Marketers predict that by 2010, we'll spend less than 10 minutes preparing 90 percent of our food. We have already lost it, and we're trying passionately to get it back. It wasn't so long ago that all our food came from someone who loved us. Now it's served to us by anonymous teenagers. Her chefs at the Institute were half-right, she's decided.
Cooper sighs heavily.
We've turned food into a commodity, like a shirt or a chair or a widget. The food was all locally grown, and much of it was organic. Guests sniffed the air like hounds and listened abstractedly to the questions. Cooper's first critic suggested that she was confusing the genetic-modification issue with lack of choice, that genetically modified crops would bring such high yields that farmers could stop monocropping. One of my challenges as a chef is that we play to a white-tablecloth audience.