The hunger tales
Making conversations about the food shortage and waste crisis fun, Hungry work: the cooking that underwrites activism, The Nigerian food boom, Finding Queer and BIPOC alcoholic support groups and more
Hello readers! Big news on the personal front — I’m jumping back into the Private Chef world! Kate and I have been working long hours and many, many days to get our properties rehabbed and it’s been super exciting working on the Airbnb we are restoring in Pennsylvania. The big and beautiful and completely overwhelming Victorian is finally starting to take shape, and while it has provided some financial security, storage for our personal items, and for longer than I had planned - housing - it’s finally time for me to get back into the culinary world I know best.
Kate and I will be making the journey out west to spend the next few months - and longer if all goes as planned - splitting time between Denver and Aspen. I can’t wait to share my passion of food and beverage again. After closing Himitsu, I really struggled to find the love in what felt like the only real skill I had, my entire identity. I can’t say that the past four years went by without regrets and the consuming feeling of loss, but I can now look back and realize that I gained so much more than I lost.
I learned that I have more to offer this world than hospitality. I am more than my collected learned skills, that my skills transfer to other worlds, and never again will I be defined by what I do to earn a living. I’ve met people that have changed the way I interact with the world and the way I view this life.
Perhaps my biggest take-away, and I realize I’m not telling anyone anything new here, is that some of my greatest lessons have been from people that I may have written off as kind people that I wouldn’t really *learn* anything from. Those are the people I’m most grateful for truly instilling in me that you really can learn something from everyone you interact with.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this all comes with the balance (and extreme privilege) that living in Spain three months a year has kept me alive and inspired. To see such a huge manifestation become an actuality has made me so proud of myself. I’ve really started to feel like myself again, daily, not sporadically.
I’d like to be the first to introduce you to the next new adventure, SOBREMESA.
This week I’ve been thinking about this quote from Anthony Bourdain:
“Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”
This week:
Make food not waste food week
The hunger tales
Hungry work
How to feel visible
The Nigerian food boom
Album and wine pairing
Make Food Not Waste Week:
This October, New York City had its inaugural ‘Make Food, Not Waste’ restaurant week.
“According to nonprofit Feeding America, there are currently 92 billion pounds of food wasted annually in the United States. That is around 145 billion meals, over $473 billion worth of food, and about 38% of all food in America.”
In response to this, a dozen top New York restaurants participated in the week, creating special zero-waste dishes that showcase some of the possibilities of sustainable cooking and tackling food waste.
Grub Street published 5 of the dishes with a description from the chefs which I thought I’d share. They showcase the potential of ingredients that would normally be discarded. There is so much creativity in the industry which we should take advantage of to begin addressing the issue of food waste. However, these efforts can’t just be isolated to one week a year.
Kampachi crudo and kampachi "empanada" at Corima:
To start with these two dishes, chef Fidel Caballero’s staff breaks down an entire kampachi: The filet becomes a crudo (pictured above), served with mushrooms, fermented husk-cherry salsa, celtuce and chicharrón furikake. The fish bones, meanwhile, are smoked, dried, and turned into a jus for an empanada made with meat from the fish head and collar along with mushrooms, foie gras, celery root, and quelites, a wild green foraged in Mexico.
Lobster Dip with yuzu gelee, celery, and crispy rice chips at Nami Nori
Lobsters with their shells, oranges with their peels, and leftover rice star here. The lobster dip has butter-poached meat finished with lobster-butter maltese (a citrusy hollandaise), chopped chives, yuzu gelee, celery, and shichimi pepper. To make it, chef Takahiro Sakaeda extracts the lobster meat from the shells and poaches it in butter. Then he infuses the butter with reserved shells, as well as blood-orange peels, and uses it all to make the sauce. Crisp rice chips are made with unserved sushi rice, boiled into a paste, spread thinly, dehydrated, and fried.
Corn-husk grits at June
Jaye Witham, chef at this Cobble Hill wine bar (and sister to Rhodora, the city’s original no-waste destination), decided to utilize the entire ear of corn — from husk to kernel to cob — to make grits. The grits themselves are made of corn husk; the kernels are roasted, and the cob gets turned into a purée. The corn is finished with charred nectarines, Jimmy Nardello peppers and micro cilantro, a garnish that’s been swiped from other menu items so as to further reduce waste.
Butternut sassafras soda with maple sorbet at the Musket Room
“When cooking in a restaurant, especially fine-dining, there is a lot of waste,” says Musket Room chef Camari Mick. “For example, sometimes there needs to be a specific cut for vegetables. As chefs, it is our responsibility to not have obscene amounts of waste.” For her No Waste recipe, Mick juices a whole butternut squash, then takes the remaining pulp, blends it until it’s smooth, freezes it, and turns it into a sorbet with a Pacojet. “It’s really a frozen butternut-squash-maple purée,” she explains, “but it has the consistency of a sorbet.”
Pomme gâteau at Le Crocodile
Chefs love a perfect dice, but the hidden side of showcase knifework is lots of leftover trim. Chef Aidan O’Neal goes through four to eight quarts of cubed apples per service for his Waldorf salad and a crab-and-avocado appetizer. O’Neal turns the scraps into apple cake, served at breakfast and brunch. “We pay for our waste to be picked up by the pound,” he says, “and it’s far more beneficial if the food we buy, store, transform, and cook leaves through the front door of the restaurant in a satisfied guest, rather than out the back door and into a garbage truck.”
The Hunger Tales:
Bakudapan Food Study Group, an eight-woman collective founded in 2015 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia have created a board game to illuminate the factors that contribute to a food crisis.
The group studies the social, political, cultural, and environmental conditions that contribute to food insecurity and scarcity. They then work to bring this research to a wider audience through international art exhibitions, public programming and performance, independent publication, and communal gastronomic practice. The board game ‘The Hunger Tales’ is another piece of this and an exploration into how to combine play with education to try to create space for urgent discussions. MOLD Magazine explored this project and the work the group is doing last month.
“The Hunger Tales revolves around a few stakeholders that players can play as: Mayor, a proxy for the policymaker, Wholesaler, the food distribution middleman, and two farmers with different back stories that should influence their decision-making process... For each turn, a player draws an Event card, which dictates the conditions for playing. These dealt cards affect the luck and chances of each player. These cards include global ‘trends’, ‘phenomenons’, and possibilities to ‘deal’ and ‘sabotage’. The winner is the player who accumulates the most ‘gold’, but winning also comes with effects on the wider ecosystem. The game allows for ‘real-life’ situations to occur such as “the Mayor and Wholesaler usually tend to gain more Gold than Farmers, with the rounds giving them an upper hand by way of capital-holding such as the Mayor’s salary, although the Farmer’s amount of Gold to meet as a winning condition is set lower than the rest.”
The design draws from “various references from the vast landscape of Indonesian design vernacular: food packaging, food stall and restaurant signage, propaganda posters, news of absurd and wasteful “food influencers” with gluttony for expensive meals, humorous tributes… and subtle political satires.” which make it vivid and genuinely engaging. Despite the seriousness of the theme, the players also have fun playing it.
Since its first debut at the 2021 Asian Art Biennial it has been exhibited across the world, most recently at Bakudapan’s residency at the Singapore Art Museum.
Hungry Work:
Speaking of the intersection between food and social movements, Lola Olufemi black feminist writer, researcher, and organizer from London wrote an essay for the substack Vittles.
“Domestic work, and cooking in particular, has always been a sustaining force for radical social movements: the transformation of any social and political landscape is hungry work. Food is a focal point around which communities under threat solidify their interdependence, not only bringing people together but also structuring how they relate to each other, providing parameters for frequent meeting and exchange.”
Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, Black and racialized women’s organizations prioritized social reproduction in communities (caring labor, cooking, cleaning, and emotional support). All of which uphold and allow the existence of social work to create change.
“Food was a means of recruitment, an invitation to step away from the state and towards one another, a balm for the soul while the world outside the estate walls continued to crumble.”
She also goes on to talk about the lessons we can learn from the grassroots collectives of the 1970s and 1980s in today’s society, and the current food crises and shortages in the UK. “What and how we eat is intimately tied to our social condition and our capacity for transformative action.”
The Nigerian food boom:
The BBC published an article claiming “Nigerian cooking that are rapidly moving into the mainstream of UK dining” which is exciting!
“The Nigerian foodservice market is estimated to be worth $10bn in 2024 and is expected to reach $17bn in 2029.”
A combination of a growing Nigerian population in the UK, social media and the expansion of people’s knowledge and curiosity of food from different cultures, and some well-known Nigerian celebrities, have all contributed to this change.
Dua Lipa (notoriously always on holiday) published a piece in her newsletter Service 95 ‘The Best Traditional Dishes To Eat In Abuja & Where To Find Them’ (Abuja being the capital of Nigeria.)
Some Nigerian dishes to to try in Abuja according to Muneera Tahir, a chef, food consultant and author of the cookbook Nigerian Food Plating:
Masa – “A fermented rice cake with a spongy texture.”
Dambu – “Similar to couscous, but made with tsaki [maize]. Dambu made with broken rice [grilled and chopped rice] is called dambun shinkafa, while dambu made with shredded meat is dambu nama.”
Suya – “Skewered meat.”
Sinasir with suya – “A type of rice pancake.”
How to feel visible:
I’ve shared some of Jenna (J) Wortham’s writing from the New York Times Magazine in this newsletter. It wasn’t until recently I read their essay about becoming sober and the challenges of this journey, particularly finding spaces for people of color. They wrote a beautiful, vulnerable essay in The Small Bow about it titled ‘How to feel visible’.
“It was reassuring to talk about race and gender as instigators of our addictions and support systems for our recovery. How learning to love the self meant learning to love your gender expression and your complexion and all the other elements of selfhood.”
“I was learning and unlearning in the same breath. I felt relaxed in a way that I hadn’t in the other meetings I’d attended.”
Wine and album pairing:
It’s time for another album and wine pairing. An album I have had playing all December and January has been The Japanese House’s In the End It Always Does. The perfect mix of smooth hazy sounds, emotional lyricism and danceability.
The big theme here was really balancing the sad and humbling themes in the lyrics with the pop-like and hopeful dance sounds, a true dichotomy in artistry. I jumped at pairing a Vouvray, (an always stunning chenin blanc from the Loire Valley in France). I wanted to hone in on something fuller bodied, which is always by go-to for bigger and emotional themes in music. (Think about the classic pairing of a roaring fireplace during the holidays when there’s cooler weather and big emotions - most folks lean into their bigger reds like Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Tannat, etc.) But there’s contrast here, there’s that dichotomy with the sounds of dance-pop cutting through the heavier emotions. Vouvray provides that ripping acidity and crushing stone fruit and honey giving much need levity to the fuller bodied wine helping that wine, well… dance - on your palate.
Cheers!
Thanks for reading!
Carlie xx