To those unfamiliar with the absurdist theater of school lunch, it is puzzling, even maddening, that feeding kids nutritious food should be so hard. You buy good food. You cook it. You serve it to hungry kids.Yet the National School Lunch Program, an $11.7 billion behemoth that feeds more than 31 million children each day, is a mess, and has been for years. Conflicts of interest were built into the program. It was pushed through Congress after World War II with the support of military leaders who wanted to ensure that there would be enough healthy young men to fight the next war, and of farmers who were looking for a place to unload their surplus corn, milk and meat. The result was that schools became the dumping ground for the cheap calories our modern agricultural system was designed to overproduce.
Kathy Gunst, a radio journalist and the resident chef at NPR’s Here and Now, interviewed chef Jacques Pépin for the first time on the radio about ten years ago. She wanted to hear about what he had learned from his many decades in the kitchen. What he said surprised her. Because what he described did not have to do with flavor combinations or ingredient sourcing. It had to do with sound.Pépin told her he could walk into a kitchen where a young cook was searing a steak and immediately tell if the steak was going to be overcooked. Not by looking. Just by the quality of the sound.
The thanksgiving special set was most excellent over at the Four Seasons. The turkey and fixin’s – quite brilliant. The bread – quite a disaster. They would have been better off going to a convenience store for that. I was extremely shocked. Another surprising thing is the entrance to the hotel. I expected some grand hall, but the one in Tokyo feels more like a service entrance way around the back of the building – apparently this location has no ‘front.’ Of course, a deluge began without warning over the course of the meal, but the concierge was kind enough to provide umbrellas from the lost & found to aid us in our egress.
