My guest today Alex Dent. Alex is a professor of anthropology at the George Washington University in DC. He is a celebrated teacher and researcher who’s taken deep dives into intriguing topics like violent response to digital piracy and Brazilian rodeos as a physical manifestation of country music. As it happens, Alex takes the resulting related energies and pours them into being a vocalist and guitarist for the DC punk band, Weird Babies.


Alex and I are brothers in culinaria. As the unrelated person with whom I’ve eaten and cooked the most since our kids met in day care 13 years ago, Alex has fed my kitchen alchemy as much as I’ve fed his. Being a decades-deep non-meat eater, Alex has served as my vegetable protein guru as well. Recently we blended my obsession with Brazilian feijoada bean-sausage stew and his obsession with everything Brazil, his second home. We arguably created the world’s first acceptable vegetarian feijoada. Here’s our chat.