David Moscow – From Scratch

By: Kelly Kearney

Q) Your new show “From Scratch” takes your average cooking show to the next level. Where did this fresh idea come from to mix culture, travel, sustainability and cooking?

David: I was always kind of my mom’s sous chef and she was an incredible cook when I was growing up. I was always the person who got the things out of the fridge and stirred the sauces but never actually made the actual recipes. I would be like, “How many teaspoons,” and she would be like, “Oh, it’s just a pinch.” And still today she keeps the recipes of a lot of her favorite meals close to her chest, but that’s really where I got my love for cooking. All of our family are from Utah and Montana and I’d spend my summers with my cousins up in Maine. We were always sort of picking wild strawberries and as we got older that changed. I missed it and I missed the excuse to just take a break and go out into the woods. This show came from that need of finding that missing piece. I also think having a kid starts making you remember the things you loved. I mean, I haven’t picked apples in thirty years and that’s sad and crazy! So, it was just sort of like I’m not sure what I’m doing and let’s go out and see how this works. I think that’s one of the interesting things about this show. Most shows have experts showing you how to do something and cultivating an experience for you. I am not like that. I bumble my way through it and the experts are staring at me aghast as they’re trying to teach me.

Q) “From Scratch” is exactly like its name. The meals you’re creating highlight the creativity as well as the workmanship that goes into providing the ingredients. As a city dweller, where the only jungle you’ll find is a concrete one, what was it like to actually go into these challenges where you had to leave your comfort zone and milk buffalo for cheese or catch a live octopus? These are not skills you learn in urban America.

David: Oh no…No, definitely growing up in the Bronx I did not learn this. I think It just continuously reinforces the fact that these experts are incredibly talented. I didn’t expect to be a success every time out; I was lucky that I was as successful as I was, but there’s a lot of failures across the show. It spotlights how tough agriculture is, the gathering and how it’s based on the seasons and the weather and how global warming effects it. Like with fishing, we’ve over fished a lot of places and you have to go out longer and further than you ever had before. This was all stuff I learned from the people that we pay on the front lines to get our food. So, there were scary times and times where I almost drowned even, but it was all a learning experience.

Q) What was the most challenging adventure you’ve had on the show?

David: Most challenging? That would have to be almost drowning while catching an octopus. That was insane…Or maybe me being an idiot in the ocean. [laughs] The expert who came along said, “It’s really rocky,” and I’m like, “Oh no, it’s fine. I’m a good swimmer.” Then I realized that, no, he’s a good swimmer. He could free dive and hold his breath for five minutes. I am not a good swimmer, on that level anyway, and he had to save me. So, that was the most intense reality check for me. Most of it was challenging though. Like, for example, along the way learning how to harvest rice. I had to turn wheat into flour, but then how do you turn that flour into a pizza crust that tastes good? Or like, I always thought things like coconut alcohol and coconut sugar was from the coconut. I found out it’s not from the coconut, it’s from the flower on the coconut tree. That blew my mind! You cut the flower and it’s almost like a sap from a maple tree and that’s where coconut sugar comes from. So, lots of learning going on for me and for the audience. The one thing I do in the show is ask a lot of questions and that really is just the basis or the spine of the show. I ask questions because I don’t know any of it. I’m dropped into a situation where I don’t know the whole picture and I have to figure it out by myself. It just turns out, the audience gets to see that too

Q) What were your favorite places to visit and what made them so special for you?

David: Good question. I think the most, WOW…incredible scenery and travel wise such an adventure spiritually was Finland. Finland was amazing. It has a lot of woods and this fly fishing, A River Runs Through It kind of meditation about it. The Finns always have nature and woods right in walking distance and they spend a lot of time picking mushrooms and communing with nature. I thought coming from the city, coming from New York and L.A., and going there was the most interesting dynamic. It was kind of like another world and I wondered if I could live there because it was certainly relaxing. My kids freaking loved it. We just sat there in blueberry patches in the woods together and ate. Even now, it’s six months later and blueberries are by far my son’s favorite food and I believe it’s because we plopped him down in the woods and he was like, “Oh my goodness! I can eat all of this!” [laughing]

Q) Besides learning some incredible new skills and teaming up with inspiring local chefs, was there anything from filming the show that changed your perception of food and how it unites us all?

David: I think for some people, and it feels like a very American thing, where we feel like we’re an island. You know? Like they did this on their own and they pulled up their bootstraps and whatever success they had they did it themselves. When you make a pizza and you realize it took eighty people to make this one slice, you think about going out to harvest the grain and going to a mill to learn how to mill it and then picking tomatoes and going anchovy fishing and then milking water to turn it into mozzarella cheese. And at the end of the day, this place where we thought we did it on our own, in actuality we discover we are tied to each other and not alone. Every single thing that we put on our plate was made by a bunch of people. I think something I learned that really stuck with me was that these sorts, jobs where people make and produce our food and bring it to our tables, those people need get paid more. The jobs are hard, the jobs are dangerous, and I mean, food is necessary. You cannot live without food! These people need to get paid more, and that’s a big thing I learned on this journey.

Q) You must have some hilarious behind the scenes stories to share with the fans. After all, it’s not every day you get to milk goats and get chased by horses.

David: Oh yeah, sneaking into the cherry orchards to try and pick cherries for the Sardinian desert! [laughing] I stood outside the gate and I see that there’s a horse in there. The guards who were supposed to let us in didn’t show, but they said I could go in. I said, [skeptically] “OK, but there’s a horse in there,” and they said, “Oh, don’t worry about the horse.” I didn’t know and wondered if a horse is like a dog and it was guarding this orchard. So, I go on in and the horse is kind of far away on this flat part and when I went inside the gate I stayed as far away from the horse as I possibly could. I start picking the cherries, which as you know is half picking and half eating like, “This cherry is for the chef and this cherry is for me….” Then, I look up while I’m eating and the horse is now not far for me at all, maybe like twenty feet! I started thinking I should keep this tree between me and the horse until I finish and that’s when the horse starts coming at me! I have no idea if the horse was just there to say “hello” or if the horse was like, “It’s time to stop eating my cherries!” So, I very quickly ran and hopped the gate to get out of there and that was a pretty amusing situation. One of the funniest things was after I almost drowned. I swam back up to the boat and the crew was like, “That was amazing! That looked great!” I was like, “Oh my God! I almost died!” On the boat ride home, me and the diver were very quiet because we both knew how close to death I was. The look of panic in my eye [laughing]…That was very amusing.

Q) What do you hope the fans get out of “From Scratch?”

David: There’s two sides of this, I think. There are people who are going to watch, like you and me, who live in a city and I think that they’re going to maybe go try some of this out. Maybe they’ll go fishing or go to a farm or get some chickens for their backyard in Brooklyn. I hope that happens. Then, on the other side, people like my family who lives in Utah, they’re going to watch and feel prideful because it’s looking at farmers and hunters and fishermen and actually showing how cool it is. How they’re working with their hands and getting stuff done and producing what keeps us alive. For example, I showed one of my cousins who’s up in South Dakota and he’s like a local handyman and in a small town and he raises all his own food. And he watched the episode and he was like, “Thank you for this. You look like an idiot so that people like me can look really cool.”

Q) Is there a region of the world you haven’t visited this season that you would love to cover in the next?

David: We’re prepping Season 2 now. A&E loved the show enough that they said they’re going to bring us back for another season, even before the first airs. So, we’re all very excited prepping it now. We are thinking of maybe like the greatest hits like France. We want to hit France because food wise you can’t beat that. Same with Japan, you can’t beat that and then there’s some neat off the beaten path places that are starting to get some notoriety. Like the country of Georgia is supposed to be a very cool place. My family is Eastern European, so that’s something that I want to do. Maybe hit Poland, Ukraine and Georgia. We’re going to hit Peru too; I’ve never been to Peru and I think that’s going to be killer! I don’t know if you know this, but two of the Top 10 restaurants…You know when they do the list of the best restaurants in the world? Two of them are in Peru and they have three of the Top 50! I had no idea. So, I can’t wait to go see Peru.

Q) Feeling disconnected from the food you ate led you on this path. Now that you’ve experienced how our food makes it to our plates and you’ve acquired some incredible skills through these adventures, what if any, is something you will try to implement in your everyday life?

David: So, one of the most intense episodes of the show is when we went to Texas and we went to a small processing plant for beef. I killed a cow and I did it by hand and with a knife. I cut the jugular vein and the blood leaked out. I eat meat and I felt like it would be hypocritical of me to not experience this, but the minute I did it I was like, “I don’t like this.” But once the process happens you can’t stop. You have to breakdown the animal. So, I had to get all the way to the end, to butchering it, then I took those cuts of meat and went around Texas and made barbecue from nose to tail and we made gelatin out of the hooves and marrow. We made candles out of the fat. I calculated if I had eaten meat or beef five times a week (which is very easy to do if you have a couple burgers), a hot dog and a beef stew, if I ate it five times a week for my whole life then I would have eaten over 11,000 cows! That is an insane number of cows! So, my beef and meat consumption has been dramatically reduced because of that experience. Now, I eat beef very rarely and if I do eat it I spend a lot of money on it because I think it’s important that the farmers get paid. It should be a special occasion, kind of like how my mom grew up or her parents grew up, where meat was a condiment and wasn’t the main portion of the meal because it was expensive. I think going back to something like that is what I’ve instituted in my life.

Q) Due to environmental concerns, conscious eating is taking the world by storm. Do you have any tips for foodies that want to take a more active role in sustainable food practices or reducing their carbon footprint?

David: Wow. [pause] That’s such a great question. You know, we went to Iceland and their culture is really about sustainability. Almost a thousand years ago when the Vikings came, they chopped down all the trees and the dirt started sliding into the ocean and they almost died out because they had done such environmental damage over the years. More recently, in the 1970’s, they over fished the Cod and they almost wiped out the sharks. They did some pretty damaging stuff and have now changed their tune. Now they’re one of the most sustainable countries because they’ve realized that there’s only a small amount of us on this little rock and we really need to monitor what we’re doing so that we all survive. What Iceland has done as a society is, they realized that they’re killing the place that they live. They’re now legislating and the government is now instituting fishing permits for every man, woman, child and corporation. They have an amount of fish that they are allowed to fish and they can’t go over that even if it effects the economy. That is something that they know is important and they legislate for. We can all do stuff individually; making better food choices like not eating as many meat products, leaning into things like plant based and “Meatless Mondays,” but I think at this point we’re at a precipice. You know, truthfully, from what I’ve learned out there the plane is crashed into the mountain. These fishermen go out there and they say their dad has caught ten times more fish than they got and their grandfathers caught ten times more fish than their fathers did. They’re going out there longer and they’re going out there farther and we really are emptying the ocean. They see it, and this is not something as individuals we are going to be able to do much about unfortunately, but collectively what we need to do is to start voting for the planet. We need to start pressuring the people who are supposedly in charge to think about the planet we live on. So, I would say definitely legislatively through government is one way and, two, we really need to start telling companies and corporations that this is important to us. They won’t have anyone to sell to if there’s nobody left on this planet. Those two sides of things need to get active.

Q) What’s next for you David? Are you working on any other projects the fans can get excited for?

David: We have a spinoff coming off of “From Scratch” called “From Scratch Home.” I build a house and I got a pour concrete and ask it asks the question, “So how do you make concrete?” Well, you have to harvest sand or find some environmentally sustainable alternative. So, that’s a spinoff that’s going to happen and will likely start shooting it this year. We’re going to piggyback on the backside of “From Scratch.” I also produce films and I have two films that are up for Indie Spirit Awards – Wild Nights with Emily and To Dust, which win at Tribeca this last year. I like helping other creative people get their projects off the ground and then I love making this show “From Scratch.”