Visceral Origami

I used to love watching The Jetsons. I can remember whole afternoons as a kid, maybe ten or eleven years old, wasted watching the cheap animation, the crappy jokes, the weird vision of the future in which they can give a robot a sense of humor but not a proper-sounding voice box. One thing I never got, though, is who would want to eat food in pill form. Even if you had the technology to create little food-flavored nutrition pills, why would you? As a chubby little kid, I loved food. It goes with the territory of being a chubby little kid. And I just couldn’t fathom tossing back a pill and calling it lunch. Similarly, I’ve never understood people who go to Florida or Huston and come back all excited with little packets of freeze-dried ice cream from NASA. Yeah, it’s what the astronauts eat, but it has the consistency of packing material. Give me actual ice cream any day of the week. I think the astronauts would agree with me.

So I was baffled and intrigued when I read this article:

But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings.

The article describes foods made of paper, pills flavored like watermelon, condiments that levitate under the beam of an ion-particle gun. Deep in my little foodie brain, I began to understand the logic of the future dining experience. The world of The Jetsons didn’t eat their food freeze-dried, condensed, gelled, in pellets, in discs, in powders just because they could. They did it because to do so was cool. The Jetsons was really a horrible dystopic vision of a future in which the hipster culture of the new cuisine had run rampant and taken over the world. It all makes sense now.

That said, I’m man enough to admit that the article had me. There is something very interesting about revolutionizing the way we think of food and nutrition. And as works of art, the food served at Moto are beautiful. Delicate, light, with watercolor rose petals and Escher sketches printed on them, they are literally works of art, a magical unification of print and food. Beyond that, what is the appeal of a place like Moto? Can a person really derive satisfaction from plates of paper crackers? Possibly it’s that the appeal of Moto’s cuisine goes beyond the question of nourishment and into deeper questions of food and cuisine in general.

For a while, now, I’ve been thinking about why I like to cook so much. Why go through all the trouble of making a meal, decorating it, making it pretty, if only to eat it? Why do I do things like make a still and sit for hours on end tending it, just so that I can have a bottle of a liqueur that I could have imported. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the reason I like to cook is that it unifies my artistic and scientific sides.

I’m fascinated by science, and I always have been. When I was a kid, I would spend hours mucking around, looking for frogs in the drainage basin at the base of my development. When my father bought squid for dinner, we would clean it together, taking care to examine the organs, look at the structure of the eyes, the ink sacs still full and black. My scientific prospects fairly ended at age twelve when I blew up a glass bottle in an experiment (the goal of which was to make soda). I nearly killed myself in the process and was left with a big crescent-shaped scar on my neck to remind me not to play stupidly again. And I didn’t. I turned to the arts for creative fulfillment and was done with science altogether, but as the old saying goes, you can take the boy out of the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of the boy. Inevitably, I was going to find something technical or scientific that would grab my attention.

This isn’t to say I started cooking when I was twelve. Not at all. I started cooking when I was five, and maybe before then. My mother would let me help her as she cooked dinner and cookies and whatever else she might have been cooking when I was little. When she went back to work when I was five, I told her that I would miss her baking. I think what I was actually trying to say was that I would miss cooking with her (which I needn’t have worried about—mom and I still make dinner together when I’m home). As I grew into my teenage years, I began to experiment again. This time, it was with different combinations of flavors, different ways of mixing and matching foods. Some recipes would come out weird and inedible. Some would be delicious and new. Some I would eat once and love and never be able to re-create again, no matter how closely I matched the recipe. With each, I learned what foods and spices did what. What does the egg do in a bread? What does the wheat do? The milk? What kind of flavor does rosemary contribute to a recipe? If a recipe is too spicy, how can I cut the spice? And so on. In college, while all of my friends were eating ramen noodles, I ate couscous with spicy pepper and tomato sauces. Or pasta with broccoli. When I had next to no money while I was temping after college, I always ate well. You could give me ten dollars and I could whip together a full meal for me and two friends and it would be great. Still can.

It’s this fusion of the scientific mind with the artistic mind that I love about food. Food is chemistry made practical. It is a Bunsen-burner balancing act of oils and crystals, proteins and gases, heat, pressure, time. A recipe for, say, leg of lamb is a scientific formula in coded form. It says, “Soak the protein bundle in a combination of acid and fat to soften the cellular membrane and loosen connective tissue. Heat intensely for fifteen minutes to carbonize the sugars in the outer layer of the meat until crusty, then lower temp to 300 degrees for two hours to denature the protein until easily cut and digested." Seasoning instructions are recipes for which oils best complement which other oils.

It’s art because the experience of eating lies beyond the tongue. We eat with our eyes, with our noses, our minds, our memories, our hearts, our companions. When humans eat well, we eat with our full selves. The meal is a shared experience that demands it please us aesthetically. I love setting a dish on a table and watching people watch the food. I love seeing sushi come out and hearing people “ooooh” at the beautiful pinks and greens. Sushi, especially, is a food that values aesthetics. Fully half the experience of eating it comes in the joy of seeing it beforehand. And then it’s eaten, and it’s gone, a beautiful, intangible experience, like that of viewing a flower or a play. Perfectly filling and ephemeral.

Having come to all of this, I was all set to splurge a bit and eat at Moto some day after work (it is, after all, only a stone’s throw from my office). Until I found out that it costs $245-a-head to eat there. Possibly because of the class IV laser they have in the kitchen.