TANK Magazine – The Food Issue SAMPLE

Volume 8 Issue 9 · £8 · Autumn 2016 · The Food Issue

Eat me

Patricija and George in Torbjørn Rødland’s breakfast of champions. What lies beneath our all-consuming obsession with food?

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Contents

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Editor’s letter Bring the magazine to life: how to use the Fashion Scan app.

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Front

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Measure for measure: recipes are a mixture of art and science – the delicacy of measurement and caprices of taste.

Radio Tank

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With great taste: Phillip Lim is a designer; last year he celebrated the ten-year anniversary of his label 3.1 Phillip Lim. A taste of empire: Fabio Parasecoli is a professor of food studies at the New School for Social Research in New York. His book Al Dente (2014) is a history of the Italian diet since the 1950s. His forthcoming book, Feasting Our Eyes (2016), is a look at food and cultural identity in film.

On the chef’s table: A. S. Hamrah is a writer, film critic and semiotician based in New York.

He has written for numerous publications including n+1, Harper’s and the Baffler.

104 Flavour country: Martha Henriques is a science and health writer. Photography

by Paolo Barbi.

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The sonic inferno: José Luis Pescador is an illustrator based in Mexico.

Features 124 The belly of architecture: Jenny Jones is an architect and a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Arts, London.

134 Food of the future: Bee Wilson is a food writer and the author of five books, including, most recently, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. 140 Discreet charm: Maria Dimitrova, a writer based in London, discusses food in film.

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The smell of shrimp: Timothy Morton, is professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University; he is the author of numerous books including The Poetics of Spice (2000) and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013).

Last year, Björk published a booklet of her email correspondence with Morton as part of Archives (2015).

146 Consider the oyster: Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the world’s most famous photographers.

158 Digestive logic: Alistair Ian Blyth is a translator and writer based in Romania.

His translations include An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Cătălin Avramescu, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher; and, most recently, The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepeneag.

204 The decentred self: photography

by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie, styling

by Hamish Wirgman.

218 Clean and serene: photography by Tina Tyrell, styling by Julia Ehrlich.

Curated pages

164 Sweet and low: Christabel Stewart and James Wilson on art, food and society.

228 Strangers and the tide: photography by Osma Harvilahti, styling by Bobby Hook.

Fashion feature

242 Tall order: photography by Estelle Hanania, styling by Benoît Bèthume.

172 Children of the revolution: the designers shaping fashion’s next chapter. Uniqlo U, Alaïa, John Alexander Skelton, Jahnkoy, ONEBYME, Chin Mens, Atlein and Ports 1961. Words

by Tamsin Blanchard, photography by Alice Neale, styling by Hamish Wirgman.

Fashion

256 Time of no reply: photography by Torbjørn Rødland, styling by Nobuko Tannawa.

272 My dinner with: Delfina Foundation; Eva Chen, Carol Lim and Humberto Leon; Holli Rogers and Esteban Cortázar; Marco de Vincenzo and Delfina Delettrez; Sandra Choi and Alan Yau; Claudia Roden.

294 Stockists 295 Subscriptions

112 Concrete orchard: photography by Rachel Chandler, styling by Eugenie Dalland.

188 Wild strawberries: photography by Joanna Piotrowska, styling by Nobuko Tannawa.

Mirror, mirror 296 Living in Harmony: Charles Fourier’s gastrosophie. Jane Levi is a food writer and academic who studies food and utopia.

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Measure for measure: recipes are a mixture of art and science – the delicacy of measurement and the uncertain caprices of taste Scan the opposite page to watch the story come to life.

Go to page 25 to see how.

The custom of eating a shoulder of lamb at a Passover Seder originated in 70ad. Whether the lamb should be roasted or cooked with water in the oven is still hotly debated. We recommend seasoning Francesca’s shoulder with an Equipment shirt and a J.W.Anderson skirt. Add sautéed gloves

by Bora Aksu x Agnelle and shoes by Jacquemus.

Alternatively, you can prepare Xavier’s shoulder in a marinade of jumper, shirt and trousers by Raf Simons, with a flat-leaved Camper shoe garnish.

The measurer wears a top by Les Benjamins, trousers by Levi’s Made & Crafted and shoes

by Prada, throughout.

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In Italy, pork collar is used to make coppa, unbrined ham. A typical pork collar is 90mm in diameter; J.W.Anderson’s clear plastic version is only 70mm. Xavier wears his with a cardigan, also by J.W.Anderson. Long necks, like Xavier’s, opposite, give stock added body and richness, especially in gravies when browned to a shade akin to his clothes by Paul Smith.

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“The only certain way in which a mushroom may be identified is to know it thoroughly.

Once its personality is established in the collector’s mind, he will recognise it as he would a friend” From Field Book of Common Mushrooms (1936) by William Sturgis Thomas. Always inspect your Loewe bag, or rather your friend, with the utmost care.

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Ricky Lauren’s Hamptons Cookbook (2016) espouses the importance of the area’s “laid-back style”, something encapsulated in Xavier’s clothes

by Polo Ralph Lauren. The new Polo Ralph Lauren flagship has just opened at 169 Regent Street, London.

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Always inspect your fish before descaling: sea bass and bream have fingernail-like scales, which are never pleasant to eat, while mackerels’ are soft and inoffensive. The most delicious of them all are those on this top and trousers by Maison Margiela thanks to their smooth and shiny texture.

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“Reposado or ‘rested’ tequila barely kisses the wood of its cask, but it nevertheless retains a straw-like hue... Whereas añejo or ‘aged’ tequila will take on a brown or amber shade” From How the Gringos Stole Tequila: The Modern Age of Mexico’s Most Traditional Spirit (2015) by Chantal Martineau. Xavier’s Gucci jumper has the two-toned appearance of both reposado and añejo tequila, which he wears atop a Gucci rollneck. Tequila is best served in Gucci glasses.

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The value we place on a meal is hugely affected by the orientation of the food on the plate. Recent studies have shown that triangular plating is most appealing, particularly when, as on Xavier’s top –

by Iceberg, like the rest of his clothes – the triangle points upwards. Opposite, Xavier wears a jacket

by BOSS, a jumper by Bally, a striped shirt by Pringle of Scotland and a pin by Louis Vuitton.

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The body or mantle of a squid can be butterflied or cut into rings. A 10-metre-long “colossal” squid caught in 2007 would have produced calamari the size of tractor tyres. Xavier’s ring size is decidedly smaller than that and all his clothes are by Craig Green. Francesca wears a top and trousers by Tommy Hilfiger.

Photography: Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie / Womenswear styling: Nobuko Tannawa / Menswear styling: Bobby Hook / Hair: Maki Tanaka using Bumble and bumble / Make-up: Natsumi Narita using MAC Cosmetics / Videography: Stine Deja / Photography assistant: Sam Henry / Styling assistant: Gabriele Rizzi / Models: Xavier at Select Model Management and Francesca Cioffi at Linden Staub

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Concrete orchard: beneath the paving stones lies the beach.

Photography by Rachel Chandler, styling by Eugenie Dalland

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Page 113: Aiden wears a jumper

by Miu Miu and jeans by Levi’s.

114: Lisa wears a dress by DKNY. 115: Lisa wears a dress by Versus.

118: Lisa wears a dress by Versus and her own ring.

119: Tasha wears a shirt and skirt

by Emporio Armani.

120: Tasha wears a dress by Tome.

122-123: Prisca wears a jacket and trousers by Calvin Klein Collection.

Grooming: Ingeborg / Models: Tasha P at D1, Lisa Saeboe, Prisca Franchetti and Aiden Koch

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Food of the future: what became of the dream of a meal in a pill? Bee Wilson traces the strange legacies of the meal replacement, from early feminist fantasy to contemporary Silicon Valley reality

Photograph by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie

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“What will the man of the future eat?” asked the American journalist Henry J.W. Dam in McClure’s magazine in 1894. Dam had been to Paris to interview the French chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who was then considered a prophet of future food.

Berthelot’s prediction was that eating was about to go high tech. Sitting in a small, dark study in the Institute of France, Berthelot told Dam that it would soon be possible to generate “artificial beefsteaks” and other factory-engineered forms of nutrition.

This new food, predicted Berthelot, would “be a tablet of any colour and shape that is desired”.

Berthelot was not the only one in the late-19th century to dream of replacing breakfast, lunch and dinner with tablets, pellets or lozenges. In the 1880s, another chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall set up a Pure Food Company selling “meat lozenges” and solidified “beef tea”. Back then, beefy pills looked like the future.

These Victorian chemists were wrong on the details, but right about the general concept. Meal replacements are now everywhere, from protein bars to SlimFast to liquidised “on the go” breakfast cereals (leading Australian brand UP&GO claims to offer the protein and calcium of a bowl of cereal in a single handy drink). Today’s advocates of universal meal replacements such as Soylent or Huel (the British equivalent) usually take them in the form of a thick, slurry-like vegetarian drink rather than artificial meat tablets. But Berthelot was prescient in seeing that in a scientific age, evermore people would want to dispense with the messy and inefficient business of meals in favour of something more utilitarian and flavourless. The dream of the “mealin-a-pill” has become a daily routine for thousands.

“He won’t go out to restaurants with me,” sighed a twenty-something woman who I met recently after giving a talk in Seattle. She was despondent that her boyfriend refused to share her great love of food with her. In their relationship, there was no staring at each other across a candlelit table, no swapping spoonfuls of dessert, no grocery shopping for interesting new ingredients. In place of all this mutual joy, he just ate “sports bars” whenever he got hungry, feeling no need to share. He was a gym fanatic and claimed that the bars gave him all the nutrients his body needed. What he got from these bars was better than what she got from food, he insisted; more streamlined. “At least he’s healthy, I guess,” she said, not sounding very convinced.

She looked sad and asked me if I thought he

would ever change. She reminded me of a parent whose child won’t try anything green.

The French by Rivka Galchen From before and even through and beyond the Renaissance, the French – to the extent that we can summarise them through this time as the French – disdained the potato. Potatoes could be fed to hogs, maybe to cattle, but for humans to eat them was an indignity, and furthermore potatoes caused, it was thought, syphilis, leprosy, sterility and early death. For a number of years, it was forbidden, under pain of fine, even to cultivate them.

But in the mid-18th century, during the Seven Years War, a French army pharmacist was a prisoner of war in Prussia; during that time, he survived on a diet of potatoes. When a contest was held, years after his return, to propose a diet to counter dysentery, the pharmacist proposed a diet of potatoes. Potatoes won! Not long after they gained official recognition as food. They remained unpopular, however. The pharmacist tried to change that. In 1767, he threw an all-potato feast for the king; at the feast, the queen wore a potato-blossom headdress. In 1785, the same pharmacist convinced Louis XVI to give over 100 acres outside of Paris to grow potatoes.

The pharmacist had the acres heavily guarded, so that they would seem valuable. Then, as per his plan, he let the guards off duty for an evening, and the potato plants were, predictably, stolen and re-cultivated by the masses.

Even if French fries aren’t really French – most people credit the Belgians, and the “French” part of the name is thought to be derived from the style of slicing – it remains the case that many of the tastiest methods of potato preparation are French.

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When someone eats nothing but pizza and Cheestrings, we call them a picky eater. Yet when someone builds their life around modern meal replacements, we are supposed to believe that they are doing something superior to the drab old business that the rest of us indulge in whenever we sit at a table with knives and forks and conversation. In this time-obsessed, screenfixated age, these people are carving out more minutes and hours to spend on useful stuff like email, social media and ordering more possessions online. They are the winners, who sip their portion of slurry and get on with the day. We, with our dirty chopping boards and endless rush to get unreliable ingredients ready in time for dinner, are the losers.

What are we thinking, using our lunch break for actual lunch?

In utopian fiction of the late-19th century, the meal-in-a-pill was a feminist concept. In Mizora, a serial published in the Cincinnati Commercial in 1880-1881, Mary E. Bradley Lane envisaged an all-female society where the women ate artificial meat and cream. This was an alternate reality to the real world where women were tied to the kitchen.

In 1887, American novelist Anna Dodd published a satire called The Republic of the Future. In it, she imagined food tablets being delivered by pneumatic tubes to dwellings that contained no kitchen. “When the last pie was made into the first pellet,” she wrote, “women’s true freedom began.”

Today, the meal replacement has different, more individualist connotations. It is not about liberating women from cooking meals, but freeing young men from eating them. Huel – which costs around £4.83 per person for a day’s supply – is not something you buy to save someone else the trouble of cooking.

Rather, it is an extreme form of self-care, for individuals, not households. Many Huel users claim it has transformed their health, helping them either to lose weight or to gain it, giving them more energy to exercise, clearing up their skin. Based on testimonials, users are preponderantly young, single men interested in a more scientific way of eating. Huel – devised by dietician James Collier – is made from oats, pea protein, rice protein, flaxseed, coconut, a few other things and vanilla flavouring.

It boasts that it contains, “all the proteins, carbs and fats you need”. This is something to “take”, like you would a vitamin pill, rather than something to savour, like a ripe peach or a bowlful of buttery egg noodles.

To me, the thought of going a day without food remains dystopian. Waking first thing, I am often in a state of mild panic: why didn’t the alarm go off sooner; how will I make inroads on my to-do list; what do the children need for school today; and why did I not get it ready the night before? What calms me is the prospect of coffee and toast, and perhaps a pear: that reassuring music of the coffee grinder and the toaster, the warm, comforting smell that fills the kitchen. Food makes the panic dissipate.

For people who drink meal replacements, on the other hand, food itself has clearly become the cause of panic. Maybe Soylent is a logical reaction to an age that can’t stop talking about food, with Instagram feeds devoted to cake, and restaurant meals photographed as if they were babies. For some people, the whole complexity of food – the ethics of green beans, the healthiness or otherwise of butter – is just too much. Soylent drinkers can opt out of all this.

“At least I won’t have to think about lunch,” said an elderly woman who was buying a bottle of Weetabix On The Go in the queue in front of me at Boots. “It’s one less thing, isn’t it?” Many of the customer testimonials on the Huel website describe it as something that can save you from the stresses of eating. Some say that it has stopped them from compulsive snacking because it keeps them full.

A waiter writes that before he started having Huel, he would come out of work after his shift “and eat crap”.

To contemplate the reasons a person would have for using meal replacements is to see how disappointing the experience of eating has become for many. I started to think about meal replacements differently when I came across a blog written by Dan Wang, a 24-year-old writer and editor based in the United States, though he has also lived in Canada and Germany. Wang drinks Soylent once a day and argues that the prejudice against meal replacements is misplaced. Unlike many users, he does not claim that Soylent has changed his life or made him healthier. He does not pretend it is even particularly satisfying. But neither, he points out, is most of the food for sale in the average Western city.

“I challenge the doubters to declare that every meal they have is a plate of nutritious deliciousness, prepared simply, and enjoyed in the company of friends,” he writes on his blog. Wang himself started

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drinking Soylent over a year ago, to replace the meals, that would otherwise become “a hot dog in a cafeteria” – in other words, lunch. Soylent comes in two versions: “Version 1.3, which I’ll call cake-mix Soylent; and Version 1.4, which I’ll call burnt-sesame Soylent”. Wang marginally prefers the cake-mix version, although he does sometimes worry that he will one day find it too disgusting to swallow.

For Wang, Soylent makes sense for modern life, not because it is something utopian and wonderful, but because the rest of the Western food supply is so dispiriting. “I spent the first seven years of my life in Kunming, Yunnan,” Wang tells me. He sees Kunming “as a food paradise: the broths, the rice noodles, the cold dishes, and especially the mushrooms, all delicious”. When he found himself studying at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, none of this deliciousness was available to him. His lunch options – the only ones he could afford on a student income, anyway – were “microwave meals and greasy hamburgers”. He still cooks tasty Chinese meals for himself in the evenings, but during the day, he finds Soylent a way to avoid wasting money on bad food. It appeals to his sense of frugality. But, he emails from San Francisco, “If cheap, nutritious, and delicious food were easily available, I would opt for it over Soylent every time.”

It says something sad about our food supply that not-eating can now seem like a better option than eating. For most of the 20th century, the idea of the meal-in-a-pill had space-age connotations. But astronauts themselves, it turns out, are not so keen on food in a tube. They yearn for comfort food.

There was a notion – encouraged by those pouches of dehydrated Neapolitan space ice cream that you see in museum shops – that astronauts had different palates from earthbound humans. But these days, NASA space food consists of a menu of around 200 items, all designed to be as similar as possible to real food, only thermostabilised and vacuum packed.

According to the US space agency, a favourite is fajitas, made from long-life tortillas, hot sauce, and various vacuum-packed meats. Another is shrimp cocktail. It reminds American astronauts in their lonely cabins of the tasty flavours and textures of home.

The future never turns out quite as predicted.

Spacemen crave the old-fashioned food of an actual kitchen: something to chew, to savour, to share around a table, to remind them that

they are still human. Meanwhile, back on earth, many people no longer even aspire to such pleasures.

With our screens to comfort us, we no longer need a stove. “My definition of Man is, ‘a cooking animal’,” wrote James Boswell in the late-18th century. Now, we are animals who neither cook nor necessarily eat.

The idea of the meal-in-a-pill goes back a long way.

But this is the first generation to test what happens to human society when meals are removed from the equation not due to famine or poverty – but rather because there are other things we care about more. § First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, published by Fourth Estate, is out now.

In Flooded McDonald’s (2009), in the context of the global financial crisis, the Danish art collective SUPERFLEX built and then flooded a replica McDonald’s restaurant.

Video still courtesy the artists

Scan this page to see a video of the installation.

Go to page 25 to see how.

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Clean and serene: the eternal sunshine of a spotless wardrobe.

Photography by Tina Tyrell, styling

by Julia Ehrlich

Opposite, all of Sarah’s clothes are by Versace, she holds a matching spray bottle. Overleaf, left, she wears a bodysuit by Courrèges with shoes and a bag by Dior, and a mop and pail, while right, holding a horsehair cobweb brush, all of her clothes are by Chanel.

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Sarah holds a grooming brush and wears a sweater

by Emilio Pucci, trousers by Akris and shoes by Dior, while all of Dylan’s clothes are by Dior Homme.

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On the previous page, left, Sarah wears a dress

by Gucci and shoes by Giorgio Armani and carries a heavy duty push broom, while right, she wears a jacket and trousers by Sonia Rykiel, a belt by Altuzarra, shoes by Dior and carries a bag by Louis Vuitton along with a large bottle cleaning brush. On this page, Sarah wears a jacket by Giorgio Armani with a scarf and earrings by Dior.

Set design: Julia Wagner at ACN Studio / Hair: Ayumi Yamamoto / Make-up: Allie Smith using YSL BeautĂŠ / Nails: Kelly B at DeFacto / Casting: David Chen / Post-production: D-Factory Paris-NYC Photography assistant: Matt Shrier / Models: Sarah Brannon at New York Models and Dylan Fender at Fusion Models

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Strangers and the tide: disruptive visions of dramatic, new menswear.

Photography by Osma Harvilahti, styling by Bobby Hook

Scan the opposite page to watch the story come to life.

Go to page 25 to see how.

Johan stands in the surf zone of the beach.

All his clothes are by Balenciaga.

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On this page, Filip, doused by a rainshower, wears a coat by Maison Margiela and a jumper

by Raf Simons. Opposite, standing in a Whitstable street, all of his clothes are by Maison Margiela.

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Opposite, Filip wears a jacket and jumper by Vetements from matchesfashion.com, while Johan wears a jumper by Raf Simons from oki-ni.com.

Overleaf, left, on the foreshore of the pebble beach, all of Johan’s clothes are by Prada, and right, Filip wears an apron and trousers by Dries Van Noten and boots by Jimmy Choo.

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On the previous page, Johan wears a jumper by MSGM. Seagulls have become a problem in Kent as they move further and further inland. On this page, above, all of Johan’s clothes are by Prada. On this page, right, Filip wears a jumper and trousers

by Raf Simons with his own ring. Opposite, all of Filip’s clothes are by Maison Margiela.

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On this page, all of Johan and Filip’s clothes are by Prada. Opposite, they both wear trousers

by Xander Zhou. Huts throng the shoreline, once storage for fishermen, today they are mostly owned by beach-going families.

Grooming: Ammy Drammeh using Chanel Le Rouge Collection NÂş1, Chanel Le Lift V-Flash and Bumble and bumble / Videography: Elizabeth Black / Video editing: Jordan Tallis / Styling assistant: Gabriele Rizzi / Models: Filip at Select Model Management and Johan Kroon at Supa

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Time of no reply: photography by Torbjørn Rødland, styling by Nobuko Tannawa

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Page 257: Jamie wears a jacket and trousers

by Emporio Armani, with the photographer’s own glasses, throughout.

258-259: Maurits wears a jumper by Moncler and Patricija wears a top by Hermès.

260: Maurits wears a shirt by Marc Jacobs and trousers by Tommy Hilfiger, while Jamie wears a jacket and top by Emporio Armani.

261: Maurits wears trousers by Brooks Brothers.

262: Jamie wears a coat by Fendi.

263: All Patricija’s clothes are by Gucci.

264: Jamie wears a coat by Emporio Armani.

265: Patricija wears trousers and boots by Balenciaga.

266: All of Patricija’s clothes are by Gucci, while all of George’s are by Polo Ralph Lauren.

271: Jamie wears a jumper by Tommy Hilfiger and Patricija wears a dress by Dior.

Hair: Yoshitaka Miyazaki using Bumble and bumble / Make-up: Ammy Drammeh using Chanel Le Rouge Collection Nº1 and Le Lift V-Flash / Casting: Bobby Hook / Styling assistant: Gabriele Rizzi / Models: George Gell and Patricija Zil at Premier Model Management, Jamie Howard at D1, Maurits Duran at Select Model Management

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My dinner with: Delfina Foundation; Eva Chen, Carol Lim, Humberto Leon; Holli Rogers, Esteban Cortรกzar; Marco de Vincenzo, Delfina Delettrez; Sandra Choi, Alan Yau; and Claudia Roden

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The Delfina Foundation family lunch.

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“Family lunch” at the Delfina Foundation Delfina Foundation, 29-31 Catherine Place, London, 6 July Founded by Delfina Entrecanales in 1988, Delfina Foundation was created as an independent non-profit to provide subsidised, high-quality studio space and resources for artists. With its rich history and international acclaim, the foundation has nurtured and supported hundreds of artists, including 13 Turner Prize nominees. Every few weeks the foundation opens its doors to outsiders – gallerists, curators, journalists – to meet with its in-residence artists and eat a “family lunch” together, hosted by its founding director, Aaron Cezar.

Below, Jane Levi.

Aaron Cezar “Family lunch” is really an informal articulation of what we try to do here at Delfina Foundation: to find artistic approaches with which to rethink the world around us. During the lunch I’ll ask each of the artists in residence to talk about their work as it relates to the theme we’re currently exploring, which is the politics of food. The artists very much live and work in this space, we think of this entire house as a studio. So Delfina Foundation is very much a home, and like in any home, everything that happens outside the domestic space affects what happens inside. In the last three weeks we’ve seen some seismic shifts take place, not only in Britain with the renegotiation of its role and position within Europe, but also with the multiple acts of terrorism around the world, from Istanbul to Dhaka, from Medina to Orlando. We had a family lunch the day after the referendum, it was an incredibly sad and depressing lunch, although the format of lunch reaffirmed why we do it.

So today I thought we should talk about the idea of utopia or utopianism in relation to our current programme, the Politics of Food. Partly because it has been the subject of research for one of our UK associate artists, Jane Levi.

Jane Levi I’m mainly a historian, but like anyone who works with food I dabble in other disciplines. I have a particular interest in the people who have tried to create ideas of utopia – or at least a different way of living – using food. I use food as a lens through which to examine what such people were trying to do and the thinking behind it. So I tend to focus on people who have explicitly used food as one of their forms of expression and how they communicated what it was that they were trying to achieve to the rest of the world – like some of the countercultural groups in the 1960s and 1970s in San Francisco; or the 20th-century Diggers who fed the poor and held the principle that food should always be free. For the latter group, it was a performative act of giving and expressing freedom, so food is a good way of declaring your political stance on a lot of things.

I’m also very interested in historical precedents to those kinds of ideas, and the way that the urge to find a better way of life is continually expressed throughout history in different ways of thinking about agriculture, thinking about how we share food or not, how we eat together or not.

AC I want to connect those ideas to the work of Thomas Pausz, one of our international residents, who is seated at the end of the table. Thomas has been exploring a different context of agriculture within the framework of the city, and in particular thinking about urban farms and allotments.

Thomas Pausz Yes, I work with allotments and the connection that they have with utopianism is maybe more in its perception. But allotments raise questions like: Is food growing viable? Is it a necessity or a lifestyle choice? In relation to Brexit, I read an article that explained how the food security of Britain is seriously in danger because of the possible changes in trade and movement between different countries. Food growing is going to become more important in future. At a global level, we need to stop shipping food around. I live in Iceland where everything is imported, and from this experience of living in a place of scarcity I began looking at allotments.

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AC I want you to talk about your work with dandelions because it’s a very specific example of looking at the whole notion of sustainability and how we can think about food systems.

TP I’m going to work with the dandelion as a resource because I want to try to exhaust all the possible materials and possible things you can make from one species. I want to make edible things, syrups, raw materials, pulps, and hopefully even rubber. There are two ideas at play here: one is in terms of our loss of biodiversity, so with the dandelions I think it will be interesting to find diversity with one single resource, and two, is related to our “plant blindness”. There are many plants that we don’t even look at, that we don’t know how to use.

AC There’s a thread in your work that runs towards another of our artists and so I want to turn to Kathrin, who is an artist based here in London – she provided some of the drinks that are on the table. I want to know more about the idea of communal hop picking and agriculture that led to the creation of these drinks.

Kathrin Böhm I’m working on an art project that takes the shape of a community drinks enterprise. One of the first drinks we made this year is an elderflower soda and it’s picked by communities in Barking and Dagenham, which are traditionally working class. The enterprise is called Company, so in relation to utopia, our logo is a simple “c” which is related to ideas of collectives, community, co-operatives and congestion charges! When you talk to old hop pickers, they will point out that the picking was about making some money, but it was mainly about being in good company. There is a collective spirit that comes out of this 100-year-long tradition, and that’s what I’m really interested in. The project is also about community economies, about exercising this idea that an economy involves many aspects of doing, sharing, contributing, paying.

AC Now, Daniel and Alon of Cooking Sections have been part of our Politics of Food programme since the beginning. And a major project they’ve been working on this summer looks at food products coming from the British Empire.

Alon Schwabe About three years ago as part of the Politics of Food programme, we started a research project based on a collection of historical posters that were created by a governmental initiative called the Empire Marketing Board. The board existed for eight years between 1926 and 1934 and its whole purpose was to encourage the citizens of the British Empire, especially the UK, to consume foodstuffs from all over the colonies and dominions. The aim was to both reinforce the economy, but also to put responsibility for the success of the British economy on the citizens of the Empire rather than on the King or ruler.

Daniel Fernández Pascual The way they would do this was through these beautiful posters. The posters were propaganda that created desires, wishes, dreams and so on. Many of these posters can be seen at the Victoria & Albert museum today. So we are trying to think about the contemporary legacy of all of this.

AS We have been doing a lot of research into the imaginary landscapes that were depicted in the posters and really investigating these spaces and what remains of them. In one series of posters we found a proposal for Empire shops, which would have opened all across London and in major

Delfina Foundation comprises two Edwardian houses joined down the centre by a dining room and kitchen. For this lunch, the “family” ate Brazilian pastéis de bacalhau (cod croquettes) and bacalhau à brás (scrambled salt cod, eggs and potatoes).

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Veda bread is a small, malted, caramel-coloured loaf sold in Northern Ireland that, when fresh, has a very soft consistency.

Above, Laura Wilson.

The Empire Remains Shop

by Cooking Sections, 91-93 Baker Street, London, runs until 6 November 2016.

The Politics of Food residency programme at Delfina Foundation runs until 18 September 2016.

British cities, where people could go to buy products that came uniquely from the British colonies. These Empire Shops never actually opened. But this summer on 4 August, we are opening the Empire Remains Shop at 91-93 Baker Street. Here we will speculate about the remains of the British Empire in contemporary London. It will be a three-month installation with a window display that changes every ten days. There are going to be events, performances, dinners, plays, lectures, symposia.

AC I want to return to Laura to speak about one of the projects she’s initiating here, which has again the potential to develop a new product for the English market.

Laura Wilson I’m originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland and my work involves working with traditions, but also looking at how information is passed on from one person to another. In the past my work has involved brickmaking, but most recently I’ve been working with a baker and a dancer in Sheffield to look at the choreography of bread making. This summer I’m starting a project called “Trained on Veda”, an exploration of a particular bread called Veda bread now only available in Northern Ireland. At the beginning of the last century it was popular in the UK, but for various reasons the processes of making and distributing it fell into decline. So now it’s only produced in Northern Ireland, but I’ve made contact with the baker who still bakes Veda and who is the keeper of the secret recipe.

I’ve been in discussions with him about how we’re going to produce Veda bread for the first time outside Northern Ireland in over 100 years. We think this is the right moment for all of this to come to fruition. I’ve also been working with a baker just outside London who wants to retire. He runs a bakery that has been family-owned for generations. I want to investigate his business model and look at how I can make Veda bread on a mass-scale in London.

AC The topic of markets and movements runs through the politics of food, especially for Chris Fite-Wassilak. Chris is a writer, a critic, a sometimes curator and a cheesemonger. Chris, can you explain the context of your practice in relation to both markets and utopianism?

Chris Fite-Wassilak Cheese, for me has become a very big lens through which to discover other things. I work as a writer, thinking about cultural history, but I’ve also been working as a cheesemonger since 2003.

I grew up in suburban Atlanta eating things like Velveeta cheese, but over the past ten years I have been learning a lot more about farmhouse production of unpasteurised cheeses. It’s these dichotomies that interest me as well as the idea of how we can develop and find mini-utopias away from central economies. I’m spending the next few months working on this in a long-form piece, firstly about the politics of production, but also about the intimacies of consumption. I’ll be looking at two specific cheeses: one is a goat’s cheese made by an anarchist in the Limousin region of France – he was a soixantehuitard and he squatted in a forest before starting a commune between farmers so as to be able to survive within the market. All the farmers produce one cheese together that they can then distribute nationally. The second cheese is called Provel, which was first produced in 1947, and is from St. Louis, Missouri. It’s a typical, gooey, processed cheese: a mixture of Cheddar, Swiss cheese and provolone. St. Louisans are very proud of it. My grandma was obsessed with Provel and I could never understand why, but it’s one of these things where you have all these ritualistic meals in which it features very

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strongly. I’m thinking about the trace of this cheese and about foods that may not have a good provenance, but still have a strong connection for people.

Eva Chen, Carol Lim & Humberto Leon Red Egg, 202 Centre Street, New York, 28 July Humberto Leon We all have a common love of dim sum; we’ve talked about this a lot. I think we talk about eating every time we meet up.

Eva Chen I think that every time we see each other we talk about eating for most of it. Remember there was a phase when everyone used to have their after-parties here at Red Egg and this place would turn into a club at night?

Carol Lim Yes, we had a holiday party here one year. What’s nice about this place is that they do dim sum but then the owner’s from Peru, so they also have a lot of Peruvian dishes.

EC Do you guys eat lunch out every day or do you order in?

HL We order in. We get lots from Nyonya, a Malaysian place. And we love this place called Hampton Chutney. There’s also a really good Thai place called Larb; it’s delicious.

EC I’ve been there before.

CL There’s a new Hawaiian poke bowl place, which is fresh raw fish over rice.

EC That’s the new thing, right? Everyone talks about poke bowls. Not to be confused with Pokémon balls. What are your favourite foodie Instagram accounts? I like Bon Appétit magazine [@bonappetitmag].

HL I like Bon Appétit a lot. And I like Angela [Dimayuga] from the restaurant Mission Chinese Food [@swimsuit_issue].

EC My friend Christine is a food blogger [@cy_eats] and she specialises in junk food, so all she posts are oozing burgers and crazy, slightly gross things. She does a lot of videos and they always make me feel a bit nauseous, but her Instagram is really good. I went out to eat with her once and watching her take pictures of the food – she carries a side flash – and when she picks something up she squeezes it like a pimple – it’s kind of gross. Food blogging seems so specific because you want things to be spilling and oozing, which is very different to fashion blogging where everyone wants it to be perfect and pretty. Though perhaps not so much anymore. So a brief intro – how did we first meet?

HL Teen Vogue days?

EC I’d shopped at Opening Ceremony before; I always liked the kids who worked there because I felt like they were way cooler than me and very informed about cool stuff. They’re all fashion nerds, which I liked. I was always very intimidated by you guys because I felt like you were really cool.

HL What?! We’re the nerdiest!

EC Yeah, now I know that you’re extremely nerdy and you’re obsessed with food so we get along. I feel like Kenzo and Opening Ceremony are so hip. How have your roles in the industry changed and evolved?

HL The way information is shared has changed drastically and it’s made everyone rethink how they do things. I think we’re lucky because when we did our first Opening Ceremony show we really focused on making sure that the experience was...

Humberto Leon and Carol Lim are the creative and business brains behind Opening Ceremony, which they founded in New York in 2002. Since 2011, they have also been creative directors at Kenzo.

In November, Kenzo will partner with H&M in a collaboration to celebrate the brand’s 50th anniversary.

Eva Chen first met the designers when she was a fashion editor at Teen Vogue.

She went on to edit Lucky magazine and is now head of fashion partnerships at Instagram.

Red Egg restaurant in New York serves Cantonese food and is famed for its world-class dim sum.

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Humberto Leon photographs Carol Lim and Eva Chen.

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EC Visceral. The first OC show was the one with the cars. We mention that show a lot when we meet with designers. You have to give people an experience these days. Every editor, every model, every stylist in attendance even the people who are showing people to their seats are Instagram producers; they all have a content platform. So even if it’s a Parsons [School of Design] student who’s volunteering at the tent, she’s broadcasting content to her 1,000 friends. So for you guys every show you do there’s a moment.

Obviously, the cars or the melting chocolate wall – which was my favourite.

I remember walking in and being like, “It smells like chocolate,” and then it started melting down the walls...

CL But you also know there was a chocolate perfume created and it was being wafted through the room.

HL So you were supposed to feel that before.

EC I mean, it worked, it totally worked. Having moments like that is really important. Also now the industry isn’t just the 1,000 editors, buyers and models; it’s half a billion people around the world, so you want them to feel that they’re a part of it. I don’t know if I would have been able to be an editor 15 years ago. You want as many people to be a part of the experience as possible. That’s why I think the H&M collaboration that Kenzo is doing is awesome. You’re bringing it to a whole new audience and making it possible.

HL For the H&M thing, we designed all-new pieces for it.

EC The gloves are really cool. I think they’re going to be a standout. I don’t know who’s going to wear them, maybe street-style kids, but they’re cool.

HL Once you see the price, you know anybody would wear that. We went into the archives and there are some spectacular museum-worthy dresses that are coming out.

EC I loved that about your last show also, you had prints! I remember coming in to do a preview and you guys had archival images and archival ad campaigns.

HL I think a lot of our new customers don’t have any idea about the history of the brand. So we really try to focus on the storytelling: what we do arcs back to Kenzo Takada himself who was one of the founders of ready-to-wear. People say that in many ways he pushed the big houses, the Saint Laurents and Chanels, into ready-to-wear. He was “streetwear” before the term even existed. We have to make sure that he’s remembered in a way that we can tell the story of the brand. It’s relevant – we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary. It’s a big deal.

EC Fashion now doesn’t have to be $20,000 for a couture dress. Well, probably $20,000 isn’t enough for couture, but you know what I mean.

Fashion is so much more unassuming now. Using Vetements as an example: reconstructed Levi’s jeans, Kenzo sweatshirts. I remember frantically, crazily hunting one sweatshirt down when I was at Teen Vogue. Then, one day, my mum was at my apartment and she said, “I’ve been through your laundry and I’ve put your sweatshirt in the wash.” And I was like, “What are you doing? Stop!”

HL Chloë Sevigny once told me that for her first ever designer purchase she wanted to buy some Margiela shoes. So she took her mom and her mom said, “Chloë, those are shoes from the devil.”

Foodies to follow: @bonappetitmag – a mix of posts by the staffers of Bon Appétit magazine. Expect blistering shishito peppers, roasted koji and sourdough croissants. @swimsuit_issue – for sweet, soy-braised rattlesnake. @cy_eats – to get up close with some of the most irresistible restaurant dishes you are never going to eat. @clerkenwellboyec1 – there is such a thing as a free lunch, after all.

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Japanese soy sauce, or shoyu, is brewed with roasted wheat, whereas Chinese soy sauce traditionally leaves out the wheat.

This difference in ingredients, as well as brewing time, gives Japanese soy sauce a slightly sweeter, rounder taste when compared to Chinese soy sauce, which has a denser, saltier, thicker finish.

EC How are you both so reactive? Because I do think you guys move faster than most brands.

CL Number one, we’re curious, so we’re always seeing what’s happening and then we always have a conversation about what we are interested in. It’s not like a company; it’s just two people talking and saying, “Let’s do it.”

EC Tell us about Kenzo World and Spike Jonze’s movie for the fragrance.

HL So we are launching our first perfume and it’s called Kenzo World.

It’s coming out in September and Spike came out of commercial hiatus to do a commercial for us. So we’re launching a mini-movie with him.

EC Who’s in it?

HL It’s this girl named Margaret Qualley. We love her; she’s amazing.

It’s very much the Spike Jonze world we love. We’ve been working on this for two years. We started with the scent and the bottle, and it all takes so much time, but finally it’s all coming out in September. It’s kind of a big deal for us. Because when we started, when we lived in the suburbs, you would learn about a brand through the fragrance, perhaps in a magazine. Like for YSL Paris – I remember thinking I loved that smell.

CL Or the Benetton perfume.

HL Or CK. In my mind, Calvin Klein was the fragrance.

So it’s a different audience. It’s exciting to do something that almost talks to us as when we were teenagers. We know that this is going to touch people who have no idea what Kenzo means, and that’s something really nice.

CL I think that accessibility is so important because you might have a 15-year-old who can’t afford a bag or a pair of shoes yet, but wants to feel like she’s part of the world. That’s why I love the name Kenzo World, because it is a world – a girl who lives in Kansas can be part of the Kenzo World just like someone who lives in Paris.

They’re all joined together and feel a lot closer to the brand.

And the advertising is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

HL This is probably the most unmissable perfume commercial. We decided to release the campaign the week that the fragrance is available in stores, which is unprecedented. Normally, they do a month lead-up, but we are doing it immediately and we’re releasing the video on iTunes because we made an original track. So it’s a simultaneous iTunes music launch. We’re also launching the fall film that we did for our Kenzo campaign on the fashion side.

HL We did a film with [the musician] Carrie Brownstein, which she wrote and directed. It’s so hilarious. It stars Natasha Lyonne and Mahershala Ali. We try to do different formats and try to utilise different budgets to do different things that are interesting to us.

EC I think the death of a brand is when it just does the same thing.

HL I agree. We also try to have a point of view, so we’ve been very vocal about being pro-Hillary. We’ve been very vocal about being pro-feminist, pro-gay, anti-guns. We try to really use our platform to talk about what people are doing.

CL As a company, we are 56% women, and of our directors and senior managers, we are 76% women!

HL We’re also 60% non-white.

EC I think that transparency is super important, so people know where

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you guys are standing. It’s important that people use their platforms and voice to have an opinion. Right now we’re in a phase in American history where it’s dangerous not to have an opinion. With the people who don’t want to alienate people or don’t talk about politics, I’m like, “It’s even more important that you talk about politics because it’s right now.”

HL Playing the middle-ground zone is not what you should do.

EC I’m not even a super historical-political buff, but this whole election has me very agitated because it’s so important – as a woman, as a mother, as an American.

Holli Rogers & Esteban Cortázar Loulou, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 107 rue de Rivoli, Paris, 24 June Esteban Cortázar I saw a conversation on Instagram between Alek Wek and this guy, they were talking about how millennials really connect with the truth. They don’t buy into fakeness; they realise when things are too systematic. When somebody’s posting something that feels as if it’s too planned out, they know right away. They can tell the difference between what’s authentic and what’s not.

Holli Rogers I think that’s why Snapchat has become really important.

EC Exactly. Because everything has become so systematic, I think twice about everything. I do what I do because I’m passionate about it, not because I want to make money. Of course, I want to be successful, but at the same time I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager and I love what I do. When I have a buyer who comes in and is just flipping through the sales report and the sell-through, it makes me think. I say, “Wow, where’s the passion in this? How are you buying this?”

HR To me, it’s really simple: it’s just about product. I say this to the business all of the time – we could have an amazing e-commerce platform and beautifully refurbished stores, but if we don’t have the right product, none of it really matters. I think if we stop the markdowns happening when they happen, that would be one major solution. The problem is that everybody wants to log last year’s figures. But one of the decisions I made around Christmas time – when you would normally go into markdown for winter products – was to say, “Don’t mark down coats or boots”. These are the things that you’re going to need in February when it actually gets cold, but you can’t find anything except silly chiffon dresses.

If we could get away from calling it “spring” and “fall”, I think that would fundamentally help because it’s a ridiculous concept.

EC The whole idea of calling something “spring” and “fall” makes the designers themselves design that way, which then affects the whole thing.

I think collections should be everything.

HR Because you’re selling to both hemispheres. Most retailers who are online are selling globally.

Loulou is the new restaurant at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Palais du Louvre.

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Esteban Cortázar is a Colombian-born fashion designer. He launched his eponymous line in 2002 when aged just 18. Receiving high praise, the collection sold out at Bloomingdales. After spending time as the creative director at Ungaro, Cortázar relaunched his line with an exclusive, trans-seasonal collection for Net-A-Porter in 2012. Breaking the traditional autumn/winter, spring/summer cycle, Cortázar produces highly coveted capsule collections adopting a see-now-buy-now approach.

Holli Rogers worked her way up the ranks of Net-A-Porter, after working previously for the likes of Chanel and Neiman Marcus, and became fashion director in 2011. Under her direction, the e-tailer uploaded 60 times more stock and doubled the number of countries to which it shipped. In May 2015, Rogers became the CEO of Browns after its takeover by retail-aggregator Farfetch.

EC There should always be a coat. There should always be a summer dress.

There should always be great knitwear. There should always be light stuff.

There should always be chiffon dresses, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t also be a great jacket and coat. When we did the first collection for Net-A-Porter the launch dates kept changing, so the climate became irrelevant. The collection just had to be what it had to be. It made me think so much about how I structured my business. I have investors; they’re great and I’m happy with them, but of course, they’re like “What’s next?

What are your projections? How are you going to meet them?” Often, I just don’t know. Because I do it for many other reasons, too.

HR Esteban, you were very brave in doing what you did, but now that’s what everybody is talking about. Everyone is doing it your way.

EC What I think is happening right now is that everybody is also just trying to do it their way. It takes time to see which idea will stick. It’s not actually happening exactly how I want, not yet. First, you realise that it’s hard to deal with the factories, then the fabric arrives late. It’s not easy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I keep the delivery window big enough to allow for the fact that I don’t know exactly how it will turn out. It’s hard because the factories don’t actually understand. They are starting to, but it boils down to fabric.

HR How fashion is evolving, the cycles changing, the production capabilities, is exciting. So many people have become stuck in their ways, but the speed of the industry makes them ask, “How do I deal with this?” It’s like they’re re-engaging back into what they do instead of this mechanical, walkin-with-a-spreadsheet routine. It forces me to look at everything in another way because things are coming at you from different angles.

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EC I think retailers need someone to inspire them. I think what’s interesting and exciting about the future is the new generation. When you have a new generation of people who are thinking in different ways, they rethink how processes can work. It’s a millennial thing – kids who grew up looking at a screen instead of a book. It makes you think in a different way and can sometimes alter how you think of the future. I’m working in opposition to most people who show a collection and shoot a campaign with such rapidity. They’re like, “Next, next, next. Boom, boom, boom. Who has the most followers? Let’s shoot her.” We’re living in a time right now where authenticity and integrity feel scarce, so what’s important is keeping that sense of realness. Retailers need to have emotion when buying. Listen to the designer. I’m swimming through, and I do the show, but at the end of the day I have people to answer to, and it’s tough to hold onto my integrity and authenticity…

HR Yes – with all of that investment, try and not let that go because that’s what makes you so special. When I saw your last collection, I was like, “Oh my God, those colours are amazing! And the fur! And all of it is amazing”. I just don’t ever want to see that get watered down just because you’ve got numbers to hit.

The national dish of Esteban’s homeland, Colombia, is bandeja paisa, an overflowing platter of ground beef, egg, corn cakes, chorizo, avocado, rice, red beans, chicharrón (fried pork belly), fried plantain and morcilla (blood) sausage.

Marco de Vincenzo & Delfina Delettrez Boat trip, River Tiber, Rome, 20 July Marco de Vincenzo Being on this boat as we approach the bridge of Castel Sant’Angelo, surrounded by wonderful light, the vegetation on the banks is so thick that we cannot see the city, it’s like watching the grandeur of Rome from another perspective – from below. Above us there is chaos, but it’s so tranquil here. I am often asked about working in fashion and living in Rome.

I must say that the feeling I have is like this: fashion is chaos above its banks, but to live in Rome is to keep the chaos at a distance.

Delfina Delettrez It’s true, above us there is the Roman traffic, but here is my tranquil place. I really like observing our city from a new point of view. Working in fashion and living in Rome at the same time is a bit like being in an incubator. I always say that to be in Rome for a day is like staying three days in another city. I really think that living here means being able to reflect on what you are doing. It’s a way to be clear with yourself and get straight to the heart of things. The colour and scent of the mint in this cocktail takes me back in time and reminds me of my roots.

MDV It’s true. The mint in the glass has a beautiful colour; it looks like a smaller version of the treetops surrounding the river banks. I love being surrounded by colour – drinking and eating “colour”. It is eight in the evening and I’m more in the mood for a drink like this – made with ​​ mint, lime and cinnamon – than food. Being Sicilian and living in Rome for so many years, I prefer strong, bold food flavours. If there was a direct line to my house in Messina, it would be difficult to say no to a plate of pasta alla Norma [pasta with tomato, fried eggplant, ricotta].

DD I don’t like having food routines. I prefer to eat outside in a typical Roman trattoria. But my favourite place is Settimio al Pellegrino, a chichi restaurant where you feel like you are eating at your grandmother’s home. I have a childlike relationship with food. I eat like a baby on demand, whether it’s 10am or 4pm or midnight – I eat when I’m hungry. And I love

Delfina Delettrez launched her cult jewellery brand in 2007.

The daughter of Silvia Venturini Fendi, she met de Vicenzo when he was working at the Fendi studio as Venturini Fendi’s assistant.

After working at Fendi for 13 years, Marco de Vincenzo launched his own label in Paris in 2009. A winner of Vogue Italia’s talent competition, Who Is On Next?, de Vincenzo has been fast gaining acclaim, and this autumn, he introduces his first menswear collection.

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Hugo cocktail: 30ml Elderflower cordial 70ml Prosecco 20ml Sparkling water A handful of fresh mint Ice

everything crunchy – seeds, pistachios. I like things that make a noise. But I’m a disaster in the kitchen. When my daughter realises that it’s Sunday and I’ll be cooking, she looks scared because when I cook I fixate on the detail and aesthetics rather than the flavour of the food. Usually I start with a colour and try to mix the shades. If I had to identify myself in a role in the kitchen I would be the person who finishes the dishes and decorates them.

MDV I’m also terrible at cooking, although I really like to watch those who can. In the meantime, I could eat a plate of meatballs and sauce every day.

DD Working around the idea of Made in Italy, traceability is fundamental nowadays. It’s the best guarantee thanks to its strict rules and control. Made in Italy and impeccable craftsmanship are the essence of hard work – it’s like crafting the fossils of our time. Understanding where something is made, why, when, by whom and how is increasingly important.

It introduces the customer to the value of items. I think that more and more people are attracted to authenticity and the silent power of quality and craft. And I think that this is a reaction to the artificial era we are living in; technologies advance at such speed that it’s beyond our control – they can make us feel spaced out, even if we pretend that we have control over them.

Craft reassures us, it infuses the object with humanity. You recognise that the product has been created for a person, not just for the market, so it’s a more direct relationship. I have embraced the Made in Italy programme from the beginning. All my products are 100% made in Italy, more specifically in Rome. I will never change this because design, quality and comfort are what makes a piece special.

MDV Yes, Made in Italy is about the savoir-faire that the whole world envies. Soon, the average luxury consumer will have been born 15 years ago so the only way they will be able to distinguish Made in ​​ Italy products from everything else will be the combination of craft techniques and technology. I like to think that in 40 years time, the fashion collector will have a closet full of clothes and feel the same emotions that we feel when we see the wardrobe of a lady who has lived in the 1960s and kept her Pierre Cardin or Courrèges.

DD Artisans possess specific skills and use techniques that have been handed down for generations. My craftsmen often work behind curtains because they do not want to be seen or to reveal their working techniques.

MDV You know, I always make time to personally meet all the craftsmen and their families.

Sometimes they have continued the work of fabric or embroidery for over 100 years. It’s nice to see the passing of tradition throughout the generations and the need to forge links between past and future.

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DD Travelling and getting to know new aesthetics and traditions is what opens my mind to new ideas. I don’t find ideas by sketching at night, I am more practical. I go to antique furniture shops; I look at objects, vases and Italian 1950s furniture to get inspired. But ideas are very rude, they always come in late, and you never meet them where you are supposed to! I’m currently working on my next collection for October to be presented at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris. I usually create site-specific installations that meld with the jewellery itself. I think this comes from a need to challenge myself more and more; I seek to build universes that the viewer can immerse themselves in.

What are you working on?

MDV I’m working on my spring/summer 2017 collection, which will showcase my first ideas for men. I don’t know what will happen with it, but I’m excited to see. Most of the time when working on a collection I have a story in mind, but the end result always surprises me because it often differs from the original idea.

Sandra Choi & Alan Yau The Duck and Rice, 90 Berwick St, London, 7 July Sandra Choi I was born in England, but my mum and dad had four young children; I was number two, and they couldn’t cope with us all. So I was brought up by my grandparents in Hong Kong. I was not doing great at school, so my parents said, right, responsibility over – back to mum and dad!

And I was sent back to the UK with my younger sister. What about you?

Alan Yau My father was a tailor in Hong Kong so he came over here hoping to make a little bit more money. But the most popular thing at that time was the restaurant business, so he became a chef. I think my father is an amazing cook. He worked as part of the third generation of the very famous Peking Rendezvous restaurant in St. John’s Wood.

SC My grandfather was a fisherman in Hong Kong and he got a boat in the 1950s, which landed in Liverpool. He worked there and kept trying to find a place where there was no Chinese food to start a business – he picked the Isle of Wight! Jimmy Choo was married to my aunt, so I moved from the Isle of Wight to London to live with my family. In our culture, when you live with family, you immediately adopt what they do and help out. So I ended up helping in the studio – and the whole thing fascinated me! How do you approach the design of your restaurants?

AY I get criticised a lot for my stuff being over-designed, but I look into the design side as a way to make the project more interesting. Quite apart from the interior, I want to look into the graphics, the uniform,

Above, Delfina and Marco took a boat trip down the River Tiber and conversed over a pre-dinner cocktail.

The Duck and Rice is one of Alan Yau’s newer ventures, a Chinese-English “pub” featuring the mouthwatering house special of Szechuan chilli chicken, tender aubergine and firm, fresh noodles.

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Sandra Choi talking to Alan Yau during their meal at The Duck and Rice.

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everything else. In the restaurant business, the requirement to do amazing food as a product is a prerequisite. You have to do that to succeed. Lately, my main interests are in regards to the emotional architecture of the space – that I can feel the space. I can definitely feel if the space is negative, positive or flat.

SC I think, yes, you’re selling a pair of shoes or a handbag. But I want to paint the whole picture – the music, the ambience, and the way that you display everything needs to feel right.

AY I tend not to eat in my own places. When you do that it becomes work. It becomes very stressful because for me nothing is ever right. I really don’t know how other people do it.

SC I sometimes pop into a store and announce myself. I don’t shop, but I do walk into stores – it is the shop staff who complete the experience.

AY I tend to believe in the spiritual side of things, particularly with hiring. If you put something good out there, it will attract the right type of people. Hiring or looking for a good chef has never really been the problem.

My problems have really been more to do with funding. In my experience, money and creativity never get on because pitting the commercial production against what the baby requires, especially in the incubation stage, never works. During the incubation stage of a concept, you need absolute focus and a single-mindedness to push through with it.

SC I believe that if it’s meant to be it will happen. You go with the flow.

If I don’t laugh and don’t look at everything with a positive perspective, I’ll probably cry. We work in a very ruthless industry. Why do you think you are so successful?

AY I’m not sure whether I’m that successful. I enjoy what I do and to be honest, I think that if I were less creative, I would have been a lot more successful. It’s because the people who invent things don’t make the money.

SC From my point of view, you have to balance the two. Without creativity, you can keep on going on the back of the brand, off its power, but somehow your audience will see through it. You have to tell a story that the world wants to hear and maintain what you are about as a brand. That’s key.

AY This is the Szechuan chilli chicken.

SC It’s very peppery. That numbing sensation is incredible.

AY Yes, but this is even spicier – a lot of people don’t understand this concept. So they ask the chef to water it down, water it down, and then the chef becomes used to people complaining about the heat and automatically puts in less chilli.

SC So authenticity is key.

AY Yes. I don’t care about how many people complain.

Numbing is really the essence of what Szechuan cooking is about.

Without the numbing, you’re almost taking the soul out of the cooking. And if you don’t enjoy that, then don’t have the dish. This is Cantonese roast duck. This place is called The Duck and Rice because to me, pubs should be about humour and irony. I don’t do much cooking at home. My ideal weekend is really to spend two to three days in Istanbul and we do that every two weeks. I’m actually thinking of getting a place there and spending maybe four to six months of the year in Istanbul. Since 2010, when I went into a temple in Thailand and was ordained as a monk, I feel as if my whole body sensitivity changed. I began to appreciate certain cities that are more compatible with my

Sandra Choi was employee number one at Jimmy Choo, the luxury shoe company her uncle co-founded in 1996 with Tamara Mellon. Choi studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins, while living with her aunt and Choo. In the more than two decades as creative director of the brand, Choi has guided it through numerous, often fractious private-equity transactions, as well as the departures of co-founders Choo and Mellon in 2001 and 2011, respectively.

Hong Kong-born restaurateur Alan Yau introduced London to Japanese noodles and canteen-style dining in the early 1990s, with the eradefining ramen franchise, Wagamama. Through his subsequent ventures, including Chinese fine-dining restaurant Hakkasan and dim-sum teahouse Yauatcha – both of which have been awarded a Michelin star – Yau has redefined the status of Chinese cuisine in the UK.

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Yonezawa Wagyu is ranked alongside Kobe Wagyu as among the best beef in Japan.

Characterised by its fine texture and intense marbling, it has a rich flavour and subtle, sweet fragrance.

energy, or cities I feel alive in. The three cities I enjoy the most from that point of view are Bangkok, Istanbul and Las Palmas.

SC When I think about food and memory I think of my grandmother.

She had seven children and she would provide a different breakfast every single day, seven days a week. She would think of different combinations of food to put on the table for lunch and dinner. The minimum number of dishes to put on the table is three! And that’s not including the soup. It made me want to open the cupboard and pull various ingredients together and make a meal – it’s about being resourceful and creative.

AY The most memorable meal I’ve had was in Takahata in Japan, a small town in the Yamagata prefecture. It’s famous for two things – organic farming and a breed of cow called Yonezawa Wagyu.

I believe that this beef is the best beef in Japan. In Takahata, there is a butcher’s shop with the nickname of “one-cow butcher” because the husband and wife team that run the shop take one cow a day and they have a butchery in the front and a restaurant in the back, which they open for dinner. The dedication and the way that they choose to live their life and focus on a single product is incredible. To me, that is the kind of world that I think we should strive for: responsible agriculture and eating on the basis of quality.

Claudia Roden & Peter Lyle The Palomar, 34 Rupert Street, London, 4 July

Born in Cairo in 1936, Claudia Roden may be the world’s most revered living cookery writer.

Her books regularly appear in all-time best-of lists; the New Yorker made her the subject of an epic profile; historian Simon Schama called her Book of Jewish Food, “the richest and most sensual encyclopaedia of Jewish life ever set in print”, and her work wins book awards otherwise reserved for historians and anthropologists.

Peter Lyle is a writer and editor.

Peter Lyle Sorry it’s loud. I think my voice recorder should be up to it.

Claudia Roden I chose here because it’s a mix of Jewish foods – I can see the pickled herring is Ashkenazi, but then it’s with pistachio and flatbread.

So a lot of it is Sephardi. Sephardi Jews are the Oriental Jews from Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, so what I can see from the menu is that they’re using recipes from all these cultures and sometimes using Ashkenazi ones. They’re the European Jews. Here, for example, there’s the word “Yiddish”, but on the whole, it’s Sephardi, like this Lebanese bread, for example. I’d like to try that.

PL I grew up in the East End and I had friends and neighbours whose grandparents had come over as Polish Jews.

CR But they were all going up to Golders Green…

PL They were going, but they weren’t all gone. There was still Bloom’s and Rinkoff’s and salt beef and all-night bagels and cheesecakes. I loved all that comfort stodge, but when you finally taste a matzo cracker after years of reading loving tributes to them, it’s pretty disappointing. I felt like in a lot of ways – the shalom/salaams, the skullcaps, the beards – the outward symbols of Islamic and Jewish culture seemed similar, but this Jewish food I knew didn’t

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have any relation to the spicy Indian and Bengali home-cooked food I’d eat, and I was confused by that. But when I got your Book of Jewish Food I finally realised that it does all connect up in the end – it’s just a long way around.

CR Because the Sephardi are all over the Mediterranean. This coming Friday I’m going to the Oxford Symposium on Food and the theme is offal.

I’ve just written my piece for it and they’ve got the Tunisian tongue here that I described in my paper. But it’s quite different here – you see, they do it with yoghurt. In Tunisia, they do it with pickles or capers.

PL Look, there’s a whole offal plate here…

CR “Jerusalem Mix”, yes. In Jerusalem they do it with all the parts of the chicken, but here I think there are sweetbreads, too. If you want we can choose the pork belly, but it won’t be very kosher.

PL There’s no way round that, is there?

CR And you see, here’s ras el hanout. There’s an interesting story I could tell you about pork in Spain. And then here there’s octopus. Octopus is not kosher. They can’t eat anything without scales.

PL Something a bit scaly comes off an octopus when you’re cleaning it.

CR Yes, but they don’t count them as scales. But then sweetbreads are wonderful… it depends on what you want. A lot of people at this conference on offal are going to talk about how they’re disgusted by it. When I was working on The Food of Spain I did cook a lot of pig trotters and ears, and I would always invite a lot of people over to try dishes. I served pigs’ ears, but they were cut into small pieces so they didn’t look like pigs’ ears. So I’d told everybody in advance that we were having pigs’ ears and they still came, but when it came to it they couldn’t bear to eat them. Then, of course, in a lot of Arab cooking, there are testicles.

PL “Lambs’ eggs!”

CR Yes, so I bought some of them. And I went and bought a whole lot because I thought maybe I wouldn’t find them again, I’d better buy a lot, and I wanted to try it many different ways: in a stew, on the grill, all kinds of ways of doing them. And then my children came in and they looked in the fridge.

Anyhow, I served them to some friends on a day when they had just become vegetarian. And they just looked at them in shock. So I gave up on things like that because if you’re not going to eat them, what’s the point?

PL (To waitress) So can we have the mussels, the aubergine, the bread, the polenta, the lamb’s tongue and a Jerusalem Mix? CR I looked up this restaurant before we came and I realised that when I was in Jerusalem in 2014, to get a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Jewish Film Festival, one of the chefs here had entertained me. There were three chefs who did this big dinner in Jerusalem – huge – for me, and they made it a Jerusalem menu, because Jerusalem was the world’s capital of stuffed things.

PL Stuffed things? Sweet, savoury, anything?

CR Yes, everything. In my books – the Jewish and the Middle Eastern – I’ve got many kinds of stuffed vegetables, every kind of stuffed vegetable, and also things like stuffed pigeon. They did that because my first book, the Book of Middle Eastern Food, was first published in Hebrew 45 years ago, soon after it was published in English. And it was the first book in Hebrew to have Arab dishes.

The annual Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery was founded in 1981 by Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin.

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The Palomar “serves the food of modern day Jerusalem” – inspired by the rich and varied food of the Jewish diaspora, from Spain to Yemen and Eastern Europe. Roden wanted to try the restaurant because she knew one of its chefs from Jerusalem, where he had cooked for her.

That’s why they say it had an impact; it was taken up in all the kibbutzim, in all the places where they were cooking. A lot of the people who came from the Arab world usually arrived poor, and as soon as they came they began to grow up despising their own culture. The Arab culture was seen as backward; it was seen as the “enemy” culture. So they had to forget about that and they didn’t want to know. Their mothers might have done a couscous, but they didn’t really want to eat it. Somebody told me that when they went to school, the teachers would ask, “What do you eat at home?” To find out who they were.

And one of them, an anthropologist or something said that everybody said, “Steakim and chipsim”. They felt that was the only thing that didn’t place them as coming from the wrong culture.

PL So that first book had its impact because people had lost touch with these foods they actually loved?

CR A lot of my first dishes in the first book had never been in print before. I started just by collecting recipes from the Jews who left Egypt.

They left Egypt all of a sudden in 1956, after the Suez war. There were 80,000 Jews in Egypt and it was dramatic – some of them had only a week to leave and they left everything behind. A lot of them ended up in London, so I was already in London as an art student and I went to see them.

People were staying in all kinds of unusual places – hostels, put up by the government. They had to decide where to stay; they became asylum seekers.

A lot of them went to France, America, Latin America, all over the world, some of them stayed here. What people were doing by then was exchanging recipes, which they hadn’t done in Egypt.

PL They hadn’t wanted to share in Egypt? They’d hoard them and hide them?

CR Yes. You didn’t give away your family recipes.

PL But then people realised they had to be preserved by sharing them instead of guarding them?

CR When I was researching the Middle East, people would ask me, “What are you doing?” And I would say, “I’m collecting recipes”, and as soon as I said that people weren’t interested in talking to me. Because it was such a boring idea, they thought I was pathetic.

Then they would ask me what kind of recipes I was collecting and when I replied that they were Middle Eastern, people would say, “Is it going to be eyeballs and testicles?” You know, because that was the idea of the Middle East, and people had a disgust of the Middle East at that time. And so I kept on; there’s a whole culture there, a whole world. But there was another reason. When I left I thought I was leaving forever. I thought I’d never see Egypt again, and I felt that I was losing my world forever. I didn’t really even know it then, because we were a very Europeanised generation – I went to an English school in Cairo and we spoke French at home and Italian with an Italian nanny. Everybody I knew was brought up by Italian nannies.

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PL Can I ask about Elizabeth David? I thought I’d heard you say she was helpful to you when you started, but today I feel like she gets blamed for certain pretensions, for a loss of British food roots, for sun-dried tomatoes, et cetera...

CR Elizabeth David wasn’t very sympathetic to others. Today, we are very much a community of food writers: we are friends, we help each other and we do things together. She never wanted to have anything to do with anything like that. She said – maybe she was right – that she thought people had to do their own work, their own research, and not go as a group. She always was a bit of a snob about food, though, quite strict, and there were things she didn’t like. She didn’t like chickpeas, for instance.

PL My mum had cookbooks by people like Jane Grigson and Jocasta Innes – books without photos, maybe some line drawings, but nothing that would date them too much and they are still so useful. It’s the same with Middle Eastern Food – the page on pickled lemons is still the best. Have you been ripped off by other writers and chefs though?

CR People do rip you off. There’s no copyright in recipes, but some people actually acknowledge where they found recipes and it’s nice of them to. I met Yotam Ottolenghi before he was huge, when he’d just opened his restaurant and we did a couple of talks together. He came to London as a journalist and photographer, and was learning French patisserie, but people started asking him how to make Middle Eastern dishes because of his background. He said that he always gave them my recipes, written out, without telling them they were by me. But then he said, “Now I tell them.” In Israel now, a lot of chefs say they learned from my books. Somebody is giving a paper at the Symposium about recipes as offal. It means they’re just rubbish, unconsidered texts that are thrown away.

PL Because cookbooks are not seen as part of literature.

CR Yes, and because there is no copyright at all, the recipes don’t belong to you, they belong to a country. Today there are a lot of people who invent recipes, so I wonder whether they can say those recipes belong to them.

PL But you must have frequently seen recipes of yours, uncredited?

CR Yes, especially if they spell it in the Jewish-Egyptian or the Egyptian colloquial way and say it’s from somewhere else. But I can always tell if it’s mine – everybody makes things a little bit differently.

PL You always seem to want to remind us how food is a social thing.

Do you still entertain people a lot?

CR I do. Everybody comes to my house expecting something. But I find now, as you get older, that this intimacy and company of friends becomes very important. Especially if you live alone. So I have a lot of friends from the past, from different times, and they’re so glad that I just call them.

PL You talk about getting old, but before the beginning of my 30s, I realised that the best times of my life, the times when I thought, “I can’t

Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who in the 1950s steered British home cooks away from the mundanity of wartime food, directing them to use fresh ingredients to create Mediterranean and European cuisine.

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Claudia Roden finishes dinner at The Palomar with an espresso.

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imagine anywhere I’d rather be than here and now,” were with friends and during or after food. So I feel like these are the happy times, not the consolations in later life but the core. I liked the word that Anna Meroni of Polytechnic University of Milan used. She said that instead of fixating on nutrition, calories, superfoods, bad foods, we could think about “conviviality”.

As a way of putting food back into a connected world, it seemed like a good way to put food back into its context.

CR I agree, it is. And now a lot people are using food as a way of building bridges, because of all the communities that are at war. I keep being asked to give talks about it. The latest ones are via the EU, as it deals with immigrants, to get me to talk about this bridge-building because food is a way for immigrants to insinuate themselves into a new culture…

Morocco, Turkey… Suddenly, the idea of food, of conviviality, seems to have become this way of making policies that deal with cultural conflicts and encourage integration.

PL It is interesting that offal now seems to be the preserve of the fancy kitchen.

CR Well, there’s nothing more nutritious, and done right it’s about the most rarified, indulgent thing you can eat: chicken livers, sweetbreads. Jacob Kennedy from Bocca di Lupo [restaurant], who is making a dinner at the Symposium, once cooked a whole pig’s head at a series of lunches he did for Inspector Montalbano, the television programme. Each lunch was around one of the stories and what was being eaten – I did one too. He served half the head cut open at the table and nobody wanted to eat it, so he ate the whole thing.

PL I don’t know how you eat a head. Obviously the cheeks are nice, but how do you eat it? Can you nibble meat off the whole skull?

CR Yes, and the brain is wonderful. If you cook it separately it’s even better. §

All illustrations by Isabella Cotier. isabellacotier.com

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