Hello, everyone. It's lovely to be here, and it's appropriate that we're in a circus tent,
because what I went through was sort of a three-ring exercise. I'm going to take you
through each of the rings. Herbert just said something which resonated with me, and with
you, I'm assuming, too, you are what you cook. There's enormous truth in that. We've
got so many chefs here, I'm sure, that's sort of a mantra that makes a lot of sense to you.
But for me, that's only part of the story. I'm not a chef. However, I am a customer
of chefs. I'm an omnivore. I'm a great eater, although that changed when I became the man
who couldn't eat. And that's the journey I'm going to take you through today. I came back
to eating. In fact, so much so that I was able to enjoy a 28-course meal at Noma on
Friday night. It was unlike anything I've ever had before. Round of applause for Noma
for doing this. And in those extremes between the extended food deprivation, which I'll
tell you about, and this celebration at Noma, was a journey I went on which told me everything
that I never knew about food and life, and I don't think would have been able to understand
in any other way. I'm a writer. I'm also a writer besides being an eater. So I rely
on stories to make sense out of the world, to make sense out of my place in the world,
to make sense out of events, and to make sense out of life.
Chefs, I think, use ingredients the way that I use stories. They use ingredients to stitch
together narratives. It's the way that they create meaning. It's how they make sense of
the world. It's how they take the chaos around them and find inspiration and channel it into
something memorable. But I don't think what chefs can fully understand is the extent to
which we as eaters, people like me, take what the chef has done and then translate it into
our own stories, into our own narratives, into our own journeys, and they inform who we are.
Okay. Oh, sorry. Okay. He's not a handsome guy up there. He's not a lovely portrait.
That's me. A few years ago. So I suffered with a lifetime illness, something called
Crohn's disease, which isn't of particular importance. But what Crohn's disease did for
me was it always made food this double-edged sword. Food was something which I craved and
relied on, and I needed it to sustain my health, but there was always the risk involved that
food could in fact do damage, that it could hurt me, that what I was using to keep me
alive could also kill me. And I always had this kind of conflicted relationship with
food. One day, I was home for lunch, and I was making my grandmother's tuna fish salad
recipe, and I'd finished chopping the onions and slicing the olives and mixing up the mayonnaise
and grinding the pepper and the salt. And I had this plate of tuna in front of me, and
I was about to eat, and I felt a funny pain in my gut, a funny kind of a twinge, not unfamiliar
to people who live with GI issues. But within a few minutes, what was all of a sudden not
so unfamiliar became devastating. My guts literally exploded on me within a period of
about a minute or two, and I found myself very quickly in a bad situation. I had emergency
surgery, which saved my life. That was the good news. The bad news was that when I came
out of the surgery, it was a tough spot, and there were a lot of complications, and the
prognosis was that for me to heal, there were going to be two things going on that seemed
antithetical to healing. Number one, my gut was going to be in a medically induced coma.
So through some medicine, I was going to lose all feeling and sensation in my gut. It was
going to be shut down, and it would be shut down so that I would be able to live on nothing
by mouth. No food, no drink, on a food pump being fed intravenously, the synthetic concoction
18 hours a day, which would keep me alive, but not do anything more than that. So I was
nothing by mouth for a long time, and that put me in a place with food where I'd never
been before. Eventually, I came back to eating, as you can tell from my raves about Noma the
other night. But when I came back to eating, and here we are, the first moment of that
return to life among eaters, I'm in the hospital, and I had gone through nothing by mouth periods
before, but short term, four days, five days, and at the end of that week or so, I would
begin to feel the normal feelings of hunger and craving, and to me, that was the sign
that my body was telling me, you're healthy, you're ready to get out of the hospital, you're
ready to resume life. And every time I'd gone through one of those experiences, my memory
was that apple juice, and that clear broth, and that jello tasted as good as the 28 courses
I had at Noma the other night. I mean, when you go without food, and you put food in your
mouth, you put food on your tongue, it's a process of rediscovery. This time, I drank
the apple juice, and I drank the ginger ale, and I ate the jello, and I drank the clear
broth, and nothing, nothing in my mouth. I had been without food for so long that the
taste buds had atrophied off my tongue. My tongue was as smooth as a porpoise's skin.
So my gut was medically imperilized. I couldn't feel what was going down into my gut. And
now I couldn't taste what was in my mouth. And this was a fate almost worse than nothing
by mouth, because now it was complete emptiness. I was an empty vessel being filled up with
food to sustain me, and I couldn't enjoy nothing. There was no pleasure whatsoever. There was
no ability to revisit all the things that I wanted to come back to when I was ill. And
what it enabled me to do, though, was really to live a kind of controlled experiment, because
eventually I did come back. And let me take you through some of that.
When you are in the state I was unable to appreciate food, unable to experience food,
you become dislocated as a human being. What I didn't know was that aside from the hunger
and aside from the absence of flavor, that removing food from my life really cut me off
from the connection to every human emotion, to everything that you rely on in the course
of a day and the course of a life to feel connected, to feel like you are among the
living, as I say. And things happen that are not necessarily of great significance until
you are in them and you are not in them. You are dislocated as I was. You have occasions
like a child's birthday party at a restaurant in New York City, the Benihana chain, where
the food is the show. The food is presented in front of you by a chef who is having a
good time and everybody is having a good time sampling the food and then eating the art
and getting involved in that whole process. And you begin to understand that food, as
I say, is not only on the tongue and not only on the gut, but in the heart and in the head.
And what happens to you if you can't be part of it?
Food as love. This is perhaps the greatest expression of food. Every July 4th, my family
are guests at a holiday party on a lake in Maine where the hostess makes sort of the
ultimate summer cookout. And the hostess makes the stars and stripes take a little corny
for the holiday, but it tastes great. She picks the blueberries and the strawberries
off of her property and puts them together. And this was the occasion of my sister becoming
engaged to an Englishman with the very English name of Simon Clark. And the host responded
by taking her tradition, the stars and stripes cake, and making it into a stars and stripes
and Union Jack cake. And as I say, it was sort of the ultimate expression of love and
generosity. And imagine what it's like to look at this and not to take a fork full and
put it in your mouth. Not only are you missing the strawberries and the blueberries and the
cream, but you're missing the occasion. You're missing the celebration. You're missing saying
to two people who love each other and have come together that I'm breaking bread with
you. I'm eating cake with you. I'm part of your experience. Imagine what it would have
been like to stand at the tent outside today as an observer, standing outside the tent
instead of eating all that wonderful breakfast that we had this morning. And of course we
think about when it's gone the social function of food, which is maybe the strongest emotional
component of it. We're not only talking about occasion. This is a summer dinner party at
Friends in Upstate New York. My wife is at the table. I'm not, as you can see. But we
live in a small apartment in New York City with two children. There's no escaping what's
going on. And when I first began the food pump regimen, the idea was, well, I'm home.
I'm home from the hospital and things will be back to normal. I'll sit down at the dinner
table with my wife and our two kids. And for the first couple of nights, I sat down at
the dinner table and everything was different. I was there with a food pump on my back. It
was loud. It was noisy. It was intrusive. There was no way to miss what was going on. But
around me were my wife and kids who were eating, who were going on with their lives, who were
sustaining themselves. And there I was beginning to resent what I couldn't participate in.
And it drove me over the edge. And it drove me literally away from the table. So losing
the social function of food is probably the greatest impediment that hits you when you
can no longer, you know, you can no longer eat. Now, for those of you who, you know,
who are professionals in the industry, the tactile element is something that perhaps
you can relate to. And I did. As I say, I'm not a chef. I'm not a good cook. But I can
do a couple of things passively. I love to grill because it's the most forgiving medium
of cooking. And I'm a very inexact cook. So I love to grill like the shish kebab on the
left here. And I'm a very good chopper and arranger. And I can chop and arrange a salad.
And for me, it's the closest that I can come to creating a meal and an understanding the
pleasure of cooking for other people. So you missed that element. But I was unable to cook
because I couldn't taste and I couldn't smell and I couldn't sample and I couldn't eat.
And it's like cooking in the dark. All of your senses leave you. And my limited ability
became absolutely useless to me. In my growing obsession, I began then to understand that
food, I'd always been an omnivore. I loved food. I'd craved it. But that it was also,
as I say, the different pivot points, the different chapters in the narrative of my
experience. This, in my head, in the mental journey that I took, was me as a teenager.
And it was something I never thought of that way before. This is a little variety store
in a tiny little town called Bridgeston, Maine, where I grew up in the summers. And what
it is, for me, it's a symbol of independence and celebration. Because it's the place where
I used to go about 10 minutes to midnight every night in the summer. I'd leave the campfire
and I'd race into town and I'd get here and get the last pizza out of the oven before
they closed and bring it back to the campfire and share it with my friends around the campfire.
I always thought this was the best-tasting pizza in the world. When we took our kids
to this restaurant a couple of years ago, they disabused me of that notion. Apparently,
this makes Domino's look like gourmet pizza. But in my memory and in my experience, it
represented something greater. As I say, it represented independence. And I began to think
that these food events, I thought that my life was the sum of all sorts of parts. And
I didn't realize that, in fact, food was how I made sense of my life. And now that it was
gone, I began to think that this was something that I was now telling a story of a life that
no longer existed. So I used to work for this crusty old guy who was here on the screen
named Bob Alton. And I made a movie with him in which he said, and he said this to me one
day. And I thought, well, that's very funny. Bob's a crusty, caustic old guy. He's getting
a rise out of me with this crusty, caustic joke. He was a long time recovering alcoholic.
And I thought of it, you know, it was very funny. It was this little quip he had. However,
when I went through the food deprivation experience, I realized what he meant. For Bob, not having
whiskey was a great emptiness in his life. And his life wasn't the same without it.
There was no substitute for it. He never, he progressed, he moved on. But his life was
never the same. It was fundamentally changed without alcohol in his life. I felt that way
about food. My life was not the same. I missed food and nothing I could do could replace it.
And I began to think and try to convince myself that this would end and I would come
back to food. And if I were to come back to food, what would make me whole again? What
did I want? And every day I would have a series of images of places and experiences that would
randomly pop up in my head, sort of, you know, suppressed memories that were now unleashed
with all the confusion going on in my head. And I thought of places that had some sort
of meaning for me at the time, but now, of course, that was expanded. Places like Patrick's
Roadhouse in Santa Monica, California, which is a shack, as you can see on the Pacific
Coast Highway. And they make burgers and eggs and, you know, nothing of great significance
except for one dish. They have the world's best banana cream pie. It's like nothing
else I've ever had. It's simple. It's fresh bananas and cream and homemade crust. And
I used to travel for a Los Angeles affair a bit. And I always scheduled my trip so that
my plane would land at 11 o'clock in the morning. I'd leave LAX. I would drive straight to
Patrick's. I would call ahead to make sure they had a banana cream pie. I would sit
down. I would eat the pie. It would explode in my mouth. And I would feel like, okay,
now I'm connected to Los Angeles. Now I'm connected to where I need to be. Now I feel
as though I'm 3,000 miles away from home, but I have something familiar. And I was
sustained. And I could go on then with a busy couple of days and know that my experience
was complete. So things like the banana cream pie began to weigh on me to think that this
is, this vision is what is going to get me out of this hole I'm in. And I thought it's
interesting, I said what Herbert said earlier, that you are what you cook. And I wasn't cooking
so I was nothing. But there was something else going on too. I mean, Herbert's remark
is a derivation of, you know, the old phrase, tell me what you eat and I will tell you what
you are. You are what you eat. And as I thought about my experience, I realized that wasn't
it. That wasn't enough because eating can be indiscriminate. You can be hungry in an
empty vessel and you can fill yourself up with candy bars. You can fill yourself up
with whatever is on the plate in front of you. That's not who you are. That's not defining
enough. I realized that what I was experiencing, these kinds of fantasies and obsessions, it
was something more, they were cravings. They were all encompassing cravings that were tapping
into every emotion that was not satisfied because I wasn't able to put anything in my
mouth. And I realized that no, no, really cravings tell you who you are. That is the
real hook into your personality. That's the real insight into your identity. If you can
begin to understand what your cravings are, you can begin to understand not only what
you need, but who you are. And one of the things that I loved was going to the White
Horse Tavern where we live in New York and having a slow pull draft of Guinness and sitting
in the place in the Dylan Thomas booth where Dylan Thomas famously drank and died and sit
underneath the plaque that commemorates Richard Burton and crave that experience. I missed
that. I understood what my old crusty friend Bob Alton meant.
So I also occurred to me that I'd been through this before. When I was a kid, we lived in
St. Thomas. That's my kindergarten picture. There I am in the middle bringing integration
single handed later the island. And I missed things from the States. I loved my new classmates
and I loved the beaches, but it was 1968 and I missed processed food. The food on the island
was Kalalu and fish head soup and it was very strange to me and I couldn't connect to the
culture and my parents took so much pity on me that they had, they called friends in
New Jersey who had a box of Twinkies shipped to us and I went down to the dock with my
father on this leaky dock and I bit into the Twinkie and it transported me back to my ranch
house in a subdivision in New Jersey and I felt connected and I felt secure and I felt
safe and I thought you've been through this before and food has saved you. The Twinkie
has saved you. The other great experience for me when I was a kid growing up was Cassis
Daly on the Lower East Side which has been there since 1888. When I was five years old,
my father took me there for the first time. He'd eaten there as a kid. His father had
taken him there and it was the other seminal experience for me. What they have at Cassis,
what we eat is this heart attack on a plate. You can see hot pastrami on club which is
with the center dug out like a canoe and they stuffed the pastrami inside and we put hot
spicy mustard on it, half sour pickles, french fries, Dr. Brown's celery. I went there
when I was five and this is what I call the Jewish tea room. This is the dining room and
I came from this tiny little town in New Jersey where we didn't have restaurants. We didn't
have places like this and I walked into this place and it was a circus like what's going
on in this tent. It was loud and noisy and the plates were banging and the glasses were
rattling and people were shouting orders and the smells were overwhelming and it was communal.
You have to go through this religious experience. You take yourself up to the altar at the counter
and you present yourself after waiting on this long line and you place your sandwich
order and then there is this ancient tradition of the meat pulled from the cooker and you
can smell it in your nose and all your senses begin to come alive and there's this artistry
as they chop through and then they hand you what I thought of as Jewish communion. I was
five years old. I was a picky eater. I didn't like anything except plain spaghetti and the
cutter at counter handed me the sample slices and I put it on my tongue and it was a religious
experience. It exploded on my tongue and I knew what it was to love food and I knew
why my relatives were all fat and ate themselves to death with this food because it reminded
them of who they were. My family is Jewish but we grew up in this tiny little town with
no connection to any heritage and I felt like, I guess Catholics feel like when they walk
into the Vatican and they walk into the Sistine Chapel and food did that for me here and at
the end of the process you get this and you eat this sandwich which weighs about the same
as a brick and it goes down your gullet and it lays in you and it feels real and it connects
you to the reality of what's going on around you. So as I came back to food I thought I'm
going to try this. I want to be who I was. I don't want to have this scar in my gut and
I don't want to have this emptiness in my head. I want to go back to the way things were and
a very smart friend of mine said, you're a fool if you do that because you are experiencing
something that requires analysis. You need to understand that this is a profound experience
and if you just go back to the way things were and you forget about everything you will
have lost the opportunity to understand the meaning of what you're going through and the
meaning of what you will need to go forth and I said, Mark, you're a bright guy, that's
wonderful, but that's in the abstract. I want to taste that Twinkie. I want to taste that
pastrami sandwich. I want to know if I am still who I thought I was before all this
happened.
So I tried it and this was also made a little more urgent by the fact that the hostess company
announced that they're going to stop manufacturing Twinkies. So I had double reason to do this.
So I went to my local grocery store and I went to a shelf that I never go to because I hadn't
had a Twinkie since I was on the Leaky Dock in St. Thomas and I bought a box, I walked
out to a park on a beautiful sunny day, I unwrapped the cellophane wrapper, I bit into
it and I spit it right out. It was horrible. It was awful. More than anything, it was chemical.
I won't bore you with all the 51 ingredients that are in a Twinkie, but do you have any
idea what sodium acid pyrophosphate is?
I don't either, but I can tell you that it tastes awful. When I was tasting this, I
was tasting not only that, but imagining that I was tasting the latex gloves of the technician
who was stirring the vat. It tasted completely like chemicals and that's not what I needed.
But I also realized what else was going on. I was sitting on a park bench alone, eating
this, individually wrapped out of the cellophane concoction, which hadn't changed in shape
or recipe or dimension, but something had changed in me. This was food which is meant
to be consumed individually and I was eating it appropriately in isolation on this park
bench and hating it. I realized that I had just come through this period of terrible
isolation, cut off from food and this was no longer what I wanted. I didn't want to eat
anything which is going to be a metaphor or a manifestation of that kind of aloneness,
of that kind of separation. Then I went back to Katz's to complete the experiment and
I ordered the sandwich with the mustard and the Dr. Brown cellray and all that and I bit
into it and it was fantastic. It was fabulous. It was even better than it was than I remembered
it because not only were the flavors absolutely alive in my mouth, but I was in the Jewish
tea room and I was sharing it with the tables of eaters and I was part of the community
of eaters again. That began to change my thinking about this sense of understanding what I craved.
What I was craving was sure I wanted my flavors back and I wanted the feeling in my gut back,
but I wanted the totality of the food experience and I thought of it as sociability and all
the things that we've touched on. Then I gave it a little more thought. There's been so
much talk among crowds like this past 20 years about the farm-to-table movement, the
locovore movement, seasonality movement, et cetera. We talk about the benefits of sustainability,
the economic benefits, the environmental benefits, the gastronomic benefits, et cetera, but I
don't think that there's much attention paid to the psychological and emotional benefits
for the consumer and the eater. In the last 20 years where we live in New York City, farmers
markets have exploded. Every Thursday I go to our local farmers market through the fall
and I buy bush as many apples as I can carry home. I eat the organically grown apples and
we do the same thing in Maine with sugar and gold, small kernel corn when it's fresh.
It represents a part of the experience that I realized was akin to how I was living my
life and what I wanted, that I wanted what was authentic. The synthetic food that I was
on had led me to death and what was going to lead me back to life was understanding
what was authentic not only on my tongue, but emotionally and psychologically.
The apotheosis of it just happened a couple of weeks ago. This is a place in Maine in
Wisconsin called Reds Eats that claims to be the number one lobster roll stand in the state
of Maine, which is a big claim. You wait a long time. You wait about an hour online
to get in and they live up to their reputation. They are the best and the reason they are
the best I think is because they represent authenticity. This is lobster right off the
boat. This is actually a lobster and a half on a roll and there's nothing on it. There's
no fancy play with it. There's drawn butter and mayonnaise on the side and a basic hamburger
roll, a hot dog roll. This is like the Carnegie deli of lobster shacks. There's so much meat
that it's falling off your roll. It represents authenticity and it connects you not only
to what's on your plate but to where you are. You're in a community of people who are waiting
online for this shared experience. I thought it was sort of the totality of my understanding
of this experience until I went to Noma Friday night. I had among the 28 courses Rene's
Brilliant Lobster Concoction and it was delicious. What was so interesting about it was that
it took what for me was the traditional process of eating, which is you start by sucking the
juice out of the spinners of the lobster and getting the flavor of the salt water in your
mouth and then going through the eating. In fact, it took that process and that is the
essence of the recipe. It takes the juices of the lobster and it creates this broth and
you use that in combination with the lobster tail. I thought, well, I haven't stopped learning
the meaning of this experience yet because I've discovered that even if something like
lobster that I think has to be prepared only one way and one place can be done like this
and I can understand and appreciate it, then thank God there are talented people in this
world who can take ancient traditions like this and adapt them and do something creative
and wonderful with them because when they do that, they are in fact telling new stories
that eaters like me can absorb and can bite into and begin to use them to understand the
world around us as it changes. That I think is the essence of my experience and I think
for many, many around us as well. So I'm out of time. Thank you very much. It's been a
pleasure to talk to you.
