Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Welcome to this installment of Conversations with Tyler. Today, the guest is Mark Miller, who is one of the most extraordinary food minds of our generation. It’s hard to even summarize what Mark has done. I think of Mark as the modern founder of southwestern cuisine. He’s well known for having been the driving force behind opening Coyote Café, which transformed the Santa Fe dining scene. In Washington, DC, where we are now in the Panda Gourmet restaurant, Mark is best known for Red Sage, a southwestern restaurant, that was one of DC’s best for a long time. Mark has written numerous books on food, on salsas, on chiles. He has the very best book on tacos. If you’ve ever seen a famous poster of all those chiles, the Chile Poster — well, Mark did that. Mark’s been connected with a lot of restaurants. He originally studied anthropology at Berkeley. I think of Mark’s contribution as synthesizing anthropology, cooking, studying food through books, studying food through practice. He’s lived in 20 countries, traveled in over a hundred, and he understands taste, sensation, and context of food — its anthropological setting combined with all this fantastic real-world experience. On top of all that, Mark has been a food consultant for more companies than I can name. That’s just my very brief introduction to Mark, and it doesn’t begin to do him justice. We’ll start the conversation in a moment. We also have with us Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View. Megan is a long-standing friend of mine. In addition to her writing on politics and economics, Megan was, arguably, the very first economics blogger. She is deeply involved in the food world. Megan each year writes the single best guide to kitchen equipment — what is new out each year. We’ll start by chatting with Mark. Then Megan will come in with some questions. So, food worlds. I’m very interested in how you think about food worlds and this contrast between the food worlds of China, Japan, Tokyo, and South Korea. You told me you thought Seoul had the most interesting and creative food world of those three. Tell us why you think that. I’ve been traveling to all three countries for approximately 40 years or more, so I’ve really seen them transform themselves. I’ve also seen how they adapt and how they acculturate other international influences. I’ve been going to Japan since I was a student at Berkeley — 1969 was my first trip. I’ve been going to China since the ’70s. Seoul is the one that I know the least, but I’ve been following it for about 15 years. Recently, in May, I went to the big Seoul Food show where I actually ate a hundred food products that I had never had before, which was interesting. The other thing that happened was I realized that Seoul had moved in terms of its transformation of plasticity and creativity. There’s a restaurant called Mingles that every single dish was incorporating Korean ingredients, but in a very creative, modern way. They were not afraid to move their food outside of the traditional vortex of what was seen as Korean food, and they were using Korean ingredients in a new way that was authenticating a cuisine. They were doing pizza, they were doing coffee. They were doing very good pizza, that’s almost as good as you’d find, for instance, in Italy. In Japan, when you go to eat pizza, whether it’s Neapolitan, either in Tokyo or Kyoto, you find that they get to a certain level of the form of it, but the flavor and the gestalt and the aesthetic — they can’t quite get at it. They remain Japanese. The homogeneity of Japanese culture is its strength; it’s also its weakness. In China — I’ve been going there for work and I’ve seen some data from one of the big companies that has 7,000 restaurants — we’re seeing that they’re using the Western restaurants in order to create a sense modernity and identity. Whether they’ll really use it for their own personal things — right now there is no other alternative. That social space that’s open from children, through going out, through celebrations and weddings, the Western brands are the markers for special [outings]. Korea, though: I was surprised that first of all they’ve moved so quickly. The last time I was there was four and a half years ago. I would have thought to get to this level would’ve taken them 20 years. Plus the level of Italian, coffee, pizza, modern Korean, French was all exactly where we would be in the United States.…

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