This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Are Hush Puppies Racist? Is A2 Milk Really Healthier? And What’s Up With Wedding Cake? Ask Gastropod!, first released on July 9, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

ADRIENNE: So this is Adrienne. I’m located in New Jersey in the US. And I listen to a lot of food media and I’ve heard a lot of different claims about the origin of the word hush puppies.

CYNTHIA GRABER: Hi Adrienne, and all the rest of you Gastropod listeners, you are the reason we make the show. And so this episode, we thought we’d turn the tables and ask you what you want to know!

BETHANY: Hi, Gastropod. My name is Bethany. I’m calling from San Dimas, California. I have a question about wedding cakes.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Hush puppies for starters, wedding cake for dessert, and what are we going to wash it down with?

GRABER: A glass of milk! In this case, a glass of A2 milk, because listener Ezequiel Williams wanted to know what it is, and why people say that even though they’re dairy intolerant, they can drink milk as long as it’s the A2 variety. What is that? We’re on the case.

TWILLEY: We of course are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and this episode: are hush puppies racist? Why do we celebrate weddings with a multi-tiered, super fancy, sometimes not particularly tasty, very expensive cake? And can poor, dairy-intolerant me actually drink a glass of A2 milk?

TWILLEY: We’ve got the answers to all these important questions but first, an important announcement! Mark your calendars, we are doing our first ever Gastrohang on Thursday, September 26. It’s an online event, it’s going to be a ton of fun, we have a bunch of cool stuff planned, and it is exclusively for those of you who support the show at the Gastropod fan, super fan or supreme fan level. So if you want to come to the Gastrohang—and believe me, you do— get yourself on over to gastropod dot com slash support and get on the list.

GRABER: We’re excited to hang out with you, and we’re also always excited to hear from you. Like in this voice memo we received recently from a listener about our most recent episode all about food allergies.

LISA: Hi, Cynthia and Nicky. My name is Lisa and I’m in Dublin, Ireland. I have a severe peanut allergy that is potentially life threatening. And so it was so, so, so validating to hear the bits about the anxiety and the fear and the stress that it causes, because I think a lot of people don’t understand that.

TWILLEY: Lisa told us even her own friends and family sometimes get frustrated when she’s not comfortable eating at a particular restaurant. And another thing that makes life harder—a lot of restaurants are so afraid of being sued that they just say they can’t guarantee their food is free of nuts, even if they are keeping things separate and washing stuff in between.

GRABER: And then sometimes she orders a dish, and the restaurant can in fact provide it without peanuts, but the server decides to be cute about it.

LISA: And then when they bring it to my table 15, 20 minutes later, they’re like, oh, extra peanuts, right? Ha ha ha ha ha. And it’s like, no, that’s that’s not actually funny. This is not a joke to me. I really want someone to take this seriously.

TWILLEY: We are here for you, Lisa!

LISA: I’m also really excited to hear that there’s ongoing research. I know 10, 20 years down the road seems like a lot, but if in 10 or 20 years I can go to Southeast Asia and eat all the food, I would love to.

GRABER: Fingers crossed! This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics, and by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: So our listener Adrienne called us up with a question about the food item known as the hush puppy.

ADRIENNE: My family’s not from the South, and so, like, it was just, like, a funny term for a food that we found when we moved to Maryland.

GRABER: I am from Maryland, we did eat hush puppies at restaurants when I was growing up, but I do want to point out that Maryland is not in fact a Southern state. I know, I know, we’re south of the Mason Dixon line. But true southerners will agree with me, we are not southern, we are mid Atlantic. And, here’s a little foreshadowing, we are not where the hush puppy originated.

TWILLEY: I do not have a puppy in this debate, I’m sure you are correct Cynthia. But I too am curious about the hush puppy. Some of you might not have heard of this particular food item. I had not, I grew up in England where the hush puppy is a kind of shoe, and I first encountered an edible hush puppy while waitressing in a seafood restaurant in North Carolina.

ROBERT MOSS: I used to work at a seafood restaurant as well. And we had a big crank thing that we would swing over the deep fryer and sort of crank them out and like little, look like a little Vienna sausage type size.

GRABER: Robert Moss is a former seafood server who today is a food writer and culinary historian from South Carolina, and he was happy to explain what a hush puppy is, for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure.

MOSS: Well, a hush puppy is basically this crisp, golden brown orb of fried cornmeal batter. It’s very simple, but it’s quite a great Southern treat.

TWILLEY: This golden brown orb has a texture that has led to harsh words between Cynthia and me. I’m afraid to say that we are not in agreement on this issue. I think a hush puppy is like a doughy, moist corn batter texture on the inside.

GRABER: I think it’s like, fried kind of bits of cornbread, and like who doesn’t love fried cornbread?

TWILLEY: Robert is a diplomat.

MOSS: I think what makes a hush puppy so good is it’s simple. It’s basic. You pick it up. It’s got to be crisp. You bite right through it. It’s not too dry in the middle. It’s not too mushy in the middle. It’s just got this nice wonderful cornmeal texture.

GRABER: But the texture isn’t what led Adrienne to ask us to investigate.

ADRIENNE: I’m less interested in the dish and more interested in the word. Because it’s the word that I always found sort of entertaining and—I liked the story that it was used to hush puppies. But is that really true?

TWILLEY: The story Adrienne is referring to is basically that the hush puppy is called a hush puppy because it was used to quieten down dogs.

MOSS: So a lot, there’s a lot of tendency of people, I think, to to work backwards from the name and, hush puppies is certainly in that camp. And you think about, you think, well, it’s hush, it’s puppies. Well, it must have started off as quieting dogs. And yes, there are any number of stories that are out there, yeah, about people trying to shut dogs up by throwing them some fried cornmeal.

GRABER: That sounds logical, but Adrienne wanted to know—and we here at Gastropod want to know—is that true? Robert also wanted to know.

MOSS: I started digging into it and you quickly get hit upon, like, the Internet is just a terrible Sargasso sea of awful stories. And they quickly sound like this, this just can’t be right. And so then I wanted to go back behind it and start going to the primary sources and really piecing it together. And like most of these things, I, I start off saying, well, I’ll just do a little quick research and nail down where the history came from. And then, you know, days later I’m [LAUGH] wallowing in archives and with far more information than I ever thought I would turn up.

TWILLEY: OK Robert, lead us into this Sargasso sea of hush puppies. What are these origin stories with which the Internet is filled?

MOSS: I think the most basic one is that there’s a bunch of people on the fishing trip usually in the South somewhere back in the 19th century. And they’re, they, they’re frying fish at the end of the day around the campfire and the dogs smell the fish fry and start barking and yapping. So they throw a little cornmeal, corn, cornbread batter into the pan, where they’re frying the fish and then throw it to the hush puppies to shush them. So that’s sort of a basic, story But people want to elaborate on that. Particularly anything Southern, commentators you know, they can’t help but try to link that to the Civil War somehow. So the story then gets embellished to say, well, there are a bunch of confederate soldiers around the campfire in the woods with their dogs for some reason. And the Yankees’ soldiers were approaching and they needed to shut the dogs up because they were barking. So they quickly thought quick and fried up a bunch of cornmeal and threw it to the, to the dogs. Which has the advantage for storytelling of not only have the civil war in it, but becomes this sort of last minute desperation because it has drama and everything.

GRABER: And then let’s not forget, it’s the South, there’s an unfortunate tendency to relate anything southern somehow to life on the plantation. And this is where the potential for a link to race comes in.

MOSS: So the story there, which has all sorts of just really terrible racist overtones, is the cooks in the main house have leftover breading they’re using for frying catfish. So they send it down to the slave quarters where thrifty women fried it up and use it to hush the, the, the barking childs and, and all that kind of stuff.

TWILLEY: There’s a lot of creativity going on here, but is any of it true?

MOSS: None of those things, none of those stories have any basis in fact. In fact, there’s no evidence I’ve been able to find of anybody eating something called a hush puppy, in the South or anywhere else before the, the early 20th century. So the timing just doesn’t even support it, much less sort of the silliness of a lot of the explanations.

GRABER: Okay, time to get out of the Sargasso Sea of internet stories and find out the truth. Let’s get some food basics established first. There was no mention of a hush puppy before the 1900s, but clearly people had fried up cornmeal before then.

MOSS: Yeah, you’re right. Fried cornmeal has been what Southerners ate, and Americans in general ate, American colonists ate since the early colonial days. You had corn dodgers, you have, Johnny Cakes, you have corn pone. All sorts of variations of making some kind of batter out of cornmeal, which was, you know, or maize, which is a staple, and frying it in a pan. Frying back then, back before the 20th century, would largely be in, you know, these sort of shallow frying pans placed over the coals of a fire. Typically not deep fat fried.

GRABER: Basically these were kind of lightly fried cornmeal pancakes, not deep fried well-browned orbs.

MOSS: It’d be, you know, like you would think of almost sauteing today. It’d be cooking it in a small amount of fat, maybe enough oil or lard to coat the pan. So, yeah, certainly there was all sorts of fried cornmeal batter.

TWILLEY: But no hush puppies. Which Robert knows because when he came across the very earliest descriptions of deep fried balls of cornmeal dough, people were writing about them as newfangled.

MOSS: You see these accounts of people first encountering something that they consider to be new. So it’s clearly something that is different, whether they call it a hush puppy or something else.

GRABER: There were a few things that had developed at that point in history to set the stage for the birth of the hush puppy.

MOSS: What had changed was the, really the rise of deep frying, which is a phenomenon of the late 19th century. When, you know, industrial hog production made lard a lot cheaper, you had the rise of peanut oil and cottonseed oil and other lard substitutes as the South was trying to find alternatives, or-things to do with, with the crops. And so peanut oil, for instance, became widely available, much cheaper and more able to use in large quantities for frying.

TWILLEY: The other thing that transformed the fried corn dough landscape was something we’ve talked about on the show before, the rise of cheap, industrially-manufactured deep cast iron pans. They’re what kickstarted the rise of fried chicken too.

GRABER: You can hear all about that on our episode about fried chicken called Poultry Power. These newly affordable cast iron pots were kind of like a dutch oven.

MOSS: So people had those and you could fill them up with a cheap oil and deep fry.

TWILLEY: So these new deep fried corn dough blobs were different than all the shallow fried corn blobs of yesteryear. But who invented them? Who is the creator of the hush puppy?

GRABER: Well apparently the very first ones weren’t called hush puppies.

MOSS: I am convinced that the original name of Hush Puppies was actually red horse bread.

TWILLEY: I am sorry, what?

GRABER: Robert said it all starts with a guy named Romeo Govan, he was born into slavery in South Carolina.

MOSS: But, after the,, the Civil War, you know, after emancipation, he was a farmer for a long time, but he lived in near Bamberg, South Carolina on the banks of the Edisto River. And one of the things he did to earn a little money is he started hosting fish fries. Where he would catch fish. It was caught right there on the Edisto and, and fried up for, you know, people from the community. He quickly became like the most in-demand fish fry king of the Edisto area. Built what he called a clubhouse, which is sort of a wooden pavilion on the banks of the Edisto River. And then organizations, political parties, lots of political campaigns would have big fish fries, they would pay him to cook for them, and. You know, he would cook alongside the river.

TWILLEY: And here is where the red horse name finally starts making some sense because as well as bass and catfish, Romeo would fry up a local fish called the red horse. I’d never heard of it, but I promise it’s a real fish.

GRABER: And Romeo named a special treat he invented “red horse bread,” it went with the redhorse fish.

MOSS: Earliest account I’ve found is, I think, 1903, a newspaper account of someone who attended one of these fish fries and was raving about what Romeo Govan called red horse bread. I think they called it the—the newspaper writer called it the, “once tasted, never to be forgotten red horse bread.”

TWILLEY: And what exactly was this amazing, unforgettable red horse bread? Robert says it was nothing more nor less than deep fried cornmeal batter.

MOSS: We have a recipe, from a 1906 account of one of his barbecues. Which is that the batter is simply cornmeal, water, salt, and egg that he would drop by the spoonful into the hot lard that the fish had been cooked in. And it just became a standard accompaniment for a Romeo Govan fish fry.

GRABER: Romeo died in 1915, but the popularity of the bread kept spreading around the region. Throughout the decades, all the way through around World War II, there are mentions of red horse bread in South Carolina press.

TWILLEY: Awesome. But even though Romeo’s red horse bread is a hush puppy in all but name, the actual thing Adrienne wanted to know about is the name. And Robert says, as these deep fried corn dough balls spread across the south, they picked up a few different names.

MOSS: Wampus was one. I think that was down in Florida. Three finger bread, for some reason. So, I think that kind of like fishing, cookery sort of led itself to creative names, like hush puppy or, or red horse bread.

TWILLEY: Hush puppy was actually relatively late to the red horse bread party.

MOSS: The earliest reference I could find of somebody calling that a hush puppy was sometime in the early 1920s. So at least two decades after Romeo Govan was serving red horse bread.

GRABER: It looks like there was a dividing line between South Carolina and Georgia—South Carolina kept calling it red horse bread, but somewhere along the line folks in Georgia started to call it a hush puppy.

MOSS: And you can sort of track it. In the 1920s, you can find it down around Macon, Georgia, at fish fries down there. And then by 1930s, it’s moved south. And there’s all kinds of newspaper magazine accounts of fish fries in Florida, particularly fishing trips where people are eating hush puppies. And that’s around the time a lot of northern sports reporters were going south and writing about fishing expositions at a time. When, heading south to do to do fishing was sort of a big thing. And they were all would- would rave about their hush puppies that these sort of camp cooks would cook after they finished fishing. And so by the 1930s, hush puppies were starting to get picked up a little bit, even outside the, you know, outside the South. And, you know, by, after World War II, it pretty much eclipsed red horse bread, and we’ve been calling them hush puppies ever since, even, here in the mid, middle part of South Carolina.

TWILLEY: Alright, that’s how the name spread, but that doesn’t explain the name itself. Where does the term hush puppy come from and why would you call a food item a hush puppy?

GRABER: Well, it turns out that fried cornbread-y bits weren’t the first foods to be called hush puppies, and this might help explain the name.

MOSS: I did find that hush puppy was a term at some point for gravy. As sort of a slang term and some accounts from like, cowboys on the trail out west and talking about the cook making hush puppy. But it’s pretty clearly some kind of pan gravy that was made out there. And then, you know, in the early 20th century, there is a Mississippi senator that got in the newspaper for calling, what we would call pot liquor, the, you know, the cooking juice that the greens, the collard greens and other things were cooked in, he would call it hush puppy. ‘Cause he said it, it, you know, you drink a little pot liquor or quiet the hound or stop the hounds from growling in, in your stomach.

TWILLEY: So this is interesting, we’re back to the story about a hush puppy being some food that keeps the growling dogs quiet, but the dogs are metaphorical this time—they’re growling in your stomach.

GRABER: Robert says he can’t figure out why or when someone decided that a food should be called a hush puppy, but THIS story, about it being named hush puppy because it quiets that annoying internal growl, he believes that’s what the name comes from.

MOSS: That sort of metaphorical thing seems a lot more likely as a name to me than an actual, you know, act of throwing cornmeal to dogs. And it’s sort of, you know, Nicky, you mentioned serving baskets of hush puppies, as sort of a appetizer or as a welcome or a lot of seafood restaurants do that. It is a little something to nibble on while you’re waiting for the food to keep those, those dogs from growling. So that to me is my hypothesis. I don’t have any good evidence other than it just makes a lot more sense than all the other stories out there.

TWILLEY: Mystery more or less solved. But there is one other thing I was wondering. You remember the shoes that were called Hushpuppies? They were like leather or suede shoes, kind of dorky looking?

GRABER: I totally do—I remember them as being old people shoes, but they went through a kind of renaissance in the 1990s thanks actually to the movie Forrest Gump. But so what’s their origin story, is it connected to cornmeal?

MOSS: The official story from I think is it, Wolverine? The company that makes the Hushpuppies. Their official story is that one of their salesmen went down South to Florida for one of these fishing trips and ate hush puppies, and liked the name. And just thought it sounded like a cozy name for a comfortable shoe. And they, they, they named it that way. So it, it, as far as I could tell, yes, the hush puppy shoe was named after the, the crisp fried treat and not the other way around for sure.

TWILLEY: I feel so much better for this knowledge, thank you Adrienne for the question, and Robert for answering. And now we have a cake-based mystery to solve—but first, a quick word from our sponsors.

[BREAK]

BETHANY: So I’m a former wedding photographer. I haven’t done it in years, but every single time I did, I would be sort of bewildered by the amount of money people were spending on a wedding cake.

GRABER: Bethany is a Gastropod listener from California.

BETHANY: We see bakers coming with, you know, elaborate designs. Cakes are as tall as people, you know, with columns. And then we also see ribbons that are wrapped and—all this sort of stuff is used on cakes.

VOICEOVER: This was the breathtaking moment these newlyweds unveiled their gigantic, castle themed wedding cake. They’ve truly outdone themselves with this masterpiece. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] It stands proudly at around 12 feet tall, a true architectural marvel, adorned with sugar spires, candy turrets, and delicate icing details that would make any bride and groom envious.

TWILLEY: This is not a new thing.

BRITISH VOICEOVER: Weighing about 300 weight and standing 9 feet high, its beautiful workmanship is a glowing tribute to the artists who have created it. Tier upon tier, supported by beautiful silver columns, this empire cake is a masterpiece of the confectioner’s art. One of the most beautiful ever made.

BETHANY: I want to know more about it. Why the trend is so popular, why people spend thousands of dollars on a cake for a single day. Can you look into the history of this? I’d really love to know more about this special dessert.

TWILLEY: To get to the bottom of the origins of wedding cake, we went back to Ancient Rome with Carol Wilson, she’s a food writer who has traced the wedding cake’s long and peculiar history.

CAROL WILSON: The earliest one surprisingly, was in ancient Rome. When the newly married couple would have a cake—just a simple cake made of wheat or barley—and that would be broken over the bride’s head. And the guests would gather up the crumbs as a token of good luck.

GRABER: Carol told us nobody really knows what that wheat or barley cake tasted like, or even if it was sweet.

TWILLEY: But in any case, fast forward through the Roman invasion of Britain, followed by the Norman invasion of Britain and, Carol says that at least in medieval England, the Roman barley cake had evolved into a tasty spiced bun.

WILSON: And these would be stacked in a towering pile as high as possible. And if the bride and groom were able to kiss over the tall stack, it meant a lifetime of prosperity for them.

GRABER: Carol told us by the late 1600s, in England the stack of buns had morphed into a bride’s pie, and it wasn’t always sweet.

WILSON: The first time it was specially mentioned for a wedding, as bride’s pie, was recorded in 1685 by Robert May in his book, The Accomplished Cook. And it was a large round pie with an elaborately decorated pastry crust. And that concealed a filling of oysters, pine kernels, coxcombs, lamb’s testicles, sweetbreads and spices. And those were expensive ingredients. So for the less wealthy people, there were humbler versions. And these pies just consisted of minced meats, maybe with some dried fruits.

TWILLEY: Traces of this kind of spiced dried fruit pie can be found in the delicious personal size pies that British people eat by the dozen at Christmas, they’re called mince pies. Although nowadays the only meaty part is the fat, which is traditionally suet from cows or sheep.

GRABER: Mince pies are small, but these bride pies were party sized, and everyone at the wedding absolutely had to take a bite to ensure the happiness of the couple.

WILSON: And a ring was traditionally placed in the pie, and the lady who found it would be the next one to marry.

TWILLEY: Carol says the bride’s pie was still traditional in England until the 1800s, but in the meantime, the 1500s and 1600s saw some big breakthroughs in cake technology. First, Italian and French bakers figured out how to get cake to rise with whisked egg batters rather than having to use yeast, and then chemical leaveners like baking powder came along.

GRABER: The other thing that advanced the cause of the wedding cake as opposed to a wedding pie is that sugar became cheaper, which is a story we told in our recent episode Sugar’s Dark Shadow. And so in the 1600s, wedding traditions started to change. Pies were still around, but many of the elite had cakes.

WILSON: So fruited cakes, which also became symbols of fertility, gradually became the centerpieces for weddings.

TWILLEY: Rich or poor, cake or pie, there was no escape from dried fruit. Because these bride cakes were dense, rich fruitcakes. Covered in a layer of icing.

WILSON: Now, this icing was a type of meringue and it was made from whisking egg whites and sugar for about two hours with ambergris, which is a secretion from the sperm whale. Musk, and orange flower water. And this was spread over the cooked cake and then it was dried in the oven until the icing had set hard.

GRABER: I have to admit, it doesn’t sound super appealing. But the other notable thing about this hard, dried, ambergris, musk, and orange flower water flavored icing is that it would have been white.

WILSON: Pure white color in the 17th century was very much sought after as white icing resembled purity. But there was also a more practical reason. Because these bride cakes were expensive, especially the sugar. For that icing that I’ve just mentioned. It meant that only the finest refined sugar had been used, and so it was a display of the family’s wealth and status.

GRABER: So now all the elements of the wedding cake tradition are finally in place. At least among the elite.

TWILLEY: This white-frosted fruit cake, often a multi tier affair among the wealthy—it really reached its apex at the wedding of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert. Their cake was truly a showstopper. It was a three-tiered wedding cake that weighed 300lbs and was ten feet wide

WILSON: Well, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840. And white icing was used to decorate her cake. And by then it had evolved into a less complex mixture. So, that icing, since Queen Victoria’s wedding cake, has been known as royal icing ever since.

GRABER: But royal icing—the hard mixture of basically just powdered sugar, egg whites, and water—that description doesn’t do justice to how elaborate Queen Victoria’s cake was. There was a sculpture of the helmeted warrior goddess Britannia. There were sugar sculptures of the royal couple, there were turtle doves and sculpted cupids. It must have been mind-blowing.

TWILLEY: This is the moment that the wedding cake becomes *the* focal point of the whole reception—this is when it becomes the elaborate centerpiece that bewildered Bethany.

GRABER: Queen Victoria’s wedding really set the standard for weddings to come. For instance, royal icing became common on wedding cakes, and it’s because of her that most British and American brides wear white at their wedding. But Carol said some of the traditions and superstitions around weddings cakes in general date back even earlier.

WILSON: Sharing the cake with family and friends increases the happy couple’s fertility. But the bride who baked her own cake was asking for trouble.

TWILLEY: Because everything is always the woman’s fault, there’s more: if the bride so much as tasted the cake before the wedding, her no-good husband would be unfaithful, and if she kept a piece of cake after the wedding, he would stay true. The power of cake, my friends.

WILSON: And every guest must eat a small piece of the cake to ensure that the happy couple were blessed with children.

GRABER: We haven’t tested the science behind any of these claims.

TWILLEY: Traditionally, Carol says, there were two cakes, one for the bride and another for the groom.

WILSON: And the groom’s cake, again, a dark, heavy fruitcake, wasn’t usually iced, but that was cut up into little squares and that was put into boxes for the guests to take home as a wedding memento and also to ensure good luck. And the recipients of the groom’s cake would place the boxes under his or her pillow. And, they were meant to dream of their future spouse.

TWILLEY: I am a big cake fan, I even like a good fruit cake, but this gives me nightmares! Even in a box, I’d be worried about the crumbs.

GRABER: It does also sound kind of uncomfortable. In any case, Brits ate fruitcakes at weddings for quite a long time.

WILSON: When the late Queen, Elizabeth II, married Prince Philip in 1947, she had a very similar cake, and that was nine feet high and weighed 500 pounds.

TWILLEY: My own parents got married even more recently than that and they had a fruitcake at their wedding. They expected me to, too.

GRABER: I had never even heard of a fruitcake at a wedding until Bethany sent us off on this quest, my mom can’t remember anyone she knew ever having a fruitcake at a wedding. It turns out that apparently they were traditional in America, too, but they seem to have fallen out of favor by about the 1950s in the US, and sponge cakes became the thing.

WILSON: And today there are practically no rules about wedding cakes. They can be any color, flavor, or shape.

TWILLEY: The one rule, as our listener Bethany noticed, is that if you call it a wedding cake, you can charge more.

GRABER: Same thing with the dress, thank you Queen Victoria.

TWILLEY: OK, so some people, definitely not me, like to wash their sweet things down with a glass of milk. But is that A1 or A2 milk? If that distinction sounds like gibberish to you, stay tuned: we’ve got the story of the two versions of milk and why A2 milk is what all the cool kids are talking about these days after the break.

[BREAK]

[HAPPY MUSIC]

SINGER: Everybody’s free… to feel good. Everybody’s free! To feel good!

GRABER: This song is accompanying a video with happy people going surfing and smiling joyfully in the breeze because—they’re drinking A2 milk. Yes, it’s an ad.

TWILLEY: I would not drink a glass of any kind of milk, but I have to confess, they’re making this A2 stuff look great. The only problem is I have no idea what A2 milk is. Or any other A number for that matter.

GRABER: And neither did our listener Ezequiel Williams. He wrote to us to ask what in the world it is and what’s the difference between A1 and A2, which are not apparently steak sauces. For those Americans familiar with A1.

TWILLEY: Or roads and paper sizes in the UK, which is what I grew up with. The A2 goes from London to Dover, A2 paper is like, small poster size.

GRABER: But our curiosity was piqued, and so we called up someone who has a little more familiarity with the topic.

SAVAIANO: So I’m Dennis Saviano. I’m the Meredith Professor of Nutrition at Purdue University.

TWILLEY: Dennis told us that in milk, the main protein is something called casein—there’s about 2 teaspoons of casein in every quart of milk and most of that casein is made up a subtype of casein called beta casein.

SAVAIANO: And some time ago, probably a few thousand years ago, there was a little bit of a change in the DNA and therefore the protein structure of the casein in some cows.

GRABER: So basically, as we’ve said, there’s casein, then there’s beta casein. And then to make it more complicated, there are different types of beta casein. They have slightly different amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein.

TWILLEY: There are a bunch of these beta casein variations, but Dennis told us the two most common ones are called A1 and A2. And, like he said, scientists think somewhere between five and 10 thousand years ago, there was a totally normal random genetic mutation in a cow that led it to produce A1 beta casein rather than A2. Yes, A2 came first, before A1, it’s confusing, I’m sorry.

GRABER: These types of tiny mutations happen all the time, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a big deal, but even it’s not an evolutionary advantage, if it’s not a disadvantage, then maybe the change sticks around. That seems to be the case here.

SAVAIANO: And so it happened in some cows, and it wasn’t a deleterious effect. They still produced milk. The milk still fed their calves and… it sustained itself.

TWILLEY: Where this gets super intriguing is that most of the cows that are raised industrially today are breeds like Holstein and Friesian that have this A1 mutation. Meanwhile, traditional Indian and African breeds of cattle—they still produce A2 milk.

GRABER: And to make it more confusing, some heritage-type breeds like Jersey, Guernsey, or Brown Swiss—their milk typically has a bit of both, but they tend to produce more A2 than A1, in varying proportions. Now, scientists don’t seem to know why the breeds that tend to be used in industrial farming tend to be A1 cows, it seems to be just how history shook out.

TWILLEY: So far, so fascinating, but also kind of NBD. But then in the 1990s, a health researcher in New Zealand came up with a curious hypothesis. He thought that maybe drinking A1 milk might be causing higher rates of diabetes in kids.

GRABER: This sounds bizarre, like the change wasn’t a big deal, at least to the cows, why would it matter to us? But Dennis said it has to do with how the different proteins are digested in our guts.

SAVAIANO: When the A1 casein is digested, there’s a fragment that’s formed that’s a… drug like, a morphine-like compound. It’s called a casomorphine. It has morphine properties.

TWILLEY: So that’s the deal with A1. Dennis said when our bodies break down the A2 version of casein, the compounds that are produced are not morphine-like.

GRABER: But a morphine-like compound? What in the world is something morphine-like doing in our guts?

SAVAIANO: Well, it binds to the mu receptor in the stomach. It binds to the same receptor that morphine would bind to.

GRABER: Normally when we’re talking about morphine, it’s for pain relief or a high, and the receptors it’s triggering are in the central nervous system, particularly in the brain. But we have morphine receptors in our guts too, and they seem to be involved in regulating how quickly things move through our guts.

TWILLEY: So far, so normal. We’ve talked about this on Gastropod before, our bodies have receptors for all sorts of things in all kinds of different places. Like my favorite factoid: that there are bitter receptors in testicles. That’s because these receptors are multipurpose, the same kinds of chemicals can bind to them but do totally different things based on where in our bodies that’s happening.

GRABER: So the claim isn’t that A1 milk is giving people an opioid high.

TWILLEY: Or else maybe I would be more into drinking milk.

GRABER: But kind of weirdly, in the 1990s that researcher in New Zealand claimed not only that A1 milk might be behind diabetes in kids, but also that it might be causing increased rates of heart disease, and if that’s not enough, maybe it caused schizophrenia and autism and a whole laundry list of, well, everything.

SAVAIANO: The systemic effects are interesting hypotheses. There’s less data there.

TWILLEY: Dennis is being polite but really, after more than a couple of decades of research and reviews, scientists haven’t been able to find good evidence for these kinds of serious health claims.

GRABER: But one claim that’s kind of stuck around is that A2 is better for people who have a hard time digesting milk. That this older version is easier on your gut.

AUSTRALIAN VOICEOVER: A lot of people who drink A2 milk say, they just feel better. What if everyone could feel better?

TWILLEY: Yeah yeah, it’s another ad. Why should we believe this claim either? That’s certainly what Dennis thought up till a couple of years ago.

SAVAIANO: So I’ve done these lactose intolerance studies since the 1980s. I’m 70 years old and, you know, I’ve done them for 40 years. And when the A2 milk company came to me and said, we want you to do a study in the United States, because we have these studies in China and Australia and I said, great, it’s not going to work. I’ll take your money. I’ll do the study. It’s not going to work. I’m going to show it doesn’t work.

GRABER: Dennis did indeed take their money. And he designed what’s considered the gold standard of a scientific study: it was double-blinded, so neither the participants nor the scientists knew in the moment who was getting what. They had four different types of milk with different levels of A2 or A1 proteins, one of those was also lactose free. And the milk doses were adjusted for the body weight of the study participant.

TWILLEY: And he found pretty conclusively that overall people who drank the 100 percent A2 milk had significantly fewer stomach upsets and less pain than they did after drinking conventional A1 milk.

SAVAIANO: I was as surprised as anyone, because I was the skeptic.

GRABER: Dennis really didn’t think it would turn out this way, but the study results were clear.

SAVAIANO: Clearly people have more discomfort, stomach discomfort with A1 milk than A2 milk on average. It’s five or six studies that show it, including my own.

GRABER: But here’s the thing: A2 milk didn’t help everyone. And that’s because there’s something else going on. You heard that one of the milks in Dennis’ study was lactose free, and that’s because people usually say that they’re lactose intolerant, not casein intolerant. But in fact most people have self-diagnosed their dairy issue, and it turns out that either or both can be the case.

TWILLEY: Side note, you can also be allergic to milk rather than intolerant, in which case your symptoms could also include a rash and wheezing.

GRABER: Allergies could also cause digestive issues, but all of this would come from an actual immune response, we talked about this in our most recent episode about food allergies. But what we’re focused on in this episode is not a dairy allergy but a dairy intolerance.

TWILLEY: If you’re lactose intolerant, the deal is you don’t have the machinery to make enough of an enzyme called lactase that can digest the main sugar in milk, lactose. And not being able to digest that sugar causes a range of uncomfortable effects.

GRABER: The response to casein—apparently in many cases the response to A1 casein—this is a different biological process. But it does end up causing the same types of digestive issues, so from a personal perspective, it’d be hard to know what’s causing your milk-related distress unless you’ve been officially diagnosed with a lactose issue.

TWILLEY: Which is maybe why A2 milk helped some people and not others.

SAVAIANO: And that’s one of the things we’re really interested in, is, who is it true for?

GRABER: In fact, scientists don’t even know for sure why A1 milk would cause problems for people. Dennis said one theory is that the way the two different proteins latch onto the gut changes how they move through the digestive system.

SAVAIANO: The A2 tends to stay in the stomach a little longer. And we don’t know if that’s because of this morphine-like compound with the A1s kind of pushing things through. Because it’s a—again, on the stomach lining, there are receptors for morphine like compounds, and it could be that this affects the rate of passage. Or it could be that the curds that form are different because of the different structures. But regardless of what the reason is, we know that the A1 tends to move through the stomach faster.

TWILLEY: Basically the idea is that this observation—that A1 milk blows through your system faster, even though no one knows why—but that speediness could be part of why it causes such digestive problems in some folks.

GRABER: But weirdly Dennis also thinks that there could be something else going on—that A2 milk could be linked to better processing of lactose, that somehow the A2 protein could improve the production of the enzyme lactase.

SAVAIANO: There’s an animal study that suggests that. So what we’re going to do is a human study to see if in humans, we can replicate that and see if we get a difference.

TWILLEY: Stay tuned. Which is basically the case with everything to do with the science of A2 milk. But in the meantime, Gastropod’s very own intrepid citizen scientist Cynthia decided to do a little study of her own.

GRABER: Early one Sunday morning, I did something I was not looking forward to

GRABER: To find out if A2 milk feels somewhat better for me, I have to first make myself somewhat sick by drinking regular milk, which I’m very excited about. So here I am. I’m going open, open the fridge. How do you feel about me doing this particular study?

[LAUGH]

TIM BUNTEL: I’m thinking about excuses to get out of the house for the morning. [BOTH LAUGH]

GRABER: I decided to do a scaled-down version of what the participants in Dennis’ study had done. I went to bed, woke up, and didn’t have anything else, so I’d been fasting for about maybe 10 hours—though his study said a 12 hour fast. Also, in theory, based on his study I should have been drinking maybe about 24 ounces of milk—I just couldn’t handle that. Instead, I opened the refrigerator, got out the milk, and poured myself a full 16 ounce glass.

[RUSTLING, MILK POURING]

GRABER: Why do people do this? Why am I doing this? [LAUGH] If I am writhing in stomach pain in an hour, it’s Gastropod’s fault. Here we go.

TWILLEY: Honestly, I have no biological milk digestion issues, but just thinking about drinking a glass of milk makes me want to puke. This experiment is so gross.

GRABER: I felt the same way.

GRABER: Well I finished that about two minutes ago. I already feel nauseous. We’ll see if it gets worse.

GRABER: To be honest, I think that was just psychosomatic, it takes a little while longer for the symptoms to hit.

TWILLEY: OK, feelings aside, this is science: what were your findings from your A1 milk chug? Not too much detail, please.

GRABER: There’s not too much detail to give. I felt kind of generally nauseous all day, not too bad, I could still go about my normal life, but I really didn’t feel like eating anything. It was basically over by nighttime. I didn’t get what I’ve gotten a few times in the past, which is like stomach-twisting pain. But to be honest, that’s probably because I wouldn’t have qualified for Dennis’s study. I’ve eaten dairy recently, and I’ve taken Lactaid pills for it. Both of those would have disqualified me. Maybe my symptoms would have been worse if I didn’t have any of either anywhere in my system.

TWILLEY: Not the gold standard I’m afraid! But still—was the A2 milk experience any different?

[MILK POURING]

GRABER: It looks exactly the same as other milk.

GRABER: I really didn’t want to go through with the whole thing—I stared at the full glass of milk for a minute, and then just went for it.

GRABER: Here we go, time to drink all 16 ounces.

[SWALLOW]

GRABER: Okay, I finished it, now we’ll wait. [CLINK OF PUTTING DOWN GLASS]

TWILLEY: I have to say, I know you suffered and I’m sorry about that, but all along I have been expecting this whole experiment to have been in vain. Because here’s the thing, you already know that Lactaid helps you, so you know your problem is lactose related, so how could A2 milk help?

GRABER: I thought the same thing, but Dennis did make the point that maybe A2 milk might somehow help people create more lactase enzyme, although he didn’t know how, he said it just seemed to be the case that this happened in animals. So I thought, maybe it could be better.

TWILLEY: OK, worth a try. But did you feel any better after the A2?

GRABER: Nope, not in any measurable way. I still felt just a little bit nauseous, I still didn’t really want to eat lunch.

TWILLEY: Listeners, this is very rare. Cynthia doesn’t skip meals.

GRABER: It’s true, I don’t. So I think we can say pretty safely that A2 milk is not going to solve my dairy issue.

TWILLEY: Cynthia’s going to stick with the Lactaid pills, and the scientists are going to keep doing the science.

GRABER: One thing Dennis wondered, and is interested in figuring out, is that maybe it has to do with how you grew up—like maybe if I’d grown up drinking A2 milk, it would help my lactose processing and I would be less lactose intolerant.

TWILLEY: And Dennis is also thinking that maybe this works vice versa. Maybe drinking A1 milk from when you’re a kid—maybe that is what creates the biological ability to process that form of casein.

SAVAIANO: What’s the adaptation? Can people adapt to this? Do they change? People like me who grew up on A1 milk, are we fundamentally different from an epigenetic perspective than people that grew up on A2 milk? And is that why I don’t have symptoms from A1 and other people do? So, yeah, there’s a lot of unanswered questions and my focus is really around the GI tract. And because I think that’s where the likely effects are going to be—we’re going to be able to understand those effects.

GRABER: And then there’s a question about whether there is in fact any impact of drinking of A1 milk beyond the gut. We’re now pretty sure that A1 milk does not cause schizophrenia or autism, but does the fact that it latches onto that opioid receptor have any impact on the rest of the body?

TWILLEY: Dennis doesn’t know that either, but he wants to find out.

SAVAIANO: So it’s a fascinating question. That’s why we go into science, to study these fascinating questions.

TWILLEY: For now, while we wait for the scientists to do the science, if you want to try 100% A2 milk for yourself, like Cynthia did, you can—it’s in stores. Dennis says it tastes identical to regular milk. It’s just more expensive

SAVAIANO: Oh, yeah, there’s a difference in price at the store. When you have to make a herd that’s completely A2 and you have to certify that it’s A2, there’s additional costs. And I don’t know what the profit margins are, but my guess is the A2 profit margin’s higher than the, the commercial milk profit margin. So, I mean, you know, supply and demand determines price, right?

TWILLEY: Ultimately, Dennis says that now we know about this A1 mutation, we might end up just removing it from the food system and only having cows that produce the A2 variety. One day all milk might be A2 milk again, like it was many thousands of years ago.

SAVAIANO: My guess is the dairy farmers will breed it out, as we get more and more science. I think you’re going to come to a point where the consumer will just say, why take the chance with the A1 when I can buy the A2. And the dairy industry is going to respond to that with herds that are essentially all A2.

GRABER: I’m going to be honest, I don’t think that many people care enough, or have issues with the milk they’re drinking today. Because, in America, only about 25 percent of people can’t digest milk well, and A2 won’t help all of them.

TWILLEY: But in the entire world, it’s more than half—nearly 70 percent of people have a difficult time digesting milk.

SAVAIANO: The question we’re asking is for which one of those does it matter?

TWILLEY: Which of those people can’t handle dairy because of the A1 beta casein rather than the lactose?

GRABER: And the answer you will not be surprised to hear is, we don’t yet know.

SAVAIANO: We know on average it matters. The question though is, is, so if those were 50 people, let’s say. Which of the 50 are affected, which aren’t, and why?

[MUSIC]

GRABER: So there you have it, the relatively definitive answer to hush puppies and wedding cakes, the slightly more open-ended story of A2 milk. Thanks to all of you who submitted questions, keep them coming, we’ll come back with more answers in future episodes!

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Robert Moss, Carol Wilson, and Dennis Saviano for helping us get as close as possible to the bottom of these mysteries. We have links to their books and writing and research online at gastropod.com, where you can also sign up as a Gastropod fan or super fan or supreme fan, and get your very own invitation to our first-ever Gastrohang this September.

GRABER: Thanks as always to our supreme producer Claudia Geib. We have a couple of fascinating episodes from friends of the show coming up for you: a Radiolab story about a newly discovered human body part—yes, scientists found a whole new organ!—and a Planet Money story about a booze-based trade war. Tune in, and we promise we’ll be back soon with brand new Gastropod episodes!