Said Keller: “With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?”

Keller goes on to say it is the responsibility of government to develop policies that promote environmental values.

And Aduriz: “to align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.”

What we have here is an instance of a classical debate that goes back to Plato’s argument for tossing the poets out of his ideal polis. Should art be judged solely on its aesthetic value or should moral considerations influence our judgment.

Paula Crossfield at Civil Eats called the two chefs “dinosaurs” with attitudes “staler than day old bread.” And Nick Wiseman, writing for the Huffington Post, called their attitudes “disappointing”:

But focusing solely on the aesthetics and disclaiming any other responsibility altogether is a cop-out. He can’t singlehandedly change food policy but a philosophy of abdication (deferring instead to the “world’s governments”) fails to acknowledge that change needs leaders.

Crossfield and Wiseman are right that the influence of chefs of this stature goes well beyond the service they provide to their patrons, and they are thus responsible for spreading a message that devalues sustainability.

But there is a genuine conflict between their obligation to uphold the standards of their art vs. their obligation to meet standards of social ethics. For artists, the former is a serious concern, one that most of us don’t face. To claim that the attitudes of these chefs is a “cop-out” is to discount the idea that artists have obligations to their artistic practice—which I would imagine forms the very substance of their lives.

It is not at all obvious that their obligation to rigorously adhere to standards of social ethics should be a weightier consideration.

We have a long tradition of letting artists off the hook for their moral transgressions. Paul Gauguin abandoned his wife and child to pursue his art, and the great poet Ezra Pound was an avowed Nazi. The world would be a poorer place without their works, despite their despicable behavior.

But we surely cannot compare Keller and Aduriz to Gauguin and Pound. Neither Keller nor Aduriz are indifferent to sustainability issues. They both assert that they use local, sustainably-produced ingredients when they can. We aren’t talking about moral monsters here. The fact is most of us are less than maximally virtuous when it comes sustainable practices, and most of us are willing to cut ethical corners when it comes to satisfying desires.

There is a good deal of the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black in this debate.

If we want great art, we have to let artists be artists. And that means putting up with their obsessions, especially when transgressions are minor.

Keller and Aduriz can continue to advocate for sustainable practices while at the same time maximizing the aesthetic appeal of their food. To do so is not hypocrisy. It is a recognition that there really are moral conflicts that have no easy resolution.

Photo from New York Times

The “Food is the New Rock” meme has received a lot of discussion (here and here), I guess because of this NY Times report on the Great Googamooga festival:

For decades, food was an afterthought at rock concerts and festivals, where experiencing the rush of live music meant enduring an icky wasteland of cold pizza, warm beer and stale pretzels. But over the last five years or so, gatherings like Outside Lands and Lollapalooza have responded to a national surge in culinary consciousness by upgrading the grub to epicurean levels and welcoming top chefs into the tent.

Now the viands are about to upstage the bands. The headliners at the Great GoogaMooga, a convergence of food and music that will devour part of Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Saturday and Sunday, are star chefs like April Bloomfield, Tom Colicchio and Marcus Samuelsson, serving a feast of elevated street food.

This sudden interest in food at rock concerts is continuous with the extraordinary growth in the public’s interest in food-related entertainment like the Food Network and food-related activism such as the slow-food movement, locavorism, etc.

So is food to the early 2000’s as rock was to the 60’s? There are some striking parallels.

The cultural protests of the 1960’s were, in part, a response to the perception that American society had become excessively conformist and repressed; the authentic individual was in danger of being swallowed up by the emerging corporate culture described in William White’s The Organization Man. Rock music with its loud, in-your-face expressiveness, throbbing, incessant rhythm, sexually liberating messages, and romantic veneration of guitar players as heroes was the embodiment of that search for authentic individualism well before the Vietnam War became a galvanizing issue.

A search for authenticity and an anti-corporate mentality also drives some of the current interest in food. The focus on fresh, local ingredients, the interest in how ingredients are influenced by where they are grown, the search for authentic ethnic cuisine, artisanal cheese, etc. suggest a longing for authenticity. Those factors as well as a concern for animal welfare and sustainability are part of a protest against the depredations of industrial agriculture.

The romantic individualism nonsense is in part replicated by chefs as “rock stars” –rock star chefs are just as dependent on an army of workers slaving away in the galley as the “guitar gods” were dependent on band mates to hold the rhythm together. In fact, chefs  may have a greater claim to genuine expertise. Chefs need considerable organizational skills, business acumen, and a knowledge of ingredients. “Guitar gods” just had to play fast and look pretty. (Yes. I know there were exceptions)

Of course the 60’s and the present are alike in that both anti-corporate protest movements were dependent on corporations for their existence. The more things change…..

But this explanation of the parallels between rock and food only goes so far. The vast majority of rock fans in the 60’s and “foodies” today are not much involved in a protest movement. We can’t ignore aesthetics in explaining cultural trends.

Part of the attraction of rock music was that it exposed a new way of listening to music. The introduction of electronic instruments and electronic processing meant that rock was defined by the production of new soundscapes. Rock music had textural layers and a focus on timbre every bit as complex and intriguing as classical music. This focus on texture and timbre was enhanced by the use of the human voice to express individual personality rather than a “pure” operatic tone. The difference between the Stones and the Beatles had little to do with song structure, melody, or harmonic structure—all of which could be analyzed in 2 minutes by any first semester music theory student. The difference was their sound, and every rock band, to the extent they were concerned with originality, was striving for a new way to sound.

I suspect the recent interest in food is in part driven by new ways of tasting. The increasingly globalized food trade and the movement of populations via immigration has made new flavors available to anyone who lives near an urban area. And food science and molecular gastronomy have made kitchen experimentation an exciting field driven by constant innovation.

Thus, our age is unique in the possibilities presented for expanding the pleasures of the palate—and human beings, when left to their own devices, seldom miss an opportunity to enhance their pleasure.

At bottom it is aesthetics driven by technology that explains both rock stars and chefs as rock stars.

My favorite?

I’m a sucker for Mourvedre. The meaty, spicy 2007 Domaine Tempier La Migoua, Bandol was a standout, although its hard to kick a Burgundian Premier Crus to the curb. The 2009 Vigne de L’enfant Jesus, Beaune, Burgundy, produced no revelations and fell short of offering salvation, but it was the most elegant pour of the evening.

The most interesting wine was the 2008 Domaine de Labarthe, Gaillac. Bright red fruit, baking spices, and herbs vaulted from the glass of this little known wine made from the Duras grape. A nice cassoulet would show off the virtues of this soft, fruity, rustic yet complex wine.

But the real stars of the evening were the guests whose insightful comments about the wines kept the conversation flowing.

The Hyatt’s Red Marlin Restaurant hosted the evening.

Here is the list of wines poured:

NV Domaine Laurent, Cremant Brut, Limoux, CHARDONNAY
2010 Dupeuble Pere et Fils, Beaujolais, GAMAY
2009 Vigne de L’enfant Jesus, Beaune, Burgundy, PINOT NOIR
2009 Domaine La Garrigue, Vacqueyras, GRENACHE
2007 Domaine Tempier La Migoua, Bandol, MOURVEDRE
1995 Chapoutier, Hermitage, Rhone, SYRAH
2009 Chateau Palmer, Alter Ego, Margaux, CABERNET SAUVIGNON
2010 Trinch, Bougueil, Lire, CABERNET FRANC
2008 Domaine de Labarthe, Gaillac, DURAS

The San Diego Wine Society meets about once every six weeks over dinner at a local restaurant to taste high-end, international wines. By meeting as a group, everyone gets a generous taste of these very special wines while spreading the cost among all the participants.

If you have a serious interest in wine, I urge you to sign up for this group and attend our dinners—their Meet-up page is here. There is no membership fee.

I hope to see you at a tasting in the future

Ripe Syrah in high-toast oak blended with just enough Viognier to remind you of a garden party Bar-B-Q, Côte Rôtie’s amalgam of smoked meat and floral aromas is one of the peak experiences wine has to offer; and Cayuse captures its essence.

A layered, complex nose of bacon, dill, and violets envelope ripe berry with hints of vanilla. On the palate, the purest expression of succulent blackberries give this wine weight and substance, while vibrant acidity and some alcohol burn on the peppery, medium-length finish enliven rather than distract.

This is a serious wine, sturdy yet elegant.

Good: Flowers and meat

Bad: Delicate palates may find it a bit hot

Distinctive: Côte Rôtie meets Washington State

• Here is a slide show of some of the weirdest food consumed by humans
• For some reason, this week on the Internets people are wondering “is food the new rock and roll”. Sammy Hagar has a take on it.
• Italian wine has a long history in the U.S. Check out the story.
• Here is news you can use—research on how to carry coffee without spilling it.
• Chefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Aduriz created a food fight this week with their claims that chefs have no obligation to promote sustainability.

But it’s the subjective stuff that really throws the money wrench into the works here. How we perceive those – and measure our enjoyment of them – will likely not be fully explainable in our lifetimes by science. That is because they are what is known as qualia: like happiness, depression, pain, and pleasure, those sensations can be described but cannot effectively be measured across individuals in any meaningful way scientifically.

He goes on to argue that there is no way to compare my qualia with yours, since these are thoroughly private, subjective states with no precise scale to measure them. Thus, there is no way to be sure that when a wine critic claims a wine is jammy or lacks acidity, her experience is similar to what another critic means by those terms, and assigning numerical value to such experiences is of limited value.

As far as I know, this is the first time the word “qualia” (a technical term used by philosophers and cognitive scientists to refer to subjective states) has been mentioned on a popular wine blog.

Perhaps that is a sign of progress (if in fact the use of philosophical terminology counts as progress, a debatable proposition).

At any rate, I commented on the post pointing out that most people who work in the field of cognitive science think qualia are reducible to brain states which can be measured.

I imagine wine tastings of the future in which critics are perched on the dais helmeted by portable fMRI machines to make sure their qualia match.

If fine food is about anything it is about food traditions, and dishes and menus have meaning to they extent they are expressions of a tradition. Chefs and their critics provide “readings” of a dish in light of past renderings of that dish and the sensibility that lies behind it.

So I read with great interest, New York Chef Sara Jenkins’ plea to American chefs to pay more attention to their own traditions instead of echoing the accomplishments of Europe.

American chefs, it seems, too often become enamored with the technique and forget the foundations of tradition, flavor, and sourcing that hold the best recipes together. As a result, we end up mixing together eight or nine different ingredients whose only commonality is the their trendiness. I do love the freedom that comes with America’s lack of cultural definition. In this country, chefs are not chained to making a regional food simply because that’s what their patrons grew up eating. But with freedom comes choices, and sometimes there can be too many choices to navigate. When chefs abandon all tradition, they often lose the integrity that makes the ingredients come together into something profoundly satisfying and alive.

Even the molecular concoctions of el Bulli (Spanish chef Ferran Aria’s home before it closed) were based on tradition. During her visit to el Bulli, Jenkins writes:

That night, the most memorable dish was a salty tomato sorbet with a crisp crouton on top filled with olive oil. Again, I admired the apparent simplicity of the dish, three ingredients paired perfectly together in an unexpected format. It wasn’t until the next morning, eating my standard Catalan breakfast of toasted baguette rubbed with a ripe tomato half and drenched in olive oil, that I realized what I’d eaten the night before had been a highly innovative reworking of something that the chef, Ferran Adrià, probably eats every morning for breakfast.

Genuine art is not merely an interesting collection of colors or shapes and edible arts are not just a collection of pleasant flavors. Aesthetic properties must connect to and resonate with something already present but latent in consciousness, tapping into a reservoir of meaning that makes them available to the emotions, the intellect, or sensibility. In the Edible arts, perhaps more than in other media, that reservoir is a food tradition.

Diners come to the table with a history of experiences that will shape what they taste. When chefs do not pay homage to that history, food lacks meaning. Flavors without context are like a pretty, yet pedestrian landscape painting. Pleasant enough to experience but without the deeper meanings that we expect from works of art.

So when I saw L.A. Cetto’s version for $20 I jumped at it. L.A. Cetto is one of the premier wineries in Baja’s Guadalupe Valley, and some previous vintages of their Nebbiolo were quite good. But this is a disappointment.

The cherry aromas are impressive at first but they quickly subside to be replaced by vegetal notes, mostly stewed tomatoes. The palate’s fruit is short-lived as well, giving way to stiff woody flavors that carry through a medium length finish of fine-grained tannins.

Firm and round, but dull from a lack of acidity, sums up my impression of the mouthfeel. This might please fans of funky wines who chase after odd expressions of a varietal. It is drinkable but doesn’t give much pleasure.

Good: The price and the varietal

Bad: Coarse, vegetal nose

Distinctive: From an up-and-coming region

Price: $20

• For wine lovers, an inspirational article about the wonder of wine.
• Here is a clever take on food trends from a skeptic
• Will the U.S. ever have a genuine wine culture? Probably not.
• If you are into supermarket spicy tuna rolls you might want to read this—but you may not eat them again.
• Everything you need to know about the versatility of pesto—lots of green things make a good one.