LT in The House 2025.

Onomatopoeia is when a word mimics the sound it describes.

For example: meow, woof, chirp, ribbit.

Bang, crash, and boom.

Certain characters ‘own’ their distinctive onomatopoeia. Like adamantium claws coming out of the back of the hands.

The Japanese language has almost double the amount of onomatopoeia compared to English. That’s because Japan has words to describe feelings and moods.

Here’s a quick Japanese lesson.

Katakana シーン is pronounced ‘shiiiin’.

It is the sound effect of silence.

It’s often used when a joke falls flat, or when someone says something extremely embarrassing.

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A couple of weeks ago, Powerhouse contacted me about Lee Tran’s new podcast - The Culinary Archive Podcast - Season 2.

I was in the middle of my daughter’s violin practice when I saw the email and thought:

They want me on the podcast? Whoa.

I texted Lee Tran: what are we going to talk about?

She texted back: manga!

I was like sure!

Powerhouse was like ‘yay, can’t wait!’

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The next morning, when I had caffeine in the system, it hit me :

They didn’t want me on the podcast; they wanted me to talk about the podcast. To you, my readers.

It was a press release email.

They want my body, but not my voice.
I get how Phoebe feels now in that episode of Friends, the one in which they cast her face and dubbed her voice for Smelly Cat.

Hear that? It’s the sound of the awkward misunderstanding caused by a middle-aged man’s inflated ego.

The joke’s on Powerhouse, they also overestimated the reach of my newsletter.

If you’re a real food person, you’ll already know the podcast that examines the changes in Australia’s food culture and its evolving palate. Each episode is a deep dive into milk, honey, eel, coffee, and honey.

And I would never need to be formally invited to push Lee Tran’s podcast. We are text buddies.

But if you need a refresher: Lee Tran Lam is a journalist who has written for Good Food, Gourmet Traveller, The Guardian, Eater and Gastro Obscura. Named a Future Shaper by Time Out Sydney, she created the award-winning Should You Really Eat That? podcast for SBS, co-founded Diversity In Food Media Australia, edited the New Voices On Food books and her first podcast, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry, has been recommended by Bon Appétit, Broadsheet and Concrete Playground.

Please welcome, LT.

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H: It’s 2025, do you think it’s still wise to start a podcast?

LT: It’s a personal question. Do you want to start a podcast because everyone has a podcast? Or do you feel like, oh, there's a subject I really want to cover, no one else is doing it, and I think a podcast is the best way to do this, and it’s going to be interesting?

H: People tell me ‘Go start a podcast’, and I say ‘Are you insane? Each episode takes a week to write, a week to record, a week to edit… not many can do what Lee Tran does.’ So, how do you do it?

LT: The chore is always finding time to sleep. And then you get grumpy when you don’t sleep enough. I started working on The Culinary Archive in November 2023. So yeah. It's a long process.

H: How do you decide what topic to research, who to interview etc.,?

LT: It's funny. I have this terrible ability. Maybe “ability” is not the right word. (H: “terrible” is not the right word either) If someone's introduced to me and says their name, I’ll forget straight away. But I can remember an article I read 12 years ago and tell you the exact details.

There's this thing I read, again, like seven years ago. It's this woman. She was from Manchester. She had never been to Japan. But, you’d know during postwar Japan, there were a lot of issues with malnutrition, and getting enough food. This woman, from Manchester, and this is an era where if you got married, you had to leave your job, right? Anyway, post-war, it was in Kyushu and it was about a seaweed and they called it ‘lucky grass’ or ‘gambler's grass’, and Japan had problems growing it. This woman worked out a way of, I think, cultivating with maybe using oyster shells. And she saved the entire seaweed industry from Manchester! She died before Japan made it work, now there’s a monument of her over the Ariake Sea. When her kids went to visit, they were mobbed like it was Beatlemania¹. So I read articles like this and think maybe one day there's a good segue into manga. It's just in my brain somehow.

Seaweed by Alana Dimou. Courtesy Powerhouse.

H: Speaking of manga, what are you reading?

LT: The English translator of Solitary Gourmet lives in Melbourne and he translated it back in 2020 into English. The publication date was meant to be June 30, 2024. I even pre-ordered it. And then it didn’t come out. I called my local bookshop, and I emailed the translator again, in the end, I decided to track down the French version and read it via the little high school French I remember, and Google Translate. Some of the translations are quite funny.

Like there's one where they talk about tenkasu? Tenkasu is the tempura crumbs, yeah? They translated it as doughnut fritter crumbs.

French Goro and Lee Tran's food manga stash

H: At this moment, I can imagine some French in Paris going “Pop quiz mon petit malin, do you know they put doughnut fritters in their udon noodles? Those crazy Japonaise!”

LT: It's also funny that slurping noises. All these onomatopoeia. How different they are in different languages. So in French, and I don't know how they pronounce it, but it's on the page. It says glu glu. So G-L-O-U G-L-O-U. English would be like ‘slurp slurp’. And then the Japanese version would just be like ‘suu suu’.

H: There’s probably a whole post or section we can do on the sound effects in manga. (Turns to readers and winks.) So for the longest time as a kid, those characters meant nothing to me. And then as I slowly learn Japanese. I go oh, those are sound effects. Have a look, you can’t unsee it now.

LT: Yeah. In Superman versus Meshi, they did that too.

H: It’s everywhere.

<End transmission>

Superman reading manga (piiii-) and feeling hungry (guuuuuu~) and salivating (dara-)

Our conversation ended at onomatopoeia, just like how I started the post.
Zoom’s forty-minute limit is useful sometimes.

If anything it should show how geeky, proper and well-researched Lee Tran is, as opposed to yours truly.

So if you’re into food nerds nerding about food with experts², please catch her podcast via Spotify and Apple Podcasts when you’re cooking, taking the train to work, or doing bread delivery.

1. Madame Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, also known as the “mother of the sea”. https://www.qsr.mlit.go.jp/suishin/story2019/english/02_4.html

2. Not me, I’m the guy they want to talk about the podcast. But that’s progress! Next stop, sponsors!