The Hungry Thinker

A culinary students prespective of the world.

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Good Mourning

Today is one year since The Hungry Thinker was established. I haven’t had much discipline to posting, but I’m going to try and change that this year. Below is a poem about how love feels to Generation Z. I’ve decided I identify most as a Gen Z bitch, and not a millennial. For you baby boomers and millennials, think about how much the worlds changed since you were in your 20′s. We’re the product of a lifetime of the internet and social media. Sometimes it feels like we’re the science experiment of the quinquagenarian. Which is a word I learned today.

We text goodnight for the 100th time this summer. 

Between the rain and the sun,

Impossible weather.

And the tears and my cheeks,

Intolerable young love;

We lost a god today.

He and I, we cope so differently.  

I can’t leave it alone.

Our gods aren’t the same anymore. 

Catch her eyes in the mirror. 

Bow to her.  

For she is god,

And has only love.

The boy;

she’ll never leave him home alone. 

He forgets her name,

She forgives him,

But he doesn’t believe in this god. 

Those chains don’t wear loose. 

He worships the lonely,

Masks himself in human cloaks. 

Broken hearted boy. 

I don’t know their names, 

But I’ll whisper them in my prayers tonight. 

Between breathes,

A million little thoughts; 

Have you ever seen the elephants dig a grave?

Broken hearts aren’t just human.

And He doesn’t believe in this god.

Look how many miracles she performs.

How to mend a broken heart. 

Do you think god googles the answers?

He won’t believe in this god. 

He’s shakes hands with ghosts. 

I shake hands with herself,

Good mourning, god.

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Hungry Thinker Art Summer 2019

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Home Video Magic Summer 2019

[thehungrythinker-blog]

MIAD 2016/2017

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Hungry Thinker Art 2016

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Food Before Humans

Preface: This essay/study/thought was presented me as my final assignment for graduating with my associates degree in culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University. I beg this piece inspires you to think of where regional food and cuisine truly comes from. 

I find myself for the first time being told to stick to a specified region of cuisine. I don’t follow suit well in any aspect of life, much less cooking. Which perhaps isn’t the best, considering I have years of practice before I master the ‘now’ of cooking. If I had the knowledge and tech of today, but only the animals/produce/spices/herbs of indigenous India, what would I do? What would I make? If I ignored religious restrictions and the impact of traditional Indian dishes, how would it change what I create? And I think of India, because I believe it to be, in its modern state, a hodgepodge of a million different timelines. It is history in the flesh, written into the food and etched along its people’s interactions.

To Illustrate, there are parts of India still stuck in slavery. In the year 2016 there were 18.3 million people living in modern slavery in India. For the majority of the US, slavery is something only taught out of history books. The type of poverty India sees is almost unfathomable to us. Infant mortality rates in India are 40:1000 live births. In America, we assume our child makes it into adulthood, and even our homeless have access to clean drinking water. 12.5% of the Indian population has no access to clean drinking water. To put it in perspective that’s roughly 163 million people, or 1,690 Flint Michigan’s.

But, there are also centers of great wealth and technological advancement in India. Take Bollywood for example, Shah Rukh Kahn, Bollywood’s richest actor’s net worth is $600 million, that’s $30 million more than Hollywood’s Tom Cruise, who’s net worth is $570 million. In America the top 1% earners own 40% of the nation’s wealth, but in India the top 1% owns approximately 73% of the country’s wealth. Being born and raised as a privileged-white American, it is almost impossible to imagine living in a world like India.

There are polarities greater than the ones in our own backyard, more war than we’d see in a lifetime, drought & famine, natural disasters, and cruel government. And all of this, is a screenshot of what built Indian cuisine. That timeline is what makes Indian cuisine. That timeline is what made India vastly vegetarian, the biggest supplier of spice in the world. That timeline introduces potato and mustard to Indian cuisine and builds ground for curries, naan, vindaloo, and tandoori. And what if we ignored all that? What would India be, then? Without the history & religions, and cultures & beliefs, what would India be? Without trade routes, and slavery, and British rule, what would India be? What is left of India, then?

All that would remain is the natural environment. Just the land and its garnishes. The animals, and plants, herbs and spices. So what are they?

     anise

     areca nuts

     fennel

     bananas & plantains

     cinnamon

     cloves

     coconuts

     cucumbers

     coriander

     eggplants

     grapefruit

     mangoes & mangosteens

     melons

     millets

     nutmeg and mace

     okra

     pears

     plums

     rice

     sugarcane

     taro

     tea

     turmeric

     yams

The first domesticated animals in India include; cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goat, pig (rarely eaten in India due to the Islamic and Hindu/Buddhist religion), horse and donkey. As far as fish go, the Arabian Sea is responsible for tuna, sardine and billfish. What’s left of India after you remove the people and their history and their cultures, is this grocery list of uninspired ingredients. What makes Indian cuisine, Indian cuisine is the innovation of these ingredients and the history and culture that molds them into staples over centuries of slow and steady evolution. It isn’t just recipes handed down from generation to generation. These dishes were made on the backs of slaves and heavily impoverished citizens. So where does the cuisine go next? How does it evolve from here? As the rich get richer and poor get poorer in modern India, will we begin to see a divide in the way we think about Indian food? I don’t think so.

I believe it to be very difficult to change what people view as home cooking. Home cooking is what your mom made you every day for the first 18 years of your life, and your moms home cooking was just your grandmas home cooking, and before that, her mom’s cooking. Its nostalgic and heartwarming, and things like that don’t change, and they shouldn’t. It’s what makes culture and community.

But there’s no stopping what happens next in restaurant and recipe innovation. The world is begging for diversity and innovation in food, we’re sick of trying to be inspired by the kitchen of Auguste Escoffier. It’s time to open new ideas from regions that otherwise don’t hold a big voice in the culinary industry. For a place that supplies the world with its spices, it’s heartbreaking to see Indian cuisine being over shadowed throughout the world, especially the western world. The western world, or America rather, prides itself on being a melting pot of cultures, but it’s not. While we use spices and ingredients native to India on a daily basis, we’re the last ones to suggest going out for curry. So the next step for Indian cuisine probably isn’t how to innovate the food. But how to change the rest of the world to find a home inside Indian cuisine. The cuisine will marry to its new home’s history and through that exchange, it will naturally evolve. The food is the people and the people are the food.

Works Cited:

“Brand India.” IBEF, www.ibef.org/exports/spice-industry-indias.aspx.

Chandran, Rina. “Forced to Walk Miles, India Water Crisis Hits Rural Women Hardest.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 13 July 2018, www.reuters.com/article/us-india-water-women/forced-to-walk-miles-india-water-crisis-hits-rural-women-hardest-idUSKBN1K318B.

“COUNTRY COMPARISON: INFANT MORTALITY RATE.” Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html.

“Detroit, Michigan Population 2019.” Detroit, Michigan Population 2019 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs), worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/detroit-population/.

“Income Inequality Gets Worse; India's Top 1% Bag 73% of the Country's Wealth, Says Oxfam.” Business Today, 30 Jan. 2019, www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/oxfam-india-wealth-report-income-inequality-richests-poor/story/268541.html.

“India.” Global Slavery Index, www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country-studies/india/.

“India, How Indigenous Farmers Are Developing Climate Resilient Agriculture.” LifeGate, 27 Mar. 2018, www.lifegate.com/people/news/india-indigenous-communities-climate-resilient-agriculture.

“INDIGENOUS VEGETABLES OF INDIA WITH POTENTIALS FOR IMPROVING LIVELIHOOD.” INDIGENOUS VEGETABLES OF INDIA WITH POTENTIALS FOR IMPROVING LIVELIHOOD | International Society for Horticultural Science, www.ishs.org/ishs-article/806_72.

Ingraham, Christopher. “The Richest 1 Percent Now Owns More of the Country's Wealth than at Any Time in the Past 50 Years.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 6 Dec. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f31d2a6b792d.

Staff, Wealthy Gorilla. “The 20 Richest Actors in the World 2019.” Wealthy Gorilla, 1 May 2019, wealthygorilla.com/richest-actors-world/.

Varma, Subodh. “1/3rd Of What We Eat Today Is Foreign - Times of India.” The Times of India, Home, 25 June 2016, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/1/3rd-of-what-we-eat-today-is-foreign/articleshow/52919858.cms.

“Where Our Food Crops Come From.” CIAT Blog, blog.ciat.cgiar.org/origin-of-crops/.

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 9: Blackbird, Chicago; Restaurant Review

What is it like to eat at your first michelin star restaurant?

It's the same feeling of christmas morning as a kid, there is no nostalgia to this event, it is new and your body is pulsating and breathing pure anticipation, excitement, nervousness. And as an adult, you are trapped in this role of being the most chic, the most classy and the most sophisticated version of yourself. You are not only there to be impressed, but to impress. So, you take your seat, mine, back to the wall eyes on the dining room, wait staff, and line. In that cryptic and selfish fashion; I think there is no one on earth who will have the exact same experience I am having in these anticipated moments. I know after the experience, I won’t tell but a handful of trusted confidants, because it is only mine and no one will ever experience, but me. It will not be worth telling the world to have them ruin it with their opinions, and questions and advice. I zoom out and shut out, no phone, hardly any conversation with the people attending christmas morning with me.

The first present is opened. Months later, it is one of the only things I remember about Christmas. Olive oil gelee and other souped up fixings mocking caprese salad. I take the spoon the way I was taught in dining class, scoop away from me, then back towards my mouth, and my lips close around the spoon and I’m not impressed. Not by the flavor at least, but never in my life have I had a texture so satisfying resting in my mouth. So, I pull the spoon away and place it back down and let everything sit as time pauses. It marches on around me with no apologies and I sink back into my chair, puzzled. It was the perfect temperature even, enough to notice it was cold, but it didn’t carry the harsh that cold usually carries. It melted and molded to the shape of my mouth and then down my throat, I am mystified that a dish could be so technically sound and produced, yet leave me disappointed. That’s the moment I truly understood what it was going to take to be great, to be the best. And to be entirely honest, it scared the hell out of me, but encouraged me, because I think I just might be able to pull it off.

Now the monk fish. It was cooked, and I’m hesitant to say this, but it was cooked perfectly. The dish was light and airy, but buttery and very floral, true to the inherent flavor of the fish. Except it had this black olive puree or fluid gel that was meant to be an eye pleaser on the plate. Stark black with this gorgeously pure white fish, and the black olive quite literally soiled the dish. It’s like it wasn’t even tasted or thought of after envisioning it. As you ate the black turned absolutely everything gray, and the flavor was so overpowering, I found myself eating around it, instead of trying to scrape up more. That dish was like pulling out the biggest present under the tree and in the bottom of the box was a single pair of socks. You’re upset and angry, you can’t help but think what could’ve been. It could’ve been so much more.

Time begins turning for again, fast and furious, all I can think, ‘If you wanted black on the plate so bad, why couldn’t you have used black licorice fluid gel and garnish with fennel flowers?’ The dish was clearly supposed to be about showing how beautiful a ‘peasants fish,’could be. Instead they covered it with malplaced decoratives, in hopes of giving it a face lift. Pretty wrapping paper on the biggest box. It broke the christmas spirit and set the pace for the night. Everything was almost awe inspiring. But then it wasn’t.

Finally the lavender and blueberry marshmallow, the last thing everyone ate, the thank you for coming in mint. I know it wasn’t, but, it tasted disappointingly artificial. Resembling the entire mood of service. Blackbird restaurant is artificial in the way it thinks and prepares food, at least that's what it feels like. There is no hiding the true talent and ability of a chef when they are truly pushing themselves to be everything they can. I no doubt believe the entire staff is proud of what they create and they should be, they’ve reached a level most people only dream to make it to.

I thought maybe its because the chef was still young and was still learning to push, but Blackbird was opened in 1997, 1 year before I was born, and Chef Paul Kahan is 56 years old. Another part of me thought, maybe all chef wants is 1 michelin star. But if a chef is already performing at a level that demands a single Michelin star, it would be impossible for them to not earn more stars, if they truly had it in them. It would be maddening to push the kitchen physically, but not creatively. Chef Paul Kahan and his team are not artificial in work ethic nor talent, but they are artificial in feeling and emotion. And that's what it takes to be great, to be the best. It takes wholehearted everything and nothing less.

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 8: Matcha, Anthony Bourdain & Todays Election.

I want to preface this post by saying I am a white american girl, so my thoughts are coming from a place of illiteracy in most culture outside of what I’ve experienced growing up as a white american girl in Germantown, Wisconsin. That being said I want to educate the white american girl population on how not to be a racist in the world of food. This blog post is brought on by a travel channel video on matcha hotspots around the country. Now I didn’t have a problem with this video at all, it’s your typical video targeted at all the basic bitches who can’t help but clump to new trends. My problem is that videos like this are the norm. But I’ll come back to that after I explain to other white american girls what matcha is, for those of us who still don’t know.

Matcha is a highly concentrated green tea powder that originated in Japan and has been made and used for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But it was until recent years that matcha became popularized in the US starting with lattes and now shifting into a sort of mass movement. It differs from green tea in that the powder is the whole tea leaf ground and dissolved into, usually, steamed milk or hot water. But this matcha fad has pushed itself into just about anything, including bourbon.

So how did this happen? How did matcha become something of tradition in Japanese cultures to a seemingly everyday ingredient in american kitchens? The short answer is, we don’t know. I’m sure some study was done to show matcha as a superfood and shortly thereafter a celebrity endorsement followed and the rest is history.

Now back to the previous topic, why I am I so unsettled about potential racism in food and why am I out to get this Travel Channel video? It’s not that I mad about matcha being popularized in the US and all over the world, I’m glad your typical white american girls are ‘risk taking’ when choosing new things to consume. I have a problem that for centuries we’ve called America a melting pot of cultures, but I’m a 20 year white girl in culinary school, who’s still not been exposed to many, ‘ethnic,’ or, ‘exotic,’ foods outside the americanized, white washed versions of them.

When I first watched this video of the best matcha spots, I have to admit I was in awe of all the different places doing incredibly unique things with matcha, and that jumped into making fun of all the basic girls who are just now discovering matcha, when I was introduced to it until 2 years ago by my FILIPINA roommate. So naturally I called myself out on my bullshit, did some actual research and now I’m writing this blog. As americans we’re very quick to point out how as a country we’re very integrated we have people from all backgrounds of the world living under one government. But have you checked the classrooms lately, have you checked the restaurants up and down the street, have you checked your coworkers lately?

News flash- America is still very segregated, it's just not written in the laws and the media calls themselves woke because we’re pretty fast to point out the racism, but rather slow when it comes to fixing the issue. As this video closed out I started thinking about Anthony Bourdain, who truly believed breaking bread and talking human to human could solve just about any problem. And today being election day, in a truly pivotal time in US history, it feels right to speak on this issue.

It’s obvious, more and more that laws and politicians and our government, no matter how wholeheartedly you have faith in its systems, nothing they can do, will fix the divide between us all. Bourdain has this quote that's something like, ‘food is everything. Its an extension of ourselves, of our personal and culture history.’ That's why this rant turned sermon is so important. It’s not enough to just walk into a coffee shop in your safe feeling neighborhood and order a matcha latte and call yourself, ‘culturally woke,’ which I too am 100% guilty of. I’m taking the rest of this year and the rest of my life devoted to pushing my comfort level in my dining choices. I want to force myself through that whole in the wall ethiopian restaurant and walk out the backdoor with the utmost respect for the cuisine. And I beg you to join me. This is not only important to your own, ‘woke’ hypocrisy, but the health of our country and the abolishment of all types of inequality, not just law weighing inequality, but the kind that's been passed down generation to generation.

https://www.pressherald.com/2015/04/07/america-matcha-goes-mainstream/

https://www.matchaful.com/pages/the-history-of-matcha

https://matchasource.com/about-matcha/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Bourdain

[npr]

Across New York City, more than 70 restaurants are tossing their oyster shells not into the trash or composting pile, but into the city’s eroded harbor. It’s all part of Billion Oyster Project’s restaurant shell-collection program.

The journey from trash to treasure begins after an oyster half shell is turned upside down and left on an icy tray. Once discarded, it joins hundreds of thousands of other half shells collected in blue bins and picked up (free of charge) from restaurants five days a week by Billion Oyster Project’s partner, The Lobster Place, a seafood supplier. The shells are trucked over to Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood and once a month are brought en masse to Governors Island in the heart of the New York Harbor, just yards away from both Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. There, rolling shell hills sparkle in the sun while “curing” out in the elements for one year, a process that rids them of contaminants.

The shells then get a final cleaning and are moved to Billion Oyster Project’s hatchery at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island that offers technical and vocational training in the marine sciences. In an aquaculture classroom’s hatchery, student-grown oysters produce larvae in an artificially induced springtime environment. In one to two weeks, each larvae grows a “foot” — a little limb covered in a kind of natural glue — and then is moved to a tank full of the “cured” restaurant shells, which serve as anchors for all of those sticky feet. This phase is critical: If larvae can’t find a place to attach, they die. One reclaimed shell can house 10 to 20 new live oysters, depending on shell size.

Oysters On The Half Shell Are Actually Saving New York’s Eroding Harbor

Photo: Agata Poniatowski

[thehungrythinker-blog]

FANTASTIC INNOVATION. Love seeing the community build off each other and becoming crucial to one another’s success. Great news story @npr

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 6: Remembering Inspiration

I’ve been struggling a lot with inspiration to write this post. I’ve written about 7 full length post on subjects ranging from how to rework healthcare and nutrition research to restaurant reviews, but none so much as sparked any true emotion of passion or excitement, at least enough of it to reach a final product. So what do you do when you lack any sort of inspiration. You must look back at what made you so driven and so passionate to begin your journey.

For me what kick started a longing for the culinary field was chefs table. I was still recovering from a series of neurosurgeries, when the series was dropped. It was Chef Grant Achatz’s episode that lit a fire in me. This man who is so creatively inclined to take science and art and cuisine, throw them all into one theatric experience and truly amaze and inspire its audience. Not to mention connecting with his rich medical history. It was not more than a few hours after that episode I decided I had to drop out of art school and follow culinary. 

The way Achatz thinks is not unlike a child. Viewing clouds and wishing you could eat them, seeing art and desiring to recreate it. Whimsical and fascinated by the simple, it’s what draws people to his kitchen. I think the reason Achatz and the Alinea group our so successful is because they remind adults what it’s like to be a child. And for those 3 hours your sat around the table you forget about the overwhelming and ever evolving adult world outside. 

And then I start to remember Alan Watts and how dramatically he viewed the world. We are all complexly interrelated, much alike Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. And his messages are incredibly empowering. Alan Watts reminds the individual that they’re not just an individual blip on some cosmic radar, but some part of a larger whole, a living, pulsing universe. 

Now I am overwhelmingly fueled to take a new project to think harder and deeper, rather than cloaked in foggy nothing. How do I make adults think like children, yet understand they are primordial energy, simply expressing itself as human for a bit. Quite a quizzical feat. But that is what I want food to be. So living and so whimsical that is nothing short of a cosmic carnival. It demands your entire attention, but gives you room to breath and think of something deeper. Isn’t that where we get the expression food for thought anyway, and if not, why not. 

Keeping these principles in mind, my next post will be my first restaurant review. I will be reviewing the 1 michelin star restaurant, Blackbird, located in downtown Chicago. My first michelin star experience, I try not to foreshadow. But, my experience reassured me, inspired me, and oddly disappointed me.  

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 5: On Being Revolutionary, Pt 3

Its what the industry needs; people who want to change it and how it thinks. No more mean, arrogant, above all chefs. Only humans who are so inspired to change, they can’t help but be change.

Today, I learned about the material graphene. Not in class, no, but from an online video posted from @theverge. It’s this sort of super material, that I guess has been around for years already. Its a carbon derivative just like graphite, charcoal and diamonds. Extremely light, incredibly strong, durable and a fantastic conductor. 

While it shows great promise in technological, medical and scientific advancement, what would it look like if put to use in kitchens? Imagine using graphene plates and pots. So light, you could lift the entire stock pot with a pointer finger and your front of house would never struggle clearing tables. Not only that but think of how it would change meal service and plating itself. Being such an excellent conductor, its fascinating to think how you could play with temperature of the plate vs the temperature of the food. 

This is where I’m begging our industry start to move. Or at least our industry starts thinking. Food itself can only be manipulated so many times with the same materials and thought processes. Don’t you believe its time we start integrating all these new mediums and principles and technologies into our kitchens? We see artists and fashion designers everywhere integrating the most obscure ‘things’ into their everyday work, so why can’t we?

A Thought: We have 3D printers, is it too hard to believe that we could 3D print food on a guest plate? It doesn’t have to really work, just enough for the show, to make fun of how automated our dining experiences have become. Or what about AI, how do we add AI into our kitchens? What would that experience look like for the guest? And we now have the ability to ‘make’ human eggs from human blood, what about applying that to fish. Is that, possibly, a way we could make caviar far more sustainable? 

There are so many realms to take and put to use, so why aren’t we? 

https://youtu.be/IesIsKMjB4Y 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-create-immature-human-eggs-out-blood-cells-first-time-180970388/

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 4: On Being Revolutionary, Pt 2

In the last post, I left with the question, ‘how do we captivate an impatient and unimpressed audience?’ I may have an answer, and its going to be obvious. As culinary professionals, to grab hold of an audience and make them listen and actually hear what the food is saying, we must be unapologetically radical, revolutionary and something complete unseen before. Whether that be how we pay employees, the flavor pairings, the science, the front of house, concept, menu design, to the chairs the guest sit in, it all has to be nothing less than an extraordinary marvel. 

Obviously, not every restaurant wants to be the best, nor does it have to, nor should it. But for those of us, who crave that level of precision, that respect from our audience, that ability to make people think with every bite, everything is everything.

Let me tell you about what I want my restaurant to be. I don't want a profit from my restaurant. I want everything costed appropriately, and I want to pay my utilities, my purveyors, everyone, and then I’ll split the remaining evenly per hour worked. If my employees are struggling to make ends meet, I want to struggle with them, inspire them that the craft is worth it. I’d love for the local farmers to fight to feed my guest with their incredible produce and craft. I want my front of house to move in sync with one another. One front of house person to table placement. Everything plated in front of the guest, in perfect unison, like a beautiful symphony. One long bar instead of tables, up against a bookshelf of everything that is me and my employees. Trick doors hidden in the book case that lead to the kitchen. It’ll make for great nostalgia, turning the kitchen into Narnia and all the magic it holds. I need the flavor pairings to be completely baffling, like no one else in the world can think of them. I need the wine to clash passionately with the dish its going with. So perfect of an opposite, it works, but you can’t quite put your tongue on it. I crave science and the most pretentious ideas embraced wholeheartedly and then completely mocked. Because what is food without soul and humor. 

What I’m trying to say is, I desire to be surrounded by individuals who have this Willy Wonka, misread, beautiful mindset about the kitchen. Its what the industry needs, people who want to change it, and how it thinks. No more mean, arrogant, above all chefs. Only humans who are so inspired to change, they can't help but be change. 

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 3: On Being Revolutionary, Pt. 1

10-20 years ago, prior to the rise of social media, all the chef had to do was impress the inspector and the reviewers for that one night, and that was enough to draw crowds/make people invested in coming to your restaurant. Nowadays, if you don't have a viral video and 3,000 five star yelp reviews, good luck getting people to pay attention to your food, and better luck staying in business. Most chef’s (don’t get me wrong I’m so far from being an actual chef) would argue against yelp and how social media has ruined the industry, but thats not really what I believe. The late Anthony Bourdain once talked about how 1 bad yelp review could close a restaurant. How some nobody, who was dissatisfied with the service they received, could empty a dining room for months. 

But all this attention, has done incredible things for the industry. It demands perfection. It allows no misstep to go unnoticed, if you make a mistake, it will be seen. With any and all information a google away, its hard to impress the audience and even harder to captivate and keep their attention after getting in the door. When’s the last time you went to a restaurant and were so immersed and interested in the food, atmosphere and experience that you didn’t check your phone, not even once? Thats what the industry is competing with. We can handle bad yelp reviews, Harvard backed studies show its more about the average rating than anything else, anyways. But, how do we captivate an impatient and unimpressed audience?

Perfect isn’t enough, perfect is safe, we must be revolutionary.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/12-016_a7e4a5a2-03f9-490d-b093-8f951238dba2.pdf

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 2: Fed Up With Learning, Not Thinking

This post comes from a place of frustration and arrogance. Mainly, frustration, because I’m arrogant. Being on that weird line of partial millennial and gen-z, I find myself having this internal battle between being too good for everything taught to me and this insatiable desire for knowledge from the professionals around me. Which is what brought me to beginning this blog in the first place.

I was sitting in my menu planning and cost control class, listening to this dry professor preach to me in monotone; about how marketing is changing and we must make sure our menus are ‘instagram-able,’ trendy, organized and easy to use, along with countless other bits of obvious information. While this may seem like a new concept to our professor, anyone from my generation could’ve told you those things years before professor stood in front of the lecture hall, begging the question, what exactly am I paying for here? 

Between today and the day I am projected to graduate from university, the world will look different then it does now. It’s not a question anymore, technology as well as knowledge grows exponentially. Except its not growing and changing everywhere. Not in the classrooms, especially not media studies and marketing classrooms. 

For example, in this cost control class we use a restaurant simulator that was brought to market, as far as I can tell in October of 2010. Which sounds great, teachers and professors have this relatively new(especially with yearly upgrades dating most recently from 2018) cheap, relatively easy to use platform, to integrate hands on learning in the classroom and curriculum. But, the problem with this is, all the simulations are based on marketing principles and think space/mind set that would have been effective for time previous to October 2010. And this is the root of problems that exists in classrooms everywhere. 

You see, college and secondary education is supposed to prepare us for a career we might one day have, and hope to be successful at. While it does do a fantastic job of handing us previous existing information on our fields, that lets be honest we could find online at a much more practical cost, in an organized fashion, it doesn’t teach us what is going to be the trend 3 years from now. Above that, the current system does little to even begin to teach how to predict trends or stay on top of ever changing technology and the advancement of knowledge. 

At first I began to blame the professors for somehow becoming outdated from years outside the industry they were brought up in, but thats not the case. The problem is, this lack of forward thinking and problem solving has been going on, truly, since the creation of the internet. And we, as a society, have forgotten to freeform ideas and concepts under our own merit. Ask anyone born post the invention of the internet how they come up with the themes and ideas of their novel essays, the candid answer, “I googled it.” 

This is a call to the educating and learning community. To further progress our futures and our society as a whole, we have to relearn how to think. It is no longer an option to take what is handed to us, and hope for the best. Change in the way we learn and think is the beginning of social and political the millennial us thirsts for. I am no longer satisfied with how knowledge is being presented to me. I need and crave more. This is a beg and plead for all University staff and faculty to re-think how they do things. I beg teachers to stay current in their fields, help me to know how to predict where my field is moving and please, please inspire to freeform idea and thought as my own. Correct my missteps, but not my thought process.

[thehungrythinker-blog]

Post 1: An Introduction

Welcome to The Hungry Thinker! This blog will be a series of opinion based writing aimed at exploring the truth in food & culture to our education system & politics. All told from the perspective a full time culinary student, part time prep chef, and overtime thinker. I hope this blog brings someone other than me joy, thought and maybe even a new perspective.