Graham Kerr. The Galloping Gourmet. The man and his brand are inseparable for most of us who got a taste of food programs on TV during the 1960s. Mr. Kerr first appeared on what was known as “experimental TV” on April 16, 1960, before the acclaimed Julia Child made her debut as The French Chef in 1963. But even before the two appeared on TV, Marcel Boulestin, a French chef living in England, appeared on the experimental television programs produced by the BBC during the 1930s. In January 1937, Boulestin demonstrated how to make an omelet for his first program called “Cook’s Night Out.”
Experimentation defined the 1960s, and television was no exception. Early television stations were called “experimental” from the 1920s through the 1950s when broadcast frequencies were not yet commercialized or available to the general public. The BBC’s 1937 program guide reads like a listing of experiments interspersed with articles touting the latest developments in broadcasting technology.
Far from experimental was the decision by both Boulestin and Kerr to begin their programs with an omelet. I asked Kerr why an omelet was the star attraction for his own television debut. He suggested that it was a dish that most viewed as complicated but that, with simple instruction, would enable viewers to achieve a quick victory in their own kitchens.
Watching an omelet take shape during these early years, those who could afford the new Marconi-EMI televisions required good eyesight. The TV had a screen size of only five to eight inches, miniscule compared to our high-definition 152-inch screens.
Why was food one of the first topics to appear through this experimental medium? It may be that the broadcast spectrum became a means for popularizing culinary skills as a way for consumers to save money. Before the WWII, middle class families often left culinary skills to their own chefs or ate at restaurants. The names of the early broadcast programs reflected the idea that a housewife prepared a good meal when her household staff took the night off. And before the war, during the 1920s, books and radio broadcasts included programs that suggested ideas for saving money, such as one program in 1927 called “Wastage in the Kitchen.”
These early years in broadcast are full of experimentation and enthusiasm. Mr. Selfridge, and American entrepreneur who brought Selfridges department stores to England (first one opened in 1909) the focus of a new Masterpiece Theater program currently running on PBS. Henry Gordon Selfridge introduced the first televisions in his department stores in 1927 with John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor who is often called the “father of television.” Selfridge, an innovative impresario, was much like Graham Kerr, who began his television programs by running through the audience and vaulting over a couch. His wife, Treena, brought her experience in London theaters and pantomimes to choreograph Kerr’s kitchen presence on TV.
These early entrepreneurs, Boulestin, Kerr, and Selfridge should inspire us to think beyond our contemporary food programs and find new ways to popularize culinary skills and good food. Some early efforts are appearing on website and through software applications. But it will be the sparkling personalities and creativity that will engage us anew, much in the way of Julia Child and Graham Kerr.
Just returned from a three-day feast of ideas in Monterey, California at the seventh EG Conference (http://www.the-eg.com/). The annual gathering brings together individuals from media, technology, entertainment — and his year, education. This was my second year attending the event, intrigued by the entirely eclectic group of presenters.
Magicians, musicians, jugglers, and acrobats, astronauts, nature photographers, pick pockets, and art forgers, gathered to explore new ways of thinking about education. With this gathering of intellectual explorers, we heard presentations that revealed a yearning to keep the human connection in sight while reaching to the outer edges of our digital experience. In one section called “Sustenance,” we heard about food as one of those connectors. “Red” (aka Hong Yi) an architect from Shanghai, plated art — literally created art using food on plates that represented “food painting” of maps and more.
Christopher Shi, a gastroenterologist and pianist, persuaded us that digestion of ideas through artistic expression such as music (which he demonstrated by eloquently playing the piano for us) bore similarities to biological digestion. Well, maybe. And Christopher Young, Nathan Myhrvold’s co-author for The Modernist Cuisine, explained life as a scientific chef, inventing experimental kitchens, food, and now his new website, ChefSteps (http://www.chefsteps.com/), where you can find Salmon 104, which describes cooking salmon at the temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
EG, impresario Mike Hawley’s conference, provoked us to think about the relationship between art and science. As more artists (and let’s include cooks as artists) connect with scientists, we’ll get a new food system that integrates bits with bites, allowing the human spirit to simmer along with the structures of programming and networks. Let’s hope that we hear more about this integration. Congratulations to Mr. Hawley and all the presenters at the 7th EG Conference this year — A mighty meal with much to digest between now and the next EG gathering.
Some things are best left unsaid, and my experience as a pig cloner comes up in conversations only to cause nervous twitching on the part of my listeners. “How”, they wonder, “could someone dedicated to conservation and the environment wander off into the black art of biotechnology?”
During the years when I was raising heritage breeds of livestock in Maine, I found that one of our precious swine bloodlines was drying up. The farm, founded for the purpose of conserving rare breeds of livestock, operated on the rocky ledge of limited gene material for these minute breed populations. Our pigs, which came from England, had a gene pool consisting of four bloodlines and we had one sow from one of the four lines. She hadn’t had a litter in several years, despite repeated attempts at breeding, coaxing, and the normal veterinary treatments. Genetic diversity for our U.S. herd of Gloucester Old Spots pigs looked prematurely bleak.
Most of us attracted to farming on a large scale come to it with a desire for connection to the earth as an antidote the digitization of modern culture. So the idea of using technology to solve a problem related to animal conservation seemed crazily contradictory for a hands-on farmer.
The seeming contradiction began with a question. What if cloning technology could enable this pig to start all over again? Could we bootstrap her bloodline if a copy of her was able to breed? Might her problems be related to her, not her genetic makeup?
In 2000, Scientific American ran an article, “Cloning Noah’s Ark” and suggested that biotechnology could preserve genetic diversity for animals, which I assumed included domestic animals, such as dogs.
And so did most people. The first customers for laboratories that did cloning were pet lovers who longed for their family dog after the pet’s demise. Cats and dogs were rushed to these labs to reacquire Fido or Fluffy.
But what about a 350-pound hog? At our farm, the staff gathered for a contentious meeting and decision to try cloning to see if a new “copy” of our pig would breed naturally and restart the bloodline. Overcome with moral outrage, some staff quit, others walked gingerly on, but most of us came together with the desire to remain on mission.
Which included the humane treatment of animals. We learned that our sow only needed to have cells gathered from her ear, a process that could cause minimal discomfort. After the skin cells are collected, they are injected into the another sow’s eggs after the recipient’s chromosomes and polar bodies are removed. Once the injected egg contains the skin cells from our pig, an electric shock fuses the skin cell with the egg cytoplasm. The nucleus from our pig cells enters the cytoplasm, fuses, and begins to divide, yielding the development of an embryo. The “fertilized” embryo is injected into a surrogate sow who gives birth to the clone.
We learned about omnipotent cells and conducted a cloning workshop at the farm, offering hands-on experience to the willing and curious. Visitors to the farm explored nuclei and chromosomes under microscopes, winding their minds around complex ideas of ethics and biodiversity.
One of the new cloning companies in 2001 partnered with our farm to explore cloning livestock for conservation, a welcome diversion from Fido and Fluffy. Our sow, Princess, became the proud mother of two piglets, sort of, in April 2002, aptly named Xerox and D’NA. The spots on these pigs were different than those on Princess, providing a lesson in genetic transmission.
The company, Infigen, pioneered the application of cloning technology to breed conservation and was pleased, and so were we as Princess’ offspring went off to produce strapping piglets from her bloodline in subsequent natural breedings.
The uses of such technology can be problematic for the food and agriculture entrepreneurs. GMO technology, for example, taunts those who distrust the aims of technology while beckons to those who see technology as a tool when thoughtfully utilized can break through the limitations of our natural world.
Which shall it be? Could the solutions for feeding our future populations rest somewhere between Princess and the pea?
I recently visited the new exhibit at The American Museum of Natural History in New York called Our Global Kitchen, Food, Nature, Culture. As more and more Americans learn about their food, they can now feast on a museum exhibit that attempts to tell the whole story.
To tackle food as a broad subject is to launch upon a vast ocean in a small barque amidst thousands of hidden reefs. Topics such as genetic modification of foods lurk beneath the surface of most conversations about food. But this exhibit manages to stay afloat, informing visitors without sinking into political or cultural debates. You can wander through displays that explain how humans have shaped food through plant and animal breeding and how food is exchanged through complex trading networks. The exhibit employs statistics and charts, in excess at times, to provide enough information for visitors to come to their own conclusions about the state of our food system.
One display celebrates all the ways that food connects the human family while innovating different tools and cuisines. You can experiment with your own sense of taste by visiting the exhibit’s food science laboratory where you can learn how we sense taste and flavor. One room contains examples of what people ate during different time periods, such as Ancient Rome and Early America. The exhibit curators provided a creative way to tell those stories, using models of what cuisines looked like in their own cultural settings. In all, Our Global Kitchen, is well worth a visit. My only lament is that the exhibit doesn’t come with a printed catalog in addition to a website.
The daily revelations emerging from the discovery of horsemeat in lasagna purchased in Ireland reveal the complexities of our food system. When EU health commissioners tracked down the source of the horsemeat, they found a trail that passed through multiple countries, processors, dealers, brokers, Romania, England, Cyprus, Poland, the Netherlands, and in some cases, through illegal hands.
Since much of our meat is processed, ground up, blended with flavorings, shaped into meatballs and stuffed into sausage casings, each step closer to our plates creates opportunities for processors to succumb to pressures from consumers who want cheaper meat in poor economic times. And this poses a challenge to regulators and concerned consumers who want safe and uncontaminated food.
The current kerfuffle about horsemeat Europe’s food supply chain reveals our persistent concern over what one Victorian writer, Andrew Wyntner, called “culinary poisons.” And todays heightened awareness of food sourcing only raises the steaks over public confidence in our global food system. Frederick Accum wrote in 1820 about food adulteration that he found so ubiquitous in Victorian London. Later, in 1848, John Mitchell lauded the advances in the uses of chemistry to detect the addition of substances that “diminished its real strength without altering its apparent strength. He called this kind of adulteration “the deadly kind.” Andrew Wyntner in “Our Peck of Dirt” claimed German sausages were so contaminated that he called them “poison bags.”
The discovery of horsemeat in Ireland was upsetting on several levels. Not only did the revelation raise questions about food safety and transparency, the mingling of equine with bovine clashes with cultural identities. The British have never been that keen to eat horses while the rest of Europe has assimilated horsemeat into its culinary repertoire. The consumption of horsemeat in France was legalized in 1866 on the eve of the Siege of Paris. While the French have Escoffier included horsemeat in his repertoire claiming that, “Horsemeat is delicious when one is in the right circumstances to appreciate it.” Clearly, he wouldn’t approve of the current circumstances.
Many of us wish for an opportunity to share our latest projects, especially if we’re crazy-passionate about it. Speaking at a TED conference is one of those opportunities. Recently, I had the privilege of speaking at the TEDx Austin event. As a speaker, I was witness to the miracle of a TEDx event, a day-long immersion into the inspiring and motivating lives of the speakers and attendees.
My talk came at the end of the day, and although I prepared for this talk more than I had ever prepared for the countless other talks, lectures, and seminars that I have given, I was full of remorse afterwards.
My talk was about curiosity and how it motivated me to run across four deserts; and how you can use curiosity to overcome your fear of thinking bigger about your life. In my case, I’m working on a new way to think about our food system, how we need to think bigger so that we can create disruptive, imaginative improvements for our food system. But there were important things I left out, some deeper, more revealing ideas that I really wanted you to know.
Yes, I know, speakers often think of what they could have done better. But my remorse came from seeing the irony of my talk in light of the event’s theme: fearlessness. Fear, as it turned out, was my nemesis. You see, I knew my talk, cold; but in the few days before the talk, I was having difficulty meeting the time constraints. So, I turned to reading my talk, instead of sharing with the audience my story, the one that I felt passionate about. If only I had taken a breath, just one, and listened to my heart, I could have gathered all those words I had crafted and put them into sentences that held a deeper, more personal message. Like this,
That we need to love life more than we fear death, in order for us to use our curiosity about life to understand how to solve problems, like those in our food system.
That just because understanding our food system in all its overwhelming complexity appears impossible, using our curiosity, even about the smallest aspects of our food allows us to take the first step towards a more complex understanding, the one we need in order to arrive at the “Big Ideas.”
And that to me, food represents all of life and love, its potential for creativity and close human connection. Food is constantly recreating itself, and our ability to re-invent its presence in our lives during a period of rapid change is vital to our survival.
And so now you know what I meant to say, really.
The day was full of rich and inspiring stories, of Byron Reese’s optimism that all of us have great purpose, of Darden Smith’s song that carried the revelation that we all have gifts that just need unwrapping and the courage to use them.
At the end of the day, the speakers and organizers met over an elegantly prepared meal to celebrate the success of the day. Sitting across from me was a bright young man who seemed curious about my desert running adventures. He asked me, “Are you still running?”
His question was well meaning, but it brought all the events of the day into sharp focus. “Still running?” Did it seem that I was done imagining, taking risks, being curious enough to think big. Hardly, I thought. This overwhelming challenge of mapping the food system in all it complexity, is the next uncharted territory that begs for some fearless explorers. Now is the time to lace my shoes again and get back on the desert. And if my talk was worthy, even to a few hungry souls, perhaps someone will walk along side me in some new uncharted territory.
Desert Running, a PB&J Sandwich, and the Future of Food: Robyn Metcalfe at TEDxAustin
