Off Course-On Target

$100,000 to the Naked Chef: Jamie Oliver Named Sole TED Prize Winner

I was equal parts delighted and surprised by this recent announcement on December 21st by Alissa Walker on Fast Company about the sole TED Prize winner for 2010, chef Jamie Oliver. More specifically, I’m delighted about his success, hopefully continued and extended by the attention brought by this TED Prize, on changing the food attitudes and habits of children and families.

“There he is, Mr. TED Prize 2010 (he's the one on the left). Yes, it's British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, the man who brought his brand of sexy, slightly-messy, all-natural cooking to television--and his own sexy, slightly-messy, all-natural chef-ness for women everywhere to fantasize about greasing up with extra virgin olive oil.

Don't worry, he's not gonna blow the $100k on a 2-ton chunk of pink Himalayan salt. For the last few years, Oliver's been on the front lines of fighting childhood obesity. For the last year he's been battling state school lunches in the U.K., pressuring them to spend $1 billion to overhaul the program, and penned a lovely manifesto for schools. He founded the Fifteen Foundation, a program that trains at-risk 18-to-24 year-olds in the culinary arts, and a new show, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution USA, where he hopes to bring the same level of reform to U.S. schools, will debut on ABC next year.”

via www.fastcompany.com

For the past 30+ years, I've spent more time outside of North America than in it, and every time I go back, I'm always taken aback by the increase in obesity, and the contributing behaviors I see. In the past 10 years, the most marked and upsetting increase has been the degree to which this is now affecting children, as well as entire families and social groups.

I'm personally convinced the root of the problem is eating habits and poor diets. Solutions are mostly a return to the age-old wisdom of less quantity, more quality, and physical activity. No new fads, diets, or supplements required, thank you.

One of the best things I've read in a long time and one of my most recommended books for the past few years is "French Women Don't Get Fat" by Mireille Guiliano.  Of COURSE it is written by a woman—they are SO much smarter—but I don’t find it to be at all limited or exclusive to my favorite gender.  Here’s an excerpt from the editor’s review:

“The message of this book could be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. There is no hard science, no clearly-defined plan, and no lists of food to have or have not; instead, you'll find simple tricks that boil down to eating carefully prepared seasonal food, exercising more and refusing to think of food as something that inspires guilt. It's both a practical message and far easier said than done in today's "no pain, no gain" culture.”

It is no more about women than it is about the French or diets.  It is ALL about the joy of food and the joy of life and that these are NOT mutually exclusive. I like for example, Mireille’s note  that “as an adult everyone is the keeper of her own equilibrium.”

Some things I’ve tried that have increased my already high joie de vivre and joy of eating include:

• Multiply the number of times you chew a given food by 10.
• Eat just one morsel at a time. Try this with popcorn!
• Never drink while you are eating (i.e. wash it down).
• Eat the real thing; never eat substitutes (sugar, milk, butter, chocolate).
• Strike a balance or equilibrium; if you eat more, exercise more.

You get the idea. This book is well worth the read. And congratulations to Jamie and TED!

-- Wayne

Cooking up a Snowstorm!

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As someone who just loves food, eating, and cooking, I've often been struck by the parallels between eating and learning. Feeding the mind and feeding the body have lots in common. So I have used their similarities as the basis for many of the stories I tell onstage, because they help illustrate the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization. 

While we've obviously had to pay attention to food as one of the basics of existence (food, clothing, shelter), interest in food seems to be escalating to whole new levels these days. I'm delighted, for example, at the veritable explosion of television and web-based shows that cover everything about food:

• The production of food sources, farming, fishing, gardening 
• Cooking, baking, and meal preparation 
• Finding great places to eat, delicious new recipes, new culinary talents, etc. 

Heck, now there are entire television networks dedicated to food and drawing huge audiences of all ages! And just take a look at the magazine rack when you next visit a bookstore to see how many magazines are dedicated to these topics.

So I thought you'd be interested in some new sites about food that have popped up recently. Webware.com has a number of recent posts and commentary about food-related sites. Here are three that I  think exemplify these food trends and what else we can learn from them.

IM cooked

This site is an interesting example of the trend away from "mega sites" to more specialized ones. More of the Snowflake Effect from my point of view. IM Cooked provides a place for people to share their knowledge, interests, and passions for cooking via video.

To get a feel for IM Cooked, you might want to take a few minutes to watch one of its currently top-rated videos "Man Makes Chicken with Pears" presented by the always quirky and fun Christopher Walken.

There are lots of videos available about cooking on the Internet, and even YouTube is an option for posting food-related videos, but the challenge with any general purpose site is how to find both content and the people who share your specific interests.

Another challenge is how to make these information sources more pro-active, so that you are constantly assisted in your quest to discover new ideas, ingredients, and recipes, and the people who share your passions. Or as I often like say, "Doing more finding than searching." 

But having too many niche sites also gives us a new problem in this age of abundance—the challenges that come from so much choice. I think the solution is neither a matter of going for even larger mega sites nor moving towards more niche sites. Rather, we need to move toward creating better social and automated recommender systems and having more pattern recognition that helps us mine the exponentially exploding volume of "stuff" out there, so we can zero in on just the right individual people, files, content ,and ideas that match our unique situation at any moment in time.

BakeSpace 

This site puts the focus on the food rather than the technology, something that is "so yesterday" as my kids used to say to me, but it is also so relevant that BakeSpace doesn't use Ajax or other latest "gee whiz" technology. Instead, this site helps to connect people who share a common set of interests and enables them to pursue their passions better alone and with others. As Caroline McCarthy put it nicely in her review on Webware "after all, if it doesn't taste good, it doesn't matter how well it's arranged on the plate."

I also think the tag line for the BakeSpace site is very apropos: "Come for the food. Stay for the conversation."  I'd be so much happier if we were putting more focus on conversations than community!

GroupRecipes

Over ten years ago, my daughter Lia, who was 13 at the time, hit upon a great technique to figure out what to cook up for dinner or some other meal. She would check out the contents we had on hand in the kitchen, decide what she felt like eating at the time, and then she would fire up a browser and enter these ingredients into a search engine. Her request would return a list of recipes that contained some or all of these ingredients. Inevitably, it helped her to discover a great recipe, which she'd print out, and then she would head back to the kitchen to whip it up. Worked great and it is something she still does now that she is living on her own.

GroupRecipes takes this same basic idea, but makes it even more personalized. For example, they have a StumbleUpon-like feature that is one of my favorites (you have tried StumbleUpon, right?!).  StumbleUpon increases what I call the "serendipity factor". You enter a food you'd like to "stumble upon" and then GroupRecipes uses these to find matches and provide ratings of probability that you will like a given recipe. Think of it as the "page rank" (what makes Google searches work so well) for food.

By helping you discover not only other recipes, but other people who are more like you in this very specific context, GroupRecipes adds the social aspect and improved discovery of those things you like. 

In this age of abundance, the problem is so much great food, so little time!  So this ability to have some "decision support" is a huge help.

So as you can see there really are tremendous parallels between feeding our minds and our bodies. It's also worth noting that the upcoming Learning 2007 will feature chef Bobby Flay as one of the keynoters. Elliott Masie plans to interview Bobby on this same topic of the parallels between learning and cooking, and how both can benefit. I'll be there and will have more to report back to you at the end of October.

Hope this post helps to feed both your mind and your body. As you do so,  I hope you will feed the rest of us with your comments and suggestions. (sorry, couldn't resist!)

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Hot Shanghai is VERY cool in Taipei

To cap off an excellent day of presentations and conversation, my hosts treated me to an evening out in the downtown "cool zone" of Taipei, where the entire city's young (20-somethings) workforce seems to go after work. Best of all, my hosts somehow managed to get us into THE restaurant in Taipei, called Din Tai Fung, for one of THE best and most beautifully presented Shanghai-style dim sum, and it was some of the best I've ever had. As you can see by the photo with the tower of bamboo dim sum steam baskets, a literal army in the kitchen is busy hand-forming each little treasure to be served.

The evening was made even more complete when the team who are creating the national metadata standard, which is based upon the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Standard, met with me back at my hotel. This exceptionally talented and energetic team has created a full Chinese translation of the IEEE LOM document, and even more impressively, a very detailed Taiwanese application profile to meet local needs. Their work is slated to become the national standard for educationally-oriented metadata for all of Taiwan in 2007, and they wanted to meet to get more guidance and suggestions for their final work on this national standard. A fabulous and dedicated team, and we talked late into the night.

A full day and most productive visit to say the least.  Keep your eye on Taiwan for a continued flow of great examples and experiences in all things metadata for both digital archives, learning and performance. Unfortunately there is still no sign of my lost voice yet, which certainly added an extra challenge to my presentations and meetings! Now I'm off to Ecuador to see if I can find my voice there. Stay tuned and I'll let you know where and when I find it.

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