Indeed, to eat at Chez Panisse is partly a food experience but partly also a cinematic one: everywhere you look there are elaborate posters for Pagnol’s movies. Waters is seldom at the skillet herself, but her enthusiams are everywhere. Although the menu was once heavy with traditional French cuisine – the bird-within-a-bird-within-a-bird variety, with everything flambéed and slathered – it lightened up in the late 1970s after the departure of her star chef Jeremiah Tower.3 These days, the dishes are distinctly Californian, sunny with Meyer lemons and heartiness, but never overwrought. Rather than slow food, ‘real food’ may be the better phrase.
When I visited one evening in September 2015 I ate at the café upstairs, which is rather cheaper than the main restaurant downstairs but maintains its standards for seasonal ingredients cooked simply and superbly. One is not made aware of the 30-year polemical baggage as one eats the halibut baked in a fig leaf with fennel, or chicken breast with shell beans and okra, or the nectarine galette with vanilla ice cream (actually it is Riverdog Farm chicken and August Fire nectarine, while downstairs one may also travel to Wolfe Ranch, James Ranch and Cannard Farm to sample their tomatoes, quail and lamb; one is eating at a farmers’ market where every ingredient has a story, and the story is usually superfluous when placed next to the question ‘Is it delicious?’). The only jarring element in the whole evening is how fast the slow food is dispensed, and how non-French and non-surly everything is. Unlike your checked-cloth table in a jardin in the Dordogne, you will be required to vacate a couple of hours après le commencement.
Waters has long resisted offers to franchise the restaurant and her name. ‘I don’t want a restaurant to make money. I want a restaurant because I want to know the people who work there and the people who come there. The more you have, the more you have to take care of.’ She has, however, written several cookbooks, and these tend towards the charming. The most touching, although also the most likely to induce queasiness in her detractors, is Fanny at Chez Panisse, which Waters and two friends wrote in the voice of her daughter. The book contains recipes and also a little history, and tries to capture the naive ethos of the slow food philosophy. ‘I like to be around on Wednesdays because that’s the one day the vegetables come in from the Chinos’ farm way down in Rancho Santa Fe. The Chino family has the most beautiful farm in the world. There are just rows and rows of every sort of vegetable and they all look like jewels . . .’
Beyond her restaurant and books, her central project is something called ‘The Edible Schoolyard’, an attempt, according to its literature, to ‘transform school lunch from an afterthought to an edible education’, and to imbue impressionable minds with the slow food ecosystem. Not surprisingly, Jamie Oliver is a keen supporter, and the project has enchanted the Clintons and the Obamas. ‘In my heart I am always one of those people who want to win people over rather than overthrow them,’ Waters says. ‘Bring them to something beautiful and delicious and their bad behaviour disappears.’
Waters was in her early 70s when we spoke on the eve of Thanksgiving 2015, two weeks after her beloved France had been devastated by the attacks on the culture she had tried to emulate. She was working on her memoir. She said she still felt empowered by the faith of the young people she spoke to, but her own faith seemed to be waning.
Like everyone else I’m on my cell phone. I do put it away at the table. One of the important things about food is that we use it as a means of communication, but I’ve been at tables with young people where they’re on their phones all the time. The things I was shocked by 40 years ago have now become our dominant culture – our dominant values are fast, cheap and easy, and the value we place on our food has decreased. What have we improved? Very little. We are just completely imprisoned by this culture.
iii) Faster Food
But we are in a hurry, and we need refuelling; we do not have the time to make a reservation at Chez Panisse or any other Chez. Although infused with wider concerns, slow food still has one very tentacular nemesis. Fast food, the enemy at which it railed against 30 years ago, is still offering instantly gratifying alternatives, and it is still mass-producing predominantly unhealthy food at affordable prices. The biggest problem is that some of it is delicious. The sugar and salt content of the food appeals as much to the receptors in our brain as the brief time it takes to prepare and serve it appeals to our schedules. The dominance of cheap and fast food on our high street – the Pret takeover, the Itsu sushi box, the lunchtime food-truck wok – reflects a move towards slightly healthier (or at least more imaginative) fare on the go, at least in the more affluent parts of the city. The trend is still for fast, although variety and imagination has improved a little too.
But recently a whole new category of fast food has emerged, the sort that makes any food category before it look like an eight-hour pot roast. Typically for our age, the food is only part food; the other part is tech. And as with most things tech, there is one enviable soon-to-be-zillionaire at the heart of it.
At the end of 2012 Rob Rhinehart was a slightly desperate hacker in his early 20s with hopes of a big breakthrough in a new start-up. The idea involved mobile phones, and the business was failing. Rhinehart began to economise with his food intake. He started eating junk, felt terrible on it, and then researched what the body really needed to thrive. He came up with a list of about 30 essential nutrients, and started buying chemicals and vitamins on the Internet in powdered form. He blended these with water, found he looked and felt better after drinking it, and started to blog about it (the first post was called ‘How I Stopped Eating Food’). The initial reaction from friends and readers was cynical but curious. Soon some readers of his blog began concocting their own mineral formulas for the perfect nil-by-stove diet.
Rhinehart called his product Soylent, having read the book Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. Written in 1966 and set in 1999, the book envisioned an overpopulated world with scarce resources; its most desirable foodstuff was soylent, a steak made from soya and lentils. (In the subsequent film, Soylent Green, inhabitants of New York are sustained by Soylent wafers, which are not made from good things in the ocean, as advertised, but human skin.)
Rhinehart’s product began to catch on, and Soylent became a timesaving hit at the crowdfunding company Tilt. Rhinehart and his friends swiftly attracted more than $1 million in investment capital, and Soylent started shipping and attracting international news coverage. When Lizzie Widdicombe of the New Yorker went to visit Rhinehart she found him ‘healthy-looking, which was encouraging’, and surer than ever that he had found the food of the future. He called other food, even things such as carrots, ‘recreational food’. You didn’t have to cook Soylent, it took 10 seconds or so to drink it, it filled you up and freed you up. What did the yellow-beige fluid taste like? Rhinehart wasn’t keen to define it, but Widdicombe reported that it tasted a bit like pancake batter, slightly oaty and grainy. Sucralose masked the taste of the vitamins.
The writer Will Self, on assignment for Esquire, went on a Soylent-only diet for five days and found the taste ‘slightly sweet, a touch salty, with the consistency of a cheap milkshake and a fairly unpleasant processed aftertaste’. At the end of it, the worst thing he could find to say was that consuming the same thing every day had been extraordinarily boring. Although not much of a foodie, he wondered what it would be like to crunch and masticate again, and hankered for anything that promised variety and spice.
The new food, of course, was never intended as pleasure; it was a utility. ‘I think the best technology is the one that disappears,’ Rhinehart said. ‘Water doesn’t have a lot of taste or flavour, and it’s the world’s most popular beverage.’ Unlike water, Soylent includes lipids from canola oil, carbohydrates from maltodextrin, and protein from rice. There was also fish oil for omega-3s alongside measures of magnesium, calcium, copper, iodine and Vitamins B2, B5 and B6. On the official Soylent video, which is full of young fit people living desirable-looking lives while drinking the mixture at work or
at the gym, Rhinehart says that his training as an engineer taught him that ‘everything is made of parts, everything can be broken down’. His video also showed a handsome couple preparing Soylent for their day’s activity: three bags blended in a liquidiser with water would provide breakfast, lunch and dinner, cost $9 in total and free up perhaps two hours in your day.
Liquid food has been around for a while, most prominently on space missions and in hospitals. The difference now is that Soylent is not just convenience food but core food: Rhinehart claimed that Soylent makes up about 90 per cent of his total diet. It is a completely new way of thinking about survival and sustenance, if not pleasure, and it is food decoupled from the world we’ve been used to since Palaeolithic times, bypassing the gastronome or the foodie in favour of the end-user.
Inevitably, Soylent swiftly spawned DIY rivals offering similar ways to streamline your day and gut: these are also available online and called Soylent Red, People Chow 3.0.1, Schmoylent, Queal and Veetal, Ambro, KetoFood, Nano and Joylent. There appears to be a growing market for all of them. Soylent is scaling up every day, and at the beginning of 2016 had attracted about $25 million in funding from investors convinced they had seen the future. One thing they have seen is how the dilemma of feeding a burgeoning global population may rapidly become a problem of the past.
Unsurprisingly, Soylent and its clones are a particular hit in the tech centres of Palo Alto and Mountain View, where to walk away from one’s desk on a lunch break for even a few minutes might mean crashing your next big start-up. As the official video says, ‘Using Soylent as a resource means that you can take the time you would normally spend preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals, and put that time into other areas of your life. Soylent gives you the freedom to live life the way you want to live.’ Thousands of people (yes, the Soylent minority) have now tried Soylent or its online variants as their main source of nutrition, and their binary needs have been catered to in digital ways. Long-term health effects have yet to be correlated.
The effects on one’s day, however, are instantly evident. Without food to grow and consume and punctuate our lives we become a different race: we will be less sociable (we are unlikely to sit down at Soylent-time with our friends), less communicable and impressionable (we won’t shop for food, we won’t be open to new experiences), more homogenous (if and when Soylent goes global, we will all eat the same chemicals), and more open to food poisoning (an epidemic on a science-fiction scale, one corruptible food chain rather than thousands). Fed factory swill, we will become like the animals we used to eat. We may look back even on fast food as good food. Soylent may be the beginning, and it may be the end; freedom never looked so fluid, or so synthetic.
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1 Icon marked its 150th issue with a glossary of words that should be banned, many of them integral to the slow living movement: eco, curated, artisanal, craft, experiential, sustainable, Scandinavian and timeless. The latter was defined as ‘Adjective: Designed to last but destined to be replaced next year.’
2 The true timeline stretches further back. McDonald’s began in California in the 1940s, and the marketing of its burgers with its Speedee Service System helped to popularise the concept of uniform fast food. But the chain that claims to be the first fast-food outlet, White Castle, traces its history back to 1921: this was the original home of ‘the slider’, small basic square burgers with onions produced on a factory-style production line and sold for 5 cents. Diners in the original Kansas restaurant were encouraged to ‘Buy ’em by the sack’, and if you ordered takeaway you could get five burgers for 10 cents.
3 Tower was everything Waters was not, although she appreciated the flamboyance and attention he brought to the kitchen. He went off to New York to set up Stars, a restaurant where the chefs were all show-offs, each producing circus-style extravaganzas for impressionable customers. Molecular gastronomy found its true American outlet here, and developed the talents of such chefs as Dominique Crenn. It was the antithesis of fast food: it was intellectual, labour-intensive and aspired to art. It was food you couldn’t make at home. Chez Panisse meanwhile, returned to its roots: a beautiful lamb dish, a beautiful hearth-fired chicken dish.
A new narrative in 1790: a timed ticket to an ordered past.
Chapter Fifteen
The British Museum and the Story of Us
i) The Book of Hours
We conclude this survey somewhere solid: at an institution that marks the passage of time like no other.
Two years after it opened in January 1759, the British Museum published its first catalogue. Its collection was cacophonous – books, prints, jewels, minerals, coins, telescopes, shoes, fossils, Egyptian vases, Roman lamps, Etruscan pots, Jamaican drinking vessels and a mummy – a reflection of the wide interests and hoarding habits of the man who supplied the bulk of its first stock, Sir Hans Sloane.1 About 5,000 visitors came to see these objects in the museum’s first year, about the same number the museum now attracts in one hour on a rainy Tuesday. Admittance was free, then as now, but in the early days you had to be extremely keen and fit to see your first fossil: you would visit the museum’s porter one day to express interest, the porter would check on your address and suitability, you would have to return on another day to receive a signed ticket (if approved), and return on a specified day after that to enjoy the items. An ‘under-librarian’ would take you around in a group of five, a tour which, according to the museum’s own reports, was conducted at a hurried pace to ensure the next quintet didn’t lose all interest while waiting.
Among the first objects to be seen after negotiating the huge staircase was a room containing coral and a vulture’s head in alcohol. Some of the items reminded visitors of the fairground and freak show: there was a mysterious ‘cyclops pig’ and a horn from the head of a woman named Mary Davies. Objects such as these seemed to belie the museum’s grand objective, which was to be a place ‘chiefly designed for the use of learned and studious men, both natives and foreigners, into their researches into several parts of knowledge’.2 One room, the precursor of the famous round Reading Room, was set aside, according to the first regulations, for ‘the persons so admitted [to undertake research], in which they may sit, and read or write, without interruption’, a noble pursuit not yet labelled academia. On its first day this library attracted eight visitors. The patience one needed to gain admittance was nothing compared to the patience one needed to restrain from tying up some of the museum’s trustees. John Ward, for example, the professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London, fretted that most of the objects on display were rather too rarefied for ‘ordinary people of all Ranks and Denominations’ to appreciate. There was a genuine fear that the eighteenth-century London mob would trash the place.
Many irregularities will be committed that cannot be prevented by a few Librarians, who will soon be insulted by such people if they offer to control or contradict them . . . No persons of superior degree will care to come on those days – a great concourse of ordinary people will never be kept in order. If public days should be allowed, then it will be necessary for the Trustees to have the presence of a Committee of themselves attending, with at least two Justices of the Peace and the constables of the division of Bloomsbury.3
As Ward feared, a museum is a living thing; in a healthy state it will attract all manner of curious people. Even at its opening, the British Museum had long abandoned the Ancient Greek vision of what a museum should be, and from which the name derives: a tribute to and deployment of the Muses, a demonstration of the highest cultural aims and achievements exemplified not through objects but through a salute to the capacity of the human mind; in Alexandria, learned men were paid just to be in a hallowed porticoed space, like celebrity ‘ambassadors’ today. But then came the library and university, and the dissemination of curiosity through other means, and historic and symbolic objects were placed beneath glass. And thus the museum took on a new role, and became a symbol and demonstration of time: time passin
g, time tracked, time catalogued. In some form at least, a museum is merely a chronology of its specialism, a consistent desire to order and explain events beyond randomness. In Bloomsbury, the temporal ordering of things hung heavier than most.
In 1759, Buckingham House, now Buckingham Palace, was seriously considered as the British Museum’s first home; only its purchase cost to the government – £30,000 compared with £10,250 for a Bloomsbury alternative – ruled it out. So the institution (although it was then more of an experiment) opened at Montague House, a seventeenth-century mansion in Great Russell Street, and there it has stood ever since. We’ve seen that the displays were only a little more ordered than Portobello Market; one couldn’t yet get a cohesive grasp on Britain’s place in the world, let alone any idea of the development of the human spirit or adventurous mind.
But a catalogue from 1860, marking the museum’s first centenary, suggests an expansion not only of contents but also of vision: there was now a purpose and order to the displays beyond mere accumulation. Some of this purpose manifested itself in the act of unrighteous looting, a demonstration of the rampaging Empire as we scooped up the spoils of war and stole things on our holidays. But broad learning now had a more directed chronology, a directed history rather than a cabinet of curiosities. (The catalogue also suggests the inevitability of the Natural History Museum, to be spun off from the British Museum 30 years later: alongside the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles the early rooms were home to a wasps’ nest, a dodo skull, snail shells, an elk fossil, an iguanodon fossil, a stuffed flamingo, peacocks, unhappy marsupials.) The British Museum was already thinking upon Darwinian lines, with a natural selection edging towards empirical ethnography. On the Origin of Species and the work of Alfred Wallace emerged in the late 1850s, and hindsight suggests that the new rooms at the British Museum, while still fusty with a Grecian ideal of beauty and the notion of the higher calling, were already, if often unwittingly, in step with lucid and exhilarating biology. What emerged at the museum in the middle of the nineteenth century was the one thing that modern visitors crave above all else: narrative.4
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