Can recipes save the world?
The longer I live, breathe, and cook, the more aware I become of the cracks in the world we’ve built for ourselves. I say we, but no one’s really building the world. Not to say that all of this isn’t intentionally constructed, but no one person is responsible for it, are they? Nor for climate change, or mass extinction, or soil erosion, or eutrophication. Don’t get me wrong, some might me be more at fault than others, so understand, I’m not up here on this stage demanding us all to be absolved of the collective responsibility and guilt we collectively carry for our collective failing of the planet’s biosphere; that which has supported us through history and got us here at all. No, we deserve to feel that. But I’m not gonna lie, harboring anxiety for things no one person can take sole credit for is a difficult feeling to negotiate.
The exact opposite emotion is for me, best illustrated through food. To flip it on its head, just think about the pleasant stir of familiarity we feel when we cook or eat or recipes that have been prepared literally billions of times before by people all over the world. Food’s feelings are easy to harbor. They amount to a collective sense memory shared by hundreds of millions who’ve all lived through their own subjective experiences of some of the most popular flavor chords in the history of mankind. It is a cliché to the point of abuse, but it’s still true; food brings us together. Benedicts, Caesars, Nachos, Stroganoffs, Cobbs, Beyti, Reubens… We know their flavors inside and out. But hold up. … Just what exactly do I mean by “their”? It’s actually a bit of a double entendre. Sure, we could speak of the flavors that characterize each of those plates of food. But to me it’s more interesting to get inside the minds of the people who conjured up those recipes. Lemuel Benedict, Caesar Cardini, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, Alexandrovich Stroganov, Robert Cobb, Beyti Güler, Reuben Kolakofsky… to name but a few. These were ordinary individuals, who had a knack for understanding how a few choice ingredients could come together to amount to a recipe larger than the sum of their parts. Luck surely played some part, but either way, their recipes somehow managed to escape the gravity of obscurity to become worldwide phenomena. There are plenty more recipes that never received an eponymous moniker, but nonetheless followed the same trajectory. And they all started as a “what if?” in the mind of a single human. This is the point I’d like to make. While it often feels like the weight of the human predicament belongs to no one of us, and all of us all at once, recipes have the capacity to illicit powerful asymmetric effects on the world. A single person can in this way, feed millions.
Let’s examine another eponymous recipe. An algorithm. Named after the most widely read mathematician of the late Middle Ages, the Persian Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Muhammad’s work on algebra put forth the first systematic solutions of linear and quadratic equations by completing the square. He was also famed for his work on geography, mapping the old world using “weather zones” that would have been widely useful in early agriculture for crops and grains round the fertile crescent like emmer and wheat. In mathematics, an algorithm is simply a systemic decision tree. Sound familiar? How many times have you heard a chef exclaim that recipes in kitchens aren’t inscriptions to be blindly followed, but guides to adapt to based off the circumstance and the quality of the ingredients at hand?
Digital algorithms today function under the same principles. If, And, Or, Not… the Boolean logic that runs all modern devices runs off algorithms. They may be more complex, but they operate on the same basic principle of differential inputs yielding differential outputs just as al-Khwārizmī’s did hundreds of years ago. Today, we’ve managed to personify a rather innocuous mathematical process into a boogeyman. Popular media has us believe we’re slaves to it, controlled by it, deceived by it… it seems to have utter control over our lives. But “the algorithm” (as if there was but one, which there isn’t) isn’t even a thing. Algorithms are informational. They are how to guides, employed for all the data we’re ceaselessly producing and consuming every minute of every day of our forever connected lives. I’m by no means a fan of hypervigilant surveillance capitalism, I’m only employing this example in the negative — because insofar as recipes go, (which are algorithms in themselves), algorithms (which are recipes in themselves) can surely be said to have changed the world more profoundly than Caesar Cardini’s salad.
I have another illustrative recipe concerning wheat fields, but not one to yield you 4 x 500 g boules of sourdough bread. Well, not directly anyhow. Just as cooking is chemistry, so is the agriculture that precedes it. This is a recipe for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into the soil below. Biology’s problem with nitrogen is a bit like being stranded at sea while dying of thirst. It’s the most abundant gas in our atmosphere, but so utterly inert that it is useless to life without first treating it. Bacteria figured that game out ages ago, having developed the enzymes to fix it into organic molecules, thereby making it bioavailable. And for 99% of the history of agriculture, we have been dependant on, and limited by, the recycling of those bacterial sources (always through defecation and microbial metabolisms). In the late 19th century, it was thought that mineable sources of fertilizer would be exhausted in just a few decades, leading to worldwide famine. Enter the Haber-Bosch process. It was the first high pressure catalytic process that fired fossils fuels to extremely high temperatures in reaction chambers to elicit a desired non-spontaneous chemical reaction, binding nitrogen from the air to hydrogen to produce ammonia, that could be strewn onto the ground. No longer would crops be stunted in times of need, no longer would famers face insecurity.
From our vantage point in the future, we can criticize (as many who work in the world of food often do) the invention of the Haber-Bosch process and chemical fertilizers. But it was invented for a reason. The advent of chemical nitrogen sequestration launched the green revolution. It was, in its day, considered an unequivocal good. It spared millions more from famine, and lifted hundreds of millions more out of food insecurity. We know now, with the luxury of hindsight, the toll this recipe extolls upon the earth. But how much of what is well intentioned today might become disastrous tomorrow? To quote the author and educator John Greene: “We are at once far too powerful, and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape the planet’s biospheres, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.”
With that in mind, we should now ponder an actual recipe for wheat. A loaf of bread. What might a recipe implemented by Mondelez International (the world’s largest baker) that calls strictly for the perennial wheat Kernza, developed by the Land Institute do for global carbon soil levels over the course of ten years? Instead of just abiding by the status quo, what world is produced by the world’s largest producers of ready to eat beef, hybridising their burgers with long fermented legumes, chock full of umami? Instead of walking into a fish and chips shop, and only seeing as far as the letterboard menu in front of you, what world is produced when people actively choose to adapt what they serve to not just support fish stocks, but remediate them? This is the world I’m currently working towards in my job. Starting from whole ingredients while always keeping their externalities in mind, as much as the externalities of their alternatives. When you make the effort to account for everything in an ingredient label, the challenge then becomes how to thread a needle that leaves this world a better place than we found it.
I recently judged a cooking competition. I was served a plate of duck breast, grilled bitter greens, plums, and morels. All ingredients that should have worked together on a plate. But that day, for that chef, they didn’t. The dish felt clunky. Flavors sat out of whack, out of proportion if anything. Nature knows this lesson well. In the same way that chucking 65 KG worth of elemental Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Phosphorus into a bucket, in no way to amounts to a living, breathing human, pine tree, or dolphin, the human predicament can feel just as haphazardly constructed. What we’re given to work with isn’t nearly as important as how it’s put together. Any chef worth their salt will know the feeling of having eaten a dish just a wee bit off, and thinking to themselves, “Argggh, if they’d only just…” That frustration is powerful. For anyone in this room who knows it, that frustration speaks to the embodied experience of years upon year of navigating flavors and scents and textures and technique, to arrive with the foreknowledge of how something ought to be prepared to be the most impactful version of itself that it can be. Though this may be a question better suited for Voltaire, is the recipe for Cobb salad the best possible combination of Lettuce, tomato, bacon, eggs, avocado, and blue cheese, of all their possible combinations? Does Cobb salad’s existence make this the best possible world?
Margaret Atwood once wrote, that “There is little in history that is inevitable.” Human history is written in blood, sweat and tears, it’s true, but all those are shed, for better or worse, by choice. Unfortunately, it is rarely a choice for those doing the bleeding, sweating, or crying, but that’s kind of the point. We have always had the power to choose how we plan our prep day. What ingredients to order from the supplier. Or even, if you consider the restaurant itself as a meta-recipe, what to serve on our menus. By being informed, and considerate, we can choose to end the unnecessary shedding of blood, sweat, or tears. Now, and especially in the future, by way of the legacies we choose to leave behind. Choice ingredients indeed…
The etymology of the word recipe lies in Latin: “to receive” harking back to a time when medicine and nourishment were both far less industrialised practices, and both far more each of the other. Recipes were literal prescriptions, intended to heal, made of ingredients we find and cherish in kitchens to this day. Recipes were instructions on how to make things better. Today more than ever, our world needs the brightest among us, working in food or elsewhere, to do what we do best, using our collective expertise to scribble a change for the world on the back of a napkin.
Thank you, and stay curious.
