Anything That Moves (14 page)

Wiley insisted that he wasn't trying to tell Americans what to put in their mouths. “It is not for me to tell my neighbor what he shall eat,” he said once. “Anything under heaven that I may be pleased to do I want the privilege of doing, even if it is eating limburger cheese.” But he represented an era determined to codify our way of eating. The prescriptive attitude and the drive toward conformity were general. One of Wiley's supporters in calling for a ban on chemical preservatives was a Chicago magazine with an upper-middle-class readership called
What to Eat
. In 1906, the year of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, it relaunched under the no less sweeping but more official-sounding title,
National Food.

The Bureau of Chemistry eventually split off from the USDA and became the Food and Drug Administration. It is responsible for policing the food supply, with the exception of meat and eggs, which are under USDA jurisdiction. “We do the cheese pizzas, USDA does the pepperoni,” an FDA historian told me. Wiley wanted to return food to its natural state, and the food system to its earlier intimacy. But since his time, the sophistication of food articles has accelerated in ways he could never have imagined. The aversion to the industrialized food system that coalesced with Sinclair's novel did not lead to the system's dismantling but to its fortification, and the safety net designed to guarantee food purity is now, to some, an emblem of food corruption.

The deeper into the foodie world I ate, the more aware I became of its reactionary tilt. Though the public has embraced it as a mainstream hobby, foodie-ism is a counterculture. Its shared values are a love of the special, sub rosa, small-batch, and handmade and a loathing of homogeneity, mass production, and uniformity. Among foodies, the FDA, the USDA, and the local health department are often viewed as misguided. One need look no further, foodies say, than the slop sanctioned by the government—meat treated with antimicrobials, hormones, and antibiotics; plants grown from genetically modified seeds—to see why regulations should be ignored. For instance, the USDA approved a process called “pH enhancement,” whereby beef trimmings are exposed to food-grade ammonia gas to kill pathogens (primarily
E. coli
O157:H7), resulting in a product called Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB), which gets mixed with ground beef. Not only has USDA approved the process, but it also distributes ground beef containing LFTB—which goes by the nickname “pink slime”—through the school-lunch program.

In foodies' disdain for the rules, there is a note of snobbery: What could the feds possibly tell
them
about food? “The regulations are designed for larger-scale businesses, not for small-scale producers,” Sarah Weiner, the founder of the Good Food Awards, told me. Her organization honors “tasty, authentic, responsible” traditional foods like pickles, preserves, and charcuterie. “It makes it really hard to have a food culture.”

In 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act, the most significant revision of federal pure-foods regulation in decades, was signed into law. A response to a rash of food outbreaks that killed dozens of people across the country—salmonella in peanut butter,
E. coli
in spinach, listeria in cantaloupe—it gives the government recall powers and sets standards for safe production and handling of fruits and vegetables, even for small businesses. Some worry that it will mean the end of family farms and farmers markets, or at least prove onerous to them. In an interview with
Mother Jones,
the Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy encapsulated the frustration. “The only reason that we even need to worry about food safety is because large companies and corporations have ruined our food supply,” she said.

The intellectual heirs of Wiley's pure-foodists, ironically, are the very same people trying to shield their ways of eating from the purview of regulators. “The reason there's a food-rights movement is because more and more people are afraid of the food that's available in the public system,” David Gumpert, who blogs at
The Complete Patient,
said. “They want to be able to access their food privately.” Stranger still, the movement's most prominent political supporter is the libertarian former congressman Ron Paul, whose 2011
Family Cookbook
opens with a recipe that calls for Double Stuf Oreos, Cool Whip, and instant chocolate pudding.

•   •   •

A
ppetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do. The year Sinclair wrote
The Jungle,
he got his first summer cold. It was the beginning of a series of ailments that led him to John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, which promoted vegetarianism, and to the writings of Horace Fletcher, “The Great Masticator,” who prescribed chewing your food extra thoroughly. After that, he followed Elie Metchnikoff, the Nobel Prize winner based at the Pasteur Institute. When these programs failed Sinclair, he tried fasting. After twelve days, he broke the fast with a milk diet—two gallons a day, warmed—recommended by the fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden, who had altered the spelling of his first name so that it would sound like the roar of a lion. Then Sinclair went raw, subsisting mostly on fruits and nuts. He felt amazing: he threw away his laxatives and went bareheaded in the rain. In his free time, the man whose affect friends had previously described as “spiritual” found himself doing chin-ups and standing on his head.

Fruits and nuts and milk-cleanses, though, were not food for thought. He could jump around and never got colds but found that the diets weren't conducive to what he called “brain work.” (He referred to himself as a “brain worker.”) Trying to write a novel while eating raw, he lost twelve pounds in sixteen days; after six weeks, he'd lost twenty. Eventually, he discovered the work of Dr. James Salisbury, an early advocate of low-carb eating and the inventor of the Salisbury steak. (Salisbury steak, according to the USDA, must be at least 65 percent meat—beef, pork, cow heart—and the rest can consist of varying amounts of bread crumbs, flour, fungi, vegetables, liquids, and binders.) After several years as a committed vegetarian, Sinclair heeded Salisbury's advice, and adopted a diet of broiled beef and hot water, relieved by periods of fasting. At first he was repulsed by meat; he couldn't stand the thought or smell of it. But he came around. “I am sorry to have to say that it”—the Salisbury system—“seems to be a good one,” he wrote in a book about his dietary adventures that was published in 1913. “Sorry, because the vegetarian way of life is so obviously the cleaner and more humane and more convenient. But it seems to me that I am able to do more work and harder work with my mind while eating beefsteaks than under any other
regime
; and while this continues to be the case there will be one less vegetarian in the world.”

F
or six months after our border run, Quenioux had been thinking about that pot-smoked chocolate. In his mind, he had begun to build a menu around it, with a theme, medicinal herbs, that would also reveal the yet-unknown flavors of the Chinese markets and apothecaries in the San Gabriel Valley. After a long search, he found his hostess, an elegant, dark-eyed woman with a blameless putty-colored ranch house in the hills above Encino, surrounded by overbuilt mansions on small lots and defended by a large electric gate.

On the day of the first site meeting with Quenioux and the Starry Kitchen team, she opened the door in yoga pants and a black Izod sweater, dark hair pulled back in a black headband. She had designed the kitchen at her house herself, with two ovens and a long dining table extending from a center island, and a picture window framing a stand of birds-of-paradise and a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Now her sixteen-year-old son had taken over and was using it to make pickles and ice cream and his current fixation, coffee. He prepared himself a cup in a vacuum siphon while drip brewed for her guests.

Sitting down at the kitchen table, she put on her glasses and opened a laptop. It was time to plan the party. How many people should come? Would it be too cold, in early April, to grill outside? Her husband appeared at the door that led to the patio and pool. His shirt was untucked; he was coming from the gym in the pool house, where there was a sauna and a Viagra clock. “You guys take your meeting and have fun!” he said, rushing past us into the house.

They talked about timing and dress code. The hostess mentioned that she didn't want her name disclosed and that the faces in the photographs should be blurred. “No social media,” Nguyen said, a violation of his business strategy and personal philosophy, but sensible under the circumstances. “Are the kids going to come?” Quenioux asked the hostess. She and her son looked at each other. “He wants to, but . . .” she said. “They'll stay in the kitchen with us,” Quenioux said reassuringly. They agreed: no smoking. “Smoking is so cliché and gross,” Quenioux said. “Let's keep it about the food,” she said.

“I'm a foodie girl,” she said. “It's the circles I run in. For me, that's the whole thing.” She just hadn't yet figured out how to tell her husband, a straight arrow, that the culinary event they were hosting, with food by one of their favorite chefs, was already being widely discussed as the Weed Dinner.

•   •   •

O
ne afternoon, I met Quenioux at a neat white clapboard house, where he lives among collections of china bric-a-brac and intoxicating European perfumes. He wore a yellow-brown-and-green-striped ski cap and a pair of red Converse. We took my car, a station wagon—his is a silver convertible, and too small—picked up Daniel, and headed east. Quenioux had been researching Chinese medicinal herbs and was getting excited. “Some are dangerous—fatal, actually—and some have a very distinct taste,” he said. “We need to gather the actual product.”

Quenioux has been shopping in the SGV for years. “There I find
everything
we need for the cooking we do—sea urchin, yuzu, green tea powder,” he told me once. “I can get two pounds of duck legs, no problem. I defy you to find me that on the Westside. Or some fresh blood, or a live squab—even live frogs.” He gets alligator at the Hong Kong Supermarket and swears by the chicken testicles from a Taiwanese-American chain called 99 Ranch, which he refers to as “white kidneys” on his menus. “If you want to buy a pound of top round at six p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, you can go to the Chinese,” he says. When he needs black-fleshed Silkie Bantam chickens, he pops out to the Chinese-Vietnamese grocery store Shun Fat, branches of which have replaced Targets and Vons and Ralphs, and which, because of the meat selection—far more inclusive than Wiley's “civilized” array—is known to some as the Dead Pet Store.

“God created a huge palate, and it's there to be picked up,” he said in the car. “There is a flavor I love, that so few people do: bitterness!” He described a dessert composed of a beer fruit roll-up, beer taffy, and hops crème caramel, finished with Italian white truffles and served with truffle-barley ice cream and beer nuts. Tasting individual components, the kitchen staff puckered their lips and complained; the diners, eating the whole, loved it.

“My thing is opening up new tastes,” Quenioux said. Sweet coxcombs—poached in simple syrup and grenadine to give them the bounce and flavor of a red gummy bear, and served on top of vol-au-vent
filled with orange
crème pâtissière
—he counts among his great discoveries. Then there was rabbit tartare. “Nobody's ever done something like that,” he told me. “To the foodie person, to eat raw rabbit is new. You develop a new taste in your palate, so it's exciting for people. Rabbit is very lean but it's full of gelatin. When it's raw it smacks.” He mixed it with yuzu, chilies, and olive oil, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it in white truffle powder. “It was really so fricking good.” Lately, Quenioux has been focused on ingredients like okra, sea cucumbers, cactus, and raw egg white, whose slippery textures are difficult for Americans. “I want to teach people to appreciate it,” he said. “There's so much about slimy that is good.”

When we arrived at Wing Hop Fung, a huge Chinese apothecary in a Monterey Park shopping mall, the Trans were waiting, Thi in gray surgical scrubs, Nguyen eating some kind of doughnut from a restaurant in the mall. She knew Wing Hop Fung's selection well: she brings her parents there to shop whenever they are visiting from Texas. She handed out a list of ingredients, including aphrodisiacs, longevity tonics, diuretics, sedatives, red bird's nest, and something called dodder, to remedy male impotence.

“The smell!” Quenioux exclaimed as we walked in, passing an impressive wine and spirits department—$2,000 bottles of Latour and Château Lafite; 1953 Macallan—on the way to a wall of bins filled with astragalus, peony root, and cordyceps, a mushroom whose common name is caterpillar fungus, due to its way of invading larvae and replacing the animal tissue with its own. (In Hong Kong, Thi said, it is steamed and served with meat.) The range of items was astonishing. Most of them did not register to me as food. There were dried fish maws, yellow as dead toenails, and deer tendons, hoof on: seasoning for congee. Quenioux held up a package of Hangzhou chrysanthemum that looked like a brick of hash. “Oooh that smells good,” he said. Thi pointed them to the wolfberries, shrunken red sacs. “Twenty splashes of that for sexual vitality,” Thi said. “It's good with wood pigeon.” Quenioux swooned over the dung-like Chinese truffles—“A hint of chicory,” he said, huffing—before stopping at a bin filled with dried apricot kernels. He scooped up a handful and let them slip through his fingers. “There's a north one and a south one,” Thi said. “You can't use that much of the north one because it becomes poisonous.” The menu, they decided, would have to come with a disclaimer. No pregnant women, Thi said. I looked away.

The back wall of the store was devoted to dried seahorses. Sold in $500 kits for making soup, they looked like they belonged at a crafting fair. Behind a counter, framed, was an $8,000 piece of ginseng from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Under the counter were trays of Catskills ginseng, for $1,899 an ounce. Appalachian ginseng-hunters? The mind reeled. “The older it gets the more expensive it is,” Thi said. Barrels of cheap, young stuff ($280 a pound, from Wisconsin) were scattered about the floor.

“Can we do, like, ginseng gelée with an aspic, in a consommé? Or start a soup with it?” Quenioux said.

On the way home, Quenioux continued to imagine the dishes he might make. “We have to think about ginseng, longan berries, the celery-scented thing, that risotto-like grain, the bird's nest,” he said. “If I smell something, I can mix the flavors in my head.”

•   •   •

T
he culinary avant-garde and the marijuana underworld have lately become intimates. Increasingly, their equipment is interchangeable. Over the years, the Chicago chef Grant Achatz has experimented extensively with scent. Achatz, whose restaurant Alinea has three Michelin stars, is trained in molecular gastronomy, the steaming-beaker approach to cooking used by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Catalonia, where Achatz worked briefly. Borrowing chemical stabilizers, thickeners, and gels from industrial food manufacturing, molecular gastronomy—also known as Modernist cooking—seeks to subvert the diner's expectations delightfully, using all five senses. Achatz is the most romantic of the molecular gastronomists. A Pre-Raphaelite among Dadaists, he once put dry ice in a vase with charred garlic, rosemary, thyme, and black pepper: cookout fog. Another time, he leaned hot stones against a live tomato stalk, to conjure the quintessential summer smell of walking in the garden in the morning and brushing up against tomato leaves. In 2005, right before he opened Alinea, one of his investors suggested he check out the Volcano, which he had seen while traveling in Amsterdam.

The Volcano is a squat metal cone-shaped heater with a filling chamber for “plant material,” a digital panel displaying the precise temperature, and a large plastic balloon to capture the plant's vapor. Its traditional use involves fitting a mouthpiece to the air balloon and inhaling. The Volcano's manual recommends using it with chamomile and lemon balm. “We could see it would have the ability to pump out a lot of scent and vapor and capture it,” Nick Kokonas, Achatz's business partner, told me. “It worked perfectly, from a culinary—and from a theatrical and emotional—perspective.”

In the years since, Achatz has vaporized grass, oak leaves, and hay. “My favorite is to trick people into thinking they're eating something that's not edible,” he says, such as, for instance, venison with leather aroma. His signature vapor is lavender, which he serves in a plastic balloon covered in Irish linen, under a bowl of yuzu pudding, ham
nage,
and gooseberry coulis. Before presenting the dish, the waiter punctures the bag of lavender air with a syringe in a four-by-four grid, so that the weight of the bowl releases the scent. At Alinea, Achatz's molecular cocktail lounge, the bartenders use it for the Rob Roy, which comes to the table in a plastic bag filled with lavender air. As the waiter cuts it open with scissors, it looks and smells like a new-age spa treatment. (I had a virgin one; the toasted-lavender smoke formed a film over the flavor of the deep red juice—the smell of a glamorous grandmother, covering up her snuck cigarette with eau de toilette.) When the Alinea cookbook came out, the Volcano was listed on the equipment page, along with agricultural syringes, a paint-stripping heat gun, and a refractometer for measuring sugar content in Brix. The four Volcanos in the Alinea kitchen are named John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

U.S. Customs prohibits the importation of anything used primarily as drug paraphernalia. A few years after Achatz's discovery, Customs launched an inquiry into the Volcano, which is made by Storz & Bickel, a German company. Adam Schoenfeld, who imported and marketed it, was at the time in his twenties and had recently graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. “I flew around the world, I did this, I did that, I went to Thailand, I discovered the Volcano, I ate lots of cool food, I designed my own curriculum around travel and business,” he told me. When Adam, whose father is the New York restaurateur and dumpling impresario Ed Schoenfeld (Chinatown Brasserie, Shun Lee, RedFarm), found out that Achatz had a Volcano in his kitchen, he sensed an opportunity. He sent vaporizers to technically experimental chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Dave Arnold, and the pastry-maker Johnny Iuzzini. “It was about expanding the usage,” Schoenfeld said. Customs eventually relented, determining that the Volcano could be used as “a device to aid in a method used in modern cooking called ‘molecular gastronomy.'”

“The Volcano is a multipurpose vaporization device,” Schoenfeld told me one day. We were in his apartment, a walk-up in the flower district in Manhattan. He was pale and damp-palmed, with tortoise-shell glasses and purple-and-black Adidas sneakers. I sat by the window so that I could breathe. “The premise is that you use heat to gently extract the flavors, essential oils, and aromatic compounds,” he said. “You can vaporize oils, plant materials. It is not sold for marijuana.” Nevertheless, he has learned that when sending to restaurants he ought to send two if he hopes the Volcano to be used in the kitchen. “Almost inevitably, one makes it back to someone's living room,” he said. Kokonas said there had never been an issue of theft at Alinea. “Using the Volcano is not a rock-and-roll-TV-chef thing,” he said. “It's a Michelin-three-star-chef thing.”

Representatives from Storz & Bickel have done demonstrations at the National Restaurant Association Show, in Chicago, and at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, where they trapped cinnamon-and-clove-scented vapor under a glass cloche and served it with tangerine slices. “It was a holiday scent,” the representative told me. “Like spicy cookies.” He was just getting used to the expectations of his new milieu; someone let him know he needed to wear a white coat and maybe a hat. Last year, Storz & Bickel made a presentation at Mandy Aftel's house in Berkeley. Aftel, a Berkeley perfume-maker who lives behind Chez Panisse in a bungalow permeated with the restaurant's kitchen smells, recently released a line of essential oils for chefs. To the presentation, she invited the chef Daniel Patterson and the food writer Harold McGee, and they vaporized marjoram—which had unexpected bubblegum notes—and bacon.

The laboratory equipment firm PolyScience started making culinary equipment a decade ago because Philip Preston, the company's president, is a foodie. Working with the chef de cuisine at Charlie Trotter's, a pioneering Chicago restaurant that recently closed after twenty-five years, he developed an immersion circulator that became the industry standard for
sous-vide,
a way of cooking meat slowly at a low temperature in a water bath. Then he made the Anti-Griddle freezing plate for Achatz. PolyScience also makes the Smoking Gun, a handheld tool with a chamber for burning aromatic woodchips and a tube with a nozzle attachment. Preston, who invented it, says that, in spite of appearances, the idea came not from a misspent youth but from seeing a keyboard cleaner at a computer store. “I'd been keen on adding cold smoke flavor,” he said. “I thought, if I unscrewed this bit and screwed this bit, I could turn it into a smoker.” When he got home, he pulled the screen out of a faucet and made a bowl out of a plumbing fixture, and sent the prototype to Dufresne, who cold-smoked lettuce with it. “Then everyone wanted one,” Preston said. “Grant, Wylie, Jean-Georges, the Voltaggio brothers, Thomas Keller—you'd be hard-pressed to find a really high-end chef not using it.” He went on, “It's one of those things that people look at and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what else you could do with that.'”