If you do a Google Image search for “Chef Saves World” (because why wouldn’t you?), you’ll find pictures of people like Jamie Oliver (often dressed up like a vegetable), René Redzepi, Ferran Adrià, and Mario Batali (huh?). Who you won’t find a picture of is Thomas Keller, because he’s not interested in saving the world. As reported recently in the New York Times:

‘Chefs’ obligation to help save the planet? A lofty idea, they [Keller and Spanish chef Andoni Luis Aduriz] agreed, but the priority is creating great, brilliant food.

“With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” Mr. Keller asked. “The world’s governments should be worrying about carbon footprint.”

…

Both he and Mr. Aduriz view the goal of haute cuisine as a seamless fusion of pleasure and art. But more radically, they are united in the belief that their responsibility as chefs is primarily to create breathtakingly delicious and beautiful food — not, as some of their colleagues think, to provide a livelihood for farmers near their restaurants, to preserve traditional culinary arts or to stop the spread of global warming.’

Radical indeed that chefs should care more about the food they prepare than about the future of 7 billion people – of which not even 0.1% are actually relevant to their livelihoods. So, cue righteous indignation. Here’s Nick Wiseman in the Huffington Post, where he notes his great disappointment in Keller, his ‘personal hero’:

‘Dismissing the role of chefs to do anything but cook diminishes the power of the profession. Sure, restaurants just serve food. But a chef, translated literally from its French root, leads. Mr. Keller is within his rights to leave his “chef jacket” at the door of his kitchens, but the issues linked to how he makes his living are too important. As an essential building block of life, food is linked to national security, public health, economic development, environmental protection, cultural preservation. Read Michael Pollan’s letter to the Farmer in Chief to see how inextricably linked food is to the fabric of this country. So for Mr. Keller to limit the role of chefs to just cooking great food marginalizes a profession he has vaulted to celebrity.’

I’ve now read this paragraph several times, and it still dazzles me with its absurdity. There are all these dots, but they just don’t connect. Chef = leader. Check. Leader of his kitchen, non? Food is linked to national security (!) and public health. Indeed. But hardly the food that comes out of the kitchen at Keller’s Per Se (check here if you want to know what a Per Se meal looks like. Go poke your eyeball if you want to know how it probably feels to pay for a meal at Per Se). Oh, because Michael Pollan said so! Er, not falling for that one. The profession that Keller ‘vaulted to celebrity’? Er, no.

I haven’t eaten at Per Se (or The French Laundry) and probably never will. I have tasted food from his cookbooks, and yes, his brownies are kick-ass (as is his outrageously good whipped brie). But apart from that, and contrary to Mr. Wiseman’s disappointment, I have great admiration for (finally!) a chef who just goes about his business. There is probably a reason, after all, that Per Se is considered one of the best restaurants in the world, while other chefs get dressed up as vegetables.

Who/whatever’s fault it is, the one “explanation” that keeps coming up is that we are simply hardwired to be gluttons. Cue a recent piece from The Telegraph:

‘We live in a fat society. That’s the real problem. Here in the greedy West, our entire society is behaving just like a fat person, shuffling towards an early grave, and trying very hard to remain in denial. Why are so many of us obese? Because we eat too much. Why do we eat too much? Because we’re genetically designed to live in hard times, so our metabolisms are built to crave calories. It’s why we survived as a species for all those millennia before we learnt to farm. Now, calories are not hard to find. We’ve discovered ways of delivering energy that are cheap, tasty and lucrative. It’s a perfect storm. Deep inside all of us, our Stone Age brains crave fat and sugar. Don’t worry, says the Fat Society – here it is!’

Right, so we’re genetically programmed to stuff our faces. Fair enough. Except that also means that those of us who are not obese are freaks of nature. Fine, I can live with that. But here’s where it gets interesting, and which brings me to the Internet and why I care about that (besides not being able to live without it). The big question here is some variation of whether Google is making us stupid, as Nicholas Carr famously posed the question that later became a book. Carr (and people like him) believe that the Internet affects us on a deep neurological level, ie. that it actually changes the structure of our brains and how we process information. Scare-mongering, risk-selling folk like Carr insist that the reason we should be worried is because of something called neuroplasticity, which is basically the brain’s capacity to change over time thanks to new environments, habits etc (cue the London cabbies who have bigger brains than the rest of us).

It’s a hot topic because the scientific jury is still out. Some, like (cognitive scientist) Stephen Pinker answer ‘not at all‘, while (neuroscientist) Joshua Greene adds that ‘The Internet hasn’t changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food‘. Being an evidence-based kinda gal, I’m going to stick with the science as it is, which when it comes to the Internet and what it might be doing to our brains is that there is no cause for panic (yet). Scientists are – for the most part – the level-headed folk, and for that we thank them.

Now I don’t know enough about neuroplasticity to weigh in on the debate, but it strikes me as rather interesting that the people shouting out about the biggest “risks” involved with the Internet (it will make you stupid), and obesity (it will get you) stand diametrically opposed on the issue of how much we are capable of (neurological/biological) change. If we really are programmed to eat like gluttons and are genetically powerless in the face of food, then surely that cancels out the possibility of neuroplasticity (ie. shouldn’t our clever brains have figured out that the feast or famine response is really not appropriate anymore?). If, on the other hand, our brains can change as fast as people like Carr claim, then the whole hardwired-to-be-fat scapegoat vanishes too, non?

Unless I’m missing something, someone, somewhere has missed a rather large logical gap. But hey, this gives us a couple of new options: if we can change, then the future will be full of stupid, thin people. If not, we’ll all be fat and clever.

Go on, have a(nother) brownie. You know you want one.

It sounded interesting enough, but because of the control freak that I am I already had plans for dinner (imminent), I discouraged him from going ahead. (I love him dearly, but seriously? Why can’t a snack just be an apple or a handful of nuts?)

A week later the snack pack lay untouched in the fridge, so bacon became breakfast this morning, and the figs are now on the way to cakey goodness, thanks to Dorie Greenspan, who tempted me with this picture in her lovely baking book:

Tweak-freak that I am, I immediately disobeyed her instructions to poach the figs in ruby-port and honey, instead using the dregs of a bottle of The Goatfather and several squeezes of imitation maple syrup (I am a cheapskate, and proud of it). I also threw in some star anise, because I could.

And when it came to the cake-making part, I subbed dessicated coconut for the cornmeal (because I didn’t have any, and because coconut makes everything better – as does brandy, which I added to the cooled syrup for a better boozy kick when it’s time to eat a syrup-drizzled piece).

If I were a foodblogger, I’d give you the (tweaked) recipe, with something like “adapted from”, or “inspired by” Dorie Greenspan. That’s the convention, and a reasonable one too (as I, ahem, point out in my forthcoming book on food and social media). But I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a foodblogger, and while I thank Ms. Greenspan for her inspiration, I plan to take all the credit (or blame) for the final product.

I used to know someone who was obsessed with being credited for playing any small part in someone else’s endeavours. Of course credit must go where credit is due, but if I suggest that you bake a cake, or write a book, or muddle a cocktail, surely the credit for the success or failure of that thing goes to she who broke eggs, crafted sentences, or measured bourbon? (Did I mention I put brandy in the syrup?) Time for tea and cake.

Yes, so it finally arrived, which means that it will be coming to a bookshop near you very soon (it is, ahem, of course available through the usual online channels. You know where to look).

Funny, I was once “ridiculed” in an online spat by someone I have never met who claimed that my PhD on “food media” must be bogus because there is no such thing (because, like, it doesn’t exist on Wikipedia). Well, to borrow a line from Courtney Cox in Scream (I forget which one): “uhm, you know the saying, ‘I wrote the book on that?’”

I will add no spoilers. But just for the record, it was not me who called Jamie Oliver ‘a self-righteous, elitist git.‘

I’ve been experiencing various levels of annoyance at various times over the last few days. Much of this is heat(-wave) related, but mostly it’s from witnessing the brouhaha over the Paula Deen “scandal’ in the food media world. Practically every media outfit has their own take on it, but the facts are these:

- Deen (the “butter queen“, or as Frank Bruni put it, the ‘deep-fried doyenne of a fatty, buttery subgenre of putatively Southern cooking’) recently announced that she has Type 2 diabetes;

- She has known this for three years already;

- She is receiving money from Novo Nordisk to plug Victoza, a new diabetes drug (with as yet questionable benefits: those evil Danes!). Victoza is pretty expensive compared to other drugs on the market – think $500 a month vs. $20 a month.

The scandal includes any or all of the following:

a) she has deceived her audiences

b) she is a shill

c) she is a shilling a product that ordinary (read: poor) people cannot afford 

d) she is still fat (well, no one says it like that, but that’s what they mean when they comment on her not having made ‘significant lifestyle changes’)

e) she wasted three years not teaching her viewers how to cook healthy food.

Now, I’m not going to enter into the shilling debate. This piece in the LA Times did a fairly good job of convincing me the major problem with this, which is the illusion of a quick-fix solution that Deen’s deal with the evil Danes promotes:

‘The life of a diabetic is somewhat less than swell — but Novo Nordisk is selling swell, alongside drug companies that promise to medicate away depression, gas, incontinence, clogged arteries and fibromyalgia. … Support and encouragement is one thing, but what we’re being sold is magical thinking. In the battle between healthcare reality and fantasy, Paula Deen is small potatoes (steamed, skins on, no butter), but what she represents matters: another attempt to market immortality to a culture that’s particularly in love with misbehaving, followed by an easy fix.’

What does irk me, though, are the various permutations of a) and e), above. Suddenly now (or then, as it happens) that she has diabetes, Deen is only allowed to cook “healthy” food on television? Suddenly she now has a responsibility to make her audiences healthy too, and thereby fix the diabetes/obesity crisis? Maybe it would be a good idea for her to stop tasting and eating the food that she is apparently so good at making (even though she has pointed out that – surprise surprise – what we see her make on TV is not actually how she eats every day, and that her shows are for entertainment), but that shouldn’t stop her fans from making her fatty, buttery recipes if they damn well please. Should watching Anthony Bourdain sucking foie off a plate come with a diabetes advisory?

Bruni’s piece does an excellent job of describing the classist hypocrisies at play in much of this finger-wagging. But I am less disturbed by that than the evidence, once again, of how ready people are to blame their problems on someone else, and to expect someone else to fix them. It’s also an appetite for scandal which turns out to be a really convenient excuse to not think clearly about the actual issues, which as chef José Andrés also points out in this CBS interview, are quite simply not Paula Deen’s to fix.

Rant over. Now go buy the book.

The best part? You can do this too!

All you need is:

1 good brownie recipe waiting for a new identity;

1 batch of goat’s cheese fudge lurking in the freezer (preferably homemade, and preferably blessed by Norwegian angels);

120 exam scripts to mark;

An oven.

In the approximate words of the immortal Nigella Lawson (or the Barefoot Contessa, or that Italian babe with the big head [GdL], or that annoying Brit who keeps annoying people whose job it is to involve themselves in childhood nutrition [JO], et al.), See how easy it is?

Anyhoo. Needed a gift for a dear aunt(-in-law), and needed to make something different. So I did what any good American housewife did, and I baked chocolate chip cookies. Not just any, of course. Only the best will do, which is apparently this number from the NYT. (They really are the best. All the bloggers say so.)

I’m usually intimidated by the sheer size of American-style things (those muffins: seriously?), but I must say I quite enjoyed scooping golf-ball size globs of batter onto the baking tray.

(That’s a sprinkle of salt on top, by the way. It’s the secret!) And then watching them turn into jumbo cookies:

Of course I tweaked the recipe. I added two teaspoons of ginger powder to the mix, and a handful of chopped preserved ginger. An inspired tweak it was!

But as good as these are – and I mostly hope aunty will think so too – I reckon my most important revelation was finally understanding why Americans confuse raw cookie dough with something that is appropriate for ice cream. I mean, just look at it. It’s suddenly an easy confusion to understand. Shame (as we say in this part of the world).

The Loading Bay, for all non-Capetonians (and that includes some of you who actually live in the city but who – like ourselves – roll on different wheels), is a clothing-accessory ‘luxury apparel’-coffee-food-shop. They serve food all day (including a burger), but Thursday nights they stay open just for burgers. ‘Capetonians’ know about this, and there are enough of them to make booking a necessity. This is how they describe their burger (veggie available too, but who cares):

Looks good enough, no? So we booked (accepting a rather early slot, which was the only one available), we went, and I got so Capetonian on that burger that I even ate the whole thing with my hands.

Yes, so I’m one of those irritating people who usually leaves the bread and tucks into the patty with a knife and fork (technical term: going Danish on a burger). It’s not that I don’t like bread. I like bread. A lot. It’s just that usually burger rolls turn into these soggy, useless discs of starch that add no value to the meal, except as useless, soggy starch. A bit like mashed potatoes, come to think of it.

But eating the Loading Bay burger was one of those rare experiences when the whole package just worked: good patty, righteous bun (lightly toasted, as I recall, and dense enough to serve a palatable function), good cheese, condiments, etcetera. Being a Capetonian is rather delicious, it turns out.

Then the Capetonian in me got greedy, and decided that we needed to search out the best burgers in town (which is a) yawn, and b) why bother when you’ve found something that works?, as my brother-in-law pointedly remarked of the venture). We have been impressively committed to the task, hitting some most of the spots people bother to talk and blog about in the burgerverse.

The results, in a word: Meh. With the exception, of course, of the glorious bacon and blue cheese numbers that the Philosophe himself conjured on the braai just the other night (coming a close second to another home-experiment involving hand-chopped meat and duck fat). And then there was this morning, when we found ourselves in the decidedly un-Capetonian hinterland of Somerset West Mall. Look, no-one forced us there. We happened to be driving past, and decided on the spur of the moment to watch a movie in the middle of the day (because that’s the sort of thing you can do when the only creatures you have to look after are yourselves, and three cats).

11am, an hour to kill. What to do? Spur of the moment indeed:

See that processed cheese? Now imagine some crispy bacon on there, and a good puddle of Spur’s secret BBQ sauce. And no, I didn’t eat the bread. But I had a bloody mary with it, and on a Sunday morning in Somerset West, it was the very best brunch to be had. Lessons learned (attention Heston Blumenthal!): why mess with something that works?

I have been reading (and writing) about Mr. Oliver’s latest LA venture for some time now, but I didn’t get to *enjoy* the full spectacle of the first episode until last night. Late at night was a stupid time to watch, because it sent me to bed depressed.

Smite me with your bleeding heart if you must, but I am not depressed about the obesity “epidemic” in Los Angeles, America, or the rest of the world for that matter. Which is not to say I don’t find it sad that so many people get it wrong when it comes to feeding themselves and their families. Nor that I don’t find it sad that some children are made to eat something resembling airplane food on a mostly-daily basis. But getting depressed about these things would be a waste of my time and energy, a) because the reasons for this state of affairs are much more complex than even I dare to imagine that I fully comprehend, and b) because there is little I can do to change it.

Not so Mr. O. He’s depressed alright. And he also has the conceit to imagine that a) he understands everything about the system that he is taking on, and b) that it his responsibility – nay, his right – to take this system on. He keeps talking about how it is his “job” to do this and that: his “job” to try to force the LAUSD to let him into their schools (where he’s been banned from filming); his “job” to try to persuade Dino – the nice man who let Jamie into his burger joint Patra’s – to make his burgers with grass-fed Black Angus beef, and his milkshakes with yoghurt instead of ice cream. Dino really is a nice man. He lets Jamie mess about in his kitchen, and lets him fix a yoghurt smoothie, and then rightly responds: “I tried it, and it tasted good, but he missed the point. This is a great drink, but it’s not a milkshake.”

Here’s what Dino looks like when he’s explaining that Jamie is crazy for thinking that he can take burgers and fries off the menu at a burger joint:

And here’s what Dino looks like when Jamie tells him that using grass-fed Black Angus beef for his burgers will make his burgers cost $4,89, instead of $2,69 (warning: picture of a scared man):

I nominate Dino as the Food Revolution hero, because Dino gets it right. He gets that Jamie is missing the point if he thinks that putting a smoothie on the menu of a burger joint is going to do a damn thing to curb obesity. I’ve never been to LA, but I’m also pretty sure that people who want smoothies can find them elsewhere. Dino gets that he is running a business, and servicing customers who come to his restaurant because there’s something on his menu that they want to eat. He gets that there is a difference between freedom of choice and responsibility.

What Jamie Oliver does not get is that saying, on leaving Patras, “I don’t know if I can work with Dino” is in fact a very stupid thing to say, because he does not have to “work with” Dino, and neither does Dino have to work with him. Just as the LA Unified Schools District has no mandate whatsoever to work with Jamie Oliver. (Which they did in fact offer to do, just not on camera. But that, as someone else put it summarily, ‘is not a TV show‘.)

But my case is not really with Jamie Oliver, just as my case, in another context, is not with quacks like Gillian McKeith. No, my case is with the many people who do listen to them, and who do not get that these people, who may even have their hearts and concerns in all the right places, are simply not the authorities that they make themselves out to be. What’s the harm, especially if *something* improves? The harm is that worshipping pseudo-authorities is a slippery gateway to compromising all our rational decision-making faculties, believing whatever scare stories and half-baked statistics they throw about, and soon everybody will be taking advice on how to live their lives from someone called Oprah. Oh wait…

(And oh, if do ever find yourself at Patra’s, don’t forget to try the new Jamie Oliver Revolution burger, made with grass-fed Black Angus beef. If you’ve got $4,95 to drop, that is:)

That is, watch him try to feed hay-smoked mackerel paired with blueberries to a naval submarine crew who normally subsist on a full fry-up and something ‘comforting’, like steak and yorkshire pudding, followed by shortbread and custard (or some such) – every day. (This is HB trying to regenerate their tired, overfed, brain cells.)

Watch him get BA passengers to begin their in-flight meals with a nasal spray, which causes much nasal gunk to drip in the general direction of gravity, which is also in the general direction of their actual food trays: not pretty television. (This is HB trying to rehydrate their dehydrated noses so they can taste their food better.)

Generally he ends up looking like a tosser for the first 38 minutes of each 45 minute episode, until he finally cottons on to the (big) difference between the world inside his restaurants and the world the rest of us live in. Like that a naval submarine crew don’t have time, space, money, or any bloody interest in on-site hay-smoked mackerel and blueberries, but they respond very well to a good ol’ Irish stew (sous-vided for a couple of months, naturally). Or that BA passengers quite like to eat something they can recognise as food while they are hurtling through the air, like a good ol’ shepherd’s pie (taste-powered by the secret addition of seaweed, since umami is the only flavour that doesn’t get lost in the sky. Naturally.)

Each of these institutions has supposedly recognised that the food they deliver is shite, and each is genuinely (supposedly) looking for a real-life solution to that problem. And in the end, food-mentalist HB ends up being a totally wasted commodity, because the solutions he creates that can actually be implemented are totally pedestrian. And by pedestrian I mean the kind of ideas that anyone with a food-brain who can also cross a street would be capable of coming up with. Problem: Fresh ingredients take up too much space on a submarine, and too much time to cook? Solution: Cook them on-shore and vacuum pack them for easy on-board storage in the fridge or freezer. I can’t decided if Channel 4 is taking the piss out of HB, or out of its viewers.

Then there’s his popcorn ice cream in cinemas. (This is HB trying to get people to stop eating popcorn.)

Well, ok, that sounds pretty cool actually. Genius Heston strikes again!

Except that if he spent a bit more time on Google, and less time in his science books, he would also have discovered that that’s hardly an *original* idea (WTF Heston?). I bookmarked a recipe for that AGES ago (last year) already – not to mention that in 0.14 seconds, Google comes up with 7,400,000 hits on it.

Well I finally made it the other day. It goes against all my popcorn instincts. You have to soak the things (in cream, sugar and milk), which means you have to listen to all their delicious crunchy airiness die a slow pffffft into a soggy mess. Then when you’ve really drowned them good and dead (30 mins to an hour), you have to sieve them and mash the life force out of them.

Then you turn that creamy, popcorny goodness into a silky smooth custard (with an egg and mild heat). Churn that custard when it’s nice and chilled (not forgetting a good slosh of vodka to prevent it from freezing too hard), and there you have perhaps some of the most deliciously counter-intuitive ice cream. Go ahead and serve that with some salted caramel sauce, as recommended, and also a fudgy ginger brownie, if you have one to hand. It’s so delightfully wrong it’s almost like having HB in your kitchen.

(Disclaimer: Sorry, Heston. I’m just grumpy because the Philosophe recently ate a piece of pork belly that was cooked in one of your kitchens for 52 hours. I really should have been there. But you are welcome to come and try my popcorn ice cream – if you can handle defeat.)