Honest food. Honestly.

[ChrisTaylor]

I was reading an article just now about how, right now in Australia, Neil Perry and a few other chefs are getting a lot of mileage out of using wood-fired grills to, er, grill stuff. Now mostly this article was being used to promote the upcoming food and wine festival, but that's an irrelevancy. The point came up a couple of times: food cooked over fire is somehow more 'honest' than food that's, say, prepared using a vacuum chamber, plastic pouch and a water bath.

It's a term you hear in Australia a lot. 'Honest', that is. If you ever watch MasterChef, whenever they drag out some chef to go toe-to-toe with one of the competitors, you'll hear him or her say, 'my food is all about honesty ...'. They may or may not grill food. They may or may not use vacuum chambers. They may or may not make foams. They may or may not regard 'molecular gastronomy' as a bad thing and may indeed understand that, really, at its core it's just about understanding exactly what happens when you honestly place that honest cut of honest beef on your honest grill (set over an honest fire built honestly from some honest timber from honest trees).

Now. The other day Mark Best's cookbook landed on my doorstep. I flipped through it and, somewhere in Rene Redzepi's spiel about the wonders of Marque (the restaurant), he mentioned the word 'honest'. Marque is a beautiful restaurant. One of my favourites in Australia. And yet what it serves is miles away from Neil Perry's 'honest' Rockpool Bar & Grill (a high end steakhouse): it could be described, really, as art on a plate. Think the Noma, Quay, Alinea, Fat Duck, etc books--they're pretty much at the same level as this book. Mark Best and Rene Redzepi aren't the only chefs of this sort to use the term. Honest.

What exactly does it mean? The only thing I can think of as being 'dishonest' is, perhaps, some of that elBulli stuff. Not that it's 'molecular' (and therefore evil), but that you can pick up, I don't know, something that looks like a kalamata olive, only it tastes of strawberry. It's a trick. It is, I guess, a little dishonest. But I get the impression that Neil Perry and Rene Redzepi and all those other guys, they're not talking about one ingredient slyly pretending it's something else.

Am I correct in figuring that, when it comes to food, 'honest' means basically nothing?

[Anna N]

.....

Am I correct in figuring that, when it comes to food, 'honest' means basically nothing?

I dunno. I think it has at least as much meaning as "authentic".

[jrshaul]

I particularly dislike the suggestions of wood fire being more "natural."

Let us enjoy the highly natural fruits of firing a pneumatic cylinder through a large mammal's brain, stripping out its' muscle tissue, and denaturing it over the cremating ashes of a large arboreal life-form.

Mmm. Denatured bovine. Delicious.

[gfweb]

"Honest" food sounds as foolish as the "farm to table" nonsense (so cutting out the middleman is a culinary breakthrough?). It may even be related. The FtoT crowd would certainly say that their food is as honest as possible.

[gfweb]

Do they locally source their firewood?

[Margaret Pilgrim]

For me, honest can be defined by my daily compost contributions: unusable skins, peels, pits, etc. I cook from scratch. Honest food, to me, is that that is created without resort to anything prepared, packaged, canned, frozen, precombined...you get the picture. Stuff that came off the plant or animal or from the udder. Secondary stuff we made from the bean or bone or the milk or...

[Margaret Pilgrim]

Do they locally source their firewood?

We do.

[annabelle]

Sheesh. I guess if you bought it at the market, it's dishonest food?

[ChrisTaylor]

Do they locally source their firewood?

Any chef that isn't personally heading out to the forest with a ute and an axe (chainsaws being molecular tree chopping devices) is a hack.

[annabelle]

It's only a matter of time before we'll be told that eating out of trenchers is the only authentic way to eat. And cutlery? Pfffft. Don't make me laugh.

[Margaret Pilgrim]

Sheesh. I guess if you bought it at the market, it's dishonest food?

I guess my question is "Bought what?" If it's cooked, then I really have to take the market's or producer's word for what's in it. It I put it together myself, I have better sense of what I'm eating or serving. Of course, unless I grow it myself, which I don't, I have to trust someone's certification as to where it is grown and whether it was grown with pesticides.

[annabelle]

I didn't mean "you" in particular, I know what you meant. I meant "you" in a general manner. Sorry.

[kayb]

"Honest" food, to me, means knowing what's in it and where it came from. I mean, I bought sweet potatos at Kroger today. They are sweet potatos. They came out of the ground, somewhere. They do not have 87 additives, preservatives, and so on. They were probably grown with fertilizer and perhaps have come in contact with genetically modified organisms. Nevertheless, they are a sweet potato, in large part indistiinguishable from the sweet potatos we used to grow in the garden when I was a kid. I had a burger tonight; grass-fed beef that I cooked on my gas grill. I will roast a chicken later this week that I also bought at Kroger; it's probably laden with antibiotics and hormones, but nevertheless, it is a chicken, no matter how little resemblance it will bear to the farm-raised broilers I'll pick up in late March to see if there's a huge taste difference (my first venture into organic chicken).

Dishonest food? Chicken McNuggets. Krystal burgers (if you are not in the southeast this won't mean anything to you). I am convinced vegetarians can eat Krystal burgers, because I can't believe there is any meat anywhere about them. That said, I want a sackful of them about once every two years. Pop Tarts. Marshmallow Creme.

Or saying, "I baked you cookies," when what you did was hack pieces off the roll of Pillsbury cookie dough onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven."

[Keith_W]

It's a term you hear in Australia a lot. 'Honest', that is. If you ever watch MasterChef, whenever they drag out some chef to go toe-to-toe with one of the competitors, you'll hear him or her say, 'my food is all about honesty ...'.

They talk about "honest food" then they make a faux egg with mango puree for the yolk and vanilla ice cream for the white, like this.

[ChrisTaylor]

"Honest" food, to me, means knowing what's in it and where it came from. I mean, I bought sweet potatos at Kroger today. They are sweet potatos. They came out of the ground, somewhere. They do not have 87 additives, preservatives, and so on. They were probably grown with fertilizer and perhaps have come in contact with genetically modified organisms. Nevertheless, they are a sweet potato, in large part indistiinguishable from the sweet potatos we used to grow in the garden when I was a kid. I had a burger tonight; grass-fed beef that I cooked on my gas grill. I will roast a chicken later this week that I also bought at Kroger; it's probably laden with antibiotics and hormones, but nevertheless, it is a chicken, no matter how little resemblance it will bear to the farm-raised broilers I'll pick up in late March to see if there's a huge taste difference (my first venture into organic chicken).

Dishonest food? Chicken McNuggets. Krystal burgers (if you are not in the southeast this won't mean anything to you). I am convinced vegetarians can eat Krystal burgers, because I can't believe there is any meat anywhere about them. That said, I want a sackful of them about once every two years. Pop Tarts. Marshmallow Creme.

Or saying, "I baked you cookies," when what you did was hack pieces off the roll of Pillsbury cookie dough onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven."

How is a grocery store chicken 'laden with antibiotics and hormones' any more honest than a Chicken McNugget? I mean, in Australia, at laest, the chicken nuggets contain chicken. It might not be top quality, free-range, corn-fed organic chicken. But it is still chicken. I'd suspect it'd be on par with the frozen whole chickens you can buy in the supermarkets. I mean, McDonald's and these stores use the same suppliers. So in short, I have as much of an idea where my tub of McNuggets comes from as I do a supermarket chicken. I fail to see how the McNuggets, for all their other failings, are dishonest by that measure. How is the guy in charge of ordering ingredients for McDonald's Australian head office any more/less dishonest than the person, presumably the chef himself, who orders ingredients for Marque/French Laundry/Noma/el Bulli?

I can read the ingredients on a side of a box of Pop Tarts. It gives me a fairly solid understanding of what the Pop Tarts contain.

And too, and I know I'm playing with fire with this one and touching on another issue altogether, what's the big deal about knowing what your food comes from? I mean, okay, with steak things like the animal's diet, etc determine the quality and flavour of the end product. I get that. But knowing exactly where it was raised? Knowing where my sweet potatoes come from? How many people who ask these questions or hear from TV chefs, et al that these are important questions know what the 'correct' answers are? Unless it's purely a matter of food miles/fresness, why should it matter whether my potatoes come from 20 kilometres down the road as opposed to 200 or 2000?

If it's more than that, if it's a lack of trust of mass-produced/battery-farmed goods and perhaps even organic/free-range/etc labelling systems (and fair enough on that, I mean, free range in actuality isn't necessarily free range as you imagine it), then I refuse to accept that McDonald's and Woolworths are less trustworthy than, I don't know, some guy with a stall at the market selling tomatoes for $20/kilogram. Surely the only way I'll truly be able to know with 100% certainty that my fruit, vegetables and meats were 'raised right' (i.e. free of whatever 'chemicals' I deem to be unacceptable) is if I raise them myself.

Edited February 26, 2012 by ChrisTaylor (log)

[ChrisTaylor]

It's a term you hear in Australia a lot. 'Honest', that is. If you ever watch MasterChef, whenever they drag out some chef to go toe-to-toe with one of the competitors, you'll hear him or her say, 'my food is all about honesty ...'.

They talk about "honest food" then they make a faux egg with mango puree for the yolk and vanilla ice cream for the white, like this.

So do you define 'honesty' as serving simple food? Simple in the way, say, a grilled steak is simple? Where do you draw the line on that? From memory, Rockpool serves triple-cooked chips. I don't know if they go all 'molecular' when drying them out (i.e. like Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked chips), but surely that process is getting to be as complex as making some icecream and a fruit puree and serving these two items inside an egg shell. Is the dessert you mention dishonest because it's a bit complex (although hardly as complex as some of the desserts from Noma, et al) or because it's presented in a way that plays with your expectations (granted, it's not like you go into a cafe for breakfast, order a boiled egg and find yourself spooning icecream into your mouth)? Is it dishonest because rather than, say, scooping a ball of icecream onto a puddle of puree they've attempted a 'clever' (and oft-copied--not that these guys, whoever they are, invented it) presentation?

[Margaret Pilgrim]

I agree with most of what you write, Chris. But trust in food sourcing is not too different from trust in most other sellers. The antique guy tells you that something is 18th Century. You believe him? Why? Or why not? You have a sense of his integrity.

You get a sense of the integrity of foodstuffs from certain growers, even certain areas. And one has a personal choice in deciding whether or not to consume factory farmed animals.

Perhaps honesty is the wrong word. There must certainly be honest factory farmed animals. But I need to make a conscious decision as to whether or not to eat these chickens or factory pork.

[kayb]

"Honest" food, to me, means knowing what's in it and where it came from. I mean, I bought sweet potatos at Kroger today. They are sweet potatos. They came out of the ground, somewhere. They do not have 87 additives, preservatives, and so on. They were probably grown with fertilizer and perhaps have come in contact with genetically modified organisms. Nevertheless, they are a sweet potato, in large part indistiinguishable from the sweet potatos we used to grow in the garden when I was a kid. I had a burger tonight; grass-fed beef that I cooked on my gas grill. I will roast a chicken later this week that I also bought at Kroger; it's probably laden with antibiotics and hormones, but nevertheless, it is a chicken, no matter how little resemblance it will bear to the farm-raised broilers I'll pick up in late March to see if there's a huge taste difference (my first venture into organic chicken).

Dishonest food? Chicken McNuggets. Krystal burgers (if you are not in the southeast this won't mean anything to you). I am convinced vegetarians can eat Krystal burgers, because I can't believe there is any meat anywhere about them. That said, I want a sackful of them about once every two years. Pop Tarts. Marshmallow Creme.

Or saying, "I baked you cookies," when what you did was hack pieces off the roll of Pillsbury cookie dough onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven."

How is a grocery store chicken 'laden with antibiotics and hormones' any more honest than a Chicken McNugget? I mean, in Australia, at laest, the chicken nuggets contain chicken. It might not be top quality, free-range, corn-fed organic chicken. But it is still chicken. I'd suspect it'd be on par with the frozen whole chickens you can buy in the supermarkets. I mean, McDonald's and these stores use the same suppliers. So in short, I have as much of an idea where my tub of McNuggets comes from as I do a supermarket chicken. I fail to see how the McNuggets, for all their other failings, are dishonest by that measure. How is the guy in charge of ordering ingredients for McDonald's Australian head office any more/less dishonest than the person, presumably the chef himself, who orders ingredients for Marque/French Laundry/Noma/el Bulli?

I can read the ingredients on a side of a box of Pop Tarts. It gives me a fairly solid understanding of what the Pop Tarts contain.

And too, and I know I'm playing with fire with this one and touching on another issue altogether, what's the big deal about knowing what your food comes from? I mean, okay, with steak things like the animal's diet, etc determine the quality and flavour of the end product. I get that. But knowing exactly where it was raised? Knowing where my sweet potatoes come from? How many people who ask these questions or hear from TV chefs, et al that these are important questions know what the 'correct' answers are? Unless it's purely a matter of food miles/fresness, why should it matter whether my potatoes come from 20 kilometres down the road as opposed to 200 or 2000?

If it's more than that, if it's a lack of trust of mass-produced/battery-farmed goods and perhaps even organic/free-range/etc labelling systems (and fair enough on that, I mean, free range in actuality isn't necessarily free range as you imagine it), then I refuse to accept that McDonald's and Woolworths are less trustworthy than, I don't know, some guy with a stall at the market selling tomatoes for $20/kilogram. Surely the only way I'll truly be able to know with 100% certainty that my fruit, vegetables and meats were 'raised right' (i.e. free of whatever 'chemicals' I deem to be unacceptable) is if I raise them myself.

OK. I didn't express myself well. If I cook the antibiotic and hormone laden chicken from Kroger, I at least know it's chicken, and at some point, walked around on two feet, albeit in horrible conditions in a chicken farming operation. Just like my grass-fed beef walked around on four feet in a pasture and never met a hormone other than what it produced itself. I can still track the bite on my fork back to an animal/bird, no matter how it was raised. Ditto sweet potatos. McNuggets and PopTarts and a host of other prepared foods, on the other hand, have so many other things added in that they only vaguely resemble the alleged source. I cannot draw a straight line from the sweet blue paste in a blueberry Pop Tar to a real blueberry, whether I got it in a plastic clamshell at the grocery or plucked it from a bush at my local organic orchard/farm. Or, for that matter, from a shaped-and-formed McNugget (I mean, seriously? Couldn't it just as easily be ground pork? Or what part of the chicken did it come from, anyway?) to the bird.

A sweet potato is a sweet potato. It will taste different, if it's grown in your back yard and dug at an appropriate time, than it will if it's grown on a commercial farm, dug and then housed in climate-controlled circumstances until it's ready to ship. But it's identifiable as a sweet potato. A McNugget is not identifiable as chicken, to me. Nor is a blueberry Pop-Tart identifiable as blueberries. That's all.

Edited February 26, 2012 by kayb (log)

[Margaret Pilgrim]

Well said, kayb.

[Ashen]

My interpretation of the word "honest" as it relates to food, may not be what these chefs mean by it. Honest to me means that whatever method of cooking is used, traditional or modern/molecular, the chef doesn't muck up the ingredients just for the sake of mucking them up. So what is muck in my opinion? Using a technique just for the sake of its cool factor or adding ingredients just for the sake of having more ingredients. There was a recent program that was bragging about how a chef had created a new menu with over 400 ingredients in 5 dishes . I am sure at least some of those would be sous vide and or using some other modernist technique. Is it dishonest food? No , I wouldn't say that, but I don't consider it to be honest either. Does using a molecular make it less honsest? or using lots of ingredients? No, but doing it just for the sake of doing it ,without regard to what best serves to elevate the ingredients is less honest to me.

[Keith_W]

They talk about "honest food" then they make a faux egg with mango puree for the yolk and vanilla ice cream for the white, like this.

So do you define 'honesty' as serving simple food? Simple in the way, say, a grilled steak is simple?

I define "honesty" as something that tastes of itself, and not trying to be something that it isn't - e.g. a coddled egg that isn't a coddled egg as per my link Well, I meant that tongue in cheek since you mentioned Masterchef.

A good example of "dishonest food" are Japanese crab sticks. I wouldn't mind so much if they called it what it is - hydrolyzed protein sticks - but painting it red with food colouring and adding artificial crab flavour and calling it a crab stick goes too far, IMO. Yet another example is the "ham" they put on pizza. It is also hydrolyzed protein with pink food colouring and a lot of salt. Call it "meat substitute" but don't advertise that it is "ham" when it clearly isn't.

Another example of "dishonest food" - food which has been overwhelmed by so many other ingredients and spices that it no longer tastes of itself. Being of southern Chinese descent, our food is cooked simply with an emphasis on the taste of fresh produce. This type of philosophy is echoed in a number of other cuisines - e.g. Japanese, Italian, South American, French, and it appears to be a baton that modern chefs are taking up. This also means that I am not a fan of using heavy spices (e.g. Northern Chinese, Hunanese, or Indian cooking). To a Southern Chinese - you do that because you have something to hide. Produce which is subpar or not fresh, perhaps.

When you bite into a steak cooked by Neil Perry you can really taste the beef and the effect of his private dry aging cellar under his restaurant. His cooking style amps up the flavours which are already there. A piece of sashimi is a study in simplicity - superb fish dipped in soy sauce, with nowhere to hide.

In contrast - when you eat a beef rendang, the spices overwhelm the beef so much that you may not actually taste any beef. The meat might be buffalo or horse for all you know. Or the beef could be roadkill. Don't laugh - that's what it is like in parts of Asia.

Edited February 26, 2012 by Keith_W (log)

[Ashen]

Keith.. that is similar to what I think about honest, although I would disagree with a generalization about Indian cuisine. Jenni's recipe for Rajma is the very soul of "honest" food to me.. Yes there are spices ,but the focus and point of the dish is the beans , and they shine.

[Mjx]

It's only a matter of time before we'll be told that eating out of trenchers is the only authentic way to eat. And cutlery? Pfffft. Don't make me laugh.

Trenchers? You effete degenerate! You'll eat it from your bare hands, and like it!

Food itself is honest, regardless of what it is or who made, and from what.

Food preparers (from chefs, all the way down to the kid dumping chicken nuggets in the the fryer at a fast food place), maybe not.

What it comes down to is whether or not preparers are presenting the food as what it is, and acknowledging their actual feeling/beliefs about it: If he or she is willing to acknowledge 'Here's a bunch of fried, breaded, composite, chickenoid substance, made with ingredients of unknown, possibly dubious origins, and I'm cool with that', or 'Here is a bite and a half's worth of locally sourced, organic and foraged foamed parsnic and a cube of eel, very pretty, and I had fun making it, although it is a little bit silly', that's 'honest' (really, 'honestly presented') food.

You start saying either of those things is other than it is, and honesty (and in my opinion, credibility) goes out the window.

The whole 'down-to-earth, locally foraged, cooked over a live flame' thing is fine (to a point; I've seen what some of those idiots can do to a bed of ramps, and I'm not seeing much respect for nature, there), but implying that it makes for more 'honest' food is just another form of snobbery.

[annabelle]

It's only a matter of time before we'll be told that eating out of trenchers is the only authentic way to eat. And cutlery? Pfffft. Don't make me laugh.

Trenchers? You effete degenerate! You'll eat it from your bare hands, and like it!

Food itself is honest, regardless of what it is or who made, and from what.

...but implying that it makes for more 'honest' food is just another form of snobbery.

Heh. You mean like Alice Waters roasting an egg in a long spoon over a night's worth of firewood? Surely you jest! It's honest and authentic, and really, whose Gran didn't do it the same way?

[gfweb]

Exactly. If pretense is honesty then we have forgotten the definition of the word.

Good food simply cooked might be a good definition but that would make classic French dishonest.