Food for Thought

Respect for food is a respect for life, for who we are and what we do. --Thomas Keller

Two years ago, I decided to stop being a "survival cook" and learn about food. My own cooking style had been predicated mainly on frozen chicken tenders purchased in bulk, half-off day-old baked goods from grocery stores, and frozen vegetables. I decided that I would cook myself a "real" meal on New Year's Eve, a fitting date to herald a new beginning. Inspired by a recipe I'd seen on a cooking show, I jumped right into the deep end of the pool with a broiled butterflied chicken. It was the first time I'd ever purchased a whole chicken. (Indeed, it was the first time I'd purchased any chicken that wasn't frozen tenders or boneless skinless breasts.)

My interest in food first came from the passionate words of professional chefs. Hardworking, ill-paid and often mistreated, these chefs nonetheless toughed out their early days fueled by an unshakable devotion to good food. Unanimously, they praised the virtues of proper organization, room for inspiration while remaining connected to tradition, and an utterly tireless work ethic – all concepts I adored but hardly exemplified in my own life, in any area, and most certainly not in my own kitchen. But more than that, they seemed to find a spiritual aspect in the commission of a meal: cooking was alchemy, feeding customers was voluntary service to fellow humans, and eating was a transformative experience that could rattle the cage of ordinary perception till it broke open. I wanted a taste of that.

My New Year's Eve dinner, while edible, was not a screaming success, but one aspect of the preparation would keep me on the path of exploration: I had had to cut through the chicken's ribs with kitchen shears. This violent, visceral moment in my kitchen was simultaneously the most distressing and direct experience I had ever had with food, opening up the entire world of food procurement and preparation when I had previously concerned myself primarily with consumption.

I later found that many professional chefs experienced similar epiphanies on a grander scale, usually by raising or killing animals for their restaurants themselves. Chef Thomas Keller, generally regarded as one of the best chefs in the world, once asked his rabbit purveyor to bring his order live so that he could slaughter them himself, determined to fully understand what rabbit on a menu entailed. "Because killing those rabbits had been such an awful experience," Keller noted, "I would not squander them. I would use all my powers as a chef to ensure that those rabbits were beautiful.… Should a cook squander anything, ever? It was a simple lesson."

Michael Ruhlman, author of several books exploring the psyche of the chef, found it easy to extrapolate Keller's experience into a full worldview: "What was true of rabbits was true even of wheat. Thus to burn a crouton was a waste of life. Not the life of the wheat but the life of the person who grew the wheat, the life of the person who baked the bread, and the life of the cook who spent time cutting that bread and burning the croutons."

This stirring call to awareness and sustainability resonated with me. I soon found myself leaning toward organic meats, partly out of the desire to make my eating habits more sustainable and less cruel, but partly because it simply tasted better. I discovered that fruits I hadn't thought I'd liked were delicious in their natural state, and products that upset my stomach caused me no distress at all if I stuck with the organic versions.

"Chefs, thanks to their celebrity, now have the clout and the passion, as well as the knowledge, to point us back to the things that matter -- to sustainable farming, to raising animals naturally in fresh air, rather than inside cement barracks pumped full of antibiotics," Ruhlman notes. In my case, it was even more than that: chefs caused an entire domino effect that impacted every area of my life. I soon sought ways to increase sustainability, local sourcing, and purveyor respect in everything I purchased. I cooked and stored my food differently. Eating out became less convenience-based and more driven by a desire to explore new cuisines. A friend of mine with equal interest in cheffing philosophy even credits it with ultimately causing her switch to ecologically friendly feminine hygiene products.

Despite the global impact of cheffing philosophy, there is a refreshing temperance visible in the world of chefs, even those who have elevated their craft to the spiritual. It's common for chefs pursuing lofty goals to also profess a love for high-end fast food burgers, candy bars, or cigarettes. Thanks to these down-to-earth "lapses," it's easier to recognize the value of making small changes in lifestyle rather than despairing that one's entire life does not yet meet some unspoken moral goal. I eat meat with an awareness that it is not the most sustainable or ecological choice that I could make with my diet, but I eat less meat, and what I do eat is overwhelmingly organic – a big change from only a year ago, and a success in many ways.

The following New Year's Eve seemed to demand another culinary leap. I found a local French bistro offering a high-end tasting menu that evening. The introductory appetizer -- a clever take on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with apple "foam" so dense that it served as the "bread" -- was so startlingly different that I could not find words to describe the sensation of eating it. My dining companion and I enthused to our waiter and asked whether this dish made it onto the menu with any regularity. He explained that it had taken hours of painstaking work to make -- suitable for a course on a special evening such as this one, but unlikely to surface on any menu in the future. Ever.

This was food not as fuel or as culinary achievement, but as temporary art. Grant Achatz, chef and owner of the illustrious Alinea restaurant in Chicago, notes that creating inspired cuisine "isn't a mental execution, or that's a small percentage of it. It starts up here [in the chef's head] from emotion, whether it's passion about a particular ingredient, the process that you're going to use to manipulate that ingredient, or the end result once you have it in your hands."

Achatz's intention to alter the mental state of his customers extends to Alinea's architecture: "That's why the hallway is the way that it is," he notes, referring to the Alice in Wonderland-like entry to the restaurant, which narrows as diners reach the interior.

"It's my intent with that entryway to disorient people, simply to break the monotony of the experience right away.... Now, you're disoriented, alarmed, your senses are awakened. You're thinking, 'What's going on?' That was the point."

Achatz continues the theme of thwarted expectations with Alinea's serving dishes, which look more like modern art influenced by science fiction than standard dishware. The food, too, disorients: one famous micro-dish, the "PB&J," consisted of a peeled grape dipped in peanut butter and wrapped in a paper-thin layer of toasted brioche bread. Keller, too, exhibits playful behavior toward culinary staples; his famous dishes include a high-end take on coffee and doughnuts, and a salmon tartare cone inspired by Baskin-Robbins. It is this tightrope of invoking memory and disorienting sensibilities that makes culinary masters great; it's the same tightrope many of us are walking spiritually as we learn how to weave our past and our future together.

"Take your time," says Keller. "Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention."

As in the kitchen, so in life.

Note: As I wrote this article, Grant Achatz issued a press release announcing that he has been diagnosed with an advanced stage of skin cancer. As an otherwise healthy 33-year-old, Achatz "look[s] forward to a full, cancer-free, recovery" following aggressive treatment: "I remain, and will remain, actively and optimistically engaged in operations at Alinea to the largest extent possible. Alinea will continue to perform at the level people have come to expect from us -- I insist on that." This is the cheffing philosophy at work once more, on a personal level.

Get well soon, Chef.

Photo of The French Laundry kitchen by SiFu Renka. Photo of Alinea hallway by ulterior epicure, both under Creative Commons license.