Best Food Writing 2014 (52 page)

Someone offers me coffee. I'd already decided to say yes to anything I'm offered here, and coffee's obviously a no-brainer. I am handed it black, in a lovely little handmade cup. No mention of cream or sugar is made—everyone's drinking theirs straight. I take a sip. It's fantastic. Later, I'll be very glad I had it—it revved my brain for the daylong conversation about food I was about to have with some of the world's foremost thinkers on the subject. NFL is a team of people passionate about exploring and expressing ideas, be it through food or words.

I ask them what they think of the idea that insects are the food of the future.

“Well, if any one thing becomes the food of the future, that's a very depressing future,” says Ben Reade in his charming brogue. “We need diversity, and that's why we're interested in looking at insects—it's another walk of life that we can investigate. We have the whole phylogenetic tree that we can eat, so we have to look at all the different branches. I think it's really important to make sure people realize that insects are another ingredient that can be added to a repertoire, and not suddenly become
the
ingredient, when there is no
the
ingredient, is there? That's only an economist's way of looking at things. And if economists look at food too much, then things get dangerous.”

“The same thing happened with soybeans, right?” adds researcher Josh Evans. “Soybeans have been used for hundreds of thousands of
years in many cultures, and they're perfectly healthy if they're prepared the right way. But once they were touted as
the
ingredient that everyone will consume, that will save the world, that's when vast swathes of the Amazon were cut down.”

“We see insects not as
the
food of the future but as an interesting addition to the foods we already have,” says Michael Bom Frost, whose background is in sensory science (whatever
that
means). “To convince Europe to eat insects, it's not enough to fry them up or to extract the protein. I think we have to lower the barriers for first-time entomophagists. If you just hand someone a cricket, and say, ‘Eat it!' I think there's a ninety-nine percent chance of rejection. But if you give them something that's really delicious, that's in a familiar setting, I think we can lower the outright rejection rate a lot. And I think that's really important because then we can start building on it.”

Michael offers Singapore as an example, where they are using a water filtration system to treat and reuse the water from the sewers. If you think about it, they're drinking shit water, but the truth is it's perfectly safe to drink. On the one hand, there is disgust, but on the other, there is a societal need that must be addressed.

“We want to address this need with deliciousness as the vehicle for promoting insects, and not saying, ‘Eat this because it's good for the environment,' or ‘because it's healthy protein,' but ‘because it tastes good,'” says Michael.

The term “deliciousness” is bandied about with great seriousness here at NFL, and we discuss how this mouth-first approach applies to eating insects—asking first, “How does it taste?” instead of “What is it?” Nothing edible should be considered off-limits just because of our prejudices about it.

“No
ideas
are inherently disgusting. That's food fascism,” says Ben.

Michael, Josh, and I head out to the seashore to forage for periwinkle sea snails, shrimp, and “strand hoppers,” which are essentially sand fleas.
Strand
is Danish for beach. We'll be fishing for aquatic invertebrates.

On the way over, I learn what it means to be a food sensory scientist. What Michael does is scientifically interpret taste tests, usually to help develop healthier products that still taste good. One of his most notable accomplishments was coming up with data suggesting that 0.5 percent fat in milk was the lowest amount necessary for consumers
to feel satisfaction. Today, that category makes up 40 percent of milk sales in Denmark.

“It's about finding a sweet spot between health and good taste in a common food,” says Michael with a twinkle in his eye. It's clear he is passionate about what he does.

The sparse, beautiful beach scene blows me away. The glassy waves of the Øresund Strait lap gently on the shore of the Amager Strand, an artificial island added by the city in 2005, which can be reached by metro. Wave-tangled, multicolored ribbons of seaweed line the sand, like the streamers of a wild, forgotten birthday party. It's almost winter, so there won't be any parties here today; it's about 40 degrees even in the intermittent sun. The only other people out here are a few locals walking their dogs.

Michael and Josh laughingly pull on their giant army-green waders, bought especially for the occasion. I ask how cold the water is, if people go swimming here in the summertime. I try to picture the empty beach full of people and noise, where now there's just wind and sand.

“People go swimming here all year round,” says Josh. “Crazy Danes.”

They gather up their nets: one giant, practically person-sized one for Michael, a smaller green one for Josh. They step into the waves and march out into the water, soon up to their hips in the chilly Øresund. The water is clear, so they can hone in on their tiny prey.

The ocean is a choppy slate-blue extension of the sky, through which billowy mountain ranges of cloud patterns pass. Denmark is big-sky country. The light changes every few minutes, and I snap madly away at the scene of the two epicurean fishermen/academics, caught between sea and sky as they collect ingredients from the blue expanse. A line of white wind turbines in the background completes the scene, as well as part of the context: Copenhagen aims to be the world's first carbon-neutral city by 2025. Crazy Danes, indeed.

“How is it out there?” I call. They've gone quite a ways out, insulated by the thick rubber and unimpeded by the smooth waves. They wave back, grinning.

Michael is the first to wade back in with his catch. He kneels down and shakes clumps of olive-green bladder wrack into a bucket. Sea snails, shrimp, and tiny, darting strand hoppers fall out.

Context, Michael and Josh say, is as important as the ingredients on the plate. Taste, woven with philosophy and shot through with science, seems to be the conversational culture of this team, members of which must be as steeped in this sort of rhetoric as their weeds are in fermenting brew.

“People eating food is the only way they get the full experience,” Michael says.

“In the same way that there's no such thing as a painting without the context of the painting—even in the most modernistic of galleries, it's still a white wall,” says Josh. “There's still a texture, there's still lighting, there's still a mood that's created. There's no such thing as a taste without a context.”

The sea air bites at our cheeks, the wind flaps through our hair. The waves curl under, collapsing gently against the sand. Jellyfish nestled in masses of seaweed rock forward and back under the clear, undulating surface of the water. The clouds are piled high, slow as migrating herds across the wide blue sky. Josh runs down the beach and comes back with an armful of treasure: beach mustard. I grab a purple-flowered stalk and take a bite. It's just like a delicate broccoli, salted by the sea air.

Michael fishes out a nearly transparent, gangly shrimp from the bucket's brine. Like Lisa Simpson said, they aren't really that much different from grasshoppers.

“Noma currently serves a live shrimp on ice with a brown butter emulsion, and for that, people are like,
whoa
,” says Josh. “It's still sort of at the frontier of what's seen as acceptable. Or even delicious.”

“We can eat them alive and pretend we're at Noma,” says Michael.

I find I have no qualms about putting the live shrimp in my mouth, especially in this context. I wasn't worried about hurting it—it would be crushed instantly between my teeth, as good a death as any it might encounter living in the wild. I recalled something Redzepi had said about these live shrimp: “The taste of these shrimp changes from day to day, depending on the conditions of the ocean. Eating them is really like tasting the ocean on that day.”

Today the ocean tastes sweet, and tender, and fresh, with a subtle brightness that is hard to qualify. Maybe this is what the Japanese are on about, with their super-fresh food and live sushi.

Back at the lab, we boil up the sea snails we collected. Josh leads
me on an appetizer journey around the kitchen. First I try the fermented grasshopper garum that tastes like fish sauce in its complexity and emphasizes the umami flavor of many insects. Then I taste the bee-larvae granola he's made for a breakfast event they're holding next week. It's crunchy and creamy and savory at once. Delicious.

The sea snails cook up quickly and are light, fresh, and chewy, like an extra-firm shrimp. As with all the other invertebrate morsels I've tried here, there certainly isn't anything off-putting about them. Quite the opposite, in fact. If you didn't know they were insects and snails, you'd never question them. Slap a fancy title on them, like they did with Chilean sea bass (a.k.a. Patagonian toothfish), put them on the menu at an upscale restaurant, and people would order them.

I leave before dinner at Noma (the restaurant books up months in advance), but the conversation during my day at NFL alone will keep me going for quite a while. Sometimes ideas are nourishment enough.

*
I lost to David George Gordon's delicious orthopteran stir-fry.

I
have never seen a restaurant kitchen quite like this. The Kenmore oven/stove combo with its electric range is the same make and model as mine at home, but of an older vintage. Something that looks like a thirty-year-old camping grill sits on the counter next to the stove. Mason jars filled with rust-red hackberries, bumpy green cholla fruit, and twigs with the leaves still attached litter the shelves and countertops. On top of one sits a piece of spongy grayish-green moss.

“What's that?” I ask. Rob Connoley, skinny and tall, with a shaven head and lashless blue eyes that blink red in the smoky kitchen, picks it up.

“Oh, just something I found in the woods. I'm going to take it to Naava.” That's Naava Konigsberg, local herbalist, whom Rob consults for information about the various plants he forages, before taking them to the biology lab at Western New Mexico University for further analysis. “I'll ask them, is it edible? Sustainable? Are there toxic levels of pollutants?” He puts the moss back down. “Don't worry, I also try it myself first. If I die, I won't serve it.”

Rob keeps up the steady stream of chatter while he drops a squiggle
of pale green watercress purée on four plates, tosses it with a bright saffron-yellow streak, and plants a white ball on one end that looks like fresh mozzarella (it is actually a curd made from sweet corn shoots). At the other end of the plate, trapezoidal hunks of acorn bread lean drunkenly against one another like the ruins of a small city. He plops a couple of elderflower boba—glistening, translucent balls resembling oversized golden whitefish caviar—onto a small heap of greens and moves to the next plate.