Rene Redzepi and Alfred W. Crosby

Yarrow (Gerarde 1597)

To most people the common yarrow will be a weedy roadside plant best kept out of the garden. It is easy to overlook that this humble plant was a witness to all of the 'Rise of the West' (McNeill). Its botanical name refers to Achilles who purportedly took it along as an antibiotic on his travels, the Norse introduced it to Greenland about 1000AD and it is now common in large parts of the world.

Yarrow also features as a foraged green in Rene Redzepi's NOMA kitchen where it is a common ingredient. It is also included several times in Redzepi's tome: 'Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine' (2010). Out of thin air, despite its generalist cosmopolitanism, Yarrow (or bloodwort or milfoil) was made to stand as a symbol of environmental awareness, hyper-regionality and creative idealism, a pawn in the battle for global food security and Michelin Stars. Yes the yarrow is local but it is local to, back of the envelope calculation, everybody living in the temperate zone. This is a pattern, not just a particular aspect of yarrow which is actually a very bad example as the new world already possessed yarrow, a variation with a genetic link so close that it continues to baffle taxonomists. 

The foraging locavore (from Euell Gibbons to Richard Mabey) is almost always subsisting on plants that have long ago left their natural boundaries and gone global. Yarrow, nettle, dandelion, cowslip, garlic mustard, chickweed and sorrel, all used at NOMA, are all extremely hardy and thrive on human disturbance. These are plants that were introduced to the Americas and Australia as a consequence of European farming practices, as so well described by Alfred W. Crosby in The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986).

The ironies are several. Regionality is celebrated by making use of plants that have gone global (making it possible for a cook in New Zealand to reproduce a Nordic recipe). The chef who made his stake claiming that at least one third of his ingredients was foraged is relying heavily on plants associated with farming to do so. The plants that are used to make his food 'distinct' are some of the commonest plants on earth. The dandelion, after all, is the plant on which the sun never sets (Crosby).

Redzepi is famous for not using olive oil as the token symbol of him turning his back on the high tradition of French cuisine. When running the entire ingredient list of the NOMA book through Map Your Recipe you would expect a large part of the plant-ingredients to be domesticated in the Euro-Siberia center. A relatively small center missing from the original scheme proposed by Vavilov but added by his students. It is the origin of such plants as kale and kohlrabi. It has those but the book includes ingredients originally domesticated in every global center of diversity bar Tropical Africa and Australia, just like the Big Mac:

Earlier I already reported that food pairing visualizations may suggest that Redzepi still thinks like a classical (read French) chef. The abundance of plants domesticated in the Mediterranean also confirms this.
I am not a geo-food fundamentalist; there is no cuisine in the world that does not make use of globalized plant resources (perhaps only apart from the one you find in the Eskimo Cookbook). Cooking is culture not nature and the concept of an evasive plant makes no culinary sense. This is not meant to detract from Redzepi's project, which I continue to find admirable, but it is meant to remind us of the fact that in a globalized, anthropogenic landscape every claim made about regionality needs to be understood and evaluated against a backdrop of global environmental transformation.


World history weighs in on every locality on the planet, plants tells that story.

Food pairing / gastronomy with a telescope

The theory of food pairing inspires little faith (see earlier) but when moving away from culinary applications perhaps it can be used to differentiate cuisines and cooking styles. How Chinese is Jamie Oliver? How similar are Mexican and Indian cuisines? How do French and Indian cooking differ? How unique is Rene Redzepi? 

The aim is to find a way to reveal the inner structure and logic of a cuisine, if such a thing exists, by comparing the way a cuisine or a cook combines ingredients with other cuisines and cooks. The first step is turn a collection recipes (a cookbook) into ingredient pairs, here is what a fragment of a looks like:

potato,pork,2
chicken,cucumber,1
chicken,grapeseed,15
chicken,milk,6
chicken,onion,9
chicken,pork,3
cucumber,grapeseed,3
cucumber,onion,2
cucumber,pork,2
grapeseed,milk,10
grapeseed,onion,11
grapeseed,pork,4
milk,onion,2
milk,pork,1

Two recipes use both potato and pork, one recipe combine chicken and cucumber, 15 recipes combine chicken with grapeseed oil and so on down the list. In a graph the pairs look like this:

The problem is in the data more than in the code. To get to lists of ingredients as recipes that are easy to process I am using Eat Your Books, a website that catalogs recipes and cookbooks. The ingredient lists are not complete (what exactly are 'cupboard ingredients'? a reference to the mock turtles of the soup) but they will do for my purpose.

Here is the graph of 'An Invitation to Indian Cooking' by Madhur Jaffrey (1975). It is pretty much what you would expect, a chaotic self-referential hairball with the core ingredients in the center with the rarer or less staple ingredients pushed to the edge. All graphs can be enlarged, the real information however is in the shape of the graph, not in the name of ingredients.

A different projection shows the connections differently, clearer on the eyes but not necessarily better: 

If you were creating something that would generate options for chefs you could take a book like "French Home Cooking: An Introduction to Classic French Cooking" by Paul Bocuse (1989) to generate diagrams like the following that shows what Indian (blue) and French (red) cuisines combine with potato and carrots.
It is of course bad practise to use one cookbook as representing an entire cuisine, but we are here in illustrative mode. Indian and French cuisine are national cuisines; how do they compare with someone like Rene Redzepi. With what ingredients does he (in green) combine the humble potato and carrot in his book "Noma: Time and  Place in Nordic Cuisine" (2010)? I a French manner.

But from the perspective of dry cooking this is still puny and close to home. The next image compares French and Chinese cuisines. The French is the Bucase book (blue), the Chinese (red) is Ken Hom's "A Taste of China" (1990). Again we are not actually comparing cuisines but cookbooks representing a certain regional form of cooking to a Western audience but the differences are real. Chinese and French cooking are worlds apart and only share some basics like vinegar, onion and pork. Chinese cooking comes across as much more homogenous and compact.

Now add Jamie Oliver's "The Naked Chef" (2000) to this French/Chinese data and see what happens: Jamie Oliver's cuisine is like a giant flesh eating amoeba devouring both cuisines whole and it still remains hungry. For now it is seems more French then Chinese.

Here is what happens when comparing Rene Redzepi (red) and Jamie Oliver. Even though the two appear to be opposites (the wild vs the supermarket, the avant-garde vs the popular) this graph does not really show it as you can see by the overlap. Both are Western chefs cooking Western food even when many ingredients are not shared.

The next image returns to the observation that Indian and Mexican food are historic twins. Would food pairing confirm this? Comparing Jaffrey (blue) with "Rosa's New Mexican Table" by Roberto Santibañez (2010) resulted in the following. The two cuisines are structured as separate spheres with a few heavily contested ingredients. Ingredients do not a cuisine make, as Rachel Laudan would possibly say as this graph seems to say.

 

In conclusion, to show that two similar bodies of recipes will overlap, I have compared Jaffrey with "50 Great Curries of India: Tenth Anniversary Edition" by Camellia Panjabi (2006). Both writers are of course using different ingredients but this image, in combination with the images above, do suggest a metric of displacement and uniformity: similar recipes will generate similar and overlapping hairballs.