hello, food world
I just quit my job as a software engineer to become a chef. I’m starting a plant-based culinary program in 2 weeks.
I got into tech over a decade ago, when I was finishing college and the NYC scene was small — the era of Gawker parties, Foursquare hackathons, and the New York Tech Meetup. I learned Ruby-on-Rails and started a company with a college friend. Startups felt more like art projects then. It was before there was so much money in the industry that all the founders and VCs who should’ve been bankers were still actually bankers. The power dynamics and economics of the rest of the world hadn’t yet matured on the web, and it felt like a different place. It felt like anything was possible and everything was important. It felt like a turning point that a lot hinged on, and who knows, maybe it was. If so, then we fucked up.
Anyway, plenty of people have written about that. The thing is that it’s hard to separate the arc of an industry from the arc of your twenties when they happened at the same time. I was idealistic in a way that made sense at the time. Then at some point every tech company around me was a monolith that either couldn’t get anything done or actively made the world worse in the name of poorly-conceived aphorisms. I tried opting for non-tech organizations whose usage of technology was boring but not harmful. Outside of work (or during work) I was still reading Twitter for some reason but had become allergic to hustleporn which made it very painful. I muted the word “startup” and blocked people with bios like, “Making the world suck a little less” (because that’s how you know they are for sure making the world suck more). I got better at corporate garbage language and tried to get excited about the professional goal of being an engineering manager at a not-shitty organization.
Throughout it all, I’d been cooking and throwing dinner parties. In the early years these were sort of networking events for tech and media acquaintances, a cheap way to have people over and talk breathlessly about the future over bottles of two-buck chuck. As I got older and the world I thought I lived in simultaneously dissolved and exploded around me, cooking became a refuge from the Internet and my jittery mind, the only thing that could focus and calm me.
I first started to think about cooking as a job while working at the ill-fated Pilotworks, a startup that operated shared kitchens for small food-makers. For the first time in many years I was around people who called themselves entrepreneurs and I didn’t roll my eyes. At least they were making real things. And there was an energy among them that reverberated with me. They were talking about issues I cared about, like sustainable food systems, and it sounded like the market was paying attention. Anecdotally, it seems like more people are attempting to reduce their meat consumption and are more aware of where their food comes from and what it’s made of. And then on a larger scale, Burger King, White Castle, and Dunkin Donuts don’t just decide to offer meatless burgers out of environmental responsibility. It feels like the way we eat is finally, slowly, beginning to change.
I’ve been vegetarian for most of my life and have quietly pursued the goal of convincing the people around me that they didn’t need meat by cooking really good plant-based food. But I didn’t think it was reasonable to consider a career in food if I didn’t want to become a meat expert and I didn’t even know there was a plant-based culinary school until one day I decided to google it (duh). The Natural Gourmet Institute was founded in 1977 by Annemarie Colbin, who focused her curriculum on food that is primarily whole, local, seasonal, organic, and that makes sense for a particular geography. After she passed away five years ago, the school became incorporated into the Institute for Culinary Education. When I made the decision to enroll, it scared the shit out of me but also filled me with relief.
I couldn’t be more excited to start, but is it because I’m pursuing a lifelong passion or is it the intoxicating vertigo of table-flipping a career? Who doesn’t dream — in a conference room, walking through the fiscal year’s KPIs — of opening a bakery, arising in the darkness to put your hands in dough, the smell of egg-washed buns as the morning light filters through the windows? Those are nice fantasies, but not a basis for life-decisions. I know I love to cook but will I love to do it all day every day? In a kitchen run by other people, who may be incompetent, narcissistic, misogynistic? How will I feel losing the title of “programmer” and whatever social importance that conveys? Not to mention the salary and benefits. I’m lucky to even be able to consider this. But am I making a terrible mistake?
I’ve been struggling with those questions, and this newsletter will partly be a place for figuring them out. I’ll also try to share what I’m learning in school, some cooking tips, a recipe every week, and some of my favorite passages from the books I’m reading about food systems, agriculture, and the environment (please send me recommendations!). I imagine most entries will not be as long.
What I’m reading
The Third Plate, by Dan Barber
Farm-to-table allows, even celebrates, a kind of cherry-picking of ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow…Farm-to-table may sound right - it’s direct and connected - but really the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around. It makes good agriculture difficult to sustain.
I have some issues with Dan Barber (maybe I’ll get into them later), but for the most part, The Third Plate is really good. It explores problems with mainstream agriculture that I haven’t thought about much, like the idea that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are addressing symptoms rather than root causes of crop failure, and introduced me to some of the principles of permaculture and organic farming that seek to address those root causes. The book also got me thinking about cuisine as it maps to geography and how becoming a really good cook is related to knowing a place and its annual patterns very well.
Barber goes on to proclaim that he will invent a new cuisine that supports good agriculture. This is an audacious goal for a successful chef/restauranteur, and for an individual like me doesn’t really feel accessible. I don’t have a relationship with any farms outside of buying what’s for sale at the farmer’s market, and can barely grow tomatoes on our fire escape. I also wonder if looking to thousand-year-old cuisines as models makes sense today, because of the various ways our natural resources are changing (and thinning) more rapidly than a cuisine can evolve. But I know I have a lot to learn about crops, particularly those native to New York and the northeast, and that by understanding and using them better, I will probably make food that tastes better and works better for our bodies.