UFO Info Week-End

Some even invited us into their kitchens for a hands-on demonstration of their dishes

Some even invited us into their kitchens for a hands-on demonstration of their dishes. At the other end, talented chefs Marcus Moore, Steven Smith and Kathryn Boyden of Melbourne Sofitel’s Le Restaurant gulped twice, then promptly rose to the occasion with work that was every bit as good as the original.The evening started with Blumenthal’s sardine-and-toast ice-cream, served with Melba toast and a drizzle of balsamic reduction. Our courageous band of diners started clucking over it like nervous chickens “Cat food,” pronounced Flic, the son’s girlfriend. “Amazing,” breathed Mike, the celebrated film editor.Next came a chilled Martini glass holding a dense, lawn-clipping green cocktail from Heinz Beck of La Pergola in Rome’s Cavalieri Hilton, a whiz of rocket pur? lemon sorbet and ginger ale “Wow,” said the sister-in-law Dannie excitedly “I’ll be making this all summer. With vodka.”Also from La Pergola was the idea of offering a pepper menu.

The three peppers – a native Australian pepper berry that is 10 times hotter than conventional pepper, the finest grade Tellicherry black pepper, and Sichuan peppercorns, which are not pepper as such but the seed pods of the prickly ash tree – had everyone debating and arguing favourites.Then came the most elegant dish of the night and the only reference to classical French cooking – a long, thin slice of seafood bouillabaisse terrine with caviar vinaigrette, as prepared at Gordon Ramsay at Claridges by Mark Sargeant. It was like eating a delicate, chilled, saffron-laced fish soup in the form of a glistening rod of jellied lusciousness.Next came some more culinary shock treatment in the form of Giorgio Locatelli’s lemon- cream cappellacci with pork ragu from Locanda Locatelli. I love this dish – little tortellini-like parcels filled with sweet lemon pastry cream, served with a delicate meat sauce – but it confounded most restaurant critics in London, who couldn’t come to terms with the almost medieval sweet and savoury flavour clash. My lot had no such problems.The main course was the most difficult decision of all, as always, until I recalled a magical thyme-scented night at the Michelin-starred Hostellerie Berard in the Proven?- perched village of La Cadiere d’Azur. Or even to consider reconstructing a one-off dinner on the state of Australian cuisine circa 2003 in Britain Oh my god What am I thinking?. When I was a kid growing up in the United States in the early 1960’s, anybody could have told you exactly what the future of food was going to look like. We’d seen The Jetsons, toured the 1964 World’s Fair, tasted the culinary fruits (or at least fruit flavours) of the space programme, and all signs pointed to a single outcome: the meal in a pill, washed down, perhaps, with next-generation Tang.

If not literally served in a pill, the meal of the future would be fabricated “in the laboratory out of a wide variety of materials”, as one food historian predicted at the time, including not only algae and soybeans but also petrochemicals. Protein would be extracted directly from fuel oil and then “spun and woven into ‘animal’ muscle – long wrist-thick tubes of ‘fillet steak’”.By 1965, we were well on our way to the synthetic food future. Already the eating of readily identifiable plant and animal species was beginning to feel somewhat retro, as food technologists came forth with one shiny new product after another: Cool Whip, Pop-Tarts, non-dairy creamer, and a slew of eerily indestructible baked cakes and breads. My favourite was the TV dinner, which even a 10-year-old recognised as a brilliant simulacrum – not to mention an obvious improvement over the real thing.

My poor mother, eager to please four children whose palates had already been ruined by the food technologists, once spent hours in the kitchen trying to simulate the Salisbury steak from a particular brand of TV dinner.What none of us could have imagined back in 1965 was that within a few years, the synthetic food future would be overthrown in advance of its arrival. The counter-culture seized upon processed food, of all things, as a symbol of everything wrong with industrial civilisation. Not only did processed foods contain chemicals, the post-war glamour of which had been extinguished by DDT and Agent Orange, but products like Wonder Bread represented the worst of white-bread America, its very wheat “bleached to match the bleached-out mentality of white supremacy”, in the words of one underground journalist.As an antidote to the “plastic food” dispensed by agribusiness, the counter-culture promoted natural foods organically grown, and whole grains in particular. Brown food of any kind was deemed morally superior to white – not only because it was less processed and therefore more authentic, but because by eating it you could express your solidarity with the world’s (non-white) oppressed Seriously. What you chose to eat had become a political act, and the lower you ate on the food chain, the better it was for you, for the planet and for the world’s hungry. Almost overnight the meal in a pill became a symbol of the forces of reaction rather than progress.