Food Play is No Flash in the Pan

Okay, I might have been wearing a blindfold at the Idea Festival's Lights Out Dinner last week, but I wasn't blind to the possibilities it and those to come provide for parody or outright dismissal--dilettantes dining on delectables in the dark while the real world grapples with issues like the UN's warning of a coming "silent tsunami" of hunger. Worse, they open the Idea Festival up to charges of staging events that are about little more than the novelty they offer.

What, really, is the point of playing with our food?

That's a question the festival asked and answered when it invited a young chef and molecular biologist from Chicago, Homaro Cantu, to speak at last year's gathering. Much of what Cantu presented in his hour on the stage drew applause and delighted laughter. He and the equally young kitchen crew at his Moto restaurant are capable of dreaming up some wacky ideas about how to cook, how to present food, and how to reconfigure it. He showed clips from their competition in an Iron Chef episode, and they proved you can't question his inventiveness.

But to what end? How many of the world's hungry billions can eat his frozen beet balloons?

Well, Cantu has a serious side, or at least an ambitious one, and his design business has several applied-for patents for edible food implements and packaging, and for advances in food storage (think lo-o-o-o-ng space flights, to Mars, for example). He also thinks a lot about "decentralizing" food sources in a hungry world, and innovative methods people may--or may be forced to--adopt. He says he never could have come up with these new and practical ideas if he didn't allow himself to play with food.

Some are openly questioning whether the avant-garde cuisine movement Cantu has cited as his early source of inspiration has reached the end of both its utility and novelty. But in the same online magazine comes another article that suggests new ways of thinking about food, and what constitutes food, may indeed get us closer to solving the problem of feeding all the hungry billions.

Would I want to eat the break-through food the article describes? Um, maybe with a blindfold on...

David

Comments

[SeattleTim]

"Dinning in the Dark" can be hazardous to your health and I don't mean the CSI episode about murder in a "dark restaurant." "Dinning in the Dark" is a metaphor for the problems created by the globalization of food. Too many are blind to the impacts on the planet or their health of having year round access to every fruit, vegetable and protein-- e.g. strawberries from Chile in December or God knows what kind of cheap, farmed seafood from China, stuffed with faux-food chemicals, year round, etc. Talapia anyone? Maybe your "Flash in the Pan" post is just what we need to throw some light on important food source questions.

-- Naw. Just pass the whipped cream from Denmark please. My Chilean strawberries are a little bare.
SeattleTim