior Paint and Gold Leafing.” Among the surfaces to be gilded was the elegant coffered ceiling.

Government experts insisted that gold decorations violated historic preservation standards. At one meeting in 2013, for example, everyone, according to the minutes, “agreed that there was no precedent for the building for any gold leaf and it should not be used.”

The issue appears far from closed: The 2014 tax application says the ceiling may be “touched up or repainted.” The Trump Organization’s website for the hotel says its central courtyard will be furnished “with gold accents.”

“There is going to be gold,” predicts a former member of the Trump team. “They’re going to do it the way they want to. He wants to use gold on everything.”

One long-running battle between Trump and the government agencies concerned the size and locations of signs bearing his name on or near the historic building. The name for the main event space also raised eyebrows. It was originally called the “Grand Ballroom,” but more recent renderings show an adjustment. The space is now called the Presidential Ballroom.

One of the signs puts a slightly finer point on the matter: “TRUMP Presidential Ballroom,” it proclaims. His team says it will open in the fall of 2016.

Check out more articles on BuzzFeed.com!

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

How Donald Trump Won Control Of A Prized D.C. Landmark was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

ST. LOUIS — There was a popular type of tweet on Friday evening as Republicans recoiled and Democrats danced at the latest Trump controversy. It was about Ted Cruz: If only he had waited two weeks, he would have had the moral authority and indisputable backbone to explain that he opposed Trump for this exact reason and offer a way forward for the GOP.

That didn’t happen.

None of this was ever a problem for Ana Navarro, CNN’s Republican political commentator, who has taken aim at Trump from day one. As many on the Republican side are having a worse and worse cycle as the election wears on — and wears on Americans — Navarro is getting more attention and more plaudits.

She can turn a phrase (“The chupacabra is more popular with Hispanic voters than Donald Trump is,” she has said on air). But what separates Navarro as Republicans now huddle, privately stew, denounce, and try to figure out how to put back together the mess in front of them, is the emotion — the disgust — she shows on air.

Navarro told BuzzFeed News people are used to seeing scripted, robotic partisan surrogates on TV, all spewing the same talking points and “trying to defend crazy shit that cannot be defended.”

“This election, while absolutely horrific for me in so many ways, has also been strangely liberating,” she said. “I am not supporting any candidate and I am not under the thumb of any campaign or party. I don’t get the daily guidance or called to task if I don’t defend something or other. I am unplugged, unchained, and unmuzzled.”

Her latest viral turn came on the heels of a 2005 video that showed Trump crudely talking about women, including language that suggests he forced himself on women to kiss them. “I don’t even wait,” Trump gloated, before adding he can just “grab them by the pussy.”

On air, Navarro was apoplectic, her voice rising, as she repeatedly used the word “pussy” to drive the point home, and undoubtedly get the undivided attention of viewers who might have the TV on in the background.

“Will you please stop saying that word? My daughter is listening,” said Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes.

Navarro lost it.

“Don’t tell me you’re offended when I say ‘pussy,’ but you’re not offended when Donald Trump says it. I’m not running for president, he is,” Navarro shot back.

It was great TV. And the clip shot around Twitter just a couple minutes after the exchange. CNN anchor Don Lemon said he was going to commercial and when they returned, Navarro was gone. Lemon said she had to leave and Navarro explained on Twitter that she had been on air seven hours and was tired.

But Navarro isn’t new to the game, she’s just playing it better than almost any other Republican or commentator.

A longtime Republican strategist, her friendship with Jeb Bush was the source of tension within his shortlived campaign because she was seen by the media as speaking for the campaign.

But from the day Trump infamously hit Mexicans and immigrants, Navarro was there to fight him. She hit her stride when she slammed him with utter indignation over his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the Mexican-American judge from Indiana ruling on the Trump University case, who Trump said could not do his job because he was “Mexican.”

“How dare he question a judge’s responsibility, a judge’s adherence to the Constitution, because he is of Mexican descent? This man was born in East Chicago. He is an American citizen. He is just as American as Donald Trump,” she said.

“Mexican-Americans bleed, just as any other American, when they go to war. They bled just as any other American on 9/11. They fight for America. They are Americans. And what he is doing is disgusting. I am livid about it, and if this is his strategy to win over Hispanics, he’s got a hell of a wake-up call coming to him come November,” she concluded.

Her clips were widely shared on Khizr Khan, the gold star father of a son killed in Iraq, who Trump attacked for days, and as a woman and Latina she was there to check him on Alicia Machado, the ’90s beauty queen who Trump shamed over her weight.

She now gives speeches seemingly daily, to Latino groups, to Republicans, journalists, and others — her brand of “say-it-like-it-is truth-telling” and willingness to drop in a few jokes and expletives entertaining audiences unentertained by the election. In private Republican groups, she is similarly scathing. She drew applause at Mitt Romney’s Utah donor gathering for laying into Trump supporter Anthony Scaramucci, a person present said.

She doesn’t like Hillary Clinton, and has criticized her for leaning too much on being a woman candidate. But in an election that at times seems to have snuffed out the prospect of anything bipartisan happening ever again, Navarro is keeping its ember alive. It’s not unusual to see immigration activists, very liberal Democrats, and women and Latinas of all stripes lauding Navarro on Facebook and Twitter.

After Navarro tore into Hughes, a Latina who works for a Democratic donor wrote on Facebook that “CNN should give Ana a raise given that she’s the only one keeping it real in there.”

The Latina publisher of LatinHeat.com wrote on Facebook in capital letters that she loved Navarro, adding, “Unlike some gutless commentators (Latino and otherwise) she has the guts to take a stand and to say it loud and repeat it — TRUMP is a racist, a misogynist. How hard it is to just speak up about it? It takes a woman.”

Navarro said that as a political refugee from Nicaragua, who has seen the loss of her beloved brother when he was 38 years old as well as friends, she tries to enjoy life and live passionately, but here too Trump insulted her.

“I am the sister of a disabled man and have lived through the pain of seeing him mocked,” she said. “He compared losing a son to the ‘sacrifice’ of building a building. I saw my parents bury my brother. No, it is not comparable.”

Navarro says that she’s learned to ignore the Twitter trolls but at the beginning they hurt. She battled weight issues her whole life, she said, so being called a “Mexican hippopotamus” or something similar was mortifying.

“People who liked me would tweet me about my sexy Latina accent. People who hated me would tweet me about my irritating Mexican accent,” she added. “Hell, I didn’t even know I had an accent. Everybody in Miami talks like me.”

While it’s clear that Navarro takes the prospect of a Trump presidency deadly seriously, she’s also having fun.

Before Trump’s damaging tape was released, Navarro was at her usual on Facebook, telling her friends that she had worked an 18-hour work day, “with every bone in her body complaining,” but rather than go to sleep she thought she would go across the street for oysters and wine. “Hell, you only live once!” she wrote, as friends thanked her for her work.

But on Saturday morning, after the Trump tape was released, she was back at it, joining other Republicans, with a new pronouncement.

Trump should step aside, and Mike Pence should be the nominee, she said.

“The reason you can’t recover from this is because this is consistent behavior from Donald Trump,” she said, running down his attacks on Rosie O’Donnell, Alicia Machado, Megyn Kelly, and others.

“It is not enough for Republican leadership to disavow his comments, to condemn his words, it is time to condemn the man. It is time to ask him to step down. It is time to tell America he does not represent Republican values. He is a pig, he is vile,” she thundered.

None of the other five people on the CNN panel interrupted her.

 — @jarettsays

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com.

As Trump Falters, Ana Navarro Is Having The Last Word was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.