Talk of Foie Gras Ban Galls Me

The State of Confusion California, has a ban on foie gras set to become law on July 1st of this year.  Restaurants currently selling foie gras will have had 7 years to find an alternative menu item.  There has been a lot of talk about the subject and where there is talk there is inevitably misinformation.  Regardless what your initial feeling is about foie gras, take a couple of minutes and see for yourself here, here, here and here, whether you think the practice is cruel or not.

All animals that are raised by humans as food will inevitably die, that is just a simple fact.  We are obliged to provide those animals, I believe, with as respectful and stress free an existence as possible.  Respect includes reducing the waste from those animals by using every edible portion of each animal we kill and finding uses for the inedible portions where possible.   I personally feel that the duck farmers that produce foie gras have, are and will continue to do just that.  I don't like liver and giblets, sweet breads and organs, but I do like foie gras and I see its production as nothing more than taking advantage of the duck's genetic trait.  For me there is no ethical issue.  I have more concern for the treatment of cattle, pork and chicken on most farms.  And, if you have ever witnessed animals at an abattoir you would realize the last moments of their lives are not so comfortable, either.  Add to that the treatment of chickens in the entire production process and you can certainly find far more deserving sectors of agriculture for a ban.

But, maybe you are not convinced by the links and you still think that foie gras is not ethical for you.  That's fine: convince me.  Define what is ethical.  If you are a vegan, congratulations, but let me remind you that agricultural practices of humans are the single biggest contributor to global warming, desertification, loss of top soil and water shortages; not to mention damage to ecosystems from over use of synthetic AND organic fertilizers and reduction of habitat for wild species.  None of which, in my opinion, is very ethical on face value.  But, you believe your life style is doing some good and this allows you to sleep better.  Fair enough.  And, I respect that.

The State of California did pass a law banning the shark fin trade, that I happen to agree with.  "Oh, hold on Dennis," I hear you cry!  "What hypocrisy is this?"  well, the difference is that shark finning is having an ecological impact that goes beyond whether or not I think it is ethical to eat shark (for the record I would be ok with farmed shark where no threat of extinction exists).  My guide for all matters seafood is the Seafood Watch program from Monterey Bay Aquarium.  There are some alternatives suggested by Seafood Watch, but unfortunately, the really prized fins come from the more endangered species and are usually harvested in the most wasteful manner using only the fins.  That is why I am opposed.  I respect the culture that wants to keep this traditional item in its cuisine, though I would respect it more if it found a  more sustainable, respectful and humane way to do so.

But, regardless of whether I agree with you or not, there are some limits to what I am prepared to do to convince you, or others, of my stance.  One limit is to avoid criminal behaviour including publishing your personal details on line for the world to see.  Or, having my supporters contact you to harass or threaten you.  But, mostly, I will respect the privacy of your family and especially your children.  Some in the California legislature are less principled.

Rule Britannia!

Watch any food/travel show that is set in a non English country and inevitably it will begin with the words "food is extremely important to ______ culture".  Watch one of these shows in North America or Britain and they probably will not start that way.  But, food is just as important to English cultures as any other.  Food is important to human culture, regardless of where it resides.  Culture, in fact, owes its very beginnings to food and cooking.  And the long held myth that an English kitchen is devoid of taste, culture and tradition is an ignorant misconception.  Much has changed in England and North America and many of the world's top chefs are of English, Canadian and American origins.  These chefs will, to a man/woman, point to the likes of Marco Pierre White as an inspiration for their success.  And Chef White deserves much praise; his food has been amongst the world's best for a long time and he has been at the forefront of the English revival in cooking.  Watch this video from No Reservations (the relevant part starts at 4:15 and runs to 11:50)

Chef White is a very talented chef, I would never disparage his abilities or approach to food.  Of course there is a BUT coming.  And here it is:  Chef White and Anthony Bourdain tend to think that no one was sticking up for the lowly cuisine of the peasantry of Britain until Chef White arrived.  The talent is unassailable but the image?  White passes himself off as some brooding culinary version of J.D. Salinger in self imposed exile from the cooking elite.  The whole time continuing to cook food only accessible to the very wealthy.  Go ahead, try and get a seat at his restaurant in England.  I find the opening scene of Bourdain in a recording studio with allusions to the punk movement, ironic.  He finds in White a kindred spirit who believes he is catering to the masses while all the time rubbing shoulders with the most inaccessible chefs in the industry and attending invitation only dinner parties in exotic locations with ingredients found on the endangered species list. 

Bourdain's infatuation with White revolves around a picture of the man at a young age with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a face framed by a mass of disheveled hair instead of a crisp white chef's hat.  How avant garde!  I fail to see the importance to food of smoking and listening to punk rock.  Before you begin to believe that White's demeanor is a recent phenomenon take a look at this video from the height of his success as a young kitchen star.

Both White and Chef Raymond Blanc (his mentor) discuss cooking with an attitude that they are doing something vitally important to civilization.  One would begin to wonder if, in fact, there is a Nobel Prize for culinary arts (there's not). The food looks beautiful and probably tastes great but, the "one must suffer for their art " demeanor is enough to kill an appetite.  Not to mention the smoking at the table and in the kitchen.

What may come as a shock to the likes of Bourdain and White, and maybe many of you, is there have been two people who held the British Banner for culinary arts much higher long before the likes of Chef White.  These two are amongst my favourite all time cooking superstars and were as hard core as it gets.  I am talking about The Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson-Wright and Jennifer Paterson.  Their show taught me more about food and cooking than anyone other than Graham Kerr and Jacque Pepin.  Here is a clip:

Tell me that food doesn't look fucking good (there, I used the f word, that makes me hard core, right?).  And if you think the Two Fat Ladies aren't "hard core" check out their Wikipedia pages here and here.  For Christ's sake Paterson died of lung cancer from smoking, surely that beats a dangling cigarette?  And they traveled by motorcycle, Anthony.  For me Dickson-Wright and Paterson embody the ideals of British culinary culture.  Go to YouTube and spend an afternoon watching their videos, they will entertain and inform you with a sense of humour about themselves and their food. 

Now, it is true that the Two Fat Ladies series didn't start until the mid-nineties, about the time that White was receiving his third Michelin star, but, both Dickson-Wright and Paterson had been cooking for a long time and cooking the kinds of meals seen in their shows.  Paterson had been writing about food even before White opened his first restaurant.  And, the food White was cooking in his earliest days was the food of French chefs he trained under, it was not until he "retired" that White transformed his cuisine to the English country style his restaurants cook today.  As far as preparing and eating "snout to hoof" for a television audience, again Dickson-Wright and Paterson were amongst the earliest. 

Does this mean I have lost my bromantic feelings for Anthony Bourdain?  Of course not.  Bourdain has done a lot to remove the mystique from the profession of Chef and let us all in to the world of professional kitchens in a way that we did not have before.  His style of writing and style of his No Reservations show are brilliantly easy to follow and entertaining to boot.  But, keep in mind, this is only one man's experience.  There have always been kitchens that were run without the "punk" attitude and the vulgar language.  And, while a professional kitchen is a stressful place to work it is no less true for many work places like an emergency room, the trading floor of a stock market, a riot, a fire and many others where the consequences are more severe than an offended dinner guest.

What a chef does is provide a culinary experience that helps us escape the everyday hassles of jobs, bosses, family and bills.  There is only one other form of pleasure that provides as much satisfaction but, professionals in that realm tend to end up in jail.  And just like real love is something that we experience in the home, real food culture is also something that is best enjoyed in the home.  In fact, the home cooks, in my opinion, are the ones who are truly maintaining a nation's cultural heritage.  Look, the punk movement so worshiped by Bourdain was born out of the disenfranchised youth of Britain who failed to find relevance in the music of super groups like Pink Floyd and Queen.   Likewise, in matters of food, the mass appeal of street food, greasy spoons and dinner clubs is born from a culture that can't understand paying $300 to sit nervously at a dinner table scared they may be attacked by a megalomaniac chef who didn't like their take on his deconstructed Pot au Feu!

Culture - all the knowledge and values shared by a society - started at the side of a camp fire discussing the days events and the meaning of life while waiting for some slow footed wildebeest to transform into a succulent golden brown and delicious slab of goodness.  That is the very essence of cooking and is best when shared with loved ones in the home and not by professionals in the bawdy house of some Chez I'm Great.  I love the fact that British food is regaining its rightful place as a world cuisine and hope that a return to the food of the peasantry in all cultures will soon replace that of the gentry and I suspect Chef White will continue to draw inspiration from that cuisine.  There does seem to be a mellowing of Chef White, who now endorses Knorr products, and there are several videos where he is featured giving tips for home cooking encouraging home cooks to keep it simple.  Good on him.  And good on British food.

On Art And Artifice In Culinary Pursuits

Recently, I have been reacquainting myself with John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, a series of interlinking short stories that the author uses to discuss many of the characteristics of story telling, language, narrative and art in general.  The book does a masterful job of asking readers why it is we place so much trust in narrators of stories when we know that they are merely another creation of the mind of the author who we would view as fallible if we knew anything about their life. The book is a critique of the writing process and literature itself.

Additionally, Barth's book asks the deeper question: what is art?  (a question I have explored in conversation with several friends).  I believe that Barth would argue that art and artifice share the same root but only in the way chimps and humans share the same ancestor.  Both words have evolved separately in different directions which have muddied what the common meanings of the words are with the classical definitions.  But, that art and artifice have the pedigree to perform the function of differentiation. 

Art (as a word) was brought to the English language by the French who derived it from the Latin nominative form of artem which is ars meaning: practical skill; a business craft.  Both Latin words are derived from the root ar meaning: fit together; join.  The English used the word art to mean: skill as a result of learning or practice and used it to describe the work of artisans such as those who worked with stained glass.  Today, however, we seem to apply this to any creation we view as outside our own abilities or skills.  If we see a painting of flowers that is beyond our abilities as painters we tend to say "that's so artistic, the painter is such an artist."  But, if I, as a painter, was to make a painting that critics raved about and declared it a "a modern, contemporary commentary on traditional mores meant to question our ideas of human existence, blah, blah, blah" and everyone agrees this is the finest example of art in the history of the medium; and then someone recreates hundreds of copies, indistinguishable from the original and sells them for more than I made off my original, and you buy one and hang it in your living room, do you own a work of art from an artist?

By the traditional sense of the word I would have to concede that you do and they are.  However, academics in fine art wished to separate skillful craftsman from imaginative artists and needed a definition of the word which harkens back to the Latin ar and came up with this meaning: "those which appeal to the mind and the imagination" (fitting together in imaginative ways), I would argue a new word is needed to differentiate between my original and the very skillful reproductions.  This word I will use is not meant, in any way, to suggest a lack of esthetic appeal or talent, only a differentiation in the purpose for which the thing is created.  The word I use, and which Barth alludes to, is: artifice.

Arifice is a word that, also, came to the English from the French via the Latin.  In Middle French the meaning was: "skill; cunning" which, used as a noun, became " workmanship, anything made by craft or skill" but which has, today, come to mean: "device, trick".   This is unfortunate because the root of the word is a more useful and descriptive meaning: ars which we've discussed and facere "do"; doing craftsmanship.  This gives recognition to the talents of the artisan without stripping them of their due, while still distinguishing between the fine art definition of art: a creation of the mind and imagination.

I don't expect Messrs. Merriam and Webster to reconsider the definitions of these words on my say but, in future I will distinguish between them by referring to art: refitting one's environment, appealing to the mind and imagination for the purpose of creativity.  And artifice: the making of anything by skill or craft for the sole purpose of industry.  One does not need skill to create art and one does not need creativity to create artifice and there is no rule that says art can not be profitable but, its main purpose should not be profit.  Possessing both skill and imagination, however, would elevate an artistic creation.

So, what  has this to do with food and wine.  Well, it seems impossible, today, to read reviews of restaurants and wines without someone referring to the food or wine as art.  I take exception to the use of the word, as I hope I have made clear, not because I believe there is a lack of talent, but only because it lacks accountability for the creative process and the purpose for the thing's creation.  I will be the first to admit that there is a lot of talent that goes into conceiving and executing a dish in a restaurant, and striking the right balance between taste and presentation is a skill I admire with some envy. 

But, in most restaurants today, cooks and chefs are simply reworking a series of recipes and techniques that have been the staple of the restaurant business for several decades now.  Escoffier, as Adam Gopnik pointed out, invented the whole premise of fine dining today:

Escoffier's  formula for food was, in essence, the same as Jasper Johns's formula for Dada art: take something; do something to it; then do something else to it. It was cooking that rested, above all, on the idea of the master sauce: a lump of protein was cooked in a pan, and what was left behind [...] was deglazed with wine and stock, ornamented with butter or cream, and then poured back over the lump of protein.

 Add to that a chef's approach to plating, which is simply a series of tried and tested ways of piling food on a plate in aesthetically appealing ways (skill, cunning, craft), and you have today's haute cuisine with tiny portions on oversize plates re-imagined in innumerable ways.

I once heard Anthony Bourdain suggest that "there are very few artists" amongst professional chefs.  I believe he said it in a manner meant to provoke, as is Bourdain's way.  I have no such motivation when I suggest that he is correct.  But, does this mean that we should not be in awe of the new generation of cooks and chefs and even foodies opening new and exciting restaurants that eschew the Escoffier model for a return to regional cuisine that celebrates instead the peasant dishes developed over centuries.  These restauranteurs, such as Morin and McMillan at Joe Beef in Montreal, are stripping their food of the artifice (in the contemporary definition of device or trick) and creating cuisine that is about flavour, tradition and sustainability.  After all, for millenia food was meant to nourish and sustain, both the body and the environment, out of necessity rather than fashion.
 
The presentation of this food and the interaction amongst the patrons and cooks (especially in venues that have taken to communal tables)  is helping to reconnect diners to the culture of food.  This participatory approach to dining is, in itself, an artistic endeavor where the mere act of dining becomes artistic expression through interactions between cooks and guests with a new experience with every seating; while the food itself may be artifice, the experience becomes an art. 

In addition, the movement known as "molecular gastronomy" - though not by its practitioners - is another exciting new trend that might offer a glimpse at true culinary art.  The manipulation of food to resemble anything but food provides the diner with a multi-sensory experience and a chance at a new way to taste and experience familiar foods.  But, to be clear, this only applies to those who are attempting new experiences and, in my opinion anyway, excludes those who attempt to perfect the way food is cooked.  Heston Blumenthal is an amazing cook but, in his efforts to perfect dishes he loses the very essence of what art is, namely an interaction between the artist's take on a subject and the patrons' response to it; a kind of manipulation of the senses by providing the unexpected.

In the area of wine and beer, I believe there is even less art being practiced as the processes become more bogged down in science and tradition and technique all focused on attaining a certain "standard" for a grape rather than an unexpected experience.  It is true that every wine maker and brewer is presenting consumers with their own take on a style or grape but, is there any new method or technique that hasn't already been attempted; is anyone trying to shock drinkers for the sake of amusement or bemusement alone.  Merely fiddling with the proportions and "cooking" times does not, again in my opinion, constitute art.  A skill? A craft? Absolutely.  But, the artists were the inventors of wine and beer that found the ways to turn fermenting, rotting fruit into a cultural icon and in most cases they did it with an eye on enjoying the product more than the potential sales.

And to me this is where the culinary arts have to concede:  no winery, brewery or restaurant is creating art solely for the sake of its creation; every bottle is filled and dish served in the hope of turning a profit - and usually a quite hefty one at that.   That is not to criticize, who amongst us isn't looking to find an enjoyable way to make a buck?  But this is the realm of artifice, in my definition, and we should enjoy it for what it is and admire the skill and talents used without feeling badly about calling it by its rightful name: craftsmanship!

Bourdain Versus Deen Pt II

Originally, Anthony Bourdain gave his thoughts on some of the Food Network's "talent".  As you recall, I suggested that he didn't go far enough.  Then the New York Times' Frank Bruni came to Deen's defence by suggesting that Bourdain was a culinary elitest (sorry, link may require registration).  Then Rebecca Marx came to the aid of Anthony Bourdain.    So the battle rages on.  

But, the point isn't, from my standpoint anyway, that there is anything wrong with fried chicken or macaroni and cheese or even butter or lard.  My problem with Paula Deen and certain others on the food network is that they elevate fat, sugar, butter and lard to iconic status and their shows are more about how great it is to cook big, fatty meals like they remember from their childhood.  But, they never talk about cooking technique, food quality, importance of ingredients or, most importantly, moderation.  

And look, I don't see eye to eye on everything that Bourdain says.  He has some of his own simple minded thoughts especially on the subject of vegetarianism.  Bourdain has travelled extensively and eaten food all over the globe.  His preference is always the food of the peasants, but that doesn't suggest that it is unhealthy or unpalatable.  Far from it.  And I agree.  His show talks about the culture that lead those peasants to seek out the ingredients they use and how the techniques evolved because of the ingredients and the availability of materials and fuels.  All the influences of community, locale and mores are examined in each dish that he eats and an attempt is made to understand that culture's food.  As he said in a recent tweet when someone suggested he be banned from the south:

Which South? The one with a glorious tradition of food? Or the TV version?