Interview with Hamaro Cantu, by Blaine Brownell, April 2007

Chef Homaro Cantu does unimaginable things with food. Executive Chef at the highly-acclaimed Moto restaurant in Chicago and founder of Cantu Designs, Cantu abolishes traditional approaches to cuisine in favor of innovative preparation methods inspired by scientific and industrial processes. Wearing the many hats of cook, mad-scientist, sustainability advocate, and designer, Cantu is continually redefining how we think about food, from his development of completely new preparation methods to his design of new forms of cookware and edible surfaces.

BROWNELL: Please briefly describe your background. How did you become interested in the art of food preparation?

CANTU: I have always had a fascination with what we eat. As a child I would eat unusual things to see how they would taste. There is a quote from Brillat Savarin—“Everything in the universe that lives, eats. And everything in the universe that eats, tastes.” I have always followed that simple rule when approaching food as food is essential for existence.

BROWNELL: I imagine that training with Charlie Trotter would be a dream apprenticeship for a typical aspiring chef, but I'm curious about how you established your own unique path. One day, you're at Charlie's concocting classics as a sous chef; the next, you're wielding a laser at Moto. How did you make such a big transition?

CANTU: I was always trying to fix things that would break at Trotter’s. Fixing things slowly turned into creating new things that didn’t need fixing. After leaving Charlie’s I spent a year in my basement playing around with everything I didn’t have time to play around with. That being everything I could get my hands on from industrial supply stores, hobby shops, medical supply stores, etc. Inventing contraptions has always been a hobby of mine. It was not until I left Charlie’s that I could afford to purchase the equipment needed to support that passion. However, utilizing existing resources to fix a problem is the challenge I enjoy the most.

BROWNELL: Is this how you became interested in design? How have you connected the process of design with the process of food-making?

CANTU: By realizing how energy inefficient commercial kitchens really are, from a logistics and overhead standpoint to waste in general. It’s a pretty scary picture considering how large the industry has grown over the last five years. When chefs get together at conferences, the topic of energy efficiency never comes up. That really tells me we need more culinary designers that keep this in mind.

BROWNELL: I am curious about your development of “postmodern cuisine." In its heyday, postmodern design was concerned with rehashing the past in interesting ways, without much regard for material or technological innovation. Since I assume your definition of postmodernism is different, how do you define postmodern cuisine?

CANTU: For me it’s creating new products out of items we already know and have a reference to. How do I deliver a dish of steak and eggs to you that looks like spaghetti and meatballs and has textural similarities to spaghetti and meatballs? Postmodern Cuisine is the process of innovation that leads us from one to the next. That path of innovation leads to new discoveries.

BROWNELL: You also use the term "molecular gastronomy." Could you please explain this?

CANTU: Molecular Gastronomy is where chefs are striving to experiment with ingredients that have been present in food processing establishments. This is where Chefs begin to collaborate with the scientists that create the ingredients. That is the basis for MG. Culinary programs such as Le Cordon Bleu are beginning to encourage ingredient experimentation and education that goes further than standard household ingredients.

BROWNELL: Traditional thinking suggests that great chefs lead successful careers by perfecting particular kinds of cuisine within established frameworks, yet you reach far beyond the conventional boundaries of your profession. You bring industrial and scientific modes of production into the kitchen, for example, and the products of your efforts extend beyond the dining room into commercial, aerospace, and relief-effort projects (just to name a few). How have you been able to redefine the scope of your craft, and what advice would you give for other creative minds attempting to do the same in their fields?

CANTU: I don’t think I will ever redefine the scope of my craft as the ultimate goal of eating is survival and we just try to find new ways to create the foods we consume to survive. For other creative types that want to make a business out of being creative I would suggest the following:

1) Make sure if you create new products, they are sustainable and socially responsible.

2) Have a lot of fun and make sure those around you enjoy their lives at work. That will stimulate a creative drive that is necessary for the innovative process to move more quickly.

3) We may “have it wrong.” Always be willing to face that fact. And that is a fact.

BROWNELL: As you know, design and architecture are currently experiencing a green revolution of sorts. This new-found environmental awareness is not completely dissimilar from the various environmental and health movements the food industry has experienced, which in turn led to the development of organic labeling, macrobiotic cuisine, free-range chicken, etc. What lessons can sustainable design learn from "sustainable food," and how do they connect?

CANTU: I think we can learn that we aren’t even close to achieving a truly long term solution to our food supply – so I guess we can learn that we are still learning. I think the food world needs stricter guidelines on its labeling practice. The laws that govern what is “all natural” or even “organic” can be misleading. To be all natural, some ingredients only need to contain 5% of all natural products. And then if we take this a step further, what is the point of organic labeling if all we do is transport that product over long distances utilizing a form of transportation that is harmful to the environment?

I think we need to rethink this entire system. When was the last time you saw a “locally grown” label on a product in a major grocer? That to me would be a step in the right direction. I could spend the rest of my life working on this problem (who knows, maybe I will). The answer is having food processors create products exclusively from and for local markets that are truly all-natural and organic.

Second, let’s use this example: If I invent a tomato that glows in the dark and saves electricity, is that better than a natural tomato? How different would that be from creating fuel out of soybeans or corn? Perhaps you could even eat the tomato I create after it over-ripens and is ready for the table. Because it looks bizarre and is unfamiliar, it may not be readily acceptable. Finally, if my tomato were locally grown and a GMO product, where does this fit into the world of sustainability? I don’t have an answer for this yet; then again, I will never have all of the answers.

BROWNELL: Glow-in-the-dark tomatoes! I admit that is an outcome I never would have imagined in terms of sustainable cuisine. With the increased sensitivity towards food processing, however, consumers often indicate a preference for more natural, raw forms of nourishment. In a similar way, the fields of design and architecture are populated by proponents of more natural, less "processed" materials and methods. How would you relate to arguments in favor of "natural" versus "synthetic" modes of production (if such a clean dialectic actually existed)? How do you counter skepticism about the use of heavy-duty processing ingredients like liquid nitrogen in your food preparation, for example?

CANTU: I have devised food production techniques that utilize LN2 and these techniques will allow for more sanitary and highly efficient food production methods on large scales. We need to familiarize ourselves with how this can be utilized on a small scale first. Perhaps we may have it wrong, but we won’t know until we try out these new discoveries.

BROWNELL: Bruce Mau once told me that "the bigger you are, the bigger the target on your back." With all the publicity and attention for your paradigm-breaking work, how do you counter criticism that your cuisine is simply based on "shock value" or being "hyper-trendy?"

CANTU: Shock value has been a part of this cuisine, however, there is a deeper process at work with these innovations. The processes I create to produce food can (and are) being applied to large food processing lines that can save companies millions. I also have patents pending on some unusual kitchen gadgets. My goal with these multi-function tools is to take a lot of the devices the everyday consumer uses and shrink them into the size of a drawer. Imagine a thermometer that is also a spatula, strainer and knife.

As raw material costs go up and the energy costs associated with those goods, we will have to develop fewer products for consumers and these products must perform multiple tasks. This is a sort of anti-product development; however, we are beginning to exist in an anti-material world (I don’t have to tell you this). This is not for shock value, but one of the many ways that outside-the-box thinking about food can lead to a healthier environment, lower costs on consumer goods and innovative products. If you think differently about what you eat, then what you use to create those foodstuffs changes, thus creating a new path of innovation in food processing.

Finally, I believe he who risks nothing, risks too much. We all must do something about the rapidly changing ecosystem and the globally connected economy; this is my own small part.

BROWNELL: Your “small part” is actually influencing cuisine in profound ways, and I imagine that your growing fan base would like to know what you will conjure up next. When you peer down your looking glass, what do you envision as the future of food? How will design play a role in its manifestation?

CANTU: We need to design less food-related products for the sake of selling and more products for the sake of survival and well-being. When I mention food products, I mean kitchen devices that are designed to break after two years or toasters that are designed to only make an egg sandwich. These products are exactly what we need to get rid of. There is no point in selling more products as we edge closer to our raw material horizons. It has been a challenge for me, but I want to produce retail products that last longer, are more energy-efficient and will enable us to exist over the long term. We have no choice.

The design element will take into account many factors beyond just functionality, and help us navigate deeper into eco-functionality. From the farm to the table, we need designers to create more efficient means of eco food production that assist in sustainable living.

Today I was reading about new designs for homes that are pre-fabricated with rooftop gardens, solar panels and complete plumbing systems. This is a step in the right direction. I believe we need to resist the urge to continue spending more on unnecessary products, and instead channel a lot of our incomes into healthy food stuffs and not items that follow the old ways of thinking that more is better. When we design edible products in the future, we will take into account what it really takes to eat what we eat. Then we will eat more flavorful, healthier foods that are future-friendly and will perhaps even grow outside our front door. It will just take more work to obtain these items, and we must face this fact soon.

Copyright 2007 Ambidextrous Magazine, Inc.