 Hello everyone. It's lovely to be here and it's appropriate that we're in a circus tent Because what I went through was sort of a three-ring exercise. I'm gonna take you through each of the rings Herbert just said something which resonated with me and with you. I'm assuming too You are what you cook. There's enormous truth in that. We've got so many chefs here I'm sure that's sort of a mantra that makes a lot of sense to you, but for me. That's only part of the story I'm not a chef However, I am a customer of chefs. I'm an omnivore. I'm a great eater Although that changed when I became the man who couldn't eat And that's the journey. I'm gonna take you through today. I Came back to eating in fact So much so that I was able to enjoy a 28 course meal at Noma on Friday night It was unlike anything. I've ever had before round of applause for Noma and for doing this and in those extremes between Extended food deprivation which I'll tell you about and this celebration at Noma was a journey I went on which told me everything that I never knew about food and life And I don't think would have been able to understand in any other way I'm a writer. I'm also a writer besides being an eater So I rely on stories to make sense out of the world to make sense out of my place in the world to make sense Out of events and to make sense out of life Chefs, I think use ingredients the way that I use stories. They use ingredients to stitch together Narratives it's the way that they create meaning. It's how they make sense of the world It's how they take the chaos around them and find inspiration and channel it into something memorable But I don't think what chefs can fully understand is the extent to which we as eaters people like me Take what the chef has done and then translate it into our own stories Into our own narratives into our own journeys and they inform who we are Okay, sorry Okay, he's not a handsome guy up there. He's not a lovely a lovely portrait. That's me a few years ago, so I suffered with a lifetime illness something called Crohn's disease which isn't of particular importance But what Crohn's disease did for me was it always made food this double-edged sword food was something Which I? Craved and lied on and I needed it to sustain my health, but there was always the risk involved that food could in fact Do do damage that it could hurt me that what I was using to keep me alive Could also kill me and I always had this kind of conflicted relationship with food one day I was home for lunch and I was making my grandmother's tuna fish salad recipe and I'd finished chopping the onions and slicing the olives and mixing up the mayonnaise and grinding the pepper and the salt and I would have this plate of tuna in front of me and I was about to eat and I felt a funny pain in my gut funny Kind of a twinge not unfamiliar to people who live with GI issues, but within a few minutes. What was all of a sudden not so Unfamiliar became devastating my guts literally exploded on me within a period of about a minute or two And I found myself very quickly in a bad situation I had emergency surgery which saved my life. That was the good news The bad news was that when I came out of the surgery It was a tough spot and there were a lot of complications and the prognosis was that for me to heal There were gonna be two things going on that seemed antithetical to healing number one My gut was going to be in a medically induced coma. So through some medicine I was gonna lose all feeling and sensation in my gut It was gonna be shut down and it would be shut down so that I would be able to live on Nothing by mouth no food no drink on a food pump being fed intravenously the synthetic concoction 18 hours a day, which would keep me alive But not do anything more than that So I was nothing by mouth for a long time and that put me in a place with food where I'd never been before Eventually I came back to eating as you can tell from my raves about Noma the other night But when I came back to eating and here we are the first moment of that return to To life among eaters. I'm in the hospital and I had gone through nothing by mouth periods before But short-term four days five days and at the end of that week or so I would begin to feel the normal feelings of hunger and craving and to me You know that was the sign that my body was telling me you're healthy. You're ready to get out of the hospital you're ready to resume life and Every time I got through one of those experiences My memory was that that apple juice and that clear broth and that Jell-O Tasted as good as the 28 courses. I had at Noma the other night I mean when you go without food and you put food in your mouth you put food on your tongue It's a read a process of rediscovery this time I Drank the apple juice and I drank the ginger ale and I ate the Jell-O and I drank the clear broth and nothing Nothing in my mouth. I had been without food for so long That the taste buds had atrophied off my tongue. My tongue was as smooth as the porpoises skin So my gut was medically Imperilized I couldn't feel what was going down into my gut and now I couldn't taste what was in my mouth And this was a fate almost worse than nothing by now because now it was complete emptiness I was an empty vessel being filled up with food to sustain me and I couldn't enjoy nothing There was no pleasure whatsoever There was no ability to revisit all the things that I wanted to come back to when I was ill and What it enabled me to do though was really to live a kind of controlled experiment because eventually I did come back and Let me take you through some of that when you are in the state I was unable to appreciate food unable to experience food you become Dislocated as a human being what I didn't know was that aside from the hunger and aside from the absence of flavor that Removing food from my life Really cut me off from the connection to every human emotion To everything that you rely on in the course of a day in the course of a life to feel connected to feel like you're among the living as I say and things happen that are not necessarily of Great significance until you're in them and you're not in them. You're dislocated as I was you have occasions like a Child's birthday party at a restaurant in New York City The Benihana chain where the food is the show the food is presented in front of you by a chef Who's having a good time and everybody's having a good time Sampling the food and then eating the art and getting involved in that whole process And you begin to understand that food as I say is not only on the tongue and not only on the gut But in the heart and in the head and what happens to you if you can't be part of it Food as love this is perhaps the greatest expression of food every July 4th My family are guests at a holiday party in on a lake in Maine Where the hostess makes it's sort of the ultimate ultimate summer cookout And the hostess makes a stars and stripes cake little corny for the holiday But it tastes great She picks the blueberries and the strawberries off of her property and puts them together And this was the occasion of my sister becoming engaged to an Englishman with the very English name of Simon Clark and The host responded by taking her tradition the stars and stripes cake and making it into a stars and stripes and Union Jack cake and as I say it was sort of the ultimate expression of love and Generosity and imagine what it's like to look at this and not to take a fork full and put it in your mouth Not only are you missing the strawberries and the blueberries and the cream, but you're missing the occasion You're missing the celebration. You're missing saying to two people who love each other and have come together that I'm breaking bread with you I'm eating cake with you. I'm part of your experience Imagine what it would have been like to stand at the tent outside today as An observer standing outside of the tent instead of eating all that wonderful breakfast that we had this morning And of course we think about when it's gone the social function of food Which is maybe the strongest emotional component of it We're not only talking about occasion. This is a summer dinner party at friends in upstate New York My wife is at the table. I'm not as as you can see But we live in a small apartment in New York City with two children. There's no escaping what's going on and When I first began the food pump regimen the idea was well, I will I'm home I'm home from the hospital and things will be back to normal I'll sit down at the dinner table with my wife and our two kids and For the first couple of nights. I sat down at the dinner table and everything was different I was there with a food pump on my back. It was loud. It was noisy. It was Intrusive there was nobody miss what was going on But around me were my wife and kids who were eating who were going on with their lives who were sustaining themselves And there I was beginning to resent what I couldn't participate in and it drove me over the edge And it drove me literally away from the table. So losing the social function of food is probably the greatest impediment That that hits you when you can no longer You can no longer eat now for those of you who you know who are professionals in the industry The tactile element is something that perhaps you can relate to and I did I say I'm not a chef I'm not a good cook, but I can do a couple of things passively I love to grill because it's the most forgiving medium of cooking and I'm a very inexact cook so I love to grill like the shish kebab on The left here, and I'm a very good chopper and arranger and I can chop and arrange a salad and for me It's the closest that I can come to creating a meal and an understanding the pleasure of cooking for other people So you miss that element, but I was unable to cook because I couldn't taste and I couldn't smell and I couldn't sample and I couldn't eat and it's like Cooking in the dark all of your senses leave you and my limited ability became absolutely useless to me In my growing obsession, I began then to understand that food I'd always been an omnivore. I loved food. I'd craved it, but that it was also as I say The different pivot points the different chapters in the narrative of my experience This in my head in the mental journey that I took was me as a teenager And it was something I never thought of that way before this is a little variety store in the tiny little town called richton, Maine where I grew up in the summers and what it is It's for me It's a symbol of independence and celebration because it's the place where I used to go about ten minutes to midnight Every night in the summer I'd leave the campfire and I'd race into town and I'd get here and get the last pizza out Of the oven before they closed and bring it back to the campfire and share it with my friends around the campfire I always thought this was the best-tasting pizza in the world when we took our kids to this restaurant a couple of years ago They disabused me of that notion Apparently this makes dominoes look like gourmet pizza But in my memory and in my experience it represented something greater as I say it represented independence and I began to think that These food events I thought that my life was the sum of all sorts of parts and I didn't realize that in fact food Was how I made sense of my life and now that it was gone I began to think again to think that this was something that I was now telling a story of a life That no longer longer existed so I used to work for this crusty old guy was here on the screen named Bob Alton and I made a movie with him in which he said and he said this to me one day And I thought well, that's very funny Bob's a crusty caustic old guy Here's he's getting a rise out of me with this crusty caustic joke He was a longtime recovering alcoholic and I thought of it. You know it was very funny. It was this little quip. He had however When I went through the food deprivation experience. I realized what he meant For Bob not having whiskey was a great emptiness in his life And his life wasn't the same without it. There was no substitute for it He never he progressed he moved on but his life was never the same It was fundamentally changed without alcohol in his life. I felt that way about food My life was not the same. I missed food and nothing I could do could replace it And I began to think and try to convince myself that this would end and I would come back to food And if I were to come back to food, what would make me whole again? What did I want and every day I would have a series of Images of places and experiences that would randomly pop up in my head sort of you know suppressed memories that were now Unleashed with all the confusion going on in my head and I thought of places that Had some sort of meaning for me at the time but now of course that was expanded places like Patrick's Roadhouse in Santa Monica, California Which is a shack as you can see on the Pacific Coast highway But and they make burgers and eggs and you know nothing of great significance except for one dish They have the world's best banana cream pie. It's like nothing else. I've ever had it's simple It's fresh bananas and cream and homemade crust and I used to travel for a Los Angeles affair a bit And I always scheduled my trip so that my plane would land at 11 o'clock in the morning I'd leave lax. I would drive straight to Patrick's. I would call ahead to make sure they had a banana cream pie I would sit down. I would eat the pie it would explode in my mouth and I would feel like okay Now I'm connected to Los Angeles now. I'm connected to where I need to be now I feel as though I'm 3,000 miles away from home But I have something familiar and I was sustained and I could go on then with a busy couple of days and know that my experience was complete so Things like the banana cream pie began to weigh on me to think that This is this vision is what is going to get me out of this hole. I'm in and I thought it's interesting. I said what Herbert said earlier that you are what you cook and I wasn't cooking so I was nothing but there was something else going on too. I mean Herbert's remark is a Derivation of you know the old phrase tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are you are what you eat And as I thought about my experience, I realized that wasn't it that wasn't enough because eating can be indiscriminate You can be hungry and an empty vessel and you can fill yourself up with candy bars You can fill yourself up with whatever is on the plate in front of you. That's not who you are That's not defining enough. I realized that what I was experiencing these kinds of fantasies and obsessions It was something more they were cravings. They were all encompassing cravings that were tapping into every emotion that was not satisfied because I Wasn't able to put anything in my mouth and I realized that no no really Cravings tell you who you are that is the real hook into your personality That's the real insight into your identity if you can begin to understand what your cravings are you can begin to understand not only what you need but who you are and One of the things that I loved was going to the White Horse Tavern where we live in New York and having a slow pull draft of Guinness and sitting in the place in the Dylan Thomas booth where Dylan Thomas famously drank and died and sit underneath the plaque that commemorates Richard Burton and Crave that experience. I missed that. I understood what my old crusty friend Bob Alton meant So I also occurred to me that I'd been through this before when I was a kid we lived in St. Thomas and There I that's my kindergarten picture. There. I am in the middle bringing integration single-handedly to the island And I missed things from the States I loved my new classmates and I loved the beaches, but it was 1968 and I missed Processed food The food on the island was Kalalu and fish head soup and it was very strange to me And I couldn't connect to the culture and my parents took so much pity on me that they had They called friends in New Jersey who had a box of Twinkies shipped to us And I went down to the dock with my father on this leaky dock And I bit into the Twinkie and it transported me back to my ranch house in a subdivision in New Jersey And I felt connected and I felt secure and I felt safe And I thought you've been through this before and food has saved you the Twinkie has saved you the other great experience for me when I was a kid growing up was Cats is daily on the Lower East side, which has been there since 1888 when I was five years old My father took me there for the first time his he'd eaten there as a kid his father had taken him there and It was the other seminal experience for me What they have at cats is what we eat is this heart attack on a plate Hot post you can see hot pastrami on club, which is this with the center dug out like a canoe and They stuff the pastrami inside and we put hot spicy mustard on it half sour pickles French fries Dr. Brown's celery I went there when I was five and this is what I call the Jewish tea room This is the the dining room and I came from this tiny little town in New Jersey where we didn't have restaurants We didn't have places like this and I walked into this place and it was a circuits like what's going on in this tent It was loud and noisy and the plates were banging and the glasses were rattling and people were shouting orders and the smells Were overwhelming and it was communal and you have to go through this is religious experience You take yourself up to the altar at the counter and you present yourself on after waiting on this long line And you place your sandwich order and then there is this ancient tradition of the meat pulled from the cooker And you can smell it in your nose and all your senses begin to come alive And there's this artistry as they chopped through and then they hand you what I thought of as Jewish communion I was five years old. I was a picky eater I didn't like anything except plain spaghetti and the cutter at counters handed me the sample slices And I put it on my tongue and it was a religious experience It exploded on my tongue and I knew what it was to love food And I knew why my relatives were all fat and ate themselves to death with this food because it Reminded them of who they were I I'm my family is Jewish But we grew up in this tiny little town with no connection to any heritage and I felt like I guess Catholics feel like when they walk into the Vatican and they walk into the Sistine Chapel and food did that for me here And at the end of the process you get this and you eat this sandwich Which weighs about the same as a brick and it goes down your gullet and it lays in you and it feels real And it connects you to the reality of what's going on around you So as I came back to food, I thought I'm gonna try this. I want to I want to be who I was I don't want to have this scar in my gut and I don't want to have this You know emptiness in my head I want to go back to the way things were and a very smart friend of mine said you're a fool if you do that Because you are experiencing something that Requires analysis you need to understand that this is a profound experience And if you just go back to the way things were and you forget about everything You will have lost the opportunity to understand the meaning of what you're going through and the meaning of what you will Need to go forth and I said Mark you're a bright guy. That's wonderful, but that's in the abstract I want to taste that Twinkie. I want to taste that pastrami sandwich I want to know if I am still who I thought I was before all this happened So I tried it and this was also made a little more urgent by the fact that the hostess company announced that they're gonna stop Manufacturing Twinkies, so I had double reason to do this so I went to my local grocery store And I went to a shelf that I'd never go to because I hadn't had a Twinkie since I was on the leaky dock in St. Thomas and I bought a box I walked out to a park on a beautiful sunny day I unwrapped the cellophane wrapper I bit into it and I spit it right out. It was horrible. It was awful More than anything it was chemical. I Won't bore you with all the 51 ingredients that are in a Twinkie, but do you have any idea what sodium acid pyrophosphate is? I don't either, but I can tell you that it tastes awful When I was tasting this I was tasting not only that but It's so you know imagining that I was tasting the latex gloves of the technician who was stirring the vat It tasted completely like chemicals and that's not what I needed But I also realized what else was going on I was sitting on a park bench alone eating this Individually wrapped out of the cellophane concoction, which hadn't changed in shape or recipe or dimension But something had changed in me This was food which is meant to be consumed Individually and I was eating it appropriately in isolation on this park bench and hating it and I realized that I had just come through this period of terrible isolation cut off from food and This was no longer what I wanted I didn't want to eat anything which is going to be a metaphor or a manifestation of that kind of aloneness of that kind of Separation and then I went back to Katz's to complete the experiment and I ordered the sandwich and With the mustard and the Dr. Brown's celery and all that and I bit into it and it was fantastic It was fabulous It was even better than it was when I than I remembered it because not only were the flavors absolutely Alive in my mouth But I was in the Jewish tea room and I was sharing it with the tables of eaters And I was part of the community of eaters again and that began to change my thinking about this sense of Understanding what I crave that what I was craving was sure I wanted my flavors back And I wanted you know the feeling in my gut back But I wanted the totality of the food Experience and I thought of it as sociability and all the things that we've touched on and then I gave it a little more thought There's been so much talk among you know crowds like this past 20 years about the farm to table movement The locovore movement and seasonality movement, etc And we talk about the benefits of sustainability the economic benefits the environmental benefits the gastronomic benefits, etc But I don't think that there's much attention paid to the Psychological and emotional benefits for the consumer and the eater in the last 20 years where we live in New York City Farmers markets have exploded so every Thursday I go to our local farmers market through the fall And I buy bush as many apples as I can carry home and I eat you know the organically grown apples And we do the same thing in Maine with sugar and gold small kernel corn when it's fresh and it represents a Part of the experience that I realized Were was akin to how I was living my life and what I wanted that I Wanted what was authentic? The the Synthetic food that I was on had led me to death and what was going to lead me back to life was understanding what was authentic Not only on my tongue, but emotionally and psychologically and sort of the apotheosis of it just happened a couple of weeks ago This is a place in Maine in Wisconsin Maine called reds eats that claims to be the number one lobster roll stand in the state of Maine, which is a big claim and You wait a long time. We wait you wait about an hour online to get in and And they live up to their reputation. They are the best and the reason they are the best I think is because they represent authenticity. This is lobster right off the boat This is actually a lobster and a half on a roll and there's nothing on it There's no fancy play with it. There's drawn butter and mayonnaise on the side and you know a basic hamburger roll hot dog roll and This is like the Carnegie deli of of lobster shacks There's so much meat that it's falling off, you know your roll But it represents authenticity and it connects you not only to what's on your plate But to where you are and you're in a community of people who are waiting online for this shared experience And and that you know, I thought was sort of the totality of my understanding of this experience until I went to Noma Friday night And I had among the 28 courses Renee's brilliant lobster concoction and It was delicious and what was so interesting about it was that it took what for me was the traditional Process of eating which is you start by sucking the juice out of the spinners of the lobster and getting the flavor of the salt water in Your mouth and then going through the eating and in fact it took that process and it made it You know and that is the essence of the recipe It takes the juices of the lobster and it creates this broth and and and you use that in combination with the lobster tail And I thought well, I haven't stopped learning the meaning of this experience yet because I've discovered that even if something Like lobster that I think has to be prepared only one way in one place can be done like this and I can understand and appreciate it then Thank God there are talented people in this world who can take ancient traditions like this and Adapt them and do something creative and wonderful with them Because when they do that they are in fact telling new stories that Eaters like me can absorb and can bite into and begin to use them to understand the world around us as it changes That I think is the essence of my experience and I think I think for many many around us as well So I'm out of time. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to talk to you