You followed a link on instagram.com that redirects to https://modernistcuisine.com/mc/all-about-whipping-siphons/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabAV9wjx_J1PV6kGewRD3C16LGfkVmilZ6Ck45omZHCm3J6pFVNNLHCqK0_aem_UgBphsCEvg-R8tmc9Cb1HQ.

Make sure to only follow links from sources you trust. Learn more

We're showing you this because our systems detected that the link you're trying to follow may not take you where you intended to go.

Last week, reports surfaced that Cold Steel had sent letters to several knife makers over the use of the name ‘San Mai’. Since the 1980s, Cold Steel has successfully registered three US trademarks for the term San Mai, and according to the company San Mai was recognized as incontestably a distinctive trademark associated with the Cold Steel brand. Cold Steel says they have invested millions over the years promoting San Mai and bringing the name to a large international audience. The letter (see image below) informed the makers, who use the name San Mai, of the long standing trademarks and asked them to remove references to San Mai from their websites and social media within 10 days.

On the forums and in social media, enraged knife makers called Cold Steel’s letter “heavy handed” and “corporate bullying” and questioned the company’s exclusive rights to use the term. In response, this morning Lynn Thompson issued an open letter to the knife community that you can read here. The letter is an open apology to the knifemaking community, but it also reaffirms Cold Steel’s exclusive rights to the name San Mai. It’s a delicate balance between defending its trademark rights and relationship with makers and the knife community at large.

> > Keep your folders awesome. Grab a Pack of 5 Microfiber Blade Sleeves for $8.99 < <

Cold Steel just issued the following statement to KnifeNews.com including a note from Lynn Thompson:

There is a lot of confusion between the process of forging or manufacturing three-layered-steel and the name San Mai® as used in America today. These are two very different things.

It’s important to make this very clear. Cold Steel claims no ownership of a process, and is not trying to stop people from making three-layer steel knives or swords.

That is a huge misunderstanding.

However, we are asking people to respect the long standing trademark of the name San Mai® which Cold Steel has promoted for over 30 years.

Lynn first began using the name San Mai® in 1986. Cold Steel was creating a new series of blades featuring 3-layered Japanese steel and Lynn chose a cool Japanese name for that steel and for the blades featuring it. In accordance with US trademark law, he registered it with the US Trademark Office for use here in the USA.

That is the initial registration which you are referring to in your email.

Over the years Cold Steel heavily promoted San Mai® and raised awareness of both the steel and the products that featured it.

We advertised San Mai® worldwide, through magazine ads, our catalogs and our testing videos as well as at live events and trade shows.

We invested millions of dollars promoting the name San Mai® and we went on to expand upon that trademark, registering the name as well as the mark or symbol associated with Cold Steel’s San Mai®.

Cold Steel’s San Mai® became a well-known and world renowned brand, and the U.S. Trademark Office recognized San Mai® as a distinctive trademark associated with Cold Steel knives in 2008.

The Trademarks were also recognized as incontestable by the U.S. Trademark Office in 2014.

In order to retain those trademarks, and in order to expand upon them – to the extent that they are now recognized as incontestably distinctive and associated with Cold Steel – we not only had to promote them but to protect them.

To do this, we are required by law to make a reasonable effort to defend our trademarks.

Since the mid-eighties we have done so numerous times. This has included sending out letters not dissimilar to the ones that went out to a small number of makers last week.

Note from Lynn Thompson, Cold Steel Founder and President:
I have a great deal of admiration for custom makers, and it was the pioneering work of the American Bladesmith Society® that inspired me to try and push the limits of performance and durability in my own production knives. No custom bladesmith has ever been sued over the San Mai® name, and it is my sincere hope that such a drastic course of action will never occur.

The letters that were sent out were intended to politely ask people to respect my long standing trademark of the name San Mai®, something I have invested millions of dollars building, and growing for decades.

It was never my intention to appear to be intimidating members of the knife making community, and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize sincerely to each and every bladesmith for the misunderstanding.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, I’d like to encourage them to write to me via the address below. Thank you!

Lynn C Thompson

Cold Steel Inc.
6060 Nicolle Street
Ventura CA 93003

Knife Featured in Image: Cold Steel Recon Tanto SAN MAI III

Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-­it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.

Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS — short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid — often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers. Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood. The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood.

Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: She had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere. Hansen’s team of lab technicians and junior scientists fetched a blood sample from a lab-­supply company and prepped it for analysis. Then Hansen switched on an oven-­size box known as a mass spectrometer, which weighs molecules so that scientists can identify them.

As the lab equipment hummed around her, Hansen loaded a sample into the machine. A graph appeared on the mass spectrometer’s display; it suggested that there was a compound in the blood that could be PFOS. That’s weird, Hansen thought. Why would a chemical produced by 3M show up in people who had never worked for the company?

Hansen didn’t want to share her results until she was certain that they were correct, so she and her team spent several weeks analyzing more blood, often in time-consuming overnight tests. All the samples appeared to be contaminated. When Hansen used a more precise method, liquid chromatography, the results left little doubt that the chemical in the Red Cross blood was PFOS.

Hansen now felt obligated to update her boss. Johnson was a towering, bearded man, and she liked him: He seemed to trust her expertise, and he found something to laugh about in most conversations. But, when she shared her findings, his response was cryptic. “This changes everything,” he said. Before she could ask him what he meant, he went into his office and closed the door.

This was not the first time that Hansen had found a chemical where it didn’t belong. A wiry woman who grew up skiing competitively, Hansen had always liked to spend time outdoors; for her chemistry thesis at Williams College, she had kayaked around the former site of an electric company on the Hoosic River, collecting crayfish and testing them for industrial pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Her research, which showed that a drainage ditch at the site was leaking the chemicals, prompted a news story and contributed to a cleanup effort overseen by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. At 3M, Hansen assumed that her bosses would respond to her findings with the same kind of diligence and care.

Hansen stayed near Johnson’s office for the rest of the day, anxiously waiting for him to react to her research. He never did. In the days that followed, Hansen sensed that Johnson had notified some of his superiors. She remembers his boss, Dale Bacon, a paunchy fellow with gray hair, stopping by her desk and suggesting that she had made a mistake. “I don’t think so,” she told him. In subsequent weeks, Hansen and her team ordered fresh blood samples from every supplier that 3M worked with. Each of the samples tested positive for PFOS.

In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. After he packed up his office and left, Hansen felt adrift. She was so new to corporate life that her office clothes — pleated pants and dress shirts — still felt like a costume. Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next. She reminded herself of what he had said — that the chemical wasn’t harmful in factory workers. But she couldn’t be sure that it was harmless. She knew that PCBs, for example, were mass-produced for years before studies showed that they accumulate in the food chain and cause a range of health issues, including damage to the brain. The most reliable way to gauge the safety of chemicals is to study them over time, in animals and, if possible, in humans.

What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.

In 1979, an internal company report deemed PFOS “certainly more toxic than anticipated” and recommended longer-term studies. That year, 3M executives flew to San Francisco to consult Harold Hodge, a respected toxicologist. They told Hodge only part of what they knew: that PFOS had sickened and even killed laboratory animals and had caused liver abnormalities in factory workers. According to a 3M document that was marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” Hodge urged the executives to study whether the company’s fluorochemicals caused reproductive issues or cancer. After reviewing more data, he told one of them to find out whether the chemicals were present “in man,” and he added, “If the levels are high and widespread and the half-life is long, we could have a serious problem.” Yet Hodge’s warning was omitted from official meeting notes, and the company’s fluorochemical production increased over time.

Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.

Sometimes Hansen doubted herself. She was 28 and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.

When 3M was founded, in 1902, it was known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. After its mining operations flopped, the company pivoted to sandpaper and then to a series of clever inventions aimed at improving everyday life. An early employee noticed that autoworkers were struggling to paint two-tone cars, which were popular at the time; he eventually invented masking tape, using crêpe paper and cabinetmaker’s glue. Another 3M employee created Post-it notes to help him bookmark passages in his church hymnal. An official history of 3M, published for the company’s 100th anniversary, celebrated its “tolerance for tinkerers.”

Fluorochemicals had their origins in the American effort to build the atomic bomb. During the Second World War, scientists for the Manhattan Project developed one of the first safe processes for bonding carbon to fluorine, a dangerously reactive element that experts had nicknamed “the wildest hellcat” of chemistry. After the war, 3M hired some Manhattan Project chemists and began mass-producing chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine atoms. The resulting chemicals proved to be astonishingly versatile, in part because they resist oil, water and heat. They are also incredibly long-lasting, earning them the moniker “forever chemicals.”

In the early ’50s, 3M began selling one of its fluorochemicals, PFOA, to the chemical company DuPont for use in Teflon. Then, a couple of years later, a dollop of fluorochemical goo landed on a 3M employee’s tennis shoe, where it proved impervious to stains and impossible to wipe off. 3M now had the idea for Scotchgard and Scotchban. By the time Hansen was in elementary school, in the ’70s, both products were ubiquitous. Restaurants served French fries in Scotchban-treated packaging. Hansen’s mother sprayed Scotchgard on the living-­room couch.

Hansen grew up in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, not far from 3M’s headquarters. Her father was one of the company’s star engineers and was even inducted into its hall of fame in 1979; he had helped to create Scotch-Brite scouring pads and Coban wrap, a soft alternative to sticky bandages. Once, he molded some fibers into cups, thinking that they might make a good bra. They turned out to be miserably uncomfortable, so he and his colleagues placed them over their mouths, giving the company the inspiration for its signature N95 mask.

Hansen never intended to follow her father to the company. She spent her childhood summers catching turtles and leopard frogs at the lake and hoped to have a career in environmental conservation. Her first job after earning her chemistry Ph.D. was on a boat, which took her to remote parts of the Pacific Ocean. But the voyage left her so seasick that she lost 20 pounds, and she soon retreated to Minnesota. In 1996, at her father’s suggestion, Hansen applied for a position in 3M’s environmental lab.

After Hansen started her PFOS research, her relationships with some colleagues seemed to deteriorate. One afternoon in 1998, a trim 3M epidemiologist named Geary Olsen arrived with several vials of blood and asked her to test them. The next morning, she read the results to him and several colleagues — positive for PFOS. As Hansen remembers it, Olsen looked triumphant. “Those samples came from my horse,” he said — and his horse certainly wasn’t eating at McDonald’s or trotting on Scotchgarded carpets. Hansen felt that he was trying to humiliate her. (Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.) What Hansen wanted to know was how PFOS was making its way into animals.

She found an answer in data from lab rats, which also appeared to have fluorochemicals in their blood. Rats that had more fish meal in their diets, she discovered, tended to have higher levels of PFOS, suggesting that the chemical had spread through the food chain and perhaps through water. In male lab rats, PFOS levels rose with age, indicating that the chemical accumulated in the body. But, curiously, in female rats the levels sometimes fell. Hansen was unsettled when toxicology reports indicated why: Mother rats seemed to be offloading the chemical to their pups. Exposure to PFOS could begin before birth.

Another study confirmed that Scotchban and Scotchgard were sources of the chemical. PFOS wasn’t an official ingredient in either product, but both ­contained other fluorochemicals that, the study showed, broke down into PFOS in the bodies of lab rats. Hansen and her team ultimately found PFOS in eagles, chickens, rabbits, cows, pigs and other animals. They also found 14 ­additional fluorochemicals in human blood, including several produced by 3M. Some were present in wastewater from a 3M factory.

At one point, Hansen told her father, Paul, that she was frustrated by the way senior colleagues kept questioning her work. Paul had recently retired, but he had confidence in 3M’s top executives, and he suggested that she take her findings directly to them. But as a relatively new employee — and one of the few women scientists at a company of about 75,000 people — Hansen found the idea preposterous. When Paul offered to talk to some of 3M’s executives himself, she was mortified at the idea of her father interceding.

Hansen knew that if she could find a blood sample that didn’t contain PFOS then she might be able to convince her colleagues that the other samples did. She and her team began to study historical blood from the early decades of PFOS production. They soon found the chemical in blood from a 1969-71 Michigan breast cancer study. Then they ran an overnight test on blood that had been collected in rural China during the ’80s and ’90s. If any place were PFOS-free, she figured, it would be somewhere remote, where 3M products weren’t in widespread use.

The next morning, anxious to see the results, Hansen arrived at the lab before anyone else. For the first time since she had begun testing blood, some of the samples showed no trace of PFOS. She was so struck that she called her husband. There was nothing wrong with her equipment or methodology; PFOS, a man-made chemical produced by her employer, really was in human blood, practically everywhere. Hansen’s team found it in Swedish blood samples from 1957 and 1971. After that, her lab analyzed blood that had been collected before 3M created PFOS. It tested negative. Apparently, fluorochemicals had entered human blood after the company started selling products that contained them. They had leached out of 3M’s sprays, coatings and factories — and into all of us.

That summer, an in-house librarian at 3M delivered a surprising article to Hansen’s office mailbox. It had been written in 1981 by 3M scientists, and it described a method for measuring fluorine in blood, indicating that even back then the company was testing for fluorochemicals. One scientist mentioned in the article, Richard Newmark, still worked for 3M, in a low-lying structure nicknamed the “nerdy building.” Hansen arranged to meet with him there.

Newmark, a collegial man with a compact build, told Hansen that, more than 20 years before, two academic scientists, Donald Taves and Warren Guy, had discovered a fluorochemical in human blood. They had wondered whether Scotchgard might be its source, so they approached 3M. Newmark told her that his subsequent experiments had confirmed their suspicions — the chemical was PFOS — but 3M lawyers had urged his lab not to admit it.

As Hansen wrote all this down in a notebook, she felt anger rising inside her. Why had so many colleagues doubted the soundness of her results if earlier 3M experiments had already proved the same thing? After the meeting, she hurried back to the lab to find Bacon. “He knew!” she told him.

Bacon’s face remained expressionless. He told Hansen to type up her notes for him. She remembers him telling her not to email them. (In response to questions about Hansen’s account, Bacon said that he didn’t remember specifics. When I called Newmark, he told me that he could not remember her or anything about PFOS. “It’s been a very long time, and I’m in my mid-80s, and just do not remember stuff that well,” he said.)

A few months later, in early 1999, Bacon invited Hansen to an extraordinary meeting: She would have the chance to present her findings to 3M’s CEO, Livio D. DeSimone. Hansen spent several days rehearsing while driving and making dinner. On the day of the meeting, she took an elevator up to the executive suite; her stomach turned as a secretary pointed her to a conference room. Men in suits sat around a long table. Her boss, Bacon, was there. DeSimone, a portly man with white hair, sat at the head of the table.

Almost as soon as Hansen placed her first transparency on the projector, the attendees began interrogating her: Why did she do this research? Who directed her to do it? Whom did she inform of the results? The executives seemed to view her diligence as a betrayal: Her data could be damaging to the company. She remembers defending herself, mentioning Newmark’s similar work in the ’70s and trying, unsuccessfully, to direct the conversation back to her research. While the executives talked over her, Hansen noticed that DeSimone’s eyes had closed and that his chin was resting on his dress shirt. The CEO appeared to have fallen asleep. (DeSimone died in 2017. A company spokesperson did not answer my questions about the meeting.)

After that meeting, Hansen remembers learning from Bacon that her job would be changing. She would only be allowed to do experiments that a supervisor had specifically requested, and she was to share her data with only that person. She would spend most of her time analyzing samples for studies that other employees were conducting, and she should not ask questions about what the results meant. Several members of her team were also being reassigned. Bacon explained that a different scientist at 3M would lead research into PFOS going forward. Hansen felt that she was being punished and struggled not to cry.

Even as Hansen was being sidelined, the results of her research were quietly making their way into the files of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since the ’70s, federal law has required that companies tell the EPA about any evidence indicating that a company’s products present “a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” In May 1998, 3M officials notified the agency, without informing Hansen, that the company had measured PFOS in blood samples from around the U.S. — a clear reference to Hansen’s work. It did not mention its animal research from the ’70s, and it said that the chemical caused “no adverse effects” at the levels the company had measured in its workers. A year later, 3M sent the EPA another letter, again without telling Hansen. This time, it informed the agency about the 14 other fluorochemicals, several of them made by 3M, that Hansen’s team had detected in human blood. The company reiterated that it did not believe that its products presented a substantial risk to human health.

Hansen recalls that in the summer of 1999, at an annual picnic that her parents hosted for 3M scientists, she was grilling corn when one of the creators of Scotchgard, a gray-haired man in glasses, confronted her. He accused her of trying to tear down the work of her colleagues. Did it make her feel powerful ruining other people’s careers? he asked. Hansen didn’t know how to respond, and he walked away.

Several of Hansen’s superiors had stopped greeting her in the hallways. When she presented a poster of her research at a 3M event, nobody asked her about it. She lost her appetite, and her pleated pants grew baggy. She started to worry that an angry co-worker might confront or even harm her in the company’s dark parking lot. She got into the habit of calling her husband before walking to her car.

A year after Hansen’s meeting with the CEO, 3M, under pressure from the EPA, made a very costly decision: It was going to discontinue its entire portfolio of PFOS-­related chemicals. In May 2000, for the first time, 3M officials revealed to the press that it had detected the chemical in blood banks. One executive claimed that the discovery was a “complete surprise.” The company’s medical director told The New York Times, “This isn’t a health issue now, and it won’t be a health issue.” But the newspaper also quoted a professor of toxicology. “The real issue is this stuff accumulates,” the professor said. “No chemical is totally innocuous, and it seems inconceivable that anything that accumulates would not eventually become toxic.”

Hansen was now pregnant with twins. Although she was heartened by 3M’s announcement — she saw it as evidence that her work had forced the company to act — she was also ready to leave the environmental lab, where she felt marginalized. After giving birth, she joined 3M’s medical devices team. But first, she decided to have one last blood sample tested for PFOS: her own. The results showed one of the lowest readings she’d seen in human blood. Immediately, she thought of the rats that had passed the chemical on to their pups.

Hansen told me that, for the next 19 years, she avoided the subject of fluorochemicals with the same intensity with which she had once pursued it. She focused on raising her kids and coaching a cross-country ski team; she worked a variety of jobs at 3M, none related to fluorochemicals. In 2002, when 3M announced that it would be replacing PFOS with another fluorochemical, PFBS, Hansen knew that it, too, would remain in the environment indefinitely. Still, she decided not to involve herself. She skipped over articles about the chemicals in scientific journals and newspapers, where they were starting to be linked to possible developmental, immune system and liver problems. (In 2006, after the EPA accused 3M of violating the Toxic Substances Control Act, in part by repeatedly ­failing to disclose the harms of fluorochemicals promptly, the company agreed to pay a small penalty of $1.5 million, without admitting wrongdoing.)

During that time, forever chemicals gained a new scientific name — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, an acronym that is vexingly similar to the specific fluorochemical PFOS. A swath of 150 square miles around 3M’s headquarters was found to be polluted with PFAS; scientists discovered PFOS and PFBS in local fish and various fluorochemicals in water that roughly 125,000 Minnesotans drank. Hansen’s husband, Peter, told me that, when friends asked Hansen about PFAS, she would change the subject. Still, she repeatedly told him — and herself — that the chemicals were safe.

In the 2016 book “Secrecy at Work,” two management theorists, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey, argue that there is nothing inherently wrong or harmful about keeping secrets. Trade secrets, for example, are protected by federal and state law on the grounds that they promote innovation and contribute to the economy. The authors draw on a large body of sociological research to illustrate the many ways that information can be concealed. An organization can compartmentalize a secret by slicing it into smaller components, preventing any one person from piecing together the whole. Managers who don’t want to disclose sensitive information may employ “stone-faced silence.” Secret-keepers can form a kind of tribe, dependent on one another’s continued discretion; in this way, even the existence of a secret can be kept secret. Such techniques become pernicious, Costas and Grey write, when a company keeps a dark secret, a secret about wrongdoing.

Certain unpredictable events — a leak, a lawsuit, a news story — can start to unspool a secret. In the case of forever chemicals, the unspooling began on a cattle farm. In 1998, a West Virginia farmer told a lawyer, Robert Bilott, that wastewater from a DuPont site seemed to be poisoning his cows: They had started to foam at the mouth, their teeth grew black and more than a hundred eventually fell over and died. Bilott sued and obtained tens of thousands of internal documents, which helped push forever chemicals into the public consciousness. The documents revealed that the farm’s water contained PFOA, the fluorochemical that DuPont had bought from 3M, and that both companies had long understood it to be toxic. (The lawsuit, which ended in a settlement, was dramatized in the film “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott.) Bilott later sued 3M over contamination in Minnesota, but the judge prohibited discussion of health repercussions; a jury ultimately decided in 3M’s favor. Finally, in 2010, the Minnesota attorney general’s office filed its own suit, alleging that 3M had harmed the environment and polluted drinking water. The company paid $850 million in a settlement, without an admission of fault or liability. The AG also released thousands more internal 3M records to the public.

The AG’s records helped me report a series of stories for The Intercept about forever chemicals. Much of my reporting, which started in 2015, focused on what 3M and DuPont knew, even as they continued to produce PFAS. But, as I reported on the cover-up, I wondered what it meant for a sprawling multinational company to know that its products were dangerous. Who knew? How much, exactly, did they know? And how had the company kept its secret? For many years, no one inside 3M would agree to speak with me.

Then, in 2021, John Oliver did a segment on his comedy news show, “Last Week Tonight,” about forever chemicals. The segment, which mentioned my reporting, said that they could cause cancer, immune-system issues and other problems. “The world is basically soaked in the Devil’s piss right now,” Oliver said. “And not in a remotely hot way.” One of Hansen’s former professors sent her the segment, and Hansen watched it at her kitchen table — a moment that would eventually lead her to me.

“This actually made me sad as there are so many inaccuracies,” Hansen wrote to her professor in response. But, when the professor asked her what was incorrect, Hansen didn’t know what to say. For the first time, she Googled the health effects of PFOS.

Hansen was deeply troubled by what she read. One paper, published in 2012 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that, in children, as PFOS levels rose so did the chance that vaccines were ineffective. Children with high levels of PFOS and other fluorochemicals were more likely to experience fevers, according to a 2016 study. Other research linked the chemicals to increased rates of infectious diseases, food allergies and asthma in children. Dozens of scientific papers had found that, in adults, even very low levels of PFOS could interfere with hormones, fertility, liver and thyroid function, cholesterol levels and fetal development. Even PFBS, the chemical that 3M chose as a replacement for PFOS, caused developmental and reproductive irregularities in animals, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.

Reading these studies, Hansen felt a paradoxical kind of relief: As bad as PFOS seemed to be, at least independent scientists were studying it. But she also felt enraged at the company and at herself. For years, she had repeated the company’s claim that PFOS was not harmful. “I’m not proud of that,” she told me. She felt “dirty” for ever collecting a 3M paycheck. When she read the documents released by the Minnesota AG, she was horrified by how much the company had known and how little it had told her. She found records of studies that she had conducted, as well as the typed notes from her meeting with Newmark.

In October 2022, after Hansen had been at 3M for 26 years, her job was eliminated, and she chose not to apply for a new one. Three months later, she wrote me an email, offering to speak about what she had witnessed inside the company. “If you’d be interested in talking further, please let me know,” she wrote. The next day, we had the first of dozens of conversations.

When Hansen first told me about her experiences, I felt conflicted. Her work seemed to have helped force 3M to stop making a number of toxic chemicals, but I kept thinking about the 20 years in which she had kept quiet. During my first visit to Hansen’s home, in February 2023, we sat in her kitchen, eating bread that her husband had just baked. She showed me pictures of her father and shared a color-coded timeline of 3M’s history with forever chemicals. On a bitterly cold walk in a local park, we tried to figure out if any of her colleagues, besides Newmark, had known that PFOS was in everyone’s blood. She often sprinkled her stories with such Midwesternisms as “holy ­buckets!”

During my second trip, this past August, I asked her why, as a scientist who was trained to ask questions, she hadn’t been more skeptical of claims that PFOS was harmless. In the awkward silence that followed, I looked out the window at some hummingbirds.

Hansen’s superiors had given her the same explanation that they gave journalists, she finally said — that factory workers were fine, so people with lower levels would be, too. Her specialty was the detection of chemicals, not their harms. “You’ve got literally the medical director of 3M saying, ‘We studied this, there are no effects,’” she told me. “I wasn’t about to challenge that.” Her income had helped to support a family of five. Perhaps, I wondered aloud, she hadn’t really wanted to know whether her company was poisoning the public.

To my surprise, Hansen readily agreed. “It almost would have been too much to bear at the time,” she told me. 3M had successfully compartmentalized its secret; Hansen had only seen one slice. (When I sent the company detailed questions about Hansen’s account, a spokesperson responded without answering most of them or mentioning Hansen by name.)

Recently, I thought back on Taves and Guy, the academic scientists who, in the ’70s, came so close to proving that 3M’s chemicals were accumulating in humans. Taves is 97, but when I called him he told me that he still remembers clearly when company representatives visited his lab at the University of Rochester. “They wanted to know everything about what we were doing,” he told me. But the exchange was not reciprocal. “I soon found out that they weren’t going to tell me anything.” 3M never confirmed to Taves or Guy, who was a postdoctoral student at the time, that its fluorochemicals were in human blood. “I’m sort of kicking myself for not having followed up on this more, but I didn’t have any research money,” Guy told me. He eventually became a dentist to support his wife and family. (He died this year at 81.) Taves, too, left the field, to become a psychiatrist, and the trail ended there.

Last year, while reading about the thousands of PFAS-related lawsuits that 3M was facing, I was intrigued to learn that one of them, filed by cities and towns with polluted water, had produced a new set of internal 3M documents. When I requested several from the plaintiff’s legal team, I saw two names that I recognized. In a document from 1991, a 3M scientist talked about using a mass spectrometer — the same tool that Hansen would use years later — to devise a technique for measuring PFOS in biological fluid. The author was Jim Johnson — and he had sent the report to his boss, Dale Bacon.

This revelation made me gasp. Johnson had been Hansen’s first boss and had instigated her research into PFOS. Bacon had questioned her findings and ultimately told her to stop her work. (In a sworn deposition, Bacon said that by the ’80s he had heard, during a water-cooler chat with a colleague, that Taves and Guy had found PFOS in human blood.) What I couldn’t understand was why Johnson would ask Hansen to investigate something that he had already studied himself — and then act surprised by the results.

Jim Johnson, who is now an 81-year-old widower, lives with several dogs in a pale-yellow house in North Dakota. When I first called him, he said that he had begun researching PFOS in the ’70s. “I did a lot of the very original work on it,” he told me. He said that when he saw the chemical’s structure he understood “within 20 minutes” that it would not break down in nature. Shortly thereafter, one of his experiments revealed that PFOS was binding to proteins in the body, causing the chemical to accumulate over time. He told me that he also looked for PFOS in an informal test of blood from the general population, around the late ’70s, and was not surprised when he found it there.

Johnson initially cited “480 pounds of dog” as a reason that I shouldn’t visit him, but he later relented. When I arrived, on a chilly day in November, we spent a few minutes standing outside his house, watching Snozzle, Sadie and Junkyard press their slobbery snouts against his living ­room window. Then we decamped to the nearest IHOP. Johnson, who was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, was so tall that he couldn’t comfortably fit into a booth. We sat at a table and ordered two bottomless coffees.

In an experiment in the early ’80s, Johnson fed a component of Scotchban to rats and found that PFOS accumulated in their livers, a result that suggested how the chemical would behave in humans. When I asked why that mattered to the company, he took a sip of coffee and said, “It meant they were screwed.”

At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contrac­tors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.

Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.

Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-­ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.

Johnson said that he eventually tired of arguing with the few colleagues with whom he could speak openly about PFOS. “It was time,” he said. So he hired an outside lab to look for the chemical in the blood of 3M workers, knowing that it would also test blood bank samples for comparison — the first domino in a chain that would ultimately take the compound off the market. Oddly, he compared the head of the lab to a vending machine. “He gave me what I paid for,” Johnson said. “I knew what would happen.” Then Johnson tasked Hansen with something that he had long avoided: going beyond his initial experiments and meticulously documenting the chemical’s ubiquity. While Hansen took the heat, he took early retirement.

Johnson described Hansen as though she were a vending machine, too. “She did what she was supposed to do with the tools I left her,” he said.

I pointed out that Hansen had suffered professionally and personally, and that she now feels those experiences tainted her career. “I didn’t say I was a nice guy,” Johnson replied, and laughed. After four hours, we were nearing the bottom of our bottomless coffees.

Johnson has strayed from evidence-­based science in recent years. He now believes, for instance, that the theory of evolution is wrong, and that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo-cancers.” But his account of what happened at 3M closely matched Hansen’s, and when I asked him about meetings and experiments described in court documents he remembered them clearly.

When I called Hansen about my conversation with Johnson, she grew angrier than I’d ever heard her. “He knew the whole time!” she said. Then she had to get off the phone for an appointment. “So glad I’m going to see my therapist,” she added, and hung up.

I once thought of secrets as discrete, explosive truths that a heroic person could suddenly reveal. In the 1983 film “Silkwood,” which is based on real events, Karen Silkwood, a worker at a plutonium plant, assembles a thick folder documenting her employer’s shoddy safety practices; while driving to share them with a reporter, she dies in a mysterious one-car crash. In another adaptation of a true story, the 2015 film “Spotlight,” a source delivers a box of critical documents to The Boston Globe, helping the paper to publish an investigation into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Talking to Hansen and Johnson, though, I saw that the truth can come out piecemeal over many years, and that the same people who keep secrets can help divulge them. Some slices of 3M’s secret are only now coming to light, and others may never come out.

Between 1951 and 2000, 3M produced at least 100 million pounds of PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS. This is roughly the weight of the Titanic. After the late ’70s, when 3M scientists established that the chemical was toxic in animals and was accumulating in humans, it produced millions of pounds per year. Scientists are still struggling to grasp all the biological consequences. They have learned, just as Johnson did decades ago, that proteins in the body bind to PFOS. It enters our cells and organs, where even tiny amounts can cause stress and interfere with basic biological functions. It contributes to diseases that take many years to develop; at the time of a diagnosis, one’s PFOS level may have fallen, making it difficult to establish causation with any certainty.

The other day, I called Brad Creacey, who became an Air Force firefighter in the ’70s at the age of 18. He told me that several times a year, for practice, he and his comrades put on rubber boots and heavy silver uniforms that looked like spacesuits. Then a “torch man,” holding a stick tipped with a burning rag, ignited jet fuel that had been poured into an open-air pit. To extinguish the 100-foot-tall flames, Creacey and his colleagues sprayed them with aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF. 3M manufactured it from several forever chemicals, including PFOS.

Creacey remembers that AFFF felt slick and sudsy, almost like soap, and dried out the skin on his hands until it cracked. To celebrate his last day on a military base in Germany, his friends dumped a ceremonial bucket on him. Only later, after working with firefighting foam at an airport in Monterey, California, did he start to wonder if a string of ailments — cysts on his liver, a nodule near his thyroid — were connected to the foam. He had high cholesterol, which diet and exercise were unable to change. Then he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. “It makes me feel like I was a lab rat, like we were all disposable,” Creacey told me. “I’ve lost faith in human beings.”

It may be tempting to think of Creacey and his peers as unwitting research subjects; indeed, recent studies show that PFOS is associated with an increased risk of thyroid cancer and, in Air Force servicemen, an elevated risk of testicular cancer. But it is probably more accurate to say that we are all part of the experiment. Average levels of PFOS are falling, but nearly all people have at least one forever chemical in their blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “When you have a contaminated site, you can clean it up,” Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemist at Harvard University, told me. “When you ubiquitously introduce a toxicant at a global scale, so that it’s detectable in everyone ... we’re reducing public health on an incredibly large scale.” Once everyone’s blood is contaminated, there is no control group with which to compare, making it difficult to establish responsibility.

New health effects continue to be discovered. Researchers have found that exposure to PFAS during pregnancy can lead to developmental delays in children. Numerous recent studies have linked the chemicals to diabetes and obesity. This year, a study discovered 13 forever chemicals, including PFOS, in weeks-old fetuses from terminated pregnancies and linked the chemicals to biomarkers associated with liver problems. A team of New York University researchers estimated in 2018 that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to as much as $62 billion in a single year. This exceeds the current market value of 3M.

Philippe Grandjean, a physician who helped discover that PFAS harm the immune system, believes that anyone exposed to these chemicals — essentially everyone — may have an elevated risk of cancer. Our immune systems often find and kill abnormal cells before they turn into tumors. “PFAS interfere with the immune system, and likely also this critical function,” he told me. Grandjean, who served as an expert witness in the Minnesota AG’s case, has studied many environmental contaminants, including mercury. The impact of PFAS was so much more extreme, he said, that one of his colleagues initially thought it was the result of nuclear radiation.

In April, the EPA took two historic steps to reduce exposure to PFAS. It said that PFOS and PFOA are “likely to cause cancer” and that no level of either chemical is considered safe; it deemed them hazardous substances under the Superfund law, increasing the government’s power to force polluters to clean them up. The agency also set limits for six PFAS in drinking water. In a few years, when the EPA begins enforcing the new regulations, local utilities will be required to test their water and remove any amount of PFOS or PFOA which exceeds four parts per trillion — the equivalent of one drop dissolved in several Olympic swimming pools. 3M has produced enough PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS to exceed this level in all of the freshwater on earth. Meanwhile, many other PFAS continue to be used, and companies are still developing new ones. Thousands of the compounds have been produced; the Department of Defense still depends on many for use in explosives, semiconductors, cleaning fluids and batteries. PFAS can be found in nonstick cookware, guitar strings, dental floss, makeup, hand sanitizer, brake fluid, ski wax, fishing lines and countless other products.

In a statement, a 3M spokesperson told me that the company “is proactively managing PFAS,” and that 3M’s approach to the chemicals has evolved along with “the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves.” He directed me to a fact sheet about their continued importance in society. “These substances are critical to multiple industries — including the cars we drive, planes we fly, computers and smart phones we use to stay connected, and more,” the fact sheet read.

Recently, 3M settled the lawsuit filed by cities and towns with polluted water. It will pay up to $12.5 billion to cover the costs of filtering out PFAS, depending on how many water systems need the chemicals removed. The settlement, however, doesn’t approach the scale of the problem. At least 45% of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals, and one drinking water expert told me that the cost of removing them all would likely reach $100 billion.

In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio,” by the end of 2025 — a pledge that it called “another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth.” But it acknowledged that more than 16,000 of its products still contained PFAS. Direct sales of the chemicals were generating $1.3 billion annually. 3M’s regulatory filings also allow for the possibility that a full phaseout won’t happen — for example, if 3M fails to find substitutes. “We are continuing to make progress on our announcement to exit PFAS manufacturing,” 3M’s spokesperson told me. The company and its scientists have not admitted wrong­doing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms.

Hansen often wonders what her father would say about 3M if he were still alive. A few years ago, he began to show signs of dementia, which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every time Hansen explained to him that a novel coronavirus was sickening people around the world, he asked how he might contribute — forgetting that the N95 mask he helped to create was already protecting millions of people from infection. When he died, in January 2021, Hansen noticed some Coban wrap on his arm. It was shielding his delicate skin from tears, just as he had designed it to. “He invented that,” Hansen told the hospice nurse, who smiled politely.

After she left 3M, Hansen began volunteering at a local nature preserve, where she works to clear paths and protect native plants. Last August, she took me there, and we walked to a creek where she often spends time. The water is home to three species of trout, she told me. It is also polluted by forever chemicals that 3M once dumped upstream.

For most of our hike, a thick wall of flowers — purple joe-pye weed and goldenrod — made it impossible to see the creek bank. Then we came to a wooden bench. I climbed on top of it and looked down on the creek. As I listened to the gurgling of water and the buzzing of insects, I thought I understood why Hansen liked to come here. It was too late to save the creek from pollution; 3M’s chemicals could be there for thousands of years to come. Hansen just wanted to appreciate what was left and to leave the place a little better than she’d found it.

David Chang changed the way America eats. In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar, a ramen joint in NYC’s East Village, ushered in a style of restaurant that’s now recognizable everywhere: food that emphasized “what cooks really wanted to eat” with little regard for existing conventions; unabashed loudness; and a maniacal attention to detail and deliciousness, perhaps best encapsulated in its signature dish, a pork-belly bun that would be imitated across the country.

Along with Momofuku’s rise has come Chang’s own. He’s now attached to some 15 restaurants spanning NYC to Toronto to Sydney (not counting his growing Fuku fried chicken enterprise), is the figurehead of a media and entertainment company, and, thanks in part to well-reviewed shows on PBS and Netflix, has become a recognizable public figure, even among those who have never eaten his food. After 15 years spent in the public eye, Chang has transcended his place in the so-called “bad boy” chef generation, and is now a leader in the restaurant industry. “He is probably the modern equivalent of Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and ’70s,” the New York Times’s Pete Wells wrote in 2018, “somebody whose success in one part of the culture allows him to sound off on the rest of the culture and where it is heading.”

For those who’ve closely followed Chang’s arc, it’s impossible to divorce the chef and restaurateur’s ascent from the image that helped propel him there — angry, effusive, self-aware, self-righteous, and disarmingly candid — an avatar embraced by the media, but largely created by Chang himself. As the canny narrator of his own story, he has often declared that he is mystified by his own success, as in a2014 interview with CBC/Radio-Canada, when he described himself as “so in the moment, and unaware, and unprepared for any success, and I just didn’t care what anyone thought.”

Part of Chang’s savvy has been the mindful integration of his flaws in public; he has catalogued them throughout his career, so that the man and the myth are nearly inseparable. The latest entry in this ongoing project of self-narrativization is his memoir Eat a Peach, which was released in September. The book, co-written with food writer (and Eater contributor) Gabe Ulla, focuses on Chang’s years building Momofuku, 2004 to roughly 2017, although it briefly explores his formative years, from his “certifiably average” childhood in Virginia to his time in culinary school and as an inexperienced young cook at NYC institutions Craft and Café Boulud.

I am definitely not the intended audience for Eat a Peach: In 2008, I was hired as the corporate beverage director for Chang’s young empire; I held this job for seven months before I was fired without explanation. At the time, there were just three restaurants, all within a stone’s throw of each other, and there had never before been an official sommelier or beverage director at Momofuku.

A few months ago, I began an essay about my experience working at Momofuku. Peter Meehan, food editor of the Los Angeles Times and onetime Chang co-conspirator, had recently stepped down from his position following allegations of toxicity and “explosive anger” directed at his employees. I wanted to know, in part, why Chang hadn’t been held similarly accountable for his own behavior during the late 2000s — the wall-punching, desk breaking, violent threats, and screaming he’s been open about for years — when the peers who had surrounded him were dropping like flies as their misdeeds came to light.

Though my Momofuku career was short-lived, its impact on my life and career was not: For much of the 12 years that followed, I wondered whether being chewed up and spit out was the fault of the industry or the result of my own ineptitude. And now I’m fresh off of some 290 pages of Chang’s innermost thoughts, mea culpas, and sanguine reflections of restaurant life, all of which have reminded me why I began this inquiry in the first place. The David Chang I visited in this memoir is familiar, though the story he tells, viewed from the perspective of someone who lived on the other side of it, feels distorted: Important characters have been stricken from the page, while his own tale has been edited into an ultimately redemptive one — an inward-looking, relentlessly self-flagellating apology performed in public, when the people he hurt deserve one most of all.

Eat a Peach is divided into two sections. The first chronicles Chang’s rise to fame in largely chronological order, while the second section, as he defines it, abandons “the chronological telling of this story to explore subjects I’ve yet to fully process with [his therapist]: mania; some armchair philosophizing and shameless artistic comparisons; the limits of anger; racist chicken; the joy of pushing the boulder back up the hill.”

Chang often switches back and forth in time throughout the book, discussing events that are germane to whatever topic he happens to be addressing (section titles include “On Being Addicted to Work,” “The Magazine Business,” and “Fast Food and Asian Villains”). Vignettes are woven into chapters as footholds, from the time Chang publicly swore at an industry leader who’d given him a “degrading lecture” in the early days of Noodle Bar to trips to overseas festivals once de rigueur in the industry — the Cook It Raw and Omnivores of the mid-2010s.

Like any memoir, Eat a Peach is an exercise in self-reflexivity. But it’s also remarkably transparent about how it operates and what it intends to do. Primarily, it wants to reframe Chang’s self-righteous anger, to bundle it up with his guilt, regrets, and ruminations, and to sell it back to the public as his pardon. He’s older and wiser, he wants us to know — a cliché, but he really means it. This is, of course, classic Chang: to lean into the obvious, to embrace it, and, in the process, to render the accompanying criticism pointless, whether it’s his well-documented love of Bud Light or his passionate embrace of Domino’s pizza. “Even this book, written with the benefit of greater knowledge and better perspective, is still riddled with problems,” he writes. “I’ve talked a great deal about the importance of failure as a learning tool, but it’s really a privilege to expect people to let us fail over and over again.”

And Chang does fail again and again, as he recounts in the book, especially when it comes to his anger. His memoir both acknowledges these failures and attempts to move past them, because absolution feels like the true goal here. “I hate that the anger has become my calling card,” Chang writes. “With friends, family, my co-workers, and the media, my name has become synonymous with rage.” Chang, always seeking to be in control, wants to reassert it over his own mythos, and to that end, he largely succeeds in Eat a Peach — as he always has in telling (and selling) his own story.

After all, the myth of Momofuku did not create itself. It took work. To fuel his high standards of creativity and perfection, Chang needed — and created — a combustible environment at Momofuku, aided by internal and external forces. “Conflict was fuel, and Momofuku was a gas-guzzling SUV,” Chang writes. His pursuit of that conflict was often valorized by the media. A few weeks after I began working at Momofuku, Larissa MacFarquhar’s March 2008 profile in the New Yorker, “On the Edge,” dropped. That profile painted a robust picture of an angry chef who had trouble controlling his emotions: In response to a series of mistakes, none “egregious” in themselves, MacFarquhar writes that Chang had “screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later.”

The anger was always framed as a means to an end, part of Chang’s quest to create “the perfect restaurant.” This need for perfection is a deep throughline in the Chang mythology; a child golf prodigy, he won the Virginia state championship two years in a row. When his peers began to catch up as he grew older, he recounts his father sitting him down to “analyze each mistake I’d made.” Chang has embraced this part of his biography, as well as the emotion that arrives when his peers don’t possess his relentless drive, or when he recognizes that his own high standards are, in fact, unreachable: rage.

Eat a Peach is strewn with references to how this anger manifested within Chang’s body, always simmering just beneath the surface. “When I’m angry, I seethe with such intensity that it can’t simply be emotional,” he writes. “It’s like I’m an animal registering danger.” Elsewhere, he writes that “the only thing that could snap me out of my fits was punching a wall or a steel countertop, anything to cause me some kind of physical pain.” There are the headaches that follow each outburst, the “constant thrum of depression in the back of my skull.”

There are moments when Chang appears to understand the weight of his anger and his indulgence of it. In one section, he describes reading an eGullet review written just a month after Noodle Bar’s opening, in which a diner recounted witnessing Chang’s takedown of an employee during dinner. The diner describes the scene as a “public humiliation,” noting that Chang “brought his cook to the verge of tears, told him he was going to be fired” in full view of guests. “We left feeling a bit traumatized,” the reviewer said of his experience. Chang writes that he doesn’t remember the specific incident, but concedes that, apart from a few details, the account is “accurate and could have been written about almost any night I was working service.”

But acknowledging a problem doesn’t necessarily begin to fix it. It is possible to be both broader in one’s perspective and still complicit in its lack of resolution. It’s notable that Chang’s acknowledgement of this incident, complete with the benefit of hindsight, is presented to the reader as a lesson about how his anger affected the restaurant’s guests. “Recently, I’ve started to see this particular incident for the lesson it was,” Chang writes. “I was contradicting my own belief that the only thing that matters is how the diners feel when they walk out the door. Because we were in such tight quarters, when you came to Momofuku, you were eating dinner with me. And nobody wants to eat dinner with a dick.”

What this anecdote shows is that, while Chang believes that he has learned from his errors, he appears to have missed the full lesson: He was abusive — at the time, unapologetically so — to his staff. I had worked in kitchens for a long time, and I knew chefs, so even MacFarquhar’s startling portrait of a chef so emotionally volatile that he gave himself shingles felt in line with the overall climate of restaurant work. Yet I was surprised by Dave. In all my years of restaurant work, I had never seen anything like the roiling, red-faced, screaming, pulsing, wrath-filled man that was David Chang.

Despite the formative role that Chang’s rage plays in both his personality and the memoir, as someone who witnessed it, its scope and its effects on the people around him never feel adequately described, partly because he favors hazy generalities over specifics, and partly because he claims to suffer from memory lapses in and around the maelstrom of his anger. “The slightest error or show of carelessness from a cook could turn me into a convulsing, raging mass,” he writes, cutting the recipient of the abuse out of the description. At another point in the book, when relaying an outburst he had in Copenhagen, Chang describes the moments that led up to it, and the precipitous aftermath, but not the incident itself,nor whom it affected.

The recipients of Dave’s anger — his employees — lack the same power to forget, or to leave the consideration of its impact to others. I vividly remember the day that a line cook, who could not have been more than 22, was brought to tears by Dave’s rage for cooking what was deemed a subpar family meal: “I will scalp you,” Dave screamed. “I will murder your fucking family!”

I recall, too, in sharp relief, the afternoon service meeting in which I was excoriated in front of my staff for purchasing a sparkling moscato to pair with one of the courses at Ko, even though Dave had himself told me that I had carte blanche to serve whatever I wanted with his food, since I, a certified sommelier through the Court of Master Sommeliers, was the expert. “Who the fuck told you that you could buy this?” he screamed. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Reached by my editors, Dave provided the following comment about those two incidents: “While I do not recall these specific instances, they are entirely consistent with my behavior at the time, which I did not begin to correct until several years later,” he said. “The bottom line is that I’m sorry. I’m still working to get better and repair many personal and professional relationships, but I also respect that the path to forgiveness does not exist on my terms. No one but me deserves to carry the burden of my past failings.”

That apology, while noted and accepted 12 years later, cannot change the fallout of that moment. Dave didn’t really care about the moscato; he cared, it seemed, more about cutting me down in front of the staff I managed, so that they no longer saw me as their boss but, instead, as a small, easily flustered, puffy-with-tears young woman. He succeeded. From then on, it was virtually impossible to command respect from my staff. They had seen me as Dave saw me, as someone unworthy of respect. And that was enough.

A memoir is necessarily a work of hindsight, but even for a memoir, Eat a Peach is extremely self-referential. In the book’s preface, ever getting ahead of criticism, Chang sets the reader up for his role as an imperfect narrator: “I won’t pretend I can recount everything exactly as it happened,” he writes. “I’m sure I’ve also contradicted statements I’ve made in the past, whether it’s because I’ve changed my mind or I was playing fast and loose with the facts before or I’m misremembering them now.”

What Chang does effectively with this maneuver is reveal every storyteller’s role as an editor. Often, he points out what hindsight offers in the retelling of a story. And in some vignettes, when Chang recounts actions and events he’s now not proud of, he deems them worth “correcting” — but instead of addressing those he has harmed outright, he fervidly professes his guilt, then opts to write over them. It’s better living through editing.

This is the entire conceit of a chapter simply entitled “Thirty-Five”: It’s printed in the book’s normal black typeface, with “crossed out” sections “written over” in a red typeset, a trick that makes obvious the work of self-editing. “[I]t’s revisionist history if I change [what I was truly thinking at the time],” Chang writes at the beginning of the section. “All I want to do is edit this period of my life — not just for you, but for myself. I wish I could have seen and experienced it all differently. I wish I could am going to rewrite this whole chapter.” The “wish I could” is replaced with “am going to” in red.

Using this storytelling device, Chang pulls back the curtain, revealing some examples of what we now acknowledge were long-standing foundations of abuse in restaurant kitchens. He recalls criticizing and swearing at multiple job candidates who sought a work-life balance: “I convinced myself that basic human needs were selfish. … I had conflated my own selfishness with selflessness. I was miserable to work for,” he writes in the edited red text. With the exception of one struck-through “fuck that guy,” the edit ultimately glosses over exactly how those candidates were dismissed. It projects a better outcome (the edited one) while using his own shame to skip over any direct reckoning of his effect on other people.

Editing happens in less obvious but more egregious ways, as well. One night in Sydney, Australia, as Chang writes in “Thirty-Five,” he threatened a hotel employee — essentially a colleague — with a knife. “My staff tells me I screamed at the man. Threatened him. They said I had been slicing something on a cutting board and was now gesticulating wildly with the knife. They said it could be interpreted as a weapon.” This moment, written in the “edited” red-text format, enjoys one paragraph in Eat a Peach, a spare handful of sentences dedicated to what is almost certainly a crime. (Chang notes, in the lived-in clarity of black text, that “the ensuing report to HR nearly got me deported from Australia.”) Chang claims, and so the reader experiences, an absence of memory.

Elsewhere in the book, Chang displays his ability to recall — or, at least, to fact-check — miniscule details about the past. There are nearly 100 words dedicated to poularde en vessie, an obscure French dish that Chang learned to make at Café Boulud, in which a whole chicken is stuffed with truffles and foie gras and then placed inside of a pig’s bladder. In another place, a description of tuna carpaccio takes up 339 words. And Chang shows off his persistent dedication to detail by including lengthy end-of-night manager log emails from Momofuku, which cover everything from new dishes to staff recalculations to mechanical issues in the kitchen.

The knife-wielding, earth-shattering incident, however, takes up no space whatsoever in Chang’s brain. He claims to have blacked out, his anger so hot a flame it melted his memory. But he could’ve made the same effort to recount the incident and reckon with its impact in the book that he did to unearth all those lavish descriptions of onetime dishes. (As a point of comparison, the late New York Times journalist David Carr’s 2009 memoir, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, is a model of excellence when it comes to self-reporting, employing standard journalism methods to get to the soul of murky personal truth.) Instead, as an editor, Chang decided that these details could not be rehashed by him after the fact — that his side of the story was all that he could tell. But in his capacity as “truth-teller,” which is partly what he’s attempting to project here, Chang has an obligation to dive deeper into these liminal spaces, particularly if he’s serious about contending with the abuses of his past and their consequences.

One thing in particular that I needed to know was how Chang’s memoir would handle Andrew “Drew” Salmon, who was the behind-the-scenes partner in all things Momofuku for more than a decade (and who went on to become an advisor to Christina Tosi after parting ways with the company in 2017). When I began at Momofuku, he was Chang’s business partner and the company’s chief operating officer. As the head of the restaurant group’s managerial operations, he was my boss. Early into my brand-new job, I was called into a meeting with him. Ostensibly, it was to discuss my schedule, but the only thing I remember,12 years later, is the question he asked in that cramped cellar room.

“Are you a chef-fucker?”

“A what?”

“A chef-fucker. The kind of person who goes around trying to fuck famous chefs.”

I was not, but I suppose that was what he had heard about me. I was young, I had come from other restaurants, and I had slept with a famous pastry chef who was friends with Dave. Word had, I suspected, gotten around, as it does in New York restaurants. Still, being presented with my private life was gutting. Salmon used this meeting to exert his power, and was, from that moment forward, a hostile manager in my eyes. (Salmon, reached by my editors, provided the following comment in regards to the allegation of this conversation: “I’m sorry, I have no recollection of the conversation that is being described. I don’t want to dismiss her feelings or take away from her story or perspective, but I don’t remember having said this.”)

In a straightforward retelling of Momofuku’s history, even one as compressed as Eat a Peach, one might expect at least a passing nod to the business partner whose presence loomed large for more than a decade. But in the 290 pages of Eat a Peach, Salmon’s name never once appears, despite the long and steady roster of other names recited. And if Salmon, whose condescension and abrasiveness as Momofuku’s No. 2 left staffers feeling demeaned and bullied, is absent from this book, I can only wonder what else is left unsaid. (Salmon provided the following comment to my editors regarding his demeanor and its effect on staff: “It was a long time ago. I predominantly worked from our office and probably didn’t fully appreciate how much talent we had in every part of our company. I’m sure I could have been more patient and empathetic in all my communications.”)

At a minimum, Chang has largely left out the problematic friendships that swirled around him during the most meteoric phase of Momofuku’s rise. Missing from the majority of the book’s narrative are the bad actors who had parties in “rape rooms” and then kicked backed at Ssäm Bar, the ones renowned for their bad behavior. He doesn’t get to that part of the story until page 225, tying it specifically to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, and by then it feels like an afterthought.

In fact, for all his supposed self-awareness, Chang does not hesitate to bathe in nostalgia when it comes to the so-called good old days — a point he acknowledges, writing “you can still sense my bro-ish excitement when I tell old war stories.” But when I think about Chang and “war stories,” I mostly remember how, when he came into a room back then, the staff held their breath, like a grenade could detonate at any moment — or the particular terror we experienced if Chang came in and the music was playing too quietly at Ssäm Bar. Then, his sonorous indignation. The rage. None of that was exciting to those of us who were in the blast radius.

Unsurprisingly, I’d push back on the much-repeated idea in Eat a Peach that, as Chang writes, “My greatest strength is in creating environments for other people to grow and succeed. I love teams.” It may be true now, but back then, the restaurant came before its workers, and, beyond that distinction, the back of house superseded the front. In 2008, Chang took what he describes as “the whole gang” to the James Beard Awards, where he ended up winning for Best Chef: New York City. I wasn’t on the “Momobus,” with its disco lights and stripper pole, for “a night the team wouldn’t soon forget,” because I wasn’t invited aboard. Someone had to work service, even though, as Chang writes, at that point, “I still didn’t understand what a sommelier really did.”

Dave was always quick to remind those of us who made up the front-of-house team of our general lack of expertise. More than once he said that he could run a restaurant without the front of house, and yet, there we were, Momofuku’s ugly stepchildren, overpaid, he told us, for skills we didn’t possess. We couldn’t cook, he told us; we were no artists. We were just “greedy bastards,” as he put it in his New Yorker profile. In the book, Chang concedes this prior wholesale lack of respect for the roles played by bussers, managers, sommeliers, and servers. “I’d always felt there was a huge imbalance in the way that servers were compensated with tips, while cooks were not,” he writes, all these years later. “It was my opinion that the kitchen made the only truly essential contribution. Wine lists and waitstaff were affectations of Western dining.”

Early in my tenure at Momofuku, I waited on then-New York Times dining reviewer Frank Bruni, who awarded our restaurant three stars. My pairing with the crab course, which I devised the day before the critic arrived, made it into the newspaper: “[Ko’s] sense of mischief is underscored by the ‘wine pairing’ for a course of soft-shell crab: a glass of chilly Budweiser, bringing to mind a day at the beach,” Bruni wrote. I poured the beer counterside (Ko had no actual tables), into a sake glass, much to his unconcealed delight. But to hear Dave tell it at the time, contribution to the newspaper’s review notwithstanding, my role was that of an overpaid appendage, a testament to his belief that only cooks can add value to restaurant life.

The managerial structure produced by that belief, devised to pit the back of house against the front of house — by tipping kitchen staff out of the collective tip pool, always a point of contention among servers, for instance — meant that the nervous system of Momofuku was permanently electrified with tension. Chang was never abashed about these underpinnings, so perhaps it’s fair to say that his employees knew what they were getting into. But there was also a push and pull between men and women: Momofuku often felt like a boys club, with more male bussers, more male kitchen staff, more male managers, and, generally speaking, more men working at the restaurant than women. While women were in administrative positions and ran much of the company, many were also swayed — or cowed — by the Chang ethos. As a result, there could be a palpable thrum of misogyny, however unintentional, cascading down through the restaurants.

This is all to say that Momofuku culture was insider culture. Either you were in or you were out; I was never “in,” so I was delivered a regular helping of mistreatment by the people — managers, people in administrative roles, and chefs who went on to become nearly as famous as Chang himself — whom Chang groomed to believe that coolness was the premium capital of the Momofuku brand. My schedule changed on a whim. Days off flip-flopped and requests were not recognized. Unpredictability and the personality clashes are common in restaurants, but I lived in a constant and dizzying state of fluctuation. That was the norm, because as Chang writes, “It didn’t matter to me what your personal needs were. Any needs were indicative of frailty and I was of the mind that there was no place for weakness in our company.”

My time at Momofuku ended in September 2008, when I was called into the main office on a fall afternoon and fired without explanation. I had never been written up for any infractions during my time working at Momofuku, nor had I, to my knowledge, broken any rules or done anything in violation of my contract (although New York is an at-will state). I began privately dating a server during my time there, but that was not a contractual issue — and, actually, other staff members higher on the ladder than I was were publicly dating subordinates at the time. My cause for termination was never made clear; I simply understood it to mean that I was being fired because I was not liked by the upper echelons of management, not because I was bad at my job.

In these past months, I have spent a lot of time talking to friends and colleagues from those days. Most remember my trauma, or can speak to their own. I was surprised at how much I unearthed, and also at how much I had forgotten, like the Roundtable emails circulated among management at the end of each night, or the needlessly respected bloggers who visited us in the early days at Ko (though I never forgot Gael Greene, who committed me to the page as a “gorgon”), or even Peter Serpico’s hand-torn pasta with snails and chicken skin, a dish I loved, but filed away with all of my own strange emotions from that time.

I ran into Dave five summers after I was fired, when I was moonlighting as a sommelier at a restaurant in the Hamptons, where I now live. Removed from Momofuku, he did not seem to remember that there had ever been anything but ease between us, and he invited me to sit down at his table for a drink. I declined. He had apparently been able to put our shared past behind him, but I couldn’t.

The problem with Chang’s apparent ability to move on was that many of us who worked for him could not, the scars we received lasting for years, if not a lifetime — a fact he seems to be starting to reckon with. “Recognizing my flaws doesn’t mean I’m ‘cured,’” he writes at one point. “I’ve done so much harm,” at another. But for all of the hand-wringing, all of the guilt, all of the acknowledgment of the bad things that he’s done or condoned, nowhere in the book does he say “I’m sorry” or apologize — the word “sorry” appears six times, never in the form of an apology — other than to “anyone whose role I’ve exaggerated or downplayed in my memory.” In the end, Chang’s trauma, and the trauma he inflicted on other people, becomes part of his public persona, while we simply carry ours.

At the time that Salmon asked me if I was a “chef-fucker,” part of me believed that I deserved to be spoken to in that way, which is why I didn’t quit. Momofuku was the biggest, most important, and best-paying job I’d ever had — I was making $100,000 a year under the most visible umbrella in the dining world — and I had convinced myself I couldn’t replace it. Beyond telling friends and family members, I stayed largely silent. As a leader, a manager, and a chef, Chang had a real and lasting impact on people’s livelihoods. He made careers: Without Chang, you may never have heard of Christina Tosi, Akira Akuto, or Peter Serpico — and that’s just the abbreviated list. He also broke careers. So like everyone else, I accepted the abuses of Momofuku for fear of being fired, of being blacklisted, of never being able to gain a foothold in the restaurant industry again.

But I remain convinced that I speak here not only for me, but also for so many other staff members who walked through the doors of Momofuku one last time, looking back and wondering if they would remember the sublime — and there were enough of those moments — or only the sour. Not everyone shares my experiences or memories, of course, but I know that I am not alone in wondering why it took so long to talk about the despotism of Momofuku. Wrapped up in rising stardom, and in the blackouts of anger, David Chang let the important business of taking care of his staff get away from him; he let us down. He let me down.

And Chang’s impact on restaurant workers goes far beyond me or Momofuku: The “norms” that he initiated over a decade ago still thrive in other restaurants, his intricately documented rage influencing a generation of young chefs. In a restaurant group where bad behavior was sometimes rewarded, that is a lesson learned. Those of us who worked for him — and who lauded him — are not absolved of our responsibility. We may have been terrified, but we should have held him accountable. Even after his rage was given prime real estate in one of the country’s most respected magazines, we gave him a pass.

I think about all of this a lot, and I also think about the fact that I was worked to the bone, drained of my love for restaurants, convinced that I was bad at my job, that I wasn’t cool, that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t a hard worker, that I wasn’t worthy. The routine assault of my skill set deflated me so completely that, even though I came to Momofuku with an Ivy League degree, a master’s, and a sommelier certification, after my departure, I enrolled in a full-time culinary program at Chang’s alma mater, the French Culinary Institute. I graduated second in my class. He will never be able to say I can’t cook again, I told myself.

Still, even after all this, after all the anger that Dave and Momofuku planted in me, I sometimes think of him and my time there fondly. What I gained at Momofuku, perhaps most surprisingly, are deep and lasting friendships that I find immeasurably meaningful. And, in a strange and twisted way, Momofuku delivered to me my current and complete life: Ten years ago, a close friend whom I met at Momofuku (who still keeps me in her phone as “Momo Hannah”) asked me to come out to Long Island to help her open a restaurant, and, after that, I never really left. I met my husband here, bought my house here, had my babies here, and may even retire here someday.

As for Dave, he was funny, and generous, and I liked him, and I wanted him to like me, in that thirsty way that you want the people whom you feel will never truly like you to at least understand who you are. I stayed longer than I should have, chasing moments that were pleasant enough: a bag of gifted cockles during a weekend in Sag Harbor, a night drinking flaming tiki bowls at the Rusty Knot. I saw versions of Dave that were decent and kind. The world has seen that, too; on November 29, Chang became the first celebrity and 14th contestant in history to win $1 million on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the sum of which he donated to Southern Smoke Foundation, a Houston-based crisis relief organization for people in the COVID-battered hospitality industry. He is not a monster, but what he created could devour people in monstrous ways.

Taking Chang at his word, I recognize that he sees some of the pain and torment in what he has birthed. “Restaurants saved my life, but they’ve also hurt and betrayed many of my peers,” he writes. I have no doubt that he has grown in the 12 years since I worked for him. Like me, he’s a parent now. I hope that he is kinder, that he surrounds himself with better people, that he approaches management with less of the toss-spaghetti-at-the-wall wildness than he did back then. I also know that Momofuku is different than it was during my time there: It has a human resources department, and support systems, and it may even be a wonderful place to work now. The place, I hope, like the man, has reached maturity.

Some have asked me what I, personally, would like to see as the denouement to this story. What does restitution look like to those of us harmed by Dave and what he built? Yes, it was different then, and our culture has changed, and I understand that he is working toward becoming a better person. I also believe that he owes a tithe beyond an apology. (Releasing every former employee from any nondisclosure agreement that prevents them from talking about what they experienced at Momofuku might be a start.) For all that Dave has edited in and out of this narrative, what he cannot change is the trauma left in his wake. The one thing he can offer up that is commensurate with the scope and scale of the grief he has caused is the space he occupies in restaurants and in culture: He can cede it to someone who will use it to change this toxic industry that has broken so many of us.

The book’s parting image leaves the reader with a fruit-laden Chang, peaches and nectarines, acquired from the farmers market, firmly in hand. “What are you going to do with all that fruit?” his wife, Grace, asks in the final line of the book. He does not answer. I suspect that he does not yet know what the fruit of his labor should become.

Hannah Selinger’s IACP award-nominated work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Cut, Wine Enthusiast, and elsewhere.
Dola Sun is a freelance illustrator.

Disclosure: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.

For a guy who chugged a Ghost energy drink for breakfast, Mike Satinover has remarkably steady hands. They don’t jitter when he places a level, the kind you’d buy at Home Depot, on top of two logs of rolled-up dough sheets, resembling industrial spools of paper towels.

Rolling out ramen dough is exacting work. And Satinover won’t trust anyone else at his restaurant to do it — not until he can train someone properly, and that might take months. So with hands as still as a watchmaker’s despite three espresso shots’ worth of caffeine in his bloodstream, he adjusts the rolls of dough until the level’s bubble floats precisely between the center lines.

This ensures an even thickness when the machine he feeds the dough into pushes out what will become 300 servings of ramen noodles. Unfurled end to end, the sheets of dough he’ll make today would stretch 116 yards — longer than a football field.

Satinover, 35, sports peach-fuzz hair and a black Pippin’s Tavern hoodie that’s dusted with flour. As the noodle-making machine whirs and slowly coils, he takes out a pocket humidity gauge. The air inside his Logan Square restaurant, Akahoshi Ramen, measures 17 percent this winter morning, too dry for his ramen to remain as pliable as he’d like — 30 to 40 percent humidity is ideal. Already he’s had to repair some broken patches. Maybe he’ll buy a humidifier, yet one more unexpected expense.

Mostly, the man is exhausted. Energy drinks don’t get Satinover wired anymore, only lift him to a state of not-collapsing. But this is what he signed up for when he left his lucrative marketing job to toil from dusk till dawn in pursuit of serving a perfect bowl of ramen.

“I’m not getting good sleep. It’s pretty brutal,” says Satinover, whose restaurant has been packed since he opened it in late November. “I’m worried the mental and physical exhaustion will get to me.”

He continues feeding dough into the complicated and frightening Yamato Richmen noodle-making machine. It’s all buttons, rollers, and dials — 595 pounds of shine and chrome that could mangle appendages if you’re standing too close and not paying attention. At $40,000, it costs as much as a 2024 BMW 2 Series (shipping alone, from Japan, was $5,000), and for over a year it took up space in Satinover’s West Loop apartment, even before he signed the lease for the restaurant space.

His devotion to precision is astounding to behold, exasperating to capture in words: Three hundred servings of noodles (at 135 grams each) requires 30 kilograms of flour. But not just any flour. Over the years, Satinover has dialed in on the two types and the ratio he needs to hit the sweet spot of noodle firmness, a 13.2 percent protein level: 19,500 grams of King Arthur Sir Lancelot (14.2 percent protein) and 10,500 grams of King Arthur Sir Galahad (11.7 percent). Then, to give the noodles the toothsome chew and pale yellow hue he desires, he adds exactly 10,500 grams of water containing 330 grams of sodium bicarbonate, 150 grams of potassium carbonate, and three-eighths of a teaspoon of riboflavin.

Even with a noodle-making machine as high-tech as Satinover’s, he can’t just set it and forget it. The noodles need to be pressed again and again. Ramen noodles are denser than, say, macaroni — if kept in broth overnight, good ramen noodles shouldn’t bloat. The dough enters the machine between two rollers, set at 1.5 millimeter thickness. Once it emerges, it’s folded by Satinover, then pressed again at specific intervals five more times before it’s cut into those familiar long strands. And that’s just the noodles for his miso ramen; for his soupless ramen, he uses a thicker noodle with an entirely different, but also painstakingly derived, formulation.

This noodle-making process eats up five hours of Satinover’s day, and it doesn’t include the 48 hours required for the noodles to sit in a sealed proofing box, commonly used for pizza dough, to age and develop flavor. All this should yield enough noodles to meet the demand for two nights of dinner service. But the way business is going at Akahoshi Ramen, the buzz surrounding it growing by the day, the reality is closer to a night and a half.

Striving for a perfect bowl of ramen — even if it can’t practically be achieved — requires more than feel, intuition, and thousands of hours of muscle memory. It demands exactitude measured in decimals, seconds, and milligrams, using levels, humidity gauges, and refractometers. It is cooking that veers into the domain of laboratory science.

Ask Satinover why this kind of precision is necessary — or really any question at all — and you’ll get an answer that is thought out, quantitative, ready to be bullet-pointed: “There are two reasons. From a business perspective, it’s consistency. My intuition about what’s right isn’t applicable to every component of every dish. I need a control, and numbers are easy to control. The other reason is to avoid having to think about it, to avoid the mental load of what’s correct and what’s not. The number is correct. Twenty grams of onions is correct, not 10 onions. What if you have a larger onion? It’s for a reduction in mental exhaustion.”

Satinover is a chef obsessed and possessed. But he doesn’t have the contemplative intensity of a Grant Achatz or Curtis Duffy — he is more in the mold of a chill gamer and sneakerhead, his cooking philosophy formed on Reddit, not at the Culinary Institute of America. His singular infatuation with ramen has served him well. For more than a decade, Satinover achieved esteemed status on Ramen Internet, which led him to roll out a series of pop-ups around the country and now to open what is Chicago’s most buzzed-about restaurant in years.

Anything is possible in America, even the redemption of a punch line. As recently as 20 years ago, outside of Little Tokyos and suburban strip malls catering to the Japanese, the idea of ramen as an American dining genre was a fanciful notion. Ramen was the staple of hungry and destitute college students. Ramen was chicken-flavored noodle soup from Maruchan, a dozen packets collecting dust in a food donation bin. Ramen in America was an avatar for cheapness and convenience, until it wasn’t. And now? People travel across multiple state lines just to sample a bowl of Japanese noodle broth because someone on Reddit said it was worth the trip. What a country.

The online forum r/ramen is one of the friendlier corners of Reddit. The majority of posts by its 787,000-plus members feature photographs of homemade ramen attempted by amateur cooks. The photos are beautifully composed, the presentation of the ramen an art form in itself.

The more meticulous artisan will execute the “noodle fold,” which involves draping noodles over chopsticks, then carefully folding them once, all together, onto themselves, the individual strands aligned, resembling a three-dimensional barcode. Some bowls have ajitama — a soft-boiled egg marinated in soy sauce — that’s been bisected lengthwise, showcasing its oozy, lustrous yolk in all its sunflower-yellow glory. Amateur cooks are known to use an eyedropper to place precisely random beads of aroma oil — a fat such as butter or lard flavored with aromatics — on the soup’s surface in service of a gorgeous photo.

By and large, r/ramen feels like an encouraging place, with the genial vibe of a student art exhibition. Once the finished bowls are posted, there’ll be upvotes from fellow members, with comments like “Looks amazing” or “Great job!”

Spend any length of time on r/ramen and you’ll notice one user getting name-checked a lot: Ramen_Lord, often spoken of in language befitting actual deities (“Praise be to Ramen_Lord” and “All hail Ramen_Lord,” sayeth two recent posts). Since 2013, Ramen_Lord has earned his reputation by rigorously sharing every data point of his research on making ramen at home, hundreds of thousands of words now. If you’ve posted a photo of a homemade bowl on r/ramen, there’s a decent chance the recipe was developed by Ramen_Lord. At Satinover’s previous job, at the marketing research firm Kantar, a colleague learned Satinover was into ramen and suggested he check out the writings of the Reddit user Ramen_Lord.

What the co-worker didn’t know: Satinover is Ramen_Lord, a secret he kept from all but his family for nearly four years. Like many usernames, the self-glorifying moniker was intended as a joke. Satinover never imagined that one day he would, in fact, be viewed as a ramen lord.

It wasn’t until the food website Serious Eats interviewed the man behind Ramen_Lord in 2017 that Satinover outed himself. There was nary a a word about Satinover not being of Japanese ancestry, this gaijin who dared to call himself Ramen_Lord. By this point in the rise of ramen in America, the well-known names making it weren’t even Japanese: David Chang of the Momofuku Noodle Bar empire is a Korean American. Ivan Orkin is a New York native who ran beloved shops in Tokyo and New York and cowrote a bestselling English-language ramen cookbook.

Reddit users saw Satinover as someone who put in the work, who earned his stripes by being rigorous with his research. From the start, Satinover’s posts were treatises reminiscent of the recipe deep dives that propelled food writer J. Kenji López-Alt into culinary celebritydom. At a time when cooking content is condensed ever shorter, and more aspirational than useful, everything about Satinover’s instructions is slow and precise: Pork belly chashu should be cooked sous vide in a water bath at exactly 154 degrees Fahrenheit. For ajitama, the amount of soy sauce and mirin needed is 10 and 8 percent, respectively, of the combined weight of the peeled eggs and the water, which should be weighed separately.

There’s a culture of secrecy around ramen recipes in Japan, especially among shop owners in a fiercely competitive market. But Satinover wasn’t yet a restaurateur, just a hobbyist. Over the years, he would post a dozen recipes that he developed — from chicken paitan and tonkotsu gyokai tsukemen to a new wave Tokyo-style soy sauce — and these arrived on Reddit with the impact of a surprise Beyoncé album drop.

“I decided I’m just going to have no secrets, no matter what happens. I have to be an absolutist in that approach,” Satinover says. “The more I delved in, the more I realized they weren’t really my secrets to have. I’m not even Japanese. As an outsider, it felt very bizarre to think, Well, I have amassed this knowledge; let me just hoard it for myself. Why not share it? These things deserve to be known by everybody.”

Satinover’s most popular post was his most ambitious. In 2020, he and his twin brother, Scott Satinover, posted a free 137-page e-book called The Ramen_Lord Book of Ramen. There’s no fancy layout and only a handful of pictures — it’s just Satinover’s ramen brain downlinked to 47,351 words in a single-spaced Google doc. (A doctoral student in engineering, Scott helped write, edit, and explain the science.) Whatever poisonous reputation Reddit has sometimes earned, this was the very opposite: a community of like-minded folks celebrating something nice, flipping out in all-caps exaltations that its Lord had collected his wisdom into a bible.

A frequent question from Reddit users: When might they ever get to taste Satinover’s ramen in person. One-off pop-up dinners? Sure. But in that Serious Eats unmasking, Satinover was asked whether he’d consider opening his own restaurant. He replied: “I’m not sure I’m cut out for it. Loving a dish and loving making a dish are only part of the equation for owning a restaurant, and I have an immense respect for those who pursue that career, but it might not be my strong suit.”

Mike Satinover’s upbringing wasn’t dissimilar to that of other kids in 1990s Oak Park: He played a lot of video games, tried tennis and gymnastics, generally earned excellent grades. For a while, he was deep into spoken-word poetry, and his parents remember him obsessing over every word on his laptop to find the perfect imagery. “Mike has a goal in mind and then he pursues it with passion and vigor,” says his father, Ira Satinover, a retired oral surgeon. His mother, Luisa DiPietro, is a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Dentistry.

Their son would spend long stretches of his days immersed in role-playing video games like Final Fantasy, the type of attention-span-testing contests where, Mike Satinover says, “you just have to grind to beat it — no shortcuts.” Later, in college, he would go through a phase of making macarons, the notoriously finicky Parisian confection. Over several years, he baked 38 batches, a few dozen cookies each time, documenting every attempt with detailed recipe notes.

In high school, Satinover had aspirations of becoming a chef. It was the alchemy and instant gratification, the possibility that, when it came to ingredients, one plus one plus one could equal five. When he was old enough to drive, he worked 20 hours a week as an unpaid stagiaire at an Italian restaurant in Forest Park. This was about the time Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential became a pop culture sensation, and the restaurant industry’s seedy side was still being glorified as rock ’n’ roll. Satinover enjoyed the quieter parts — picking herbs and piping goat cheese into squash blossoms — but the head chef treated him like scum. “He called me all sorts of crazy names,” Satinover says. “He never taught me anything. It was all very unpleasant.” After a solid year of full-frontal shit eating, he couldn’t stomach the idea of entering culinary school, much less spending his life working in a restaurant.

His decision in high school to study Japanese (which interested him more than French or Spanish — that, and he was a fan of Dragon Ball Z) opened up new options. His junior year, he took a two-week trip to Nagano, Tokyo, and Kyoto, spending part of the time with a host family. An Italian Jewish gaming-obsessed geek who knew only upper-middle-class Oak Park, Satinover had his world rocked by Japan. Beyond the modernity and cleanliness, it was the cultural minutiae — like waking up to the smell of a rice cooker instead of an alarm clock — that most intrigued the impressionable 17-year-old. On a more abstract level, the collectivist culture of the Japanese, which stood in contrast to American individualism, was strange and strangely compelling to him.

When the time came for college applications, Satinover sought out schools with strong Japanese language departments. That’s how he ended up at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He spent his junior year at Hokkaido University. It was there, in Sapporo, Japan, on a frigid November night in 2009, that one perfect bowl of miso ramen would slingshot Satinover’s life into a whole new trajectory.

Sapporo has something in common with Chicago: It, too, is a northern city that endures bitter winters. The warming properties of ramen make the dish a popular elixir, and Sapporo boasts more than a thousand ramen shops in a city of two million people. The defining feature of Sapporo ramen (there are upward of 40 recognized ramen variants across Japan) is a broth cooked with miso, a fermented soybean paste. Unlike cleaner, lighter broths such as shoyu (soy sauce) or shio (sea salt), miso ramen is viscous and often creamy, its pungent, earthy savoriness particularly soul satisfying in cold-weather climates.

Sapporo-style miso is one of the few types of ramen requiring a wok. At searingly high temperatures, woks provide the requisite char (Chinese originators called it “wok hei”) that gives food an appealing, slightly burnt tinge. In Sapparo-style ramen, bean sprouts (or cabbage) with a thick dollop of miso paste first get this charring, the flames from the gas burners licking high and caramelizing the sugars. Pork broth is then ladled into this stir-fry, and within seconds everything comes to a vigorous boil.

What happens next necessitates nimble hands and tight choreography. As soon as the curly yellow noodles come out of the cooking water, they are shaken dry to remove excess moisture (overcook them by even 10 seconds and they’ll lose that springy chew). When they land in the serving bowl, the wok broth with bean sprouts is poured over top. Toppings — pork belly chashu, strips of bamboo shoots called menma, scallions, sometimes corn and butter — are nestled into the noodles. Then the finished bowl is quickly dispatched to the diner. Assuming every component is properly prepped, a bowl of miso ramen should take less than four minutes from cook to serve.

Satinover knew none of this when a fellow student recommended he visit Sumire, a legendary miso ramen shop in Sapporo. The only ramen he’d had theretofore was of the instant packet variety, plus a few bowls from the food court at Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights. He wasn’t yet a superfan, but the dish sounded more exciting than the broiled fish and steamed rice served at the dorm canteen.

When the ramen bowl arrived at his counter seat, it was nothing pretty: yellow noodles submerged in murky beige with a tangle of light green scallions. On the surface of the soup was what looked like a quarter-inch layer of liquefied pork lard. This insulated a scalding hot broth, McDonald’s-coffee-lawsuit hot, a temperature many degrees higher than what American restaurants would serve.

Here’s the part of the biopic where Paul McCartney sees the guitar in the music store window or Dorothy enters the Technicolor world of Oz: The first sip burned his mouth.

Ask Satinover to describe how the ramen tasted, and he’ll respond by telling you how it made him feel: incredulous. “My brain couldn’t comprehend what this really was in terms of composition. I didn’t understand that you could make food taste like this,” he says. “There was something immensely pleasurable about it in a core, visceral way. Nothing was wrong. Everything was correct.”

If ever a bowl of noodles could kick your ass, Sumire’s miso ramen did it to Satinover with steel-tipped boots. For the first time since arriving in Japan, he was tasting food in the outer bounds: intense savoriness, extreme richness, wobbly fat from the chashu, bean sprouts charred dark. As he sat alone at this second-floor walkup in Sapporo, his life changed, even if he didn’t know it at the time. But the problem with losing his ramen-in-Japan virginity to something so maximally delicious was that it set Satinover up for a high nearly impossible to replicate, like having Gisele Bündchen as your first girlfriend.

Satinover’s ramen bell couldn’t be unrung. Every free moment in the coming months was spent at a ramen shop, slurping, chasing that dragon. So obsessed was he that he proposed doing an independent study at school, documenting and reviewing ramen shops in Sapporo. (Basically, a food blog.) There would be lengthy write-ups of restaurants, photos, interviews with chefs, Google Maps listings. In his introductory post to the Sapporo Ramen Guide, still online today, Satinover wrote (grammar cleaned up slightly):

So, using my decent-at-best Japanese, I will be compiling some of the best, and some of the worst, shops there are, written for your pleasure and use. I will do the research, I will conduct the interviews, I will ask the questions, then show you the results, so you don’t have to.

Two months and 21 posts later, his teacher scored his project 98 out of 100.

When Satinover returned to the University of Wisconsin to complete his degree (in addition to Japanese, he also majored in international business and marketing), he began feeling an intense yearning. The one place in town serving ramen might have been fine for Madison, but it was inadequate for someone who had visited nearly a hundred ramen restaurants during his year abroad. He describes what he felt as “deep reverse culture shock”: “I was like an addict. I went from eating this thing all the time to not having it at all. I missed the memory of it. I had a lifestyle, and that lifestyle was immediately stripped from me in an intense, difficult way.”

Let’s pause to look back at Chicago’s fledgling ramen scene, circa the early 2010s. It’s not like ramen wasn’t around then, but the offerings here were of the mom-and-pop variety, with no online footprint, no publicists — the types of places Eater wouldn’t hyperventilate over. There was one spot where local ramen geeks got their fix: Santouka, the noodle chain with an outpost in Mitsuwa’s food court. But Arlington Heights was so far away that city dwellers had to pay the Illinois Tollway each time they wanted a bowl.

If there was one chef who helped ramen achieve “city cool” in Chicago, it was Bill Kim, who spent time under Charlie Trotter. Kim’s restaurant Urbanbelly, which opened in 2008, had a few things that lent it street cred: It was next to a laundromat in a sad Avondale strip mall, its interior design oozed hipness, and its seating was communal benches, which, apart from Avec, was still a novel concept here at the time.

Kim, a Korean American, served an array of pan-Asian dishes, including lamb and brandy dumplings and a killer pineapple and pork belly fried rice. Urbanbelly also offered ramen, and though it didn’t adhere to traditional Japanese interpretations, it was nonetheless delicious: The restaurant’s flagship bowl featured pork belly and shiitake mushrooms in a broth tinged with pho spices, lime juice, and fish sauce. I suppose you could call that pho, but the noodles were ramen-style.

After Urbanbelly, Chicago’s culinary scene began treating ramen as a fine-dining novelty. (Wagamama was already doing this in London, and David Chang was making waves at his Momofuku in New York.) Around this time, chef Takashi Yagihashi started serving shoyu and miso ramen in the food court at the Macy’s store in the Loop and during Sunday brunch at his namesake white-tablecloth Bucktown restaurant. Those led to Slurping Turtle, which he opened in River North in 2011. After that, Oiistar made a splash in Wicker Park, buoyed by its Yamato noodle-making machine.

Chicago’s ramen renaissance truly arrived in the mid-2010s: High Five Ramen from the Au Cheval team, Furious Spoon, Wasabi, Ramen Shinchan in Palatine. Nick Kokonas, the financier behind Alinea and later the Tock reservation system, said he considered opening a place called Fuck Yeah Ramen.

But for Mike Satinover, posted in the ramen hinterlands of central Wisconsin in 2011, his Sapporo noodle experience became a phantom limb, an itch that couldn’t be scratched.

The only solution was to make ramen himself. Early attempts were predictably awful. The process of making a bowl from scratch is so labor intensive that most amateurs would have given up after one go. But just as it had with macarons, Satinover’s predilection to try, tinker, and try again kicked into gear. His motivation this time was a deep yearning, a physical craving for that one perfect bowl of ramen. So he kept going.

By night he was the mythical Ramen_Lord, chronicling every step of his ramen journey for an online fan base. By day, Mike Satinover made use of his business degree, working as a marketing research analyst. The decade he spent in that job gave him an understanding of consumers and of the product features that appealed to different types of them. (For example, how willing would someone living in the West Loop be to pay $19 for a bowl of ramen?)

He reached, then blew past, his 10,000 hours for mastery a number of ways. Early on, he’d make a bowl of ramen from scratch once a month, and as he became more proficient, he upped that to once a week, then two, sometimes three bowls a week. Over the years, he amassed two dozen Japanese-language ramen cookbooks. He’d discover these during weeklong pilgrimages to Japan, where he’d consume between three and five bowls daily — “a very normal amount,” Satinover contends — fastidiously documenting his research on Reddit and Instagram.

What improved Satinover’s ramen making most swiftly was hosting pop-up dinners around the country, the first in 2017 at New York’s Ramen Lab, an incubator for ramen chefs by the noodle manufacturer Sun Noodle. He’d get in his reps making as many as a hundred bowls a night. Driven by Satinover’s growing profile on social media, coupled with a 2017 profile in the Chicago Tribune, his pop-ups became a hot item. He’d release the tickets on Tock at noon, and within 30 seconds, all 90 seats would sell out. Satinover branded his pop-ups Akahoshi Ramen — the name means “red star,” a symbol that, fittingly and remarkably, appears on the flags of both Chicago and Hokkaido prefecture, of which Sapporo is the capital.

Satinover harbored dreams of quitting his lucrative day job to make ramen. But how? His celebrity on Reddit opened access to a network of professional chefs. “For something in the English language about ramen that showed proper technique, how to source ingredients, how to make proper tare, there was no one else before Mike posted on Reddit,” says Scott LaChapelle, who runs the acclaimed Rhode Island ramen shop Pickerel. “There was no information online, and Mike propelled that forward.”

There’s little consensus on who’s the best ramen chef in America, but Keizo Shimamoto is on the shortlist. A Japanese American who blogged about ramen, he relocated to Tokyo for four years to learn how to make it. That devotion earned him a starring role in the 2013 documentary short Ramen Dreams. When he returned to the United States, he created the ramen burger (a hamburger with a bun made of crispy noodles), which became a viral sensation, and opened his acclaimed shop Ramen Shack in New York City and a second location in Orange County, California.

Satinover dined at Shimamoto’s New York restaurant and introduced himself. Soon the two became friends. Satinover invited Shimamoto to his Chicago apartment, where he served him his interpretation of miso ramen. “It’s top notch. I was really impressed,” Shimamoto says. “I fell in love with miso ramen in Sapporo, and having Mike’s in Chicago and getting that Hokkaido Sapporo feeling, that’s what makes me emotional.”

Shimamoto adds: “He tells everyone I’m the best ramen chef in America. He’s definitely taking that crown pretty soon.”

It’s one thing to control every variable and cook one perfect bowl of ramen in your apartment. It’s something else entirely to scale this up to serving 200 bowls a night to a paying public with sky-high expectations. There’s the practical realities of opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant. (Running joke: How do you become a millionaire as a restaurateur? Be a billionaire, open a restaurant, and run it until you become a millionaire.) Even if the margins are decent, invariably there will be supply chain issues and fluctuating food costs. You’ll need to train staff members to replicate your ramen faithfully, only to have many of them leave the job after a few months. Then there’s dealing with the weekly torment of municipal bureaucracy.

Every pain point makes attaining that one perfect bowl even more difficult. Shimamoto himself urged Satinover not to open a restaurant. In 2022, Shimamoto closed his remaining Ramen Shack in California. In addition to the staffing and supply issues that led to the decision, Shimamoto says, physical and mental health issues had taken a toll on him: “Whether you’re making a million bucks or not, you struggle and question daily what the point is of everything.”

Running a restaurant isn’t the domain of a talented hobbyist. Satinover knew scrutiny and bad reviews would come. And even though he could speak Japanese, he recognized that the optics of a white man making Japanese food and being heaped with acclaim for it weren’t great, even if the criticism came largely from white people on social media. “​​I doubt very much that the best ramen is in some white guy’s house,” one Facebook commentator wrote in response to the 2017 Tribune story. Satinover’s personal Facebook account was flooded with messages from people calling him a cultural appropriator — but not one of those people, as far as he could tell, was Japanese. (Several Japanese friends tell me that when gaijin come to Japan and attempt their culture’s cooking, the locals view it not as appropriation but as appreciation of their cuisine.)

It’s routine that chefs — white chefs in particular — who devote their culinary lives to a cuisine not of their ethnic origin hear about it from the online cultural appropriation police. The really successful ones, like Andy Ricker, formerly of Portland’s Pok Pok empire, and Rick Bayless, Chicago’s Mexican food devotee, mitigate criticism by being fastidious in their research and respect for tradition. They speak the language, they spend time living in the country, they dive into the cuisine headfirst.

Of those who criticize him, Satinover says this: “It doesn’t matter that I studied Japanese throughout high school and college, that I majored in Japanese. It doesn’t matter. I’m not Japanese, I’ll never be Japanese.”

It would be one thing if this were a passing fancy for Satinover. But it’s a deeply embedded desire of his — one he can’t deny himself. He decided against outside investors because he didn’t want to compromise on his vision. So he poured his life’s savings into Akahoshi Ramen. His goal is simple enough to be written on a napkin: He just wants to make ramen for a living. And he is fine, at least for now, earning a third of his marketing job salary to do it.

“Just doing the math, there’s no return on investment here,” Satinover says. “It’s to have my dream ramen shop. I need my own ramen shop. I don’t care if it makes money or not. I would just hate myself if I didn’t have my ramen shop.”

Over the last few years, this pursuit has provided plenty for Satinover to talk about with his therapist. Recently, their sessions have focused on pushing back against the high expectations of others and, in a way, the voice in his own head. Satinover feels a particular turmoil in accepting praise: He needs a certain amount to satisfy the ego, but he also feels dishonorable when the word “best” gets foisted on him. It sets him up for failure.

“ ‘Best’ is what I’m working towards, and when I get it, I don’t like it,” he says. “How do I give myself more compassion to enjoy the fruits of my labor, instead of beating myself up?”

Fourteen years nearly to the day he tasted that life-changing bowl in Sapporo, 70 days after quitting his marketing job, Mike Satinover peeled back the butcher paper taped over the windows and doors, wiped the glass clean, and opened Akahoshi Ramen to the public. It was the night after Thanksgiving.

He had installed a seven-seat counter, where you could watch him assemble bowls, like you might at a shop in Sapporo. What felt more like an American restaurant were the additional 50 tabled seats, where you could dine more leisurely and, ideally, order a few yuzu highballs to drive up the check average. He had assembled a team of four cooks and five front-of-house staffers. One of those cooks, a longtime fan of Ramen_Lord, DM’d Satinover about working for him the day Satinover announced Akahoshi on social media.

Satinover had learned that if you try to please everyone with options, you risk pleasing no one. So he kept his menu intentionally sparse: four types of ramens, two rice dishes, and extra toppings. That’s it. There is no tonkotsu, the crowd-pleasing, bombastic, pork-fat-laden ramen that’s seemingly obligatory on every ramen menu in America.

His signature bowl is, of course, the Sapporo-style miso ramen, made with a blend of three miso pastes imported from Japan. Also on the menu is a lighter variant, the soy-sauce-based shoyu, as well as tantanmen, a Japanese take on the Sichuan street food dan dan noodles. This bowl does not have broth; instead, it’s mixed with a cool sesame sauce and topped with numbingly spicy crumbles of ground pork. Satinover’s final ramen is also soupless: aburasoba, a garlicky, soy saucy variant with fried scallions and a generous heap of chopped pork belly.

“We only have four ramen, so each one has to be pretty awesome,” he told me as he prepared for the opening that night. “If it’s not awesome, we’ll have a problem.”

The best word to describe the scene in the restaurant hours before the first-ever customers arrived: “boring.” Satinover was washing dishes, sipping his dinner of Monster Energy Ultra Sunrise. The pork belly chashu sat sliced in a hotel pan in three-ounce portions. The broth had been heated to exactly 203 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that won’t agitate and cloud the soup. A line cook was snipping toasted seaweed with a pair of scissors. Satinover offered the cooks their choice of prep music, and they chose an album called Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress by the hardcore metal band Gulch. Everything was prepped and precise.

At 5 p.m., the music was switched to something less cranium crushing and more low-fi chill, and soon Satinover called out the restaurant’s first orders: “Two shoyus, two misos, please!” The first tantanmen came out of the kitchen at 5:30; Satinover was delighted that the diner asked for extra chile oil.

From the open kitchen, Satinover hobnobbed with well-wishers, many of whom were regular attendees of his pop-ups, and accepted liquid gifts of congratulations. Unlike the ramen culture in Japan, where diners eat as quickly as possible, then leave, Akahoshi has a relaxed come-stay-for-a-while air about it.

Judging from messages reposted on the restaurant’s Instagram feed, customers — including local food writers — enjoyed what they tasted. Nick Kindelsperger, who has since left his post as a Tribune food critic, was among the first diners that opening night, and he posted on Instagram: “This is the best ramen I’ve had in Chicago.”

But there were issues that first week. One night, the ajitama sat too long in the warm soy sauce marinade, so instead of the oozy lava flow, the yolks were fully hard-boiled. Some of the soup was overly salty because the broth wasn’t properly diluted. Another night, the bok choy on the tantanmen was ice cold. The toilet in one of the restrooms overflowed.

Five days in, Eater Chicago published a story about the restaurant’s growing popularity under the headline “Akahoshi Ramen, Now Open in Logan Square, Is Chicago’s Toughest Reservation.” Satinover wasn’t thrilled about that, because it’s not entirely true, as he allocates 50 seats to walk-ins nightly. Between a reputation for hard-to-score reservations and the early adulation from reviewers, Satinover had a creeping sense that the lofty expectations were getting pushed further beyond reach. He’s already heard from a number of customers that $19 a bowl is too expensive. One Google reviewer questioned whether those claiming Akahoshi has the “best ramen in Chicago” were paid off by Satinover.

“The major criticism of this restaurant is that it’s overhyped,” Satinover says. “I knew we would have this problem, I just didn’t realize how much.”

As a former food writer at the Tribune and an avowed ramen geek, I’ve tasted a good sampling of bowls around town. How does Satinover’s stack up? I find his interpretations fantastic — the miso and tantanmen in particular. I’ve had countless other bowls that leave me feeling like I ingested a fat-and-salt bomb. Akahoshi’s are rich but not heavy. The flavor is subtly robust, and the noodles have an appealing bounce. Everything about the bowls tastes clean and unadulterated.

I think part of why Satinover’s ramen seems so exceptional to me is that I have been given privileged information. He painstakingly walked me through the choices he made in composing each bowl. He explained to me how he gives the noodles the requisite chew. I saw him scoop out the three-miso blend used for the tare, the primary seasoning agent that contributes the earthy, sweet-savory undertow in his miso ramen. I watched him use a refractometer to make sure his broth had the proper viscosity. Would a casual diner, without all that, appreciate Satinover’s ramen the same way?

Apparently so. As I watched Satinover prepare the dough that morning in early December — Akahoshi Ramen’s 11th day in business — he spat out his restaurant’s scores for me like a die-hard Bulls fan reciting Michael Jordan stats: On Google, Akahoshi had exactly 39 reviews, with an average of 4.7 stars; on OpenTable, it had 70 reviews, all but one a five-star rating. The previous night, 147 customers walked through the door, ordering 180 bowls of ramen. (Weeks later, Satinover would serve 197 bowls in four hours.)

A normal day at the restaurant for him is 14 hours. And a little more than a week into his new life, he was very tired. Asked on Reddit what he misses from his old desk job, Satinover answered that it was not having body aches all day long. “I’ve prioritized this restaurant over everything else in my life,” he told me. “I have no other hobbies, nothing else is driving me. It’s more important than friends, my own mental and physical well-being. And I’m kind of OK with that.”

This is his new reality, from now until the day his restaurant shutters: coming to terms with the fact that making one perfect bowl of ramen 180 times a night is impossible and futile. Where does one cede control? What compromises will need to be made? And when others proclaim you the most exciting ramen chef in America, is that just putting a target on your back?

Satinover thinks about all this often — it’ll be fodder for his next conversation with his therapist. But that morning there were more pressing issues. He needed to finish making those noodles. And he had just gotten word that his dishwasher had a DJ gig that night and wouldn’t make dinner service. Satinover was going to have to wash 180-plus bowls himself.

For decades, in courthouses and government offices all across the US, people have been filing bizarrely worded pseudo-legal documents filled with strange symbols, secret coded language, and even bloody fingerprints in an effort to unlock secret bank accounts set up for them by the evil impostor government that runs this country.

These people call themselves "sovereign citizens," and the complex symbolism they use in these documents offers a fascinating insight into the beliefs and practices of a fringe movement whose prominence in America has grown over the past few decades and whose ideology overlaps with that of many other, often more dangerous, far-right extremist movements in the US, including groups like the militia that recently took over a national wildlife refuge in Oregon.

The bizarre conspiracy theory at the center of this all

The sovereign citizens movement is a far-right anti-government extremist movement in the US that believes the government — at all levels, local, state, and federal — is illegitimate and has enslaved the American people.

Their belief system is complex and rooted in a series of bizarre conspiracy theories that hold that the original US government set up by the Founding Fathers has been replaced with an evil secret government that has sold all US citizens into slavery by using them as collateral against foreign debt.

As explained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, they believe the government creates a secret alternate identity for each American at birth and sets up a secret US Treasury account — sort of like a corporate "trust" — under that alternate identity. The US government funds these "corporate shell" accounts to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

Because the US no longer uses the gold standard, it instead uses these accounts as collateral to back up its currency. The money is said to represent each citizen's future earning potential. The sovereign citizens thus believe the government has "pledged its citizenry as collateral, by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans," according to the SPLC.

Part of their proof is that birth certificates and other government documents, said to represent this scheme, put names in all capital letters. So whereas Jennifer Williams is the real person, JENNIFER WILLIAMS is the secret Treasury account.

By declaring themselves "sovereign citizens," members of these groups say they are freeing themselves from government enslavement and separating themselves from their secret, government-created alternate identity.

According to the FBI, which considers this a domestic terrorist movement, "By declaring themselves 'sovereign citizens,' they [believe that they] are emancipated from the responsibilities of being a U.S. citizen, including paying taxes, possessing a state driver’s license, or obeying the law."

Things like driver's licenses, permits, and even zip codes are seen as "contracts" with the illegitimate US government that cede one's sovereignty. By rejecting these things, you're "tearing up" the contract and freeing yourself.

These beliefs may be nutty, but the groups are quite serious. A 2014 survey asked US law enforcement officials to rank terrorist threats to the United States. They ranked sovereign citizens as the highest threat — with Islamic extremists coming in second.

How sovereign citizens think court documents will unlock their secret accounts

Sovereign citizens believe they can tap into their secret US Treasury account (and get access to all that secret hidden money) by "filing particular government forms in a particular order, and by using precisely the right language," according to the SPLC.

This is what is known among sovereign citizens as "redemption theory": Basically, all you have to do is break the secret code, and the government — in particular, court judges, who are all in on the conspiracy — will be forced to unlock your account and give you access to all that money that is rightfully yours.

This is part of why sovereign citizens file endless court documents with strange wording, odd capitalization, fingerprints made in red ink or even blood, and other coded symbols. Take this document, for example, written by a sovereign citizen, in which he declares himself to be a superior court judge:

JJ MacNab, who tweeted the document, is an expert in far-right extremist groups who has studied and written extensively about the sovereign citizens movement. In a series of tweets, MacNab "decoded" the document, explaining the meanings behind many of the strange elements included in it.

Here are a few of those tweets, which are really fascinating (note: "sovcits" is sovereign citizens):

As mentioned above, sovereign citizens believe each person has two identities: a real identity, which they refer to as their "sovereign" or "flesh and blood" identity, and a secret government-created alternate identity, which they refer to as their "corporate" identity.

They use red ink (or sometimes even blood) instead of blue or black ink to signify to the evil shadow government and their puppet judges that it is the true flesh-and-blood person who is signing a particular document and not the corporate shell.

This is a signal to the judge both that the individual knows the secret code that will unlock his sovereignty (and Treasury account) and that the signature on the document is not to be interpreted as the individual signing over his sovereign rights in a contract with the shadow government.

This use of postage stamps and blood on legal documents, MacNab explains, is related to a broader "ritual" that is used to get one's sovereignty recognized by, of all things, the US Postal Service.

The strange way they write their names on documents — with odd punctuation and lowercase letters — is also part of the secret code.

According to a 2010 report by the Anti-Defamation League, it's "very common" for sovereign citizens "to use punctuation in their name — such as commas, colons, and semi-colons — to separate their first and middle names (their 'Christian appellation') from their last name, which many think is their 'government-given' name."

For example, "Michigan militia leader Mark Koernke, when he also became a sovereign citizen, began writing his name as 'Mark Gregory,, Koernke.'"

These are just a few of the odd, secret coded messages that are often included in these documents, but they give you a sense of the incredible intricacy of these rituals and how very seriously these people take their beliefs.

Okay, so they're weird. But are they actually dangerous?

As I mentioned, the FBI considers the sovereign citizens movement to be a domestic terrorist movement, and there have been a number of violent incidents involving sovereign citizens.

Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City bombing was a sovereign citizen; Andrew Joseph Stack, who flew his small plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, was also affiliated with the movement.

Sometimes violent incidents erupt from routine encounters between sovereign citizens and law enforcement. For example, on May 20, 2010, a routine traffic stop in West Memphis, Arkansas, ended in the deaths of two police officers at the hands of Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph, both of whom were "deeply immersed" in the sovereign citizens movement. Both Kanes were also killed in the shootout.

Sovereign citizens also frequently find themselves in court for criminal activity. SPLC reports that sovereign citizens "are notorious for engaging in a variety of schemes involving money, false identification documents and the courts — scams that land them in criminal trouble with remarkable regularity."

But for a lot of sovereign citizens, their "activism" mostly comes in the form of harassing county clerks and judges by filing endless pseudo-legal documents in an attempt to "crack the code" and unlock their sovereignty and their secret US Treasury accounts.

Given that these secret accounts are completely fictitious and do not actually exist outside the minds of these people, they strangely never seem to be able to crack the code. So they just keep filing more documents.

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

At Vox, we believe that clarity is power, and that power shouldn’t only be available to those who can afford to pay. That’s why we keep our work free. Millions rely on Vox’s clear, high-quality journalism to understand the forces shaping today’s world. Support our mission and help keep Vox free for all by making a financial contribution to Vox today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month $10/month $25/month $50/month Other

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

The oppression of women is ancient and has manifested itself in different ways over the centuries. It is one thing to see this, it is another to ask how, when it is so deeply unnatural, it has been maintained.

Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation Devaluation A lowering of the exchange rate of one currency as regards others. of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.

The role and image of women is historically transformed in relation to the economic developments that have prevailed, particularly in Western Europe, the cradle of capitalism and so-called human rights. Through economic and social transformations, capitalism and patriarchy end up reinforcing each other. Capitalism is not the only factor, but by establishing unequal social relations (as a consequence but also as a condition for its existence), capitalism explicitly serves patriarchy by facilitating the oppression of women. Patriarchy, on the other hand, is useful to capitalism as it provides a devalued population from which it will be able to derive maximum benefit.

Three visions structure the feminist analysis of the links between capitalism and patriarchy

The first considers gender and sex relations as constituting an autonomous system and that the same applies to race or class relations. Since patriarchy preceded capitalism and persisted during it, it would therefore reproduce itself independently. However, this hypothesis does not exclude the possibility that the two systems influence each other: capitalism is sometimes useful to patriarchy and vice versa. This theoretical current influenced by Marxism tends to analyze the oppression of women according to the same methodology as class oppression: it defines women as composing a patriarchal class exploited by the dominant class of men appropriating their surplus labour. Despite the importance of Christine Delphy’s reflections developed in the book The Main Enemy - Political Economy of Patriarchy which demonstrate that all women, regardless of their status, are victims of oppression, this analysis minimizes the importance of other dynamics and is insufficiently based on a more economic analysis of domination. According to this logic, it could be argued that the housewife of an immigrant worker would belong to the same class as Silvio Berlusconi’s ex-wife, Veronica Lario. Proponents of this hypothesis consider the anti-patriarchal struggle to be predominant: there must be greater solidarity among all women than between men and women of the working class. As Cinzia Arruzza claims, we believe it is necessary to add capitalism to the equation. Not all members of the same “patriarchal class” live the same realities and oppressions and are therefore not immediately in solidarity with each other. One cannot compare the experience of immigrant (working class) women with that of wealthy women, as the latter can exploit the former. Thinking only of the gender class (even if it does exist) while ignoring the socio-economic aspects inherent in capitalism blurs the understanding of patriarchy as it is and ? actually helps to its perpetuation?

The second hypothesis, embodied in the neoliberal discourse, sees capitalism as indifferent to patriarchy, having even eroded it: thanks to capitalism, they claim, women have experienced a degree of liberation through access to salaried work, credit, consumption, etc... For these theorists (generally represented by liberal feminists), capitalism could do without gender oppression because the market is indifferent to the identity of workers. Yet it is obvious that capitalism benefits from reproductive services performed by women. It also benefits from the fact that part of the population is devalued (and therefore more flexible, less paid). This theory implies that capitalism is not only be independent of patriarchy, but even to be glorified when it comes to gender equality! To consider patriarchy as a residue eroding in contact with capitalism is a fundamental error, highly detrimental to any dynamics of women’s emancipation, as we see in this section.

The third hypothesis, which we support, argues that patriarchy cannot be regarded as an independent system. Women and feminists in the colonies understood this well through the various structural and physical violence they faced, whereas very few Western feminists were just beginning to address the issue. Cinzia Arruzza insists "on the need to consider capitalism not as a set of purely economic laws and mechanisms, but rather as a complex and articulated social order that contains within it relations of exploitation, domination and alienation. From this point of view, the attempt is to understand how capitalist accumulation continues to produce, reproduce, transform, renew and maintain relations of hierarchy and oppression. It is a question of analyzing and understanding gender oppressions in a comprehensive way, without turning a blind eye to the diversity of mechanisms that participate in them, and avoiding falling into simplifications that would exclude certain realities.

An historic alliance

In the forthcoming book on debt and feminism, we will devote a whole section to deconstructing historical myths about the place of women. We see how the devaluation of women is not a coincidence of history - the time when their position changed coincided with the commodification of the world. The advance of capitalism has profoundly transformed their role within family and society while modifying and amplifying their oppression. Many of the discourses and stereotypes explored above have their origins in the historical stages of capitalism. At the same time as capitalism was taking root at the expense of the feudal system - where sex and gender were not the first criteria for discrimination - a wave of expropriation, privatization and monetarization of life laid the essential foundations of male domination as we know it today. By accentuating the worst features of already existing marginalization and thus formalizing a status of “inferior” to a number of activities, capitalist accumulation formalizes the separation between so-called productive and reproductive work. Domestic work becomes a woman’s affair, a private affair, cut off from the collective, from remuneration, from social recognition. Yet it is necessary and essential to life, to well-being, to the reproduction of social conditions... and ultimately to capitalism. The elites have understood this: the idealization of the housewife and the persecution of all the others are proof of this.

The devaluation of women and their work - in the broadest sense of the word - in the same way as colonial expansion, the plundering of resources or slavery, is thus not simply a consequence but a condition for capitalist expansion. This is not to say that capitalism by definition needs gender oppression in order to reproduce itself, but we can see that it has never existed without gender oppression. Capitalism and patriarchy are therefore today simply inseparable: the former establishes social relations that facilitate the exploitation of women, the latter provides the justifications for it.

Capitalism in its current form is thus structurally patriarchal: it fundamentally needs the appropriation of women (of their work, their bodies, their knowledge, etc.), but also of other groups categorized as inferior during the great moments of capitalist expansion (nature, animals, racialized people, etc.), in order to make profits and therefore to reproduce.

This system is extremely dynamic and opportunistic, capable of adapting, finding gaps and new opportunities for profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. . Crises feed it; current social relations are opportunities for commodification and profits. In essence, capitalism will never be able to contribute to a reduction of inequalities. It is therefore completely illusory to believe that gender inequalities can be fought without fighting capitalism and other social relations that are intimately linked to it such as racism and extractivism. They are consubstantial and clearly manifest themselves in the current realities of women’s work.