Part 3- Tomorrow's New World Order

And here, before we launch into the New Year, the final chapter of the Petra Proudhurst papers. 

What are we to do with this knowledge of the Space Age?  Do we waste it letting it rot in the laboratories of the world?  Or do we step boldly forward with this knowledge and ensure a better future?  The choice is obvious.

As the leaders of the world it is our responsibility to respond to the challenges of the future and focus our resources and imagination on solutions.  I say let our imaginations shine.  We cannot stand idly by and expect our dreams to come true under their own power.  The future is not a gift but an achievement.

I look into the laboratory and see a future in which struggle for sustenance has vanished.

I envision supermarkets overflowing with the foods of the world.  Piles of fruits and vegetables in the heart of winter.  Aisles of canned soups and packaged dinners.  I see jars of cured meats for .45 and cans of tropical fruit 5 for a $1 from Kansas City to Singapore.  A fully nutritious meal for a family of 4 will be prepared in under 15 minutes.  And for desert, individually wrapped pies for the whole family.  Now you can have your cake and eat it too.

In the future, supplements will counter deficiencies in vitamins and minerals.  Artificial flavors will provide the spice of life to any dish.  With advances in food preservation the daily trip to the grocery store will not exist.  The pantry will be the breadbox of the home.

As this new technology expands around the globe there will be the inevitable excess of grain.  Imagine cheap breads for every child.  A limitless food source for our livestock.  Meat prices will plummet and the food of kings will be for every man. With new food resources social equality will simply grow on the tide of abundance.  It is simply a matter of vision and willpower.

Man has worked with nature from its beginnings to create a more hospitable world.  It is our magic touch to use our imagination to improve our world.  It is not a utopia but it is a step in that direction.  Now is the time to act.  Do not hesitate. 

I am confident in the engineering of today for a better tomorrow.

The struggle against Convenience Food continues.

Secrets Part 2

Frontier of the Future

The world today is made, is powered, is penetrated through and through with science.  Let us look into the face of the future.  We see the long shadows of problems that already extend across the land today.  Increasing populations, diminishing resources, pollution of sea and air.  Is this the prospect we face?  Or through knowledge and understanding can we shape our future into one more befitting the human dignity and spirit.

We look to the frontiers of the future with confidence that man will master nature through understanding.  And it is to this end of understanding that we scientists labor today.

19 years ago, in 1943, Mexico faced droughts that threatened millions with starvation because of a virus; stem rust.  My mentor, Norman Balroug, plant geneticist and pathologist, arrived with radical ideas straight from the laboratories of Dupont.  Immediately, he setup a facility financed by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.  Under his hand we developed a wheat variety resistant to stem rust using multiple pure lines as parents.  This alone saved thousands of acres of crops.  But Norman did not stop there.

He began breeding varieties that absorb more nitrogen and so grow more grains.  He introduced nitrogen fertilizers that doubled the yield on a single stalk.  But these plants bent and broke under their productive weight.  Field after field toppled over as if a hurricane had swept through.  I had the great opportunity of witnessing his most brilliant moment.  He brought over Japanese dwarf wheat with a thicker stem, the Daruma, and melded that wheat variety into the population.  The result, a sturdy, productive plant.

Doctor Balroug created the first high-yield variety plant, resistant to disease, responsive to fertilizers, accepting of pesticides, and thus began the Green Revolution.  Today, Mexico exports wheat to the rest of the world.

We have isolated the beneficial genes of wheat, corn, and rice and cloned them.  GA 20 increases oxygen intake.  Rht reduces height.  Sd1 dwarfs the rice plant. The earth is a machine.  It can be improved as any other machine provided you have the right tools.  We have developed these tools, and they promise a wealth of results.

Tests have begun in India in the Punjab province that will triple food production there.  In Southeast Asia the new rice strain, IR8, has left our laboratory and entered the farmer’s field.  Beginning this year, Standard Oil of New Jersey will supply the farmers of the Philippines with seed packets complete with individually developed pesticides and nitrogen pellets.  In the same packet.  Imagine.

There is an old Byzantine proverb that says, “He who has bread has many problems.  He who has no bread has only one problem.”

Human ingenuity has taken the head seat at the table and presented us with a new range of tools so that we need not worry about that one problem.  We can alter the very structure of life to suit our needs.  This is opportunity, plain and simple, to save our tomorrow. We have created answers to our challenges.  We have created a global agriculture industry the world will never forget.

Thank you.

Secrets Part 1

Found among the files.  Stuffed into the corners.  Crumpled and stained with coffee.  These pages hint at when and where our secrets began.  

The year is 1962.  Our world is waiting for something new, bulging at the seams.

It is the age of superpowers, a chess match between the United States and the Soviet Union.  In May of 1960 a US spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace broiling tensions.  The pilot is still in captivity.  Last year the Bay of Pigs invasion fell flat and embarrassed the newly elected President Kennedy.  As the construction of the Berlin Wall divided Germany, the Soviet Union sent the first man into orbit and claimed technological superiority. Neither side will budge. Today, the game involves the entire world without a checkmate in sight.  What is the next move?  Is there a game changer, a single swipe that guarantees success?

It is the age of commercialization.  AT & T launched Telstar, the world’s first communication satellite, and television has become king.  In the comfort of our living rooms we see what to buy to make life better.  Everything is for sale; it just takes the right pitch.

It is the Space Age.  The Boeing 707, launched 4 years ago, shrunk the world.  Britain and France promise to develop a supersonic passenger plane to cross the Atlantic in 3 hours.  Mariner II reached Venus and sent us the first signals from another planet.  The goal is for man to set foot on the moon that luminescent ball in the night sky.

There is another age, one that most people are less aware of.  It is the age of agriculture, or as we in the industry call it, the Green Revolution.  Food problems have haunted mankind since the beginning.  The food needs of growing populations were always met by expanding cultivated land.  Not 50 years ago the intellects of the world foresaw mass starvation.  But investments in scientific research have led to dramatic breakthroughs.

The story of English wheat is typical.  This ancient crossbreed of wild wheat and goat grass became the first mass scale agricultural product.  Farmed by hand and planted once a year it yielded a meager crop.  Over 10,000 years humans developed the plow, the seed drill, and rotation crops so that yields increased 4 fold. Today, new plant breeds, inorganic fertilizers, and modern pesticides have tripled that in 20 years. Today, industrial countries have eliminated the threat of starvation.

The world is on the verge of a new age; the Age of Tomorrow.  Let us project ahead to an age of prosperity in which technology ushers in an era of leisure.  With new textiles, new building materials, new colors, new flavor enhancements, new hair products, new fuels nothing is impossible.  Never before has humanity made such progress in understanding the world.  We stand on the edge of tomorrow.

It's been a long and dreary spell without Nordo around these parts.  The months have dragged on with nothing to look forward to.  The world wobbles along on its axis without direction.  We've waited for a message, a note, a blip on the screen.  Nothing.

Then without warning he returns.  With unabashed style he flies in on a Pan Am plane direct from Honolulu with wild tales, even wilder dishes, and armed with blistering opinions on the state of the world through the eyes of a chef, or a celery stalk, his totem vegetable.

It looks as though Nordo may have gotten himself into the trouble while abroad.  A stable of international spies on his tail, he seems to have stumbled upon something no one wants the public to know.  Perhaps it is too incendiary, too incriminating.  Perhaps it would upend the dining table and flail the entire modern meal on the carpet.  What ever the secret is you can be sure it involves what is in the supermarket aisle.

Rushing down the tarmac he cradles a suitcase in his hands and constantly peers over his shoulders.  Beads of sweat drip from his brow.  He pulls up just short of running us over.

"We got them now," he pants.  "We got them.  Everyone will know what they've done."

Check out the website (Cafenordo.com) for details on the shows, buy tickets, and stay tuned for behind the scene updates on the drinks, the food, and the disastrous state of the global food industry!

Freedom from Industrialized Foods

Things have been slow in the Carnal Food Movement. Nordo has seemingly retreated into his kitchen for deep deliberations on the future. But occasionally, we do receive some bits of news from him. Apparently, the world has been weighing heavily on his shoulders. Monsanto has been buying up seed and grain companies left and right and a sugarcane company in Brazil, and the world of artificial foods continue to grow. He wrote me the entire ingredient list of a Stouffer's Salisbury Steak frozen dinner. The gravy alone had over 40 ingredients. It must have taken hours. He sent this out only a day ago in a missive titled "The Need for A Holiday Celebrating Freedom from Industrialized Food".

Mythologue #1

As the story goes there was a time that people subsisted on very unnatural things.

It was the age of petroleum when the black tar was used to fuel everything under the sun- machines, medicine, men, and women.

Trucks, who drank the stuff, rumbled over highways, poured from the stuff, and transported to every store boxed confections, extruded from the stuff, each one carefully packaged in the stuff.

Long oily worms of the stuff were pulled free and spun into new types of fabric.

Vats of the stuff were applied to the skin in order to lubricate, hide blemishes, and provide an attractive sheen.

And, as the story goes, people bored into the inner workings of Nature itself. They cracked cells open and unraveled the strands of life.

Strands were twisted and rewoven to create new lives that died in a year.

To be bought every year.

Strands with bar codes. And strands with trademarks.

Strands with ingrained poisons for pests.

Strands with new colors and new flavors contrived so that our foods became infused with preservatives and would grow around the world in great fields of regularity.

People found that they could create another world, a synthetic manufactured world entirely controlled. People would never want and never need to fear the whimsical cycles of Nature.

As the story goes people willingly turned a blind eye to the darker side of their creations, and they relinquished power over their world to anonymous companies and unscrupulous individuals. Due to the chemical tinkering strange and unsightly creatures began to appear, and the Synthetic Garden was born.

Nordo.

I'm sure something is brewing. Keep posted.

Around and Around In Glass

There are percolations heard in Nordo's kitchen. Something seems to be brewing. Perhaps another show is coming...?

But for now, a small tale from a restaurant.

A female finger rubs the rim of a glass. It tingles. She amiably smiles over the rim at her gentleman as her foot, clad in a t-strap heel, bounces in time with the piano. He utters a comment, and she laughs tilting her head back. The glass is an elegant bowl on a long thin stem and empty.

A waitress in a flouncy black dress whisks the glass away in mid stride. The woman and her gentleman barely notice. The waitress approaches the kitchen. “Corner.” A waiter jerks to a stop, and she speeds by without pause. Pans rattle, and a spoon clatters to the floor.

The glass held high in the waitress’s hand rounds the bar station, its lipstick stain evident from across the kitchen. Turned upside down, it is placed in a dish rack. “Need more white wines”, she commands.

The glass is rearranged in the rack. Another two, four, six surround it. “They happen when they happen,” is the response. The rack is pushed into the washer. The door clicks closed, and the sterilization clears away any residual memories.

The waitress gazes up at the ceiling. “You can always tell when something isn’t right at a table.”

“The looks?”

“No, the way they hold their glass. Tight.”

Steam whistles out from the dishwasher and the door pops open. The rack is pushed out. The glass is hot to the touch.

“While you’re here, take these to the bar.”

“Got it.”

The glass clinks against another repeatedly as the kitchen door swings open raising a veil on the bar sounds. As alcohol slides down the throat, laughter bubbles up to the ceiling. The waitress passes table nine.

“I know, but there can be no regrets.” The lady intones.

“No. No regrets.”

“We make choices.”

“Yes. Choices.”

“Another round?” The waitress announces herself.

The lady and the gentleman size up the evening’s progress. The lady speaks first giving the slightest lift of a question for him to respond to. “Of course, another round.”

“Let it flow,” he complies.

And the waitress moves on with a smile. “Two more Sauvignons. Table nine.”

“Got it. They’re on a tear.”

The bartender reaches for the rack and grabs the glass by the base. Spun right side up it comes to rest on the bar. Another is set beside it. The pale yellow liquid slips into the bottom of the bowl, one finger, two fingers, three fingers, and a splash for good luck. Rounded out, the glass is full.

“Good pour.”

“Someone just got lucky.”

The waitress swirls the glass and watches the wine tickle the rim. “Someone may get lucky.”

From across the room the lady waves off her man. He responds with a quick word. She locks her eyes on him. The waitress pauses, the glass hovers in the air above the table.

“Why do we always go round and round on this?”

“Why are you so damn stubborn all the time?”

“Someone has to be right.”

“Sauvignon blanc,” the waitress whispers.

Without recognition, the lady grips the glass under the bowl. She takes a long drink.

“Thirsty?” A derisive drawl elongates the question.

“In need of drowning.”

“I could help with that.” And he tilts his glass with a, “Here’s to you.”

Tables stand empty with dirty plates, rumpled napkins, and credit card receipts. The evening’s volume fades, the remaining voices easy to distinguish.

“I don’t care what you think.” The words slip around in a slur, her voice raised in pitch. The glass sloshes overhead full with the words.

“I didn’t ask if you did.”

They repose and sit behind their respective walls.

“Done for the evening?” The waitress breaks the blanket of silence. The man stares ahead as the woman looks away from the man. She rubs the rim of the glass. Three seconds pass.

“Yes. I am done for the evening. I am done with all of this.” As the lady rises, the glass tips, and slowly falls to the table. It spills a dark wet spot onto the tablecloth. She walks to the door and out into the night.

“I guess I’ll take the check.” He raises his glass and gulps down the remaining wine.

It is quiet. The waitstaff nod to one another over tasks. A long stem rose rises in the center of each table. . A spoon, knife, and two forks lay upon a napkin. The glass is placed to the right and up from the napkin. It stands empty waiting.

Dan Barber's foie gras parable | Video on TED.com

"The great blessing for chefs and for people that care about food and cooking, is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food, whether we're talking about brussel sprouts or foie gras. And it's almost always, (and I haven't found an example that proves otherwise,) the most delicious choice."

Dan Barber's foie gras parable Video on TED.com

Watch this video of the incredible Chef Barber of Blue Hill in NY, discuss the most delicious and controversial of foods after visiting a farm in Spain that makes truly humane foie gras. Fascinating!