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’m glad no one was impertinent enough to suggest that I do the same, because the only adjective I could think of to describe this doctor is impatient. Or rather, IMPATIENT. I guess that isn’t the best quality with which to introduce yourself to 40 students who you have to spend four hours a week with for the next twelve weeks. Against their wills, I might add.

Look, sometimes I think it’s entirely justified. Like when a waitron takes f.o.r.e.v.e.r. to bring the bill, or worse, that second drink. Or when some eedjut driver is meandering on the road, or pulls over without indicating, all while talking on their eedjut cellphone. And let’s not talk about those meanderthals that populate our malls (meanderthal citation: Philosophe, sometime in the twentieth century)

But all in all, it’s probably not a good way to live life, especially since it means I frequently forget to take pleasure in whatever I’m doing simply because I like the idea of being done with it (cue writing, swimming, teaching etc). I was reminded of this on the bus ride home from campus, where people like me (impatient to get home) have to sit and watch students just chillaxing, chatting on their phones about where to hook up on Long Street, sometimes two of them in some banter which you just know hasn’t yet reached the point where they get to touch each other, but that that’s all they’re really thinking about. There were several examples of this latter scenario, which reminded me of that lovely courting game, by definition impatient, but in execution a drawn-out, frustrating, exciting game of patience and plotting. At least the best versions of this game are.

Ah yes, those delicious, excruciating days of waiting to see the android of your eye again. How pleasant to think of it, to imagine scenarios, the first kiss…

I do miss those days. But I wouldn’t go back even if I could. Not even if the Doctor himself offered me a trip back in time. Imagine knowing how my life was going to turn out and being stuck in that “what if” phase. I reckon that would be worse than trying to navigate through Canal Walk on payday. But there’s probably a better chance that the Philosophe will be inclined stick it out for the lifetime he promised if I can manage to be a little less

and just a bit more

Provided, of course, that being patient doesn’t make me blue in the face.

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.

If bitters interest(s?) you, go read this description of a bitters tasting, complete with fascinating stuff like why the ‘Ango’ label is bigger than the bottle, and what goes with what: ‘Ango’ pairs well with rum, whisky, gin, coke (!), and coffee (!), but not with Cognac, while Peychaud’s works with Cognac, tequila and whisky, but not with gin.

Even more interesting is what led me to that post in the first place, which was my own sneaky suspicion that bitters and ice cream would rock. And so they apparently do – over at the Angostura site their advice is to ‘to dash 5-6 dashes of Angostura aromatic bitters onto some plain vanilla ice cream. Voila, your ice cream is transformed into a gourmet dessert!’:

Gourmet yawn. Nah, what we need is the bitters in the ice cream. I am talking rock shandy-flavoured creamy goodness. Made with creme fraiche, a touch of lemon, and plenty of the red stuff to offset all the sugar in the condensed milk. The perfect post-Christmas tonic.

Now excuse me while I go talk to my ice cream machine.

(It’s apparently never to late to be the geeky kind of fan who would paint the inside of their front door to look like a travelling time machine. I take full responsibility. Every Doctor should have a Tardis.)

Still, I was sorry that one of the first things I said to the Philosophe this morning was one of those wifey-naggy comments about him not dusting off his feet before getting back into bed for our first cup of coffee. I was (am) sorry because a few minutes later he would learn about the death of Christopher Hitchens, someone he has admired for a very long time, and for whom I also (belatedly) grew to have deep respect.

It is a very sad day. It is one of those sad days, I suspect, that will have thousands of people not only lamenting the loss of a great thinker, but also confronting their own mortalities. I know this is the case for me, even as I wish it wasn’t. Death is unnerving like that. Not the idea of death itself, but rather the idea that it will come too soon. That I will not have finished everything I want to do. That I will not have become the person that I want to be (ie. the one who has accomplished it all). That I will have (ugh) regrets. Worst of all, that it will come too soon to someone else whom I will then have to live without. Death makes us pathetically, frighteningly small.

And so, on days like these, I am tempted by all the things I could do better. Work harder. Read more. Write more. Write better. (Be more like Hitchens.) Drink less. Smoke less. (Be less like Hitchens.)

But that would be forgetting that today is not about me, and also that inspiration should come from life, not from death. I will miss reading new writing by Hitchens (his Vanity Fair pieces in particular), which never failed to inspire me to write better. But fortunately for me, there is practically a whole lifetime of Hitchens’ writing which I have not yet gotten round to, a good deal of which sits on shelves right in front of me.

Books are a bit like the Tardis, come to think of it. They can look small and boring, but the best ones are bigger on the inside, and they take us to really cool (though sometimes scary) places. People too. Hitchens was a giant for sure.

The next day (assured by Google that it wasn’t a completely hair-brained thing to do), I rolled blue cheese into the pastry. It looked a bit weird, but then I had a(nother) glass of wine and everything seemed fine. I cut it to size, scored it and put it on top of that Guinnessy goodness, gave it an egg wash, popped it in a hot oven and hoped for the best.

I was quite pleased with the result, but our dinner guest claimed it actually was the BEST Guinness pie she’d ever eaten. She’s apparently eaten lots (of Guinness pies), and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any, so I’ll take her word for it. (Even if I do know that she on occasion eats baked beans out of a tin for dinner.)

So maybe I could get into this pastry thing. There is something rather splendid about taking a puffy golden pie out of the oven. And how cool is it to make funky crusts. What’s next: roast chicken with a goat’s cheese crust? The previously dreaded apple pie with a cheddar crust? (I now get the cheesy crust, but in a sweet pie??) What cheese goes with lamb?

Then again, maybe our guest wasn’t even talking about the crust. She did reveal that whoever used to make her Guinness pie pretty much put beef and Guinness in a pot with, like, nothing else. (Did I forget to mention that mine obviously included onions, celery, garlic, rosemary, tomato paste, salt, pepper, a squirt of Worcestershire, and extracts from the blood of a leprechaun?)

Whatever it was, it worked. As did the Guinness ice cream, which should really be called genius ice cream: sweet, bitter, creamy, and thanks to the addition of caramelised and salted cashews, salty and crunchy too. All food groups in one delicious mouthful (and then several more).

But no more food now. Is it beer o’clock yet?

Sláinte.

I wish I had done it myself, but letting someone else worry about the birds was in the end a brilliant idea, since all I had to do was sit back and enjoy: 

I guess Bukowski said it best: