Welcome to Food with Mark Bitman. I'm Kate Bitman. Thanks for being here. We know how many of you are loyal

listeners and we appreciate that so much. If you'd like to hear more from Mark and me and our small but

mighty team, check us out on bitmanproject.com. When you subscribe there, you'll get access to our recipe database, which now has thousands of recipes, with more added weekly.

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Reach out to us with any questions, comments, or stuff you think should be featured on the podcast or on our site, food at markbitman.com. com. I first met Hannah Goldfield when we worked together at the New Yorker more than 10 years ago.

We were both raised in New Haven, though, and she'd taken the school bus with my sister, so we

quickly bonded over that.

Hannah and I have stayed in touch periodically, and then she ended up writing a really nice article

about my dad and Community Kitchen a few months back.

My dad and I were both happy to see that Hannah had written about intentional drinking

for the New Yorker in May

because it meant that we had a good reason to have someone we like so much on the podcast, but also

because we like talking about drinking and not drinking. I put together a bunch of questions for the

interview, as I always do, but ahead of time I said to my dad, I doubt we'll even use much of this.

It's Hannah, and it's going to be super organic. We'll just chat. He agreed, and that is indeed

what happened. What a lovely lady, you'll enjoy this no matter where you land on the drinking

spectrum. We get pitched by the New Yorker, but I haven't seen much lately, and I saw this, and I was like, oh, my God, this is perfect, because my dad is like, we need to have more conversations about non-alcoholic beverages and sobriety and sort of anything in that vein. And I was like, oh, perfect. It's Hannah. Yay. Yeah, we do like to talk about

this stuff. We had this woman, Alison Robiccelli on a couple of years ago to talk about N.A.

beverages and that kind of thing. And as it'll become clear in this conversation, I'm not a huge fan of N.A. beverages, but we'll talk about that.

Go, anyway, we're into it, and we're glad that you wrote about it because, you know, because then we get to talk about it with you.

So, I guess the first question is, why this piece, why now?

I think because I had been thinking about so much about my own relationship with alcohol.

...