Daily Connect: Two Distinctly Different Approaches to Making and Selling Food

Exhibit A:

Matthew Lightner, head chef at Castagna Restaurant in Portland Oregon offered his approach to creating new dishes in the Summer issue of Gastronomica magazine:

“When I try to come up with new ideas and dishes, one of the first things I do is to research, especially Native American history: what the indigenous people ate; how they ate; how they utilized local ingredients how they maintained a spiritual connection that stretched from the seeds, nuts, and fruits to the people who harvested them, and continued on to the animals that enjoyed these edible pleasures as well.  To the Native Americas there was nothing other than local and sustainable,  Foraging, harvesting, cooking, and eating, they took the Earth into themselves and created a bond with the soil and its riches...”

Exhibit B:

Cheetos one-ups the competition for packaged snack foods with this ad...

...and an insanely fun and brilliantly compiled online video game where you can “help a hipster out” by feeding him cheetos to make him happy (link here)

After all that cheetos wacking, I needed to read some more from Lightner:

“....At Castagna we see product as a cycle of abundance: when you eat it you become part of the cycle, and if it has been artfully prepared you can taste it, feel it, smell it, hear it, see it, and we hope understand it.”

Very different models for food sourcing, preparation and presentation, I'm trying to more of the former these days...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Castagna Photo By eyeliam from Portland, United States (Castagna) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons