Photo by Cole Breiland

Lakehead hears about the cutting-edge of food

Cole Breiland

Photo and Graphics Editor

Students and faculty got a chance to hear about home cooking and the latest haut-couture in food.

The event hosted speaker Peter Trnka, author of Best of Czech Cooking; author Alissa Hamilton was unable to attend due to a delayed flight, although her new book Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice was available for sale.

“I am in a position where I have given all my life to food, but I am now rather scared by and intimidated by food, and don’t quite know what good food or good cooking is.”

Trnka was born in Czechloslovakia during the Cold War, but moved with his family at the age of four to London, England.

He began cooking at the age of eight. He was propelled both by his mother’s underdeveloped cooking talent, and his growing obsession to control what he ate.

He recalled cooking meals beside his mother as she prepared the family meal. His obsession often led him to cook the same dish for entire weeks at a time.

By the age of twelve, he was creating four-course dinners for his father and his coworkers. Around that age, he remembers his sister commenting that while the food tasted great, it all looked the same. From that point on Trnka began to think about how visuals were important to cooking.

Trnka very nearly became a cook, but did not want to study the business aspect, and so studied Philosophy.

Trnka said he finds it much easier to write about food than philosophy, due to his lifetime of experience with it, remarking that he has more cookbooks than books on philosophy published.

In his current thinking on food he wrestles with the questions about the importance of ritual, dangers in making food, and other factors that make food good.

He sees two modern food revolutions that have interesting similarities and differences.

Slow food is a movement to counter society’s fast food culture, characterized a preparing home cooked food from scratch, and eating together. The movement seeks to re-establish the importance of ritual in eating, and to avoid the health effects of heavily processed food.

Molecular gastronomy is the application of science and chemistry to cooking to create newly refined tastes. It uses science to develop optimized cooking techniques, such as salting and brining meat, and then cooking it for two days at 150 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in incredibly tender and succulent meat. Other common techniques include turning food into gels and molding them into an alternate form, like a strawberry turned into a banana, using liquid nitrogen for freezing, or juxtaposing ideas about food, like making escargot ice cream.

While both are labour-intensive approaches to food, they each present different ideas about what good food is. While molecular gastronomy seems the epitome of food processing, it similarly rejects the homogenization and degradation in quality that results from mass processing.

So where are ideas about food going? Trnka is not totally sure, but sees the popularity of cooking food in mass media as an indication of food is consuming our culture.