Artist Profile: Josh Scherer’s Last Meal Will Be a Carne Asada Burrito

Mythical Chef Josh Scherer cooks more than just food. When he enters the kitchen, he successfully blends nourishment with entertainment, adding a splash of culture, history, and comedy — along with a generous pinch of existentialism — to create his perfect dishes. The result is a dish greater than the sum of its ingredients.

In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Scherer had to look down at the plaque on his desk to recall his official job title, executive director of culinary content, because he takes on so many roles at Mythical Entertainment. Mythical is the production company behind Good Mythical Morning, a YouTube show hosted by comedic duo Rhett and Link and the most-watched daily show on the internet. Beyond cooking unique dishes for GMM, Scherer also develops and hosts his own food shows on the Mythical Kitchen channel, co-hosts a food podcast, and recently wrote “The Mythical Cookbook.” If those accomplishments aren’t remarkable enough, the chef was also honored on the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Food & Drink category.

“The only thing I have ever cared about is food,” Scherer said. “It’s the lens through which I view the world. It is the singular thing that has remained constant in my entire career.”

Food cravings are familiar to most, but for someone with a palate like Scherer’s, cravings are not just about specific foods or even how they taste. Instead, when the chef craves a particular food, he wants the feeling it will give him or the sentiment the food represents. For instance, as a schoolchild on the reduced lunch program, Scherer would often receive standard American institutional food like rubbery chicken nuggets with sickly sweet barbecue sauce. His friend from Lebanon, however, would usually bring in his parents’ homemade Lebanese meals.

“All I wanted was homemade food, and all this kid wanted were the crappy American school lunches. So we would swap,” Scherer said.

He reflected on food’s peculiar capability to signify things to the world, satisfying wildly different cravings for different people.

“Why is it that all I crave is the love of a parent and cooking something from scratch, and all this person wants is just this factory-made garbage?” Scherer said. “We’re all trying to meet in the middle and find these similarities, but the things in front of us are dividing us in a weird way.”

From his time as a UCLA track and field athlete, to his early career in print journalism, and now his current role in entertainment, food and the complex tapestry of culture that it represents has remained a commonality. After an hour discussing food with Scherer, it became abundantly clear that his fixation was never about the actual consumption of food.

“The only thing I care about is the process, the philosophy, the culture, and the people behind food,” Scherer said. “I cannot tell you how many times I have finished making a dish and not wanted to take one bite of it. To me, it is not the eating. It is simply the process and learning about the history behind everything.”

To propel his love of food from the school lunch table to a YouTube platform with millions of subscribers, Scherer had to learn how to perform for a camera in order to succeed in the contemporary fame landscape. After a rocky start — “I literally didn't know what to do with my hands,” he said — the chef harnessed the tenacity he developed as a college athlete to improve his performance.

“I would literally watch TV chefs, and I would sit there with a pen and paper, and I would write down notes as if I were an athlete reviewing game film,” Scherer said. “Everything is a learned skill. And if you want to learn how to do it better, all you have to do is get reps under your belt.”

The result of these reps is a finely tuned, charismatic comedic voice best described by Scherer himself: “It’s me five beers deep at a party, being really excited to explain something to somebody.”

This description is apt; the chef’s persona across all of his projects is characterized by a remarkable intelligence and breadth of knowledge about food, history, and culture. However, Scherer’s media presence has more nuance than he gives himself credit for. His most standout qualities are his empathy and humanity, which he best embraces in his profound, food-focused interview show, “Last Meals.” In each episode, Scherer cooks celebrities their ideal final meal and interviews them as they eat it together.

“‘Last Meals’ was a bit of a happy accident,” Scherer said. “I was looking up episode types that would get a lot of views, and people’s death row meals was a very popular YouTube genre — like eating serial killer death row meals in the height of the true crime era a couple years ago. And I thought, ‘What would my own death row meal be?’ And so I cooked it for myself.”

As Scherer gifts guests such as Tom Hanks, Emma Chamberlain, and Gordon Ramsay with the meals of their dreams, he expertly guides their conversation toward an authentic discussion of life and death while maintaining an atmosphere of levity. This existential touch, too, was an accident when the show originated.

“I had no intention of talking about death or mortality or existentialism while I was making a carne asada burrito, but it’s all I could think about,” Scherer said.

His lingering mind turned out to be a blessing for the show, which now garners hundreds of thousands of views from fans who appreciate his refreshingly honest approach to celebrity and culinary entertainment.

“All of ‘Last Meals’ specifically is me trying to figure out my own life and my own beliefs and acting as a mirror through other people,” Scherer said. “It’s very cool to be able to pick the brains of all these people that I’ve grown up watching and are heroes to me and genuinely inspire me — and also get paid to do it.”

A profoundly deep thinker, Scherer naturally concluded his interview with a piece of parting wisdom directly addressed toward Crimson readers.

“You could’ve existed at any point of the several hundred thousand years of human evolution,” Scherer said. “Only, what, 35 of those years have had Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? And you are there concurrently with them. You are a statistical miracle. And you get to enjoy ’em.”

—Staff writer Stella A. Gilbert can be reached at stella.gilbert@thecrimson.com.