https://chmararosinke.com chmara.rosinke Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:48:57 +0000 https://chmararosinke.com en https://chmararosinke.com/Brot-Baking-futures Fri, 12 May 2023 08:29:46 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/Brot-Baking-futures Brot: Baking the future Austrian Pavilion at London Design Biennale 1-25 June 2023 A loaf or slice of bread may seem simple, but there is a curious complexity to the matter of bread. From geopolitical contexts to microbiological processes to multi- sensory experiences, bread and bread making can open up a whole new universe and pathway for transformative design practices. Together with the curator Thomas Geisler, the design duo Chmara.Rosinke addresses and explores the complexity of bread in this year’s Austrian pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2023. Bread is eaten daily in Austria and many countries around the world. This staple food is often a main source of nutrition. In the Global North, bread is usually taken for granted and food scarcity is rarely addressed – its geopolitical implications, or the impact on the social stability of individual countries. In recent years, there has been a cultural surge around bread. Bakeries that look like sleek boutiques are popping up in urban areas, and home bakers are handling the subject of sourdough with almost scientific meticulousness, sparking a private war against the heavily industrialised production of bread. The psychological stress of the global pandemic lockdowns has only intensified the incipient hype of bread baking. What can we learn from this complex and fascinating subject area in relation to the discipline of design? Education about fermentation is one – it has cultural and historical origins in bread and beer. This process is more widespread in the medical technology and food industry than we may think. In the form of precision fermentation, mankind is making even greater use of the capabilities of microorganisms and will revolutionise food and material production in the coming years. But above all, bread as a product and its production is emotionally charged. The focus of the Austria pavilion is on the sensory experience of bread. The colour, shape, tactile properties, smell, and taste of a freshly baked loaf are just as important as the sensuality of the process. Dough processing and bread baking are multi-sensory experiences that have therapeutic qualities and can achieve a whole new significance in our time as a cultural technique and source of inspiration in a transformative design practice. <img width="2362" height="3150" width_o="2362" height_o="3150" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0fb0c99ce7cf11f97cb21641725c697119462d28522b2697edccb4d9f7b2359/LDB23_Austria_3_TW_small.jpg" data-mid="180925959" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0fb0c99ce7cf11f97cb21641725c697119462d28522b2697edccb4d9f7b2359/LDB23_Austria_3_TW_small.jpg" /><img width="5600" height="3733" width_o="5600" height_o="3733" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/69e8576dcfe0fe6cccdae7e189b7455e85b6676a95635c5b0fc7424402a9046a/LDB23_Austria_2_TW.jpg" data-mid="180925946" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/69e8576dcfe0fe6cccdae7e189b7455e85b6676a95635c5b0fc7424402a9046a/LDB23_Austria_2_TW.jpg" /> <img width="1516" height="2000" width_o="1516" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c100b0d4c007486eb8416eea44f2de167637d4833e3b28bf442b6104311ba18/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020444_2_small.jpg" data-mid="184096951" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6c100b0d4c007486eb8416eea44f2de167637d4833e3b28bf442b6104311ba18/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020444_2_small.jpg" /><img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54e523179408c537ebc0a986d8d954b777dc28a3813cfa809ccefbf4bec92a6d/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020460_2_small.jpg" data-mid="184096965" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54e523179408c537ebc0a986d8d954b777dc28a3813cfa809ccefbf4bec92a6d/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020460_2_small.jpg" /><img width="1000" height="1333" width_o="1000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e3ba6a7743c74c9853fde484751106afa8dbd0e3928ff19411d3b3f20cdc0996/P1020587_.jpg" data-mid="184097238" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e3ba6a7743c74c9853fde484751106afa8dbd0e3928ff19411d3b3f20cdc0996/P1020587_.jpg" /><img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/78049791fef4d95ea80e5a5bcc6218f7be76c2ff7f93c2e042c09026e8c0c336/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020465_2_small.jpg" data-mid="184096968" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/78049791fef4d95ea80e5a5bcc6218f7be76c2ff7f93c2e042c09026e8c0c336/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020465_2_small.jpg" /><img width="3456" height="5184" width_o="3456" height_o="5184" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57821c8fa0cd245e97e46d7680ac41705a4790b0a003fed514389154f3f76f27/IMG_7447.jpg" data-mid="184097522" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/57821c8fa0cd245e97e46d7680ac41705a4790b0a003fed514389154f3f76f27/IMG_7447.jpg" /><img width="1334" height="2000" width_o="1334" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b1827f40f6023488372445e05ed5766a2a5f87f408e1fb93b62a5bb3660bc037/20230602_IMG_6351-HDR_cmarkuszahradnik_small.jpg" data-mid="184097634" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b1827f40f6023488372445e05ed5766a2a5f87f408e1fb93b62a5bb3660bc037/20230602_IMG_6351-HDR_cmarkuszahradnik_small.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa4a2825b65e59a840cad06f9118e88b1db4997b46cff3ea825616a7cef3a53c/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020550_2small.jpg" data-mid="184097670" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aa4a2825b65e59a840cad06f9118e88b1db4997b46cff3ea825616a7cef3a53c/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020550_2small.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/540fdc134c10cf32f0ae2968a26a359a50298c3ef2fc9988d322fbe68892c501/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020457_3_SMALL.jpg" data-mid="184097653" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/540fdc134c10cf32f0ae2968a26a359a50298c3ef2fc9988d322fbe68892c501/BROT_chmararosinke_P1020457_3_SMALL.jpg" /> Three&nbsp;speculative scenarios :&nbsp; Our society, culture and therein specifically architecture is based on the fact that mankind has started to bake bread and brew beer. The three speculative scenarios we show in the exhibition "BROT: Baking the future" are by no means dystopian visions of the future, but rather alternative realities that put our own existence and the use of bread in a different light. 1. Bakers and Gatherers The "Bakers and Gatherers" are a technology-critical society who, in a world affected by&nbsp;climate change and pollution, see the only way&nbsp;to restore balance in the world, is in gathering&nbsp;the ingredients for their bread. They live in small societies of 10-15people, where each person plays an important role in the process of gathering as well as baking. They are also strict about not having too many children so as not to upset the balance. The breads are seasonal and are prepared with water&nbsp;harvested from birch trees and thus purified. Other ingredients are mealworms, which settle in the flour anyway, and other insects they find seasonally.&nbsp;The insects enrich the bread with proteins. Since&nbsp;the grain for the flour is also gathered wild, many&nbsp;alternative grains such as buckwheat have to be used in addition to classic cultivated grains such&nbsp;as wheat or spelt. The incorporation of seasonal wild herbs such as wild garlic or dandelion and the temperature differences in fermentation bring great seasonal differences to the breads. The bread is worked in a circle with a small cut. Exactly this shape corresponds to the shape of the baked breads. The bread is baked in a solar oven with stone storage, so that bread can also be produced on sun-free days. Electricity and other newer technologies are only used in exceptional cases in the form of solar cells&nbsp;and a specific multitool. This multi-tool serves as a&nbsp;helper in gathering, cutting, chopping, but it also includes a scanner to check the food for parasites, which have become a greaterthreat due to climate change. Electronic components are obtained through bartering with the Cyber Yeast Society and the Brotonists. 2. Brotonists The "Brotonists" is a quiet, somewhat conservative baking society that has a cult-like reverence for bread and the process of baking. Once a week, everyone lines up in front of the main building where the ingredients rye, spelt, emmer, wheat, water and salt are distributed. Each person receives the same ingredients. Nevertheless, the society is strongly characterised by hierarchies. Due to the differences in the microbiome of the people baking, different breads are produced with the same ingredients. Even if this can be influenced by therapies, these people are less respected. Status symbols of this&nbsp;society are the oven and the sourdough shrine.&nbsp;A piece of furniture to precisely temper different sourdoughs and maintain the perfect humidity. The reverence for the process of baking bread is evident in the beautifully crafted bread-making tools. Everything is crafted from silver fir, which has antibacterial properties, and hornbeam, which is also used to make gears for mills. The highest art form of this society is the scoring of the bread. Each loaf has its own pattern: cross, circle, curved line and the rye bread, of course, burst open. The art here lies in simplicity and perfection. Everyone is allowed to bake, but the ceremonial scoring is left to the head of the family. To relax, the members of this society listen to different bread crusts in their bread player or smell different mixtures of ingredients. The shape of the yeast is celebrated with vessels or ceremonial proofing baskets. Once a year, all bread doughs are put into the ceremonial "mother yeast" and fermented in it. The individual microorganisms and individual doughs partly mix in this process. 3. Cyber Yeast Society The "Cyber Yeast Society" is a society of hedonistic loners. However, they meet once a day as a group in the "dough and sweat centre". Here they do fitness, while they work on dough, in the sense of multisensory experience and strive for physical and mental perfection. The time they spend changing clothes after training, showering and performing the prescribed sexual intercourse is enough to ferment and bake the enzymatically modified dough. Through regular genetic sequencing of their microbiome, an individual supplementary sourdough is mixed, enriched with various necessary microorganisms. The yeasts used in the sourdough are genetically modified and able to ferment microplastics from the environment into proteins. The wheat is Crispr modified to achieve the ideal texture and crust-to-crumb ratio, but also to provide vitamins and nutrients that are otherwise lacking in this bread diet. Depending on their social status, individuals in the society receive better or worse drugs in their sourdough, or may also earn extra green breads in some cases. Their standard bread is black and rectangular. They carry it in a bread box strapped to straps around their upper body.&nbsp; <img width="2690" height="3588" width_o="2690" height_o="3588" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f9c9416c9f4500fd958ece216f3dbd97e7ec9a1cc7ffdf82f0c7f447d2fcd01/P1020577-Kopie.jpg" data-mid="184097270" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2f9c9416c9f4500fd958ece216f3dbd97e7ec9a1cc7ffdf82f0c7f447d2fcd01/P1020577-Kopie.jpg" /> The installation is just the starting point of the materialization of a research project on bread and baking as a cultural and aesthetic practice. We would like to grow our project over the next few years and create an interdisciplinary network that not only connects us through the fungi and microorganisms that live in symbiosis with us and help us make bread, but also provides potential for interdisciplinary work on the complex problems of our time in the context of ecologically responsible food security.&nbsp; We'd very much like to thank all supporters and partners of this project. Curator: Thomas Geisler (Design Campus, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) Main sponsor: Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Republic of Austria Support/Cooperation: Austrian Cultural Forum, LondonGerman Design CouncilGoethe Institute, LondonDesign Campus, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen DresdenOxford - UdK Berlin - Seedfunding for Creative Collaborations Photo and film: Markus Zahradnik Making of photo: Kuba Dabrowski Photo no 1, 2: Taran Wilkhu 3D print: Tim Schütze Sound: Mariano Rosales Sculpture: Marek Elsner General support : Marcus Naumann, Michal Pecko “The Bread-Paper” ( project newspaper) “The “Bread-Paper” has been initiated as part of the exhibition “BROT: baking the future”. This first issue includes interviews with key players from a broad range of different fields of knowledge, such as microbiology, psychology, agriculture, art, the bread-making industry, and geography. The objective of the “Bread-Paper” is to reveal the complexity of bread and bread-making. However, the “Bread-Paper” by no means lays claim to being complete; instead, it aims to present ongoing explorations of the intricacy of bread worlds.” Editorial: Maciej Chmara, Dr. Hannah Varga, Anna Rosinke Graphic design: Ortner etc. Interviews with: Lisa Kappel, Helmut Gragger, Klara Czerniewska-Andryszczyk, Josef Weghaupt, Karl de Smedt, Friedrich Longin, Regine Schönlechner, Heinrich Grausgruber, Corinne Mynatt, Sang-hyeok Lee, Jessica Barnes, Charles Spence, Lexie Smith, Rob Dunn, Sudeep Agarwala <img width="2421" height="3508" width_o="2421" height_o="3508" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc181b525fa570804e8566c64e20b5557e221f3460413d76de9c31ae711b0e0e/1.jpg" data-mid="184098477" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dc181b525fa570804e8566c64e20b5557e221f3460413d76de9c31ae711b0e0e/1.jpg" /><img width="2421" height="3508" width_o="2421" height_o="3508" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6d7550748df626b288c6c17a9fd3d581743aa00195e437f74d25f0c9e6c43f7e/bread-show104.jpg" data-mid="184098898" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6d7550748df626b288c6c17a9fd3d581743aa00195e437f74d25f0c9e6c43f7e/bread-show104.jpg" /><img width="1080" height="1285" width_o="1080" height_o="1285" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ab36182bdef619d8442d9018d1f8a93fe2c28718474d8c07d86c4c6d62fdc0c3/braeds-slices.jpg" data-mid="184099803" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ab36182bdef619d8442d9018d1f8a93fe2c28718474d8c07d86c4c6d62fdc0c3/braeds-slices.jpg" /><img width="1076" height="1279" width_o="1076" height_o="1279" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5f5e827620286796bffdd1fa3bb778d1b163cecf70ead378602f06de268b21a/sclices.jpg" data-mid="184099889" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e5f5e827620286796bffdd1fa3bb778d1b163cecf70ead378602f06de268b21a/sclices.jpg" /><img width="1068" height="1299" width_o="1068" height_o="1299" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0823a4ac3131df77a0d8ecab6b21d251c73bee28a00a1de17f5502382d8c3872/top-views2.jpg" data-mid="184100174" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0823a4ac3131df77a0d8ecab6b21d251c73bee28a00a1de17f5502382d8c3872/top-views2.jpg" /><img width="1070" height="1321" width_o="1070" height_o="1321" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0f436a9f98c546e67dcf146c019590c8c052e4d675b2adf9f79deaf463fe889/top-views.jpg" data-mid="184100175" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0f436a9f98c546e67dcf146c019590c8c052e4d675b2adf9f79deaf463fe889/top-views.jpg" /> https://chmararosinke.com/The-Cooking-Ape-Institute Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:48:57 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/The-Cooking-Ape-Institute The Cooking Ape Institute Neowranghamism - the society of food preparation. &nbsp; (A fictional Interview, that was developed in the frame of the MUSAE residency. The references to scientists and chefs in this text are used in the context of designing a possible and make no claim to scientific correctness. This text has to be seen as a project in the context of speculative design and not as a paper in the scientific understanding). Abstract: In an increasingly digitalized society, the physical and psychological needs of sensory activities are often neglected. In evolutionary terms, the human brain corresponds to the brain of a person from several thousand years ago and is not prepared for the strong visual focus that digitalization brings to our everyday lives. Our senses provide us with orientation and mental balance. However, the way they work cannot be separated from each other; it is always an interplay of several senses that allows us to perceive the world. In psychology, this is known as a multi-sensory experience and is particularly prominent in the culinary world, where haptics, acoustics, olfactory, gustatory and visual senses create a shared experience. Just as the senses were considered separately for a long time, we are still separating the individual areas of nutrition and are unable to create a holistic approach. The modernist image of the body as a machine that needs fuel is only slowly being overcome. We may still be in our infancy when it comes to understanding the complex world of the microbiome and its influence on our physical and mental wellbeing, but at least we are now aware of it. More and more start-ups, insurance companies and politicians in the healthcare sector are taking an interest in the umbrella term “food as medicine” and personalized nutrition. However, thinking one step further and considering nutrition in the wider context of preparation reveals even greater potential. This isn’t just about cooking directly, as cooking primarily really describes the heating of food. It’s about the general cultural technique and aesthetic practice of preparing food. Looking at the preparation of food in evolutionary terms, we could argue that our fine motor skills and the development of various technologies and the handling of new materials are strongly linked to the preparation of food. While in the past, preparing meals and cooking was a very arduous activity that led to the need for more and more automation, in today’s Western society, where a large part of the population spends a lot of time in front of screens, working with food can take on a completely different significance in the context of mental equalization. In addition to the multi-sensory aspects of preparing food, especially when working with sourdough or other fermented products, there is a microbial exchange that can benefit both the product and the person cooking it. Cooking can take on a whole new role in our society through a holistic approach, with the cornerstones being personalised nutrition, environmentally friendly nutrition (such as the Planetary Health Diet) and mental health through multi-sensory perception during the preparation process. This concept, leading to improved mental and physical health, is by no means the romanticisation of grandma cooking. This goal can be achieved through the latest technological developments in brain wave analysis, AI-driven recipe development and microbiome sequencing. Maciej Chmara (M.C.): Dear Prof Coctione, Ten years ago, you founded the Cooking Ape Institute at KUH University in cooperation with other universities and established the Neo-Wranghamism Society. A society interested in the aesthetic practice and cultural technique of food preparation. Laying the foundation stone for the interdisciplinary and inter-university institute was a revolution at that time and controversial among experts. However, the doubts were quickly dispelled and there were many imitators. Can you tell us something about the foundation and why the concept was so revolutionary back then? Prof. Coctione (P.C.): First of all I need to explain the term cooking. We have used the term cooking, although back then it was classically defined in the context of heated, meaning cooked food. Different cultural techniques of food preparation like fermentation or dough making where not included in today’s holistic understanding of the term. So please excuse me, when I mix these terms in the interview, back to your question… There were indeed many upheavals in those years. To explain the founding of the institute, I will have to expand a little on the status quo of research at the time. Personalized nutrition was still a marginal phenomenon and genetic sequencing of the gut microbiome was not yet accessible to everyone. Ultra-processed food was not only widespread but also the main source of nutrition in many countries. The first studies on the health risks posed by these foods were slow to emerge. Glyphosate, which even then was suspected of causing cancer and, as we now know, has a strong negative influence on our intestinal flora, was not only permitted but was also used on a large scale in agriculture. Glyphosate residues were found for example in over 90% of flour samples at the time. There was too little political will and too much lobbying for politicians to intervene. The average meat consumption in Western societies was around 600% higher than it is today and was of course not at all compatible with the Planetary Health Diet. The global population was recovering from more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic with lockdowns, and the socio-psychological consequences of these were not even foreseeable. The climate situation seemed hopeless, and despite global efforts, no decision could be made to phase out fossil fuels. Artificial intelligence was still in its infancy and, like the entire highly inefficient and chaotic digital world, consumed vast amounts of energy. It was a time to bury our heads in the sand. Some of these problems have still not been solved today, but at least we have made some progress in terms of social policy and have been able to establish solutions. I don't want to digress too much, but it's important to remember this time. In society as a whole, many negative developments could be observed especially in the health of young people. Humans developed more and more intolerances, some of which were only imaginary, mostly when it came to wheat, gluten, or lactose. Initially, the imaginary intolerances were ignored in the sense of classical medicine. The term orthorexia, meaning the phobia of unhealthy food, was coined at the time. As mentioned earlier, we were also only at the beginning when it came to researching the microbiome. The influence of ultra-processed foods and pesticides on our microbiome has also been poorly investigated to date. An interesting indicator of why we might want to do more research in this area was that in richer countries we could see a stunting of the microbiome. There seemed to be little pieces of the puzzle everywhere that somehow fit together but didn't quite fit yet. At the same time, the press spoke of the Anxiety Generation among young people, partly due to social anxiety, on which two years of COVID lockdowns certainly had their influence, as well as the shift of social contacts to the digital sphere. The phenomenon of AI friends only worsened this development. Of course, this all sounds very dystopian now and there were also good things during this time, but I have to clarify where our starting point was. M.C.: Not exactly optimistic. P.C.: Unfortunately, things didn't look any better for younger schoolchildren when it came to social stress or the rapidly spreading picky eater syndrome, which wasn't taken seriously at first. The development of fine motor skills also became a major problem. Yes, many children could not hold their pens properly because they spent hours every day with tablets or phones. An interesting phenomenon of the "Anxiety Generation" was the millions of ASMR videos on YouTube and other social media that were consumed to calm down. ASMR had also found its way into pop music with musicians like Billie Eilish. Of course, even back then there were already cries that the digital social and working world was bringing these problems with it. But new devices and technologies just seemed too attractive to pass up. We all know that, in the end, political intervention was necessary in the area of technology. I shouldn't digress too much and come to the boil soon. We had a lot of discussions with our team of food enthusiasts about how we might solve some of these problems and we didn't realize how interconnected everything was. Identifying problems in the food sector was quickly done. But cooking itself was not taken seriously by many scientists who were interested in food. They were still too attached to the idea that cooking was only a means to an end. There was no homogeneous development in cooking in society and many contradictory studies. On the one hand, young people, in particular, were increasingly eating out in restaurants, having food delivered or buying other forms of prepared meals, while at the same time, there were also groups that cooked more complicated multi-course meals and focussed on perfecting sourdough-bread baked at home. On the face of it, it seemed a contradiction in terms that everyday normal cooking was absent, but people were meeting up to cook a 13-course menu by some Michelin star chef at home or watching hours of videos on perfect bread dough folding techniques. "Normal" cooking had simply lost its meaning, seemed uninteresting, and was often rationalized away in stressful everyday life due to time constraints. You could say that we were the first generation for whom it was no longer economically worthwhile to cook. If you lived in a city, it was often cheaper to go out to eat than to cook for yourself. The freedom to choose and the responsibility coming with it shouldn’t be underestimated. M.C.: I don't want to interrupt you, but could you perhaps briefly explain who were the founding members of the team and why, what we take for granted today was so revolutionary? P.C.: Yes, of course. That will certainly help to clarify things a little. On the one hand, we had Anne Madden here, who was working on yeast research. She had led various projects on the symbiotic existence of yeasts and wasps and also a project with Rob Dunn to investigate the influence of the microbiome of the baker's hands on the dough. As we all know today, this does of course exist, but until then it was more of a myth. At the time, Anne Madden discovered by chance, actually by cross-checking a study, that the microorganisms already contained in the dough also have an influence on our skin’s microbiome and on digestion. The baker's microbiome seemed in our understanding back then, “unnatural" compared to non-baking people. At that time, the discourse on interspecies symbiosis or social co-existence emerged in the arts. With her research, Madden made an important contribution to the practical and medical understanding of the inter-species debate. Another scientist, Chris Callewaert, was developing microbiome therapies against pathological odor. It made sense to combine their research and the movement of sourdough bio-hacking or sourdough cyborgs was born. At first, this was a somewhat bizarre and esoteric group of people who worked on sourdough together in strange procedures or even bathed in it to model their microbiome - I admit, that I have also visited a couple of meetings. However, further scientific findings have supported this movement and managed to bring it into the mainstream in a modified form and make it what we know it today. Another member of our team and also one of the financiers of the institute was Naveen Jain, who at the time was better known for his internet and aerospace companies than for Viome. Today, Viome is the global market leader for personalized microbiome analytics but was just a start-up back then, which had its fair share of difficulties. Viome mainly made a profit from food supplements based on the results of its analyses and was more of a niche product for wealthy people. It was the introduction of these products on a large scale and the cooperation with state health insurance companies that changed the profile of this company. They also had a significant influence on the development of medical recipes based on AI. A small research team from the University of Oxford, which had also just been founded, joined the institute. Prof Charles Spence, founder of gastrophysics and head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, played a key role here. Today, as you know, he is celebrated as a pop star for his research in the field of multi-sensory experience. Also on board, alongside some Ph.D. students, was Philip Burnet, a pioneer when it comes to his findings on neurobiology and the microbiome, and of course Katarina Johnson, who put forward the following hypothesis very early on, I hope I am quoting her correctly here: „Similar to the 'hygiene hypothesis', which posits that an absence of microbes impairs immune system development, we propose that we may have evolved to depend on our microbes for normal brain function, such that a change in our gut microbiome could have effects on behavior. The plant-based movement became stronger and stronger in an ethical and ecological context. However, it was also associated with a healthy microbiome. Many fine dining chefs started to serve vegan food. Until that point, fine dining was still dominated by animal produce. Daniel Humm, who transformed his world-famous 3 Star Eleven Madison Park into a vegan restaurant, was also a founding member. Very soon more chefs, bakers and fermentation specialists like for example David Zilber joined our initiative. The BeMoBil Institute with Prof Gramann from the TU Berlin joined in cooperation with the University of Belgrade and the ETF. This was very important because they were able to help us analyze brain waves in the context of movements and prove our hypothesis of how important cooking is for the body and mind. It seems strange, but until then nobody had studied what happens in the brain during the process of food preparation. Artists, designers, synthetic biologists, agricultural researchers, experimental musicians, and many other scientists attended our meetings. I would like to mention the Austrian microbiologist Lisa Kappel. She was instrumental in reformulating cookery recipes. If you look at older cookery books, you only ever find ingredients and techniques, possibly chemistry. We aimed to present the microbiological aspects of cooking in the same way without making the recipe too complicated. It took a rethink to give the cooking, the aesthetic practice, and the microbial exchange the same value as the result, the cooked food. And well, I was there too, with a background in classical physiological medicine, but I've always been fascinated by cooking. I'm sure I've forgotten to mention plenty of other people and would like to apologize for that, but we were more of a think tank than a closed group. M.C.: We all know what that led to, but how did the institute become such a huge success so quickly and was able to influence large sections of society in such a short time? Dr. C.: First of all, I have to say that although the success is great, there is still a long way to go, we still don't understand many things and much of what we do understand has still not been implemented everywhere. So, there were all these problems, individual pieces of the puzzle that didn't fit together, and the problem that medicine and research, in general, were very specialized. This meant that classical doctors were not very interested in the psyche, psychologists had little knowledge of the body, there were many black sheep among nutritionists with abstruse theories and in the highly specialized research, neurobiologists, for example, did not talk to microbiologists. From today's perspective, this was madness. It was still the legacy of a modernist way of thinking. However, the development of AI in the field of science, such as System Pro, has helped to outline structural or thematic parallels and even bring together people from completely different branches of research. In a relatively short time, the previously specialized academia has opened up and cooperated in a much more interdisciplinary way in research and teaching. I would therefore like to summarize our key points here once again. Various physical and mental illnesses have emerged in a large part of society. An uncontrolled, chaotic, and, above all, unreflected digitalization of everything that could somehow be digitalized - many took neoliberalism too seriously. And the battle against climate change seemed to be lost - if we had acted more decisively back then, we would certainly be in a different situation today, but that's another topic. A large part of society developed fears, social phobias, food intolerances, and fascination with ASMR and there was a real hype around cookery shows and doughfluencers - I mean dough specialists on social media. In summary, it sounds a bit absurd, of course, but these were the approaches of our interdisciplinary group.&nbsp; Research into interspecies symbiosis developed rapidly and we began to understand the connections, perhaps not yet fully, but at least to surmise them. It became clear that the depletion of our microbiome had a strong influence on physical health and also a previously underestimated influence on mental health. Through regular genetic sequencing of the gut microbiome, diets could be individualized and adapted. Very soon, a niche product became a regular test available to everyone. The umbrella term, Food as Medicine, was on everyone's lips, but it was clear that this was only part of the solution. Just as in the "hygiene hypothesis", the team was convinced that food could not be separated from its preparation. Despite the latest findings, everyone still behaved as if the body was some kind of device that had to be refueled in order to function. The complexity of our existence could not be reflected in this modernist picture. If, depending on how we define cooking (preparation of food), we say that humans or their ancestors have been cooking for 800,000 to 1.9 million years, the process, in the meaning of the cultural technique or aesthetic practice, is just as much a part of human development as the food itself. This is also where our point of view differed from the classic "Cooking Ape" theory and so the concept of Neo-Wranghamism emerged more as a joke during a long team meeting and some bottles of was and really good orange wine. To summarize in one sentence, Wrangham attributed our brain growth and thus our development of more complex thinking to the easier digestibility of cooked food. Of course, Wrangham's theory is more complex and includes other physiological changes and the formation of social structures, as well as the definition of gender roles. The social role of eating together was also emphasized and was seen as laying the foundations for the development of language. But the link to the act of preparing food was never really closed. I speculate that it is also a late consequence of gender segregation. Even today, we still can't speak of equality and since everyday cooking seemed to be a woman's job for hundreds of thousands of years until recently, it was simply uninteresting, like many other domestic activities for male-dominated sciences. Only professionalized cooking was reserved for men until recently. Yet it is obvious that the development of tools, architecture, and, of course, later agriculture can be traced back to the way we gathered, hunted, and prepared food. As far as I've heard, Wrangham doesn't have much use for the term but is not averse to our complementary theory. We really could have come up with a better name, but oh well... Back on topic. Criticism of digital development has been around for a long time, with the help of recent developments in mobile EEGs, motion tracking, and easier interpretation of results by artificial intelligence, evidence has been provided that our senses are degenerating due to the lack of stimuli. It wasn't just that senses were gone, but their interaction was gone and the digital world, where anything was possible, was suddenly an empty dreary prison cell for a large part of our brain. Consuming ASMR videos, cookery shows, and observing sourdough influencers led to a kind of multi-sensory placebo effect or supplement drug for the brain, which is why it was so popular. However, it was only a bad copy of the real thing and did not have a positive influence on the development of cerebral grey matter and fine motor skills that complex manual skills can have. No other cultural technique can promote this as much as the preparation of food. Of course, there are also social aspects and many other things that we associate with cooking, but when the institute was founded, this was a milestone that had not previously played a major role in social discourse. Industry has tried to rationalize cooking further and further away and our research could lead to a rethink. When it became clear how important the interplay of haptics, olfaction, acoustics, and optics was in cooking, these findings could be linked to the interspecies discourse. Just as it was clear that our microbiome can change through the processing of sourdough, it also does so through contact with other microorganisms. Suddenly the way was paved for understanding cooking in the same way as we do today in all its complexity, as an elementary component of our existence and not just as a means to an end. M.C.: How was it possible to achieve such a major change in the ten years since the institute was founded? P.C.: Since the individual team members had their roots at different universities, we were able to introduce an interdisciplinary Master's and Ph.D. program, which was taught in a hybrid form and also led to a strong development in research. Many of the students who came from classical medicine and psychology, for example, then joined forces and opened psychosomatic practices to better research and establish cooking therapies. Since personalized nutrition was already an issue in some countries and some of it was also included in state health insurance schemes, it was obvious to try it with cooking, because there was no risk and, unlike other expensive therapies, it didn't cost much. Many imitators didn't study with us, but they read the publications and set up interdisciplinary practices or various forms of cooking restaurants. Cooking naturally becomes even more interesting when the social aspect is added, and it is usually not possible to cook at home with 20 people. The movement became fashionable, and as the ecological food transition was also compatible with our goals, there was broad government support. Other attempts to push society towards healthier and more ecological eating behavior had failed in the decades before. M.C.: That all sounds very simple form today’s perspective, but surely there was also a headwind? Even today, gastronomy is complaining a lot about the trend of home cooking. P.C.: I don't believe that traditional gastronomy will ever disappear completely, but of course, certain concepts have to adapt. We should look at cooking realistically and in the context of our entire existence. The preparation of food will not become an end in itself. A major opponent of the movement is the pharmaceutical industry. It's obviously more lucrative to sell pills than to watch people cook, and the food industry wasn't keen at first either, but eventually, they couldn't ignore the scientific findings and with these, the societal pressure against ultra-processed food became too strong to ignore. However, as we know, the rapid development of synthetic biology in the alt-protein market has brought a large part of the industry back into the fold. The chemical giants have of course suffered, but not only because of changes in the food sector. They were trapped in a fossilized logic and most companies were no longer sustainable. Hence, the pesticide sector and agribusiness were not the death knell in my opinion. To be honest, I don't mourn the loss of this sector either. Companies that were open to change still exist today. We shouldn't forget that even if the percentage is small, there are still voices that want to go back. M.C.: Cooking today has a strong influence on the field of medicine and also on our everyday lives, social structures, and our working world. It is on par with other therapeutic techniques such as yoga or the fitness center in terms of popularity, and often even surpasses them. People tend to say that we should get more physically active again. P.C.: Yes, this is true, but as you may know, we are also bringing more and more physical activity into the kitchen and are endeavoring to make drives for mixers, for example, as analog as possible. However, humans are also lazy animals and we still need a lot of convincing to bring the fitness center into the kitchen and liquidate electric drives in this area as much as possible. M.C.: We've already come to the end of our time, but since you mentioned the kitchen, I hope you can tell us briefly something about this segment. P.C.: The fact that we have hardly talked about the kitchen so far is almost like the separation of food and its preparation, that we have criticized. I don't know whether it's an anecdote or based on studies. But a friend who was a designer back then and now runs bread baking courses and works for the bakers' guild once told me that 94% of kitchens and kitchen appliances were designed by non-cooking men. Ten years ago at kitchen trade fairs, you could still hear advertising slogans like: „Even my husband can cook in this kitchen“ - no joke. And everything was supposed to be digitalized and automated. The Vorwerk Thermomix for example became a mass product. One has to say, that it was a completely different tool than it is today. The users of this appliance became a kind of laborer for simple tasks. People opened the packaging and poured the contents into the machine. The appliance did the rest, then the person washed it. Insanely depressing. We had become slaves to a food processor and that meant „cooking" for many people. Vorwerk has done a really good job with today's version, in which the appliance encourages us to cook, is linked to the results of our microbiome analysis, and suggests recipes and preparation techniques depending on our mood. It has also been reduced to the core functions of weighing and precise temperature control. The developers have thought again about what people are good at, what they should be good at, and what machines should do. The company was already on the brink of collapse and the pressure was correspondingly high. I'm pleased that there was such a quick rethink. Some other manufacturers of kitchen appliances, such as Samsung or Anova, have also managed to rethink the smart kitchen segment. Smart kitchens were mostly about automating as much as possible and at some point, it was like disempowering the person doing the cooking. Cooking lost all its appeal. When AI found its way into the kitchen and was able to combine "mental microbial health" and ecological aspects in recipe selection, it was a great help, as the parameters for how and what we should cook simply became too complex. It also made the kitchen much more energy efficient. This was because the menu planning included when the oven was heated up and you could use it to bake a casserole, a cake, a loaf of bread, and perhaps something for the neighbors. In the same way, food waste could be massively reduced with the help of AI and intelligent recipe selection. I would like to emphasize here that it is important to differentiate between what people are good at, which techniques are important, and what is perhaps too complicated for us in terms of the complexity and number of parameters where we can use the help of technology. This way of cooking will become automatic over time and we will have to rely less on new technologies again and perhaps also carry out microbiome analyses less often because we will learn to listen to our body's needs. This projects was created by Maciej Chmara as a part of his MUSAE S+T+ARTS Fellowship 2024. The link to the project here: http://musae.starts.eu/musae/2nd-open-call-scenariosl-by-maciej-chmara/&nbsp; <img width="3508" height="4896" width_o="3508" height_o="4896" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ba10853807689ea52a934d449b1f0c42e3d6d5015f9f2405b5ace2f1bef83c80/illustrtion-musae-1.jpg" data-mid="219310240" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ba10853807689ea52a934d449b1f0c42e3d6d5015f9f2405b5ace2f1bef83c80/illustrtion-musae-1.jpg" /> <img width="345" height="157" width_o="345" height_o="157" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/75bf7aff74af296a182cf8c2ec6a5b266f2bf76c9a6f0426af5ad385616b6081/starts-1-1.png" data-mid="219311758" border="0" data-scale="34" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/345/i/75bf7aff74af296a182cf8c2ec6a5b266f2bf76c9a6f0426af5ad385616b6081/starts-1-1.png" /><img width="329" height="117" width_o="329" height_o="117" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aff5932f07debc487aae8683359215cda968a9726e73bcf344064b4e0ea3d455/european-omission-1-1.png" data-mid="219311757" border="0" data-scale="42" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/329/i/aff5932f07debc487aae8683359215cda968a9726e73bcf344064b4e0ea3d455/european-omission-1-1.png" /> https://chmararosinke.com/Brot-Audio-guide Sat, 25 May 2024 03:47:23 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/Brot-Audio-guide BROT. Audio Guide (DE)&nbsp; https://chmararosinke.com/OFIS-collection Wed, 14 Oct 2020 07:05:35 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/OFIS-collection OFIS collection A new collection dubbed OFIS – an acronym for office for important stuff (name of our Berlin studio) that came to life in times of Covid lockdown. For OFIS, we restricted ourselves to one size of square timber and plank and a very small palette of colours that have been reoccurring in our work over the past years. The geometry of the objects, defined by their proportions and spacial reduction to archetypal shapes, equally mark a return to earlier works of our studio. The OFIS collection is comprised of an office chair, a kneeling stool, a desk, a floor lamp and a chaise-longue. Year: 2020To order OFIS collection furniture pieces contact us via email&nbsp; <img width="2000" height="3000" width_o="2000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0f7dbd561a3496697974d2bffe693841269859103e7528266437f150d5bfe545/OFIS-chmararosinke-3420-small.jpg" data-mid="85529383" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0f7dbd561a3496697974d2bffe693841269859103e7528266437f150d5bfe545/OFIS-chmararosinke-3420-small.jpg" /> <img width="1667" height="2500" width_o="1667" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/965b3ad5ceae2e80e0a1906ff07f67e2bd3dcc22b2e43822c6b48c83928b1a8d/OFIS-chmararosinke-3415-small.jpg" data-mid="85529384" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/965b3ad5ceae2e80e0a1906ff07f67e2bd3dcc22b2e43822c6b48c83928b1a8d/OFIS-chmararosinke-3415-small.jpg" /> <img width="2500" height="1667" width_o="2500" height_o="1667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0b815060fee22b4b19873050c548399eb56192632a0a6654d3d0f1a50ffc34a8/OFIS-chmararosinke-02-small.jpg" data-mid="85529372" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0b815060fee22b4b19873050c548399eb56192632a0a6654d3d0f1a50ffc34a8/OFIS-chmararosinke-02-small.jpg" /><img width="2500" height="1667" width_o="2500" height_o="1667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/420b844723514e3214cdeff269a3de23b40b865fddf9d7cb73d9809f48ae4b3f/OFIS-chmararosinke-3346-small.jpg" data-mid="85529388" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/420b844723514e3214cdeff269a3de23b40b865fddf9d7cb73d9809f48ae4b3f/OFIS-chmararosinke-3346-small.jpg" /><img width="2500" height="1667" width_o="2500" height_o="1667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f4df66631ac9a14406f349819e6afa44ba53081850341165de9b14fb7fecdd3/OFIS-chmararosinke-3562-small.jpg" data-mid="85529373" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f4df66631ac9a14406f349819e6afa44ba53081850341165de9b14fb7fecdd3/OFIS-chmararosinke-3562-small.jpg" /><img width="1667" height="2500" width_o="1667" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b18f1b31a6b11e1e76a84ff4bbafed64de6d3c222a2fc5db3316a240f076f43a/OFIS-chmararosinke-3394-small.jpg" data-mid="85529386" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b18f1b31a6b11e1e76a84ff4bbafed64de6d3c222a2fc5db3316a240f076f43a/OFIS-chmararosinke-3394-small.jpg" /><img width="1667" height="2500" width_o="1667" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f92fa2e2d190c26fe8fb07dd98a087b823fe84514c652a0248f7fbdf9a8b84a5/OFIS-chmararosinke-3528-small.jpg" data-mid="85529375" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f92fa2e2d190c26fe8fb07dd98a087b823fe84514c652a0248f7fbdf9a8b84a5/OFIS-chmararosinke-3528-small.jpg" /><img width="1667" height="2500" width_o="1667" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5d8ee40a195e9470d331ffd1f9c937887eb6c1dd2fc23ed472cbade54845c50a/OFIS-chmararosinke-3558-small.jpg" data-mid="85529365" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5d8ee40a195e9470d331ffd1f9c937887eb6c1dd2fc23ed472cbade54845c50a/OFIS-chmararosinke-3558-small.jpg" /><img width="1667" height="2500" width_o="1667" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ec61d7eac34032669bcc2ef520ad8c48bc4537aab14a747d2c79061de9d4ecc3/OFIS-chmararosinke-01-small.jpg" data-mid="85529367" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ec61d7eac34032669bcc2ef520ad8c48bc4537aab14a747d2c79061de9d4ecc3/OFIS-chmararosinke-01-small.jpg" /> https://chmararosinke.com/Living-a-good-life-with-bread Tue, 04 Oct 2022 19:45:26 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/Living-a-good-life-with-bread Living a good life with bread&nbsp; //&nbsp;“On the Search for Deliciousness – Baking Europe”,&nbsp;Professor Charles Spence // “Making and breaking bread during the pandemic – Baking Europe”,&nbsp;Professor Charles Spence //&nbsp;“What is bread? – An attempt”,&nbsp;Maciej Chmara// “I am standing in a grove of trees” Sudeep Agarwala // “Breadcrumbs – an anthology of Polish lyrical poetry with the motif of bread”,&nbsp;Klara Czerniewska-Andryszczyk // “Bread-interview with Giulia”, Maciej Chmara “Living a good life with bread” is a research project developed within the framework of “Oxford x UdK Berlin. Seedfunding for Creative Collaborations”. Project partners:&nbsp;Prof. Charles Spence (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford), Maciej Chmara (Institut für Produkt- und Prozessgestaltung, UdK Berlin) Drawings: Ania Rosinke <img width="2600" height="1733" width_o="2600" height_o="1733" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4752409eaac9550dbeb173b1ef6cfdb0e065cf89c24b60963c905c8e2de0e32b/makieta_mockups-1-small.png" data-mid="154977618" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4752409eaac9550dbeb173b1ef6cfdb0e065cf89c24b60963c905c8e2de0e32b/makieta_mockups-1-small.png" /> <img width="2600" height="1733" width_o="2600" height_o="1733" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e58a707f33090ee91505570cbc71b53af5b5e7b646c2f2451815a27e18604b80/makieta_mockups-2-small.png" data-mid="154979184" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e58a707f33090ee91505570cbc71b53af5b5e7b646c2f2451815a27e18604b80/makieta_mockups-2-small.png" /><img width="2600" height="1733" width_o="2600" height_o="1733" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7df2b520eaa8fe4625630244c25b76d0e92c6e15dff6acf59119f9b37ee0061e/makieta_mockups-3-small.png" data-mid="154979726" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7df2b520eaa8fe4625630244c25b76d0e92c6e15dff6acf59119f9b37ee0061e/makieta_mockups-3-small.png" /><img width="2600" height="1733" width_o="2600" height_o="1733" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01262b24cbb346f770ff737207ec1857b9829610fca36c4fa3591c0a7fd2ee16/makieta_mockups-5small.png" data-mid="154981112" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/01262b24cbb346f770ff737207ec1857b9829610fca36c4fa3591c0a7fd2ee16/makieta_mockups-5small.png" /> https://chmararosinke.com/What-is-bread-an-attempt Tue, 04 Oct 2022 19:50:55 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/What-is-bread-an-attempt “What is bread? – An attempt”Text: Maciej Chmara When you have a loaf of bread in front of you, it is obvious it is bread. But trying to define what bread actually is isn’t that easy. Wikipedia says more or less the following: Bread is a traditional food baked from a dough made from ground grain (flour), water, a leavening agent and usually other ingredients. Bread is a staple food. So far so good. In the definition of its components, the article refers to the toasted aromas of the crust, which result from the Maillard reaction. This description is so broad that it actually applies to the majority of breads, but excludes many simple breads, such as matzoh, several Arabic and Indian flatbreads, and steamed buns. On the other hand, however, it includes sweet breads, which I personally would tend to classify as cakes. Although pain au chocolat has the word “pain”, bread, in its name, it is disputable whether it really is bread. In May 2022, we were sitting in front of a couple of slices of bread at the Running Duck restaurant in Oxford , having a discussion with other bread enthusiasts. Two Brits, Charles Spence, professor of psychology, who thought, listened and rather kept to himself, his brother Simon, who runs the restaurant, baked the bread and has a profound knowledge of culinary history, an Italian friend, Simone, who, according to himself, never finished his PhD in psychology at Oxford because he invested too much time in baking bread, and two Austrian-influenced Poles, Ania Rosinke and myself, Maciej Chmara. We debated what bread really is and argued about which country bakes the best bread – usually the answer was the country of birth of the speaker. Charles' brother Simon had a very clear idea of what constitutes bread: gluten and yeasts (whether industrial or natural yeasts in the form of sourdough); to him, gluten-free bread clearly is no bread. The Italian colleague included banana bread, pain au chocolat, as well as Italian sweet pastries like pandoro. At this point, a heated discussion arose about where bread ends and cake begins. Is it the yeast? Then what about matzoh, soda breads or other yeast-free breads? It can't be the added sugar either, as many breads use sugar or malt to feed the yeasts – or is there a quantity limit? I myself enthusiastically defended the exclusion of sweet breads from the term bread and the inclusion of gluten-free breads. I have often baked the latter for my father and find them pretty wholesome, when prepared properly. / I have often baked the latter for my father and rather enjoyed the taste and texture, when they were well-made. The day ended with a few bottles of another fermented product and we still had no clear answer to the question of what bread actually is. In the weeks that followed, I asked many people this question and received very different answers; many of them were connected to memories and full of emotion. I finally arrived at a definition that tries to explain bread on a different level, and not only by its ingredients per se. Bread is a staple food, a base that, in the vast majority of cases, is not eaten plain. To test it, a slice of fresh bread might be enjoyed plain or with olive oil and salt or butter, but in general bread is used to spread, coat or dip in pastes or sauces. Bread is, to a certain degree, incomplete without other foods, like rice or pasta, and aches to be completed. For sweet breads, I like the Austrian name of „Mehlspeisen“ (flour dish), and I would tend to exclude them from the definition of bread, as they stand apart, are usually enjoyed without addition and are a complete dish on their own (usually as a dessert or for breakfast). Bread is parted, whether by tearing, breaking or cutting, and it’s essential part is not the crust – there also are non-crusty breads – but the crumb, which, whether baked or steamed, is different from the dense consistency of pasta even in the case of heavy dark breads. This definition, like many others, is certainly contestable: you might&nbsp; for instance ask whether steamed buns really are bread, which complicates the whole thing: it would be much simpler to restrict my definition to baking. It is merely an attempt, and I am open to suggestions. https://chmararosinke.com/grove-street Tue, 04 Oct 2022 20:20:32 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/grove-street “I am standing in a grove of trees” Text:&nbsp;Sudeep Agarwala I AM STANDING IN A GROVE OF TREES in northeast India. Everything around me is absurdly green. In fact, I think it must be the greenest place I’ve ever been. This land is fed by the Brahmaputra River, which comes all the way from Mount Kailash just north of Nepal. It sweeps through the Himalayas on the Tibetan side of the range, where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo. As it is about to hit the disputed border between China and India, it makes a sharp kink and floods into Arunachal Pradesh, down through Assam, only to run into its twin sister, the Ganges, in Golden Bengal. Here, the two rivers mix and form the fertile delta that is Bangladesh before passing on into the Indian Ocean. My ancestors are from this land and—though my parents raised me far away, in America—I weirdly identify with it. The streets here evoke just enough of my summers spent traveling in Kolkata to make things feel familiar. I recognize the vast paddies of rice and fields of jute, the fruit sold on the streets, the color of the soil, even the smell of the cities. But the slight differences that arise start to make the valley seem uncanny. I hear people speaking Asamiya, which is close enough to Bengali that I feel like I should be able to understand it, but distinct enough that I can’t quite make out what is going on. Farther outside the big towns, I hear Sylheti, Chittagonian, even Rohingya being spoken, and I am out of my depth. I see the occasional temple or vermillion-smeared roadside shrine, all dedicated to local gods I am hearing about for the first time. But soon, the Gods change more fundamentally. I reach a part of India where almost all men wear skullcaps on the road, where muezzins climb slender minarets and announce Fajr at first light. I constantly catch myself bringing my hands together mid-namaskar and pivoting to a clumsy salaam instead. I make do, but only just. In my defense, I am massively jet-lagged, and have been sleeping badly. I am here on a work trip, inspecting agarwood — trees used for perfume and incense — but this mission seems preordained by older forces. Shortly after the partition of India in 1947, my Hindu grandfather changed our last name from Poddar to the more cosmopolitan Agarwala, rinsing us of our provincial Bengali heritage and evoking long travels to Rajasthan and the Punjab. To scholars of the Mahabharata, this new last name conjures images of King Agrasen and the Solar Dynasty. To everyone else, I am a mere merchant — Agarwala is literally, a peddler (“wala”) of incense (“agar-batti”). Names portend everything, it seems. For the last 15 years, I have studied yeast biology and genetics, and now I engineer that yeast toward the production of rare flavors and fragrances that are slowly disappearing from the world. Who better to study the world’s most fragrant trees than a yeast-loving incense peddler? Somehow I have walked into a trap set by my family two generations ago. My hosts collect me at Guwahati and divine within minutes that I am a Bengali from America. The rules of hospitality dictate that I must be made comfortable, and if there is one truth that is self-evident and obvious to anyone in India, it is that Bengalis love fish and must have it for dinner. The driver makes an urgent phone call to the house. I picture a clamor in the kitchen, a race to the bazaar, and try to object, but my kind hosts won’t hear a word of it. I give up, slowly zoning out for our four-hour journey east from Guwahati to the district of Hojai, picturing its sacred trees. Before I know it, I’m out on the grove, leaves crunching underfoot. The air is still and hot, I am comically sweaty, and my handkerchief has long since soaked to the point where it only smears the gathering beads of moisture from my forehead across my face. It is hard, but I must focus. These trees have been planted and carefully manicured so that after a few years of cultivation, they can be treated with a controlled fungal infection, which rots the wood and lends it its trademark scent. The guide takes me to a bandaged tree and gently unwraps it: it has undergone an infection over the past few months. He picks up some of the agarwood that has turned darker — it is still hard, but comes off the tree with his pocketknife. He rubs it between his palms to release some of the fragrance and lets me smell. It is musty — earthy. It smells of compost more than anything else, but there’s a slight sharpness that seems hauntingly familiar. As we wander the property, the guide tells me this tree is the only wood that was allowed to be taken from the Garden of Eden, that Adam and Eve wrapped themselves in its bark during their flight from Paradise. In the Hebrew Bible, Balaam uses this same tree to describe the beauty of the encampments of Israel — the tree that was planted by God Himself. The Psalms describe the coming Messiah as being anointed in the fragrance of the wood’s oil. The Prophet Mohammed later on fell in love with the same smell. To this day, its fragrance is mixed with water from the Zamzam well and is used to wash the Kaaba twice a year at the center al-Masjid al-Haram, Mecca, the holiest place in all of Islam. This scent is a conduit of revelation. Later that afternoon, dozing in a wicker chair in an office next to a processing facility, I am presented with a distilled placed on the desk in front of me, and the facility director studies it closely to make sure the color is exactly right. He is concerned about changes to the process and what this may mean to the oil. He opens one vial and — as it’s too valuable to hand it over — wafts it towards me. This is the fragrance of memory, my own and everyone else’s. This is the smell we have loved for thousands of years. So this is the scent of History and Myth, of God and His Prophets. It is surprisingly personal and familiar — a faint memory from the other side of the mirror, somewhere in the land that feeds off the Ganges. I am young, six perhaps, on vacation in India with my parents. My cousins and I sneak into a sparse, tidy room that belongs to the house matriarch, the woman who raised everyone who grew up here, some of whom, like my father, moved away to start new lives in the United States. The room is small with a few chests, an almirah made of dark wood, and a small shrine to a God whose name I do not know. I am not supposed to be here, and my young heart is pounding. In that moment, a lasting association is built: the faint scent that hangs in the air of that private room turns out to be endlessly intoxicating. It is here now, present in front of me, as I sit groggy in wicker furniture in a processing facility. This is the fragrance of memory, my own and everyone else’s. This is the smell we have loved for thousands of years, that has beguiled the generations, the people I know and love, my grandmother. The conspiracy initiated by my grandfather 70 years ago, perpetuated by scents in childhood and my studies in adulthood, has brought me to this strange, familiar grove, and I start to understand why now: I have to recreate this perfume in yeast. This new mission leads me to a bigger question: will the scent I create in yeast be real? I anxiously lay out cake forks and serviettes, and try to explain the problem I’m facing to my guest that afternoon. An ancient story comes in handy. Theseus sailed to Crete with his army to slay the Minotaur and then sailed back to unite Attica under Athens. He was the hero of the ancient city-state, and for generations afterwards his ship was preserved by its citizens as a symbol of their heritage. So precious was this memory that every time a plank was slightly rotten-through or broken, it was carefully renovated. Centuries passed until all memory of the original vessel had faded. Plank by plank, nail by nail, the entire ship had been replaced by newer, stronger materials, again and again. This raises the question: if every single part of the ship has been replaced, is it still the same ship Theseus sailed to Crete? There is a silence at the table, and I glance nervously at my guest, Ganesh himself, the god who has the body of a boy and the head of an elephant. I rarely have a deity sitting at my kitchen table for a meal, but in this instance, I am facing a historic conundrum and need all the help I can get. We have a friendly argument over who should be taking notes and decide that we both should: I have my fountain pen and steno pad, my guest sits tusk in hand among his sheaths of birch bark; we share a pot of ink. He moves to speak, but I interrupt him. “Let me be glib,” I say. “I can solve this paradox by saying that there was no Ship of Theseus to begin with. As he travelled to Crete and back, the ship was constantly changing. It maintained its core property of constant change. The ship never was a stable entity in the first place. Either this Thing we call the Ship of Theseus has always been the Ship of Theseus, or it never was.” Divinity aside, he looks up from his scattered sheaths of birch, dubious. I explain to him where I stand now. That, if things go well and all the pieces align, I could create a new living organism that will create the same molecules that lend the trees in Assam its awesome fragrance. I am replacing the rotten wood that is distilled into perfume with yeast strains that can produce the same compounds. I feel compelled to explain. “I will take a sample of this amber liquid from the processing plant I dozed off in, and will identify the exact molecules that produce its fragrance. I will design snippets of DNA with encoded proteins that are capable of making this molecule. I will synthesize the DNA and introduce it into a fungal species — a yeast that we have exquisite experience and knowledge of how to manipulate. Using different sugars and growth conditions, I can then grow this new yeast organism that I have created by the liter, by the thousands of liters, in gleaming steel fermentation vessels. It will be the same as the perfume from the rotten wood, to the molecule, practically.” “This could mean that someday we wouldn’t need to mow down these splendid groves to attain their precious fragrance. What’s more, we could make sure that this fragrance will be fixed for the rest of humanity for all time. We could divorce this oil from its various plant species, growth conditions, and processing technologies. We could democratize it so it descends from its station among prophets and Messiahs, and becomes available for everyone to know and love.” Perhaps I have been talking too much. I look up to see the last of the sweets gracefully plucked by the elegant trunk. I know there’s a flip side here, and I must explain: the power of this process is one of the reasons I’ve not been sleeping. I worry that I may end up taking away something important and foundational from a scent that has been dear to the world throughout history. “I know that it may all be fiction. It’s impossible to say whether the plant mentioned in the Bible is the same one that is written about in the Vedas, the same one so beloved by the Prophet Mohammed. Who knows how that all relates to the oil in my grandmother’s room, or the ampoules on the production facility I traveled to? These experiences and these memories, both historical and mythological are superimposed on each other in a way that weighs on us.” Perhaps I should stop myself there. Is it rude to tell my guest what a burden immortality is? I hesitate to remind him of his own story: how he was created as a boy with a human head by his mother. How he was instructed to stand guard over her and protect her while she was bathing in a grove. How Shiva approached the two of them, and how, as a boy, he valiantly, but in vain, fended off the powerful god. How he incurred the wrath of the god and was beheaded by his trident, killed instantly. How his mother, grief-stricken and enraged, threatened to burn down all of Creation unless her beloved boy were brought back to life. How she demanded that he should be made immortal and worshipped as a god. How Shiva was chastened and feared her, immediately sending out his servants to bring the head of the first creature lying dead with its head facing north. How they returned with the head of the elephant demon Gajasura, whom Shiva had defeated in battle. How he was revived and attained immortality only after the gods spliced the elephant head onto the body of the boy. That this is how he, in his immortal form, sitting at my kitchen table, enjoying the final scraps of tea, came to be unchanging and eternal. The break in the conversation grows longer. I remind myself that in the annals of Sanskrit literature, my elephant-headed guest is also known as Swaroop, the Lover of Beauty. We stare at each other silently, deep in thought. The sun is setting on our garrulous Sunday afternoon adda. It’s almost dinnertime and my guest makes a polite excuse and leaves. I need to clean up the mess on the kitchen table. The fruit I had cut in preparation for this meeting has long since browned in the summer heat. All around the house the fresh-picked flowers I placed as offering and decoration have withered and will have to be swept up. Looking around the room, there are no more elegant plumes of smoke streaming upward from the incense that I burned to welcome him into my home. Now, in the lengthening shadows, there are only tidy piles of ash scattered around the table and floor. Their fragrance is fading away. this article initially appeared at Growbyginkgo.com https://chmararosinke.com/Bread-interview-with-Giulia Wed, 05 Oct 2022 12:07:31 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/Bread-interview-with-Giulia “Bread-interview” with Giulia Maciej: What is your relationship with bread? Giulia: Pretty good, (smiles). My relationship with bread started about a year ago, out of interest and curiosity. I didn’t have much knowledge about bread, before that. I felt drawn towards it. While researching different food and food cultures, I have realized that bread is kind of the base of all of them and the base of our nourishment, so I wanted to look into it more. I started to work in a sourdough bakery, learning how to follow the process and getting my hands dirty. I learned to understand what it means to produce bread and to be part of the act of producing bread, to give bread to other people and thus to feed other people, to nourish people. M: You told me that at the beginning you were a bit annoyed by the dough. G: I got annoyed by the stickiness at the beginning. In the bakery where I am working the hydration is very high, so it’s always very sticky. But at one point it just doesn’t stick anymore or one gets used to it and learns how to handle it. M: When I was learning to make pizza, I believe that my hydration wasn’t high enough at the beginning and I learned my way through to a higher hydration. But when I tell people today how to work with a pizza or bread dough, I see how difficult it is to explain how to position your hand and what movement to make. The result is very often, especially with my children, for whom it seems fun, that dough is everywhere, and their hands and the bowl are connected with these sticky dough strings and everything is super hard to clean. But when you hold your hands in a certain position and work with a certain speed and a good flow, even highly hydrated dough acquires a dynamic of its own and doesn’t seem to stick at all. G: I think, anything you do – I mean I don’t like the word train, but at some point your body knows how to act, how to move. At one point there is kind of a switch. But yes, without experiencing it it’s very difficult to explain. M: Can you tell me something of controlling or perhaps losing control of the dough? G: I have a greater fear of losing control with pastry than I have with bread. Because with pastry, you follow a recipe very exactly, and then it’s uncooked and you just put it in the oven and wait, you cannot adjust anything. Perhaps I had it a little with bread in the beginning, but now it’s different, I also taste the raw dough while making it. This morning I probably ate 200g of raw dough, and tasted the starter. You can also see if it’s fully developed, or check the texture, or stretch it. Actually, you can control a lot in the process of bread making. M: What you are describing already requires a higher level of experience. From the very many breads you have baked you know what the starter or the dough should taste like to get to a good result. But the taste of the raw dough, even the saltiness of it, doesn’t have so much in common with the taste of the finished baked bread. G: Yes, that’s true and perhaps it’s also just ok at a certain point. When you form the bread, put it in the fridge, it’s an act of fate or trust that the process will go well and you leave the control to the bacteria that continue your work. It’s always like this with fermentation, you can kind of guide it, but actually not control it anymore. M: How did you get into cooking and working with food? G: I got into cooking thanks to my dad. My mum is not that kind of traditional Italian mum. When we were on holiday or traveling, he was also the one who was more curious to discover local ingredients, going to markets and then opening the bags and finding out what we could cook with it. It became a nice activity that me and my sister shared with him. Spending time together preparing and then eating together. Starting my research, I got into cooking even more. I started to feed other people to better explain my projects and also test these on them. I started from what I knew, worked with raw ingredients, and much simplicity, how to transform them without changing too much of their nature. I like people to recognize what they eat. And later I learned very much about cuisine from other people I worked with. M: You talk a lot about the sensuality of eating, and of cooking. About learning to cook by observing hands and movements and that cooking is the interplay between your senses and the ingredients. Looking at it from this point of view, how would a good bread recipe look like – or is it even possible to write one? G: I think yes, it is possible. I thought a lot about how you can interact with your body while cooking and how to understand this. Perhaps it’s not a perfect recipe at the beginning, but one that you have to repeat more often, so your body acquires the knowledge. Maybe it would be a visual recipe, where you can follow the gestures of the hands. And by this to learn that your hands are the tools and not to start with a machine from the beginning. You can gain awareness of what you are making. M: Last time we were also discussing other ideas of how to communicate intuition or improvisation in cooking, or how you can use your hands as a measure, and we came to the conclusion that perhaps a hyper-precise recipe in the form of a text that you first have to study very exactly, might make sense. G: …maybe yes. In my projects I call these series of movements choreography of hands. In order to be a choreography, they have to have a script. So maybe yes, maybe we need hyper-precise scripts. M: The description as a choreography is very interesting. In dance there are different commands that represent a series of movements, it is a language that the dancer has to learn to be able to understand and perform. In our case, the text would need to explain individual movements and series of combined movements that we have to learn to later follow the commands of the recipe. G: Actually, I tried to do something like this in my projects at the beginning. I created a vocabulary for it. The definition of a movement was defined by a series of actions. M: The olfactory sense has an extremely direct connection to our memories and our emotional centre in the brain. Freshly baked bread, with its complex and beautiful smell, releases memories, situations or culinary emotions in most people. What is your personal bread moment? G: There is a special bread smell that I recognize more in Italian bakeries than in others. It’s kind of a Ciabatta smell, not really sourdough. We had a bakery next door, and I have a strong memory of standing in line, queuing with my dad and waiting to get a bread on Saturday morning. And when you got it, it was still warm and you could try to steal a piece or perhaps someone gave it to you. But there is also another one. It’s a bread with caraway seeds that I ate when I was on holidays in the north of Italy with my parents as a kid. I disliked it because I didn’t like the taste of those seeds. It goes kind in the direction like anise and fennel, it just was too strong. In addition, it was a dark bread, probably rye flour. I recently came across it again, and wanted to replicate it, bake it at home and it took me back to my memories. It was a nice exercise to go back in time with the help of baking. M: I have to say, that also one of my strongest negative bread memories is connected to bread with caraway seeds. When I started to study in Linz and I bought bread or rolls in a bakery, everything was with caraway seeds. And I was shocked when I ate this with strawberry jam, I didn’t understand why anyone would put this spice in their bread. Today I also add caraway seeds, fennel, anise and other spices to the bread, especially on cold days to accompany a nice soup, but surely the amounts I use are still very subtle compared to Austrian breads. M: Let’s talk about your bread project in Milan. You recently gave me a beautiful description that I still have in my mind. You said there was no discrimination of bread today. What did you have in mind with this? G: The general idea of the project was to recreate a kind of landscape of different breads on the occasion of a meeting of the design academy Eindhoven in Milan. After starting to working there (Eindhoven) I was inspired by the international environment at the academy. You can meet people from every part of the world there. I realized that we always meeti in this international context and that food always accompanies the gatherings. It supports discussions, that’s also why I started to work with food. I wanted to recreate this feeling of different cultures coming together and so I used bread from different cultures and basically nothing else. On the one hand you show the differences and the diversity, but on the other hand there is no real diversity, because in the end it’s just bread. So in this sense there was no discrimination, all kinds of bread are breads. I also told you about my experience in Apulia last year. I was at a masseria (a farm, the Masseria Cultura in Noci) and wanted to bake a bread from the countryside and recreate the specific shape and taste of the wood oven. And in the end I just couldn’t handle the heat of Apulia, it was like 40 degrees, my dough was exploding and I didn’t have any experience with wood fired ovens. In the end I just used the heat to bake flat breads on stones. I realized it’s just flatbread, but it’s still bread. Talking about bread we like to think of beautiful loaves, but every mix of flour and water that is baked becomes a bread. M: Let me pick up on this. A few weeks ago, I was sitting in Oxford and discussing with a few people from different background what the definition of bread actually is. Do you have an answer to this question, what is a bread? G: You know, since you have asked me this question the first time I have been thinking about it every single day. And I will definitely ask my colleagues at the bakery as I am curious what they will say. But me, personally, I would not consider for example a pain au chocolat bread, I would go for the essence. When you take grain and grind it and add water and if you like other elements, it can be salt or not, it can be yeast or not, it can be other additions or not… you bake it and if this nourishes you, that’s bread. I think. There should be a kind of transformation. Pain au chocolat or banana bread, maybe they are still part of the family, but they lose a bit of… M: Purity? G: Yes, but it is also something else. Bread comes from the necessity of feeding. And when you have a pain au chocolat, there already is the further aspect of pleasure there. I am not saying that this is bad, but when I think about the essence of bread, I think that it comes from a necessity. M: Do you have a bread or a bread recipe that you absolutely favour, that would be the only bread that you could eat until the end of your life? G: Right now it would certainly be a rye sourdough bread, but if I may give a more emotional answer, it would this Italian small bread that is very hollow inside and has a very nice crust. M: I wouldn’t like to miss the contrast of simple breads, the softness and fluffiness crumb and the crunch of the crust. G: That’s why I mentioned this Italian michetta. They are or have been quite traditional in Milan. Nowadays it’s not that easy to find them. They have this kind of turtle shell shape and are amazing for making sandwiches. The bread becomes a good partner with what you put inside, it doesn’t overrule it, but you have this amazing crunchiness that is on the outside, when it’s well made and on the inside you don’t have much of a crumb, it’s quite hollow. So as a bread it’s a pretty specific one and the smell of it and the crunch of it is really, really nice. But I am with you, that the contrast is important, I like a soft crumb as well. https://chmararosinke.com/On-the-Search-for-Deliciousness Tue, 04 Oct 2022 19:57:02 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/On-the-Search-for-Deliciousness “On the Search for Deliciousness”Text: Professor Charles Spence,&nbsp;Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, University of Oxford The search for deliciousness, at least according to the North American biologists Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez can be linked to the evolution of flavour and is a key part of what makes us human. As they put it: “In short, our human evolutionary story is a story of flavour and deliciousness, and the story of flavour and deliciousness is a story of physics, chemistry, neuroscience, psychology, farming, art, ecology, and evolution.” Indeed, noted gastronomes such as Anton Brillat-Savarin (1835) have long been on the trial of what exactly it is that makes certain foods taste delicious. Although Dunn and Sanchez do not specifically talk about bread in their book, Dunn has written elsewhere about the science behind delicious sourdough bread. Dunn starts one article by posing the following question: “how does flour, water, bacteria and wild yeast from the air result in something as delicious and as unique as a loaf of sourdough?” His suggestion is that the bacteria found on the hands of bakers (not to mention in the spaces that they inhabit) are crucially important in this regard. According to a number of influential commentators, such as the North American author Harold McGee, molecular gastronomy may hold the answer. McGee describes the latter as “the scientific study of deliciousness”. Peter Barham, a physicist from the University of Bristol, together with colleagues from the Department of Food Science at the University of Copenhagen also consider molecular gastronomy as lying at the heart of the search for deliciousness, pronouncing that: “We take a broad view of Molecular Gastronomy and argue it should be considered as the scientific study of why some food tastes terrible, some is mediocre, some good, and occasionally some absolutely delicious. We want to understand what it is that makes one dish delicious and another not, whether it be the choice of ingredients and how they were grown, the manner in which the food was cooked and presented, or the environment in which it was served.” Meanwhile, the authors behind the 10 Principles of Modernist Cuisine are also keen to stress the fundamental need for chefs to: “always strive to produce the most delicious, technically exquisite food”. But is deliciousness in bread, or any other food product for that matter, something that can be assessed and/or promoted by means of an analytic scientific approach? According to Schmidt and Mouritsen (2020, p. 2), meanwhile, : “In the present context, meat elicits umami taste as it is rich in free glutamate and free inosinate, which we over time have come to associate with deliciousness (Mouritsen &amp; Styrbaek, 2014).” On the analytic versus holistic approach to deliciousness Specifically with regard to the world of wine, North American, Clark R. Smith, of Vinovation Inc., thinks not. The controversial vinologist created something of a stir a few years ago when, in an issue of Vineyard and Winery Management, he complained about the analytical approach to winemaking that was apparently advocated by the UC Davis wine program. In a commentary provocatively titled Does UC-Davis have a theory of deliciousness?, Clark suggested that the scientific analytic approach was often responsible for making clean but dull wines. Instead, Clark argued for a fusion of the analytic approach to wine-making with an “older, visceral, holistic method of assessment”, in order, hopefully, to produce an integrated view of what makes wine “delicious”. Translating the debate to the world of bread, one might perhaps want to contrast the approaches that have been championed, on the one hand, by the likes of Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery in California, with the much more rigorously scientific approach to bread making epitomized by the likes of Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya in their five-volume Modernist Bread, on the other. One of the replies to Clark’s broadside on the art and science of wine-making from Jim Lapsley He argued that quality (or deliciousness in Clark’s terminology) should not be considered as an objective absolute property of a food, but rather as depending on the taster’s viewpoint. As Lapsley notes: “A concept of deliciousness is not coded somewhere in the genes. Rather it is an individual judgment that involves likes and dislikes and generally requires a social and personal context that is most often learned. Ask yourself: Did you like your first taste of beer or did you find it unpleasantly bitter? Do you like it now? Well, your frame of reference has changed (and perhaps your taste buds too). Although we can recognize wine styles, the assessment of relative quality between wines of two different styles or within one particular style is ultimately a personal or hedonic judgment.” Interestingly here, while various commentators have been debating the concept of deliciousness, and how best to achieve it, in the world of wine, some of the most creative individuals of the kitchen have been suggesting that chefs should be striving to deliver more than simply just deliciousness in the food/dishes that they deliver to their customers. What lies beyond deliciousness? In their 2006 ‘Statement on the new cooking’, top chefs Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, and Thomas Keller, together with Harold McGee took great pains to emphasize the importance of deliciousness to modern(ist) cooking. At the same time, however, they also stressed that what they are after goes beyond merely delicious food to include those dishes that the diner will find ‘stimulating’. At one point, writing that: “We do not pursue novelty for its own sake. We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous-vide, dehydration, and other nontraditional means, but these do not define our cooking. They are a few of the many tools that we are fortunate to have available as we strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes.” The Michelin-starred Spanish chef Andoni Luis Aduriz, of Mugaritz near San Sebastian has been pursuing the latter position in some of his dishes. A decade ago, Andoni had the following to say, in one interview: “You know, I went to cooking school decades ago, and there they taught me how to make delicious food. It's not my goal to make delicious food anymore. I want to make interesting food.” Indeed, this chef is famous for, amongst many other things, serving the occasional dish that he knows many of his guests will not like the taste of, because they help to illustrate a particular narrative function within the fabulous multi-course meals served in the restaurant. Ultimately, as one of the most symbolic and historic of our fermented foods, not to mention one that took on such a special role in the home during the early stages of the Covid pandemic, it is presumably unlikely that a purely analytic, scientific strategy is ever going to provide a definitive answer to the question of what, exactly, makes bread, or at least some of it, so delicious. Instead, a more holistic artistic approach is likely also needed, one that allows the consumer to literally taste the idiosyncratic hand of the maker. That being said, the question of whether bread – that seemingly magical mixture of flour, water, bacteria, and wild yeast – can, or even should be interesting/stimulating, rather than just delicious, is one that, for now at least, I better leave unanswered. 1 Dunn, R., &amp; Sanchez, M. (2021, p. xvi). Delicious: The evolution of flavour and how it made us human. Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. 2 Brillat-Savarin, J. A. (1835). Physiologie du goût [The philosopher in the kitchen / The physiology of taste]. J. P. Meline: Bruxelles. Translated by A. Lalauze (1884), A handbook of gastronomy. London, UK: Nimmo &amp; Bain. 3 Dunn, R. (2018). Inside the fascinating (and delicious!) science of sourdough bread. Ideas TED, December 19th. https://ideas.ted.com/inside-the-fascinating-and-delicious-science-of-sourdough-bread/; Dunn, R. (2018). Never home alone: From microbes to millipedes, camel crickets, and honeybees, the natural history of where we live. New York, NY: Basic Books. 4 McGee, H. (1984/2004). On food and cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen (Rev. Ed.). New York, NY: Scribner. 5 Barham, P., Skibsted, L. H., Bredie,&nbsp;W. L. P., Bom Frøst,&nbsp;M., Møller, P., Risbo,&nbsp;J., Snitkjær,&nbsp;P., &amp;&nbsp;Mortensen, L. M. (2010, p. 2315). Molecular gastronomy: A new emerging scientific discipline. Chemical Reviews, 110, 2313-2365. 6 Spence, C., &amp; Youssef, J. (2018). Assessing the long-term impact of the molecular gastronomy movement on haute cuisine. International Journal of Gastronomy &amp; Food Science, 14, 35-44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgfs.2018.10.001. 7 Schmidt, C. V., &amp; Mouritsen, O. G. (2020). The solution to sustainable eating is not a one-way street. Frontiers in Psychology, 11:531.doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00531; Mouritsen, O. G., &amp; Styrbaek, K. (2014). Umami: Unlocking the secrets of the fifth taste. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 8 Smith, C. (1995). Does Davis have a theory of deliciousness? Vineyard and Winery Management, July/August, 8-10. 9 Robertson, C. (2010). Tartine bread. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. 10 Myhrvold, N., &amp; Migoya, F. (2017). Modernist bread. The Cooking Lab; see also Whitley, A. (2006). Bread matters. Fourth Estate, 11 Lapsley, J. (1995). Tastes great! No, less filling! Vineyard &amp; Winery Management, November/December, 56-62. 12 Adria, F., Blumenthal, H., Keller, T., &amp; McGee, H. (2006). Statement on the ‘new cookery’. The Observer, December 10th. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/dec/10/foodanddrink.obsfoodmonthly. 13 Ulla, G. (2012). Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz on Mugaritz and deliciousness. Eater, May 15th. https://www.eater.com/2012/5/15/6586849/chef-andoni-luis-aduriz-on-mugaritz-and-deliciousness. 14 Ammann, J., &amp; Ritzel, C. (2021). The soothing effect of bred in the Covid-19 pandemic. Baking Europe, Autumn, 6-9. 15 Geissler, L. (2018). Time works. The Ingredient, April, 64-67. 16 Hayward, T. (2014). The cult of inconsistency. FT Weekend Magazine, October 10th. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/41cb3e4c-4e66-11e4-bfda-00144feab7de.html. 17 Forkish, K. (2012). Flour water salt yeast: The fundamentals of artisan bread and pizza. Ten Speed Press. https://chmararosinke.com/Breadcrumbs-an-anthology-of-Polish-lyrical-poetry-with-the-motif-of Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:51:57 +0000 chmara.rosinke https://chmararosinke.com/Breadcrumbs-an-anthology-of-Polish-lyrical-poetry-with-the-motif-of “Breadcrumbs – an anthology of Polish lyrical poetry with the motif of bread”Text: Klara Czerniewska-Andryszczyk Bread is deeply engrained in Polish vernacular culture. However, it was not until I tasted a slice of Maciej Chmara’s self-baked loaf this past summer that I finally understood the meaning of many ritualised gestures that, for me, were somewhat anachronistic and totally incomprehensible. The modest reverence of our ancestors, picking up and kissing slices of bread when they happened to fall on the ground; the utter disgust I caused my grandmother when throwing out uneaten bread – mouldy or dry, inedible for anyone; the customs that are still cultivated at weddings or official ceremonies, such as inaugurations of public buildings and end-of-summer harvest festivals (“dożynki”); the mysterious link to the spiritual, the divine, the (super)natural – suddenly appeared perfectly proper after we spent a few days together, tasting, smelling, and discussing (his) bread. As an inspiration, Maciej left me a book with more than 240 poems and 103 Polish proverbs featuring the motif of bread, written between the 1400s and the 1990s. The anthology, published in the 1990s, allows you to travel through epochs, styles, and topics. Varying stylistically across the centuries but recurring throughout the book, these motifs could (arguably) be treated as a pars pro toto of the history of Polish culture, covering significant aspects of our heritage and cultural identity. To begin with, it is perhaps important to mention that the etymology of the term “zboże,” which denotes “cereals” and “grain” in Polish, refers to something “coming straight from God.” The idea that bread and crops are provided by a supernatural force and the rituals of gratitude this inherently entails, seem to be shared with many a nation or tribe, past or present – and not only Christian, although this is particularly relevant in our Polish context. In fact, the anthology could just as well serve as proof of most Poles’ vigorous religiosity, as the vast majority of poems, up until the 20th century, combine the motif of bread and land cultivation with the theme of God and the teachings of the Bible. (NB: Perhaps it was only possible for the anthology to be published in the 1990s, i. e. after the fall of communism, as it was not until the late 1970s that religion was finally – although reluctantly – admitted back into the public realm: Karol Wojtyla, himself an actor and poet cited in the anthology, was elected Pope John Paul II in 1978, and since then, Poland experienced a national surge in religious expression, which, combined with the Solidarity Movement, lasted well into the late 1990s and in some aspects continues to this day.) In Christian mythology, God is the creator of everything – the Earth, the human being, and the cosmos. I find it hard to comprehend that there are people in the 21st century still believing that “God gave man dominion over all things”, i. e., the natural world. Nevertheless, throughout the whole book, we witness thankful prayers praising God for his generosity. For instance, Jan Kochanowski, the most important Polish poet of the Renaissance, concludes his classic Psalm 65 thus: “…Wherever you place your foot You multiply abundance. The deserts bloom, the mountains rejoice The fields are full of cattle, and grains Grow in the valleys, and full of hope, The ploughman laughs.” Pleas for the rain to come and fertilise the soil are equally abundant – times (and climate) may change, but our complaints about the weather and the fears of farmers about their crops prevail: “Let you squeeze those humid clouds with your holy hand And they will nurture the arid land and trees That burn.” (Kochanowski, again). As in many other countries, the Christian code of conduct seems to have been added to the pre-Christian, “pagan” beliefs. The idea of a peasant living in close relationship with the cyclicity of nature – starting work at dawn and finishing at dusk, or adapting to the cycle of seasons, merges with the ancient commandment to remember the Sabbath day and keep it sacred (noted e. g. by Jan Kochanowski and Adam Mickiewicz, the nation’s prophets from the Renaissance and Romantic period respectively). The ritualisation of labour is also praised throughout the ages. However, the perspective shifts with time. It is interesting to read the poems written in the 20th century: through the first iterations of anti-colonial thought e. g. by Antoni Słonimski (strangely recalling motifs found in the verses of the Baroque era that described Poland as a fertile land able to feed other countries, “a granary of Europe” producing and exporting crops across the early modern world – which, again, is an iteration of the quasi-religious motif of Poland as “a Messiah of nations”), to propagandist, socialist-realist pamphlets of the 1950s, to various more “domestic” or “folk-inspired” approaches, through which one can learn the hierarchies and traditions of breadmaking, and, additionally, conduct some ethnolinguistic exercises, discovering such now forgotten terms such as “dzieża” [djiezhah] – a large wooden container used to pat and leaven sourdough, or “snopowiązałka” [snoh-poh-vyazaukha] – the revolutionary reaper-binder, described by many a Socialist Realist. It is also interesting to identify the protagonists of the poems. Is it the bread itself? Or the land that originated it? Or God Almighty? Is it the peasants as a nameless group? Or the poet’s closest relative who bakes tasty loaves every morning? In some cases, the poet’s attitude towards bread reflects his/her attitude towards the world, his/her home country, or the society s/he lived in. I believe it is vital to underline the distance with which the poet reflects on the farmers or other people involved in making bread. Although breadmaking was perceived as a creative act – one that comprised a lot of effort, toil, and skill that was indisputably praised, the poet almost never put him- or herself in the shoes of the baker, implicitly marking a deep class divide between manual labour and creative work. In short: the poet never bakes. On the contrary, s/he often positions him-/herself as a guest, a visitor, a stranger coming from afar. Someone who just jumps in and shares a meal with the “collective subject”: “Oh, you, who by blind fate are condemned to work, You are the mainstay of the state. Venerable peasants, The lifeblood of nations (...) By feeding and defending others, you are The first class of mankind! (...)” writes the prominent author, scholar, politician and activist, Ludwik Osiński, at the turn of the nineteenth century. Marianna Bocian, one of the few female poets included and herself the editor of the anthology, noted in “Bratu Janowi, a więc chłopom polskim” (“To my brother Jan, and therefore, to Polish peasants”): “(…) my eight-year-old brother sowed rye with his hand he cried as it was beyond his strength (…) God summoned your hands to sow and reap you sowed your sweat and tears in me (…) you ask: is it true that writing poetry claims your entire life? Why is it given to just a few… you say, laughing: sowing is no art at all even a child knows how to do it! have you already forgotten the toil of learning to sow which, years later, became the masterpiece of your life? (…)” The poet thus observes that everyone is blessed with a different gift, playing a different role in society. The role of the poet, however, is the frailest: “When the worst comes When the soldier fights without bread, We shall not write poetry.” claimed Stefan Garczyński, who fled Poland after the 1831 November Insurrection and died soon after in the South of France. Consequently, bread, soil and farm workers are substituted by the figures of soldiers and blood spilt on that same land. The common attribute in both cases is the scythe: used for crops in times of peace, and, assembled vertically, used as a weapon during uprisings. In 1795, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe for 123 years. Poles mounted several insurrections to maintain their identity in the lands that became part of Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All this can be read between the lines of poems assembled in the volume. The metaphor of the field as a fertile ground and a burial place all at once, the resemblance of grains and drops of blood – this comes back each time there is war or famine, up until the 20th century, with World War II, the concentration camps, gulags, and the martial law of 1981–1983. Consequently, the motif of bread is followed by the motif of hunger, with all its dull and painful iterations. A forgotten phrase struck me: to work “on foreign bread”, meaning to work for a stranger, only for the money, without the satisfaction promised by “the real thing” – the bread ascribed to one’s own land. Bread brings memories. The taste and smell of it evokes nostalgia. The poets bring back tender memories of their childhood or depict the landscapes of their youth in a romanticised vein, full of metaphors and colours and sounds. Sometimes, one can even deduct where the poet was from when he recalled a loaf baked on leaves of calamus or horseradish. Others, like Kazimierz Wierzyński or Mieczysław Braun, suggestively evoke the implicit sexuality of moist ground and fertile seeds in their sensual, synaesthetic verses, full of juicy, clacking sounds. Essentially, bread is meant to be shared. Again, this notion is closely linked to Christianity and the story of the Last Supper, the miracles of Jesus, and the Eucharist. εὐχαριστία – what a beautiful word! Literally meaning to give thanks, to be grateful – it should be the quintessence of our relationship with nature, and with other people. Regardless of the economy, whether bread is a gift or is given in exchange (as in Malin Elmlid’s project, The Bread Exchange, launched around 2013), let us delve into the words of Maria Majchrzak – a fragment from her poem, Reconciliation: “I offer my hand like bread As a reconcilement Sincerely Let the salt Drip from your eye We will leaven the dough To make bread And I believe We will form a loaf For our shared Brotherly table.”