TASTE3 BLOG

While browsing all of the impossibly delicious tasting exhibits and demos at the conference this year, many of the Taste3 attendees stopped by to visit with our friends from TCHO to weigh in with their opinions on the chocolate maker’s latest creations.

TCHO wants to thank all of your discerning palates for voting on its “Fruity” formulations throughout the weekend. Recipe A was the winner of Friday’s tasting, and Recipe D took the honors on Saturday. TCHO’s head Chocolate Maker is already tweaking the recipe based on your valuable feedback. You can taste how they’re doing and tell them what you think - it’s a work in progress! Be sure to keep your eyes peeled (and your palates at the ready) for their third flavor, “Nutty,” to be released later this month.

Posted by: The Taste3 Team

From left: Karen Zoller, Loretta Barrett Oden, Mark Zoller, Marie Wright, Ed Nappen, Cherilynn Whitehouse, Christopher Barefoot of Robert Mondavi Winery, Margrit Mondavi, Jill Greenwood of Taste3, and Carol Brys. In foreground: Luce

This year, a select group of Taste3 attendees were invited to attend an exceptionally special afternoon champagne reception with Margrit Mondavi. Ever the gracious hostess, Margrit welcomed into her home a very small group of community members in appreciation of their ongoing support to Taste3 and their status as a Founding Member of the conference. The Taste3 Founding Members program is open to anyone who has previously attended Taste3 and who actively aids in growing the community by inviting and securing one or more conference registrants. Each of the delegates of Taste3 bring incredible value to the party, through their passion, their ideas, their questions, and their vision. If you would like to join the Founding Members program, and have a colleague, friend or associate that you feel would be a great addition to the community, please send an email to info@taste3.com for more information. Each year at the conference, our Founding Members will have access to an exclusive, private event that promises to be no less that a once in a lifetime experience!

Posted by: Jill Greenwood, Taste3 Team

Photo submitted by: Mark Zoller

It’s been hard to describe the days that enveloped Taste3. The words don’t seem to come together. The thoughts are there and the memories still vivid, yet I can’t seem to find a way to perfectly summarize into a cohesive way just what the conference was like. For the most part I tell friends or co-workers “Great. The most fun I have had in years,” or “So amazing and educational,” and “I was encouraged to drink at 10 in the morning.”

Still, none of these adequately does the job, does it? I make a succinct comment about it all because the everyday person probably doesn’t care or doesn’t share the passion. I doubt I would be able to listen to our I.T. guy go on for hours about a computer conference, so I try my best not to pin someone down and chatter their head off.

I can easily talk about the winery tours, the meals, and the events, but what’s hard to convey about is the speakers. Each one had a passion that reverberated through the room, and stirred every seat. We vibrated with anticipation, laughed with every joke (Bear Fruit Bar!), were moved through their words, and disquieted with concern. How does one grind down these 36 speakers into superficial small talk?

I don’t think we can; hours could be spent discussing each 18 minute presentation. The phoenix-like life and death cycle of bread. The adoption of the Fortune cookies in American faux-Chinese cuisine (previously adopted from Japanese cuisine). The practical applications of urban vertical farms, and their impact on the local economy and diets of middle and lower class American families. The secret life of bees and the people who keep them. The politics of dates and their cultural implications. Each topic could have been a three day conference in itself and you would not go wanting.

In the end, I found myself energized. Filled. And most of all, driven.

“One way or another,” I thought to myself, “I want to present up there.” As of yet? I’m not sure just what… A minor hurdle, I admit, but I’m still really carving out my niche in the food world. In fact, I predict many of you are thinking the same. I know that my fellow Fellowship recipients were all feeling that now instinctive need. Taste3 had given to us this precious and enlightening experience. In exceeding and overwhelming gratitude we want to give back to Taste3.

So, I will come back next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. How can I not? And one day, I plan to come back and hopefully be able to present something that will reverberate with you all and allow me to finally give back for what Taste3 has so generously given to me.

Posted by: Garrett McCord, http://vanillagarlic.blogspot.com/

Christopher Barefoot, Estate Director at Robert Mondavi Winery, and Mia Malm, Director of PR for Icon Estates, take in the festivities at the finale celebration on Saturday night.

Peter Reinhart, master breadmaker, with Carol Brys of International Flavors & Fragrances, and Jeffrey Elliot of Henckels.

Jessie Coutts, Nicolo Regazzoni and Mathurin Molgat

Dr. Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society’s Explorer-in-Residence, with Janet McCartney, Taste3 Director of Operations, and Marie Wright of International Flavors & Fragrances.

Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes shares a laugh with Novella Carpenter and Garrett McCord.

The Taste3 Operations Team, from left: Tamara Bulat, Jill Greenwood, Miranda Higgs, Melanie Sandeen, Janet McCartney, Michiyo Katiyama, Lisa Stringle

Photos by: Jill Greenwood, Taste3 Team

First and foremost I would like to thank Margrit Mondavi and the memory of Robert Mondavi for putting on such an amazing program and giving me the opportunity to participate in such a thought provoking event. You will never know how much I have appreciated it and I know it will carry with me for years to come.

I was sitting to the side of the signing booth where Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director, Center for Food Safety was signing his book, Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture and The Green Lifestyle Handbook when the group started to get larger. I had been extremely touched by his speech and I figured that most people felt the same way. About seven people were standing around listening to different conversations when Michael Ruhlman asked a simple question. “So are you saying you should never buy Cheerios?” Andrew looked up and said, “Absolutely.” A little conversation went on between the two of them but inevitably it got lost in the happenings and Michael walked away.

A simple two minute dialogue and my perspective on the conference had changed. The point Michael Ruhlman was making was, how do you make this a universal thing? How do you take all of the information that we have heard in the past two days, and make sure that every middle class family in America has access to organic, local food as easily as we do? Because it’s surely not the case now. If next to every box of Cheerios there was a box of organic granola from a local grain farm that cost the same, well wouldn’t that be perfect?

If there was one message that was communicated multiple times by multiple speakers it was simply, we can’t keep living the same lives and expect the world to stay the same. In a perfect world I would probably buy a patch of land in a fertile valley and raise my own bees (the gateway animal of course), chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigmy goats and pigs and just forget the world existed. However, I don’t think my conscious could allow me to forget about the many problems that GMOs and herbicides are causing to other people. While I still want to get my own farm, I can’t forget about the rest of the world and the problems that exist.

So what is the solution? How do we make the availability of local, organic produce more available? How do we teach families that are barely scraping by the importance of eating organic food? When a family is barely putting Cheerios on the table, how can you expect them to drive to a farmers market and pay more money for raw oats which they will have to make into cereal themselves? There needs to be something more we can do. The question is what?

I wish Bryant Terry had been able to speak more because I think that he is on this same type of path. I think the next necessary step is another sort of culinary corps. This culinary corps would be about educating families about organic food and creating programs that would allow for more organic food in cities where it is notoriously harder to find. Maybe there would be programs informing families how to grow your own organic food (windowboxes are maybe the gateway of farming). Perhaps there needs to be a government program that gives money to farms that are certified organic. Whatever the solution is, it needs to happen soon. It is clearly a pressing issue as it becomes so evident what chemicals in our food can do. We need to make a change, not just in our lives or how we treat food, but how the nation treats food. We can’t just take care of ourselves, we need to take care of everyone at this point.

Any ideas?

Posted By: Sasha Schroeder, CIA Student

It’s four o’clock in the morning after Taste3 2008 and I went to bed three hours ago. Every night since arriving here the aliveness of this event, the creative energy that abounds, palpably courses through me – and even though I’m just laying here, I still feel like I cannot catch my breath after living Taste3 for the past three days.

While I know that many people (four hundred or so) who will read this were here with me as part of this dynamic community, I am directing this posting to those who were not here, who have never been here, who (like me up until a few days ago) are wondering to themselves “Is it really worth nearly $2000?!”

It is.

Okay, full disclosure, I didn’t actually pay to be here because I was one of a few extremely fortunate people granted fellowships to attend this year’s gathering. However, of the many questions I had before my arrival, this question of cost and worth was foremost in my mind. On the drive up I had said to myself, (having just finished grad school and gotten semi-comfortable saying to people “I’m unemployed”), “They – the conference organizers - are really going to have to show me how an event that lasts little more than 48 hours could possibly be worth this much money.”

They did just that and, to my surprise, the value of this conference for the most part had nothing to do with wine, food, or art (though that was beyond great too).

Here are my true take-aways from Taste3:

The Wisdom. 36 speakers, any one of which could be a heavyweight keynote speaker in their own right…all lined up, back to back (the sessions are single-track so you are never forced to choose which speaker you want to here) – it is like a live action, intervenous surreal experience of the best documentary/art exhibition/comedy performance/college lecture you will ever see.

Community. When I applied for the fellowship one of the questions they asked me was “What will you bring to the conference community?” My first reaction was “You mean I can’t just sit in the back of the room and watch?” At Taste3, in a beautiful and organic way each person ends up playing a vitally important role and actively contributes to the creation of one of the best communities I have felt a part of. You can sit in the back of the room if you want, but you won’t want to.

Crazy Good. I think we each have a little madness inside us. Perhaps a passion we’re afraid to turn into a career. A book we’ve wanted to write, but haven’t. A belief, maybe a bit radical and new, about how the world we live in could and should be better. In attending Taste3 you are surrounded by this madness and it is delicious - more delicious than the food. This is the kind of crazy that reminds you that life is short and that the reason we are all so unique is because we each have a different contribution to make. When the contribution you want to make the world is so different from the mainstream, or progressive, it can give rise to trepidation and the minimization of our unique geniuses. Taste3 takes you by the shoulders and with a vigorous shaking says “Go! Be your crazy self! What is it that you need to say or do or make or share? We want you to unleash your creative genius, however mad, this is where the answer lies.”

Hope. While many of the Taste3 presenters gave us a hard look at some of the problems we face today. They did so with Obama-like symphonic perfection and as a result left us pummeled over with inspiration, energy, new creative ideas and most importantly the audacity of hope that we’ve been hearing so much about.

I could go on, but I think I’ll try to get some sleep. Oh, I did say above that the worth of this conference was not to be found in the food, wine, or art?…I do mean that, but there is no denying that Taste3 is a wild fantasy of whatever your best, most mouth-watering summer-camp for adults might be like.

And it does not bother me that my fellowship free-ride to Taste3 will not be available to me next year (it’s a one-time only deal), because right now a few thousand dollars for how informed, alive, creative, passionate, fed, connected, aware, at-ease, hopeful, and happy (and sleepy) I feel seems like an awfully good bargain. Plus, a core-value of Taste3 (and the late Robert Mondavi) is to always be improving, to never settle for good or rest of your laurels, so you can bet you’ll find me here, far from the back of the room at Taste3 2009. See you there?

Posted By: Rachel Cole, Taste3 2008 Fellow

As someone who helped organize Taste3, I realize I’m not the most believable person when I tell you that there’s a little alchemy at play in this conference but it’s true. Certainly there’s a lot of work that goes into it. Speakers and exhibitors are carefully chosen, schedules are planned, charts and spreadsheets are created, but the most wonderful things are the things you can’t plan for—the things that surprise and delight you. These are the things that can impact your passions, your work, your life.

Being involved in the event as I am, I have limited time to interact with conference attendees. Mostly I am rushing past people, but still I get to see the alchemy at work.

I get to see June Taylor, who makes the most extraordinary preserves, talking with David Lee Hoffman, an authority on Chinese teas and caretaker of one of the largest collections of pu-erh teas in the world. June told me she has been dreaming of using tea infusions in some of her products and I can only imagine that conversation evolving into something I may get to taste in the future.

I see journalist and author Michael Ruhlman, who has recently written about competition in the chef world, talking over lunch to Master Chef Roland Henin, one of the coaches of the International Culinary Olympics (did you even know there was such a thing?). I imagine that conversation might turn into something I can read about at some point.

I hear the excitement in the voice of a documentary filmmaker as she talks about how she’s been inspired to do a project on one of the speakers. Another woman is a writer and says she’s found the topic for her next book at the conference. Several of the speaker sessions move people to tears. A participant comes up to me on the final night and, full of passion and emotion, tells me that the conference was a “life changing experience.”

I am pulled into it as well. I have lunch with a food writer about to submit a book proposal and offer to review it for her—something I’ve done for years in my work in the publishing world. Why not share my experience with someone just starting out? Why not help?

Later I sit next to Benjamin Wallace, one of our conference speakers, for the bus ride to the Robert Mondavi Winery for dinner on the last night, and he gives me the single most valuable piece of advice about book publicity and overcoming my fears of public speaking that I have ever received. I know I will be following his suggestions next year when I have to promote my own book. He even tells me I can email him for pep talks as needed (what a guy!).

This is the alchemy of the conference that one can’t plan for, it simply is. There’s a generosity of spirit, a sharing of passions and knowledge. When you put a small group of extraordinary people together in the same room, magic happens.

Posted By: Tara Austen Weaver

So I’m sitting in the balcony right now listening to Christine Carroll speak about the “Anatomy of the Trip in order to dedicate themselves to culinary volunteering (the pork did pull me back in, typing and
watching is very difficult at times). CulinaryCorps seems to be one of those beautiful and inspirational groups that has such a direct impact that one cannot be anything but moved.

It’s something I hold close to my own heart as I often organize various food workers, cooks, mavens, wine peoples, cheesemongers, chefs, cookers and cakers for volunteer days at the Sacramento Food Bank. We put out a Sunday lunch, but also create bag lunches for families. They can take as many as they want, and often take many as it makes up the bulk of their meals for the week.

These grassroots organization and home grown desire to bring food to those less fortunate is one of those aspects of the food world that gives you a real appreciation. In a world we live in where a meal is at most times no further than a 5 minute walk away (which we usually drive anyways) and spend five bucks for something we may not decide to finish? It’s shocking. Eye opening.

We are lucky to be so privileged to live and work and thrive in a world that we at times take for granted. In some places where the daily serving is less than a few ounces of grain and grey water, we eat three healthy meals a day, plus snacks.

I don’t mean to preach, and I don’t think that to this crowd there’s really a need. Yet, in the mundane repetition of preaching to the choir, I find that sometimes you have to remind the choir of exactly why they’re singing. I hope we all take some of the lessons we learned here and take them out into the world and share our skills and knowledge with the world. Not only from the academic or intellectual level, but from the dirty hands, get-down-and-gritty level.

I’ve met many of you now, and know that you are making a difference and I must admit, it inspires me to no end.

Posted by: Garrett McCord, http://vanillagarlic.blogspot.com/

Chris Cosentino of Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, known for his nose-to-tail approach with meat demonstrates how to break down a beef heart, and grind it up for beef heart tartare puttanesca on crostini.

Posted by: Elise Bauer, Publisher, SimplyRecipes.com
Photo by: Elise Bauer

Margrit Mondavi and Napa artist Gordon Huether at Gordon’s studio, part
of the Taste3 “Three Muses” Napa insider tour.

Posted by: Elise Bauer, Publisher, SimplyRecipes.com
Photo by: Elise Bauer