(soft music)
- Perfect.
I assume that's a great time to start.
Thank you everyone for coming
to this very large room,
where we will be presenting
on chef's cuisine and convergence.
We have five presenters
today, four of whom are here,
and one of whom has a
video presentation because
the United States would
not let him in the country.
So those presenters will
be Signe Skjoldborg,
myself Leigh Bush, Amir Sayadabdi,
Amanda Sophie Green,
Jean A. Nihoul, and our
Discussant Greg de St. Maurice.
Today we'll start with Signe from
the University of Copenhagen,
her paper is titled Hopping and Soy-like:
Developing a Feel for
Insects in Nordic Food Lab.
- Perfect, thank you so much.
And so, I press it here?
- [Leigh] Correct.
- All right, thank you.
Right, so thank you to the organizers for
organizing this panel, sorry.
And for having me on it, of course.
My paper has actually been retitled,
so it's now been called,
Insects at the Edges- on Food and Animal
in Nordic Food Innovation."
And I have a bit of a sore throat,
so apologies for that.
We'll just see how it goes.
Right, okay.
In 2013, the Food and
Agricultural Organization
of the United Nations wrote a report
on the topic of edible insects.
The report was called Edible Insects:
Future Prospects for
food and feed security.
In the report, researchers
advocated for an integration
of insects into global but
particularly Western diets,
both those of animals and humans.
Pointing to the strains put
on the world's ecosystems
as a result of mass
production and farming,
the report made the general claim that,
"We need to find new
ways of growing food".
Eating insects, the report argues,
and in particular the high
levels of protein they contain
can play a substantial
part in solving both
immediate issues of hunger
and future issues of
sustainable food production.
Two years later I encountered
this argument in the flesh
during fieldwork at a workshop
in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Again, this need to finally
start eating insects,
this largely-overlooked but
highly nutritious resource
gathered scientists and
politicians alike in heated debate.
As the workshop went on, however,
the imperative of eating insects because
of their nutritional value was overrun
by a concern for palatability,
or rather a lack thereof
as questions were raised
as to whether or not insects
could actually become something
that the people of Denmark
would enjoy eating.
What was referred to in the FAO report as
"the disgust factor" became
an issue in need of handling
as presenters and
participants at the workshop
all seemed to agree that
edibility does not simply
equal what goes in the mouth,
however justified from a
nutritional point of view.
As it were, the organizers
had a clever solution to this.
As part of the workshop,
a Copenhagen-based food lab working with
Nordic food innovation had
been invited to prepare
a tasty insect snack
made from grasshoppers.
The snack had two elements:
one was a cup full of warm, fragrant broth
with a small, green
piece of chervil floating
around in it.
The other was a whole
freeze-dried grasshopper
sitting in the saucer
beneath the cup of broth
as a biscuit to a cup of tea.
The smell of the broth was
meaty enough that I wouldn't
necessarily have guessed
its main ingredient
had I not been informed.
In contrast, the freeze-dried
and scentless grasshopper
was easily recognizable as such.
In this paper, I want to
explore the tension of
"Familiar Strange" or perhaps rather
of sameness and difference as
relative to the specific ways
in which the insects become recognized
as foods to be eaten
rather than animals to be avoided.
More specifically, I present two episodes
from my fieldwork in the food lab,
during which I worked with the researchers
in producing some of
the components that go
into their grasshopper broth.
In engaging these episodes,
I hope to show how the insects move
and sometimes are even held in suspense
between the categories of animal and food.
In the lab, these
categories are not distinct,
but instead form an
analytical scale that the
researchers work in different ways
in order to make the insects edible.
In other words, and going
back to the rhetoric
of the FAO report,
growing food, in the case of the food lab,
or so at least I will argue,
becomes a matter of working
the scale between food and animal.
Right.
So the first episode I
chose to call "The Lab."
The food lab is located
at the Science Faculty
of the University of Copenhagen.
It was conceived by the head
chef of the famous restaurant
Noma who founded the lab in
2008, together with a mix of
social entrepreneurs and scientists,
the point being to facilitate a space
for the exploration of
Nordic taste and terroirs.
Since their opening,
the affiliation to Noma
has brought great attention
to the lab in times of high
gastronomic popularity,
which has opened up lots of
doors for the researchers
in terms of work
collaborations in the business,
restaurant business in particular.
However, the team of researchers
who work here are equally
interested in capitalizing on
the scientific work they do
as well and not only being a
place where strange things are
cooked as is often the
coining of their work
in the public press.
Consequently, the lab
occupies a self-made space
between science lab and
restaurant test kitchen.
Physically the lab
consists of two main rooms:
A kitchen and an adjacent
room with a big meeting table.
And as I entered the
lab for the first time,
a glass bottle with the label
"Anty Gin" captures my eye.
As I have a look around,
I notice that the two
rooms indeed make for a
curious kind of environment.
The lab is filled with objects from
both science and gastronomy.
Cured ham and meats
hang from the ceilings,
some looking more edible than others.
Countless bottles and boxes
with vegetables, seeds, spices,
cuts of meats and Slavey beer
and a vast number of
other types of produce
in different stages of
fermentation and preserving.
The walls are decorated with
science posters depicting
developmental stages in
gene expressions over time,
others show metabolic
relations between species
of different kinds of produce.
"Holding a space that's
intentionally somewhere in between
"rigorous science and practical
cooking takes active effort"
one of the researchers tells me.
But if they can manage, then
the payoff is really good.
"It's a balance," he says,
"between following the trail
down the rabbit hole in search
"of historical background and
making short instructions for
"people who just want to cook
and utilize the recipes."
This predicament with balancing
different knowledge forms
and the relevance is also noticeable
in the structure of the team itself.
One is trained in the
Humanities Department,
another is a trained chef,
a third is a century scientist, and so on.
Quite fittingly, the countless
bottles and jars almost
mimick this logic of being
informed by two ends of a scale.
The cured legs of ham
hanging from the ceiling can
potentially be put in relation
with both their animal
of origin and the potential
dinner plates and side dishes
they are to be eaten from and with.
Conversely, the ants in the
Anty Gin also seemed to be
at once forest and festivity,
depending on your point of view,
although the amalgamation
of these particular parts
into one product is a bit more exotic,
at least in the context of Nordic food.
Indeed, separation and
amalgamation combine,
as the lab in order to
separate themselves out from
other labs and other test
kitchens must mix carefully
disciplines, techniques,
and organic material.
Suspending cuts of meat
or alcoholic liquids
in between food and animal,
making contextss of origin,
mixing contexts of origin
with contexts of application
is integral to their analytical register.
As such, this self-made
space upheld by the lab
not only makes possible
but rather necessitates
this kind of curiosity and experimentation
and particular kind of
attention to the animal
in the food and vice versa.
Second episode: Killing and Sorting.
The lead researcher picks
me up outside the lab
late one evening.
Me, himself, and an intern
are going to make an invention
of the lab that they call "garum".
Garum is a liquid in the
style of soy or fish sauce
only this one is made from insects
and used for seasoning
broths like the one I
had at the workshop.
We go through the deserted
after-hours halls of the
science faculty into the
warm and dimly lit food lab.
On the floor of the kitchen,
a giant box is sitting
filled with smaller boxes
and cardboard cylinders.
An intern is opening up
the boxes which are filled
with crickets, grasshoppers,
and wax moth larvae.
The lab gets the insects
fresh from Germany
and it isn't until I approach
this giant box of boxes
that I realize they indeed are fresh.
Up close when I put my
head towards the cardboard,
there is a noticeable
rumble and hassle going on
between the inhabitants.
I ask the researcher why
they are still alive,
why not just kill them
before they're shipped.
He tells me that this is
both cheaper for the lab
but it also makes it possible
for them to control the
process as they know
exactly what has happened
to the insects and when.
The researcher asks me to
help open the boxes of larvae,
"just start from one end
"and work your way across", he suggests.
I grab a pair of cutting
pliers and get to it,
hoping the insects will
not come at me full speed
once presented with an
opportunity to escape.
The larvae, it turns
out, are not so agile.
When we finish opening
up all of the boxes,
we talk about what insects to kill first.
The preferred method of
killing is by pouring
liquid nitrogen over the insects,
"blazing them" as the researcher calls it,
and killing them immediately.
Other than being a humane way of killing
these cold-blooded creatures,
this method also turns
out to be particularly
practical when it comes to
the grasshoppers and crickets,
due to its effectiveness
in preventing escapees.
Concerned with this,
the intern asks whether we should start,
"with the ones that hop or
the ones that don't hop".
We decided to start with
the wax moth larvae.
They can almost just be
poured out of the cylinder
straight into the blazing
bowl in which they now sit
in a big pile looking like beige globules.
"Feel how soft they are
against your hands when you
"run your fingers through
them" the researcher instructs.
It takes some efforts for me
to run my fingers through living larvae,
but when I finally do, I
have to agree with him.
They're soft and silky to the touch
and I can tell this has a
positive effect on the rest
of my working with them,
as I'm simply not as apprehensive
about the whole thing
as I was to begin with.
The intern holds the bowl
steady while the researcher
carefully pours the
nitrogen over the larvae
until they solidify and separate.
The researcher stirs a couple
of times around the bowl
to make sure nothing and
no one is still alive.
When all are surely dead,
the larvae are distributed
onto large trays
on a steel table in the
middle of the kitchen.
Now the sorting begins.
"This is the most strenuous
part," the intern says.
She goes to her laptop
at the back of the room
and puts on some music.
As Arcade Fire blasts away in the back,
we gather around the table
and start picking out
all the impurities, or
"fluff", as they are called.
Miscellaneous parts of the larvae
or pieces of cardboard that
have separated during the
freeze blast, and which are
not wanted in the garum.
The researcher sits on the
table on top of his legs,
and the intern and myself
are crouching over the trays on the table,
and together we pick through the cold
and nubbly piles of dead larvae.
When all the impurities have been removed
and only the clean larvae remain,
they are put into the oven to thaw.
When they are soft and squishy again,
they are transported back
into a thermal blender
and turned into beige, pasty mess,
which is measured and then
added to fermented barley,
the combination of which will
initiate bacterial activity
resulting in umami or meaty flavors
as tasted at the workshop.
The latter is then put into containers
and sealed off with cling wrap,
like it was leftovers from a
meal in any ordinary household.
The containers will then
be left alone for the next
three months inside flamingo
boxes with thermometers
set at 38.5 exactly degrees Celsius,
during which a clear
liquid will have formed,
which hopefully will resemble
soy or fish sauce in taste.
In the practices of killing and sorting,
practicality and aesthetics combine.
The insects pose a specific
set of concerns in terms of
agility, speed, number, and size,
which have to be handled
throughout these practices.
Concerns which are specific to these
particular kinds of animal.
Attending also to the aesthetics
of silkiness and to feel
into the devleopment of umami
becomes an important part of
understanding the process of
transformation that's going on
and that will eventually
turn the insects into food,
food that are the result of
working the particular sensory
qualities of wax moth larvae
as opposed to other insects for example.
In the food lab, the line between animal
and food isn't a hard line,
but rather one that's in a kind
of conversation with itself
as the different insects go
in and out of boxes, bowls,
ovens and blenders in
an equally challenging
and well-timed traffic.
Concluding remarks which I've
chosen to call Salty Liquids.
When we meet again after
the mixtures have rested,
the researcher opens a
drawer in a middle cupboard
and pulls out a variety of small flasks.
Some have been sealed off with
a yellow wax in order to keep
air from futhering their
bacterial development.
Others have been opened
and have small pipettes
attached in the top.
The labels read things
like "malt pea sauce."
another which I helped make
reads "grasshopper garum".
Both of them have very
detialed descriptions of what
went into the bottles and when.
The researcher puts a few
drops from one of the bottles
onto the top of my hand.
"Eat that" he says.
It tastes salty but with
a deep, meaty flavor
that keeps developing in my mouth.
Animal has become food
or rather the object in
and on my hand has become
recognizable as such.
In the Food lab where being
in-between is also occupying
the frontier of Nordic innovation,
the evident transformation of
the insects have been not by
a one-way domestication of the wild,
but by allowing also for the
insects to have an effect on
the researchers in the
sense of paying attention,
for example, to how
their sensory qualities
might resemble already existing foods
and consequently requires
specific handling.
Edibility here in the
case of the salty liquid
congregates at the
edges as turning objects
familiar as animal into
objects familiar as food
requires working at the
scenes of both, thank you.
(applause)
- Thank you Signe.
I was going to say that
we'd like to save all the
questions for the end, if possible,
so that we can have our
discussant facilitate
and everyone can have
their questions together.
Next step is me, Leigh Bush,
from Indiana University
and I will be talking about
Chefs, Cuisine and Convergence.
Okay.
As I said, my name is Leigh
and I'm from the Food Studies
Program at Indiana University.
And I wanted to bring
treats here actually,
because usually I do that
when I'm in a classroom.
But I figured bringing
brownies to the Mile High City
was probably a bad idea.
So we'll have to go decide on
our own pleasure afterwards.
Anyway, let me see if I can
get my presentation running
from the computer.
Are you able to get that up back there?
So that's my desktop.
Wear those boots on the farm.
I'm not sure why the
internet isn't grabbing.
Fantastic.
Okay there we are.
Chefs, Cuisine, and Convergence,
Authenticity in the Age of Prosumerism.
So my dissertation work is just
sort of in its nascent phase.
I welcome feedback on any of this,
and I'm sort of just starting
to link these ideas together.
They are coming from
three separate field sites
across the city of Chicago.
So having 15 minutes to present this is a
little bit of a squash for me.
Anyway, I am exploring how the
democratization of technology
and new media has facilitated the fusion
of producer and consumer,
creating what has been
referred to as the "prosumer"
and further considering how our
lived experience is affected
in ways that fuse the
real with the virtual.
I look at this issue from the three
field sites of production:
First from the perspective of
creative new media producers,
second from the perspective
of food producers,
and lastly from the
perspective of app developers.
To begin, for the purposes
of this presentation,
I would like to refer to
new media as those media
produced, distributed, or consumed
via computerized technology.
According to Castells, a media scholar,
new media has been so
interwoven with contemporary
human culture and society
that it represents
the social fabric of our lives.
Such technologies are often
considered to be extensions
of the self, and according
to Marshall McLuhan,
they are "prostheses of the senses",
a notion that has given
away to some scholars
referring to all modern humans as
hybrid machine organisms or cyborgs.
I, for one, felt
superhuman once I got Lasik
and look forward to my
new knees at age 35.
So I'm an appreciative cyborg myself.
With the pursuit of meaning
at the core of anthropology,
understanding how new media operates
as we become hybrid individuals
is essential to realizing
the human experience.
New media is at once ephemeral, iterative,
and infinite, it is both
fluid and fragmented,
and perhaps most importantly,
it is instant and interactive.
These oppositions complicate
our own ability to make
sense of the world,
distinguishing what is meaningful
from what is noise.
Meanwhile, as new media and
its associated devices have
made their way from cultural
capital to human essential,
cooking and its prodigy
child, cuisine, have made
their way from human
essential to cultural capital.
United, our choices in
terms of food and media,
and food media, establish a
vast network of communicative
and consumerist power.
In 2013, the Food Network
reached 99 million homes,
amounting to 75% of households,
that's up to 83% now
actually, in the U.S.,
and ranking just third after
the Weather Channel and CNN.
Meanwhile, the internet, and
new media more generally,
has one crucial advantage
over more traditional media.
The internet has exponentially
increased the concept
of media consumer as
collaborator or co-creator.
As consumers begin to assert
their own control over
cultural flows, directing these
flows is one major intention
of media outlets and producers
like the Food Network.
In the attention economy,
interactivity is an essential
way to engage with those individuals,
who both consume and produce media.
Interactive users and
prosumers are not only
more likely to stay engaged with media,
but they also add content for free,
to engage with others
across the mediascape.
This change had led
scholars like Mark Deuze
to say the following: "The
combination of mastering
"newsgathering and storytelling techniques
"in all media formats,
so-called 'multi-skilling',
"as well as the integration of
digital network technologies,
"coupled with a rethinking of the new
"producer-consumer
relationship, tends to be seen
"as one of the biggest challenges facing
"journalism studies in
education in the 21st century".
From social media like Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram,
to blogs, podcasts, and
online publications,
to public rating and
reservation websites like
Yelp and OpenTable, voices
from, and opinions on
even the smallest eateries, abound.
Especially in populist food-savvy cities,
yuppies sit in cafes or on trains,
and unfortunately, in their cars,
promoting and commenting on tweets, grams,
and Facebook posts, marking the emergence
of a new national pastime.
There are more than 178
million photos on Instagram
hashtagged "food", and
over 56 million that are
hashtagged "food porn".
The convergence of new
food culture and new media
has pulled even the local chef
into the public spotlight,
in its creation of the celebrity chef.
Whereas once, only top
contending restaurants
awaited reviews in the local paper,
and even fewer received
national media attention,
new media forms have
enabled mass participation
in our food worlds, from the
global to the local level,
through any number of platforms.
The participatory element
of dining and reviewing
has revolutionized both the restaurant and
journalism industry.
Once gatekeepers of what the public sees,
hears, and reads about,
their expertise has been
fragmented and seeded to the public,
including the chefs who themselves,
whether willfully or not,
have been pulled from
the back to the front of the house.
For the first six months
of my field research,
I participant-observed at the Third Coast
International Audio
Festival, on Navy Pier,
in downtown Chicago, Illinois.
Third Coast collects
and produces sound-rich
audio stories that form
part of an online library,
and are featured on a national
radio show and podcast.
Their annual conference
and festival honoring
the best of the best audio documentaries,
is widely considered to be the
Sundance of the radio world.
While audio media is not
new, technology change has
catapulted its reentrance
into the daily lives
of media consumers.
The podcast invented in 2004
has undergone an 11 to 23%
increase in listenership
between 2006 and 2010.
Audio stories like those featured on TCIAF
are mostly narrated through dialogue,
a dramatic structure proven
to excite and engage listeners
more fully and imaginatively
than a traditional
omniscient narration.
Producers also construct
their stories using a wealth
of story-building sound
effects, to construct the
audio environment, building
an intimacy between listener
and story, that has been
mimicked across the mediascape.
The podcast itself is transportable
via multimedia devices,
contributing to its emergence
from the domestic sphere
into the active lives of daily consumers.
Combined with the
seemingly more emotional,
temporal sense of immediacy
that goes with orality,
and pervasive sense of liveness,
this format exemplifies
how we use our media to
extend ourselves in very
real ways into new communities.
Let's see.
So here I'm going to start talking about
new media production, which
is my first field site.
The bridging together
of producer and consumer
and distributor is
highlighted in Third Coast's
bi-annual Short Docs
Challenge, in which amateur
and professional audio
producers are invited to
submit three-minute pieces
according to a theme.
In 2013, Third Coast partnered with the
James Beard Foundation,
the most prestigious
award-giving organization for
food production in the U.S.,
to host that year's competition
on the theme of appetite.
Crossing borders even further,
the five winning producers,
were each paired with
one of five local chefs,
who prepared a dish
inspired by their piece,
to be presented and tasted on stage
in front of a live audience.
Of the winning stories,
all evoked an emotional
response from the audience.
In addition to the live audio feast,
listeners were also invited
to participate online
by voting for their
favorite, which received
the People's Short Docs Award.
Voters commented regarding
their selections,
revealed their appreciation
for authenticity,
and topics that hearkened
to the nostalgia for
history and the natural
world, connections also ripe
for memory in the realm of food.
Comments to this effect were,
"Just hearing John describe
"the taste, activated my salivary glands.
"Plus just hearing
John's recounting of this
"childhood recollection was
also like biting into something
"savory and immediately
having a long-forgotten
"fond memory triggered."
Of the winning stories,
one featured an old man
reminiscing about blackbird
pie in the era of hucksters.
While in another, we
found a newborn awakening
to a bottle of warm milk.
A non-narrated piece brought
us through the audio experience
of killing and butchering a
pig, and while a fourth finds us
listening to an impassioned
French aunt instruct us
on the only proper way
to make true poutine.
So right here:
♫ Sing a song of sixpence
♫ Pocket full ♫
- I'll go backwards, okay.
So I'm gonna play a little
bit of one of the pieces,
the one about blackbirds, so you can hear,
sort of the evocative narration that the
audio producer uses.
And what you'll see in front
of you is actually a picture
of the pie that was made by the chef,
and presented onstage,
inspired by this piece.
♫ Sing a song of sixpence
♫ Pockets full of rye
- [Voiceover] I've got
blackbirds, I've got blackbirds!
Norris Pew was a huckster.
He used to sell blackbirds
in his pushcart,
for 50 cents a peach basket full.
See, hucksters would come
around when everything
was in season, blackbirds, catfish,
clams, vegetables, muskrats, whatever.
- So I talked to many of the
people who produced pieces
for this competition, and
interviews with producers
revealed that this level of storytelling
did not come easily.
Eggs were broken over and over
again for the perfect crack,
to be recorded, hours of audio
were trimmed and reworked,
and perhaps the biggest
disappointment to all on our staff,
and a fact that we never
revealed to the audience,
the passionate poutine
aunt turned out to be
one producer's French teacher
reading from a transcript.
In the hunt for the most compelling story,
it seemed that assembling a
real food audio experience
involved a lot of
technique and fabrication.
Moving from food and eating
as a tool for storytelling,
I changed field sites to
a place where storytelling
is a tool for the production
and consumption of food.
Following one chef, the
one whose dish was featured
on this last slide, to his restaurant,
I worked as an assistant,
where I was responsible for
everything from email
organization, to interviews,
to event arrangement.
The restaurant, Fat Rice,
had its own compelling story.
Co-owned by one part-Portuguese man,
and one half-Chinese woman,
the restaurant specialized
in the food of Macao, a
former Portuguese colony
off the coast of China,
representing the background
and the blending of the life
of the business partners
who had founded the restaurant.
At the time, Fat Rice
had just been featured
as the fourth-best new
restaurant in the country,
and maintaining this hype was essential
to the success of the business.
Both owners worked no
less than 12 hours a day,
seven days a week, ordering, managing,
cooking, and putting out
the various proverbial fires
inherent to restaurant ownership.
As with most chef-owners,
Chef Conlon was accustomed
to having absolute control
over his operation, a space
in which he was the expert,
and the creative mastermind,
and where time and money
were tight, this left
little time to engage with
computerized technologies,
and the chef's lack of expertise
often left him unaware of,
or frustrated with much of new media.
Over the course of several
months, I found that
instead of crafting
the restaurant's story,
Chef Conlon, like many
of his contemporaries,
fell into new media's commands of him,
rather than the other way around.
This included appearances
on morning television,
at cooking competitions and other events,
sponsored and promoted
by outside agencies.
We were fed prepackaged tweets and posts,
which were to be copied
and pasted according to
suggested timelines, via the
restaurant's generic account.
This is to say that the personal
element waned in the media,
especially any information coming directly
from the chef himself.
According to my fieldwork, this
happens for several reasons,
including the chef's
perception of social media
as a necessarily evil that
the most respected chefs
just don't give a fuck about,
the lack of mastery with
the interfaces required to
express their creativity through
media, and the time required
to become proficient in,
and keep up with new media's
immediate and evolving nature.
Now moving on to my third field site,
which was the app and platform production.
This felt lacuna in the chef world,
for the personal and authentic
stories behind cheffing,
popularized by Anthony
Bourdain among others,
was recognized by PR
consultant Ellen Malloy,
who had worked under one of
the most popular restaurant
groups in Chicago before
starting her own company,
which after years of
refining, was awarded almost a
million dollar seed funding
to begin development on
their app, which was
designed to open the world
of chef stories.
Initially, Morsel consisted of
Ellen, the company's founder,
an appointed CEO, and
three software developers.
While software experience was
essential to app development,
access to restaurant
kitchens, small, busy,
and exclusive spaces, was
equally essential for the
company's success in content acquisition.
My experience in restaurant kitchens,
working with some hot-headed chefs,
combined with Ellen's access
to the entire chef community,
led me to a position as the,
at this startup as content curator.
Over about eight months, I
traveled throughout the city...
Visiting kitchens, bars,
and special events,
documenting the stories
behind dishes and beverages,
created by cooks, chefs,
bartenders, butchers, and the like.
In this last field site,
I experienced the everyday
networks of production,
and the factors influencing
multidirectional transformations
of food, story, and media.
Board meetings consisted of
lengthy discussions about
the app as technological
tool, built by producers who
had never set foot in a kitchen.
My job required that I
extract inspiration and
personal anecdotes as quickly
and efficiently as possible,
from people whose lives
I had already documented
as consisting of zero downtime.
While I buffed up stories from
multiple daily publications,
the majority of chefs usually
have one of three things
to say about their most recent production.
This amounted to about such,
that they had created a dish
to one, use up an ingredient,
two, because the ingredient
was cheap, or three, just because.
This is to say, that for a
creator whose daily job it is
to put out anywhere from five
to 100 of a particular dish,
and change menus daily,
weekly, or seasonally,
the stories lying behind
their dishes are rarely
as though through as those assembled
for a three-minute
documentary on appetite.
Instead, skills of
articulation are put directly
into the sense of taste, not text.
In conclusion, fieldwork
across the networks of
food and media production,
revealed several spaces
of friction created by
technology's linking together
separate spheres of production,
which I found also illuminated
larger issues inherent
to life as a prosumer
in a new media world.
First, that our desire for authenticity,
is often in stark
juxtaposition with reality.
In many cases, we prefer a
distilled and mediated story,
that conjures, rather than
reflects, authenticity.
That is, we seek an
authenticity that fits into our
contemporary consumption
models, fragmented,
immediate, and entertaining.
Second, that food producers,
while given the tools
to mediate themselves,
and requiring those tools
for their own success,
do not trust, respect,
or have time to become proficient
with these technologies,
which they perceive as
inauthentic, as a whole.
And third, that the more
proficiently executed,
and seemingly authentic
our stories become,
the farther removed from
reality they sometimes are.
In sum, keeping a keen
eye, ear, and tongue,
on these background
processes, that are made to
attract and interact with us,
and considering at what cost
such entertainment costs, is
essential to understanding
what and why we as prosumers
are creating and consuming.
By paying attention to the
possibility that the hegemony
of aesthetic taste may
subvert our experience
of the physiological one,
we are better equipped
to match our expectations with our goals.
Whether it is on our
plate or in our news feed,
such investigation is
essential to co-creating
the mediated world in
which we want to live.
Thank you.
(applause)
Okay, next we're gonna
skip over Amir's quickly,
just in case we can catch
up on a little bit of time,
and move on to Amanda
Sophie Green's paper,
which is Chefs as Cultural
Bearers and Innovators
in the Production of Sami Cuisines.
- I'll go ahead and get started.
My name's Amanda Green,
I'm part of the Applied
Anthropology Program at
Oregon State University.
I want to begin with a moment
recorded in my field notes.
In June of 2014, I sat at
a table with 10 other food
activists and chefs in Jokkmokk, Sweden,
a small town just above the Arctic Circle.
We were there at the
invitation of Eldrimner,
Sweden's national artisanal
food production center,
with the goal of discussing
and tasting traditional foods,
and recipes from this
area of Northern Sweden.
And, as Eldrimner's director put it,
"To record this knowledge
and figure out ways
"to build businesses
and make money from it".
Those of you in the audience
will likely recognize
this now classic
anthropological observation,
described best by Comaroff
and Comaroff in their
2009 book, Ethnicity Inc.
It is the present focus on the
objectification and marketing
of all things related to
heritage, including cuisine,
in order to make money,
or to make a living.
During this meeting with the Eldrimner,
a leader in Slow Food
Sapmi reflected on the
recent and similar work
of Sami food organizers,
in the making of their new cookbook,
Smak Posapmi, "Taste Sapmi".
Sakmi here refers to the
land of the Sami peoples
across Northern Europe, northern Norway,
Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
Okay, these are pictures from the meeting.
In the gathering together
of a professional
food photographer,
knowledgeable food elders,
journalists, food activists, and chefs,
they realized suddenly that, oh,
we're beginning to define Sami food.
Across the globe, people
are working to document,
and in most cases,
commodify, heritage cuisines.
Possibilities to engage in
these projects in Sweden are
numerous, from designing Sami cookbooks,
competing to be the best
Sami chef, pictured here,
to documenting Sami food traditions.
Such projects inevitably enlist
chefs with Sami backgrounds
in their work to document,
revive, and sometimes market
particular culinary traditions.
But Sami chefs, and likely
most indigenous chefs,
commodify culinary heritage
not just to make a living.
This work, for most of them,
is also to maintain and honor
family and traditional knowledges,
and to maintain Sami places on the land.
The goal of this paper is
to document the roles of
contemporary chefs who identify as Sami,
or are identified as Sami,
in crafting Sami cuisines.
I seek to add ethnographic
material to this growing
discussion on the roles
of chefs in contemporary
culinary worlds.
Today I focus on three facets
I believe makes the work
of Sami chefs, and the roles
in crafting cuisines, unique.
The first is that chefs
who identify as Sami,
must represent, and
work, as more than chefs.
The second is that chefs
participate with discomfort
in the narrowing and
objectification of Sami cuisines,
and the third is that the
chefs often refuse to define
Sami cuisines in simple ways.
This paper is part of my
larger dissertation project
that describes the ways
new food movements are
intersecting with Sami political activism,
describing the emerging
discourses, practices,
and livelihoods that
are made possible in the
coming together of these two trajectories.
I've been conducting
ethnographic fieldwork
on Sami food activism since 2008,
and the bulk of my dissertation
research took place
from 2013 to 2014 in Jokkmokk,
when the Swedish government
nominated it as Sweden's
2014 culinary capital.
I define the term chef
loosely to include all those
who work with, or have worked
in restaurants and kitchens.
For this paper I use
interviews with nine chefs who
identify as Sami, and I
pull from media coverage of
four other chefs from the
years 2009 to the present.
I also ate at their restaurants,
participated and observed
in kitchens where I could,
attended food workshops
they held, and was part of
several meetings to discuss
the documentation and
development of Sami foods.
Sami identity and Sami
rights to land and culture
stem largely from the powerful
image of Sami individuals
as reindeer herders.
Much Sami political activism
works towards the preservation
and enablement of this lifestyle,
the charismatic image of the
herder and their reindeer,
as pictured here.
The work of food activism is similar.
Sami food organizers
are primarily focused on
increasing the sale and
value of reindeer meat,
so that reindeer herding
can continue to be a
viable industry for
Sami peoples in Sweden.
Chefs are equally bound
up in these projects,
where they must work as more than chefs.
They are bound up as food activists,
because once they identify as Sami chefs,
they are working to continue
a culinary tradition,
as well as working to maintain access to
Sami lands and cultural resources.
It is hoped that by selling Sami cuisines
based on reindeer meat,
they enable more people to
remain in the north working as herders.
And by building international
interest in Sami cuisines,
they popularize a small
niche Sami industry
for Sami individuals to make a living,
as chefs, sous chefs, servers,
and food tourism organizers.
At an organizational meeting for the
National Food Conference
held in Jokkmokk in 2014,
one Sami food innovator
made this hope clear when
she stated, "If they see
how special it is up here,
"maybe the young people will stay".
The importance of chefs
to the maintenance of
reindeer herding, can
also be more concrete.
Most chefs have family
that are reindeer herders
or butchers, and they might
buy the meat from them.
They or their partners may be butchers
and herders themselves,
as in the case of Andre,
who can sell more of the meat
from his wife's reindeer,
because he is also a
chef, and can tell people
the ways to prepare it.
Those chefs prepare and
serve Sami cuisines,
there is an ambiguity and refusal
to fully define Sami foods.
Scholar Christina Orion
describes a hyper-reflexivity
on the part of Sami food entrepreneurs.
An awareness of what has
been written about the Sami
by others, like myself, and
how that knowledge can be
objectifying and useful
for marketing Sami foods.
I would further add that
there is an element of refusal
to participate in the
objectification of their own culture,
a facet which I experienced
as a researcher.
For example, I often asked
chefs and food innovators
how they define Sami foods.
Many responded by refusing
to call what they produce
Sami, or by posing the
question back to me,
as in these exchanges.
I tell Thomas that I'm
interested in studying
Sami food traditions,
and the people that are
working to promote Sami foods.
I'm actually interested in
talking with people like him,
who run businesses selling meat.
He says, "Well what I do is not Sami food,
"we do Swedish food.
"We're making reindeer
meat for a Swedish market.
"We are experimenting
with different products
"and ways to use the
meat, and we make only
"some traditional food".
In another exchange with a chef I ask her,
and what about the expectation
that you're serving
Sami food, what does that mean to you?
She responds, "Sami food, well
what does it mean to you?"
I responded, I don't know,
it can mean so many different
things, that's why I asked you.
She continued, "Sami
food is so amazingly big.
"I mean we have suoovas a
la carte for people who want
"more traditional foods" dot dot dot.
"I don't know what people
expect with Sami food."
That's the quote you've been reading.
The aspect that most
chefs appear to agree on,
and most people representing
those chefs in print media,
is that Sami food means
holism, or using everything
from an animal, and using
ingredients from the local region,
reindeer, moose, ptarmigan,
fish like Arctic char,
brown trout, whitefish, and perch.
Elaine As, probably the
most well-known chef
preparing Sami foods, told
a reporter who happened
across her drying reindeer
hides following the slaughter,
"It's common sense that
you use the whole animal".
Lila Speak, a chef and
cultural representative
for many years, tells a
reporter, that taking advantage
of everything was the way of cooking,
using for example the skin, head, heart,
liver, and blood of a fish.
That is how one chef can
prepare smoked cloudberries
for his dessert, while the
chef at the Sami elementary
school can prepare tacos and pizza using
ground reindeer and moose meat.
That's why another cultural
representative can smile
and tell the reporter that
pizza is an old Sami food,
using the Sami flatbread
with reindeer fat,
reindeer tongue, and sausage.
These examples demonstrate
there is a flexibility
in what can count as Sami foods.
But chefs also work with
their own awareness of the
implications of defining
the boundaries of this food.
The concept of Sami food is not new,
but it has never recieved
as much attention
as in the present.
In 2009, Sami traditional
food specialist and chef,
Greta Huuva, was selected
by Sweden's Royal Ministry
as the Sami Food Ambassador.
During a Sami food conference, she stated,
"Sami food got a face when I
became the food ambassador.
"Journalists want to talk to me.
"Sometimes I feel too much,
"because there are more
out there than just me.
"10 years ago Sami food
didn't exist in society.
"It's been in our kitchens."
Sami chefs are figuring out
what exactly their role is
in producing these foods,
as one chef reported,
he and chefs like Greta Huuva
are not trying to be gurus,
rather they're trying to get
Sami food out to the public.
Huuva and other Sami chefs
are uncomfortable with their
participation in the
objectification of themselves,
and their food ways.
However, they are also
bound by the sense that
they must document the food traditions,
because they either risk losing them,
or they risk someone else making
money from their knowledge.
Such processes have already
occurred for example,
with the traditional Sami reindeer suovas.
Pictured here, a smoked
and salted reindeer meat,
made popular in Sweden by
the work of Slow Food Sweden,
and Slow Food Sapmi.
It is now produced by
large slaughterhouses,
which are accused of
coopting Sami knowledge
because they have no Sami cultural roots.
To document and transfer
this culinary knowledge,
Huuva and other food activists and chefs
have worked actively to start a Sami
culinary program in Jokkmokk.
Huuva believes that Sami
knowledge is transferred from
grandparent to grandchild,
but this mechanism is broken
today because children live
far from their grandparents.
Younger Sami need new ways
to learn the knowledge
she gained as a child
from her grandparents.
Approximately half the
chefs I interviewed received
their culinary training in
Sweden's high school system,
while the other half
learned from their parents,
or grandparents, and learned to cook
in restaurants on the job.
Unsurprisingly, the
younger chefs are those who
learned in high school,
while the older chefs learned
on the job and from grandparents.
The mechanism to transfer
what are considered
traditional ways of preparation,
breaks down for the most part,
from the generation of
40 years old and younger.
Huuva and chefs of her generation,
that are trained, like
herself, by their grandparents,
recognize that not all Sami
have the same traditions.
You go from the knowledge
you have yourself.
Huuva also reasons they
need Sami culinary training
because we don't get
knowledge the same way today,
and you need other knowledge
to run a restaurant.
The shift from localized
and embodied knowledge
to school-based and codified knowledge
will of course change Sami
culinary practices today,
and in the future.
Thus, chefs feel that they must work with
traditional foods, and they do,
pictured here is Greta
Huuva, but they do this work
with the knowledge that taking these steps
may change the essence of
what they're working with.
Huuva warned in 2014 that,
"Sami has an exotic sound,
"and the risk is that traditional
recipes will be modernized
"into something unrecognizable
without a knowledge base.
"The Sami are being exploited again."
Two women have taken
over the Sami culinary
training program from Huuva,
and they often face the
question whether students
should be producing
and consuming traditionally prepared,
or more modern Sami delicacies.
For example, in making
the well-known Sami bread,
called gáhkko, the new
instructors chose to use
a sourdough base, organic wheat,
rye flours, and real vegetable oil,
rather than white flour and margarine.
The instructor knew she
was being non-traditional,
but she wanted to be healthy
and stay with the trends.
She also wanted to make something that her
grandchild was permitted
to eat by her mother.
In the efforts of food
innovators to build competence
in Sami cuisine, or as one person stated,
more Sami people working with Sami food,
there is a push-pull
relationship between learning
traditional ways of food preparation,
updating those ways to
meet today's interests,
and learning skills for
the restaurant trade.
As one person put it, "Our
chefs to learn traditional
"techniques or food sanitation,
what's more important?"
Chefs and their instructors
sit at this uncomfortable
juncture deciding what Sami
foods to teach students,
and prepare for the public.
Those chefs may agree that Sami cuisines
are good as they are,
they of course must still
respond to customer interests,
the expectations of foodies.
In the north there is the
assumption that tourists want
one type of food, as one chef stated,
"After you've done it for so many years,
"you know what people expect
to eat when they come up here.
"It's cloudberries,
reindeer, and Arctic char.
"If you do these three
you've got everything."
While this may have been
true a few years ago,
I heard criticism of the
food served in Jokkmokk's
restaurants many times.
The meal of reindeer,
cloudberries, and Arctic char,
is formulaic to them.
These visiting foodies want the exotic.
Tongue, heart, intestines,
berries prepared in a new way,
unusual parts of the fish, lichens.
Some chefs have responded
to this interest,
while others stick with the
above-mentioned formula.
Chef Martin Johnson has chosen
to respond to that interest.
He tells a reporter that his
goal is to cook traditional
food in a way that no one has seen.
He serves dessert in marrow bones,
eggs in bird feeders, reindeer
blood in a taco shell,
chocolate that is smoked and salted.
He states that, while top
round and filets are for
tourists, he wants to make a reindeer stew
for a king or president.
"At home everything is in the same pot.
"But if I made that for my guests,
"they would turn around and leave.
"But I can cook it up in seven courses,
"and make it into an experience".
In conclusion, I've been
thinking about the limitations
that identity places on these chefs.
As of now, none of these
chefs have reached the
star magnitude of the new Nordic producers
like Magnus Nilsson at Fäviken,
or Rene Redzepi at Noma.
Yet these star chefs are
using the ingredients,
and sometimes the knowledge
of Sami food ways.
In one case I learned
that a chef I interviewed
actually harvested and ground
the pine bark and lichens
for these restaurants.
Chefs who identify as Sami
seek to innovate like other
new Nordic chefs, preparing
cloudberries, chocolate,
and carrots smoked with birch,
as representations of Sami cuisines.
At the same time, via their
identification as Sami,
they are equally bound up
to Sami political projects,
which may limit their innovation.
They are part of documenting
Sami culinary heritage,
with organizations like
Eldrimner and Slow Food.
They are part of building
an industry of Sami
owned food experiences,
and their valorization
and marketing of reindeer meat
may help herders on the land,
chefs work with an awareness
of their uncomfortable position
as innovators and
preservers of Sami cuisines.
And we tend to ask more from them,
to be innovative and traditional,
to be fantastic like celebrity chefs,
and to be conservative like
other bearers of culture.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Thank you Amanda, we're
gonna move on to our
last presenter, who is Jean Nihoul,
and he's from the
University of Connecticut,
his paper is titled Dan Barber and the
Lost Flavor of Wheat.
- Thank you.
Gastronomy's prominent
assumption in popular culture
has caused chefs to realize
that it is no longer enough
for them to roll out their own pasta,
or even bake their own bread.
In the pursuit of perfection,
they have recently taken their
obsessive quest for
flavor one step further,
by turning to freshly
milled whole-wheat flour.
While this may seem unworthy of being,
"on some exciting culinary frontier",
consider that globally, an
estimated four and a half
billion people eat some form
of this staple crop every day.
In the U.S., these amber
waves of grain cover
15% of all farmland, a number
which puts to shame the mere
three percent of land devoted
to fruits and vegetables.
Despite its smaller size,
this three percent produces
the items most coveted by
consumers at farmer's market.
Yet, when it comes to wheat,
"We have somehow convinced
"ourselves that it is
okay to cook and bake with
"what is essentially rotten produce".
Not only is most of the wheat
basically dead because of
the extensive bleaching
process it undergoes to
render it shelf-stable, but
the same modern varieties
of nameless and homogenous wheat
are grown in nutrient-starved soils,
thereby requiring the addition
of chemical fertilizers,
and unreasonable amounts
of water to help them grow,
demonstrating that the entire system is
inherently unsustainable.
From a flavor standpoint,
Chef Dan Barber compares
cooking with such wheat
to, "trying to build a
"delicious menu around these ingredients".
It seems that as society
has steadily grown
more distant from its food supply,
it has become apathetic to
food's taste and traditions,
and is now simply viewing food as fuel,
something Barber believes
to be "a dangerous concept,
"but that's where we are
right now, food as fuel.
"It's why nothing tastes good,
"and why our farm systems are collapsing".
And the growing of wheat reflects this.
Whereas it was once bred for flavor,
it is now solely bred for
efficiency and convenience.
Barber, executive chef of
the critically-acclaimed
Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant
in New York's Hudson Valley,
has devoted much of his
culinary expertise to reclaiming
the lost flavor of wheat.
He is not a typical chef,
as his restaurant is part of
an 80-acre working farm
known as the Stone Barn
Center for Food and Agriculture,
which grows over 200 varieties
of produce year round,
and is home to an array
of pastured animals.
Such a closed system has
given Barber a near-complete
control of his restaurant's food supply,
and has earned him numerous
accolades and awards,
allowing him to become one of the world's
most influential chefs.
His fame has provided him
with a platform to speak
at several TED talks and other symposia,
earn James Beard awards, and a spot on the
San Pellegrino List, his
own episode of Netflix's
Chef's Table, and the
opportunity to publish
The Third Plate, Field
Notes on the Future of Food.
In this manifesto, Barber
encourages farmers to grow
delicious and nutritious
varieties of wheat,
which promote healthy soil,
and sustainable farming practices.
He sees the mere growing of this crop
as a path to revitalizing
local mills and bakeries,
demonstrating that an
ingredient as simple as a grain
can influence meaningful change.
Barber's interest in wheat made sense,
given its prevalence in most kitchens,
but it was his sudden
realization of its poor quality
that motivated him to tackle the problem.
In viewing chefs as advocates for flavor,
he believes that they
"have an opportunity,
"and perhaps the responsibility,
"to use their cooking to shape culture,
"to manifest what's
possible, and in doing so,
"to inspire a new ethic of eating".
Barber considers chefs to
be ambassadors for change
who possess the ability to
reshape the food landscape,
and redefine appetites from the ground up,
not just by changing, pardon me.
Not just by inspiring
consumers to try new varieties
of produce, but by changing the
way in which they are grown.
This presentation will
discuss Chef Barber,
and his own variety of wheat,
and the impact his grain
revival has had on altering
local food cultures.
By using his celebrity
status as chef to encourage
small farms and bakeries
to prioritize flavor,
Barber has shown he possesses
the means to influence
dietary changes while
simultaneously educating
his clientele and
supporters about nutrition,
ecology, culture, and most
importantly, flavorful foods.
For the last 9,000 years, wheat
has been a staple crop for
many cultures, not only for
the value of the grain itself,
but also for its straw, which
could be used as thatch,
fodder, fuel, bedding,
among other possibilities.
It was, "a community builder,
a grain whose benefits
"were reaped only through cooperation,
"and effective social organization.
"Farmers grew it, millers ground it,
"and bakers turned it into
sustenance and pleasure".
Farmers consistently
produce delicious wheat
by saving seeds that would be
used in subsequent sowings,
as these seeds had already
proven to be well adapted
to their local climates,
with good pest resistance,
and great flavor.
Furthermore, by growing
it within a careful
crop-rotation system that
was ecologically sensible
and beneficial, it would,
"disrupt disease cycles,
"and return nutrients to the soil",
ultimately producing more
nutrient-rich plants,
and providing the opportunity to plant
a wider variety of crops.
The millers then ground
the wheat kernels whole,
utilizing all three of the
grain's main components,
"a fibrous and nutrient-rich
outer coating called the bran,
"the flavorful and aromatic germ,
"and a pouch of starch
known as the endosperm",
all of which was mashed
together during grinding,
thereby preserving its
nutritional content,
while simultaneously
creating a broad spectrum of
complex flavors and aromas
that were unique to each crop,
allowing bakers to
create exquisite breads.
However, once industrial
farming took over,
many of these heirloom or
landrace varietals disappeared,
as companies became better
equipped to more efficiently
and cheaply process grain.
Now, farmers are, "producing
grain strictly as commodity,
"with no more cultural
heritage attached to it",
and consumers have since become accustomed
to wheat that produces,
"nutrient-poor flour,
"and insipid, spongy breads".
Two stories ultimately contributed
to the death of landrace
wheat, and had disastrous
implications for its flavor.
One being a scientist's
desire to feed the world,
and the other being the
industrialization of grain mills.
In the late 1950s,
parts of the world faced
massive starvation,
and a scientist by the
name of Dr. Norman Borlaug
believed this needed fixing.
Seeing that the global market
was desperate for grain,
he encouraged farmers to,
"plant wall-to-wall harvests of wheat".
This large-scale shift to the
monoculturization of farming
had horrible consequences
for the local ecology.
As a valuable system of crop
rotations was abandoned,
much of the soil was quickly denuded.
To address this problem,
Borlaug created a cocktail of
nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium,
to feed the plants their most basic foods.
Essentially, he was bypassing
the entire periodic table,
and, "substituting a few soluble elements
"for an entire living system".
A mentality Barber likens
to, "thinking that an
"intravenous needle can
administer a delicious meal".
Borlaug's steroids ultimately
caused wheat stalks
to shoot up with heavy seed heads,
and because without the
requisite time and array of
nutrients to grow into
healthy and mature plants,
the stalks were not
strong enough to hold the
heavy heads, and the
plants kept falling over,
making harvest next to impossible.
To fix his latest dilemma,
Borlaug created a semi-dwarf
variety that had good
resistance to pests and disease,
and had such enormous
yields that harvests nearly
tripled in size within 10 years.
Undoubtedly this, "altered
the way we grow food
"on a large scale, as
the world is now awash in
"monocultures of genetically
uniform varieties,
"fed by chemical fertilizers".
But even if Borlaug had
managed to grow tasty wheat,
industrial milling practices
would have ensured its demise.
Now that wheat for flour could
be quickly and cheaply grown,
large food companies were quick
to adopt better technology
that essentially turned
their factories into,
"abattoirs for wheat".
Here, a process using roller mills,
rolls the outer bran layer off the kernel,
removes the germ, and grinds the remaining
endosperm into white
flour, which then undergoes
a kilning process to dry it
out and prevent spoilage.
It is worth noting that even
if heritage varieties had
remained popular, they
would not have conformed to
the characteristics required
for industrial milling.
Meaning that farmers who
still grow landrace wheat
as part of their crop rotations,
do so at a financial loss.
As there is no market for
their non-uniform grain,
they can only sell it
as cheap cattle feed,
or plough it back into the fields.
The result of this industrial
"mummification process",
strips most of the flavor from wheat,
and allows companies to,
"create ultra processed,
"refined flour that is
drop-dead consistent for baking,
"and totally stable for
storage and distribution".
While the uniformity of such
flour is admittedly useful
for commercial bakeries and restaurants,
it means that only six
percent of all flour produced
in the U.S. is truly whole
wheat, a sad figure given
how much of it is used every day.
As a means of recuperating
much of the social,
cultural, nutritive, and
flavorful aspects of what
used to be associated with wheat,
Barber set out on a crusade
to resurrect and restore
its terroir, and introduce his diners to,
"the idea of wheat
having taste and flavor",
a foreign concept to many.
Barber's mission was simple,
he only wanted to track down
old and delicious varietals,
which proved more difficult
than he had anticipated,
as Borlaug's variety had
successfully conquered much of the globe.
It was not until a trip
to a small town in Spain,
that he discovered a variety
of wheat known as Aragon 03,
which was of such high
quality that the town
refused to grow anything else.
Because over the years it
had developed good resistance
to pests, provided good yields,
and had an outstanding flavor.
Barber brought some kernels
back to his farm for planting,
where he realized that,
"heirloom foods may be what we
"think of as the gold
standard, grown before the era
"of industrial agriculture,
but they're frozen in time,
"and thus frequently
unsuited to current soil
"and climate conditions".
So much effort had gone into
finding this landrace wheat,
that Barber forgot to consider
that his Spanish varietal
might be unfit for the
Hudson Valley's climate.
In order to address this issue,
Barber contacted Dr. Steve Jones,
seen here on the bottom
left, head of the now-famous
Bread Lab at Washington State University,
a research center
renowned for its devotion
of taking old world techniques,
and marrying them with
modern technology to breed
new, artisanal varieties
of landrace wheat.
Barber challenged Jones to,
"breed a delicious wheat
"that was nutritious, that
had good yield for the farmer,
"and that had good pest resistance".
Jones immediately accepted,
and decided to breed
Aragon 03 with, "another
variety to accentuate its
"characteristics, and
then make it better by
"marrying it to another
local variety to ensure
"that those genetics
carry on into the future".
Ultimately creating what
is now called Barber Wheat,
a varietal perfectly adapted
to the ecology and climate
surrounding Blue Hill,
that still preserved the
original characteristics of Aragon 03.
Barber mainly uses the
flour from his wheat,
milled in-house, to bake
into breads such as this one,
which proves to be a pure
way of allowing the wheat's
complex flavors and aromas
to express themselves.
And after having had the
opportunity to taste some of it,
I can tell you that it
makes a mockery of the stuff
that permeates our supermarket shelves.
Barber's bread was utterly delicious,
and proves that wheat has
as much potential for flavor
as a tomato.
Apart from the bread, Barber
wheat is also used in many
pastries and other baked
goods that are sold at
Blue Hill's newly-created Grain Bar,
a separate venue that Barber
hopes will serve as an example
for how the artisanal wheat industry can
revitalize local communities.
He believes that the key
to this system is to start
from the ground up,
literally with the soil,
where the driver for flavor lies.
So he "encouraged farmers
to improve their soil,
"by creating a market for
grains that added fertility,
"since without a buyer,
farmers can't justify planting
"them into the rotations, and
without planting them into
"the rotations, sooner or
later soil fertility declines".
Not only does this promote
sustainable farming practices,
but with a new market for their product,
farmers can actually turn a profit.
To do all this, Barber had
to restructure the local
supply and distribution network,
starting with the farmers,
who first had to be
persuaded to grow the crop.
"But in order to persuade
them, Barber had to convince
"the bakers that they
needed better wheat".
Which required getting
millers to purchase the
heirloom grain and turn
it into a product that is
then sold to chefs and bakers,
who are then interested
to create something delicious with it.
This last part is essential,
for as Barber rightly points out,
"None of this will matter if
it isn't tethered to cuisine".
Since the food chain is such
that end users will dictate
what they wanna purchase
from the flour manufacturers,
who in turn will tell their mills,
and who in turn will tell their farmers.
And this is where Barber's philosophy is,
philosophy of the chef
as ambassador of change
comes brilliantly into play,
as he hopes that chefs,
and their use of such
products will trickle down,
and influence others to
follow in their stead.
While there is reason
to be skeptical of such
trickle-down policies, the
success of the partnership
between Barber and the Bread
Lab, has inspired one of
the country's largest fast-casual chains,
to change its own practices.
After a conversation
with Barber and Jones,
Chipotle's founder, Steve
Ells, approached the Bread Lab
to inquire about the possibility
of a collaboration to
"use regional wheats in its tortillas".
Well there are certainly issues
of scale, considering that
Chipotle uses nearly
800,000 tortillas a day,
and that switching over to inconsistent,
regionally-based wheats
would mean that its tortillas
across the country would vary in flavor,
it would represent a significant
shift in the status quo.
And while access to such grains
are "still quite sealed off
"for most of American
society", a true testament to
industrial wheat's ability
to have so thoroughly
obliterated its competition,
if the partnership between
the Bread Lab and Chipotle succeeds,
"it will bring real whole
wheat to more American plates
"than any other Bread Lab
collaboration so far".
And will do so at a national level.
Admittedly, Barber's distant
utopic system faces numerous
obstacles, but this first of its kind
partnership shows promise.
Since the late 1950s,
industrial agriculture has been
selectively breeding large,
monoculture harvests of wheat
for uniformity, high yields,
and overall resistance
to drought and disease,
essentially breeding for
efficiency and convenience
rather than taste.
As Barber aims to reverse
this by prioritizing flavor,
the chef is effectively making
use of his celebrity status
to help reclaim the lost flavor of wheat.
And while such heirloom
wheats will never replace
their industrial counterpart,
just think what would happen
if a mere five percent
of those 47 million acres
were switched to landrace wheats.
It could benefit both the environment,
and our enjoyment of food.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Thank you Jean, it looks
like we have enough time left
to listen to Amir's excellent video,
this is coming from Iran I believe.
So his talk is called...
The Role of Iranian Chefs
in the Changing Perception
of Persian Cuisine.
- Hello everybody.
I am Amir, and Sam is behind the camera,
and we are here today,
I mean we are not there, we are here,
we really wanted to be
there but it seems that
getting a visa from the U.S.
would take eight to 12 months
for those who are born in Iran,
according to the U.S. Embassy.
So we were not fortunate
enough to be there with you.
Or probably not fortunate
enough to be born somewhere else
so that getting a visa
wouldn't take a year.
Anyway, thanks for
having us, and thanks to
Rick who allowed us to
record our presentation,
and send it to you.
Though on the positive side,
since we are recording this,
we will be presenting
precisely for 15 minutes,
so the chair of the
session could just lay back
and not to worry about the timing,
or pointing us when the time is up,
because we can see obviously.
But again, we will promise
that we will be done by
15 minutes.
So our paper just like the
other papers in this
panel, is about the chefs,
and their roles in changing the cuisines.
But our paper particularly
focuses on Iranian chefs,
and their role in changing the perception,
or at least trying to
change the perception of
Persian cuisine.
We thought one of the
best ways to explore this
is to look into the cookbooks
written by these chefs,
and when we say chefs we
don't mean those in Iran
because that's another story,
and they are writing for
a different kind of audience in Iran,
and also there is no need to introduce the
Persian cuisine or to
change the perception of
Persian cuisine in Iran because
everybody already know about that.
And they grew up with
it, so there is no point.
Rather we are talking about
the chefs based abroad,
and these people are the people who have
left the country, probably for good,
after the Islamic Revolution in 1979,
and migrated to Europe, and to the U.S.,
or they are the second-generation
Iranians who are
in fact the children of
those who left the country
in 1979.
But before going into depth,
I would like to give a brief introduction
on three main categories
of Iranian cookbooks.
Because we think that
clarifying these different types
of cookbooks could give
a better general idea
of what and how Iranian cookbooks are.
Well the first group of
Iranian cookbooks are
early Persian cookbooks, which
are the cooking manuscripts
written as far as 500 years ago.
These types of cookbooks
usually aim for the
professional chefs, usually
the ones from the royal court,
and therefore their recipes are
for the elite and aristocrats
who were mostly living
in large households.
Unlike many other types of cookbooks,
housewives are not at
all the target readers of
these cookbooks because
housewives had their
very own gender-specific methods of
transmitting recipes among themselves,
both horizontally within generation,
as well as from one
generation to the next.
So recipes in these cookbooks
are not representative of
what normal people in that time would eat.
The second group of cookbooks are
modern Persian cookbooks.
Well the first of these
kind was written around
1920 which inspired all
the cookbooks after that.
These books are usually
dedicated to Iranian women
and housewives, unlike the previous group,
to teach them the modern
methods of housekeeping or,
the principles of hygiene,
as well as the cooking,
Iranian and Western dishes,
especially French dishes.
The recipes in this group
of cookbooks can be divided
in two main sections.
The first one is Iranian food,
and the second one is Western foods.
But the interesting thing
is that the attention to the
Western food and the
pages dedicated to the
Western cuisine, and
Western party hosting,
in many cases exceeded
the chapters and pages
on Iranian food.
But even more interesting
is that, at the time that
these cookbooks were mostly published,
it was very very unusual for women and for
housewives to do their
daily cooking according to cookbooks,
instead of following traditional
instructions received
from their mothers or,
for example like grandmothers.
Even more unusual was making
a non-Iranian dish at home.
At that time there was
a clear preference for
Iranian food at home, and
the use of Western food was
limited to a few European
style restaurants,
or a limited type of dishes such as
(mumbles) or beef stroganoff.
So these recipes such as, for example,
pork jelly, or other savory
jelly, they're almost
never tried by those who
bought these cookbooks.
And when you look at those recipes now,
you will realize that most
of them are entirely based on
fantasy, and they have nothing to do
with how the real dish should be.
And this fictional conception
in cookbook writing of
that time could be because
of a strong interest
in Western cuisine.
In fact, it's not about
preparing the dishes,
but rather, talking about
it without having any
practical effect at all.
But the third group of Iranian cookbooks
are what Bert Fragner,
the famous Iranologist
called "ethnographic cookbooks".
Ethnographic cookbooks
are the cookbooks that
we have focused on in our study,
and these cookbooks are kind of opposite
to the second group
that we just introduced.
The second group intended
to brag about the
Western cuisine within the Iranian border,
while the third group is
intending to introduce and
explain the characters
and highlights of the
Iranian cuisine to
Westerners, and that means
of course they are written
in Western languages,
and mostly in English.
As far as we know, and
as far as we could find,
there are 20 cookbooks
of this kind published,
and we were able to reach all of them,
and to examine them closely
using a mixed method
of content analysis.
Most of these cookbooks
have, as I told you earlier,
an ethnographic character.
That means the intention of their authors
is to present a homogenous
culture through the
perspective of the cookbook genre.
Most of these books are written by authors
who have left the country,
probably for good,
after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran,
and it seems that these authors are trying
to maintain some strong ties
with their ancestral culture.
For example, Najmieh
Batmanglij is the author of six
of these cookbooks, and
all her cookbooks present
and idealize an historical
picture of Iranian culture,
and create an image of
an unbroken continuity of
Iranian civilization.
The recipes in most of
these cookbooks have almost
nothing to do with culinary
reality, I mean nothing.
I remember that Sam and
I once gave a try to
a few of these recipes to see how
authentic they taste.
We did exactly as the recipe said,
and we followed the instructions
as accurately as possible.
Then we thought that
we could invite over a
group of Iranians in Norway which we did,
and these people they are
from different backgrounds,
and different cities in Iran.
Some of them are living in
Norway for more than 30 years,
and some others were just newcomers.
But the interesting point
was that not even one of them
agreed on those dishes
being authentic Iranian,
or at least what they grew
up with in their households,
or what their mothers
or grandmothers cooked.
So what I'm saying is that
these cookbooks seem to try to
create a national culture
and a national cuisine,
and tell us about people's
collective imaginations or
symbolic values, dreams and expectations,
rather than about just
culinary conditions.
We know that the fact that the recipe
shows up in a cookbook does not
necessarily mean that
people eat that dish.
Conversely it is not true
that people do not eat a dish
which has not appeared in a cookbook.
I mean, recipes in these cookbooks
have a nationalistic tone.
They are either the ones which others
think Iranians should eat,
or what they want others
think that Iranians would eat.
These cookbooks we think promote a
kind of romanticized,
pre-Islamic national construction
by evoking an authenticity,
and superiority of
Persian cooking from ancient times.
Most of these books claim much of the
Middle Eastern Asian repertoire
to be of Persian origin.
So in this way, food has
become one of the main
aspects of presenting the Persian culture,
and some dishes began to be recognized as
originally Persian dishes
which have traveled
through the borders
and has inspired Greeks
or Turkish, and even
Mediterranean cuisine.
And in some other cases however,
these national dishes are
not even Iranian by core.
And they're previously found or consumed
in other countries and cultures.
They were only "borrowed" from others,
so basically and loosely,
what these cookbooks say,
is that Iranian or Persian cuisine,
was the key cuisine of that area,
and the root to which
other cuisines belong to.
And if you find the non-Iranian
items in these books,
it was enriched with Iranian
food ways if you will.
To wrap it up, national
identity in the cookbooks
that we examined, can be
observed within the pages
of Persian cookbooks.
Emphasize on Persian,
seem not to be a simple state of place,
or a simple state of a nationality.
Rather they seem to emphasize
on Persianness if you will.
The notion of Persian
culture is clearly present
in these cookbooks, and we
think this is because Iranians
who formerly were stereotyped
in the West for being
sophisticated or intelligent,
or, I don't know, wealthy,
have later really been
undermined by potent
Islamophobia and racism.
The Islamic Revolution had
a great impact not only
on people in Iran, but on
Iranians all over the world.
The revolution actually
transformed the perceptions
of the people in Western
countries as a result
of international media of course.
So before this, Iranians
were often portrayed to be
progressive or to be
wealthy, or intelligent.
But after the revolution they were kinda
redefined.
So after that, Iran was
perceived once more as a
third-world nation, and its
people were thought to be
illiterate peasants, or I don't know,
religious fundamentalists.
So we propose that what these
authors are trying to do
within the pages of some
best-selling cookbooks,
might be an effort to transform
this imposed stereotype of Iran
and its Islamic Revolution,
and turn it into a more acceptable image
for the Western audience.
And what I'm saying a
more acceptable image,
I don't mean only food, and the cuisine,
but also an acceptable
image about its culture,
about its people.
And about the I don't know,
2500 year civilization history.
And in order to do that, they use food
as a defensive strategy
to alienate themselves
from their stereotyped identity.
They even avoid using
the name Iran and Iranian
in the books, instead they
use Persia and Persian,
which is the ancient name of Iran,
because Persia gives that pre-Islamic,
cool and exotic image
of Iran to the readers.
As the home of Persian cat or Persian rug.
Well the name of Iran thanks to the media
is associated with Islamic prejudice and
other unpleasant political matters,
and these others are trying their best to
stay away from that as much as possible
within the pages of their cookbooks.
So I think we are reaching our limit,
our 15-minute limit, so
I'll just finish this with
thanking you all for listening to us,
and hope to see you
again in the near future.
So thank you again.
- All right, well thanks Amir.
Thank you all for attending this session.
We're going to start with
a conversation from our
discussant, Greg de St. Maurice from
the University of Pittsburgh.
If you don't already have
it marked in your schedule,
I encourage you to attend
his session tomorrow which is
at the same time, and
called Contemporary Chefs
and Culinary Transformations.
Thanks for coming, Greg.
- Cool, thank you.
I was really impressed
by the array of papers
and the issues that they brought up and,
which works with the
title, how they converged.
So I'm gonna start by actually
bringing up some of the
questions that came up for
me as I was thinking about
how these papers worked together.
And then what I'll do
is I'll go to some of my
more individual comments,
and I'll leave out the ones
for Amir and Sam and I'll
send it to them separately.
So first, there's the
idea of what a chef is,
or who counts as a chef.
You know, how a chef is
different from a cook.
And how a contemporary chef is different
from chefs in the past.
So part of it is that
chefs are supposed to be
really impactful today, and engaged.
And I've been wondering why
there's this expectation
for chefs today to be
involved in so many different
aspects of human life.
And you know,
how that comes out of
food's role in social life,
whether it be environmental,
related to labor,
economic issues, or ethical issues.
Related to this, there's
the issue of how we judge
success for chefs.
In Signe's words, I guess
what's the potential payoff.
When a chef consciously engages
with these other dimensions?
Or what counts as meaningful change,
more in Dan Barber's words?
Meanwhile, what does it mean when a chef
refuses to engage, and
what are the consequences?
So related to all of this as well,
in a number of these papers we've seen how
chefs are telling stories,
and how stories are
being told about them, that
they may or may not have
a degree of control over.
But chefs also exist
within communities where
they are trying to represent
some communities but also,
there are other people who
are left out of the stories,
and I think it's critical
to pay attention to that
element as well.
In addition, as Amir and
Sam paid attention to in
the last paper, all of these
stories have audiences.
Which is really another piece.
So I guess I'll start next
by going to the individual
elements, I'll start with Leigh's.
So I think the media aspect obviously...
Is one that has to be
addressed, because it's so,
I guess we exist in a
media-saturated society,
and for these chefs it's
really inextricable from that.
I would like to hear more
about the negative side
of this media omnipresence,
or the evil side
of the necessary evil.
Also, why do American consumers
desire these stories?
And how is authenticity constructed,
or how are these claims
to authenticity evaluated?
So for Signe, I was really fascinated by
how the senses and cultural
notions played into this
idea of transformation and a
passage between categories.
And also how chefs and scientists
can really play with this.
I would be curious to hear
about how those in the
Nordic food movement see themselves,
not just defining what Nordic means,
but also what food does,
what Nordic food should look, feel, smell,
sound, taste, move like.
Not to mention issues of
labor and sustainability.
Also, if it's seen as an
imperative to eat insects...
How is there outreach happening?
You know, to convince
people, you need to eat this.
For Amanda, I really liked
the attention that you paid
to chefs' perspectives.
There's a lot of rich
data there, and nuance,
especially in the observation
that identity can be limiting,
and the idea of chefs being
in an uncomfortable position,
and almost refusing to answer things.
As a very detailed question, I
would like to know more about
this traditional knowledge
passed from grandparents down,
I was surprised by that.
And I'm wondering if that
has anything to do also
with maybe the difference
between a chef and a cook
in some ways, and if,
and this is just total,
supposition but, if maybe sometimes,
people refuse to answer
questions as a chef
to take on that authority,
maybe because of the way
that they acquired their knowledge.
Additionally...
A central piece in your paper
also had to do with this
idea of tradition versus innovation,
which isn't always black or white, right?
and I think you start out
with it more in the grey area,
and then you kind of get
to it where it's more
black or white, and I'd
like to find out more about
the rules for that, and
the tension between it,
maybe what fuels the tension.
So for Jean...
Yours is a great example
of what America today
really expects from chefs, in
so many different dimensions,
that they be activists,
moral entrepreneurs,
economic generators,
taste makers, celebrities.
And the attention to historical
change is really good.
Why, I wonder, you know
do we turn to chefs
today for such things?
And then, I'd like to
hear more about the wheat.
What does it taste and feel like?
What are the difficulties encountered in
producing and processing
these kinds of heirloom
varieties of wheat?
Especially when you think about issues of
scale and replication.
and here I'll come back to that idea of
what counts as meaningful change?
I think it's good to be
critical too of these things.
You know, at what point
can we say that something
has been meaningful?
What exactly are we looking for?
and so those are my questions.
We can either open it up,
or you can all sort of
answer what you want to.
- [Leigh] Does anybody have
any questions out there
that they wanna get in, by the way?
- Are you asking this
to anybody specifically?
- Well for my part I
would say that one of the
tensions is because we don't know.
In the past it used to be
maybe to the gastronome,
the person who was given the authority
to make judgments about taste,
and then disseminate those accordingly.
And now it's perhaps the person
with the fastest fingers,
as opposed to the person
who has invested their life
in accruing matters of taste.
So that's not to say that
it's any better or worse.
It is to say that it's
definitely more democratized,
and that our ideas of taste
have to adapt to that.
And one very good example
is of course, Instagram.
All of the chefs that I
worked with couldn't take
a beautiful photo of their
own food to save their lives,
and most of the dishes that
they made for photographs,
as one would imagine, weren't
exactly the tastiest dishes,
most things were undercooked
so that they would
stand up right, or given
a gloss at the end,
or a lot of these dishes we
just tossed in the garbage
right afterwards because
they weren't edible.
So that's one kind of
good example of that.
- Sure.
(audience member question inaudible)
- Also just to tag onto that.
There's also the gendered
dimension to it too.
- Lots of things to think about, yes.
I think that's why I use the
word uncomfortable often,
because they themselves are uncomfortable.
They use the term chef
because that is what,
not all of them do but the
ones who get labeled a chef
by the print media, and digital media,
end up using that term.
But a lot of them will also
say "Well, I'm not a chef.
"I'm not trained as a chef",
as you say like this Western
idea of going to culinary school,
"I'm not trained as a chef".
But they work as chefs,
they're running restaurants
and such, so there's both.
(audience member question inaudible)
No.
(audience member question inaudible)
Yeah because they wouldn't
wanna be labeled that,
whereas one example is
they have had an annual
Best Sami Chef competition, so a chef is
actually quite a wonderful
thing to be as well,
it's something you
compete to be the best in,
so it is a little different.
At the same time they
would agree that it's a
colonial imposition, a Western imposition.
- It's interesting, that
seems like a different way
of appropriating it as
well, of working with it.
- [Amanda] I see it a lot
as like a customizing new,
new ideas and making them their own.
- Any other questions?
Yes?
(audience member question inaudible)
By the way, as a sort of aside,
if anybody has any questions
that they would like to send to Amir,
either letting me or Leigh know,
we can put you in contact with them later.
- Go for it.
- Yeah, so of course in my case,
I was looking at that very fact, right,
the fact that these
stories are fabricated in
a lot of ways, as all history is.
So I guess the question is,
what you want the narrative
to represent, do you want
the narrative to represent
a feeling?
Or do you want the narrative to represent
the reality of the creation?
So in the case of Fat Rice,
that restaurant that is
offering the food of Macao,
it is extensively researched.
They go to Macao once every year,
and look into the history of
these culinary developments,
and we're talking about
a food that's gone from
Portugal to Africa to
South Africa to Indonesia,
you know and picked up
little bits and pieces
all along the way.
So you have authenticity
being already culled from
a thousand different places,
and then you have to take
both these ingredients
and these techniques,
and bring them all the
way across the globe,
and at the same time it's
probably one of the few places
that has attempted to replicate
some of those experiences
in a way that is through
cuisine, and therefore,
not represented all in one bowl,
like one of you guys talked about,
the Sami cuisine, yeah.
So again if it's evoking
heritage in some ways,
this bowl of fat rice that
is incredibly beautiful,
and it has the shrimp and
the clams and everything
on top of it, is so
visually representative of
the heritage that they're
trying to portray,
and at the same time,
it's not necessarily even,
in its visual appeal,
authentic to what you would say
it is at home.
So I guess again, that's
why I'm asking for us to
think about what we really want out of it,
and know what we're getting as a result of
what we're asking for.
- The other thing right, is
that whenever you're telling
stories like this, there's
the political element to it,
and even if you're saying that
the food speaks for itself,
there's so much that you
could say the food could say.
Somebody is always being left out of that.
Anybody else, any other questions?
Anything from you?
Oh I'm sorry, yeah, go for it.
(audience member question inaudible)
- [Leigh] The golden question.
- [Amanda] I would like
to finish my dissertation.
- I'll second that.
- I don't know for me it's, I was,
the whole idea for my paper
came from listening to
this one talk at a conference in Denmark,
the MAD symposium, which
he spoke about this,
and the idea of wheat not having a flavor,
I don't know it just seemed so wrong,
because flour is in so much
of a wheat all the time,
and it really tastes like such garbage,
I mean to answer your
question about the bread
that I tasted at Blue Hill I mean,
chocolatey, malty, a little bit of spice,
some underlying sweetness,
and it was really just
the most simple, basic bread recipe,
I mean flour, water, eggs,
yeast and that kind of stuff,
but just based off the
terroir from where the wheat
was grown you're getting
this whole range of
complex flavors and aromas
that are really just
so striking and, I was
just more, I don't know,
that's just how wheat used
to taste back in the day,
and we've just only recently lost touch
with that but it just, I don't know,
I guess I would like
to raise more awareness
about this in a way
just because it really,
I don't know it's just such
a basic staple in every
kitchen pantry but it really is just
not very good once you've
tried the good stuff,
but it's really worth
switching over if you ever
get the opportunity.
(audience member question inaudible)
Yeah I mean for right
now with these heirloom
varietals of wheat it's
incredibly limited.
The only mill where I know that
I can get this kind of wheat
is Anson Mills, by Glenn Roberts
who's with Sean Brock down
at Husk in the South, and
revitalizing this whole culture,
but I mean it really is
very closed off to much of
American society, but in a
way I think that's why it
shows promise that Chipotle
is getting involved
with this or at least interested in it.
Because if this does work I mean,
it's Chipotle it's huge,
it's across the country,
and that could really
start reintroducing the
American population to
this idea of wheat having,
as having flavor, and
tortillas not being just some
bland white thing to wrap your rice and
beans and all that kind of stuff in.
- And I think this touches
back on that question Greg
raised of what do we expect of chefs?
Are they also to be facilitating access,
like promoting social
sustainability in food systems?
Or are they there for our entertainment?
- And sort of related to the
question that was just asked is
I didn't bring this up
and I don't think really
any of us did, but there's
structural limitations to
what chefs can do, so
even though we have these
expectations for chefs,
paying attention to
structural factors is also important,
something we shouldn't overlook.
And I think actually we've
reached our time limit,
so thank you all for coming,
if you have any questions
for anybody on the panel, or for Amir,
please come up and talk just now,
but thank you for coming.
(soft music)
