When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals—like chefs. But I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional, just to be more human.

The other passage came from a speech given by anthropologist Sidney Mintz at a conference for economic anthropologists.

More and more of us wonder whether such things [as a seasonal harvest, heirloom fruits, etc.] should be brought back, not only for ecology’s sake, but also for the renewed meaning they can provide, in giving us, in addition to the recognition of our own mortality, a measurable human existence.

It’s only in the last decade or so that words like these, applied to food, have found something like a mass audience in the Western world. Ironically, this mass audience—itself still a fragile and marginal force, compared to the energy required for real change—is dwarfed by the increasing capacity of emerging economies to afford their own steak dinners and Big Macs. We have little right to refuse them the excesses of consumption we ourselves have been enjoying for the last fifty years, even if we’re starting to look upon those with regret. Let’s hope they’re more measured about their growth than we’ve been. Sid Mintz closes his lecture with:

If we cannot really change fast food; and if we cannot bring slow food to more than a modest fraction of the people of the world; then should we not aim at good food, and healthy food, for everybody? That is what I mean by foods at moderate speeds; I hope they can be made fast enough—and more important, prepared at slow enough speeds—for all of us.

Wise words to end a meditative evening with.