This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Eat Retreat, a new food-themed retreat weekend at a ranch in the hills north of San Francisco.  Modeled on Phoot Camp, the goals of the weekend are at once nebulous and incredibly simple: gather a bunch of creative people together for a weekend around a central theme of food, shake well, and serve.  Thirty-three of us arrived for the weekend, a bit unsure of what exactly to expect.  I had volunteered for beer czar duty, and came with a car overflowing with local craft beer, along with a few kegs of yeast fermented soda.  I also came prepared to teach an “intro to beer course” with a tasting, walkthrough beer styles, and ingredients.  Others came similarly prepared with their own areas of expertise. Gastronaught brought a suckling pig and yogurt starters. Inna Jam came prepared to explain pectin and how it works. Others brought cameras, guitars, and their own knives.

 

A sense of community and consensus permeated the whole weekend.  Teams were assigned to each meal and worked hard to produce a mountain of food for everyone to share.  Each team put together a menu that showcased talents, passions, and the logistical challenges of feeding a large group.  The weekend opened with a raw seafood bar, followed shortly there after by a whole roast pig.  Clearly, we would not starve.  Every time you looked up from your cutting board, there was someone with a camera, capturing the moment.  Food bloggers are relentless like that.

 

 

So the food was great, the company exceptional, and the views spectacular. Really, enough good things can’t be said about the location at Anvil Ranch.

 

 

But hanging over our heads, just out of view was a larger question: what of it?  Why were we here?  What is the point of all of this? (Maybe it’s just the time of year, but this seems to have taken on a distinctly “Passover Seder” vibe.)   Clearly there were personal upsides in abundance.  I learned how to make a great citrus jam, had lengthy discussions on the coming obesity epidemic with a food focused doc from Chicago, and learned that you can roast coffee on a bicycle-powered coffee roaster. Yet there was a clear mandate for the weekend to reach beyond us sharing knife sharpening tips and networking.  What was the outcome of the weekend?  What could be taken away, replicated, expanded, and learned be a larger group than just those there. Rosie, of 18 Reasons, put it perfectly while we were sitting around the camp fire, discussing an 18 Reasons art exhibition of the weekend: “It has to be more than just documentation of what we did and what we ate.”  It’s an issue i wrestle with (on a much smaller scale) on this blog:  am I showing more than just pictures of “here is a great meal I ate?” Is there a message, a theme, and take away that offers learning, and sustenance beyond the soft focus food porn?  Cue the self-defeating food porn.

 

 

We went into the weekend with the question hanging over us, and I’m not sure we came to a perfect answer.  If anything, we moved backwards, expanding the scope for he question we were trying to answer until it was too big to possibly be distilled into a simple recipe, art installation, photograph or sandwich. Yet that feels about right: taken as a whole, the group is a cross section of food thinkers and makers, brining a lot of perspectives to a open ended idea like “food.” Sustainability, food justice and a savory bread pudding are all linked though the common thread of food, but they are expansive topics all on their own. I suppose there is some value in simply beginning the conversation, but it feels like an empty victory, akin to moving the goal post and declaring victory.

My topic of choice, beer, can be seen through the same refracting lens.  The sourcing of the ingredients, the carbon footprint, the waste water and transportation costs, the cultural history and traditions, the rising ingenuity and flavors of a new generation of brewers all reflect the changing dynamics of the current food world. We aren’t looking for a Michael Pollan level crusade, which would be a lot of pressure to put on a 48 hour retreat.  More appropriate I think would be a clearer sense of purpose from a weekend like this.  All of the creative energy of newly minted Eat Retreat community was felt in the food, the conversations, and the kazoo solos around the camp fire.

 

 

None of this should be read is a dismissal of the value of community: in fact, I think it’s the strongest output from the weekend.  I certainly plan on continuing the friendships and relationships started over the weekend, and can’t wait to find an excuse to rope some of the creative minds there into collaborating on a beer dinner. And maybe I’m being too callous in dismissing starting the conversation as an empty victory, if the conversation is really the germination of a longer standing community, one that outlasts the discussion of “what does all of this mean?”  If I managed to open a few eyes to the possibilities of local craft beer, and in return I’m made more aware sustainable seafood choices, the effects of the weekend will play out in more subtle, ongoing ways.  Which in many ways takes the conversation out of Eat Retreat and into the larger sphere of the our communities: all of these issues are related.  And if Eat Retreat can help move a more modern, sustainable and healthy relationship with food forward, even in a small way, it’s value doesn’t have to be calculated in outputs and tangibles.

 

 

Put more directly: If Eat Retreat is a snapshot of where food culture is going, it’s a future I can’t wait to get to.

PS: I have lots and lots of great picture I just can’t fit in the body of the post, so I’m including them here.   Enjoy.

 

 

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