Dining With Michael Pollan

We talked about everything: books that shaped us, people we admire, foods we hate ...and his pet pig. Also, an astonishing wedding feast. And food you can wear.

Scrabbling through a bookshelf the other day I came upon this article from 2013; Smithsonian Magazine asked me to sit down with Michael Pollan to discuss his new book, Cooked. As you can see, we covered a wide range of topics from a pig named Kosher to worker’s rights and the delights of disgust. We could have talked all night. Won’t you join us at the table?

(By the way, Bell and Anchor, the restaurant where we were dining, is now called The Prairie Whale. It is still owned by Mark Firth, and other than the name very little has changed).

After that happy story from what now seems like a faraway land - an optimistic time when we thought Americans were going to be “paying more attention to the workers -I suggest you read Hannah Goldfield’s recent piece in the New Yorker. It’s about what the brutal ICE raids are doing to restaurants- and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

That conversation took place in 2013, so I went looking for a menu from that year. And look what I found!

Sunday, July 7, 2013
Francis Lam and Christine Gaspar were married last night in the most moving wedding ceremony I've ever attended. We gathered on a New York rooftop for the vows, and their love for each other shone so brightly that I'm pretty sure the skyline grew momentarily blurred for all of us.

Afterward we trooped downstairs for a menu prepared by some of America's most celebrated chefs. The food was wonderful, but what really struck me was that fifty years from now this menu will speak volumes about the way we ate in 2013.

The first dish to hit the the table was grilled octopus with cauliflower dreamed up by Grant Achatz, Dave Beran and Eric Rivera.

It may not look like much, but it danced joyfully about in the mouth, a little waltz of flavor and texture. It was followed by Swiss chard with chocolate and Chinese black beans that was fresh and utterly surprising.

Next came this “oyster salad”….

featuring salsify, which is sometimes known as "oyster plant." Indeed, the cream-colored root had a flavor so surprisingly saline I could have been convinced it came straight from the sea.

We went on to braised seaweed with tofu and pumpkin, another little dance of textures, followed by broccoli rabe with dried tomato and lemon, a refreshingly bitter mouthful. That was followed by quinoa with mushrooms and chickpeas, courtesy of Andrew Carmellini and Zach Dunham.

I imagine you're getting the theme: the food walked a vegetarian path, with a few significant deviations (extraordinary roast pig and duck from Yi Lee).

This menu is a remarkable snapshot of the way America is eating at this very moment. It's not just that the food reflects the backgrounds of the bride and groom - his Chinese ancestry, her Portuguese - but also how many of the guests eschew meat and fret about gluten. The result is a menu that is ethnically diverse, primarily plant based, borrowed from many cultures - and utterly original.

There was nothing traditional about the plating either: the food was served Chinese take-out style, a raft of little white boxes arriving on the tables with each course.

This dish from Danny Bowien was the exception: it came in little plastic tubs.

Pea shoots in a pumpkin broth so deliciously intense that, despite the weather (it was 90 degrees outside), I couldn't stop eating. I loved the schmaltz rice he and Angela Dimayuga served alongside; it looked innocent, but the rice was laced with chicken fat, sparked with lime and zinged with little rounds of radish.

The wedding cake? You surely were not expecting a multi-tiered white confection with a tiny bride and groom on top. Instead there were more little white containers, each holding a salted chocolate buckwheat cookie (gluten-free) nestled beneath the classic culinary marriage of China and Portugal: rich, flaky, egg custard tarts, the dim sum that arrived in China via Macau, courtesy of the Portuguese.

Leaving we were each handed a final little white box containing tiny jars of Ashley Christensen’s pimento cheese. It made a fantastic breakfast

Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves; I wear my food around my neck.

The people at Delicacies make all manner of different food necklaces (pasta is a particular speciality), which come in sterling, gold and gold-plate. Best of all, they’re on a mission to end hunger, and each purchase feeds people in need.

This particular necklace provided 50 meals.

They’re nicely packaged too….