Thank you very much. I would like to start by telling you about an event, an unusual
event that took place since last symposium, the Mad 1 symposium. It took place in a kindergarten
north of Copenhagen, a kindergarten known as Skåbo, which is Danish for living in the
forest, the kindergarten where the kids are out in the forest most of the day. And this
kindergarten was interesting because we had a visitor here in April in the spring, a speaker
from the Mad 1 symposium, Miles Irving from England, a renowned forester who was here
to forest with the Norma chefs and bringing along his family, including a three-year-old
girl. I suggested, why don't you come to my daughter's kindergarten and tell the kids
about foraging? Because that way your girl would have a little fun in a week dominated
by adults talking about food. So Miles came to this kindergarten for a day showing the
kids around the area up in Dyrhaeun, a forest-like park north of Copenhagen 3 times the size of
the central park in New York, a huge and very popular place with a lot of different vegetation
and more than 2,000 deers living there. And in this area he took out these 20 kids to
show them what is there that is edible, only tiny plants because the deer has been there
already, but there's a lot of interesting stuff there. And he would pick up stuff, he
would show the stuff to the kids. And in a sense to an adult like myself at some kind
of intellectual level, there was, well, I knew something, of course, nothing like what
Miles does. I knew something about wild vegetation. I knew there was a lot of edible stuff out
there. But seeing it through the eyes of these 3, 4, 5, 6-year-old kids and seeing their
surprise when their day-to-day playground turned out, as one of them said, to be actually
a battery of food. To see the transformation in the eyes of these kids of something that
was a nice and pleasant area to play around, becoming suddenly something that you could
eat where you couldn't go and search stuff and find stuff all the time, that was a truly
emotional, very strongly changing experience for me. It opened my eyes to the very simple
fact that at some intellectual level was well-known to me that the world is full of food. There's
more food than we usually think of, and we have as a culture, as a civilization forgotten
how much food is out there. But to see that through the eyes of these more or less happy
kids was really an eye-opener to me. So that evening, after being there and having this
fantastic, sudden understanding of the richness of the world, I went back and said, what was
so surprising here? What was that moved me so much emotionally? And I wrote down three
simple lines to explain to myself what I had experienced during that day. And these three
lines I'll try to explain to you what they mean. They seem a little weird. Everything
is everywhere and go look and eat together. Now, the first one, everything is everywhere
would seem like a somewhat grandiose statement. If you say that everything is everywhere,
you basically said nothing. So you would say, isn't that a bit far to go? But my point
here is that this is really the first approximation, as a physicist would say, our first approach,
our first take on the problem here, what is, in fact, in the world, the situation. It's
the situation that there's everywhere in the world something to be found that you could
eat, or is it rather that there's nothing in the world you could eat. And the point
is that the first approximation, the first take on what kind of world we live in is
through the eyes of these kindergarten kids to say, well, actually, the world is edible.
And everywhere you look, if you have the skills of models, which I do not, you can find something
that's edible. Also, sometimes something that's poisonous, but you will find everywhere something.
And in a way, it's a better first approach to the world to say that there's everywhere
everything than to say the opposite, which was what I was brought up with when I went
to kindergarten 250 years ago. It was more like there's nothing in the world. The world
is basically a desert of asphalt and concrete and stones and the odd lawn, but that doesn't
really edible. You stand on it and give lectures. It's not something you could eat. So the world
was like devoid of food. And food was something you would find in a plastic tray wrapped in
cellophane in these supermarkets that you would drive through in your car in the suburbs.
So the world was basically no food, no fun, and a few depots of food to be found somewhere.
And that's another first approximation. The world is empty. Of course, the truth is in
between, but first approximations are very good in the sense, is it day or is it night?
Is it raining or is it sunshine? And then you can take in all the nuances of what time of
day and what time of night and so on. But the first approximation that I was brought
up with was the world is dead. And what I see through the eyes of these kindergarten kids
is that the world is alive. In the old world, world food was something that you got out
of a plastic tray in the supermarket. Water was something coming from pipes, and that
was very nice to have water. But the idea that water would actually flow through the
environment was very strange to me at that time. And it seems it's still very strange
to urban planners who are totally unprepared for the fact that water will stream through
the environment when it rains and that this water has to go somewhere, that we are part
of a flow. And also energy was something I was brought up with as a very rare thing that
you would have to go a far way to find. And you would find it in depots like oil or gas
that you would find in the Middle East or maybe in the North Sea, but it was far and
distant and it took a lot of money and a lot of power to get it to use. So energy was also
something that you would never find in the environment unless you were very rich and
very clever and had a lot of technology. That's the old world, that's the world I was brought
up in. The real world, the one I live in, is really a world where there is food everywhere.
You can discuss whether there's enough food everywhere and so on, but you cannot discuss
the fact that nature will grow edible stuff even if you turn your back on it. Food and
edible stuff is not something odd. In a few spots it's something everywhere in the world.
Water is flowing everywhere in the world and we just need to help it flow the right way.
And energy is everywhere. We've learned that from renewable energy. There's wind, there's
sun, there's lots of energy. Only we have not built the machines to catch it. But now
we are becoming a little more clever and waking up to the fact that in fact our environment
is full of energy and we just have to reach out and grab it and take care of it until
we need it. So the real world is a world of abundance. The real world is not a world of
deserts. And this very, very simple understanding that we are part of a huge flow of life, energy
and information on this planet and there's plenty if we only become clever enough to
reach out for it. And the world is not a desert filled with depots. This is a very simple
understanding and you may ask, why didn't we know that all along? Why was I brought
up in a world that seemed to be dominated by scarcity and desert-like structures? Why
didn't we go look for it? Because we didn't. We didn't go look. There was perhaps the elder
flowers or a few things you could eat and that was sort of an oddity in my childhood
that there were things that you could actually eat out there in nature. I didn't reflect
very much about where the food came from, but eating stuff sort of right off the trees
or something was weird. So we didn't look if there was food out there. We didn't look
if there was energy out there because all the money went into the nuclear power plants
and the coal mines and whatever. And nobody cared really about doing science and technology
to develop solar panels and windmills and so on. So we didn't look at all. And you could
ask, why didn't we look? And that is an old story and a sad story and a story that has
partly been told at this symposium already last year, the fact that we saw that the world
was an unfriendly place. It was a desert that was unkind to us. It was not a nice place
for us to be. It was a hostile place for us to be. And because we thought of that, we
thought we had to control the world. We had to take command of the world to actually survive
because it wasn't in itself generous. It wasn't offering stuff in itself. We had to go there
and make sure that there was the stuff that we needed. And in short, the story starts
actually 10,000 years ago when we made a transition as a species from having been hunter-gatherers
for most of human existence, living on the food that grew all by itself in nature in
form of vegetation and animals. We were living, so to speak, on what was offered to us. And
then we became farmers. We wanted to control the plants and the animals around us so that
we were sure we would have something edible. And when you study this transition historically
and also as it has happened in modern times, there's a huge reduction in the diversity
of food available to hunter-gatherers when they become farmers. Hunter-gatherers live
off a wide diversity of plants and animals, but the farmers only base themselves on very
few fish, very few animals, and very few plants. Basically, the vector, the movement was from
living off the wild, which has its own will and is there for its own reason, to live rather
on the tame that which we control and dominate and have domesticated, brought into our house
in the form of cultivated plants and animals that have been tamed and domesticated. Now,
this, as was already referred to by John, means that 60% of what we eat, of the calories
we get, come from only four crops, a very poor and a very limited existence. And this,
of course, also has a direct consequence for gastronomy, for food making, because all
the wonderfully skilled and clever cooks of this world are using all their energy to try
to make some very few and very dull products, edible day after day after day. When we only
basically eat like four crops, it takes a lot of cleverness to make people feel happy about
having potatoes every day all around the year, so there are many different recipes for potatoes
and the chefs will compete on who can make the most novel kind of potato. But the sad
thing, of course, is that these skills are made basically to make very dull things seem
interesting. And that's a sad waste of chefs, I'd say. And I think that this is an overstatement
that all of gastronomy, but much of gastronomy has been about making something very poor
and seem rich, rather than going out there where all the rich stuff grows all by itself.
But ironically, this weird idea that the world was a desert that we had to control to get
something to eat, that was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that the world did,
in fact, become a desert. This map shows where agriculture originated in the red areas and
where it is most dominant today in the yellow areas. And you'll notice that many of the
places where agriculture arose were actually areas that today are deserts. And there's
a reason for this and the reason is agriculture. Agriculture ruined the soil, so what was left
was deserts like in the Middle East, where people now fight over hopeless lack of resources
because they ruined the whole stuff thousands of years ago. So this means that it actually
did become a desert. And we did indeed lose faith in the generosity of the planet. We
did lose faith in what was offered to us, so we started to control everything. We lost
our way as natural inhabitants of this planet and started to want to change the face of the
planet to get something to eat. Now, what we forgot was that we actually live in a very
kind garden. We live in a place that is actually very nice. So this brings me back to my kindergarten
rules where, as you may remember, the second rule was that when we know that everything
is everywhere, or we claim that as our first approximation, the next thing we should do
of course is go look and see what is there. And here's Miles and his wife going looking
in Dürreheim north of Copenhagen to see if there's something there. And of course the
point is that if you go look, there is a lot of stuff. There's plenty of offerings out
there in nature. And if you look in what you will know, of course, that inside of you there's
plenty of needs. You need something to eat. You need something to survive. And so when
you have a lot outside and you have also all these stuff, you need to bridge it. And the
bridge of course is appetite. Advertisement is the urge to reach out, to get something
from the world outside and to bring it in there so that you'll feel better. You'll feel
happy. You'll survive. Advertisement is that thing that drives us out into the environment
to pick stuff. And for some reason we have cultivated this appetite in such a style that
we only want to have stuff that we control. But we can start another tradition, which
is in fact a very old hunter-gatherer tradition that we trust the world, that we search the
world for good stuff. We have skills and we go out there and we are careful to pick things
and we do it in a clever way so we don't ruin the world, that we trust our senses, we trust
our appetite, we trust our taste, we learn how to do it and we go out there and we get
stuff. That's difficult to learn. We need people who can train us because we've lost
this knowledge, but of course we can. And we need to dare to go out there and taste things
and we need to be clever in the way we do it so we don't taste things that are known
to be poisonous of course, but we need to trust the world, we need to dare go out and seek
food, we need to take care of the world and to care about what we can find out there and
we need to share what we have when we come back. And this dare, care and share thing
is all about reaching out to the world through our appetite. Now this share thing is about
something else that we have forgotten which is linked to the kindness of the world and
that is the kindness of ourselves, of our tendency to share stuff with each other and
again we have a kindergarten rule here saying that we should eat together. Eating together
as we all know is a very satisfying and fulfilling activity. Eating together is better than eating
alone and you like to sit there and eat stuff, you like to share stuff, you like to share
knowledge about what is in the world so you go foraging, you go hunting, you go out searching
stuff, you go out growing your produce, you go out and do all that and you come back to
your family and your friends and you share it and that's when it really gives meaning
to you what you do and the more you share and the more you care about the things you
pick from the wild or things you grow in your garden, the more you care about that, the
more you get and the happier you become and the more you share that with other people
the more happiness you find. Now it's important to recognize that we are in a sense akin to
the garden to the world we live in, akin comes from the word kin, kin is about family
relationships, kinship akin being of the same kind or family related to the world and we
are in fact family related to the world, the world passes through us all the time, a recent
way of studying the matter flows through human beings has shown that if you take all the
matter flowing through a person like me or you in the course of a year including the
air we inhale and exhale again, the food we eat, the water we drink and so on, it adds
up to six tons of matter through a year, that's a lot. The amount of food and drink is on
the order of 1.5 ton and the amount of air we take in and breathe out again is somewhat
higher but this is an enormous amount of matter going through each of us every year and most
of the atoms in us are replaced in the course of the year so we are more like an eddy or
a pattern in a flow of matter going through us than we are actually stable things like
a table. So the flow aspect of us is that we are really part of the world, we are really
part of this enormous flow and of course there is some kind of identity and stability in
us and we can remember our childhood but the childhood when we went to kindergarten we were
made up of entirely different atoms than we are today. There's basically almost no atoms
left from when we went to kindergarten but of course we still have some memories of that
time, we still have the identity of that time so we are a pattern in a flow. I like to show
this ecosphere, a simple little glass bowl where you have a shrimp swimming around even
though the system is closed but they can do so because daylight enters it and the little
shrimps will make waste that bacteria will break down into nutrients that algae sort
of plant-like structures can use to collect energy from the daylight and produce food
and oxygen that the shrimps will take in and this is very similar to what's happening in
the somewhat bigger bow of the earth where you have the plants that suck up energy from
the sun, provide food and oxygen for the animals who run around and give lectures and do other
silly mad stuff, make waste that the bacteria will break down into fertilizer for the plants
and so on. All the atoms are going around all the time, one time plant, another time
animal, another time bacteria, it's a closed material flow powered by the energy from the
sun. Now it follows from this that plants need animals, you cannot have plants in the
present form without having animals who do their job in collecting the plants again,
eating them and shedding them out as fertilizer and that also means that the planet actually
needs us. I've been brought up in a time where we've sort of felt an excuse for being here,
sorry we're here, sorry we're consuming stuff but the planet needs us and it particularly
needs our shit and our farting for regulating many different things. So we belong here,
we're natives on this planet, it's not a mistake that we're here, we're not aliens from a spaceship,
we are part of this ecology but we forgot that and nobody told the new natives, the
kids that come, nobody told them that you're here, it's a good idea that you're here, you're
welcome here and the world is generous to you because what you need is in the world.
We tend to forget that and that's a bad thing because we must always remember that the most
important thing we know about anything is a very simple fact that we are here. The very
simple fact that we are here and alive is a very important fact because it tells us
a lot that our kind of beings are here. What it tells us is that we are all, each of us
in this room, are the last part of a chain, an unbroken chain of survival in the sense
that your parents survived long enough to have you and your grandparents long enough
to have your parents and before that people gave birth to people and before that some
apes gave birth to apes and before that some slime molds gave birth to slime molds or
whatever they did so there's an unbroken chain of being alive going billions of years back
and each of us without any guarantees for anything have this ability inherited that
somehow we are children of somebody who made it. Our ancestors made it and we can make
it. There's no guarantee, there's no security here but there's just the knowledge, the self-confidence
that we are out of an unbroken chain of survivors so the very fact that we are here shows us
a lot about it and of course basically we are here because they, our ancestors, had
appetite. Imagine an animal that has no appetite and no curiosity about the environment, that
animal would be dead very quickly, of course it also has to control its appetite or would
also become too obese and be eaten too easily by the predators but appetite is crucial.
If there was no appetite they wouldn't be here, our ancestors and we wouldn't be here
so it's our reaching out into the environment, our curiosity about the environment that makes
us, that makes us, makes it possible for us to be here and what we need to understand
now at this stage in human history is that we need our appetite for planet earth, we
need our curiosity and our wanting to go out there and get stuff from planet earth and
we are the generation, we are the part of history that has to make this huge change from being
afraid and scared of the world to actually having the courage to go out in the world.
We shouldn't have a strategy of controlling depots in a desert like I was brought up with,
we should have a strategy of exploring the richness of the garden of the world in which
we live, we have to make in a sense the greatest change of direction in 10,000 years. In 10,000
years we've been going away from the wild, chaming and insisting on taming everything
and now we have to go in the direction, not away from the wild but back into the wild,
not living only on the wild but we have to change the direction and this will be indeed
a milestone in evolution of life on earth because we are part of this species which
is so dominant and so noisy and if we change our strategy from dominating everything to
liking everything to feeling at home with everything, it's a huge change, a milestone
in evolution of life on earth and the cutting edge, the very, very cutting edge of this
change in evolution, the change that's about to happen. The cutting edge of all this is
those who know about taste, know about appetite, know about reaching out for the world for
edible stuff. So the cutting edge of this huge change in evolution is all the chefs
with their sharp knives and it's a great, it's a great fact that we live in this, in
this moment in human history where we discover a very simple fact that this is indeed a kind,
kind of world offering us many beautiful things. We shouldn't be afraid of it, we should like
it but of course we are also part of the world so my take home message is very simple, it's
a kind world and we are part of it so we have to be kind and not only to the kids. Thank
you very much. Okay, thank you Tor and thank you for being
such an appreciative audience. I love that sentence, this is a kind, kind of world. Tor
was very good, he only overran by two minutes which means we've got five minutes left for
questions from the audience and if you put your hand up there are some people who will
get to you with a microphone so who would like to be the first person to ask a question
at MAD 2012, there's no prizes but we would love some questions. Have we got somebody,
there must be at least one question in the audience. Yes, we've got a question, fantastic.
My question is whether there's an end to appetite, has anyone ever stated? An end to appetite,
you mean are you full at some stage? Well, are you full, are we full as a culture
ever or does appetite, is there a finiteness to, and will we know, it seems we have had
a voracious appetite for certain things and they've led us into some problems, I'm just
wondering what your thoughts are about the end of appetite if there is one. That's a
very good question, I would answer this way in practical terms, no, I think not, I think
that the world is infinite in all directions, in the sense that it will take very, very
long time before we've explored all the possibilities in the world, there's so many things we've
chosen not to do that we could try out to do, that for many, many, many generations we will
still explore this planet and the richness it has, so in that sense I think not and I
think we will continue to play around with food and make it delicious in new ways, so
I think for any practical purpose there's no end to appetite.
Okay, do we have another question from the audience, we do up here and René not only
put the symposium together but he's running around with the microphone, a man for all
seasons. Good morning Tor, thank you for that. When does appetite become greed? Excuse me?
When, if ever, does appetite become greed? When appetite becomes greed, the short answer
I would offer would be that when that which tries to satisfy the appetite is not really
satisfying in the sense that if you have a strong appetite and you need stuff to live
on and all you're offered are burgers in a burger outlet, you'll have to eat a lot of
burgers to find those fatty acids you really need or that substance you really need for
your body to function, so greed arises out of the power of the food we eat, like the
conquering of the world in the Renaissance was really about going out to find some spice
to spice up those silly four crops that we eat, because we needed that from India to
survive being European peasants, so greed comes from poverty of the input you take in.
Okay, we actually do have room for one more question, anyone has got a question? Great.
Thank you for that, it's a very empowering way of thinking of sustainability. The question
I have is education in culinary arts is about making those four starches interesting, what
needs to happen to education to change the way we think about food? Excuse me, I'm sorry.
What needs to happen in education and training around chefs to change the way we think about
food? Well we need to open up again, we need to understand at an emotional and intellectual
level that the world is very rich and of course this happens in the kindergarten and
in the cooking schools and there's a huge task before us and I think that Rene and his
friends have started a process which is of immense importance not only to what we eat
but also to the way we go about environmental issues, the way we go about sustainability,
the way we go about quality of life and I think the driving force, the motor behind the
new environmental understanding, the new wave of environmental responsibility that we'll
see also in education, the motor behind that is appetite, taste, deliciousness, quality
of life and that is a new take on the environment, it's not about excuse me, I'll use less,
I'm sorry I'm here but I almost didn't turn on the light, it's going to be very different,
I'm proud I'm here and give me some real good food and I'll give you back some real
good shit and that's another take on the environment.
