Algorithm of Life

Food as a process

Roy Choi speaks to Terry Gross on Fresh Air and defines food as an “algorithm of life.” Working with food and having awareness of process on many levels can be stunning. For instance, I can apply heat, pressure, or hydroscopic molecules to draw moisture. There are many processes to create something edible. A recipe may provide a framework for creating something truly great. But I may also apply experience, knowledge, or a relationship with others who understand hospitality and synthesize this information while cooking.

Process in a professional kitchen should be uniquely choreographed for competitive advantage. As diners, we can never really have appreciation and understanding of this. What we eat and experience as individuals can be truly great, but it is just a titration of larger interactions that are physical, emotional, and even transactional. A truck pulls up to the loading dock and a litany of processes ensue to receive raw materials. Is this what was ordered? Do these ingredients meet specifications for the business and its internal production processes? Is the food the right temperature? Is it safe? Checkpoints and criteria abound whenever this daily event occurs. All of this happens and the prep and line cooks that transform these ingredients into dinner have not even punched the clock.

To really dissect these connections backwards from the electro-chemical stimulation of when something delicious ignites the palate and brain requires imagination and a kind of ability to wonder that is difficult to comprehend. Try to think of the dance of six cooks on a hot line over the course of a day. What about their exchanges? What knowledge and experience about cooking do they bring to work and share with each other? How do their sensory translation of food affect dinner? How do systems and processes of production at the restaurant and beyond affect us culturally and emotionally? How does food affect us culturally and emotionally? What is the degree of influence on our communities?

The Culinary Institute of America acts as a sort of biosphere for many of these interactions by design. The curriculum progressively builds upwards as a pyramid in seven, fourteen, and twenty-one day classes from the most basic concepts of product identification to welcoming and serving guests that visit the school to sample the creation of its students. The building block nature of its curriculum not only benefits its students in understanding these intricate and sometimes unfathomable connections, but it also benefits itself through the support structure of its production processes. Each class supports itself through this interconnected network, whether its objective is to instruct how to fabricate a side of beef into individual roasts and steaks, make chicken stock in one hundred gallon steam-jacketed kettles, or produce Korean bibimbap for student meal plans in the Cuisines of Asia kitchen.

As a student there, having an awareness of an interconnected system where efficiency, food, culture, and passion meet was not immediate. To help finance my experience there, I worked as a student-instructor in the Continuing Education department often assisting home cooks in the Boot Camp Program learn many of the same skills I was already learning. Helping to instruct and teach my new knowledge only aided in my own personal transfer of training. At the same time, a majority of my responsibilities was to prepare the training kitchens for the Continuing Education programs. Many of my errands to collect the ingredients for each lesson required me to frequently visit the production areas throughout the main building on the Hyde Park Campus which was once a Jesuit monastery. I learned to navigate the labyrinthine hallways and elevator networks to reach each destination. Each time, I would collect products that other students were fabricating or producing for consumption by another group of students further along in the curriculum. Eventually, as I progressed in my studies, I made the connection between what I had produced in the past was only repeated by those behind me. Now, those production processes were what I needed in order to make a new product or to assist someone else to realize the same goal.

To describe food as an “algorithm of life” is accurate. There is incredible human connection and manipulation in the experience of just one taste. It is not just in restaurants or gourmet food trucks. These systems and processes exist, too, at home when we take the time to make food a part of our lifestyle. It is not just what we eat, but to realize the processes and to understand the human connection between us all through this medium is an incredible ability.