Comedian Zarna Garg: Masala Chai

Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle

Rachel Belle

Music Interviews, Arts, Food, Comedy Interviews, Tv & Film, Film Interviews, Comedy, Music, Science, History

4.4 • 709 Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zarna Garg immigrated to the United States from India alone, at 16, without a penny to her name. Fast-forward to 2018: She’s a stay-at-home mom with three kids and bored out of her mind. At her children’s insistence, Zarna got on stage at an open-mic night. Five years later? She has her own comedy special on Amazon, “Zarna Garg: One in a Billion!”

Zarna loves to top many of her meals with a big ol' pile of raw onions, but laments that Americans are sensitive to onion breath. I chat with a cognitive scientist who researched whether smell preference is cultural, personal taste or universally disliked among humans because of its chemical compounds.

And we’ll learn the fairly modern history of masala chai with Indian-American food writer Leena Trivedi-Granier (click for her recipe)– just don’t call it chai tea! We’ll tell you why.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights.
0:05.8	Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show.
0:20.0	I'm Rachel Bell and this is your last meal.
0:23.5	The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most, and we dig into
0:27.3	the history, culture, and science of those meals with experts from around the world.
0:31.7	Today on the program, stand-up comedian Zarna Garg.
0:35.4	And there's some things I'll just never get used to in this country.
0:39.4	People love to say, I love you all the time and to everybody.
0:43.2	I hate it.
0:46.2	I've never said I love you to my husband.
0:49.2	But if he said it to me, I know he's cheating on me.
0:55.8	With a white woman.
1:01.7	Zarnas first comedy special, One in a Billion, came out on Amazon earlier this year.
1:06.9	And her comedy videos on TikTok and Instagram have been watched hundreds of millions of times.
1:12.6	But the story of how Zarnah launched a comedy career in her 40s, after being a stay-at-home mother of three who came to America at 16 without a single penny to her name, is the most interesting
1:17.7	story I have heard in a long time.
1:20.7	Zarnah talks about her deep love of raw onions, the unorthodox food she feeds her kids for
1:26.1	breakfast, and she talks about her love of masala chai.
1:30.0	So we're going to learn about the fairly modern origin story of masala chai with food writer Lena Trevedi Grinier.
1:36.9	Chai means tea, and that is a mistake that people make all the time calling it chai tea.
1:42.9	Oh, God bless you.
1:45.2	You've done a service to every South Asian out there. Thank you.
	...

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