This piece was edited on 12/3 at 10:29am to add additional information on the DNA profile, explain the grand jury decision, the handwriting analysis, a few interviews with detectives and FBI investigators, and findings in JonBenet’s room the night of the incident that hint at Netflix and Berlinger manipulating the truth. I also added clips from the Dr. Phil interview because clips are being removed.

I edited it again to add info on the duct tape, Ramsey PR machine, screenshots from their 1997 website.

This case has likely been solved, but will never see justice. The real mystery is why.

A new Netflix documentary on the JonBenet Ramsey case came out last Monday. Prior to its release, the media hyped this new doc as something that would break open the case. The director, Joe Berlinger, did interviews saying he believed the case could be solved with new DNA evidence and couldn’t believe he previously thought conspiracies the parents did it could be true. People who have watched every doc on the case, read books and pored over the released grand jury papers thought this might be the doc that would finally bring new information to light.

In fact, it doesn’t do that at all. Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey presents no new information and is created by someone who seems more enamored with the fact that he got an interview with John Ramsey than anything that points to him being a serious suspect. Of course, without John, there’d be no family or personal involvement and we probably wouldn’t be watching this on Netflix.

What this creates is a terribly one-sided documentary that does a disservice to everyone involved by leaving out crucial information that points to anyone but an intruder. In fact, the documentary uses the idea that the Ramseys did it as a playful twist designed to trick the audience. The first episode highlights how complicated the house was, how the police noticed odd behavior. It leads you to believe it’s the parents before episode 2 comes in and says, well wait, there was DNA!

The problem is, the first episode doesn’t actually get into the evidence that made the police consider the Ramseys. In fact, they repeat a lot of the lies that are in the Ramsey’s book and have been disproven to make the cops look dumb. For example, the Ramseys say the cops focused on them immediately because they said there weren’t footprints outside in the snow. The Ramseys and Berlinger’s doc point out that there were no prints because there was no snow and show photos of the back of the house. This, to them, is evidence that the cops were trying to make them look bad from the start! The thing is, that’s not what the original police report says.

James Kolar was a detective who worked the case. He started working on it in 1997 when he was asked to stake out one of the Ramsey’s friends at a ski resort. In the week after JonBenet’s funeral, the cops couldn’t find the Ramseys and they wouldn’t share their whereabouts. Kolar worked for the Boulder Police Department for 17 years, but had transferred to Telluride when the murder took place. They asked him to head to the ski resort to see if they were there. He didn’t find them, but this pulled him into the case.

By 2005, he was lead investigator. By 2006, he left the case to go back to Telluride, discouraged by what he witnessed from the DA. In 2012, he released a book with his findings called Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet?

Kolar’s book is considered one of the best on the subject, though the Ramseys disagree. We’ll get to why, but he mostly does a great job of compiling all primary sources. You see the child abuse report, the photos of the spiderwebs in the grate, the failure to recreate stun gun marks on a pig. He also points out where the cops made mistakes. So, you remember how the Ramseys said the cops tried to pin it on them from the start by making it sound like there was snow everywhere and no footprints when there wasn’t snow?

Kolar’s book is the first time we find out that’s not true. The cops said exactly what the Ramsey’s said in their initial report: there was some snow on the grass and no snow on the rear patio:

The photo of the clear rear patio the documentary uses as a gotcha to prove police incompetence doesn’t do that at all. It matches exactly what the first officer on the scene wrote in his report. There was no attempt to make it seem like the lack of footprints was suspicious, he just wrote down what he saw. The Ramseys, however, saw a narrative that helped them prove bias and ran with that.

This is what the case of JonBenet has become, sadly. A millionaire family with power and PR behind them, a DA with ties to that family and a police force that did make mistakes, but who also were hindered nearly every step of the way.

Netflix’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey tries to hide or simplify details to present a clean cut, TV-ready conclusion: we need the police to do more DNA testing, we need to focus on the DNA! They hope, with advances in technology and additional DNA from scraping the additional evidence, some day, they’ll be able to link this DNA to a relative of the killer.

Meanwhile, experts have said this probably isn’t a DNA case from the start because the scene was so contaminated and the sample was so small. This remains true. The evidence has not gotten less contaminated over time.

The current DNA profile is actually too small to use genealogical testing, even though this is what the documentary presents as the solution. Again, it is an example of a documentary that is eager to present the truth as black-and-white. DNA must be the solution! How can DNA be wrong? Well, we will get to that.

First, I just wanted you to know, whether you’ve watched the Netflix doc already or not, it is far from the entire story.

I watched Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey as soon as it was out. I’d been waiting for it to drop because, well, this case is the case to me. Am I proud to be a true crime person? Maybe? No? I don’t know? I am aware of the ethical issues and all the bad things it does to society to have 800 podcasts that oscillate between horrific murder details and discounts for Squarespace.

Still, I will put on the latest episode of Evil Lives Here to fall asleep at night. Let’s blame my mom, like I do for most things. She’s the one who raised me on CourtTV! She’s the one who showed me you could read police reports and autopsies online! When I got my first laptop in 2003, I was 12 and ready to become Harriet the Goddamn Spy, okay?

JonBenet was 3 months older than me and like most girls born in 1990, I was obsessed with the photos of her that were all over the news and tabloids. How could something like that happen to a girl my age? At 6, I wasn’t into the details of the case, of course, I was just struck by this pretty girl who suddenly made me realize the world may not be such a nice place for little girls.

By 2003, there’d been a grand jury non-indictment, multiple books on the case released and still no trial or justice. I wanted to know everything. I dug into Angelfire websites, forums, Geocities websites, sketchy transcriptions of police tape interviews and radio interviews. I read Steve Thomas’ 2000 book, JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, from an illegal .pdf someone shared and that changed everything for me.

Steve Thomas is featured heavily in the Netflix documentary as a bumbling idiot. The Ramseys sued him after the release of the book and the doc features discrepancies he was caught in. Some of these discrepancies are fair and do point to a man guessing at motive and some details, but he also shares facts on the Ramseys removing items from the crime scene with the permission of the DA.

He mentions leads he wasn’t allowed to follow that would point to the Ramsey’s, like the fact that beaver hair was found on JBR’s (JonBenet Ramsey) panties and the duct tape. The police noticed Patsy wore black furry boots to an interview and asked to test them for beaver hair, but she never turned in the boots. In fact, Patsy and John don’t turn in their clothes from that night until over a year later according to Thomas. Why was this allowed? Why doesn’t the Netflix documentary mention this? Thomas does:

It’s a fair question for Thomas to have while he worked the case. Netflix doesn’t think this is worth mentioning, despite mentioning the many unidentified fibers on JBR’s body. If the parents wanted to clear themselves and help provide a better profile of the killer’s DNA or clothing, why not turn your stuff in immediately so it can be excluded? Instead, the Ramseys waited a year, when these clothes had been washed and mingled with other things to turn them in. It’s almost like the Ramseys don’t actually want a DNA or fiber sample that isn’t compromised.

Take, for example, their actions after receiving the ransom note. Patsy says she didn’t read the entire note, but saw the beginning, went to check on JBR, she wasn’t there, she called for John and then went to call 911. John says he heard Patsy scream, met her on the backsteps, took the letter, laid it out on the floor and started to read it.

This is a bit odd, since Patsy mentions details from the end of the letter on the 911 call, but it is possible John read it aloud or was relaying this info. What’s odd though is that the letter says they’ve been watching the family, they’re related to John’s businesses and if the Ramseys tell anyone about this, they’ll kill JBR.

It makes sense to call the cops immediately, even though the letter says not to. What doesn’t make sense is Patsy calling her four best friends to come over because there was an emergency and she needed them. Barbara Fernie, John Fernie, Fleet White and Priscilla White head over to the Ramsey house without knowing JonBenet has been kidnapped, Patsy doesn’t say this on the phone according to Foreign Faction, pg. 45. At this point, it’s possible someone close to the Ramseys has done this or is involved and they invite friends who know personal details from the letter over?

If Patsy had told them a kidnapping with a ransom note occurred, these friends probably would’ve acted like they were arriving at a crime scene. Instead, they thought JonBenet might just be missing in the house and proceed to get their DNA everywhere. A year earlier, Fleet’s daughter, Daphne went missing and was eventually found hiding in their home, so this instinct makes sense.

Fleet thought JonBenet was doing the same and went to search the basement, calling out JonBenet’s name, despite there being a ransom letter. John Ramsey would later point to this as suspicious behavior when he added Fleet White to the suspect list. Well, how unfortunate you invited a possible suspect to roam the house and contaminate the scene before the cops even got to your house.

Not that Fleet was a viable suspect. Someone would’ve noticed if he left his own party the night JBR was murdered. In the time since, White has sued to get the grand jury documents released, as he believes this will clear things up for the public. He cooperated with police and got in a fight with John after the funeral because he felt the Ramseys should talk to the police immediately. It’s unlikely he’s involved if he’s doing everything he can to get information and evidence released. The Ramseys still have him on their suspect list, however.

And while the Ramseys take a year to turn their clothes in from that night, their friends, staff and others are happy to do so immediately. People at the White’s party turn in their clothes to clear themselves and find the person who did this. Because the scene was so contaminated, the officers who arrived also had to turn in their clothes from that night. Trace DNA from all of these people could be eliminated from the trace DNA on JBR fairly soon. The Ramsey family’s was not.

When the documentary discusses the Ramsey’s odd behavior when cops arrived, they talk about John seeming distant or going through the mail, but this when the cops start to suspect the Ramseys. They don’t take their clothes that night and they try to interview them but agree to wait. The Netflix doc fails to mention that it’s their shifting stories in the ensuing weeks that raise suspicion. For example, John tells two officers he read to JBR then went to bed. When he finally does his police interview in April, 4 months after the murder, he says they misunderstood him and that he said he put her to bed and he went to read a book.

The two officers felt like he’d been clear and there was no misunderstanding. Patsy also changes her story. The day of the kidnapping, she says she put a red turtleneck sweater over JBR’s white top and white longjohns. It was winter and cold, so she put two layers on top of JBR. That morning, Det. Arendt (the female officer the documentary depicts as crazy) wrote in her report that she noticed a red garment in the laundry area next to JBR’s bedroom.

When JBR is found she’s wearing a white shirt and white longjohns. In April, Patsy changes her story and says she only put JBR in the white longjohns and she always had a white shirt on. In the interrogation, officers push this and she says she can’t recall when or why the red turtleneck was put in the laundry. Maybe, these are two frazzled parents who can’t remember details, but here’s another bit of info the documentary leaves out:

The Ramsey’s lawyers refused to let them be interviewed unless they could have access to police reports and the previous reports of what they said. Their lawyers were essentially given everything they needed to get their story straight. If JBR was wearing a red turtleneck, how did it end up off and in the laundry? Certainly an intruder didn’t do that. Officer Thomas sees this lie as a red flag. JBR’s longjohns were stained with urine, she had a history of wetting herself, maybe she’d wet the bed and stained the red turtleneck, angering her mom and forcing her to put it in the wash. In a 2015 AMA, Lead Det. Mark Beckner confirmed her long johns and the bed had urine stains.

This is why Officer Thomas is seen pushing the “Patsy lost it because JBR wet herself” theory so hard in the documentary. The doc tries to make it seem like a ludicrous idea with no backing that shows how dumb he is, but he’s led to this conclusion because of Patsy’s lies.

People often say this is a case of he said/she said between the Ramseys and the police, but what you’ll find is that, most often, the police take their lead from the Ramseys changing their story and saying conflicting things. Yes, it is bad the police tried to bait the Ramseys into talking by leaking fake information to the media, but remember, these are the parents of their victim and they can’t even find them after the funeral. They’ve failed to answer questions. They’ve failed to turn over crucial evidence. By this point, it’s been two months since JonBenet was murdered, is it so odd they start to take a focus on the parents by February after such behavior?

The doc leads you to believe the focus on the Ramseys was a quick, lazy decision made by bumbling cops that hindered investigations into an intruder. This isn’t true. The Ramseys became suspects after their own lies and behavior couldn’t be written off. Also, officers did investigate intruder theories immediately! Officer Thomas lists all the steps they took: they used cameras from a business in the area to track every car that turned onto the Ramsey’s street that day (a car is the only means of transportation that makes sense if you’re kidnapping a 6 year old).

They interviewed everyone who’d been at the White’s party the Ramseys attended the night before. They took every lead seriously! This is mentioned in both Foreign Faction and JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, but Netflix make sit seem as though this leads just sat until Lou Smit joined the case.

Shall we get into the Lou Smit of it all? He’s often considered the Best Detective and Smoking Gun in the JonBenet case. He didn’t solve it, but he dedicated his life to it and even passed his work on to his kids, as the Netflix doc tells us. Lou was brought in as the case stalled by the DA. From the beginning, he made it clear he didn’t think the Ramseys were capable of committing such a crime; this is why the DA liked him.

He went to work on beefing up the intruder theory. Smit would eventually leave the case when a grand jury was put together that focused on the parents. He was certain they’d be indicted because of the media treatment they received and the facts other officers shared. Some point to Smit’s work as the key to stopping the indictment since the defense was allowed to present the intruder theory to the grand jury.

Maybe, Smit did help. He presented two main theories that made sense of things the cops could never understand:

1. How the hell did someone get her from her room to the basement without making any noise or disturbing the scene? JonBenet’s room was pristine, it looked like someone just got out of bed, not like an attack occurred. Nothing from her room to the basement was out of place, meaning she wasn’t kicking or screaming on the way down. How was she subdued?

   
   Smit suggests: a stun gun. You see, there are two sets of bruises equal distance apart on the right side of JonBenet’s neck and lower back. Smit believes they look like the pattern of a stun gun. If you’ve watched the doc on him, JonBenet Ramsey: What Really Happened (2021) you’ve seen the clips of him recreating stun gun marks on dead pigs to see if he can recreate similar bruises to JonBenet. He sort of does, they kind of look like the same distance, but they’re burn marks instead of bruises.

   He was also only able to recreate it with one brand of stun gun, an Air Taser, and the maker of that stun gun said they’d never had a case where a stun gun renders someone completely unconscious and created bruises rather than burns. He also couldn’t get the dimensions to match JonBenet’s abrasions exactly. The train tracks police initially thought caused them though? A direct dimension match. This reddit thread has information (and sources!). The below images are from Kolar’s book (pg. 241 and 354, respectively):

   

Why does the doc spend so much time convincing you the stun gun could be possible when it was debunked years ago? Because it helps the Ramseys and is the only thing that could explain how JBR was removed from her bed by an intruder. If it’s the train tracks, an intruder wouldn’t make sense. Why would he decide to poke her with a child’s toy once in the basement?

2. The Window Well/Grate Theory

   Perhaps, Smit’s biggest help to the Ramseys was finally giving them a potential entry point for the intruder. The morning of the kidnapping, police and the Ramseys found all the doors locked as they had been. When asked about the broken window in the basement, John said he broke it months prior when he was locked out. John said that he and Fleet found the window open and a suitcase under it just before they found JonBenet’s body in the wine cellar at 1:05pm.

   John said this before he knew Fleet told police he was in the cellar at 6:40am, the window was closed and he moved the suitcase there to investigate the window. When asked about this discrepancy, John said he was in the cellar before 6:40am and had found the window open, but closed it because he “wasn’t thinking” (his daughter had just been kidnapped, there’s a ransom note and he doesn’t think the open window matters?). He then changes his story to say he reopened the window at 1pm with Fleet to see if there was any new glass.

   
   Why does this matter? The window with the suitcase under it seemed like an obvious exit for the intruder before John was caught in his lie in April, during his interrogation. Once it was established no one could say for sure if the window was open or if the suitcase had been moved by Fleet or the intruder, the likelihood of the window as the entrance/exit became a little less likely.

   That is, until Lou Smit joined the case. He said it was totally possible that someone had moved the grate above the basement window, jumped down into the window well, opened the window through the hole and gained entrance. He even makes a video showing that he could do it. This has become a huge piece of evidence people turn to! Look, he got in that way and he got out using the suitcase! See, this is a plausible entrance/exit!

   
   There’s just one problem: the window well and grate were covered in spiderwebs. Like, so many that the officers initially thought, well no one could’ve gone through there without disturbing the spiderweb or getting dirt/dust everywhere. From crime scene video taken that day and published in Kolar’s book, we can see this spiderwebs were not disturbed at all:

   

   

   

   This is how Kolar describes viewing this evidence against Lou Smit’s famous window well video. It took until 2005 for a lead investigator on the case to debunk this theory with crime scene video and until 2012 for the public to know this theory was debunked.

   

   And if you’re thinking, well maybe the intruder got out, destroyed the cobwebs and then the spider rebuilt his web by the time the video was taken? Well, Officer Thomas can speak to that in his book. They had a spider expert at University of Colorado Boulder come in and look at the spider/web. He confirmed these spiders go into hibernation in November and the web couldn’t have been rebuilt that morning.

Despite Lou Smit’s two biggest theories being debunked in the years after they were shared publicly, the Netflix documentary still acts as though these are legitimate theories that haven’t been tested. They still present Smit as an expert and an authority on the case, even though his intruder theory falls apart without the stun gun or the window.

Okay, at this point, maybe you think I’m trying to convince you that the Ramseys did this. I’m not! I mean, I definitely think they did and will lay my theory out at the end, but what I love about my theory is that I came up with it from my own research. I really just want you to know that in this modern media landscape, where it’s easy for streamers to sell narratives via documentary, that you have to be discerning. Dig into books, documentaries and interviews! I encourage everyone to do the same.

So, if the Netflix documentary just offers one part of the story, what else should people watch or read? Hit up the below!

I’m Just Curious

1. This DNA Explainer - Despite everything you will read in this, people still see all of this information and go “Well, the DNA.” There’s a lot of science behind why this DNA sample is most likely useless. If the Ramsey’s were staging the scene, they could easily plant unidentified DNA by rubbing different items from the house on the body (unidentified fibers were found on JBR - navy and tan cloth, beaver or rodent hair - the coroner thought it seemed like someone wiped areas of her body, Kolar and Thomas).

   When the FBI and Boulder PD say this is a DNA case, it’s because they think the DNA won’t point to anyone. They think if this DNA eventually does match something, it will be innocent trace DNA that has nothing to do with the murder and, if it matched other fibers or trace DNA on items in the house at the time, would point to a cover-up. This would be the final nail in the coffin for the Ramseys. This is unlikely, as you’ll see below. The Ramseys removed a lot of items from the house the day after the murder.

   However, people who believe an intruder did it think the evidence needs to be scraped again for additional DNA to create a better profile of the suspect. Interestingly enough, if the Ramseys had left those items in the house or turned in their clothes from that night sooner, it would’ve allowed the police to exclude fibers and touch DNA to create a better profile from the start!
   

   As long as this DNA remains “unidentified” the Ramseys can always point to an intruder. If the cops figure out it came from items in the house or people with alibis, they know it’s unrelated to the crime, thus narrowing in on the Ramseys. So, in a way, this is a DNA case, but probably not in a way where AncestryDNA is going to find a match or something.

   
   That the documentary and John Ramsey act as though a better DNA profile could point to John Mark Karr points to how ridiculous this notion is: Karr was in Georgia at the time of the murder and knew no new details. That they even present Karr as a viable suspect shows how little integrity this project has. Most likely, John knows this DNA will never match anyone and that’s why he pushes for a genealogical match as the key to the case.
   

2. Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey (Netflix) - What, I’m recommending the doc I just trashed? Well, how else will you know what the discrepancies are!! Also, while this doc is very Pro-Ramsey Family, it inadvertently throws their biggest defense out the window by ending on the fact that the DNA profile used to exclude intruders and the family is contaminated and probably invalid so no one previously excluded can be. That includes the family.

3. JonBenet Ramsey: What Really Happened (2021) - This is Lou Smit’s take, it is very biased. Still, if you want the parent’s side of things, this is the closest you’ll get.

4. The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey (2016) - This is the first documentary that presents The Brother Did It theory. It’s based on Kolar’s book which comes to a similar conclusion. The Netflix doc acts as though this doc is ridiculous and invalid because Burke sued CBS and settled, but it actually has legit interviews and science. Also, despite the lawsuit, the documentary is still publicly available.

   A lot of the questions this doc brings up have never been addressed by the Ramseys. “Burke Did It” is considered the most “out there” theories by people who only sort of know the case, but it makes sense when you consider that’s the theory presented to the grand jury after the murder (along with the intruder theory) and dig into some of the stuff below.

I Want To Solve This Thing

1. r/JonBenetRamsey - Do I believe reddit is a legit source for information? No. Do I think incredibly dedicated true crime nerds have created a great subreddit that maintains primary sources, interview transcripts, and photos? Yes. If you have a question about anything in this case, you can probably find a detailed thread that looks into every possible answer. This subreddit explained that the DNA was too degraded to provide a legit suspect DNA profile 4 years before this Netflix doc! So, yknow, dive in, but do your research.

2. Lead Det. Mark Beckner’s Reddit AMA. It’s verified! He makes it clear Burke was involved, the parents staged a cover-up, this will never go to court or be solved without a confession and BPD and the FBI both believe there was no intruder.

3. Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? by James Kolar - Kolar’s book is a must-read to me. He lays out the scenario that would be necessary for an intruder to make sense in the first chapter and you can understand how ludicrous it would be for a kidnapper to get so lucky. He then starts diving into the debunked myths he was sold by the DA and lies he catches the Ramseys in.
   

   By the end, he suggests there was an incident involving Burke and JBR, he hit her and the parents covered it up. He points to Burke’s swiss army knife and boot print being found in room where JBR was found. Oh, yeah, that thing in the Netflix doc where they say the Hi-Tec boot print was from the cops? It also could’ve been Burke. Investigators knew when Patsy was interviewed that Burke had a pair of Hi-Tec boots with compasses on them and asked her about it. She claimed she couldn’t remember what shoes she bought him.

   

4. JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas - Netflix and the Ramseys don’t want you to read this book, so you probably should. He comes to the conclusion Patsy did it because there are signs she, like Burke, lied about being asleep that night. Her fingerprints are on the bowl of pineapple, she most likely put JBR’s red turtleneck in the wash and there were open suitcases upstairs because the family was going on a trip early the next day and she was still packing when the family came home from the White’s.
   

   This is his theory. He thinks Patsy lost it in an act of rage when JBR wet the bed, I think his theory falls apart there. Also, the only evidence we see of Patsy in the basement is that her palm print is on the wine cellar door where JBR was found twice.

5. The Death of Innocence - This is the book the Ramseys wrote. It is…interesting. It’s mostly about John feeling like he lost this innocence.

6. The Bonita Papers - In 1998, Boulder PD brought in three lawyers to help assist the case because they felt the DA wouldn’t let them properly investigate. One of the paralegals who worked with these lawyers gathered all of her unedited notes for a book. The notes were leaked to the press by her nephew and uncovered some lies from the Ramseys and confirmed a lot of what Thomas wrote in his book.

The JonBenet Ramsey case is one of the most researched and investigated out there. It isn’t hard to dig in and find a theory that works for you and the evidence you find. This is why it’s easy for one documentary director to manipulate the narrative.

So, at this point…you probably want to know what I think happened. I’ve been tweeting about it in a lot of threads that are hard to follow, so I’ll break it down below based on my take on reading/watching the above. From the jump with this case, I believed the Ramseys did it. When the Lou Smit stuff came out in the early 2010s, it was the first time I really believed an intruder could be possible.

When Kolar’s book came out in 2012 debunking the Smit stuff, I went back to Ramseys Did It. When the 2016 CBS doc and Burke’s Dr. Phil interview came out, I joined Team Burke Did It. With the most recent Netflix documentary, I once again became convinced of the intruder theory, until I revisited Kolar’s book and the other info left out of the doc.

Oh, let me introduce you to some online nerd case terms:
-RDI (Ramseys Did It)
-BDI (Burke Did It)
-JDI (John Did It)
-PDI (Patsy Did It)
-BDIA (Burke Did It All Except the Cover-Up)
-IDI (Intruder Did It)

You will see people in online forums use IDI, PDI, RDI as badges to denote their favorite theory. You’ll see people who go from IDI, RDI to BDI or BDI to IDI to RDI. Whichever your choice, each one comes with a certain set of facts that those theorists believe. Are you IDI? You probably believe in the stun gun. RDI? Your focus might be the fake ransom letter. (Yeah, the BPD and FBI both think the ransom letter is fake, despite the Ramsey civil suit.)

Where am I on this now? Well, I am back to my 2016, Burke Did It All belief. Even more now that the Ramseys are pushing a new documentary that seeks to bolster the intruder argument again while leaving out facts and promoting debunked evidence. After watching the doc, I reread Foreign Faction and re-watched Burke’s Dr. Phil interview. I’d forgotten about the boot match and Burke’s reveal in 2016 that he hadn’t been asleep all night like his parents said. In fact, he was up after everyone went to bed according to him. Let me lay out how I got here.

The Ramseys Lies

They lie about a lot. Whether they put JBR straight to bed or read to her, whether Patsy noticed JBR was missing and then saw the note or saw the note and then went to her room. Whatever, these are things that could be explained by frazzled parents. It’s just odd that their biggest lies all revolve around Burke, his whereabouts, and his belongings:

1. The Pineapple Lie - The Ramseys say JBR and Patsy went to bed immediately. John played with Burke for a bit, then put him to bed. He read for a bit and then he got in bed with Patsy, took a melatonin and went to sleep. According to them, everyone in the house slept soundly and heard nothing until Patsy woke up to make coffee, found the ransom note and screamed. The scream alerted John, but according to the Ramseys, Burke slept through this, the 911 call and police arriving.

   Here’s the thing: JBR ate pineapple at 11pm/midnight, 2 hours before she died. They estimate she died at 1am or 2am. How do we know this? They found undigested pineapple in her stomach. They know it is not from earlier in the day or from the dinner at the Whites because the food from earlier was further along in her digestive tract. Also, officers find a bowl of pineapple on the dining room table. It is a bowl of pineapple in milk next to an empty cup with a tea bag in it.
   

   The Ramsey’s maid said this was Burke’s favorite snack. And, in fact, only Patsy and Burke’s fingerprints are on the bowl of pineapple (see below) and the cup. But, we know JBR ate some from this bowl because they collected it into evidence and tested it against the pineapple in her stomach: it was the same pineapple. Patsy tried to say she had no idea where it came from and someone must’ve left it out in the morning, but how can that be possible if JBR ate some?

   

   Burke and John say they have no clue either. Well, someone fed that girl pineapple 2 hours before she died and it’s very unlikely an intruder did that. It’s unlikely she could’ve prepared a bowl of pineapple with milk alone at 6 without making noise and waking someone. It’s also unlikely she was eating at midnight with her brother at midnight and an intruder could’ve committed the crime in a 2-hour timeframe without anyone hearing anything.

   Below is Burke acting weird about the pineapple in 2016 on Dr. Phil. It’s interesting he says he can’t remember if they ate pineapple and how could anyone remember something that happened so long ago, but when asked about the 911 call, he says he couldn’t forget something like that.
   

   With the pineapple evidence, it is clear she was awake at midnight, allowing 1-2 hours for an intruder to do everything. The Ramseys need to say they all went to sleep as soon as they got home because that opens the window of opportunity up from midnight to 10pm-2am and allows time for an intruder. If it’s as simple as “oh yeah, the kids wanted a snack when we got home,” why not say that?
   Of course, there’s another reason Patsy and John may not have known about the pineapple: Burke made it himself and JBR went downstairs when she heard him getting a snack and playing with his toys.

   The maid said the kids would often go play or get food after bedtime because the house was so large their parents couldn’t hear them. Burke said in his interview he could hear the fridge open from his room. We also know JBR and Burke would share the same room sometimes. If JBR would wet the bed, she’d change herself and go sleep in Burke’s extra bed. Each child had 2 twin beds in their room (see below). Burke would sleep in JBR’s room sometimes because his would get cold, he says this in his first interview.

   The Ramseys say the kids never did that. But, Burke even says JBR slept in his room on Christmas Eve because he wakes up before her and she wanted to him to wake her up for gifts. Basically, there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the two siblings being together without their parent’s knowledge, which would explain the pineapple.
   

   

   The Ramseys say this isn’t possible and Burke was asleep all night. In 2016, Burke goes on Dr. Phil and admits he was up after everyone went to bed for the first time, giving the pineapple theory more credence. Also, you’ll notice the bedroom light is on in the above bedroom picture. The bedroom is the only scene at the crime that we know was actually secured. It’s fair to assume, this is how it was when the incident occurred. If the intruders had a flashlight, why would they enter the room, walk around the bed and turn on JBR’s bedside light?
   

   In addition to that, it would’ve taken someone with inside knowledge to know that was the only working light in her room, according to the Ramsey’s maid. How would a kidnapper know about the light switch and, again, why would they need a light if they have a flashlight? It seems more like JBR woke up in the night, turned her light on, got out of bed and possibly went to go see who was in the kitchen.
   

   

   The pineapple lie confuses a lot of people and they dismiss it as a red herring, but it is probably the most important piece of information. The medical examiner is able to determine that JBR died shortly after eating the pineapple. Whoever gave her the pineapple knows how she hit her head:

   

   Here is how Patsy explains the pineapple. It’s all we have since Burke doesn’t remember and won’t answer questions. She thinks the kidnapper fed JBR pineapple right before hitting her. Why would the intruder need to hit JBR then if they’d already subdued her enough to get her downstairs to the table to eat? Why stop to feed her pineapple? You supposedly have a stun gun and duct tape, why not use them and go? Oh, also, if she was stun gunned and dragged from her bed like Lou Smit says, did the intruder wake her up to feed her pineapple in that case?

   

   One more thing about the pineapple? One of the few witnesses in this case is Scott Gibbons, he’s the neighbor to the immediate north of the Ramseys. According to Kolar he tells detectives, “He had been in his south-facing kitchen around midnight on Christmas night. He observed that the upper lights in the Ramsey kitchen were on, but dimmed low. Gibbons didn’t observe anyone inside the residence at the time, and noted that it was not unusual for lights to be on in the home at night.” (Foreign Faction, pg. 101)
   

   That means the light was on in the kitchen around the time she ate the pineapple. If it was the intruder, why would they turn a light on? They have a flashlight. Why risk being seen? Clearly, there are witnesses close by.
   

2. The Enhanced 911 Call Lie- Patsy and John swear that Burke was nowhere in the vicinity the entire morning they realized JBR was missing. They do not wake him up for information, they just check on him, see he’s sleeping and leave him alone. They say he didn’t wake up until Fleet White went to get him and take him to the White’s house. Well, that is a lie.

   
   Kimberly Archuleta was the 911 operator who took Patsy’s call. Almost immediately, she felt like something was off about the caller. At the end of the call, when the caller thought they’d hung up, Archuleta heard a change in tone and someone said “What do we do?” This was suspicious to her. She immediately went to her supervisor and noted this. After JBR’s body was found, she went back to her supervisor and said the 911 call should be enhanced because she swore there was more said at the end.

   
   The FBI and Det. Trujillo thought she was right. They sent the tape to the Secret Service and Aerospace. The Secret Service wasn’t able to pick up on anything, but Aerospace, which had better recording equipment, could. The first two experts wrote down what they thought they heard independently. The third, a detective on the case, also wrote what she heard independently. All three of them wrote the same thing:

   

   The enhanced 911 call is considered such legit evidence, we learn when the grand jury papers are unsealed in 2013, that it was presented to the grand jury. In fact, they asked Burke about the voices on the tape. He said to the grand jury, as confirmed by the 2016 CBS documentary, “It sounds like my voice on the tape,” but he still said he couldn’t remember if he was awake or not. Burke will later lie in his Dr. Phil interview and say he hasn’t heard the 911 call, but he has heard about it. However, we know the enhanced version was played for him at the grand jury and he said it sounded like him.

   John and Patsy swore Burke was nowhere in the vicinity and slept the entire morning. The enhanced 911 call proves he was in the vicinity. If he did wake up and was curious about what was going on and awake because of Patsy’s scream, why hide that? On Dr. Phil, Burke and John say again that Burke was in bed asleep during the 911 call, despite the tape.
   

   After Dr. Phil and the CBS lawsuit, Burke’s lawyer put out a statement saying that Burke never said he was asleep all morning, his parents did and he may have heard the commotion downstairs and screamed from the stairs “What did you find?” This contradicts what Burke says himself on Dr. Phil. It also doesn’t necessarily make sense of John angrily saying “We’re not speaking to you!” In his actual interview after the event, Burke does say he was awake in bed that morning. See below:

   Here is the dispatcher talking about it and Burke answering questions about it on Dr. Phil in a way that seems…not so honest. Again, when during the lawsuit, CBS is able to confirm Burke said it sounds like him to the Grand Jury:
   

   Below is the excerpt from the grand jury from Dateline covering the CBS lawsuit:

   

3. The red shirt and bedwetting lies - John said in their CNN interview that they weren’t aware of JBR wetting the bed. Their maid said John was there many times when JBR wet the bed and it’s odd he lied about this. He also must’ve known about Burke’s bedwetting and feces issues. Burke confirms that John and his mom knew that JBR wet the bed and he describes their routine around it in his videotaped interview.
   

   This interview was eventually shared with the public on Dr. Phil in 2016. The Ramseys lying around JBR wetting the bed is, again, what most likely raised Dt. Thomas’ suspicions around that theory. Netflix makes this sound ridiculous, but they ignore that the Ramseys did lie about it. I clipped Burke’s part of the footage from Dr. Phil below. It’s also interesting Burke says he and JBR wet the bed a lot and his parents would clean it up and he remembers this in 2016, but John couldn’t recall if JBR wet the bed in the 1997 CNN interview.

   I also believe Patsy did put the red turtleneck Det. Arendt saw in the wash on JBR that night, as mentioned above. She later lied about just putting her to bed in the white shirt. Again, just minor things there’s no real reason to cover up:

   

   This could also be another clue that JBR woke up in the night and took off the red turtleneck herself, another sign she was awake after her parents say she was asleep. Or did someone else take it off of her?
   

4. The Flashlight Lie - Police found a black flashlight in the kitchen. The Ramseys said they didn’t recognize it, but may have owned one. The maid and family friend John Fernie said she absolutely recognized it as the flashlight Burke would sleep with. He’d use it in case he had to go to the bathroom at night. And AGAIN, in 2016, Burke says his dad put him to sleep with a flashlight! Dr. Phil asks if he took the flashlight downstairs and he says he can’t remember. That’s a huge change in John and Burke’s stories!

   
   A flashlight sounds like something a kid sneaking downstairs to get a snack and play with his toys would bring with him. Why lie about recognizing the flashlight? Well the flashlight was the only item able to recreate the damage JBR suffered to her head. It was most likely the weapon used to hit her and BPD has held onto it as the murder weapon.

   

   Here is Burke on Dr. Phil in 2016 admitting for the first time that his father put him to sleep with a flashlight and he was up after everyone else went to bed. In this moment, Burke breaks his 20 year alibi and connects both him and his father to the murder weapon the Ramseys previously said they weren’t sure they owned. John doesn’t recognize the flashlight he used that same night with Burke?

   The 11am Timeline Lie - When John’s children from his first marriage came to the house after JBR was kidnapped, officers said it was a little before 1pm. This matters because John found JBR at 1:05pm. John’s son-in-law and daughter said that John got in their van as soon as they got there. He climbed in and said “JBR is with Beth now (his daughter who died 5 years before). I found her at 11am this morning.” Well…that means he found JBR before he “officially” did for police. It means he told his other children that JBR was dead before he “found” her at 1:05pm.

   
   John will eventually say got the timezones mixed up, but his son-in-law points out that he was referring to his own timezone, so why talk about a different time zone? Later, the Ramseys will say the kids arrived at 2pm or 7pm, despite John saying in his police interrogation that the entire family left the house at 1:30pm and never returned again.

   It’s a little hard to believe his kids arrived at 2pm or 7pm if the Ramseys weren’t there. Also hard to believe they arrived in the 1:05-1:30 window when John would’ve been finding JBR. It is most likely that the cops are telling the truth and the other kids arrived before 1pm, the body was then found and the family left the house for good at 1:30pm as John said in the interrogation. Officer Thomas documents this moment:

   

   Some believe John did this because he knew the staging was shoddy and didn’t believe that he and Patsy would get away with it. With this move, John gave himself an alibi and potential witnesses who could say he wasn’t involved with the crime until 11am if this did blow up in their faces.
   

5. The American Girl Doll Theory - Ok, this isn’t REALLY the American Girl Doll theory, I just call it that because it’s fun. BUT, people who think an intruder did it point to the fact that there was no matching source for the duct tape in the house and the Ramseys hadn’t left all morning, so how could they dispose of the tape? It must’ve come from outside the house. WELL, in his book, Det. Steve Thomas outlines a very easy way the Ramseys could’ve snuck evidence out of the house: they were allowed to.

   
   The day after JBR was found, the Ramseys asked if they could retrieve clothes for the funeral/JBR’s burial. The lead detective said sure, but you have to send someone else, we’ll take them to each room, they’ll point at what they need, we’ll document it and allow it to leave the property.

   At least, that’s how it was supposed to go. According to Det. Thomas, when Pam, Patsy’s sister, shows up to gather items, she has an entire list from the Ramseys. It includes credit cards, jewelry, passports, JBR’s American Girl Dolls and stuffed animals, clothes, and other items. Det. Thomas says she filled a car with suitcases, the officers on scene didn’t properly itemize everything taken and if the Ramseys did want to sneak stuff out, this is how they’d do it. How Thomas describes it:

   

   

   NOW, really crazy conspiracy ppl believe the source of the tape was the American Girl Doll. You see, in 1996, American Girl Doll stores trained employees to put tape on the back of the doll to cover a cord that came from the back of the doll’s neck. They also encouraged people who bought the dolls to do this. Det. Thomas looks into this theory and says it’s farfetched. It’s more likely they just hid the tape in a suitcase and had Pam take it out of the home.

   But it is weird that Pam takes a Molly doll that JBR only owned for about a month. Sure, maybe Patsy did want things that reminded her of JBR, but why a doll that’s only a month old and was a gift from her grandma? Well, tan and navy fibers were also found on JBR’s longjohns and the tape. These people think the tan and navy fibers would match the tan body of the Molly doll and her navy clothes. Did the police want to check the Molly doll for a fiber match? Yes. Could they? No. The Ramseys wouldn’t give it to them.
   

   In addition to that, the Molly doll drives suspicion because a few months after the murder, an employee at the American Girl Doll company reached out to Boulder PD to say someone ordered a Molly doll in JonBenet’s name after she was killed. The doll was bought with a money order and was sent to John’s office. John denies knowing anything about the doll, but it’s odd he didn’t go to police and say a stranger mailed him a doll in his dead daughter’s name that she owned before she died.
   

   Couldn’t that be a potential clue? Is it unrelated? Most people think they ordered a new Molly doll and destroyed the one that would match the fibers. People who don’t want to believe in the power of an American Girl Doll to solve this case, however, just think Pam snuck the tape and other evidence out when she grabbed their things.
   

6. The Ransom Note - Pretty much everyone thinks Patsy wrote the letter, but I mostly care about the opinion of James Fitzgerald. He was a linguistics expert who caught the Unabomber based on language in letters! He is very good at his job! He says it was Patsy. But, that is just his opinion.

   
   He wasn’t asked to officially review the case, even though he offered to do it for free with a panel of other experts in 2009. Chief Beckner said in his 2015 AMA that he declined the offer because Fitzgerald had trained a previous forensics expert on the case and he felt that was a conflict of interest the defense could benefit from, so there was no point in using Fitzgerald’s panel.

   

   I know Netflix showed you something that said “6 experts said it wasn’t Patsy,” but you see those were 6 experts hired by the Ramseys to help them in the civil suit they filed against Dt. Steve Thomas. These were not the findings of the handwriting experts the grand jury heard. The standards of a civil suit are very different from a criminal suit so their findings can hardly be accepted as the final word.

   Oh, also the FBI said in the history of kidnappings, there has never been a 2.5 page ransom letter and they felt it was written as a cover-up. Even if you think Boulder PD were bumbling idiots who dropped the ball, the FBI was a different team of people and the below statement is what they thought about the note.

   Also, let’s think about this. If you’re a kidnapper who wants an amount with specific instructions, do you hope there’s paper and a pen in the house so you can write that demand out when you get there? What do you do if you can’t find a pad of paper? If that’s your motive, you’re just crossing your fingers that you get there and find a way to communicate your demands?

   Also, if you’re in the middle of kidnapping her and she dies, why leave the ransom letterthat’s the only evidence pointing to you anyway? Without the ransom letter, the kidnapper could take all evidence pointing to him and easily pin this on the parents.

   
   The FBI thought it was odd a kidnapper would leave something so incriminating with the body in the house, which would immediately negate any chance of getting the ransom money and provide a clues on a suspect. If you accept the ransom note is fake, that’s incredibly damning for the Ramseys.

   

7. The Morning Timeline Lie/Was Burke Awake? - For 20 years, John and Patsy told the same story about that morning: Patsy woke up to make coffee, she went down the stairs and found the ransom note. She didn’t read all of it, she just immediately ran to JBR’s room. When she saw she wasn’t there, she yelled for John. John ran out of the bathroom to the back stairs and found Patsy. He took the letter and told her to call 911. He says at this point he or Patsy went in to check in on Burke, but they left him sleeping. Both Patsy and John say they never looked for JBR because of the ransom note

   For 20 years, the police thought that was weird as hell. Whose daughter goes missing and they don’t call her name out or search for her? Why wouldn’t they wake Burke up and ask if he knew anything? Kolar documents this:

   

   Here, is John saying he was the one who checked Burke’s room and Burke was still asleep.

   

   In 2016, thanks again to Burke’s Dr. Phil interview, we find out that Kolar was right to feel suspect about this because the Ramseys did lie. According to Burke, his mom came bursting into his room, searching for JBR, not his dad. She was screaming, “Where is my baby?!” and woke him up. About an hour later, a police officer enters his room and he says that he stays in bed. This means the Ramseys did search for her, they knew Burke was awake and there was at least an hour between Burke waking up because of his mom and the 911 call and police showing up.

   You know I have the clip!

   The thing is, Kolar and the police knew to be suspect about this during the case because Burke told the police in 1996 that his mom came rushing into his room looking for JBR. They knew she and John were lying about Burke’s whereabouts and when they woke him up from day one. That’s why the police suspected the Ramseys. Burke’s police interview is below. Dr. Phil also points out it’s weird that Burke would hear his parents searching for his sister and wouldn’t get up to see what was happening:

   If the Ramseys did search Burke’s room, they probably searched the rest of the house looking for JBR too. We now know about an hour went by from Patsy waking Burke up to the cops showing up, rather than her original “I found the letter, John checked Burke and I called the cops shortly after, Burke never woke up” timeline.
   

   Did they tell police Burke was asleep and they didn’t search the house because he could mess up their timeline and prove they’d been searching for her for at least an hour before cops arrived?
   

8. Burke and JBR’s Behavioral Histories

Most people hate the Burke Did It theory because they can’t imagine a 9yo boy being violent or doing these things. However, Burke had a history of violence with JBR. By the end of this, you’ll see that he was a 9 year old boy who previously sent JBR to the hospital, had issues with bedwetting and feces, and may have been a victim himself.

When Burke was 6, he hit her in the face with a golf club and sent her to the ER. This is in her medical records. At the time, Patsy told friends he lost his temper. In their book, the Ramseys say he was practicing his golf swing and lost control. JBR was taken to the doctor 33 times in the last 3 years of her life. There were frequent doctor calls including three 8 days before the murder. It’s more than likely that Burke hit JBR more than once. As far as we know, he’s the only person in the family to ever send JBR to the ER:

People point to JBR wetting the bed and getting clingier with her mom in the days leading up to her death as evidence she was being sexually abused or suffering trauma. What they tend to ignore is that Burke was also wetting the bed at an older age and people around the Ramseys heard odd comments from the family about his body.

Jane Stobie, a former manager who began working at John’s company Access Graphics in 1990, said Nedra, Pam and Polly (Patsy’s mom and sisters) would comment often on Burke’s penis in her 1997 interview with Vanity Fair. The three were also on payroll at Access Graphics and Stobie managed Nedra.

Of course, this could be how the family jokes around. In addition to that, however, his previous nanny said he was wetting the bed until he was at least 7. Cops asked him about it and he got defensive. If JBR regressing and her bed wetting getting worse is a sign of abuse, the same could be said for Burke. Was he wetting the bed because someone in the family was also sexually abusing him? If that’s the case, could he have picked up learned behaviors that he took out on JBR?

Wilcox says that JBR’s bedwetting was getting worse, but what we also know is that Burke’s issues with feces were also escalating. When Patsy was first diagnosed with cancer, housekeeper Geraldine Vodicka found him smearing poop on the walls. This would’ve been around the time of the golf club incident.

Nedra, JBR and Burke’s grandmother cleaned up the incident Vodicka mentioned so she also witnessed this. Another maid, Linda Hoffman-Pugh, previously found feces in JBR’s bed sheets and thought it may have been Burke’s. This matters because feces were found in JBR’s room when the crime scene was processed:

The Ramseys say that Burke lived in the house and they can’t say when he may have left the pajamas there and question if he even did. Boulder PD didn’t have a chance to question him about it. However, the fact that it was still present at the crime scene points to it being recent: The Ramseys had maids, does it really seem likely they left poop-stained pajamas and candy in JBR’s room for days? A maid was there on the 23rd according to witnesses (this is the day Fleet White makes an “accidental” 911 call at the Ramsey’s home, they had guests over).

We know JBR slept in Burke’s room on the 24th because he says this in his interview. Did Burke do this on the 25th? If so, why? Did the maid leave poop-covered pajamas and a candy box in JBR’s room for days? Did this cause a fight between Burke and JBR that night? It’s unlikely the feces is connected to the intruder, but if Burke did do this on the 25th, again, it points to him being awake that night.

Maybe it was an innocent prank, but did he hear anything while intruders came to kidnap his sister while he happened to be leaving feces in her room? These are questions he could answer, but he doesn’t seem interested.

Back when Burke did his Dr. Phil interview in 2016 and admitted he was up after everyone went to sleep, Boulder PD asked to interview him again. They even sent two people out to his house. They wanted to ask if he heard anything since this was a new revelation after 20 years. That makes sense! They have a possible new witness! Even John Ramsey was shocked at this revelation.

John says he had no idea Burke got back up, “if he even did.” He thinks Burke might’ve misunderstood Dr. Phil’s question, but it’s clear that Dr. Phil asks twice. Dr. Phil says, “Your father says he put you to sleep with the flashlight and you went downstairs.”

Burke says “Yeah, I had some toy that I wanted to put together. I remember being downstairs after everyone was in bed…wanting to get this thing out.” Dr. Phil replies “Did you use the flashlight so you wouldn’t be seen?” Burke says, “I don’t remember. I just remember being downstairs with this toy.” I’ll share this YouTube clip of an interview John did this year for Crime Junkies where he expresses shock that Burke left his room after everyone was asleep. Apparently, John and Burke never talked about this:

John says Burke wouldn’t keep any information to himself, but Burke refused to answer any questions after this revelation and sent a message via his lawyer to never contact him again. If he is interested in finding his sister’s killer, that isn’t something anyone has ever seen, at least outside of the family. Even after the murder, he seemed uninterested in where JBR was or who may have taken her. Fleet White noticed he didn’t ask any questions when he drove Burke from the Ramsey’s home to his the morning JBR was kidnapped. Kolar notes this:

Apparently, no new questions have come up for Burke since 1996. Even though he’s connected to the pineapple, the feces-smeared pajama bottoms and admitted he was up, he has nothing to say. He was willing to talk to Dr. Phil, but not the police. That’s odd.

The Evidence of JBR’s Previous Sexual Assault

Ok, this is a very complicated topic and I will beg you here to read this 2 part reddit thread that quotes from the child abuse panel’s findings on JBR directly. But, look, I know, the Netflix documentary showed you a clip of JBR’s pediatrician from ages 3-6 and he said he saw no signs of sexual abuse during his exams of her. The documentary presents this as final evidence: there was no previous sexual assault before her murder, see her pediatrician said so.

As I’ve said so many times: this isn’t the case! In order to see signs of child sexual abuse, thorough exams are needed that look at the hymen and internal vaginal walls for damage. JBR’s pediatrician never performed a test like that and said so to the grand jury. That wouldn’t have been typical for him to do when JBR wasn’t brought in for those reasons and he had no reason to suspect that. Of course he saw no evidence for sexual abuse, he wasn’t looking for it.

The coroner who did the autopsy did see signs of previous sexual abuse, but couldn’t say when it occurred. The Boulder PD decided to put together a panel of child sexual abuse experts to examine the body and look into the case. This panel included John McCann, who created the standard now used to define child sexual assault in hospitals and police cases. Basically, these are authorities on the topic. The strongest evidence of the previous sexual abuse is that it was allowed into the grand jury evidence:

The other four people on the panel were Richard Krugman, James Monteleone, Valerie Rao and Andrew Sirotnak. Every sexual abuse expert who examined the genital findings from JBR’s autopsy recognized physical signs of sexual abuse that predated her murder. The only thing they couldn’t agree on was when and how often it occurred. McCann said the abrasions were 7-10 days healed, Rao said it could be 2 months, some didn’t feel comfortable trying to date it but could say it was damage that predated her death.

You may have heard that this damage and JBR’s bedwetting were caused by UTIs and irritation that’s common in kids. This is what the Ramseys put out through their lawyers. However, the abrasions seen on the hymenal transection by the panel could only be done through sexual assault or a massive injury. There was no massive injury in JBR’s medical history that pointed to something like this. It couldn’t have been caused by horseback riding or a bike, as these were abrasions that had healed, opened and re-healed, pointing to chronic sexual abuse.

If there was some intruder or pedophile stalker who managed to get access to JBR and assault her 7-10 days before her death, that would be a huge lead. This is evidence that, like the pineapple in her stomach, cannot be denied. But the Ramseys dismiss the evidence from this panel outright. Additionally, if there’s evidence that JBR was being chronically abused, who is to say Burke wasn’t also being abused, causing him to wet the bed again or take out the same abuse on his sister? And even if you don’t believe it’s Burke, couldn’t this be possible evidence that John was abusing his daughter and it’s still someone in the family?

Many believe Burke perpetrated the previous abuse on JBR and not John because a maid previously saw them “playing doctor.” When she asked what was going on, Burke got mad at her. Also, John was gone a lot. Additionally, the previous summer at the family’s Michigan house, Patsy told staff that Burke and JBR couldn’t be alone together. A family friend said Patsy said it was because they were “exploring” with each other too much.

Of course, these are secondary accounts, but coupled with the fact that Burke and JBR would share bedrooms occasionally and they both showed signs of regressing due to sexual abuse, there is a chance that their doctor “play” wasn’t so innocent. Was Patsy having issues with Burke? We can’t say for sure, but police do know that her mother, who cleaned up after Burke spread feces on the wall, gifted her 3 books on raising problem children in the year before JBR died.

One was Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong (see above screenshot on feces). Of course, she might just like parenting books and they were just gifts.

The above facts usually get people around to Ramseys Did It. It was this thread that got me fully convinced of Burke Did It. Basically: everything done by JBR could’ve been done by a child and an adult would’ve caused more damage. The Netflix doc ignores all of this. The hit to the head wasn’t enough to kill JBR, it caused internal bleeding and knocked her out, but she wasn’t dead. The choking started 45 minutes to 2 hours after she was hit in the head and also wasn’t enough to kill her by itself. While the skin on the outside of her neck was red, there was no internal damage to the windpipe.

If an adult hit her head, it would’ve killed her. If an adult strangled her, there would’ve been internal damage to the windpipe. She was either choked by an adult who didn’t want to hurt her or a child who wasn’t strong enough to. Also, why would an intruder hit her in the head and wait 45 minutes to 2 hours to choke her? If you’re there to kidnap her, why not just leave now that she’s unconscious and you have her? Also, If you think she’s dead from the hit, why leave the ransom note that would point to you?

And while the garrote used was described as “complex” by the Ramseys, a knot expert and the FBI said it was a simple loop knot a boy scout could make and the tool was rudimentary. Burke was a cub scout. In Officer Thomas’ book, he says these are the facts that even made the FBI ask if a child could be involved.

Let’s get into the reason so many people believe the garrote was complex, despite the opinion of experts. That would be thanks to the Ramseys. You see, soon after their daughter was killed, the Ramseys decided to start a foundation in her name. By March, the foundation was created with tax documents filed.

The Ramseys still wouldn’t talk to police until April, but they took time to do this. Part of the foundation was a website, ramseyfamily.com (since taken down). On this site, the Ramseys shared a tip phone number that led to their lawyers and not the police.

They also shared intimate details about the case before police said it was okay. You see, the Ramseys point to the media circus causing them to become suspects. The truth is that it was the Ramsey’s circus. When the police started leaking information to the media, it was only after the Ramseys started a website with information from the case and started buying ads in the newspaper that also leaked information about the case!

The police couldn’t understand why the Ramseys wouldn’t talk to them to answer questions or get updates, but they wanted to put things online. The World Wide Web! In 1997! The Ramseys published crime scene photos, direct messages from family members, photos of JBR, drawings she did, and updates.

They even published a photo of the garrote, where they ask people to notice the “complexity”:

That’s odd considering police experts felt it was a simple knot with a bunch of loops that any adult or Cub Scout could’ve done. The police wondered why the Ramseys were purposefully putting out misleading information. That wouldn’t help find the killer. If it was a close friend or someone in the pedophile circuit, what if they had used simple knots and weren’t an expert? Sharing this information with the public would also mean any wanna-be fake confessor could share details of the case and confuse the suspect list.

The Ramseys are also the ones who leak the ransom note to the press. They buy an ad and publish it in the paper, despite the police begging them not to. The Ramseys even admit on their website that the police have told them not to share details from it, but they share samples of the writing with the public. Now, if an intruder tried to mimic Patsy’s handwriting or just tried to conceal their handwriting, how would releasing this to the public be helpful? This was the most intimate, direct piece of evidence from a supposed intruder and they published it in the paper and on their website:

Well, the police didn’t like this. Neither did their friends. Even Barbara Fernie, one of the people Patsy called over immediately, noticed the Ramseys were misleading the public by presenting false information. She let investigators know that one of the ads the family published was intentionally misrepresenting things. Fleet White also begged the family to stop posting and going on TV and to talk to the police.

This was the power of the Ramsey PR machine! To this day, people think the knots were complicated. They think there was evidence of a break-in on the backdoor! They think an intruder could’ve found duct tape, a paintbrush and cord in the basement of a house this crowded, big and dark (someone leaks the crime scene video at some point)! Oh, are you shocked you just saw a full video of the inside of their house? Yeah. That's pretty weird for 1996.

Maybe the cops leaked it to show the public how hard it would be for anyone to find anything in such a dark, big, crowded basement. Maybe the Ramseys leaked it so there’d be more doubt about who exactly knew the layout of their basement. Who knows?

This is also why John Mark Karr persists as a suspect. Because he knew “private” information. Well, the Ramseys maintained a website for years where relatives left personal messages. Did she ever sign one with that nickname? Hard to say, most of the site has been scrubbed from the internet. If Karr was obsessed with the case, he easily could’ve seen that there. The family put personal photos and crime scene photos on the site, anyone interested could’ve checked obsessively.

Despite the family making all this information public, Boulder PD investigators who previously worked on the case like Kolar knew that Karr was a fraud as soon as his emails came out because he still couldn’t get the details right. Boulder PD did manage to keep a few details from the public and Karr didn’t know them says Kolar in his 2014 AMA. The police know Karr is a fraud from these details, but Netflix dedicates nearly an entire episode to him. Why? It helps the Ramseys and supports their intruder theory.

Boulder Police dropped the ball on this case on day one by failing to secure the crime scene. However, the Ramseys are the people who failed to secure crucial information about the investigation and case after day one. The Ramseys benefit from muddying the evidence, the suspect list and anything else. If the police were able to rule people out, something might point to the Ramseys.

If the Ramseys could make details widely known, there’s just more people to point away from them. Their PR team goes to work at this and, now, the myth that the garrote was “complex” persists. Today, the Ramseys can use Netflix instead of a geocities site. I would be willing to believe they created their site in good faith, to collect evidence or tips, but it’s odd that they dismantled the site a few years after her murder. No one was arrested. They stopped communicating with Boulder PD after they moved back to Georgia. Was the site just a temporary PR effort?

The Ramseys continue to use the media to push the narratives they want. Let’s take, for example, something as simple as the order of JBR’s injuries. The Netflix documentary says it’s “unclear if the head injury or choking” happened first. It makes it nebulous, like no one could tell! Well, the medical examiner could. he listed this as the order of death:

Det. Kolar also points to evidence that this is likely the order. As he says below, if the garrote caused her death or brought her close to death and then she was hit in the head, her head wouldn’t have bled for 45-90 minutes:

There’s a lot of evidence that makes the timeline clear, so why don’t the Ramseys want you to know the above timeline? Because it makes them look guilty as hell. In fact, the grand jury thought this pointed to the Ramseys. Why would an intruder sit around for 45 minutes to an hour waiting to choke her and not just leave with her?

A few members of the grand jury have spoken out. They said this timeline was one of the most convincing pieces of evidence that the parents did it. They felt the DNA didn’t matter. Naturally, the Ramseys use Netflix to confuse the timeline and make the DNA sound incredibly important.

I found the Ramsey site when I was 12. I remember thinking it was so weird I could see crime scene photos and evidence. Isn’t it strange how much publicly available information there is in this case, but the Ramseys still create their own narrative?

Once you accept that these injuries could be caused by a child, the Ramsey’s PR works harder than Kris Jenner, Burke may have been a victim of sexual abuse himself and Burke may have been doing this to his sister, the case makes a lot more sense than a magic intruder floating in through a window without touching spiderwebs or the world’s quietest stun gun.

It also explains why the Ramseys would cover for Burke. If they said he did it, he might tell the police their dad had been inappropriate with both of them. If John or Patsy did it, they have little reason to cover for each other. If either parent did it, why would the other keep Burke around them? Either parent could’ve turned on the other and the innocent parent would look like a hero.

However, if it was Burke that did it, that would damage Patsy and John’s reputation as parents. Could John work for the government if he was famous for raising a son who killed his beauty pageant daughter? Would Patsy still be loved in the community? Patsy also said she’d die if anything happened to Burke. When asked if she’d protect John if he did it, she said no, she’d kill him herself.

John also said he wouldn’t protect Patsy if she did it. When asked if she’d protect Burke if he did it, Patsy screamed “You can’t ask that!” However, Burke being involved is the only reason to do a cover-up or lie about his whereabouts or keep him from answering questions about direct evidence connected to him. John and Patsy wouldn’t have covered for each other.

What do I think happened that night?

The family came home at 9:30/10pm. John did put JBR to sleep and her mom did go in and change her into a red sweater over her white shirt and longjohns. Burke, however, didn’t want to go to bed yet. John said in his interview that Burke wanted to build a car garage toy he got, but he made him go to bed. John goes to bed where Patsy is already asleep after changing JBR.

Thinking everyone is asleep around midnight, Burke gets his flashlight and decides to sneak back downstairs to get his favorite snack, pineapple and milk, and to play with his new toys. I tend to think Burke made the pineapple alone because Patsy would’ve known to clean it up with everything else if she’d known about it.

He gets to the kitchen, makes the bowl and a cup of tea. He finishes the tea, but only eats some of the pineapple. He grabs his flashlight and goes down to the basement. The basement is known as Burke’s toy room. He has an entire train room down there, he often whittles in the wine cellar and is basically left to roam down there a lot according to their maid:

At some point, JBR wakes up in the night. Maybe she heard Burke in the kitchen (her room is above it and even Burke said he could hear the fridge open from his bed). Maybe she hears him playing with toys. Maybe she wet herself and is doing her usual routine of changing and going to his room, but notices he isn’t there. Either way, she’s a six year old and she wants to play too so she goes to find him. Downstairs, she sees the leftover bowl of pineapple and grabs a piece. She heads down to the basement to play with her brother.

Burke has been in the wine cellar, we know this because he later says he opened the gifts that were being kept there (see below), even though Patsy lies and says she did this. She most likely wants to distance Burke from the scene. When JBR comes down, perhaps he sees a chance to “play doctor,” since he believes his parents are asleep. I think this is actually when the paintbrush comes into play. Or, maybe, they just get into a fight over the gifts.

The previous abrasions caused to JBR were thought to be caused by digital penetration. Perhaps, Burke saw his mom’s paintbrush in the basement and escalated things. According to the autopsy, the paintbrush was inserted once and removed. The FBI thought this was odd if it was a pedophile: they’d probably do something similar to sexual stimulation, not jam it in and remove it once. Their conclusion was that it was staged to hide previous sexual abuse. As you see from Dr. Meyer’s report below, this is another grey area the Ramseys took advantage of. It sounds horrific, too horrific for a 9yo to do it, but the actual physical evidence was not consistent with torture:

But, imagine a young boy who has been abusing his little sister. Or you just hit her and she’s knocked out and you want to try something extreme to wake her up. He happens to see a paintbrush around, escalates the situation, she screams in pain, jumps up and says she’s going to tell mom. Burke grabs her by the collar to stop her (see below, does this sound like the action of an intruder?).

We know someone grabbed the front of her shirt because it had a wrinkle pattern that looked like someone grabbed it. She scratches at her neck and his hands to get him to let go, which is how DNA ends up under her fingernail. When he lets go, she turns around to run. He grabs his flashlight and hits her on the head. She falls unconscious.

Burke is now a scared little boy who is trying to wake his sister up. He grabs the train tracks that are later found next to her body and starts poking her in the back and in the neck to get her to wake up. She doesn’t. He realizes he might be in big trouble now. He can’t let his parents see what he did. He breaks the paintbrush. He wraps a cord around the broken brush with a knot and decides to strangle her with it. Maybe he thinks that won’t look as bad as what he actually did with it. Or, maybe he simply left the paintbrush there and when Patsy and John find her, they create the garrote to hide what Burke did with the paint brush.

Whoever strangles her isn’t strong enough to break her windpipe or they were careful not to use too much pressure. However, it is enough to kill her with the head wound. After the murder, Burke will casually talk to a friend about possible ways JBR was strangled and how JBR may have been hit in the head. Officers will note he seems comfortable talking about violence. Others believe the garrote is part of the parent’s staging.

Now, Burke or his parents have to hide his crime. Maybe he’s angry and also breaks the Train Room window (some believe it was broken that morning and John’s story about breaking it months prior was a lie.) Maybe he’s so angry about what he’s done, he regresses to smearing poop in JBR’s room. He tries to hide what he’s done and grabs a blanket off of JBR’s bed. He doesn’t realize her Barbie pajamas are wrapped up in it. He goes back to the basement, throws the blanket over it and goes to bed. Some think the parents carefully wrapped her in the blanket with her favorite pajamas, however.

At some point, Patsy wakes up, well before 5:30am. They had to be at the airport at 7am and she hadn’t finished packing yet. We know this because there were open suitcases with clothes in them in the room next to JonBenet’s. Or, maybe she never went to sleep.

When Patsy greets officers after the 911 call, she’s wearing the same clothes she wore to the party at the White’s the night before and she has a full face of make-up. She says she threw on the same clothes from the night before. The Crime Junkies episode and Netflix treat this as normal for her. However, it wasn’t according to her maid. Her friends say she’d never be caught dead wearing the same clothes two days in a row. The family was also headed to the airport for a trip that morning, why travel in party clothes and not something more comfortable if you don’t care? Investigators see it as a sign that she didn’t actually go to bed.

Did Patsy stay up because she heard a fight start between JBR and Burke that escalated into him hitting her? Did Burke sneak into JBR’s room with his flashlight to leave the feces, wake her up and start a fight that ended with him hitting her in the head and Patsy rushing into the room to turn on the only light that worked?

Personally, I do believe her when she said she went to JBR’s room first that morning and noticed she wasn’t there. If John or Patsy had known about the pineapple or feces, they probably would’ve cleaned those parts up, so these activities probably happened without their knowledge.

If she saw JBR wasn’t in bed, she most likely went to search for her. She goes downstairs, she checks the dining room, eventually she goes to check Burke’s playroom downstairs. Maybe she notices he left his new toys out, but she doesn’t see JonBenet. Maybe she notices the door to the wine cellar is partially open. We do know her palm prints are found on the wine cellar door in two locations. She finds JonBenet and screams, waking John up.

John and Patsy go into panic mode. They know Burke has been violent with JBR before, they probably suspect he did it immediately. They can’t lose two children or have Burke admit to any abuse in the home, so they decide to cover it up and make it look like a kidnapping. Patsy or John decide to write a ransom note. He dictates it to Patsy, she writes it. He’s very specific about two things in the letter: they cannot call the police or tell anyone and John must bring a large enough bag to carry the $118k broken down in small bills. He pulls out a large, blue Samsonite suitcase. Later, JBR’s DNA will be found inside this suitcase according to Det. Lou Smit.

This, perhaps, is a clever attempt by John to find a way to remove JBR’s body, I believe. He intended to put JBR in the suitcase and leave the house to dispose of it. The letter would give him cover for leaving the house before calling 911 (“I went to get the cash, they told us not to call,” he could say). However, this didn’t work. Rigor mortis had already set in, they couldn’t get JBR into the suitcase.

Det. Lou Smit offered that theory on Larry King when he leaked info that JBR’s DNA was found on a duvet in the suitcase and he thinks the intruder tried to leave with the body in the suitcase, but couldn’t get it through the window. I don’t think this is realistic. Most likely, she had previously used the duvet and Fleet put the suitcase there. However, if Smit knows there’s DNA beyond the duvet, that really only points back to the parents.

Why would an intruder just hope a perfectly-sized suitcase is there to help smuggle her out that window? Smit believes they changed course and killed her because the suitcase wouldn’t fit (there were scuff marks on the wall). If you’re a kidnapper with only one small, awkward window well to leave through, wouldn’t you prepare?

It doesn’t matter, the parents have to pivot now anyway and leave her in the basement while still making this look like a kidnapping. Patsy gets duct tape and puts it over her mouth. The FBI, Boulder PD and coroner believe the tape was placed on JonBenet after she was dead. Why put tape over a dead or unconscious girl’s mouth?

The tape also had Patsy’s from the jacket she wore that night at the White’s (see below) . That means the tape definitely came from the house. John said he carried JBR into the house. Patsy went in to change her, but most likely removed the tape from JBR’s mouth in the basement. It wouldn’t make sense for Patsy’s jacket fibers from that night to be on it if this were brought in by an intruder.

Remember back when I said the Ramsey’s might’ve snuck tape out through Pam? Did the intruder just hope they’d also be able to find duct tape in the house? They didn’t bring it with them for a kidnapping? And why would you need duct tape if you she’s knocked out, bleeding from her mouth and mucous is running down her face? Does it make sense for an intruder to take time at this crucial moment to go search the house for duct tape when the girl is incapable of talking or moving from the head injury?

This is the family staging the scene. John ties loose restraints around her wrists. They tuck the blanket in around her. Some believe this is when John may have used the paintbrush to hide his previous sexual assault or he made the garrote to hide Burke’s assault if you can’t believe that Burke made this tool.

It’s time for the Ramseys to call 911 and put on a show, Patsy is yelling into the phone. At some point, this wakes Burke up or he was already up. He asks them “Please what should I do” (this is according to the CBS enhancement of the 911 call, the Aerospace enhancement doesn’t have this). Thinking she hung up the 911 call, his father yells “We’re not talking to you!” His mother says “Help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Burke asks, “Well what did you find?” and the call clicks off.

Within minutes, the police will be here, but the Ramseys aren’t dumb. They already wiped JBR’s body with a navy blue cloth to mix up DNA. Unsourced fibers are eventually found on her vaginal area. The coroner says it looks like someone tried to “wipe clean” the body with a cloth, but a matching cloth is never found in the Ramsey home. Perhaps Pam removes it when she’s given access to the scene. Maybe an intruder used something with them, but if you’re concerned about leaving evidence on her…why not just take her body like you intended?

Some have mentioned that it was the 90s and people weren’t thinking about DNA. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m old and that’s not true! On top of that, guess what case happened the year prior? OJ Simpsons! That was a huge case where the main attraction was DNA. OJ was found innocent because of DNA. There’s no way the Ramseys weren’t aware of the case.

In fact, in their first interview a week after their daughter dies on CNN, Patsy mentions OJ. They were aware of him when their daughter died:

So, yeah, the Ramseys know it matters that only the Ramseys have been in the home and they really want to make sure there’s other DNA around the body. They call their closest friends and tell them to rush over immediately, there’s an emergency and they need them. Hopefully, this will muddy the crime scene. Fleet White comes and immediately heads to the basement, but doesn’t see JBR in the wine cellar because it’s dark and he can’t find the light. He notices the train room window is closed, but it is broken. He moves the suitcase that happens to be there over to look into the windowsill for glass. At some point after this, John goes back down and opens the window.

As the police start to arrive and his friends begin searching the house, John grows frustrated that 2 police officers have failed to find JBR in the wine cellar. When Det. Arendt suggests that he and Fleet go search the house top to bottom to find anything off, he realizes now is his chance. Fleet and John first go to the train room. Fleet asks about the broken window and John says he did it months prior. According to John, they look around for any new broken glass.

Then, as Fleet is still in the train room, John heads to the wine cellar door. With Fleet standing 20ft away, John opens the door and says, “Oh my God, Oh my God.” Fleet follows behind him and sees John turn the light on. For a moment, Fleet considers that he had just walked in that room and couldn’t see anything without a light but John screamed before the light was even on, but he doesn’t make much of that for now. John will eventually say he could see the white blanket. Yet Fleet and a police officer who peered in the room could not.

Rather than risk someone finding the body where the crime occurred, John sees another chance to muddy DNA evidence. He picks up JBR, despite it being clear she is dead, rigor mortis has set in, and rushes her upstairs to “get her help.” Det. Arndt tells John to put lay her at the top of the stairs. He asks if she’s dead and moans when the officer confirms she is. Det. Arndt moves JBR’s body to the living room, but before she can tell anyone not to touch her, John places a blanket over her and a sweatshirt.

He lays on her and cries, he lays next to her and puts his arm around her. Det. Arndt tells him not to touch her hands. Next, Patsy comes in and does the same, laying all over JBR. Their friends stand around JBR and pray. If there was any hope of getting DNA from a single suspect who interacted with the body, that hope is gone now. The Ramseys have successfully created an “unidentified” third profile. I think if this DNA ever does match to anything, it will prove to be touch DNA unrelated to the killer.

Anyway, there’s too much information out there for this to still feel like a mystery. The only mystery is why the Ramsey Family has worked so hard to create a different narrative through their PR, but even that isn’t a mystery.

Well yes, and I imagine the police have already done this. You’ll remember when you started reading this an hour ago, that I told you feces were found on a candy box in JBR’s room and in a pair of pajama bottoms that were too big for her? Well, there’s your answer. Examinations can tell you how old or fresh stool is. The contents of the stool could match the meal served at the Whites and police would know someone in the family was in her room after everyone went to sleep, smearing poop on her candy.

Odds are, the poop was fresh. It’s one piece of evidence the Ramseys have never addressed or tried to spin. It’s also a detail the cops rarely mention. With all that publicly available info, isn’t it odd that this detail is the one that hasn’t been mentioned a million times? If Burke did this in her room that night, did it start a fight? Did he see an intruder while playing this prank in her room? If the poop is old, it’s irrelevant. It’s just…that that’s highly unlikely.

The Ramsey’s maid confirmed she was at the house on the 23rd and there was a huge party. She probably would’ve noticed large, stained grey pajama pants in JBR’s room. She was supposed to go back on the 24th, but didn’t. However, Christmas Eve, JBR sleeps in Burke’s room according to his testimony to police. She wanted Burke to wake her up early for Christmas presents. Seems unlikely he could’ve done this that night without the parents or JBR noticing it Christmas Day. I tend to think John and Patsy didn’t know about the feces incident or they would’ve cleaned it up.

Another way we know the pajama bottoms were probably left Christmas night? Patsy says in her interview with police that she checked JBR’s bed Christmas morning. If the accident happened then, Patsy surely would’ve noticed soiled pajama bottoms. Plus, she even says that JBR had on pink pajamas, not grey, large pajama bottoms.

The pajama bottoms were very visible in JBR’s bathroom (each bedroom had its own bathroom), so a maid, JBR or a parent would’ve seen them. Patsy definitely would’ve seen them that Christmas morning. They weren’t hidden or tucked behind anything. If Patsy and John came right home from the White’s and took JBR to bed, did they not notice them right next to the toilet?

Investigators aren’t able to ask Patsy about these pants until 1998, a year and a half after the murder. She said they were JBR’s, not Burke’s despite appearing to be his size and “boys flannel pajama bottoms.” She said it was from JBR not wiping properly. She couldn’t recall when JBR wore them last. Kolar says it’s hard to know if she’s lying about who they belonged to or not in his verified AMA 4 years ago.

So, let’s say Patsy was lying about who the pajama pants belong to. Doesn’t that mean it’s possible Burke left the feces the night of the murder? He said he got up after everyone went to bed, did he do it then and that’s why his parents didn’t know? If the police have confirmed when this happened, it throws everything the family has ever said out the window. There’s a completely different timeline. That puts Burke in JBR’s bathroom and bedroom. And, if you have a hard time with my theory that Burke was involved with the paintbrush at all, some people think it went this way:

The family came home. Patsy and John tell the kids to go straight to bed, but Burke wants to stay up. After his dad reads him to sleep with the flashlight like he says in Dr. Phil, he goes downstairs. Maybe he makes some pineapple and this wakes up JBR. She eats some of his snack. Either this made him mad or something involving the gifts did and he hits her in the head. He tries to poke her awake with the train tracks, but she doesn’t move. Some time passes, maybe 30 minutes, an hour. He gets nervous, maybe he starts yelling for her to wake up, eventually getting Patsy to come downstairs.

Patsy immediately tells him to go to his room, noticing that JBR isn’t moving. JBR isn’t bleeding, so maybe Burke doesn’t realize how hard he hit her or that she’s really hurt. Maybe he throws a tantrum, angry that he can’t finish his snack (you’ll notice there’s a lot in the bowl) or play with his new Christmas toys because his sister got him caught.

Burke storms upstairs and, out of anger, smears feces on JBR’s candy box and goes to his room. He falls asleep, unaware his parents are creating the scene. He has no idea what they’re do. They have no idea he left feces in JBR’s room or left pineapple out. Now the Ramseys have to stage a crime so horrific that no one would ever consider a 9-year old who previously hit his sister did it again with an object he was often seen with, his bedtime flashlight.

Theoretically, John may have a problem now too. If he’s been abusing his children, he needs to conceal it. If Burke has been “playing doctor” and Patsy and John know that, then they both know they’ll need to hide evidence of that. There will be an autopsy and there needs to be doubt as to where the previous injuries come from. This also explains why they can’t just call 911 after JBR is hit. This is a serious head injury, if they take her to the hospital, they might do an exam and see the prior sexual abuse. They conceal evidence of this abuse and stage the scene.

They miss the feces and pineapple, though.

It also would explain Burke’s comment on the enhanced 911 call. “What did you find?” He might’ve thought they found the pajama bottoms and the candy box. He stays in his room all morning because he thinks he’s in trouble for that. Eventually they tell him JBR was fine after their fight. She went to bed and he didn’t do anything bad. Everyone went to sleep, an intruder came in and now she’s missing.

At 9, Burke might’ve truly believed this was the case. He just has to keep his temper tantrum a secret. He wouldn’t want anyone to know what he did in her room anyway.

When a few people involved in the case did a panel in 2016, they said: The JonBenét Ramsey case is not a mystery. It just remains unsolved. Because the Ramseys want it that way. The grand jury, however, unraveled that mystery and wanted to indict the parents for child abuse.

Some people believe the feces information and who it belonged to was in the grand jury trial because it was relevant. Some people think it wasn’t included because it was found to be irrelevant or was JBR’s. Well, it’s sealed, so we don’t know! Either way, it potentially points to a 9-year old being involved in the incident and that’s where the real problem with the idea of “justice” in this case comes in.

If the feces were relevant and Burke hit her, the DA knew they couldn’t prosecute a 9-year old in Colorado and Boulder PD knew they couldn’t leak the source of the feces that confirmed an intruder couldn’t have been in her room if it was related to a child. Without Burke’s exact involvement, you can’t say which parent did what and they can point to the kid or each other (or just John to Patsy, now). It’s a no-win case. There will never be charges.

The only hope this case will be solved? If all the grand jury documents are released. Colorado has strict laws around this, but Fleet White and officers in the case have sued to get them released in the past and ~4 pages have been released. The total indictment is 18 pages. White and the Boulder PD seem to think making the grand jury documents public will solve this for everyone.

When those 4 pages were released, the judge initially decided to release all of them, then changed his mind. Kolar believes it’s because it contained information about a juvenile:

The grand jury who recommended the parents be charged with child abuse for knowing their child was in danger, but not providing help seemed to solve the case. Of course, most people are only just finding out the grand jury made this recommendation because it came out in 2013. The DA and the Ramseys kept that information sealed for 14 years and the Ramseys presented this as them being “cleared.” That was, once again, far from the truth. The grand jury did recommend charges, but the DA declined to move forward.

Netflix tells you the answer to this case is DNA, but the answer sits with the grand jury. While the documentary does mention that the jury did want to convict Patsy and John of 2 charges each, it doesn’t get into the details. The specifics make clear the grand jury believed that Burke was involved. Why does Netflix make this theory sound so ridiculous?

The charges were child abuse and “unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person.”:

COUNT IV (a)

On or between December 25, and December 26, 1996, in Boulder County, Colorado, John Bennett Ramsey/Patricia Paugh Ramsey did unlawfully, knowingly, recklessly and feloniously permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child's life or health, which resulted in the death of JonBenet Ramsey, a child under the age of sixteen.

As to Count IV (a), Child Abuse Resulting in Death: A TRUE BILL

and

COUNT VII

On or about December 25, and December 26, 1996 in Boulder County, Colorado, John Bennett Ramsey/Patricia Paugh Ramsey did unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person, with intent to hinder, delay and prevent the discovery, detention, apprehension, prosecution, conviction and punishment of such person for the commission of a crime, knowing the person being assisted had committed and was suspected of the crime of Murder in the First Degree and Child Abuse Resulting in Death.

As to Count VII, Accessory to a Crime: A TRUE BILL

If the jury thought the only two people involved were Patsy and John and charged them with assisting each other, one would be charged with the underlying crime. The fact that no one is charged with the underlying crime points to someone who couldn’t be charged, like a child. Colorado Attorney Lisa Polansky agrees with this take in the CBS documentary:

Outside of those documents that made the grand jury feel a third person was involved, is there any hope of solving this? Well, someone could confess.

Yeah, I’m back I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention one more thing.

• John Mark Karr - The Netflix doc spends a lot of time with this suspect and his voice messages to a detective on the case. They almost make it seem like he could be a legit suspect if only the DNA was a match. However, Karr has an alibi: he was in Georgia with his family according to them.

  Oh, also Boulder PD found pictures of him in Georgia with his family within 18 hours of hearing he was a suspect. They felt the DA never should’ve brought him in. He also didn’t know any private details of the case. He only knew publicly available information. As I told you above, the Ramseys had that damn website with all their info!

  Outside of that, the nickname for JBR’s grandma was known in the pageant circle. Her grandma planned most of it. If he attended shows, he may have heard it. However, the doc makes it seem like this wasn’t known at all. Anyway, Karr was cleared in 2006 for those reasons.

  
  Most people do not consider him a serious suspect and view him as a mentally ill pedophile seeking fame. It’s insulting his pedophile audio fan fiction is given serious time in this documentary and he’s getting the fame he wanted. However, it helps the Ramseys, so that may have guided the director’s desire to spend so much time on him. I think that is another bad decision and wanted to make that clear too.

  

Some people asked if I had any layouts/t

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When Saori Kawano arrived in New York City in 1978 from Yokohama, most Americans’ ideas of Japanese food ended at instant ramen and onion volcanoes. Since then, if you’ve enjoyed hand-cut soba noodles or an omakase dinner, or admired the graceful curves of a rice bowl or the flash of a Japanese knife blade, you can probably thank her.

Ms. Kawano is the founder and owner of Korin Inc., an importer of knives, kitchen tools and tableware from Japan that has become a place of pilgrimage for restaurateurs since opening in 1982. It’s the main U.S. supplier for big-name chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa, Daniel Boulud, Matsuharu Morimoto and Eric Ripert; restaurants like Buddakan, Sugarfish and Eleven Madison Park; and hotel chains like the Four Seasons and Mandarin Oriental.

Her TriBeCa showroom, packed with wares ranging from $20 kitchen shears to $2,000 sushi knives, hums with customers arriving with knives to be sharpened, and the spin of the custom-made Japanese whetstone that powers the business.

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The space is narrow, but it contains a vast network of connections and knowledge that has fueled the extraordinary rise of Japanese food in the United States.

“So much of the popularity and familiarity that we have now is due to her,” said Michael Romano, the chef of Union Square Cafe from 1998 to 2013. He was an early convert from European to Japanese chef’s knives, opened Union Square Tokyo in 2007, and now lives there part-time.

In her shop on a busy winter morning, Ms. Kawano, 68, beamed as her resident sharpener, Vincent Chin, described restoring dozens of knives in the kitchen of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. She tends to credit her success to loyal chefs and employees like Mr. Chin, but her combination of elegance, toughness and charm doubtless played a part.

“I always knew I was not going to live in Japan for my whole life and be a housewife,” she said — partly because her mother, a pioneering female insurance executive, told her so. “I never thought that Japanese food would become the focus of my whole life.”

Long before Amazon or Alibaba, Instagram and Line (Japan’s most popular social media and shopping app), Ms. Kawano was a direct link between the American culinary world and the most prestigious chefs, artisans and craftsmen in Japan.

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“She’s the only person who can pick up the phone in New York City and talk to anyone in Japan,” said Yukari Sakamoto, a sake expert who lives in Tokyo and leads high-end food tours. “Connections are everything here. Everyone knows that if Saori has vetted you, you’re worth their time.”

If you have a Japanese knife in your home kitchen, Ms. Kawano may have had a hand in that, too. American cooks have long relied on European-style knives, with one basic blade shape, descended from a butcher’s tool. Among other differences, Japanese knives evolved to cut fish and vegetables, not meat. They have many shapes and a thinner blade, making them capable of cleaner cuts.

The modern culinary conversation between Western and Japanese chefs started with Shizuo Tsuji, a writer and Francophile who opened a cooking school in Osaka in 1960. His relationships with influential chefs like Paul Bocuse and David Bouley laid the groundwork for high-end Japanese cuisine in the United States.

By the 1980s, Japanese food had a firm foothold in Europe; chefs adopted its plating, lightness and seasonality, and turned the traditional kaiseki meal — a progression of carefully ordered bites — into what we now know as a tasting menu. This nouvelle cuisine revolution, radiating outward from France, created an American market for the small plates, square bowls and Japanese knives that Korin stocked.

Ms. Kawano educated herself about the centuries-old Japanese craft of knife-making and its nuances — for example, a sushi chef might use a different knife for the same fish in different seasons, depending on its size and fattiness. She passed that knowledge on to her American customers.

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Through the Gohan Society, a nonprofit cultural-exchange program she founded in 2004 (now funded by Kikkoman, Kewpie and other global brands), hundreds of American chefs have followed her to Japan, entering through doors only she can open, visiting woodworkers, potters, glassblowers, sake brewers and miso producers.

When Ms. Kawano came to the United States nearly 50 years ago, it was for the music. Her husband, who had been accepted at the Juilliard School to study classical piano and teach Japanese string instruments, wore his hair long and his boots high-heeled; bands like Queen and the Beach Boys were his extracurricular passion.

She was also a pianist, and like most Japanese girls of her time, was trained in the traditional arts of arranging flowers (ikebana), archery (kyudo) and wrapping a formal silk kimono.

Worldly New Yorkers, she assumed, would have an appetite for learning about Japanese culture. “No one was interested,” she said.

The couple thought they’d brought enough money to last three years; it ran out after six months. So she began her culinary career in desperation, as a waitress at a posh Japanese restaurant near the Pan Am Building (now MetLife) in Midtown, where some of the biggest Japanese companies had their U.S. headquarters.

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Because she is that kind of person, it bothered her that the restaurant didn’t always use authentic bowls and plates. Having persuaded the owner to let her order some from Japan, she then decided that Americans would — or should — appreciate the graceful shapes of Japanese tableware.

From her mother’s work selling insurance, she had absorbed persistence, optimism and the art of the cold call. Every day after the staff meal, she shut herself into the restaurant’s pay-phone booth and called the housewares department at Bloomingdale’s. “I believed that someday, there would be someone on the other end who wouldn’t hang up on me,” she said.

Some months later, Ms. Kawano got through, talked the buyer into a meeting and left with a $1,500 order for plain white bowls. She began making sales calls around the city, armed with iron teapots and rice bowls.

“When I got into Zabar’s and Dean & DeLuca, that was my pride and my joy,” she said.

When Ms. Kawano started Korin in 1982, her only regular customers were Asian restaurant owners, who were rarely able to buy expensive tableware. (The era of the $400 omakase dinner was far in the future.)

There were difficult years, when she was in debt, divorced and in despair of finding a market. As a single parent, she could no longer afford child care, so she brought her daughter, Mari, along on sales calls, wrestling a stroller loaded with samples and snacks through the subway system.

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Then, in 1991, a young chef with an idea for a glamorous Thai-French restaurant showed up on her loading dock. Jean-Georges Vongerichten had lived in Bangkok for two years and was shopping for his second New York restaurant, Vong. “I couldn’t find the colors and glazes I’d seen in Asia anywhere,” he recalled.

Vong opened with Ms. Kawano’s golden plates, lacquered chopsticks and bamboo place mats, and Mr. Vongerichten spread the word to the city’s other top French chefs who, under the influence of nouvelle cuisine, had already become entranced by ingredients like rice vinegar and yuzu.

Those chefs also had deeper pockets than most of her customers. Instead of ordering wholesale, Ms. Kawano began making direct contact with artisans in Japan, researching the best makers of porcelain in Saga Prefecture and knives in Sakai. She persuaded Japanese chefs to come to New York for demonstrations of sashimi and sushi. She even talked her ex-husband, Chiharu Sugai, into becoming an expert knife sharpener, an educational process that took a decade and continues to pay off by bringing customers into the shop over and over again. (Mr. Sugai died in 2018; Mr. Chin was his protégé.)

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When the Japanese chef Noriyuki Sugie arrived in New York in 2003 to become head chef of the brand-new Mandarin Oriental hotel’s restaurant, his first stop was Korin. Entrepreneurs were opening Japanese-influenced restaurants around the world, Mr. Sugie said, with vast menus and themes like waiters dressed as ninja warriors.

“It was a bubble,” he said.

It was also the beginning of Japan’s first official foray into culinary diplomacy. Alarmed by the spread of such inauthentic places, and eager to replicate the successful gastro-diplomacy of countries like South Korea and Thailand, the government began a campaign in 2006 dedicated to spreading knowledge of traditional Japanese foodways — washoku — and informally known as “the sushi police.”

Through agencies dedicated to tourism, food and exports, young Japanese chefs were encouraged to go abroad, both to learn and to teach. “It’s very Japanese to care about whether people thousands of miles away are arranging the fish just right, or stirring wasabi into their soy sauce,” said Ms. Sakamoto, the sake expert.

In 2013, washoku was added to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage traditions, alongside Neapolitan pizza and Korean kimchi. Today, according to Japan’s official tourism agency, food is the reason cited most often by tourists for their visit to Japan.

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Ms. Kawano’s connections to top U.S. chefs were invaluable in this educational project. Americans began to hear more about Japanese fermentation, specialties like Edo-style sushi, and ramen not microwaved in a cup. They traveled to Japan to visit fish markets and shop in Kappabashi, Tokyo’s ever-expanding “kitchen street.”

“When there was more respect for the tradition, and Japanese restaurants began to get Michelin stars, that is when the category began to bring in more money,” said Mr. Sugie, who is now a global consultant for Japanese-inspired restaurants.

Today, Ms. Kawano supplies 8,000 restaurants and hotels, has 34 full-time employees including her daughter, and travels constantly, guiding chefs from around the world through Japan.

Back in the 1990s, she almost moved back to Yokohama when things got hard, but said the same mantra that got her into Bloomingdale’s kept her in New York.

“I’d ask myself, ‘Have I tried everything I can think of?’ and I hadn’t,” she said. “And I remembered that a ‘no’ won’t destroy me.”

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Whipping siphons have revolutionized the art of foam-making, bringing efficiency and creativity to kitchens everywhere. But siphons are useful for making so much more than whipped cream. These tools allow chefs to transform fatty or starchy ingredients—even fluid gels—into delicate, stable foams with ease. We use ours all the time—for making fresh soda, greatly speeding up marinating, infusing fruit with a flavorful juice, or topping a dish with foam for flavor and textural contrast.

Whipping siphons require cartridges of gas to function. Nitrous oxide offers exceptional solubility in fats and oils without the risk of oxidation or bacterial growth. Each standard charger contains 8 g of this versatile gas, which dissolves into the liquid, pressurizing the siphon. When released, the mixture expands, creating the airy, smooth texture that defines culinary foams. Carbon dioxide is also another type of gas that can be used with a whipping siphon, but its high solubility and distinct fizzy taste often make it less ideal for creating creamy, stable foams. With nitrous oxide, however, chefs gain a reliable, flavor-neutral tool for culinary experimentation, whether crafting decadent dessert sauces or innovative savory toppings. This is why we often prefer using nitrous oxide; however, carbon dioxide is required if your goal is to carbonate rather than to foam.

The possibilities with a whipping siphon are virtually limitless, opening up a world of culinary creativity. Take, for instance, our Caramelized Carrot Pizza from Modernist Pizza (page 277), which features a coconut chutney foam. This foam—made with cilantro, mint, green chili pepper, coconut cream, and coconut milk—adds a vibrant, aromatic layer to the dish.

The siphon can also streamline the preparation of batters, like teff injera (Modernist Bread, Vol. 5:156) or tempura batter (Modernist Pizza, Vol. 3:281), creating light, consistent textures with ease.

Additionally, it’s a game changer for emulsion-based sauces, particularly during service. The siphon not only keeps sauces warm but also aerates them, creating volume and a lighter mouthfeel compared to dense, overly rich sauces. For example, we use it to prepare Sous Vide Hollandaise or sabayon sauce.

Whether you’re carbonating, infusing, or foaming, there are a few basics you should know. First off, the siphon requires cartridges of gas, also called chargers, to pressurize the chamber holding the liquid. Carbon dioxide is best used for carbonation only. We use nitrous oxide for foams, marinating, and infusing. A cartridge holds 8 g of gas, can be used only once, and costs about 50 cents. Two cartridges are typically sufficient to charge a 1 L siphon. Use about 2% gas, or 8 g of gas for every 400 g of liquid—more if the liquid is low in fat.

Listen to your siphon. If the seal on your whipping siphon is faulty, the gas will go in and right back out again. So listen closely as you charge it. You should hear gas filling the chamber—and then silence. Still hear hissing? Remnants of a previous foam might be causing a leak, or some part of the siphon could be damaged. Vent the siphon, remove the nozzle, unscrew the top, and take out the cartridge. Then clean these parts and the rubber gaskets thoroughly, and check to make sure that they are undamaged and in place.

The rubber gasket keeps the dissolved gas from escaping from the lid. Make sure it fits snugly along the top of the lid and is intact.

A disposable cartridge holds 8 g of nitrous oxide, the gas used to pressurize the siphon. The number of cartridges you need depends on the volume of the siphon, how full the siphon is, the fat content of the liquid to be whipped, and the temperature of that liquid. Generally, two cartridges are enough for a 1 L siphon.

Charging the siphon—inserting the gas cartridge so that it is pierced by the pin—increases the pressure inside it dramatically and forces the nitrous oxide to dissolve into the liquid. Shaking the container is crucial to ensure that the gas is evenly distributed.

Create a sparkling drink or give porous food a surprising fizz with your whipping siphon. We slice carbonated grapes over chilled oysters and pair rich pâtés with sweet, tart, fizzy raisins. You need three cartridges of carbon dioxide to get really good carbonation in a 1 L whipping siphon or soda siphon.

STEPS TO CARBONATING WITH A SIPHON

1. Chill both the liquid and the siphon. Carbon dioxide is most soluble in cold liquids.
2. Pour in a cold liquid or add a chilled fruit. Do not overfill. Tighten the lid.
3. Insert the first carbon dioxide cartridge while holding the siphon upright. Hold down the nozzle to blow out the gas. The venting step is important because it replaces the air sitting above the liquid with carbon dioxide.
4. Insert one or two more cartridges of carbon dioxide; do not dispense any of the gas. Shake the siphon vigorously for 5–10 seconds.
5. Refrigerate the siphon to allow the gas to fully dissolve into the liquid. Let liquids sit for 2–4 hours. Let fruit sit for at least 4 hours, but preferably for 8–10 hours. Don’t open the siphon until you serve the fruit.
6. Open the siphon by holding it upright, pressing a cloth against the nozzle to contain any liquid, and slowly releasing the gas. Then remove the siphon lid, and pour out the soda or fruit. Dispensing soda through the nozzle results in a tingly and foamy drink, not a fizzy one, because the gas exits the liquid too quickly.

If you are ready to experiment, give carbonated cranberries a try.

Whipping siphons were designed for aerating cream that is high in fat. (Nitrous oxide dissolves much better in fat than in water.) But you can foam any liquid thick enough to hold bubbles. Add starch, gelatin, eggs, or agar to thin liquids to give them enough body for foaming. A fine, creamy foam comforts and provides contrasting texture, like mashed potatoes, or whipped cream atop a dense dessert. Light, acidic, and airy foams can contribute an additional layer of flavor. The more air in the foam, the less concentrated its flavor, so use a very strong liquid when making a foam to serve as a garnish or sauce. A foam used to top some other flavorful food may not need to be as intense. It’s a matter of finding the right balance.

STEPS TO FOAMING WITH A SIPHON

1. Add the liquid to the siphon, and tighten the lid. Do not overfill it.
2. Charge the siphon with only one cartridge of nitrous oxide. Shake vigorously for 5–10 seconds. Resting is unnecessary; the gas dissolves quickly.
3. Turn the siphon upside down, and press the lever to dispense a bit of foam. Check the texture. One cartridge is usually sufficient for high-fat liquids. Add more cartridges to create progressively thicker foams. The foam will release any gas it can’t hold, so an extra charge won’t ruin it. Shake the siphon each time before you dispense the foam.

You can use the high gas pressure in a siphon to force liquid into a solid, thus speeding up the processes of infusing, brining, or marinating. Meat cut into cubes for kebabs, for example, takes 20 minutes to marinate instead of 1–12 hours. Infusing porous fruit with liquid is a fun twist—think strawberries and lemonade, apple slices bursting with apple juice, or watermelon with hints of green tea.

STEPS TO INFUSING AND MARINATING WITH A SIPHON

1. Add cubes of meat to the siphon, and cover them with marinade or brine. To infuse fruit with a liquid, add the fruit and enough liquid to cover it. Tighten the lid.
2. Charge the siphon with nitrous oxide. Use two cartridges in a 1 L siphon. Shake vigorously for 5–10 seconds.
3. Refrigerate the siphon for 20 minutes to let the flavors infuse.
4. Open the siphon by holding it upright, pressing a cloth against the nozzle to contain any liquid, and slowly releasing the gas. Then unscrew the siphon lid, and pour out the contents.

Further Reading

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ForFor just about as long as there have been movies, food has played a meaningful role in film. This history dates all the way back to the silent era and films like Mr. Flip (1909), in which a fed-up waitress who’s being harassed shoves a pie into the face of her tormentor, or The Gold Rush (1925), in which silent film icon Charlie Chaplin makes a soup of his own shoe, ladling the “broth” over the boiled boot before eating it with a knife and fork for Thanksgiving dinner. And whether it’s as a vehicle for Chaplin’s absurdist physical comedy, or it’s offering romantic depictions of Italian cuisine in Goodfellas and Big Night, or it’s the way the The Menu uses visceral horror and biting satire to critique the extravagance of luxury dining culture, food plays a crucial role in making the movies we love feel real.

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But what exactly constitutes a great food movie? Well, that really depends. Some, like Ratatouille and Chef, are obvious picks — they are largely set in restaurants or kitchens, there are chefs involved, etc. Other films employ food in more subtle ways, to further the narrative or help us connect with a character. To celebrate the enduring connection between food and film, we spent the last several months thinking about the most essential food movies, eventually settling on 38 classics, cult favorites, and all the categories in between. The one thing that all of these films have in common is that they depict food, dining, cooking, or eating in relatable, often visceral ways.

To assemble this list, we gathered Eater’s highly opinionated brain trust of writers, editors, and movie lovers to passionately make their case for each and every film worth including. After much heated debate, here, in chronological order, our list of the 38 finest food movies. — Amy McCarthy, reporter

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

If you’d never seen Willy Wonka, you might not think its premise — a monopolistic recluse in a purple suit terrorizes a bunch of kids, their parents, and grandpa Joe while leading a corporate plant tour and singing about chocolate — sounded very much like a children’s movie. This is because Willy Wonka isn’t really a kids movie (though it is a family movie). For the first 45 minutes, the film indulges in a good amount of social commentary about class and consumerism aimed at adults, just like the Roald Dahl book on which it’s based (though it thankfully avoids Dahl’s blatant racism). We don’t even enter the titular chocolate factory until near the halfway point. Once we do, the children may be unknowingly competing for the title of CEO, but they’re just acting out basic parables; it’s their guardians that are the real target audience, the ones who need to be educated in the morals of pure, youthful fantasy. The film’s great feat isn’t squashing adult themes into a kids movie, the way animators coyly slide adult jokes into Saturday morning cartoons. The focus from the start is getting adult viewers to embrace the transformative powers of fantastical sweets, which can act as balms for the tedious, quotidian ills of grown-up society, if you can set aside your disbelief. — Nicholas Mancall-Bitel, senior editor

La Grande Bouffe (1973)

If you haven’t seen La Grande Bouffe, I urge you not to take this as a recommendation. The film is grotesque, and if I’m being ungenerous, I’d go as far as to say it serves no purpose beyond provoking disgust in its audience. But on a list of movies about eating it would feel wrong not to include Marco Ferreri’s 1973 satire in which four friends gather at a crumbling mansion and gorge themselves to death. Along the way they rope in some women (three hired, one a local school teacher) to further indulge in carnal pleasures (it’s rated NC-17). Although critics are divided, the more generous read is that it’s a comment on the decadence of the bourgeoisie. And as the four men, all stars of French and Italian cinema at the time, feast and, eventually, painfully consume mountains of pasta, over-the-top smorgastarta, and so much meat, their appreciation for fine cuisine is clear, even if the motivations for absolutely anything else happening on screen are not. — Monica Burton, deputy editor

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

There’s a scene near the end of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which Dielman spends three minutes in silence, alone in her kitchen making meatloaf. The camera remains fixed in place as Dielman folds the ground meat over on itself again, and again, and again, pausing briefly to sprinkle breadcrumbs on top before recommencing the folding. This moment is just one in a series of mundane tasks, many of which take place in the kitchen, that the late director Chantal Akerman highlights in extraordinary — and some might say painfully realistic — detail over the course of the film’s nearly three-and-a-half hour runtime. But while watching a woman skin potatoes, or prepare veal, or struggle — again alone, in silence — to make a cup of coffee for over eight straight minutes might not be entertaining in the traditional sense, Jeanne Dielman offers something more for those willing to sit through it.

Movie images: MovieStillsDB

The film follows Dielman over the course of three days, and as the minutes and hours tick by, a strange thing happens. Sitting in the audience, your mind begins to stray from what’s happening on screen, much as it might if you were washing dishes or cooking dinner in your own home. Time begins to take on a funny, confusing quality, and you start to think in a new way about the cost of labor, specifically the amount of time and effort that goes into preparing a meal. Cooking a healthy, satisfying dinner is a herculean undertaking, but the prep work is often forgotten once a steaming plate is set in front of you. Jeanne Dielman hits its audience over the head with a true representation of kitchen labor, and instills in viewers a newfound appreciation for anyone who has ever served them a meal, even if Dielman’s own bland boiled potatoes leave something to be desired. — Jonathan Smith, interim senior editor

Eating Raoul (1982)

Swingers, culinary aspiration, cannibalism, and death by frying pan: These are the primary ingredients of director Paul Bartel’s 1982 cult classic about Paul and Mary, a married couple who turn to murder in order to fund their dream restaurant. Paul (Bartel himself) is a wine snob who sleeps on a pillow shaped like a Beaujolais bottle, Mary (Warhol star Mary Woronov) is a nurse, and together they live unhappily in an apartment building that hosts frequent swinger parties. When one of the swingers assaults Mary, the pair kills him with the aforementioned frying pan and empties his wallet — and quickly discovers that killing “rich perverts” is a lucrative endeavor. Enter Raoul (Robert Beltran), a double-crossing locksmith who sells the bodies to a dog food factory, and you get a film whose dark satire lives somewhere between Sweeney Todd and Sideways. — Rebecca Flint Marx, home editor

Tampopo (1985)

In 1985, Japanese director Juzo Itami released what is arguably the most iconic film ever made about noodles: Tampopo. The film follows Gun (Ken Watanabe) and Gorō (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a duo of gruff truck drivers, as they embark on a quest to teach flailing ramen shop owner Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) the real art of this beloved Japanese dish via a series of schemes and bumbling espionage attempts. Both a heartfelt, occasionally slapstick comedy and a scathing satire of American Westerns, Tampopo is the rare film that isn’t afraid to get a little weird in its pursuit of ramen perfection. (Just wait for the film’s notorious sex scene, in which an egg features heavily.) — AM

Babette’s Feast (1987)

Based on a 1958 short story by Isak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast is the archetypal tale of cooking-as-art. The titular Babette flees violence in France to work for two pious sisters in 19th-century Denmark, whose bland diet of bread soup keeps them just sustained enough, but never tipping into gluttony. That is, until Babette insists on cooking a “real French dinner” of dishes like turtle soup, quail with foie gras and truffles, and rum sponge cake. In silence (so as to avoid praising what is surely a sensual sin), the town eats, and comes to understand the godly power of pleasure that food can provide. — Jaya Saxena, correspondent

Crossing Delancey (1988)

Director Joan Micklin Silver’s wry romantic comedy is the story of Isabelle “Izzy” Grossman (Amy Irving), an independent New York woman who yearns for an urbane, literary life worlds (or at least blocks) removed that of her Lower East Side bubbe (Reizl Bozyk). But Crossing Delancey is also a story about pickles, as personified by Sam (Peter Riegert), the pickle seller whom Izzy reluctantly meets through the local Jewish matchmaker. Pickles represent everything Izzy is trying to get away from: the old world, the old traditions, the old, Yiddish-inflected storefronts of the Lower East Side. Pickles aren’t sexy — although, as Izzy gradually realizes, the pickle man sure is. Filmed on location, Crossing Delancey is as much a portrait of a disappearing culture as it is of a modern woman negotiating romance, family, and the push and pull of her own expectations. — RFM

Cocktail (1988)

Okay, okay. Cocktail — in which Tom Cruise’s Brian Flanagan falls into the wild world of flair bartending — isn’t a good movie. Studio rewrites, intended to make the story more palatable by Hollywood standards, yielded a convoluted plot, flimsy character motivations, and bonkers tone shifts. It won a Razzie. It’s arguable whether it’s even a good food movie, both in that it totally misrepresents the world of bartending (even flair bartending) and can’t seem to keep its eye on the (high)ball. Yet, despite all its problems, it remains the definitive representation of cocktail mixing in popular culture (which may have more to do with popular understanding of cocktail bars than the movie’s actual staying power). Cocktail has had real-world impacts in ways few movies do: According to Punch, the Alabama Slammer wouldn’t have its widespread name recognition if it weren’t for that Cocktail, and you can still find neon signs reading “Cocktails & Dreams” at bars all over the country. For better or worse (definitely worse), it’s an unshakable part of American drinking culture and history, necessary context to understand the craft cocktail renaissance of the 2000s and everything that came after. — NMB

Mystic Pizza (1988)

Although it’s widely remembered as the movie that helped launch Julia Roberts’s career, Mystic Pizza is a lot more than that: a charming, tonally perfect portrait of three young waitresses at a small-town pizzeria the summer after high school. Roberts stars as the headstrong Daisy, Annabeth Gish as her bookish sister, Kat, and Lili Taylor as their best friend, Jojo, ambivalently engaged to be married. The pizzeria functions as both a source of income and a center of gravity for the three, who hover on the cusp of adulthood with dreams of what they want their futures to be. The movie never condescends to its working-class characters, or to the local pride that excellent pizza can provoke: When a snotty restaurant critic visits the pizzeria, you hope for a good review every bit as much as you hope for Daisy, Kat, and Jojo to get what they want in life. — RFM

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

Probably the greatest friends-to-lovers rom-com to ever rom-com, written by Nora Ephron and starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, When Harry Met Sally follows the friendships and relationships of its two protagonists over the course of 12 years in New York City. As is true for so many New Yorkers, much of Harry and Sally’s life together happens at restaurants. It’s at restaurants that they learn who the other is at their core and then become real friends. Sally is whip-smart and unapologetically herself: Consider her fake orgasm while eating pastrami at Katz’s just to prove a point (“I’ll have what she’s having”) or even the way she delivers a monologue of requests every time she orders. (“Not only does she always pick the best thing on the menu, but she orders it in a way even the chef didn’t know how good it could be,” as Harry puts it.) Harry is funny and secretly warm, at his best when he’s in dialogue with Sally. Here, restaurants are the ultimate life backdrop, or, as Sally’s friend Marie (Carrie Fisher) quotes from New York magazine to Harry’s friend Jess (Bruno Kirby): “Restaurants are to people in the ’80’s what theaters were to people in the ’60’s.” — Hillary Dixler Canavan, restaurant editor

Goodfellas (1990)

Anyone who’s watched Goodfellas has permanently altered the way they approach garlic. But outside of the iconic scene of Paulie Cicero slicing cloves with a razor blade in prison, director Martin Scorsese shows how food and Italian American mob life are intertwined. This thing of theirs is nothing without wooing dates with prime tables at elite supper clubs, laying low at mom’s house while eating her pasta, and making a Sunday gravy in between drug runs. — JS

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

Some may say that 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, starring Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy, isn’t a food movie. But this film, based on Fannie Flagg’s classic, similarly titled Southern novel, uses food to explore some of its biggest themes — love, revenge, and reclaiming one’s power. Bates stars as Evelyn Couch, a put-upon housewife who’s steeped in diet culture and stuck with an ungrateful husband until she meets Ninny Threadgoode (Tandy) while visiting a relative in the nursing home. The two strike up a friendship, and Ninny shares with Evelyn a colorful array of stories from her life in early 20th-century Whistle Stop, Alabama.

Ninny’s stories largely center the relationship between her older sister Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and her best friend Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker), who eventually fall in love after they deal with Ruth’s abusive husband in a decidedly dark (and smoky) way. The two run the town’s Whistle Stop Cafe, serving their fried green tomatoes and other Southern comfort staples as they confront terminal cancer, family chaos, and queer love in the 1920s American South. — AM

Movie images: Getty Images, Searchlight, MovieStillsDB, Touchstone Pictures/MovieStillsDB

Like Water for Chocolate (1992)

Based on Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel of the same name, Like Water for Chocolate is the film that has arguably done more than any other to equate food with the expression of emotion. Its story, directed for the screen by Alfonso Arau, follows Tita (Lumi Cavazos), a young woman living in early 1900s Mexico. Tita is deeply in love with Pedro (Marco Leonardi), but forbidden to marry him due to a family tradition. Instead, Pedro marries one of Tita’s sisters, while Tita, forced by said tradition to take care of her mother, channels her feelings into the food she cooks. This is a film in which tears baked into a wedding cake cause the guests to cry and vomit, and a quail dish made with petals from an illicit bouquet provokes overwhelming horniness in all who consume it. It’s little surprise Like Water for Chocolate inspired similar films (hello, Simply Irresistible and Woman on Top) and that, decades later, its passion still burns. — RFM

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

This early Ang Lee comedy-drama is one of those films that it’s impossible to watch without working up an appetite. Chu is a banquet chef with three adult daughters. On Sundays, he gives his talents over to preparing elaborate family meals, and Sunday after Sunday, we watch their lives take dramatic turns, as the dinner table becomes the setting for the seemingly sudden announcements of pregnancies, marriages, and other major life decisions. The importance of food to these characters’ lives is right there in the title — “eat” comes first, after all — but it’s underscored in perhaps the most devastating of the dramatic twists when Chu loses his sense of taste, forcing him to leave his job in shame. The loss is a metaphor — it comes as the chef feels increasingly unmoored by his life outside of the kitchen — but it also makes clear that in the world of the film, life has little enjoyment without the presence of good food and the ability to appreciate it. — MB

Big Night (1996)

More than any other movie on this list, Big Night captures the agony and the ecstasy of restaurant life. The highs are profound — eldest brother, Primo (Tony Shalhoub), is a culinary genius, his talent as a chef is at the heart of the restaurant he runs with his younger brother, Secondo (Stanley Tucci), in New Jersey, the two having emigrated from Italy. The business, however, is in shambles. Primo’s artistry and vision makes him resistant to meeting the demands of his customer base who, in 1950’s fashion, make requests of him like adding a side of spaghetti to their risotto. While their restaurant struggles, the restaurant across the street, Pasquale’s, is thriving under the leadership of owner Pascal (Ian Holm) who happily panders to his guests and hopes to bring Primo onto his staff. In a last-ditch effort to save the restaurant, the brothers heed advice from Pascal and prepare a blowout meal sure to entice celebrity singer Louis Prima to attend, thus earning the restaurant the buzz it needs to survive.

The dinner sequence that follows is part Waiting for Godot, part Italian food fantasia, an amazing demonstration of just how good the restaurant could be at its very best. Bottles of wine litter the table, and few food moments on film hold as much drama as the cooking, and later, unveiling and feasting, of Primo’s timpano, a dome of pasta filled with yet more pasta, sauce, eggs, sausage, and other goodies. The evening is full of ecstasy, but the realities are agony. And it’s that last note that bleeds into the famous final sequence of the movie, a silent choreography of two brothers and a cook in their restaurant kitchen, preparing an omelet that will hopefully heal the wounds delivered the night before. — HDC

Good Burger (1997)

Yes, Good Burger is a goofy kids movie about two dudes who work in a vaguely sketchy burger joint, but this Nickelodeon classic is so much more than that. Dexter Reed (Kenan Thompson) is a delinquent teen who needs a job to make cash after he wrecked his mom’s car, and finally lands at Good Burger, working alongside Ed (Kel Mitchell), a well-meaning, if occasionally clueless, burger-flipper. Amid Dex and Ed’s self-created chaos that frequently involves showers of pink milkshake flying everywhere, a new chain called Mondo Burger threatens Good Burger’s existence, which means that Ed and Dex have to figure out a way to save it.

All the way back in 1997, Good Burger was warning us about the impending problems with chainifcation, the proliferation of chemicals in the American food chain, and labor exploitation in the food industry, all of which we’re still seeing right now. Impossibly prescient for a kids movie, Good Burger also somehow manages to hold up comedically. — AM

Soul Food (1997)

It’s nearly impossible to consume food media that doesn’t extoll the healing powers of home-cooked meals lovingly shared with family in a manner befitting a Hallmark card. In many Black American families, this is embodied by weekly Sunday night dinners, cookouts, or potlucks, typically organized by an auntie or grandmother. But what happens when the primary cook and driver of the tradition falls into a coma? Such is the premise of Soul Food, the star-studded 1997 film following the Joseph family’s struggles to heal past wounds and new betrayals, preserve 40-year-old traditions, and find some way to move forward together.

Told from the perspective of 11-year-old Ahmad Simmons, the movie boasts no shortage of gut-busting punch lines or juicy, gripping drama (cough, cough, a certain affair), but the film’s greatest strength lies in its clear-eyed depictions of meals shared around common tables as both unifying and dividing forces. It’s here that the Joseph family’s loving veneer shatters — and eventually, is reforged. — Jesse Sparks, senior editor

Chocolat (2000)

Chocolat is the kind of film you want to live in. Like please, let me be the seductive, slightly magical Vianne (Juliette Binoche) blowing into the most romantic town in the south of France like Mary Poppins, setting up a picturesque chocolaterie that becomes a home for the wayward and needy, and taking on the Catholic Church’s prudish ideas. It’ll almost have you believe chocolate can change minds, erase prejudice, and reunite families. But mostly, it is the textbook example of how a good food movie should make you salivate. The endless shots of chocolate being stirred, drizzled, unwrapped, and sucked off fingers are made of pure sensuality. — Jaya Saxena

Spirited Away (2001)

It’s not a secret that Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli works magic with food scenes. There’s Ponyo, with its love of all things ham; Kiki’s Delivery Service’s carby bakery wonderland; and The Boy and the Heron’s appreciation of butter and strawberry jam toast. But Spirited Away is the studio’s best tribute to food.

Spirited Away is not an obvious food movie, it’s about a girl, Chihiro, who is thrown into a fantastical, unfamiliar spirit world that she must navigate to save herself and her family. But it’s also about the transformative and grounding power of food, in both a negative and positive sense: Chihiro’s parents turn into literal pigs after eating all the dim sum at an unmanned food stall, but eating onigiri anchors and strengthens Chihiro so she can embark on her quest. Importantly, Spirited Away also includes one of the world’s most iconic food scenes. When the lonely No-Face spirit demands all the food in a glorious display of indulgence, staffers eagerly bring him every edible thing because they want his tips of gold. We witness him gorging from an undulating buffet of hand-drawn foods — including roast pigs, bao, sushi, and all the rice — and can almost taste and smell the savory aromas.

Director Hayao Miyazaki is a mastermind, and he knows that food is an essential part of the worlds — both real and imagined — that we live in. — Nadia Chaudhury, Eater Austin editor

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

There is no truer modern odyssey than a munchies-fueled quest for fast food. Like the deepest emotional journeys, it is singular in focus, total in its commitment, and absurd in its details. Harold & Kumar, an instant classic when it premiered in 2004, expresses this perfectly (it also made me, at 12 years old, laugh so hard I shot Coca-Cola out of my nose). The movie is exactly as funny and stupid as it needs to be to follow in the footsteps of Cheech, Chong, and other stoner comedy virtuosos of the silver screen. But it also captures an ascendant moment in the cult of fast food, which would later develop into widespread internet fandoms for brands like Chick-fil-A and Jollibee. Sure, the Big Mac already held a place of cultural prominence; H&K premiered the same year as Morgan Spurlock’s fast food documentary Super Size Me (box office rank: 149). But Harold & Kumar gave us a preview of how a slider can become an icon of fascination among fans, inflating in our minds entirely beyond any actual gastronomical experience. Rewatching it nearly 20 years later, the bodily humor is still gross, the CGI cheetah is terrible, but the obsession with White Castle is so familiar, and not just because it seamlessly recalls the mythological odyssey. — NMB

Sideways (2004)

Remembered as the film that put pinot noir on the map (and wiped Merlot from it), Sideways is ultimately a film about coping mechanisms. As Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church) seeks sex to quell his insecurities on his bachelor weekend, Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) uses his knowledge and appreciation of fine wine to avoid dealing with heartbreak and anxiety over his unpublished novel.

Amid golden shots of California vineyards, the two must face what the hell is wrong with them, and wine becomes a beautiful metaphor for care, attention, and not letting things go to waste. — Jaya Saxena

Man Push Cart (2005)

Sometimes food isn’t something that sparks passion or nostalgia or reminds you of the beauty of human creation. Sometimes it’s what gets you through the day, especially for the people selling it. This neorealist film, set in post-9/11 New York, follows Pakistani immigrant Ahmad as he drags his coffee and doughnut cart to his corner to dish out quick breakfasts to office workers. He longs to be with his son, to make enough money for an apartment, to maybe even find love again or restart the music career he had in Pakistan. But the only constant is the cart, the day-in-day-out pattern of coffee and tea and bagels, sold to people he’ll never connect with. Yes, it’s bleak, but it’s also deeply human. And a reminder of the lives that exist behind morning coffee. — Jaya Saxena

Movie images: Janus films

Last Holiday (2006)

Everyone loves an underdog. Last Holiday introduces us to one of the most endearing: Georgia Byrd (Queen Latifah), a shy department store worker who leads culinary demonstrations by day and cooks along to Food Network shows by night — only to give her food away as she resigns herself to frozen Lean Cuisine meals and counting Weight Watchers points. That is until an MRI shows she has a life-threatening brain tumor.

With weeks to live, Byrd changes her tune. She quits her job, abandons her beige-cardigan-coded lifestyle, and blows her life’s savings on an eye-popping trip to a Swiss ski chalet, which just so happens to be staffed by the Emeril Lagasse-esque celebrity chef she adores. Heartwarming hilarity ensues as Byrd sheds her self-doubt, speaks her mind, and truly savors all of the rich, luxurious foods she’d once given up. Naturally, her newfound demeanor rubs off on the guests and hotel staff around her.

Tropey at times — excusable, given that this is a 2006 movie featuring LL Cool J — Last Holiday is a delightful detour from the gravitas often attributed to food films. Instead, it’s an ode to the many food lovers often left outside of the camera’s gaze and a charming reminder that life is meant to be enjoyed, full-fat butter liberally applied, and kitchens gleefully shared. — Jesse Sparks

Waitress (2007)

As Jenna, the heroine of director Adrienne Shelly’s quirky comedy about an unhappily married, unhappily pregnant diner waitress somewhere in the American South, Keri Russell spends a lot of time making pie. Pie is her calling card — she is described as a “pie genius” — as well as a way to channel her feelings, as pies with names like “I Hate My Husband Pie” and “Pregnant, Miserable, Self-Pitying Loser Pie” attest. Waitress belongs to a subgenre of movies that center diners and their employees, but few have used food as such an explicit means of self-expression, and, ultimately, self-actualization. And while the movie has numerous charms, including an off-kilter sense of humor and a supporting cast that includes Cheryl Hines and Shelly herself as Jenna’s fellow waitresses, what lingers is its sweetly stubborn insistence that while pie can’t solve all the world’s problems, it can certainly offer an opportunity for personal salvation. — RFM

Ratatouille (2007)

There is something utterly beautiful about unlikely scenarios, like putting pickles on pizza, dipping fries in milkshakes, or even a rat cooking high-end French cuisine. The latter is the absurd premise of Ratatouille, the touching animated film about a little rat, Remy, who is a fantastic cook. I could go on about the cultural impact of the film — and, in fact, we have — but what Ratatouille does so well is visually and sonically depict the beauty of food. The way Remy experiences food and particularly food combinations is stunning. For example, the moment he takes bites of cheese and strawberries together is an explosion of abstract shapes and squiggles, soundtracked by an orchestral burst.

Of course, it’s the broader message that solidifies Ratatouille as a quintessential food movie, namely that cooking is open to everybody, no matter who you are. Remy learns to reconcile his multiple selves: the one who wants to cook, the one who wants to be a friend to Linguini, and the one who is a rat brother and son. As ghost Gusteau tells Remy, “Food always comes to those who love to cook,” and while Remy initially disagrees, he eventually proves himself wrong. Anyone can cook as long as they have real passion, even tiny chef rats. —NC

Julie & Julia (2009)

Directed by Nora Ephron and starring the dream team of Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Stanley Tucci, Julie & Julia was always destined to be a comfort movie for the ages. What makes it so charming upon each rewatch is the way its characters find pleasure in food: Child’s excitement as she tries cassoulet and sole meunière in France, and Powell’s relatable sense of accomplishment as she learns from Child’s recipes how to poach eggs and boil lobsters. By connecting Powell’s and Child’s lives, Julie & Julia is an encouraging and heartwarming — if not entirely realistic — story of two women who were, as Adams says in character, “saved by food.” It also commemorates a major inflection point in modern food culture: when blogging became a serious, viable pursuit, paving the way for today’s creator economy. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter

It’s Complicated (2009)

Nancy Meyers is well known for meticulously crafting worlds in which privileged characters play out dramas with comfortingly low stakes. The most delicious of these is showcased in It’s Complicated. Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) finds herself in an affair with her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin), who left her for a much younger woman years earlier. Jane, reeling from her new status as the other woman, is thrown for even more of a loop when her kind architect, played by Steve Martin, shows romantic interest. However, those plot points aren’t nearly as important as the beautiful Santa Barbara, California, setting and the food scenes it gives way to. Jane is a notably good cook, with a predictably enviable kitchen and access to the finest Californian ingredients. She also owns a bakery and in an iconic two-minute sequence, she and the architect visit the shop after hours and whip up some chocolate croissants. It’s Jane at her most joyful, as she and the architect toss around the dough, turning it into beards and the triangles of a bikini top (they’re also high). In a film full of aspirational moments, this is the scene we would most like to recreate. — MB

The Trip (2010)

A food film for anyone who loves to plan their travel around eating, The Trip follows comedian Steve Coogan on a newspaper assignment to review some of northern England’s best restaurants. For the trip (get the name) he brings along fellow comedian Rob Brydon, and off they drive to feast at restaurants like L’Enclume, Holbeck Ghyll, and the Inn at Whitewell. Coogan and Brydon play versions of themselves; their wives and girlfriends are actresses, their circumstances — and the Observer article — are fictional, too, but the dynamic the two cultivate meal after meal is real. Their sprawling conversations as they drive through gorgeous scenery and dine in some of the most acclaimed restaurants in England are less My Dinner with Andre and more unending comedy routine, with the duo’s dialogue and numerous impressions totally improvised. And while it’s clear that while they’re not food experts (Coogan at one point describes a tomato soup as tasting like tomatoes), they do hit on some of the highs and lows of haute cuisine — the scourge of sauce dots, the sometimes silly naming conventions of the dishes (scallops, Brydon muses, can’t be “rested” since they’re dead), but also how damn good fine food and wine can be. And underneath the laugh-out-loud performances lies a moving portrait of middle-aged life, love, and friendship. And so much food. — HDC

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

With artsy close-ups of ingredients being prepped and plated, set to soaring orchestral music, almost every food documentary now owes some of its aesthetic sensibilities to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In a novel approach for the time, Jiro took a Planet Earth-inspired eye to shots of hands slicing fish and forming sushi. With it, director David Gelb changed not only how we watch food in the United States, but also how we eat. The award-winning Jiro turned its namesake Jiro Ono into a global phenomenon, making reservations at Sukiyabashi Jiro a hot commodity. In doing so, it also popularized the concept of omakase and spurred a high-end sushi boom in the United States. Of course, Jiro then paved the way for Gelb to make the influential Chef’s Table. — BM

The Lunchbox (2013)

What’s more romantic than a crossed-wires connection a la You’ve Got Mail, especially one in which two people fall in love through the making of and eating of food? This is the core of The Lunchbox. In the international production directed by Ritesh Batra, housewife Ila Singh lovingly cooks lunch tiffins for her husband to be delivered by way of Mumbai’s intricate and lengthy dabbawala system. But it turns out the operation isn’t perfect and her meals end up with a different person in a different office, Saajan Fernandes (played by the late great Irrfan Khan).

Aside from the meet-cute, will-they-won’t-they plotline, The Lunchbox is about food’s particular ability to bring people together. Saajan and Ila develop their friendship as she prepares him dishes she knows he’ll enjoy, like the aubergine stir-fry. Meanwhile, Saajan begrudgingly shares these meals with his new trainee Sheikh, who then becomes a familial figure in his life. The film also beautifully showcases the ways cooking can be a craft, especially in South Asian cultures. I recognize the way Ila taste-tests by dabbing bits on her palm — much like my mom does — and the way her upstairs neighbor could smell that certain spices were missing from a dish. It’s clear the making and enjoying of food is one of those less obvious love languages that director Batra just gets. —NC

Chef (2014)

In the film that Jon Favreau directed, wrote, and stars in, Carl Casper is an acclaimed chef, stuck creating generic crowd-pleasing menus at a fancy-pants Los Angeles restaurant. As he becomes increasingly bored by the whole shtick, he realizes that he wants and needs to cook without any restraints. He gets his wish after he’s fired for blowing up at a food critic over a bad review, and not knowing what else to do, he opens a food truck, El Jefe, focused on Cuban sandwiches. He then takes the truck on a cross-country road trip that serves the dual purpose of allowing Carl to reconnect with his son and find a way back to cooking.

Favreau loves food. Each dish prep scene is shot with care, whether it’s Carl slicing vegetables at the restaurant, pressing a grilled cheese in his home kitchen, or fashioning an assembly line of sandwiches in a tiny food truck space. The same goes for every bite taken on screen, including beignets in New Orleans and brisket straight from the smoker in Austin (hi, Aaron Franklin). But ultimately, Chef is about who we cook for and why, and posits that being a great chef comes from making delicious food for yourself and loved ones. —NC

Movie images: IFC Films, Columbia Pictures/MovieStillsDB, MovieStillsDB

Phantom Thread (2017)

Sometimes, you need to lightly poison your lover to make them act right. Or at least that’s the message at the heart of Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 epic. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Reynolds, an intense, obsessive, and sometimes paranoid dressmaker with a voracious appetite. He meets Alma (Vicky Krieps) when she’s waitressing at a restaurant and the two quickly become enmeshed, with Alma moving in with Reynolds to serve as his creative muse. While those who have only seen the trailer might not immediately clock it as a food film, the drama and resolution in Phantom Thread always hinge on a meal. There’s the restaurant where Alma and Reynolds meet, the ill-fated dinner she prepares for him in a display of her devotion, and a pivotal, poisoned mushroom tea, which Alma gives to Reynolds so that she can be the one to nurse him back to health. Finally, the film culminates in a mushroom omelet, lovingly prepared by Alma, that reveals the depth of this complicated couple’s connection. — AM

Bao (2018)

Domee Shi’s Pixar short Bao acted as the intro to Incredibles 2, but I’d argue that it stole the show. In just under eight minutes, Bao told the story of a mother whose baozi becomes sentient. After her coddled dumpling baby grows into an independent adult, the mother impulsively eats him. We realize then that it was a dream, representing the mother’s fear of growing distant from her real, non-dumpling son. Though the twist horrified some viewers, it resonated deeply with others, especially within the Asian American community, for its depiction of overprotective parents and complicated familial love. Every ingredient and the entire dumpling-making process is rendered in beautiful, drool-worthy detail, informed by tutorials from Shi’s mother; Shi’s animated food only improved in her 2022 feature-length debut, Turning Red. — BM

First Cow (2019)

All of the characters in Kelly Reichardt’s masterpiece First Cow know that pastries are out of place in the unforgiving frontier of the 19th-century Oregon Territory. The oily cakes and clafoutis that Cookie (John Magaro) makes are too sweet for a world made savage by greedy, violent interlopers. The titular cow, who lost her bull and calf on the journey to the frontier, is also out of place. When Cookie and King-Lu (Orion Lee) take to secretly milking the cow for a fledgling bakery pop-up, essentially stealing from the local governor who owns the animal, they risk their physical safety, but they also provide purpose where before there was meaningless solitude. Cookie’s pastries not only make use of the cow’s milk, which will never go to her lost calf; they also bring immense joy to local customers otherwise consumed with individual material gain. The protagonists also find a shared purpose in their scheme, as well as comfort, support, and a kind of love in the domestic sphere they carve out of the cold forest, a liminal place that exists outside the rules of polite society and the annals of progress (as King-Lu puts it, “History hasn’t gotten here yet”). In this world, baking becomes a subtle act of rebellion by offering cohesion to disparate elements and motivation to lost people. That’s still true everywhere history has arrived. — NMB

Minari (2020)

Minari follows a Korean immigrant family as they try to build a life in rural Arkansas in the 1980s, drawing partially on the experiences of director Lee Isaac Chung. Jacob (Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) work as chicken sexers for the poultry industry in order to support their two young children, though Jacob would rather make a living growing Korean vegetables. Arriving from Korea to assist the family, Monica’s mom Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) slowly builds a relationship with her grandchildren, while Jacob’s pursuit of his farm creates other tensions. Tender and moving, Minari — which gets its name from the Korean word for water celery — frames food as a symbol of hope and of sacrifice in pursuit of the “American dream.” — BM

Pig (2021)

Pig was the movie of the summer back in 2021 (or at the very least, my movie of the summer, a substantial portion of which I spent blogging about it). It stars Nicolas Cage as retired chef Robin Feld, who has been living off the grid in the Oregon woods, supporting himself by foraging truffles with his titular truffle pig. When his pig is stolen, Rob must return to the grisly underworld of Portland’s dining scene to get her back, forcing him to confront the life he left behind in the process. It might sound like John Wick, but the mood in Pig is far, well, moodier, exploring themes like loss, grief, artistry, genius, and finding one’s purpose. The film is at turns intimate (Rob connects with a young kid in the backyard of the home he used to live in) and imaginative (an underground restaurant worker fight club lit by chandeliers). And there’s plenty of food, as a movie about a chef should have: There’s the high-end restaurant Eurydice, a send-up of pretentious cheffery — and by contrast there’s the scene where we finally see Rob cook, a beautifully rustic pigeon with chanterelles designed for the movie by Portland’s own Gabe Rucker. A must-see for fans of Cage, mushrooms, and/or tear-jerkers, Pig is unexpected and compelling, a uniquely introspective food film. — HDC

The Menu (2022)

What would you pay for the most exclusive dining experience in the world? That’s the question at the heart of The Menu, director Mark Mylod’s 2002 dark comedy-horror film. Ralph Fiennes terrifies as the tyrannical chef Julian, a man with a lust for revenge on those who have misunderstood or undervalued his culinary genius. His victims are a dining room full of elites, played by a stellar ensemble cast that includes John Leguizamo, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Nicholas Hoult. They’re the kind of people who have earned enough money and power in uniquely unscrupulous ways to fritter away $1,200 per person for dinner — except for Margot (Taylor-Joy), a sharp-witted sex worker who’s determined to make it out alive. The film unfolds much like a tasting menu, and each course more terrifying than the next. That terror culminates in one hell of a dessert, er, ending — one that’s all but assured to have you laughing out loud. — AM

The Taste of Things (2024)

Set in France in the 19th century, The Taste of Things is the love story of a cook named Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) and her gastronome employer Dodin (Benoît Magimel). It’s a film that understands the deep romance in cooking for, and with, another person. Accordingly, the story is told through food, which director Trần Anh Hùng presents in indulgent, drawn-out, and atmospheric detail; the film begins with an ensemble cooking sequence that’s 40 minutes long in the most generous estimations.

Trần excels at displaying cooking sensually. He lets the camera linger on the steam that billows from a pot of stock, for example, and then holds it there as Dodin drips that stock onto the taut skin of a chicken, the kitchen aglow in golden-hour light. These lush visuals are enhanced by the crisp sounds of cooking, with no soundtrack for distraction. It’s a film that makes you yearn not only for the food, but also for the lifestyle — of spending your days cooking in a sun-drenched chateau kitchen, because you love the act of doing it, and then sharing that food with someone you love. — BM

Marylu E. Herrera (she/her) is a Chicago-based Chicana collage, print media, craft, and fiber artist. Her collage work has been featured in the Cut, the Los Angeles Times, Bitch Media, Eater, and Punch.

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If you’re looking for Knife Steel Nerds Christmas gifts, some good choices are the book Knife Engineering, the book The Story of Knife Steel, and the Buck knife model 501 “The Larrin.”

Video

There is a video version of the following information:

Why Analyze AI Capabilities?

I’ve had multiple people over the past couple years send me steel compositions that ChatGPT came up with. People want to know what I think, and if AI is going to be taking over everything now, including the design of new steels. I took a few of the steel compositions people sent me so I can analyze them to see if they would work. Can ChatGPT come up with new and fresh ideas to revolutionize knife steel? Let’s look at them and see:

Infinisteel

ChatGPT has some grandiose claims for this first steel:

Introducing the revolutionary super steel, InfiniSteel! This cutting-edge material boasts unparalleled toughness, edge retention, and corrosion resistance, surpassing any other steel on the market. By exploiting a unique interplay between various alloying elements, InfiniSteel exhibits remarkable properties that set it apart from conventional steel grades.

The InfiniSteel composition consists of:

Iron (Fe): 75%
Carbon (C): 1.2%
Chromium (Cr): 20%
Vanadium (V): 2.5%
Molybdenum (Mo): 0.8%
Tungsten (W): 0.5%

The biggest issue with this steel is that it won’t harden. When heat treating knife steel the main step is “austenitizing,” the high temperature step before the steel is quenched (rapidly cooled). You can read more about austenitizing in this article. It is called the austenitizing temperature because the steel transforms from the low temperature ferrite phase to the high temperature austenite phase. Ferrite is the normal “phase” of iron at room temperature which has a certain set of properties, such as being magnetic and soft. When you heat up iron to high temperature the atoms rearrange themselves into a different structure called austenite, which has different properties, one of them being that it is not magnetic. When you quench austenite it transforms to the hard steel phase martensite. If you don’t transform to austenite at your heat treatment temperature you will still have soft ferrite after heat treating and thus it will not make a good knife edge.

Some elements are “ferrite stabilizers” and some are “austenite stabilizers.” This steel has a relatively high content of ferrite stabilizers including 20% Cr, 2.5% V, 0.8% Mo, and 0.5% W. This would be ok if there were enough austenite stabilizers, but the only austenite stabilizer in the steel is carbon, and 1.2% is not enough for all of those ferrite stabilizers. ChatGPT is just adding elements in because when it reads random articles online that say that each element does some beneficial thing. It doesn’t know anything about balancing different elements together and it has no idea that it needs to have enough carbon or other austenite stabilizers to go with all of those ferrite stabilizers.

Here’s a detailed explanation of the role each component plays in the alloy and how they contribute to the exceptional performance of InfiniSteel:

Iron (Fe): As the primary element in steel, iron provides the backbone of the material’s structure. It imparts strength and toughness to the alloy, ensuring InfiniSteel can withstand substantial loads and resist deformation under various conditions.

Carbon (C): The addition of 1.2% carbon significantly improves the strength and hardness of the alloy. This results in superior edge retention, allowing InfiniSteel to maintain a sharp edge even after extensive use. Additionally, the high carbon content enables the formation of carbides, which further enhance wear resistance.

Chromium (Cr): Chromium contributes to InfiniSteel’s exceptional corrosion resistance. At 20%, it forms a stable, adherent, and self-healing passive film on the steel’s surface, effectively protecting it from oxidizing agents. This film also enhances the steel’s resistance to various corrosive environments, such as those with high humidity or in contact with aggressive chemicals.

Vanadium (V): Vanadium’s primary function is to refine the steel’s grain structure, leading to enhanced toughness and resistance to impact. At 2.5%, it forms hard vanadium carbides that strengthen the material and improve its edge retention properties. Additionally, vanadium aids in stabilizing the passive film, further enhancing the steel’s corrosion resistance.

Molybdenum (Mo): Molybdenum strengthens the steel matrix and improves its resistance to high-temperature creep and stress rupture. At 0.8%, it also contributes to the formation of a more stable passive film, increasing the corrosion resistance of InfiniSteel.

Tungsten (W): The addition of 0.5% tungsten enhances the high-temperature performance and hardness of InfiniSteel. It forms carbides that provide excellent wear resistance, contributing to the alloy’s outstanding edge retention properties.

Through this unique interplay of alloying elements, InfiniSteel achieves an unprecedented level of performance in terms of toughness, edge retention, and corrosion resistance. The combination of carefully selected constituents enables the alloy to outshine any other steel on the market, making it the ideal choice for a wide range of demanding applications, such as aerospace, automotive, marine, and cutting tools industries.

The explanations of what the different elements are doing are also very dumb and obviously based on random articles from non-experts online. For example, under iron it says that the iron “imparts strength and toughness to the alloy.” This is a very odd thing to say about the steel since steel is made up of iron. Iron is pretty soft before we add other elements to it, especially carbon. So why would you describe iron as imparting “strength”? Sounds like something a dumb AI would write.

It also says that “Vanadium’s primary function is to refine the steel’s grain structure, leading to enhanced toughness and resistance to impact.” Small amounts of vanadium, like 0.1-0.2%, are added to prevent grain growth. In knife steels when you have 0.3% or more added, that is for wear resistance. In that case it is adding wear resistance and reducing toughness. So the claim by the AI that the vanadium is added for enhanced toughness is nonsense.

The AI also says that molybdenum was added for “its resistance to high-temperature creep and stress rupture.” High temperature creep is when a material is held under stress at relatively high temperature for long periods of time. The material slowly deforms, which is called creep. Resisting creep is totally unnecessary in a knife, and the AI is just pulling things from various places to support its choices in a seemingly random way.

No manganese or silicon was added to the steel. These are not always shown on datasheets but are present in all tool steels that I am aware of. I would say it just didn’t mention them, but it also gave the percentage of iron (75%) which leaves no more room for Mn and Si.

User
Please provide a detailed analysis of Infinisteel vs Magnacut?

ChatGPT
InfiniSteel and MagnaCut are both high-performance steels designed for demanding applications. Here’s a detailed analysis comparing their properties and performance:

Composition:

MagnaCut:
Carbon (C): 1.15%
Chromium (Cr): 17.0%
Manganese (Mn): 0.6%
Nickel (Ni): 0.3%
Nitrogen (N): 0.18%
Vanadium (V): 4.0%
Molybdenum (Mo): 2.0%

Comparison:

Toughness: Both InfiniSteel and MagnaCut boast high levels of toughness due to their vanadium content, which refines the grain structure of the steel. InfiniSteel contains 2.5% vanadium, while MagnaCut has a higher vanadium content at 4.0%. The higher vanadium content in MagnaCut might result in slightly better toughness compared to InfiniSteel.

Corrosion resistance: InfiniSteel has a higher chromium content (20%) than MagnaCut (17%). This results in better passive film formation and, consequently, superior corrosion resistance. Additionally, MagnaCut’s nitrogen content (0.18%) further enhances its corrosion resistance. However, InfiniSteel is likely to have the edge in this category due to its higher chromium content.

…

The person who sent me this also asked ChatGPT how the steel would compare to MagnaCut. Somehow ChatGPT managed to get the composition of MagnaCut wrong. MagnaCut has 10.7% chromium but ChatGPT says it has 17%. It also has 0.2% nitrogen as a target, so the 0.18% nitrogen that ChatGPT reports could technically be a nitrogen content that would be seen in an individual bar of steel, but that is not the target composition. And it also reports that MagnaCut has 0.3% nickel, even though nickel is not added to the steel and is not reported in the datasheet.

ChatGPT also repeats its mistake from earlier, saying that vanadium in higher amounts leads to more toughness. So it says that MagnaCut would have higher toughness because it has 4% vanadium instead of the 2.5% in “Infinisteel.” That is not how it works.

My Grade: D-

It is difficult to give the steel high marks when you can’t harden it.

Ultravium Steel

— create a unique composition of elements for a great blade steel that does not exist yet…
ChatGPT:
Creating a unique composition for a great blade steel requires a deep understanding of metallurgy and the desired properties in the resulting steel. While this composition doesn’t exist yet, we can propose an innovative blend of elements to produce an exceptional blade steel:

Name: Ultravium Steel

Composition:

Carbon (C): 2.5%
A higher carbon content contributes to increased hardness, making the blade exceptionally sharp and able to hold an edge for extended periods.
Vanadium (V): 7%
Vanadium adds wear resistance, enhancing the blade’s durability and edge retention. It also aids in fine-grain structure formation, crucial for sharpness.
Molybdenum (Mo): 3%
Molybdenum boosts the steel’s strength, toughness, and resistance to corrosion. It also helps maintain blade sharpness under high-stress conditions.
Tungsten (W): 5%
Tungsten further improves hardness, wear resistance, and overall blade performance. It enhances the steel’s ability to withstand extreme temperatures.
Niobium (Nb): 1.5%
Niobium promotes grain refinement, which contributes to sharpness and overall blade strength. It also adds stability to the steel’s microstructure.
Cobalt (Co): 2%
Cobalt increases the steel’s strength and high-temperature performance, making it ideal for blades subjected to extreme conditions.
Copper (Cu): 0.5%
Copper adds a touch of corrosion resistance to the steel while maintaining its strength and hardness.
Silicon (Si): 1%
Silicon enhances the steel’s toughness and resistance to wear, improving its overall durability.

ChatGPT starts out by saying that a unique composition for knife steel “requires a deep understanding of metallurgy,” which I agree with. However, this composition shows that ChatGPT also does not have this required deep understanding. The approach appears to have been adding large amounts of most of the major elements. This steel is a good example of how ChatGPT “reads” things online that say all the positive things that different elements do. When a layman reads about different elements this is also typically what they see. It says what an element does to improve properties but it doesn’t usually explain the tradeoffs or how elements are balanced or how they work together. It says that molybdenum “helps maintain blade sharpness under high-stress conditions.” I don’t know what that means or how molybdenum is helping. Is a “high stress” condition one where an individual is under attack? Or is “high stress” referring to “engineering stress” where a load is being applied to a knife? It says that tungsten is added “to withstand extreme temperatures.” What kind of temperatures? Is this a knife for use in volcanoes? It says that niobium is for grain refinement, but 1.5% is way more than necessary for grain refinement. That amount is for wear resistance and ChatGPT didn’t even mention wear resistance. Cobalt was added again for “high-temperature performance,” “for blades subjected to extreme conditions.” And again I say that if the temperature is too high for the knife it is way, way too hot for humans. Copper is added for “a touch of corrosion resistance” for some reason.

There is a big omission with this steel, however, which is chromium. ChatGPT didn’t add any of it. This means the steel does not have any corrosion resistance to speak of (that 0.5% copper isn’t doing much). But chromium is also added to steels for other reasons. It is present in nearly all high alloy tool steels, in part so that it has high “hardenability” so that it can be quenched more slowly and still fully harden. Not adding it is very strange for this steel.

Heat Treatment:

Ultravium Steel would undergo a precise heat treatment process, including quenching and tempering, to maximize its hardness, toughness, and fine-grain structure. The ideal hardness level would be around HRC 65-66.
Properties:

Ultravium Steel would be renowned for its exceptional hardness, wear resistance, and edge retention. It would maintain sharpness even under heavy use and extreme conditions.
The steel’s fine-grain structure would contribute to its ability to take and hold a razor-sharp edge.
Superior strength and toughness would make it suitable for a wide range of cutting applications, from fine slicing to heavy-duty chopping.
Ultravium Steel would exhibit excellent corrosion resistance, reducing the need for extensive maintenance and ensuring longevity.
It would be an ideal choice for high-performance knives, cutting tools, and blades used in demanding environments.
Applications:

Chef’s knives: Ultravium Steel would excel in the kitchen, making it a favorite among professional chefs and culinary enthusiasts.
Survival and outdoor knives: Blades made from this steel would prove highly reliable in rugged outdoor conditions.
Industrial cutting tools: Ultravium Steel would be sought after for its ability to withstand heavy use in manufacturing and construction.
Military and tactical knives: Its strength and durability would make it suitable for combat and tactical applications.
Artistic blades: Bladesmiths and artisans would appreciate its ability to hold intricate patterns and designs in damascus or layered steel.
While this hypothetical Ultravium Steel may not exist yet, advancements in metallurgy continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Such an innovative blend of elements could revolutionize the world of blade steel, offering exceptional performance and versatility to knife makers and users alike.

ChatGPT then claims that Ultravium would have “excellent corrosion resistance” which it certainly would not have without any chromium. It also says that bladesmiths would like it for “its ability to hold intricate patterns and designed in damascus or layered steel.” I don’t know what it means to “hold” an intricate pattern. But bladesmiths would likely not prefer this steel for Damascus because the high alloy content would make it more difficult to forge weld.

My Grade: C-

Since this steel hardens I will give it a C-. Can’t give higher than that since it skipped chromium while claiming the steel would have high corrosion resistance.

MagnaCut+

— ChatGPT
Hypothetical Composition for “MagnaCut Plus”
• • •
Element Proposed Content

Carbon (C) 1.05%
Chromium (Cr) 11.5%
Vanadium (V) 3.0%
Molybdenum (Mo) 2.0%
Tungsten (W) 0.5%
Nitrogen (N) 0.3%
Niobium (Nb) 0.5%
Cobalt (Co) 1.5%

Expected Improvements
• Wear Resistance: The increase in vanadium and tungsten would lead to harder vanadium and tungsten carbides, resulting in better edge retention.
• Toughness: The slight decrease in carbon and the introduction of cobalt would help maintain or even improve toughness.
• Corrosion Resistance: The increase in chromium and nitrogen should enhance resistance to rust and corrosion.
• Grain Refinement: More niobium would aid in creating a finer grain structure, resulting in better overall balance.
Potential Drawbacks
• Higher Cost: Adding tungsten and cobalt increases the cost of production.
• More Challenging Heat Treatment: The changes may require more precise heat treatment to unlock the full potential of the alloy.
• Diminished Ease of Sharpening: Higher vanadium content can make sharpening slightly more difficult.
This proposed “MagnaCut Plus” would aim to push the limits of what MagnaCut offers without compromising the balanced properties that make it so desirable. It would likely excel in applications requiring even greater edge retention and toughness, such as high-performance cutting tools and hard-use knives.

This steel was requested by the user to be an improvement on MagnaCut. However, ChatGPT offers from very strange reasoning:

“The increase in vanadium and tungsten would lead to harder vanadium and tungsten carbides, resulting in better edge retention.”

The vanadium content was reduced from MagnaCut, down to 3% from 4%. So I don’t know why ChatGPT thinks it has increased vanadium. It also claims that it added tungsten to form “tungsten carbides.” In these types of high alloy steels, adding a tiny amount of tungsten does not lead to the formation of any carbides that are tungsten-rich. The tungsten incorporates into other carbide types such as vanadium-rich or chromium-rich carbides. And those carbides would not be any harder. A small addition of tungsten seems to be a theme for ChatGPT and I don’t really see the point. To be fair, there are several stainless steels from Takefu where they added small amounts of tungsten and claimed similar reasoning. But I have also been on record saying I think that the tungsten is unnecessary in these steels.

“More niobium would aid in creating a finer grain structure.” The niobium content is less than MagnaCut, 0.5% vs 2%. so it does not have “more niobium.”

“The changes may require more precise heat treatment to unlock the full potential of the alloy.” Why? Based on what?

Other criticisms of the design require more in-depth analysis with a thermodynamics software that predicts carbide types and alloy in solution. ChatGPT claims an improvement in corrosion resistance because of the higher chromium, but in fact the chromium in solution is reduced in the “MagnaCut+” alloy because of the other elements. There is also  3-5% chromium carbide in the heat treated structure which reduces corrosion resistance. The improvement in corrosion resistance with MagnaCut came from reducing chromium carbide content to near-zero and this steel dropped that innovation for no reason because ChatGPT doesn’t know what it is doing.

The carbide content of MagnaCut+ and MagnaCut would be similar but MagnaCut+ would have half of its carbide be the larger chromium-rich type, reducing toughness. It also claims that cobalt improves toughness, which it doesn’t.

My Grade: C

The steel can be hardened and would be nearly stainless. But calling it MagnaCut+ while reducing corrosion resistance, wear resistance, and toughness from MagnaCut is bad so it gets a C.

Some General Thoughts

In none of the proposals that ChatGPT gave did it ever say that it would make these steels by powder metallurgy. The very high alloy content of these steels means they would not be very good if made with conventional steelmaking. Or at the very least these would not be an improvement on existing steels if they were not made with powder metallurgy. So to not state explicitly that the steel should be made with powder metallurgy is a big omission.

ChatGPT provided no heat treating information. In one case ChatGPT claimed its new alloy would require “more precise heat treatment” but it did not provide any information on temperature ranges the steel might heat treat from. I very much doubt it could give accurate ranges even if asked. Of course in the one case the steel wouldn’t be able to be hardened at all so it wouldn’t be able to give a temperature that would work.

As I have stated several times, the approach ChatGPT takes is to add a lot of every element. It seems to think that elements only improve steel, so add some of all of them and you have a new super steel. It has no real concept of balancing different elements together or what the drawbacks are for adding different elements. It is basically what happens when “internet experts” try to design their own steel. So maybe this is a win for AI because it is now as smart as “internet experts”?

Could a Different AI Design Knife Steel?

ChatGPT is a “large language model,” meaning it was trained on huge amounts of written text from humans. It uses the statistical information about how humans put words together to generate coherent text. However, the model is not good at collecting data about different things, analyzing and comparing that data to find unique insights and solutions, and then to turn that into information. The other problem is that information about how to design tool steels is not really available on the internet, especially not in a form that ChatGPT could use. To really develop a good model we would need a database of information specific to knife steel design. So not a “general AI” but a “narrow AI” for our specific task. This would still be challenging, because the exact data we want does not really exist. The more data we can feed into an AI model the better the results can be. This is the classic example of “garbage in, garbage out.” A lot of information on tool steels and stainless steels are locked within specific steel companies, or even inside the heads of different metallurgists. The scientific literature, including publicly available journal articles and reported experiments, are not usually in a format that would easily be usable in a large database for an AI. Each study is done with different conditions: they hot rolled the steel with a different amount of reduction, they tested different sized coupons, they reported microstructure values but not mechanical properties, they tested Izod toughness instead of charpy toughness, etc.

For my own development of steel I use several different things, including:

1. Journal articles and books which collect different studies to find trends with different variables. Changes to composition, heat treatment, etc.
2. My own data which I have collected the last several years on Knife Steel Nerds – toughness, corrosion resistance, hardness, edge retention, etc.
3. Thermodynamics software – this software does not use machine learning or AI but uses databases to come up with expected microstructure at different temperatures. When it works perfectly you can know what carbides you have and which elements are “in solution” and how much.
4. Simple models for different properties – I have created simple equations which predict properties and there are some that are reported in journal articles and books. Some that I have created have been reported on this website such as this study on corrosion resistance or this study on edge wear.

With those pieces of information I can come up with approximate property targets and balance elements together. A similar process could be used for a “narrow AI.” Existing thermodynamics software could also be plugged into this AI, which is already happening. I think to do much better than humans would likely require a bigger database of experimental data than we currently have. For example, small tweaks could be made to existing steels such as the content of Mo, Si, Mn, N, etc. Currently, without experimentation by making these variations, we don’t know which changes could potentially lead to improvements. If our database was big enough, perhaps an AI could make predictions about which changes to try and thus reduce the number of experiments. But we are not there yet.

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In January 2021, I was a crypto outsider day-trading a few thousand dollars of DOGE on my phone.

By January 2022, my crypto net-worth had ballooned to over $10 million dollars.

Then almost all of it disappeared.

If you want the full story, you should read Crypto Confidential. It takes you through exactly what happened in a fun fast-paced thriller of an adventure that you don’t need to know anything about crypto to enjoy.

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But what I want to share today are some important lessons around money, happiness, and sanity that crystalized as I reflected on the events of the book.

When you hold an asset, whether it’s crypto, stock, real estate, gold, Pokemon cards, whatever, you can always check to see what that asset is worth.

You can look at your stock trading app to see what people are buying and selling the stock for, or you can troll eBay to see what a mint-condition Dark Charizard last sold for.

Based on that data, you can add up the value of all your assets and calculate what your net worth is.

But here’s the problem: your net worth is more or less imaginary based on how easily you can actually sell your assets at their supposed value.

The NFT market has been plagued by this problem ever since it crashed in 2022. At the peak of the market in 2022, the cheapest NFT in the “Gutter Cat Gang” collection was 8.5 ETH, about $27,000.

Now the cheapest is 0.25 ETH, about $850. Ouch.

But it gets worse. Imagine you were extremely bullish on Gutter Cats and you bought 100 of them when they were 0.07 ETH. Well then you’re still up 18 ETH, right?

Probably not. There are only 120 Gutter Cats currently for sale, and only 64 sold in the last month. So if you try to list all of yours for sale, a few things will happen:

• If you list them all, you’d be doubling the supply of Cats for sale.

• Doubling the supply would bring the value of the a Cat down significantly.

• Then other people might see the market tanking and rush in to list their Cats, undercutting you and driving the price down further, which could lead to a death spiral in the price.

• On top of all that, you might have to wait weeks or months for your Cats to sell.

And if you sold them off slowly to exit it over time and not tank the market, it might take months to fully exit your position for who knows how much along the way.

Even at the peak of the market, there were only 12 sales on the day it hit 8.5. So there’s no way you could have exited for 850 ETH,

But you’re not thinking about that when you see the number on your net worth spreadsheet. You’re thinking “I have almost 1,000 ETH!” But that number only exists in your mind.

The same mistake can happen in real estate, where you see houses around you selling for crazy numbers and start to believe your house is also worth that much. Plenty of people (including me) fell victim to this in 2022.

And it can happen in companies too, where the founder of a company thinks they’re actually worth what all their shares are worth on paper, not realizing how quickly their fortune can turn. That’s what happened to the Bird founder who leveraged his shares to buy a mansion in Miami, only to have to sell it for an $11 million dollar loss when the value of Bird collapsed.

If you’re holding a highly traded stock in your Robinhood account and you don’t have too much of it, that part of your net worth is almost 100% real. You could almost instantly convert your 100 shares of GME to $2,500 or whatever it’s worth when you read this.

But if you dabble in crypto gambling, buy speculative assets, start a company, do anything where there might be some degree of liquidity concerns, you have to remember your wealth is partially imaginary.

Obviously this becomes a big problem for me in the book. But I won’t spoil too much…

There’s a point in time during the story where I’m making tens of thousands of dollars a day. I’m not pulling it out into my bank account of course (because I’m an idiot) but I’m seeing that number in my crypto wallet.

So, what do I do? I convince myself that buying a Rolex Submariner is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Watches hold value, it cost less than I was making a day, and I just wanted one. Besides, the money was never going to stop coming in. Right?

My watch guy (yes, I briefly had a watch guy, that’s how bad I got), texted me that he had one in, and I went out and bought it that day. I didn’t think twice about spending the ~$15,000 on it.

That absolutely was not me a year or two earlier. And if you had asked me the year before what I would do if I had seen that kind of money coming in, I would have told you that I’d be saving and investing all of it. Not buying watches and doubling down.

But once things started taking off, all I could think about was how much higher it was going to go. I didn’t feel like I was being indulgent by buying a watch or going to the Gucci store. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the paper net worth and how much money I was going to make. I still felt like I was being responsible. You gotta enjoy your money a little, right?

It’s almost impossible to imagine how much your psychology around money will change once you start seeing those kinds of numbers. And no matter how much of a minimalist, smart saver and investor you think you are, you might be surprised by how quickly your attitude can change.

One of the worst mistakes you can make in a mania is buying things for the long-term when everyone else is playing a short-term game.

The big, core assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are definitely long-term plays. You can buy and hold them and not look at them and feel pretty good about them still being relevant in 10-20 years.

But if you try to take that approach with whatever new fad pops up during the mania, you’re going to be the one left holding the bag.

The “Diamond Hands” meme was one of the most harmful ideologies you could have adopted during the last crypto cycle. When everyone is trying to get rich as quickly as possible, the best way to make sure no one else sells before you do is to convince them that everyone is going to hold onto this asset forever. They’re going to ride it to the moon.

But the reality is that in a speculative mania, you’re playing a giant game of chicken to see how long you can ride it before it collapses. You have to recognize this is true, even if the project behind the token is a fundamentally good one.

Unfortunately, not having diamond hands can lead to some really nasty consequences too, which I also discuss in the book.

This is not just a crypto lesson, it applies to all areas of making money.

The faster the value of something, or the revenue from it, goes up, the faster it can go down too.

The shitcoin that goes up 1,000% overnight might drop 90% the next night.

The website that shoots to the front page of Google overnight might disappear next week.

The Amazon dropshipping opportunity you find and make a ton of money on can be quickly cannibalized by another entrepreneur.

Even the faster you try to learn a language the faster you’ll forget it.

Value and income have a certain invisible “durability” measure.

Buying land and building a parking lot in the middle of Austin is slow, expensive, competitive, but once you have it and it’s making money, it will probably perform for a very long time. It’s durable.

Hacking your way into Twitter followers with engagement bait and algorithm optimizations could build you an audience very quickly, but they’ll jump to the next engagement hacker without thinking twice about it. It’s highly fragile.

Almost everyone who falls for the “passive income” trap eventually realizes this. Yes you can quickly build a business and yes you can make money from it, but that money will go away SHOCKINGLY fast, especially once you stop working on it.

And then you’ll be back to square one and wish you had worked on something more durable in the first place.

You’ll be shocked at how quickly some of the stories in the book turned south. Projects that had hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars in them, could disappear almost overnight. If you tried to put money into them with a long-term investor mindset, you would have gotten cooked.

No matter how smart and rational you think you are, if you start seeing huge dollar amounts attached to something you speculated on, you will get very stupid very fast.

You can’t hope that you’ll make the right decision in that moment. You have to have already made the right decision earlier, before the wave of euphoric success has crashed over you.

Whatever bad impulsive behavior you’re trying to avoid, whether it’s holding a shitcoin too long or not eating desert, the more you can prevent yourself from being able to act impulsively, the better.

One modest version of this is “automatic escalation,” where you can automatically increase the amount that’s deducted from your salary and put into your 401k each year, or with each raise. You won’t notice the small biweekly hit to your income, but over twenty or thirty years it will turn into a significant chunk of change.

There was one way I chose to automate my decision making around selling crypto in the book, and it ended up having a bigger impact than almost anything else I did. If I hadn’t made that one seemingly small choice, I would have been much stupider with my money.

You’re probably thinking “Yeah, duh,” but you’d be surprised by how quickly you forget this fact once you’re in the maelstrom.

And this doesn’t just apply to crypto. Looking at your Stripe dashboard won’t make your business grow. Looking at the scale won’t make you lose weight. You need to check these things occasionally to make sure you’re on the right track, but if you find yourself constantly looking at some metric, it usually means:

1. Too much is riding on that chart’s short-term performance

2. You haven’t sufficiently automated your decision making

Sometimes you’re constantly looking at a chart because you’ve over-invested in a speculative asset. In fact this is probably the best sign you’re over-invested. If it suddenly dropping 10-20% is going to stress you out because you need this one to work, you’re taking on way too much risk.

In the same vein, if you need your business to double its revenue overnight, you’re probably taking too much risk with it and don’t have a sufficiently long-term view.

Other times you’re constantly looking at the chart because you’re trying to decide what to do. If that’s the case, then you haven’t sufficiently automated your decision making, and you need to create better rules for yourself. You should never be looking at a price to decide what to do. You should already have your decisions made about what you will do at different prices.

Remember that when you find yourself constantly checking some metric, it means there’s a deeper problem you need to address. I wish I had known that earlier, because constant chart-checking definitely led to some of the worst consequences in the story.

As I mentioned before, there were some periods of insane income during the events of the book.

And during that time, I felt like I was rich. Money felt like it was falling from the sky.

But when the market crashed and the crypto income stopped, I was terrified. I felt awful not having that income anymore.

It was keeping me up at night, making me neurotic, there were periods where I thought I should give up on this writing goal and go find a job.

Here’s the insane thing though: my net worth was actually higher once the income stopped, and over the last two years while I was feeling that terror, my net worth hasn’t changed much.

I felt the poorest when I was actually the wealthiest, purely because I didn’t see new money coming in.

That is INCREDIBLY STRANGE. But it explains why people have such a hard time enjoying the fruits of their hard work and living off their savings and investments. Having wealth does not feel as good or secure as seeing more money come in.

I feel okay about it now, but it’s taken nearly two years to deprogram that relationship. And it was surprisingly brutal to work through it. So it’s another thing to be wary of if you chase making enough money for early retirement or even just being able to take some time off work.

Even if you have enough money to not need to be worried in the short term, you still will be if you don’t see cash coming in.

My friend Khe Hy talks about this extensively. And he should know, he walked away from a $2 million a year salary on Wall Street.

It’s easy to make a spreadsheet where you look at what you currently spend, figure out how much you need to have saved and invested (The Number) to deduct that amount every year until you die, and then try to save up that much so you can quit your job and live off of it.

But it very, very rarely works out like that.

You might get close to The Number, then decide you actually want a better lifestyle and keep grinding (the money is “too damn good”).

You might get close to The Number, then find your lifestyle has gotten more expensive along the way and you need to increase it.

You also might run into unforeseen obstacles along the way and never get close to it!

I had one goal when the story in the book started, and once I hit it, I immediately increased the goal. Then I increased it again when I hit the next goal.

It wasn’t until something very unexpected happened that I realized I’d completely abandoned the original reasonable goal for a completely unreasonable one.

One of the realizations that helped me step out of crypto world and get back to writing was that I was getting good at the wrong thing.

I imagined five, ten, twenty years in the future, and asked myself how I would feel if I never became an extremely successful crypto investor or programmer.

And the truth was, I wouldn’t care. That skillset was near meaningless to me, it was just a means to an end.

But when I imagined not being a successful author that far in the future, I realized I would be filled with regret.

This is how success can become a curse. If you get really good at the wrong thing and you’re making a bunch of money from it, people are telling you how smart and capable and accomplished you are, you might start to think that it is the thing. And then you wake up one day and realize you were duped.

Obviously you probably need to get good at something you’re less thrilled about to put food on the table and get your career started. But don’t forget that it’s merely a tool for the work you really want to do later. Deprioritize it as soon as you can.

We have a very limited time on earth to go after our dream work. And while you should absolutely make sure you can afford to chase it before you do, once you can chase it you’re robbing yourself of future joy by not getting after it.

This is why the inflation of The Number or getting Too Good at the Wrong Thing is so sad. If you’re already 30 and have, say, 60 years left, another year spent chasing The Number is 1.6% of your life. If you’re 50, it’s 2.5% of your life.

If you want to commit to a career which requires a long time to get rolling, like writing or music or building a business, waiting isn’t going to shorten the startup time.

You’re going to have to spend those 2, 5, 10 years getting it going eventually. Start before it’s too late.

Before you go, don’t forget to order Crypto Confidential if you haven’t yet! If you’ve ever enjoyed a piece of my writing, I know you’re going to absolutely love the book.

Order Crypto Confidential!

A hammering reverberates through the green fields of Ibaraki Prefecture’s countryside. Inside the spartan workshop at Isamitsu Knives, a blade, glowing red from heat, is being pounded into shape.

The manufacturer, located in Sakuragawa, may be small but it has attracted customers far and wide for its craftsmanship, a reputation earned from its use of high-quality steels known as Aogami Super and Shirogami.

The team at Isamitsu consists of just three smiths: Naoko Abe, Gaku Kanatsu and Isamitsu Abe. After spending 15 years working at a traditional knife workshop in the prefecture, Abe, 45, found himself wanting to start his own company, driven by a desire for autonomy and the freedom to improve upon old techniques.

“I started to notice things that were lacking in the process here and there, and I wanted to do things my own way,” Isamitsu says.

Since 2022, Isamitsu’s knife-making process differs from industrial manufacturers in small but significant ways. For example, when steel drops to a certain temperature after being heated, most smiths no longer hammer it due to risk of breakage. Some workshops might choose to hammer the steel as fast as possible when the temperature is high, but at Isamitsu, they do it differently.

Unlike some other knife workshops that try to attract tourists, Isamitsu Knives is located in a particularly rural part of Ibaraki Prefecture. | CASSANDRA LORD

“Instead, we move between the furnace and the hammer over and over again using a low heat,” Abe says. “By doing so, the steel’s structure becomes denser and tougher. We specifically choose to use the best steels, so we want to use them to their full potential.”

While Abe notes that it’s quite common elsewhere for knife makers to specialize in discrete parts of the process, the small team at Isamitsu necessitates that everyone has a hand in each step.

“When everyone has their own station, it’s hard to know how it will affect the next step,” he says. “This way, we’re thinking about the next step while working on the current one, making it easier to improve the final quality.”

Rather than making each knife one by one, the team makes their knives in batches. Key to this is coke, a special type of slow-burning coal the team uses to forge the knives. Coke takes a long time to cool down — in some cases, coke can burn 45% to 90% longer than normal coal — and forging in batches makes the most of that slow burn, which would otherwise be wasted in making a single blade.

Batch orders can take six months to a year to fulfill, but by intentionally overproducing, remaining knives can go onto the market for the general public. This allows Isamitsu to sell its wares online and via local pop-up stalls.

Isamitsu Abe primarily uses Shirogami and Aogami Super steel in his knives. | CASSANDRA LORD

Still, part of the reason for this deliberate overproduction is an attempt to mitigate one of the drawbacks of working with high-quality Aogami Super and Shirogami metals: They are highly sensitive.

“The metals are hard to use,” Abe says. “If you get the temperature just a tiny bit wrong, they start to crack. When working with fire, the most difficult and most important part is temperature control.”

This is evidenced in the multiple lengths the smiths go to to maintain that careful control. In addition to coke for forging (compressing metal into a desired shape), pine charcoal and mizuyaki (water quenching) are used for quick heating and cooling during tempering (a process that makes steel harder and more elastic).

The many hours of manpower are exactly what you pay for when you buy an Isamitsu knife, and they don’t come cheap. According to its online shop, Isamitsu’s cheapest knife is a 90-millimeter Shirogami paring knife priced at ¥17,600 (about $112), while the most expensive blade is a 330-millimeter Aogami Super gyūtō (butcher’s knife) at ¥189,200 (about $1,203).

In 2022, Isamitsu Abe founded Isamitsu Knives after a stint working at a knife workshop he found too traditional. | CASSANDRA LORD

“When I bought my knife, I wasn’t used to the length,” says Taeko Dada, owner-chef of Dada Shokudo in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture. “Once I started using it, I realized that the length was effective especially when cutting large pieces of meat. It felt easy to use and cut without a concerted effort.”

The low yen also makes the knives more effective from purchasers overseas, with chefs singing Isamitsu’s praises from as far away as Southeast Asia and Europe.

Nicolas Tam, head chef at Singapore’s one-Michelin-starred Willow, uses a variety of knives at his restaurant but turns to his Isamitsu-made sujihiki (literally, “flesh slicer”) for cutting meat, and as a showpiece when preparing ingredients in front of guests at the counter.

“(My knife) has an amazing heat treat — which allows (it) to hold its edge for a long time — as well as a good grind and a striking and unique appearance,” Tam says. “To be honest, there aren’t any cons I can think of. I use it daily and don’t have any complaints.”

Dutch knife shop owner Elwin de Veld echoed Tam’s praise of an Isamitsu edge.

Professional chefs and Japanese knife enthusiasts say that knives from Isamitsu are top-quality blades — if you know how to take care of them. | CASSANDRA LORD

“A good knife is not only about the steel,” says the owner of Rangelrooij, a specialty Japanese knife store located in The Hague. “Many factors will influence the quality. Abe-san knows these factors by heart: thin, razor-sharp edges and a very good geometry.”

The thought and creativity that goes into Isamitsu’s work is another element customers cite in their appraisals. Canadian knife collector Franco Alo, who goes by the moniker “Kitchen Knife Guy” on YouTube, lauds Isamitsu’s modern approach to the craft.

“They are attentive to the needs of the community,” Alo says. “I don’t doubt if you asked me years from now that there would be changes, because they aren’t stuck in the ways of the past.”

Alo points out, however, that the high price point means Isamitsu knives likely “aren’t for everyone.”

“Their knives, given how sharp they are, how thin they are, are for a more experienced kitchen knife user,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you need to be a professional chef, but you need to have proper cutting technique, use the proper cutting surface and know how to maintain your knife well to appreciate an Isamitsu. Fail at any one of those three and you’ll likely chip your knife.”

While word may have already spread overseas about the knives themselves, Abe hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and take up the craft of making knives themselves.

“These days, it’s difficult to find a place where you can learn (knife-making techniques),” he says. “So eventually I want to create a kind of video manual for setting everything up and doing it yourself.”

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.

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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.

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There was a little cafe I used to go to that did the best bacon sandwiches. They came in a soft and pillowy white bap. The bacon, thick-cut from a local butcher, was midway between crispy and chewy. Ketchup and HP sauce were served in miniature jars with the sandwich, so you could dab on the exact amount you liked. That was all there was to it: just bread and bacon and sauce. Eating one of these sandwiches, as I did every few weeks, with a cup of strong coffee, felt like an uncomplicated pleasure.

And then, all of a sudden, the bacon sandwich stopped being quite so comforting. For a few weeks in October 2015, half the people I knew were talking about the news that eating bacon was now a proven cause of cancer. You couldn’t miss the story: it was splashed large in every newspaper and all over the web. As one journalist wrote in Wired, “Perhaps no two words together are more likely to set the internet aflame than BACON and CANCER.” The BBC website announced, matter-of-factly, that “Processed meats do cause cancer”, while the Sun went with “Banger out of Order” and “Killer in the Kitchen”.

The source of the story was an announcement from the World Health Organization that “processed meats” were now classified as a group 1 carcinogen, meaning scientists were certain that there was “sufficient” evidence that they caused cancer, particularly colon cancer. The warning applied not just to British bacon but to Italian salami, Spanish chorizo, German bratwurst and myriad other foods.

Health scares are ten-a-penny, but this one was very hard to ignore. The WHO announcement came on advice from 22 cancer experts from 10 countries, who reviewed more than 400 studies on processed meat covering epidemiological data from hundreds of thousands of people. It was now possible to say that “eat less processed meat”, much like “eat more vegetables”, had become one of the very few absolutely incontrovertible pieces of evidence-based diet advice – not simply another high-profile nutrition fad. As every news report highlighted, processed meat was now in a group of 120 proven carcinogens, alongside alcohol, asbestos and tobacco – leading to a great many headlines blaring that bacon was as deadly as smoking.

The WHO advised that consuming 50g of processed meat a day – equivalent to just a couple of rashers of bacon or one hotdog – would raise the risk of getting bowel cancer by 18% over a lifetime. (Eating larger amounts raises your risk more.) Learning that your own risk of cancer has increased from something like 5% to something like 6% may not be frightening enough to put you off bacon sandwiches for ever. But learning that consumption of processed meat causes an additional 34,000 worldwide cancer deaths a year is much more chilling. According to Cancer Research UK, if no one ate processed or red meat in Britain, there would be 8,800 fewer cases of cancer. (That is four times the number of people killed annually on Britain’s roads.)

The news felt especially shocking because both ham and bacon are quintessentially British foods. Nearly a quarter of the adult population in Britain eats a ham sandwich for lunch on any given day, according to data from 2012 gathered by researchers Luke Yates and Alan Warde. To many consumers, bacon is not just a food; it is a repository of childhood memories, a totem of home. Surveys indicate that the smell of frying bacon is one of our favourite scents in the UK, along with cut grass and fresh bread. To be told that bacon had given millions of people cancer was a bit like finding out your granny had been secretly sprinkling arsenic on your morning toast.

Vegetarians might point out that the bacon sandwich should never have been seen as comforting. It is certainly no comfort for the pigs, most of whom are kept in squalid, cramped conditions. But for the rest of us, it was alarming to be told that these beloved foods might be contributing to thousands of needless human deaths. In the weeks following news of the WHO report, sales of bacon and sausages fell dramatically. British supermarkets reported a £3m drop in sales in just a fortnight. (“It was very detrimental,” said Kirsty Adams, the product developer for meat at Marks and Spencer.)

But just when it looked as if this may be #Bacongeddon (one of many agonised bacon-related hashtags trending in October 2015), a second wave of stories flooded in. Their message was: panic over. For one thing, the analogy between bacon and smoking was misleading. Smoking tobacco and eating processed meat are both dangerous, but not on the same scale. To put it in context, around 86% of lung cancers are linked to smoking, whereas it seems that just 21% of bowel cancers can be attributed to eating processed or red meat. A few weeks after publishing the report, the WHO issued a clarification insisting it was not telling consumers to stop eating processed meat.

Meanwhile, the meat industry was busily insisting that there was nothing to see here. The North American Meat Institute, an industry lobby group, called the report “dramatic and alarmist overreach”. A whole tranche of articles insisted in a commonsense tone that it would be premature and foolish to ditch our meaty fry-ups just because of a little cancer scare.

Nearly three years on, it feels like business as usual for processed meats. Many of us seem to have got over our initial sense of alarm. Sales of bacon in the UK are buoyant, having risen 5% in the two years up to mid-2016. When I interviewed a product developer for Sainsbury’s supermarket last year, she said that one of the quickest ways to get British consumers to try a new product now was to add chorizo to it.

And yet the evidence linking bacon to cancer is stronger than ever. In January, a new large-scale study using data from 262,195 British women suggested that consuming just 9g of bacon a day – less than a rasher – could significantly raise the risk of developing breast cancer later in life. The study’s lead author, Jill Pell from the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Glasgow University, told me that while it can be counterproductive to push for total abstinence, the scientific evidence suggests “it would be misleading” for health authorities to set any safe dose for processed meat “other than zero”.

The real scandal of bacon, however, is that it didn’t have to be anything like so damaging to our health. The part of the story we haven’t been told – including by the WHO – is that there were always other ways to manufacture these products that would make them significantly less carcinogenic. The fact that this is so little known is tribute to the power of the meat industry, which has for the past 40 years been engaged in a campaign of cover-ups and misdirection to rival the dirty tricks of Big Tobacco.

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How do you choose a pack of bacon in a shop, assuming you are a meat eater? First, you opt for either the crispy fat of streaky or the leanness of back. Then you decide between smoked or unsmoked – each version has its passionate defenders (I am of the unsmoked persuasion). Maybe you seek out a packet made from free-range or organic meat, or maybe your budget is squeezed and you search for any bacon on special offer. Either way, before you put the pack in your basket, you have one last look, to check if the meat is pink enough.

Since we eat with our eyes, the main way we judge the quality of cured meats is pinkness. Yet it is this very colour that we should be suspicious of, as the French journalist Guillaume Coudray explains in a book published in France last year called Cochonneries, a word that means both “piggeries” and “rubbish” or “junk food”. The subtitle is “How Charcuterie Became a Poison”. Cochonneries reads like a crime novel, in which the processed meat industry is the perpetrator and ordinary consumers are the victims.

The pinkness of bacon – or cooked ham, or salami – is a sign that it has been treated with chemicals, more specifically with nitrates and nitrites. It is the use of these chemicals that is widely believed to be the reason why “processed meat” is much more carcinogenic than unprocessed meat. Coudray argues that we should speak not of “processed meat” but “nitro-meat”.

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“Pure insane crazy madness” is how Coudray described the continuing use of nitrates and nitrites in processed meats, in an email to me. The madness, in his view, is that it is possible to make bacon and ham in ways that would be less carcinogenic. The most basic way to cure any meat is to salt it – either with a dry salt rub or a wet brine – and to wait for time to do the rest. Coudray notes that ham and bacon manufacturers claim this old-fashioned way of curing isn’t safe. But the real reason they reject it is cost: it takes much longer for processed meats to develop their flavour this way, which cuts into profits.

There is much confusion about what “processed meat” actually means, a confusion encouraged by the bacon industry, which benefits from us thinking there is no difference between a freshly minced lamb kofta and a pizza smothered in nitrate-cured pepperoni. Technically, processed meat means pork or beef that has been salted and cured, with or without smoking. A fresh pound of beef mince isn’t processed. A hard stick of cured salami is.

The health risk of bacon is largely to do with two food additives: potassium nitrate (also known as saltpetre) and sodium nitrite. It is these that give salamis, bacons and cooked hams their alluring pink colour. Saltpetre – sometimes called sal prunella – has been used in some recipes for salted meats since ancient times. As Jane Grigson explains in Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, saltpetre was traditionally used when brining hams to give them “an attractive rosy appearance when otherwise it would be a murky greyish brown”.

In earlier centuries, bacon-makers who used saltpetre did not understand that it converts to nitrite as the meat cures. It is this nitrite that allows the bacteria responsible for cured flavour to emerge quicker, by inhibiting the growth of other bacteria. But in the early 20th century, the meat industry found that the production of cured meats could be streamlined by adding sodium nitrite to the pork in pure form. In trade journals of the 1960s, the firms who sold nitrite powders to ham-makers spoke quite openly about how the main advantage was to increase profit margins by speeding up production. One French brand of sodium nitrite from the 60s was called Vitorose or “quick-pink”.

Nitro-chemicals have been less of a boon to consumers. In and of themselves, these chemicals are not carcinogenic. After all, nitrate is naturally present in many green vegetables, including celery and spinach, something that bacon manufacturers often jubilantly point out. As one British bacon-maker told me, “There’s nitrate in lettuce and no one is telling us not to eat that!”

But something different happens when nitrates are used in meat processing. When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat (haem iron, amines and amides), they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer. The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. This, as Guillaume Coudray explained to me in an email, is known to be “carcinogenic even at a very low dose”. Any time someone eats bacon, ham or other processed meat, their gut receives a dose of nitrosamines, which damage the cells in the lining of the bowel, and can lead to cancer.

You would not know it from the way bacon is sold, but scientists have known nitrosamines are carcinogenic for a very long time. More than 60 years ago, in 1956, two British researchers called Peter Magee and John Barnes found that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver tumours. By the 1970s, animal studies showed that small, repeated doses of nitrosamines and nitrosamides – exactly the kind of regular dose a person might have when eating a daily breakfast of bacon – were found to cause tumours in many organs including the liver, stomach, oesophagus, intestines, bladder, brain, lungs and kidneys.

Just because something is a carcinogen in rats and other mammals does not mean it will cause cancer in humans, but as far back as 1976, cancer scientist William Lijinsky argued that “we must assume” that these N-nitroso compounds found in meats such as bacon were also “carcinogens for man”. In the years since, researchers have gathered a massive body of evidence to lend weight to that assumption. In 1994, to take just one paper among hundreds on nitrosamines and cancer, two American epidemiologists found that eating hotdogs one or more times a week was associated with higher rates of childhood brain cancer, particularly for children who also had few vitamins in their diets.

In 1993, Parma ham producers in Italy made a collective decision to remove nitrates from their products and revert to using only salt, as in the old days. For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto di Parma. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-pink colour. We now know that the colour in Parma ham is totally harmless, a result of the enzyme reactions during the ham’s 18-month ageing process.

Slow-cured, nitrate-free, artisan hams are one thing, but what about mass-market meats? Eighteen months would be “a long time to wait on hotdogs”, as the food science expert Harold McGee comments. But there have always been recipes for nitrate-free bacon using nothing but salt and herbs. John Gower of Quiet Waters Farm, a pork producer who advises many British manufacturers of cured meats, confirms that nitrate is not a necessary ingredient in bacon: “It’s generally accepted that solid muscle products, as opposed to chopped meat products like salami, don’t require the addition of nitrate for safety reasons.”

Bacon is proof, if it were needed, that we cling to old comforts long after they have been proven harmful. The attachment of producers to nitrates in bacon is mostly “cultural”, says Gower. Bacon cured by traditional methods without nitrates and nitrites will lack what Gower calls that “hard-to-define tang, that delicious almost metallic taste” that makes bacon taste of bacon to British consumers. Bacon without nitrates, says Gower, is nothing but “salt pork”.

Given the harm of “nitro-meat” has been known for so long, the obvious question is why more has not been done to protect us from it. Corinna Hawkes, a professor of Food Policy at City University in London, has been predicting for years that processed meats will be “the next sugar” – a food so harmful that there will be demands for government agencies to step in and protect us. Some day soon, Hawkes believes, consumers will finally wake up to the clear links between cancer and processed meat and say “Why didn’t someone tell me about this?”

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The most amazing thing about the bacon panic of 2015 was that it took so long for official public health advice to turn against processed meat. It could have happened 40 years earlier. The only time that the processed meat industry has looked seriously vulnerable was during the 1970s, a decade that saw the so-called “war on nitrates” in the US. In an era of Ralph Nader-style consumer activism, there was a gathering mood in favour of protecting shoppers against bacon – which one prominent public health scientist called “the most dangerous food in the supermarket”. In 1973, Leo Freedman, the chief toxicologist of the US Food and Drug Administration, confirmed to the New York Times that “nitrosamines are a carcinogen for humans” although he also mentioned that he liked bacon “as well as anybody”.

The US meat industry realised it had to act fast to protect bacon against the cancer charge. The first attempts to fight back were simply to ridicule the scientists for over-reacting. In a 1975 article titled “Factual look at bacon scare”, Farmers Weekly insisted that a medium-weight man would have to consume more than 11 tonnes of bacon every single day to run the faintest risk of cancer. This was an outrageous fabrication.

But soon the meat lobby came up with a cleverer form of diversion. The AMI – the American Meat Institute – started to make the argument that the nitrate was only there for the consumer’s own safety, to ward off botulism – a potentially fatal toxin sometimes produced by poorly preserved foods. The scientific director of the AMI argued that a single cup of botulism would be enough to wipe out every human on the planet. So, far from harming lives, bacon was actually saving them.

In 1977, the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture gave the meat industry three months to prove that nitrate and nitrite in bacon caused no harm. “Without a satisfactory response,” Coudray writes, “these additives would have to be replaced 36 months later with non-carcinogenic methods.” The meat industry could not prove that nitrosamines were not carcinogenic – because it was already known that they were. Instead, the argument was made that nitrates and nitrites were utterly essential for the making of bacon, because without them bacon would cause thousands of deaths from botulism. In 1978, in response to the FDA’s challenge, Richard Lyng, director of the AMI, argued that nitrites are to processed meat “as yeast is to bread”.

The meat industry’s tactics in defending bacon have been “right out of the tobacco industry’s playbook”, according to Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. The first move is: attack the science. By the 1980s, the AMI was financing a group of scientists based at the University of Wisconsin. These meat researchers published a stream of articles casting doubt on the harmfulness of nitrates and exaggerating the risk from botulism of non-nitrated hams.

Does making ham without nitrite lead to botulism? If so, it is a little strange that in the 25 years that Parma ham has been made without nitrites, there has not been a single case of botulism associated with it. Almost all the cases of botulism from preserved food – which are extremely rare – have been the result of imperfectly preserved vegetables, such as bottled green beans, peas and mushrooms. The botulism argument was a smokescreen. The more that consumers could be made to feel that the harmfulness of nitrate and nitrite in bacon and ham was still a matter of debate, the more they could be encouraged to calm down and keep buying bacon.

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The botulism pretext was very effective. The AMI managed to get the FDA to keep delaying its three-month ultimatum on nitrites until a new FDA commissioner was appointed in 1980 – one more sympathetic to hotdogs. The nitrite ban was shelved. The only concession the industry had made was to limit the percentage of nitrites added to processed meat and to agree to add vitamin C, which would supposedly mitigate the formation of nitrosamines, although it does nothing to prevent the formation of another known carcinogen, nitrosyl-haem.

Over the years, the messages challenging the dangers of bacon have become ever more outlandish. An explainer article by the Meat Science and Muscle Biology lab at the University of Wisconsin argues that sodium nitrite is in fact “critical for maintaining human health by controlling blood pressure, preventing memory loss, and accelerating wound healing”. A French meat industry website, info-nitrites.fr, argues that the use of the “right dose” of nitrites in ham guarantees “healthy and safe” products, and insists that ham is an excellent food for children.

The bacon lobby has also found surprising allies among the natural foods brigade. Type “nitrate cancer bacon” into Google, and you will find a number of healthy eating articles, some of them written by advocates of the “Paleo” diet, arguing that bacon is actually a much-maligned health food. The writers often mention that vegetables are the primary source of nitrates, and that human saliva is high in nitrite. One widely shared article claims that giving up bacon would be as absurd as attempting to stop swallowing. Out of the mass of stuff on the internet defending the healthiness of bacon, it can be hard to tell which writers have fallen under the sway of the meat lobby, and which are simply clueless “nutrition experts” who don’t know any better.

Either way, this misinformation has the potential to make thousands of people unwell. The mystifying part is why the rest of us have been so willing to accept the cover-up.

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Our deepening knowledge of its harm has done very little to damage the comforting cultural associations of bacon. While I was researching this article, I felt a rising disgust at the repeated dishonesty of the processed meat industry. I thought about hospital wards and the horrible pain and indignity of bowel cancer. But then I remembered being in the kitchen with my father as a child on a Sunday morning, watching him fry bacon. When all the bacon was cooked, he would take a few squares of bread and fry them in the meaty fat until they had soaked up all its goodness.

In theory, our habit of eating salted and cured meats should have died out as soon as home refrigerators became widespread in the mid-20th century. But tastes in food are seldom rational, and millions of us are still hooked on the salty, smoky, umami savour of sizzling bacon.

We are sentimental about bacon in a way we never were with cigarettes, and this stops us from thinking straight. The widespread willingness to forgive pink, nitrated bacon for causing cancer illustrates how torn we feel when something beloved in our culture is proven to be detrimental to health. Our brains can’t cope with the horrid feeling that bacon is not what we thought it was, and so we turn our anger outwards to the health gurus warning us of its hazards. The reaction of many consumers to the WHO report of 2015 was: hands off my bacon!

In 2010, the EU considered banning the use of nitrates in organic meats. Perhaps surprisingly, the British organic bacon industry vigorously opposed the proposed nitrates ban. Richard Jacobs, the late chief executive of Organic Farmers & Growers, an industry body, said that prohibiting nitrate and nitrite would have meant the “collapse” of a growing market for organic bacon.

Organic bacon produced with nitrates sounds like a contradiction in terms, given that most consumers of organic food buy it out of concerns for food safety. Having gone to the trouble of rearing pigs using free-range methods and giving them only organic feed, why would you then cure the meat in ways that make it carcinogenic? In Denmark, all organic bacon is nitrate-free. But the UK organic industry insisted that British shoppers would be unlikely to accept bacon that was ‘“greyish”.

Then again, the slowness of consumers to lose our faith in pink bacon may partly be a response to the confusing way that the health message has been communicated to us. When it comes to processed meat, we have been misled not just by wild exaggerations of the food industry but by the caution of science.

On the WHO website, the harmfulness of nitrite-treated meats is explained so opaquely you could miss it altogether. In the middle of a paragraph on “what makes red meat and processed meat increase the risk of cancer”, it says: “For instance, carcinogenic chemicals that form during meat processing include N-nitroso compounds.” What this means, in plain English, is that nitrites make bacon more carcinogenic. But instead of spelling this out, the WHO moves swiftly on to the question of how both red and processed meats might cause cancer, after adding that “it is not yet fully understood how cancer risk is increased”.

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This caution has kept us as consumers unnecessarily in the dark. Consider sausages. For years, I believed that the unhealthiest part in a cooked English breakfast was the sausage, rather than the bacon. Before I started to research this article, I’d have sworn that sausages fell squarely into the “processed meat” category. They are wrongly listed as such on the NHS website.

But the average British sausage – as opposed to a hard sausage like a French saucisson – is not cured, being made of nothing but fresh meat, breadcrumbs, herbs, salt and E223, a preservative that is non-carcinogenic. After much questioning, two expert spokespeople for the US National Cancer Institute confirmed to me that “one might consider” fresh sausages to be “red meat” and not processed meat, and thus only a “probable” carcinogen. (To me, the fact that most sausages are not processed meat was deeply cheering, and set me dancing around the kitchen with glee thinking about toad in the hole.)

In general, if you ask a cancer scientist to distinguish between the risks of eating different types of meat, they become understandably cagey. The two experts at the National Cancer Institute told me that meats containing nitrites and nitrates have “consistently been associated with increased risk of colon cancer” in human studies. But they added that “it is difficult to separate nitrosamines from other possible carcinogens that may be present in processed meats like bacon”. These other suspects include haem iron – a substance that is abundant in all red meat, processed or not – and heterocyclic amines: chemicals that form in meat during cooking. A piece of crispy, overcooked bacon will contain multiple carcinogens, and not all are due to the nitrates.

The problem with this reasoning, as I see it, is that it can’t account for why processed meat is so much more closely linked to cancer than cooked red meat. For that, there remains no plausible explanation except for nitrates and nitrites. But looking for clear confirmation of this in the data is tricky, given that humans do not eat in labs under clinical observation.

Most of what we know about processed meat and cancer in humans comes from epidemiology – the study of disease across whole populations. But epidemiologists do not ask the kind of detailed questions about food that the people who eat that food may like answers to. The epidemiological data – based on surveys of what people eat – is now devastatingly clear that diets high in “processed meats” lead to a higher incidence of cancer. But it can’t tell us how or why or which meats are the best or worst. As Corinna Hawkes of City University comments, “The researchers don’t ask you if you are eating artisanal charcuterie from the local Italian deli or the cheapest hotdogs on the planet.”

I would love to see data comparing the cancer risk of eating nitrate-free Parma ham with that of traditional bacon, but no epidemiologist has yet done such a study. The closest anyone has come was a French study from 2015, which found that consumption of nitrosylated haem iron – as found in processed meats – had a more direct association with colon cancer than the haem iron that is present in fresh red meat.

It may be possible that epidemiologists have not asked people more detailed questions about what kind of processed meats they eat because they assume there is no mass-market alternative to bacon made without nitrates or nitrites. But this is about to change.

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The technology now exists to make the pink meats we love in a less damaging form, which raises the question of why the old kind is still so freely sold. Ever since the “war on nitrates” of the 1970s, US consumers have been more savvy about nitrates than those in Europe, and there is a lot of “nitrate-free bacon” on the market. The trouble, as Jill Pell remarks, is that most of the bacon labelled as nitrate-free in the US “isn’t nitrate-free”. It’s made with nitrates taken from celery extract, which may be natural, but produces exactly the same N-nitroso compounds in the meat. Under EU regulation, this bacon would not be allowed to be labelled “nitrate-free”.

“It’s the worst con I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” says Denis Lynn, the chair of Finnebrogue Artisan, a Northern Irish company that makes sausages for many UK supermarkets, including Marks & Spencer. For years, Lynn had been hoping to diversify into bacon and ham but, he says, “I wasn’t going to do it until we found a way to do it without nitrates.”

When Lynn heard about a new process, developed in Spain, for making perfectly pink, nitrate-free bacon, he assumed it was another blind alley. In 2009, Juan de Dios Hernandez Canovas, a food scientist and the head of the food tech company Prosur, found that if he added certain fruit extracts to fresh pork, it stayed pink for a surprisingly long time.

In January 2018, Finnebrogue used this technology to launch genuinely nitrate-free bacon and ham in the UK. It is sold in Sainsbury’s and Waitrose as “Naked Bacon” and “Naked Ham”, and in M&S as “made without nitrites”. Kirsty Adams, who oversaw its launch at M&S, explains that “it’s not really cured”. It’s more like a fresh salted pork injected with a fruit and vegetable extract, and is more perishable than an old-fashioned flitch of bacon – but that doesn’t matter, given that it is kept in a fridge. Because it is quick to produce, this is much more “economically viable” to make than some of the other nitrate-free options, such as slow-cured Parma ham. The bacon currently sells in Waitrose for £3 a pack, which is not the cheapest, but not prohibitive either.

I tried some of the Finnebrogue bacon from M&S. The back bacon tasted pleasant and mild, with a slight fruitiness. It didn’t have the toothsome texture or smoky depth of a rasher of butcher’s dry-cured bacon, but I’d happily buy it again as an alternative to “nitro-meat”. None of my family noticed the difference in a spaghetti amatriciana.

Nitrite-free bacon still sounds a bit fancy and niche, but there shouldn’t be anything niche about the desire to eat food that doesn’t raise your risk of cancer. Lynn says that when he first approached Prosur about the fruit extract, he asked how much they had sold to the other big bacon manufacturers during the two years they had been offering it in the UK. The answer was none. “None of the big guys wanted to take it,” claims Lynn. “They said: ‘It will make our other processed meats look dodgy’”.

But it also remains to be seen how much consumer demand there will be for nitrite- or nitrate-free bacon. For all the noise about bacon and cancer, it isn’t easy to disentangle at a personal level just what kind of risk we are at when we eat a bacon sandwich. OK, so 34,000 people may die each year because of processed meat in their diet, but the odds are that it won’t be you. I asked a series of cancer scientists whether they personally ate processed meat, and they all gave slightly different answers. Jill Pell said she was mostly vegetarian and ate processed meats very rarely. But when I asked Fabrice Pierre, a French expert on colon cancer and meat, if he eats ham, he replied: “Yes, of course. But with vegetables at the same meal.” (Pierre’s research at the Toxalim lab has shown him that some of the carcinogenic effects of ham can be offset by eating vegetables.)

Our endless doubt and confusion about what we should be eating have been a gift to the bacon industry. The cover-up about the harm of meat cured with nitrates and nitrites has been helped along by the scepticism many of us feel about all diet advice. At the height of the great bacon scare of 2015, lots of intelligent voices were saying that it was safe to ignore the new classification of processed meats as carcinogenic, because you can’t trust anything these nutritionists say. Meanwhile, millions of consumers of ham and bacon, many of them children, are left unprotected. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this controversy is how little public outrage it has generated. Despite everything, most of us still treat bacon as a dear old friend.

In an ideal world, we would all be eating diets lower in meat, processed or otherwise, for the sake of sustainability and animal welfare as much as health. But in the world we actually live in, processed meats are still a normal, staple protein for millions of people who can’t afford to swap a value pack of frying bacon for a few slivers of Prosciutto di Parma. Around half of all meat eaten in developed countries is now processed, according to researcher John Kearney, making it a far more universal habit than smoking.

The real victims in all this are not people like me who enjoy the occasional bacon-on-sourdough in a hipster cafe. The people who will be worst affected are those – many on low incomes – for whom the cancer risk from bacon is compounded by other risk factors such as eating low-fibre diets with few vegetables or wholegrains. In his book, Coudray points out that in coming years, millions more poor consumers will be affected by preventable colon cancer, as westernised processed meats conquer the developing world.

Last month, Michele Rivasi, a French MEP, launched a campaign – in collaboration with Coudray – demanding a ban of nitrites from all meat products across Europe. Given how vigorously the bacon industry has fought its corner thus far, a total ban on nitrites looks unlikely.

But there are other things that could be done about the risk of nitrites and nitrates in bacon, short of an absolute veto. Better information would be a start. As Corinna Hawkes points out, it is “surprising” that there hasn’t been more of an effort from government to inform people about the risks of eating ham and bacon, perhaps through warning labels on processed meats. But where is the British politician brave enough to cast doubt on bacon?