My Last Supper | Melanie Dunea & Dan Barber, Noreen Springstead | Talks at Google

So it's my pleasure to introduce not one, but three wonderful guests for today's talk. The occasion for their visit is the publication of the new book My Last Supper. This book collects together wonderful images from the culinary world greats along with recipes which each answers the question what would your last meal be? Just as each chef provides the story behind their choice of the last meal, they there too is a story behind this book which we'll get to hear about today. Melanie is the author photographer of My Last Supper. She is a globetrotting photographer who has a long list of accomplishments and is widely published. She also has a passion for charitable work. Her first book, precious, was a collection of celebrity portraits with all the royalties donated to the Starlight Children's Foundation. Dan Barber is a chef and in 2000 started the new York restaurant Blue Hill which has garnered many accolades and in 2002 led to Dan to be listed in Town and Country's Best New Chefs. Blue Hill's most recent incarnation is Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Barrington, Massachusetts. Great Barrington, Massachusetts where Dan is the executive chef and co owner. This is a model for sustainable farming which takes on as its mission not only the rigors of running a farm and a restaurant, but also educating folks about sustainable farming. Noreen Springsteen is director of marketing and fundraising at the anti hunger and poverty organization World Hunger Year which recently was added to Google's charity program AD charity program Google grants that most of you know about. On the World Hunger Year website it describes itself as a leading advocate for innovative community based solutions to hunger and poverty. Why changes society to confront these problems by advancing models that create self reliance, economic justice and equal access to nutrition and affordable food. So I hope everybody give a round of applause and welcome our guest here today.

Thank you. Can you all hear me? Yes. Thank you so much Brian. And thank you all for taking your lunch hour to be here today. About 20 years ago I tried to make some brownies. I mixed all the ingredients, put the pan in the oven. It never seemed to bake and I am not kidding you, the mixture stayed liquid and after three hours, after pulling my hair out, I ripped off my apron. I threw it down on the counter right next to three cups of flour. I had forgotten to put the flour in. Then there were the blueberry muffins that I made with the Concord grapes. I was never going to be a chef, so that's when I decided to become a photographer. I'm Melanie Dunay. I'm very honored to be here today and I thought I would give a little Bit of a backstory about who I am, which would lead to the creation of my last supper. I live here in New York. I'm a freelance photographer, and I photograph all types of people. And I'll start showing you some slides. People like singers, Kanye West, Sting, actors like Keri Russell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ian McKellen, Bernie Mac. Some clothing designers like Kate Spade, Oscar de la Renta, sports. People like Tom Brady, politicians like Rudy Giuliani. And this is how it works. I have an agent cpi. They get a phone call, am I available to do the shoot. The details are organized like the time, the date, the fee, the contract. Basically everything is done and I trot off to do the shoots. Here are some examples of some of my clients. Magazines, Book jackets, CD covers, even calendars. So as you can see, I photograph all different types of people. But I found that chefs were so interesting. They did not seem concerned at all about their images. And I was very intrigued. I started to notice a few things. Most of them like tequila, they work insane hours. Most of them do not eat the kind of food that they serve in their restaurants. They're much more simple. So I decided to find out how important food is actually to chefs. I gave them a simple interrogation, asking them, what would be your last meal on Earth? Some of them said, we've heard that question before. This is a game we've been playing for decades. So I thought, okay, sure, let me ask you a little bit more. Where would you be? Who would be the fellow guests? What would you drink? And of course, who would prepare the dinner? Some people thought it would be really boring for me to ask them all exactly the same questions. But I thought that would show who they really are. I thought, then I'll see how seriously you're taking my project. And then their true selves would shine through. So I got busy. I didn't know very many chefs. I picked the brains of the few that I knew over a few drinks, like Tony Bourdain, Mario, Marcus, Danielle and Daniel. I said, who should I shoot? They gave me a few names and then I started googling. I googled famous chefs, chefs I should know. Cute chefs, famous chefs, Michelin starred chefs. Then I started cross referencing, and soon it became very clear who were the most celebrated chefs in America. How to get the chefs? Well, I just googled and started calling the restaurants and said, hi, I'm a journalist from New York City. I'd love to get the email for the chef. Click. Some people said, oh, yeah, yeah, Send an email to reservationslahblahbla. Which we all know is the kiss of death. But that only fueled the fire. I was unstoppable. So some chefs agreed to answer my questionnaire via email. A few of them wanted me to go to them in person. And some of them said, you know what? I will meet you at 4 o' clock on Tuesday. We'll discuss the whole thing, then panic.

Some of them cooked me dinner.

Some of them cooked me dinner. Not. So once I got the answers, I started to brainstorm how I would actually photograph the chefs. In fact, the New Yorker this week did a really interesting piece on my book. And they did a tally, which I thought was fascinating. Of the chef's answers, 13 chose truffles, caviar got 10 mentions. Foie gras got seven, cracked pepper, three sea salt, six, whiskey had a few appearances, and Mozart has a few gigs to play. So anyway, here are some of the pictures from the book. I thought I would sort of talk about each shoot, and if you have any questions, just ask them now. Okay, here we go. So here's the COVID of the book. Now, this was a big dilemma because had we put one chef on the COVID then it becomes their book. So we did not know how to show the COVID So I got a dear friend, Eric Repair, and I said, can I shoot you? And then can I chop off your head? Now, Jamie Oliver, he has a lot of people around him. He's an absolutely divine guy. But we never had any discussion, just that he would show up on Tuesday at 4 o', clock, like all of them. And so I thought, okay, British, British, British, Union Jack. So I got this enormous, enormous Union Jack. Then I thought, I can't have him walk into the studio and see the flag or he won't do the shoot. So I sort of waited outside in the Cold forum, and as soon as he got out of his car, I jumped out and said, I'm Melanie. Let's go have a. A drink. The shoot was fine. After the drinks, Gabrielle Hamilton and I were meant to meet at Coney island because her Last supper talks about her love of the water and the peace and the children. It was raining, and, I mean, it took us weeks to get this permit. So we went into this. I called up Industria Studios right down the street, and I said, please, I need a studio now. They said, okay, you know, come in. We went into the studio, and one of the children had an absolute message meltdown, would not take off his clothes. And I said, if you don't take off your clothes, you're out we'll shoot you with one child. So I didn't want Gabrielle to look like a sex symbol. I wanted her to look like a Mother Earth. But yet she is so attractive, right? So I thought to keep the chef jacket, which I decided most of the chefs would be photographed in their chef's jacket, would be elegant and also would be emulating the Mother Earth factor. Mario Batali and I met at Baba restaurant on the second floor. I set up a backdrop, and I brought a bunch of different props. I brought sausages that we tied him up with, blah, blah, blah. And then I just thought, okay, he needs to look like a Roman Caesar. So that's how we did that one. Fergus Henderson. I had flown overnight and landed in London and had asked this amazing prop stylist, get me all things pig. She said, well, what do you mean? And I said, get me a pig's head. Get me a bandana with pig ears. Get me a pig snout. You know, pig, pig, pig. And when we arrived, it was post lunch, and it was a bit of a liquid lunch. So, Mr. Henderson, I was not part of lunch. And I decided to shoot around the restaurant with everybody gathering around. And I tried so hard not to shoot at the restaurants because I thought then, you know, I want to take them out of their elements. So we did the pig, and there we are. So Gary Danko, his Last supper is all about complete indulgence. Wine and foie gras caviar. And me, ladies, he shes. So we started shooting at midnight in a club called the Last Supper Club. And we wanted all of the elements that he mentioned in his Last supper. And then we wanted him to have a bit of fun. So we constructed this and had a great time. This was shot at the same time the COVID was shot. And Eric's last supper is truffles, bread. And actually, I can't remember what he's drinking. Can someone look that up for me? Anyway, so I just thought he would be simple, simple, simple. Lidia Bastianich, a lady that I absolutely adore. I wanted her to look, you know, regal and like Eva Peron, sort of super regal. So I read in the New York Times about this guy who had made couture dresses out of vegetables. So I googled and googled and googled. Finally, I got his personal address and I called him up and I said, hey, listen, let's. You don't know who I am, but I have an idea. I need a hat. Will you meet me and we can have a coffee? So we went to meet a Couple of times. Now, I had envisioned a tall hat, but of course, I'm not a designer. So he created this hat with a fork that was left over from the Plaza dining room, which I thought was really interesting. And actually, Chris is on Project Runway this season, so watch out for him. I think he's going to win. April Bloomfield. Her last supper was flying above England on an airplane, and that was a little bit hard to organize. So instead we went to the spotted pig and took the symbol of her and just shot her in a quiet way. Faron Adria. He's sort of one of the most respected or well known or unusual chefs that there is. And he has a restaurant called El Buli. And El Buli means the bulldog. I could not think of how to photograph him because his last supper was in Japan with all this unusual stuff that I couldn't get to in time. So I rented these three dogs. One of them in the background there is having a total meltdown and was hyperventilating going. So he was actually supposed to be in the middle, in the front. And I said to the dog trainers, don't worry about it. It's totally fine. Don't go inject him with anything. It's fine. We'll just have him in the background. So hence, the composition isn't exactly what I had envisioned. But that's how we got to that. Now, Daniel Boulud, he wanted his last supper at Versailles. And as I said, I love a challenge. So I emailed and called Versailles for seven to eight months every single week. S' il vous plait, je vous rais parenteau. They never answered, never answered, never answered. Finally, I just kept doing it, kept doing it, kept doing it. Finally, I got an answer. So when I arrived at Versailles, they said, oh, we're actually having construction. We forgot to mention that. So you're gonna be, you know, you know, Louis xviii. You're gonna be five miles away. So I sort of played stupid and dumb and tears, et cetera, got them to let us in the front. And I had met Daniel there. He was already in France. And I had carried his tuxedo and his shoes. I picked it up from his house, carried them overnight. And my assistant and I were panicking. We're going to leave Danielle's only tuxedo on the airplane. So we had tuxedo, tuxedo written all over our arms. And when we got there, we had a fabulous time. And I thought the picture really reflected who he is and the, you know, his Persona. Jonathan Waxen was shot right down the street at Barbudo, which is part of Industria Photo Studio. And I thought he should just be simple, clean, give your eye a rest. Laurent Torondelle loves Krispy Kremes. And that is not just a line. We got to Krispy Kreme and he literally ate them so much he was swallowing them whole like a snake. So it was very fascinating. They let us have full rain. They actually kept the conveyor belt going and donuts were falling on the floor. And talk about waste. I was like, it's okay. The conveyor belt doesn't have to move. Just leave it there. So he really does love. And there's a little bottle of Corona there because he loves Corona and Krispy Kremes. Suzanne Go. And we met on the beach in Santa Monica. Her whole ethos and her cooking and everything is about clean water, peaceful. So I thought there was no better place. Her hands are in front of her stomach because she just announced she was pregnant. And she did look kind of big with the apron. So we tried to solve that problem. Nobu wanted to meet at. Ooh, sorry. Wanted to meet at his original restaurant and eat a certain amount. I think there were eight pieces of sushi in a certain order. And we were told to shoot during restaurant week. We had one hour. But during restaurant week, people tend to linger. So you're supposed to be out by 3:30 and dinner starts at 5. So at 4 o' clock, we're outside and I have my agent, my husband, my other agent, my producer, a really good friend. That's who's making up the photo shoot. Actually, that's my husband turning around right there. So as we waited at Nobu, you know, ha ha. And he's looking at his watch. We did this shoot in about two seconds. I'm not kidding. And they said, do you want food? I said, yes, food, food. Bring food, bring food. So that's how we got that one. This is Giorgio Locatelli, a madman from London. And this is 600 mackerel that were fresh and attached to the background and bleeding everywhere. My favorite shot, he actually has a fish in his mouth and there's blood all over. But I was advised not to use that one. So this is the other one. This is the compromise. Alain Ducasse wanted to have his last meal on Mars. I think he's starting some sort of plan making food for Mars. So I think that's probably a little self promotion in there. But we tried to recreate Mars. It was very hard for the prop Stylist to find red dirt. Apparently, the only red dirt is really on a pitcher's mound. So she went to Yankee Stadium, got the red dirt, brought it over five minutes with Alain Ducasse. Tom Akins wanted to meet in Carcassonne. I had been there on holiday two weeks before. It's just in the south of France, but. Most beautiful sunflowers you've ever seen. By the time I got back two weeks later, they were dead. And I arrived there. I was not happy. He forgot his apron, you know, blah, blah, blah. So the cook in the house, I said, give me your apron. And I went out and these are actually dead Ted sunflowers. As you can see, I'm giving away all my secrets. Guy Savoie sent me a letter saying, madame, I don't talk about closings. I talk about openings. I can't talk. I don't want to be part of this. I don't like to talk about my last supper. Thank you so much. Anyway, it's not in my sort of ethos. So I sent him a letter, and I said, you know, honestly, this is so phenomenal. Can I actually include this in my book? He said, sure. Okay. Yeah. And I said, and can I come and photograph you? And he said, sure, come to Las Vegas. So, you know, you take JetBlue there, and JetBlue is always late. Get there, and literally we're supposed to shoot him in 15 minutes. We get to Caesar's palace, and he is just like, a lovely man, but he's prompt. So we did this in two seconds, literally. Fergus Henderson. I'm sorry. Gordon Ramsay. I was all riled up and prepared to just be like, f you, F you, F you, F you. I was ready. And he was so charming, so lovely, and didn't swear at me once. Tony Bourdain, he wrote the introduction to my book and is a very dear friend and also is actually, you know, when you eat with Tony Bourdain, you don't just go and have a steak. You go and have chicken cartilage with livers with all this absolutely revolting, inedible stuff, mostly. So I just wanted to show him being sort of antagonistic. I wanted to show him with a bone, just food.

Raw.

Raw food and a cigarette. So there he is. He says he regrets it now, but, you know, tequila. And the last picture, one of my favorites, is of Dan Barber. And Dan has or had. And he will be here in one moment to tell you all about it. Boris. And Boris played a huge role in Dan's life and career. And at his dinner table. And Boris was a little bit of an obstacle because Boris, as he snarfled down his Balthazar bread, always was keeping his head down. And we were trying so hard to keep Boris head up. Coupled with Boris, Minder kept saying, you know, he is 800 pounds. He's getting a bit close to you. And I said, it's fine, Honestly, I'm not nervous. It's fine, it's fine. So Dan is here to talk about Boris. He is the chef owner of Blue Hill, as you know, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. He's also the creative director. He has won a zillion awards like the James Beard Food and Wine. He's a damn good chef and a very good friend of mine. Here's Dan to tell us about Boris and his goodbye.

Thank you. That was excellent. Yeah. So, Boris, my last meal. Let's see. Boris. The picture that Melanie took, most of the people who saw it said that it was somehow Photoshopped or manipulated. It wasn't at all right. I mean, that was. Right. Not at all. Yeah. Boris was almost 900 pounds when this picture was taken. The story begins many years ago when we opened this farm. It's about 20 miles, 25 miles from here in Westchester. And Boris came with Craig Haney, the livestock manager, and began the farm with us. He was the first animal, and I grew particularly affectionate with him. But the main story for Melanie's book anyway begins with standing with Craig overlooking Boris trying to make love to a sow. And this was about two years ago, and he looked a little bit like this. I watched. This is not a picture of the happy fruition of a lovemaking session. This is actually Boris being spurned by the lady in heat. And she's not the lady in question, she's really the lady in heat. And she would sort of coyly walk around this little lot area that they were in, and Boris would come huffing over and sort of drooling and salivating and try and mount this sow. And I'm sitting there watching this. It was the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen.

And.

She would sort of turn around and see him coming and scurry away, and he would chase after her and try and mount her, and she would scurry away. And then after, like, 20 minutes, he was so tired, he'd go in the corner and fall asleep. And so I'm standing there watching this with Craig, the livestock farmer, and he turns to me and he says, you know, I'm going to shoot Boris next week. And I said, shoop. Why does that mean shoot Boris? First of all, I'm like a little child in that sense. I thought Boris was going to live forever. But I also didn't understand this idea of just shooting him and burying him. What was the point of that? But I stood there because I realized at that moment that I had no idea what you do with a boar when it can no longer serve its duties. I didn't even know it could stop serving its duties, but here I was watching it not be able to perform. And so I started to wonder, you know, what do you do? And Craig's answer was to shoot him. My answer was sort of to go back, ask him to wait. And I went and just sort of researched it because all of a sudden, this sort of obvious question I wanted answered, and I knew that just shooting him and burying all this meat, potential meat for me in the kitchen, was not something that desired. So back in the research, just looking at what's happened to pig farming in the last, I don't know, half century, we all know that people who raise pigs are kind of a dying breed in and of themselves. And there's big agribusiness that's gotten into pig production. And the number of smaller hog farms increased, all 90% and above. And these big farms have grown exponentially. So this idea of pigs out in the wild, even what I was watching what we do up at Stone Barns, is almost Middle Ages. All pigs are raised now in this confinement and in these miserable conditions. So to get the other white meat, which we all enjoy, a picture like this doesn't happen. The industry has no use for a boar that's too big, that a sow, even in heat, is going to reject. So actually, what the industry does is this, which, and I'm sorry to be graphic about it, but this is the truth. They use this machine called a sperm extraction device, and it's actually labeled. Futura is the name of the company that makes it, which I think is kind of oddly strange in that the future of animal farming in general is going to be something like this. And this is about how 99% of our pork meat, where it comes from originally, anyway, so you can go on the Internet. And I did, as I was researching this all along, while I was asking Craig to hold on, and I just. I was fascinated. This site called swinegenetics.com is like a clearinghouse for sperm. And you can. It's like match.com you can get on and get exactly what you want. Power bow to Machine power, fix your game, blockade. And all of them have different attributes that you may or may not want. You can sign up and overnight get expressed. What's called boars in a bottle. It's from frozen semen. That, again, is how 99% of the pigs in our country are procreated. So looking at a picture like this was something that had a lot of levels of intrigue for me. And I started to go over sort of all the options for Boris. So going back to the beginning of the story, one of them shoot and bury. Take him out back, put a gun between his eyes, and shoot him and bury him, and end of story. Right. But from the chef's perspective, kind of a waste of meat. And also just a difficult time, me imagining my friend Boris being shot like that. There was natural death. Of course. You could just take him away from the women, because that wasn't working, and just let him live out his days. The problem with natural death is, was the cost of keeping them alive, which was quite real. $40 a month in feed back. This was back a year ago or two years ago now with the whole ethanol craze. And the price of corn has tripled. So that's probably up to like $70 a month. The water was enormous. He drank a lot of water. The labor, very expensive. The opportunity costs all. It's very expensive to keep Boris alive. And who knows how much longer he would live for Probably a couple of years. So then there's just like slaughter. You know, you take him to the slaughterhouse, you slaughter him. The problem with the slaughter is that for a guy like Boris, he would end up like Alpo or processed dog food, which, you know, I wasn't too excited about watching my friend Boris become dog food. Why would he become dog food? He'd become dog food because when you are a boy like that, you have tremendous amounts of testosterone coursing through your blood, right? And what ends up happening after you slaughter is you get what's called bortain, which is like this. Actually, a farmer described it to me. When I asked him what it would taste like, he said, can you imagine licking the urinals at the Port Authority bus terminal? And so I couldn't imagine that. And he said Boris would probably be much worse. And that's because of testosterone. You get this acridity, this acrid sort of this horrible smell, supposedly, and taste, which is why it ends up usually in dog food. Or another farmer said that's why pepperoni was invented, was originally to deal with bore taint. You Put enough alcohol and enough spices, you hide that scent and that flavor, and it's edible. I didn't want to make 800 pounds of pepperoni, and I didn't want Boris to go into dog food. There was another option which Craig hadn't disclosed to me, but which I, in my research discovered, which was like, you could castrate Boris and then you could slaughter them. If you castrate them, you have this opportunity to let go of all the testosterone, let the testosterone work out of his system anywhere from six weeks to six months, I read. And supposedly the meat's clean, right? Then you can slaughter and then you can have all of this delicious meat. The problem with this was this. So, like, we're a small farm, we're 30 miles from. From Manhattan, and like, what do you do? He's incredibly strong animal, as Melanie witnessed. Although he was in a good mood that day because of the Balthasar bread. But when he's in a bad mood, when he was in a bad mood, oh, my God. So this idea of castrating an almost 900 pound boar was to me a big challenge. So we started to like, this is Craig Haney. This is the guy who, who brought Boris to the farm originally. And I thought, you know, nothing was being done, and I just asked him to hold off. And I thought we'd get, you know, some opinions from the players involved in our little farm and restaurant community. And the first person, of course, was Craig, who wanted to shoot and bury him. And what was interesting about Craig is that he had purchased Boris originally as a baby pig with his wife. And they had had this farm and they grew the farm, and she actually cheated on him and left him and filed for divorce. And in the end of the divorce, after this, like three year terrible divorce, she got the farm and he got Boris. So he took Boris with us to Open Stone Barns. She kept the farm. And there was this, like, this, like, intense both transference and ambivalence with him and Boris. It was like Boris represented Amy, his ex wife. So he just wanted to go out, shoot Boris between the eyes and be done with it. And then there was this other part which I started to learn as I was asking all about this. I felt like he was still in love with Amy and this was the last thing of his marriage that he could hold on to. So there were days when he was stroking Boris and being very loving to him. And in my mind, sort of couldn't disassociate Boris with his ex wife, Amy. There's Julia, who is one of Craig's assistants. And she doesn't like me at all. She really, really doesn't like me for a variety of reasons. In part because of this whole Boris thing. She felt like I was making this into a much more complicated issue than it was, which I tend to do. And she's right. But her thing was like. Her thing was like, you know, this is not. She kept repeating to me over and over, you know, this is not a. Not a circus. I don't want to be part of a circus. You're making this into a circus. And I'm just taking this out because I want to quote her correctly, because she'll sue me if I don't. But she said, he tries to mount the sows and he pushes himself all on the ladies, and it amounts to rape. He said he treats the ladies like they're a bunch of Lolitas. She didn't seem to care when getting it on with Humpert. Humpert Dan. But does that make it right? Which I thought was one interesting point. She also said. She also said at a later date, she drove up in her Kubota and pointed at me, like, right between the eyes and said, this has to end. Let him. Let Craig go out and shoot him. You're trying to have Boris become a mascot. Stop making him into a mascot. Stop making this into a circus. And I said, mascot? What are you talking about? Why would I want to do a mascot? Paul Willis is the guy who started Niman Ranch. He started all the protocol for pigs in this country. In fact, he's widely considered the guy who created humane pig farming in the world, even because the United States took the lead based on his protocols. The Humane Society for Animals has this plaque of him in the waiting room as, like, they're. They're. Jesus Christ. And I called him with this problem, and I said, you know, what do you do? And he, you know, heard about two minutes of this and said, dan, Dan, I want to get this right. Also don't want to be sued. He said, dan, do you have a backhoe with a front end loader? Very soft spoken, very slow speaker. And I said, yeah, Paul, I do. He said, okay, what you're going to want to do is take Boris, chain his front legs, raise him up by his belly, and cut his balls off and go back to work. So that was his solution. Irene works with me, has worked with me for, like 10. 10 years now. And she a great feminist. And she came sort of barreling into my office one day. I've never seen her as upset and said, do you remember Sophie, the sofa? She was the sow that couldn't get pregnant. And she said when it was discovered that she couldn't get pregnant, she was slaughtered within four days. Good old Boris, she said, hasn't got an erection in what, like six months. And for that, he becomes some great philosophical debate. She said, is there anything about this you find sexist? And then there was Jack, who's a vegetable farmer, who also both isn't crazy about me, but really doesn't like Craig because there's some competitive issues at the farm. He thinks too much of the attention is focused on the animals, and he works very hard with the vegetables. And I came down just to talk to him about if he had any. I actually, by accident, was just walking with him and said, you know, what about the sports? And he cut me off before I could. I could get out another word. He said, a number one textbook el stupido decision was to name your freaking boar. Should have named him P22 man. Once you name him, you're screwed. All sorts of attachment issues. And his voice, he got all red in the face. And he was. And he said. And then I started in again. He just cut me off again. He said, when something's not productive in my field, I rip it out right away. Gone. Goodbye. So I took a page out of Melanie's book, and I photographed him in front of his fig tree. His fig tree is a tree that we're growing in the greenhouse. I think the fig tree probably yields three figs every two months. It's just sort of a love of his. And I pointed to the fig tree, and he said, sort of quietly, and kind of calmed down, he said, yeah, I guess the fig tree's my Boris. So I wasn't getting anywhere with anyone on the farm because they all had these very strong opinions. And I called my rabbi, and Rabbi Rabinowitz is a very reformed Jew in Westchester county who leads a big congregation. And I told him the problem. I told him all the issues, and he said, tough one. He said he thought that castration and slaughter was probably the way to go, that it was justified. Obviously, it wasn't written anywhere in the Talmud, but that's what his advice. And then he called me back a week later. He said, you know, I've been thinking about this. Castration, yes. Slaughter, yes. But you have to donate 20% of Boris meat to a homeless shelter and therefore make Boris pain worthwhile. Which I thought was an interesting. There was another option here. Castration, slaughter. And then 20% donation. So many weeks passed and more opinions, more infighting, and it's really Julia's coming in and putting. Pointing me between the eyes, where we had to make a decision. Luckily, just at that point, I found a veterinarian. So here's the second and the end of the story is Veterinarian Bob. And Bob might look like an auto mechanic, but in fact, he too is of a dying breed. Vets are on their way out in this country and finding him what he called the Northern Kingdom of Vermont. He was in the most northeast corner. He was the closest vet we could find who had worked on large animals. In fact, when I called him to ask him, in the end we did this to a friend, but in the end I called him directly just to say, you know, how much would this be? And he said, I'm not going to charge you. I said, what are you saying? He said, you just. I come down with my wife and a friend of my wife's and you buy me dinner. That was so strange. I said, you know, you're going to barter for. They say, that's right. We're going to barter for the bulls. That's what he ended up doing. He came down with his pickup truck and this medicine cabinet of drugs. Yeah, it was like this, right? That's what he opened up. And it was all to get Boris semi conscious. He couldn't put Boris to sleep. You put a 900 pound pig to sleep, it goes into cardiac arrest. So you can't put him fully to sleep, but you get him as much so he doesn't feel a thing. So he was actually injecting him with Special K, you know, the street value of which was enormous. But he had to do like 50 after, like the eighth injection. He was just. Bob was just. He was just like, I've never seen anything like this. This is like 50 times what the textbook says. This thing's unbelievable. And then he went for the extra special, Special K. And he's like. He said to me, lucy's gonna be in the sky, but we're taking the diamonds. Which I thought was a great comment. And there he went to work. It took about six minutes. He used a razor blade this big. No kidding. Boris didn't feel a thing. He was awake, but was completely knocked out and actually as happy as I've ever seen him. I struggled with this greatly because here I was watching this and thinking the truth, which was, I'm the one who forced this to happen. And yet I didn't think about the reality of what Boris was about to go through and what he went through. And so I thought that picture, which one of the farm assistants took gleefully of me in great pain watching this, was the realization that attached to some of these issues related to food and farming and related to my own self interest, our choices. And so this became very clear to me in those six minutes and felt barbaric for a few minutes. But in the end, he followed through with it. And we got, in the end, about 700 pounds of sausage meat, which we are still enjoying to this day. Actually, there's the last £50 or so that we have curing. And I just end with this, that I used to make a larger point about this. And I don't know exactly how it relates to Melanie's last meal, but to our last meal with Boris. This idea that. Well, that we've never gotten so many comments about how delicious a meal was at Blue Hill, except from this experience with Boris. Every time we serve Boris and sausage, or in the other forms that we did, the cured meat, the response was just unbelievable. It's over the top. And I think there are two reasons for it. One is Bors meat is unbelievable. Just physiologically, it's incredible. It's the best pig meat I've ever had. And that's in part because he's so aged and his intramuscular fat is so well formed that each bite of this pig was like nothing you've ever tasted. It was pig times 100, right? And that's true. And you can see that even by just looking at the meat, it was like nothing. It looked like steak. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is we had this story. You know, Boris really became this mascot for the farm, for Blue Hill. And everyone who came in to enjoy him had some kind of connection to their food. And that was the ultimate lesson for me. Like, as a chef, you know, you could be tasting things besides this incredible meat, but tasting things other than the meat, this connection to an issue, farming, a consciousness about where our food comes from. So that was a nice way to. To end Boris life. And I think we did do justice to him. And, in fact, his progeny, you know, live on at Stone Barnes now we have 120 pigs. Probably 80 of them have his genetics, and they'll be passed on to future generations. So he does live on. And the life that he lived was. It was a very good one. And the meat he supplied was delicious for a lot of reasons. So that's where I end it. I turn it over to you, and thank you for listening to my castration story.

I never got to taste Boris, by the way. Dan, you did.

I didn't tell you.

But just on the last thing, we're going to move on to a serious note because we've been talking about foie gras and truffles and everything. I want to introduce Noreen from World Hunger Year. I met Noreen last year and was completely in awe of the work that they do at Y. They're the leaders in the fight against hunger and poverty, which is really unfathomable when we consider, you know, all this food around us. So, Noreen, come and tell us something.

You're probably wondering what this wonderful discussion about the echo excess of food has to do with hunger. We really believe we can make a point by juxtaposing the celebration of food with the issue of hunger. And specifically, I'd like to just talk about hunger in America. It's Thanksgiving week. I think we all know what that means to be American. It means to live in a land of plenty that everybody is expected to have a big fat turkey dinner and sit with family and celebrate and enjoy. Most people will do that. A lot of people will get their meals at soup kitchens. This year, though, 35.5 million Americans are hungry. 37 million Americans live in poverty. It's not a matter of a lack of food. There's plenty of food. Hunger is a symptom of a deeper issue, which is poverty. And at the root of poverty is powerlessness. Our organization Y, is really about a celebration of food and that everybody should have access to nutritious and affordable food. One of the other things, besides the juxtaposition of the excess of food, there's a great paradox going on in this country. I'm sure you're all very well aware of the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and children who are really not participating actively as they should because they're extremely overweight. Most cities don't have supermarkets. Detroit does not have any supermarkets. There are food and liquor stores. There are convenience stores. There are bodegas. Can't get a fresh apple. Can't get a red pepper, can't get some carrots. Everything is either over processed or unavailable, or the only thing you can get is sugary food. Part of that has to do with our country's food system and heavily subsidized, highly centralized agriculture. There's been an awakening in this country. I think most people now know there is something called the farm bill, which is really a food bill. It's in Congress right now, it's very important that everybody reach out, support it. Understand that food stamps is the first line of defense to fighting hunger. But building local regional economies all about food. Especially sustainable, organic, nutritious food where 90 cents on the dollar will stay locally as opposed to 9 cents on the dollar. When you buy something from highly centralized agriculture system in your supermarket, takes about 1500 miles for your food to travel from farm to plate. Mostly picked by people who are making below poverty wages living in dreadful conditions in America. There is another way and that's what we're working on. If you visit our Food Security learning center@foodsecuritylearningcenter.org or through the World Hungry Year website, you'll find lots of answers. There are local organizations working on farmers markets, on community supported agriculture, on bringing fresh food into soup kitchens, and really focusing on the power of food. We all eat food every day. We all celebrate food, food. And it's time for everybody to come to the table and enjoy it. So that's pretty much what I have to say. This week is our annual Hunger Thon. We take Thanksgiving as a time to raise awareness about the issues of hunger in the US and around the world. It's a radio broadcast, but we're also moving it to an online broadcast. So if you look@hungerthon.org you'll see that we're talking to people about the issues of hunger, but also trying to raise a lot of money to do our work as a nonprofit. It is heavily competitive for funds, so we have some really cool items too. If you make a donation. We have our All Star Charity CD Served 2, which is come together because of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and Jackson Brown and KT Tunstall giving of their talent to give us a song so that we can use it as a fundraiser. We also have a Bruce Springsteen signature series shirt and pin. I brought some with me today, so if you'd like to check them out, you can. Thank you.

Oh yeah, I left that out. We donated. Yeah, more just to be safe.

Kudo. Well, thank you all so much for coming. And if you want me to sign your book.