Eating on the Road With Sherry Cola

Sherry Cola, star of the 2023 comedy Joy Ride, grew up eating jian bing in the back of a cabbage truck in Shanghai. That portable, drip-free Chinese crepe became her benchmark for what makes food work on the road — and it kicked off a wide-ranging conversation about car cuisine, cinematic eating scenes, and the strange cultural assumptions embedded in both.

The episode, hosted by David Chiang and Christopher Yang, uses three movie scenes as anchors to explore what makes food portable, what eating habits reveal about character, and how much the experience of eating on the go has changed — or hasn't — since the 1980s.

The jian bing as the ultimate portable food

The conversation begins with a technical question: what makes a food truly eatable in a car? For Sherry Cola, the answer is the jian bing. She describes watching street vendors in China make them on a griddle — cracking an egg, whisking it directly on the surface, adding sausage or imitation spam, sauce, and a batter poured on top, then folding the whole thing into a sealed pocket. "Every time they make one, I'm like, I don't think it's gonna work," she says. "And then it works." The key is the folding: multiple points of closure that leave no openings except at the top. She contrasts this with a burrito, which she finds too floppy and prone to dripping on your elbows. "It needs a pizza via," David says. "It's too