back in the field

a basement in paris.

drop by drop, it becomes a river

"Renunciation," I said, "even at this late date, can work." "I'd agree with that," said Arkady. "The world, if it has a future, has an ascetic future."

bruce chatwin, the songlines

first principles

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create ... Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer. To think that these conclusions can be put to use with invariable success in the farmer's field is a big mistake.

fukuoka masanobu, one-straw revolution

nearly there

[from the archive]

R&D in high-end cuisine looks a lot like R&D anywhere else, but some of its frustrations are domain-specific. up top, a dish that was nearly there but, as things turned out, not quite there enough.

read more here in the first of a series of vignettes on hydration is our highest priority illustrating life in some parts of the remarkably small world of research and development in food.

going on progress

a 17-hour, 9.1 mile loop, with detours due to poor navigation. in order: everyman on west broadway, chambers street, some nyc city agencies, the west side linear park, the blue bottle on 15th, wework chelsea, the bowery kitchen supply store, blue bottle on 15th again, the high line, the architectural offices of diller scofidio + renfro, printed matter, moore brothers, booker and dax, and finally ippudo.

the high line is a gem in an already-great park city. i visited it a few days after it opened and remember being profoundly unimpressed by the sparse plantings but particularly liking the hardware fittings (look at those water fountains!). something made me come back whenever i was in the city and it was better every time.

the seating, plantings, and food/beverage choices are impeccable. a testament to the value of good taste combined with abundant cash and a benevolently autocratic decision-making process. there is a section just before the exit on 23rd st in which the footpath narrows slightly as it passes between two walls of abundantly leafed birches (a variety with strangely arrowhead-shaped leaves) trimmed just so their foliage pushes slightly into the path. the feeling of compression as you enter this passage of trees is a wonderful thing.

behold

this is the official bonbon of the academy of management's organizational behavior division. (milk chocolate with artificially flavored hazelnut filling.)

intentional ambiguity

Tenses are important:

abstract: This ethnography of nine internationally renowned avant-garde culinary groups in the US and Europe shows that they operate successfully despite having intentionally ambiguous (and hence uncertain and unstable) member roles and group goals. This is in contrast to the sizeable body of research suggesting that individuals and groups need clarity and stability to function effectively. I describe how this intentional ambiguity modifies group and interpersonal processes in these groups, then propose explanations for how these modifications might allow them to adapt to changing resources and environments and enable their members to teach and learn complex things such as house style. I conclude by showing how internal ambiguity supports adaptability and thus helps groups respond to external ambiguity.

TL;DR version: Ambiguity and uncertainty are not always bad. Wisely deployed, they can be beneficial for those in the business of innovation or working in unpredictable and rapidly changing environments. Which is nearly everyone working in a high-end restaurant, a startup, or an R&D group these days.

Just saying.

committee: Christopher Winship (co-chair), Amy Edmondson (co-chair), Jeffrey Polzer.

redmond, wa

there is nothing to eat here except teriyaki. last night, i went out and procured a large quantity of fruit and vegetables to accompany me during the long hours of writing, self-doubt, and evangelical television. a side effect of redmond's population of high tech workers is that grocery stores here sell decent wine. including a radikon 2002 tocai friulano mislabeled for an embarrassing price that did not prevent me from swooping down on it.

planting thoughts: session 3, sunday a.m., 8/28

stefano mancuso (director, international laboratory for plant neurobiology)
the unexpected plant: beyond the animal model
we should re-examine our preconceptions about plants as unthinking, unmoving things. stefano mancuso explained how plants are able to sense and respond to changes in their environment with more precision and sophistication than we expect. some plants (like sunflowers) appear to learn how to respond to the environment collectively, so that they may be thought to be social organisms. plants have also evolved together with the animals that live around them (including humans). they make use of animals to reproduce and protect themselves, using tasty fruit to induce animals to transport their seeds or protect them from other animals. we might, for instance, think of domesticated plants such as wheat or corn as having trained humans to protect and propagate them with enormous success. plants have also developed remarkable systems for protecting them from threats in their environment: the chemicals plants produce repel insects, warn nearby plants of imminent attacks insects, and also happen to sometimes taste good to humans.

alex atala (chef at DOM, são paulo)
insects and plants: together for life
eating insects seems unfamiliar and scary, alex atala said, but everyone who has ever eaten strawberry yogurt has eaten insects in the form of a red dye which is extracted from cochineal beetles. we seek the familiar because our experiences only make sense in terms of what we have experienced before. he distributed cubes of unflavoured agar, each containing a piece of the amazon: a single amazonian ant. many people in the audience thought it tasted of lemongrass and citrus but atala pointed out that to people who have grown up eating those ants, lemongrass and citrus taste like ants. atala's point was that we should not take for granted culturally defined rules of what should and should not be eaten. "to understand a flavour better," he said, "we must take ourselves away from the familiar." after cooking for years in european restaurants, he realized he had to go back to brazil to explore the then-unknown flavours of his country, rather than trying to cook the food of a different part of the world. his restaurant in brazil now uses the amazon as a source for new and unfamiliar ideas and ingredients that even most native brazilians have never had the opportunity to taste--raw propolis-filled rainforest honeys, spontaneously fermented sugarcane vinegars, a panoply of forest herbs and plants, and others. the enormity and diversity of the country-spanning amazon paralyzes what atala calls "the sophisticated world": in dogshead, one relatively small part of the amazon, there are 23 ethnicities, 21 languages, and over 300 varieties of domesticated plants that are not known outside that region. the amazon as a whole is "a world of flavours remaining to be discovered." atala's understanding of the region's foods comes from natives whose knowledge is anything but simple. atala increasingly believes that our efforts to preserve nature must also include plans to preserve peoples and cultures, or rich stores of local knowledge and practices will be lost.

francois couplan (ethnobotanist, author)
wild plants and culinary creativity
80,000 wild plants are known to be edible and were once eaten--a balanced, diverse, interesting, healthful diet. we've forgotten about most of these wild plants because of the rise of agriculture, and because eating wild plants used to signal low social status. couplan believes that there is a fracture of the wild and the civilised that is leading us to unbalanced, monotonous diets that depend too much on cultivated plants and which make us sick. our diets will improve if we are able to be opportunistic in combining both farmed foods and foraged foods, gathering what we can, when we can. this can only happen if more people learn about how edible wild plants can be used. this, couplan believes, is where haute cuisine comes into the picture. he has taught chefs in france and the rest of europe how to identify, gather, and use wild plants in their restaurants. "when chefs start using plants," he said, "they become stars and are not anymore despised. people begin to want to learn about them."

massimo bottura (chef at osteria francescana, modena)
never stop planting
trapped in new york by hurricane irene, bottura sent a video (subtitled version available on eater) and a statement instead. bottura believes that food should be an object of contemplation, not just one of consumption. we've turned into lazy eaters, pursuing pretty, superficially satisfying foods that are sweet, smooth, and unctuous. challenging food changes those who eat it, bottura thinks, and chefs should be helping people learn to eat challenging food again. to do this, chefs have to acknowledge that food is not only about aesthetics but also about ethics. cooking ethically means going back to the source of ingredients and influences, and acknowledging the culture and history from which the food comes. without these creation stories--stories from friends, suppliers, customers, neighbours--food loses its connection to place, time, and people. without being aware of this connection and reflecting it in, the chef's job is incomplete. "food is one of the strands of the cultural braid that binds us," bottura said "our business is not only about serving people food. that is only the final act."

søren wiuff (farmer)
all that we eat has been alive
søren wiuff changed how he farmed years ago when he realised that he couldn't make money farming industrially even though his farm was highly productive. he went back to doing things as his father did: by hand and with care, "learning what will grow in the garden, feeling your body as part of harvesting something." his close connection with the crops he grows led him to question many of the assumptions farmers usually have about what they grow and how they grow them. he gradually learned how to respond to the unpredictable, changing nature of the living things on his farm rather than trying to force them to fit into a recipe, a formula, a set of preconceptions. this has led to his accidental discovery of new crops: sowing leeks later in the season than usual (so late that wiuff thought the cold would kill them) led him discover baby leeks that sprout in april of the following year, or tasting the usually discarded aerial bulbils of mature leek plants. he credits this partly to support from working with chefs--like those at noma--who are open to trying these new and unfamiliar ingredients and making delicious things out of them. "it's like having playmates," he said, "they make me good by respecting that i'm a farmer. if someone tells me i'm doing something good, i do better next time."

molly jahn (univ. of wisconsin and commission on sustainable agriculture and climate change)
how good food can save our planet
people have to demand healthy food systems for them to take hold and become successful. when molly jahn was working as a plant breeder, she collaborated with organic farmers to develop a new variety of delicata squash that was delicious and more pest-resistant. she targeted organic farmers and chefs in her her efforts to promote the variety, and realised that the variety became successful when chefs demanded it, put it on their menus, and exposed it to consumers. much later in her career, when she had begun to work on agricultural policy in wisconsin, she helped a group of potato farmers in the state develop a stringent integrated pest management and certification program (eco-grown) to protect wildlife on and around their farms. though the program was successful in its environmental goals, she thinks that it never achieved commercial success because chefs were not as involved in its promotion. jahn's message to chefs was simple: "chefs help accelerate people's valuation of good, responsibly produced food."

other posts about planting thoughts:
planting thoughts: a symposium without dissenting views,
summaries: session 1, session 2, session 4

strategies, tactics

michel de certeau, in the practice of everyday life (an unfairly neglected book), makes a useful distinction between strategies and tactics as ways of acting.

a strategy is "the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power … can be isolated from an 'environment.' A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it." these opposing ways of acting, strategy and tactics, are ideal types and there is a combination of strategy and tactic in every action; the issue here is that tactics become a much more significant part of action under conditions of diffusion. In this, certeau's definition of strategy makes reference to a situation marked by coherence and clarity in one key respect—a "place" is a domain of clearly-defined activity, and strategy can be the dominant strategy only possible in such a domain where there are clear means to ends. a tactic, on the other hand "has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances … it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing' … the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is 'seized'"—tactics are contextual in the most profound way and are dominant where the domain is not clearly-defined.

implicit in the actor's creation of a membership-seeking line based on the context in which it will be deployed is the belief that the line constitutes an argument that certain affiliations and characteristics—his story about himself—justify a relative position in the group. again, this activity is not unilaterally undertaken by the individual seeking a position in the group; rather, the argument and bargaining process is one undertaken as mutually-conducted negotiation. for the individual, the uncertainty inherent in the process of negotiating a valid group identity introduces the need for tactical behavior.

bricolage, the art of making-do exemplified by odysseus (the many-sided), is what individuals do on a daily basis, and certeau discusses the nature of use or consumption (the act of choice and decision-making) as a particular case of bricolage. In a more conscious way, individuals who seek to negotiate membership in a group also engage in a form of bricolage—action conditioned by contingency and constantly in flux. this same lens can be turned on the nature of identity construction. returning to the idea that tactics are decisions and actions, it is important to bear in mind that the construction by individuals of stories about themselves is a sequence of decisions and actions—tactics—contingent on an understanding sense of the group to which entry is being sought: "a tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer." agents construct themselves through this mix of strategies and tactics; their design to disrupt the target group's definition and change it in their favor.

rotavap

on the one hand:

1. the documentation on this thing is awful.
2. the evaporator flask (= $$$) is missing.

on the other hand:

1. it's a rotavap.

research directions

a new year begins, and work and research projects begin to coalesce or, in some cases, resurface. here's what's on the plate:

1. a quantitative analysis of the determinants of formal association within developer groups on sourceforge.net, backed by survey and interview data. this should be an opportunity to deploy some interesting hazard rate models and, with the survey data, some new multiplex network analytic techniques. also talking again with berkman's law lab about supporting a field experiment on the same domain once the initial quantitative analysis is complete.
2. experimental research on search behavior. we're in such early days on this that it's not really worth discussing at the moment but things should come to a head within the next 2 months.
3. engineering sciences 147, which i'll be tf-ing. i'm excited about this because it will be one of a small handful at harvard that emphasises the process of innovation as well as the product and seriously grapples with the benefits and disadvantages of interdisciplinarity. if you're in the undergraduate college, think about taking this class. (and check out also this rather slick thing the lab produced for the class.)
4. a theoretical treatment of diffusion in organizations, grounded in the empirical data i collected for a previous project on information efficiency in the north american haute cuisine organization.

if you have thoughts or leads, send them on.