Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights.

Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show.

I'm Rachel Bell and this is your last meal, a podcast about famous people and the stories behind the foods they love most.

Today on the program, we explore the last meal of one of my favorite authors.

Hello.

Hey, is this Mary?

Yes, it is.

We have an interview. Yay! Yay!

I'm so excited to be chatting with you.

It's a good one, too.

Mary Roach writes brilliant nonfiction books about science.

And she has a special gift for making science writing appealing to everyone by humanizing

and humorizing topics like war, the human digestive system,

and corpses. I feel like everybody has this if you're a reader. There is a book in your life

that you recommend to everyone, a book that you think about for years and you talk about at every

dinner party. And for me, that's Mary's book Stiff. It's a book about what happens when you

donate your body to science. A topic I never thought I would be interested in until I read it

in Mary's words. And because Mary writes about science and your last meal is about food, I found a

guest who straddles both topics. Tom Ryan is a flavor scientist. He is the actual carbon human who invented stuffed

crust pizza for Pizza Hut. And I was recruited to go to a small company in Oak Brook, Illinois,

called McDonald's, and McFlurries, the dollar menu, McGrittles was probably my biggest one there.

And we'll talk with

...