Good evening everyone. How are you? Thank you for having me. I’m not quite sure why I’m here. Normally I’m in the kitchen or I’m in a classroom teaching mathematics and they’re both perfectly enjoyable. But I must tell you after the day and a half that I’ve spent here, I can’t wait to share with you in a modest way the things that drive me that I’m passionate about. And hopefully at the end of my 15 or so minutes, 19.32, you will perhaps share some of the love of the things that I do now more so than perhaps you did before you met me or heard me speak. So very briefly I’d like to tell you where I come from. I was born and raised in Mumbai and at the age of 21 I decided to do what most Indians do which is look for further education in a distant land. And so I got the opportunity and I boarded a Pan Am flight and on August 12 1987 and I landed at JFK. I had never left the country before and my flight was delayed so I missed the connecting flight to Blacksburg, Virginia. I was put on a Greyhound bus and sent down to Blacksburg, Virginia. I made it there. Long story short, I was a vegetarian when I left India for all of my 21 years and within two weeks of being in this country, I was treated to a lunch by a friend at the King. So I had a sandwich that I thoroughly enjoyed and when I asked you how was everything and I said it was great, wonderful, thank you for this generous gesture and all of that and I asked my friend what was that? What was that wonderful sandwich made of? I never eaten anything like it. He had no idea what I was asking even and he said well that’s a burger of course and I said okay what was that brown thing in the middle? That was the tastiest part. I’m not making this up. He proceeded to tell me it was beef and this was how illiterate I was about non-vegetarian cuisine. I didn’t even know what beef was. So he told me and I said okay I proceeded to go to the bathroom. I was psychologically ill for two weeks. I got my first paycheck from having worked in the library and I went by myself to the same Burger King location and got myself a Whopper with cheese. I never told my mother this story, I still haven’t. The lesson there for me was this. I had suddenly experienced such a radical change in my body that transformed me permanently really. So long story short I got my graduate education in mathematics, came to the University of Florida in 1989 and spent many a day in fact probably twice a week at the Plaza of the Americas getting Hare Krishna food. Some of you know that and it was a pilgrimage for me. It was a pilgrimage for me to walk there twice a week with my friends and get Krishna food, read the alligator, talk about nonsense, skip class, right? Continue on. The other days of the week we would make a pilgrimage to the corner of University Avenue on 13th Street. When I drove into Gainesville yesterday I was looking for all of those restaurants that I would frequent in the left hand side and none of them are there. Perhaps some have been relocated but it was traumatic for me. I mentioned this to my wife. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m not sure if I want to even go further now. So anyway, so I found myself getting all kinds of academic positions. I landed at the sets of university. After getting tenure four years into it I faced what most tenured professors face which is a professional midlife crisis and a mid-afternoon infomercial took me to culinary school. All of you ad agency guys you thank yourself for this. I got a formal culinary training. Many years later we have a restaurant in Dilan, Florida. We practice highly sustainable farm to table cuisine but none of that would have been possible to be honest with you if it wasn’t for that transformational Whopper with cheese in Blacksburg, Virginia. So here I am in front of you today talking about food as if I’m an expert but really I’m such a novice. I began in this field very very late in the game. I’ve been a professional chef only for about eight years and that’s nothing in the grand scheme of things if you might know that business. I’ve been an academic my entire life. So what drives me today is food and education and I’ve had the great fortune of trying to even combine the two nowadays and people often ask me what is the connection between the two. Well there isn’t a connection between the two I can contrive any number of them but more and more each day I’m discovering ways to communicate that those two aspects of my life that have hopefully some significance to people who just choose to listen to me and I didn’t realize until the past two days that I’m some form of a public interest communicator. I’m a pick I’m a pick. Okay so I’m a pick but I’m happy to be a pick. I’m discovering it’s a cool thing probably cooler than even being a chef and definitely cooler than teach trying to teach mathematics to kids who don’t want to learn mathematics. So people ask me why do you why do you like cooking? Well it’s easy it’s self gratifying when you do it well you receive accolades almost instantaneously and you can keep going but to be able to do it well you have to of course be completely immersed in it like any other discipline and you have to be completely passionate about it and you have to be completely original and that’s hard to do with food so which is why I cook food using local artisanal ingredients but I’m inspired globally if I wasn’t I would get boring very quickly right what I put on the plate would get tiresome very quickly now fusion food has has a bad connotation for some chefs for me it’s not so much a bad connotation rather than there are some bad interpretations of it out there so when I cook food that’s globally inspired I don’t pretend to be authentic about something I pretend to put things in quotations right that’s the easy way out you put things in quotations and get away with it that’s not a fondue well you can dip something in it yeah it’s warm it’s cheesy it’s a fondue even though it has no dairy at all in it right in it so I find myself trying to discover new ways of trying not to pee on farms so this is the this is the farm where we live it’s owned by Bill and Paul Thomas in fourth generation farmers originally from Slovenia and they own this wonderful farm in in Samsula about 10 miles from where we live and I met them for the first time because out of pure habit growing up you went to the market and you bought your groceries for the day you cooked for the day you brought it home and even though you wanted to go out and play cricket you had to help your mom and dad make dinner that night so that’s the only one you had a source ingredients is to go to the market buy the stuff touch it smell it and prepare it in some reasonable way that was enjoyable so when I went to the Lucia Connie farmers market I met Bill and Paul Thomas in and our relationship has been amazing ever since so people asked me well so you practice farm to table cuisine I wish I really practiced farm to table cuisine I practice knowing where my food comes from first right if I lived in Napa Valley I could truly practice farm to table cuisine we live in sort of a food desert in a way some people call it the bread basket of Florida is central Florida having said that Bill and Paul Thomas in and Steve and Steve Crump are the kinds of people that I line myself with because they help me remember what I enjoyed most about food which was about knowing the ingredients knowing the sources of the ingredients and then after that the inspiration sort of comes out in its own way you’re inspired by ingredients people should not be inspired by recipes right recipes are just words and words are boring as hell ingredients are really interesting so the way to be thoughtful about food for me is to truly connect yourself with ingredients and I have a charge for most of you at the end of today is when you leave here I know I’m in between you and happy hours it’s not a very enviable position for me but I certainly won’t go over is I charge you to think about the food you’re going to eat at the reception perhaps a little bit more than you would have otherwise not to take the buzz out of it I don’t want to do that but to just think about okay there’s an apple on that on that hors d’oeuvre what journey has that apple gone through to make it to that hors d’oeuvre right what might have happened let’s say worse yet there was some beef on an hors d’oeuvre what journey did that animal go through in making it to that bite of food that you’re about to enjoy and it might transform the way you think about food it might definitely will transform the way you cook food and it’ll transform the way you will eat food enjoy food so here we are at the second harvest food bank in central Florida these are young people who at one time or another one food stamps and they’re not been given a second chance to try to use food as a medium to make a livelihood so the great opportunity I have as a chef in central Florida as I can go to places like this and teach these young people about food and I can teach them about thinking about the ingredients where the ingredients come from so that when they go out there and either to their own families where they perhaps would have been used to eating really sub par ingredients using snap stamps or what have you they can be a little more thoughtful about what they were prepared home so having said that Jennifer and I my wife and I we we’ve taken the food stamp challenge a few times the most recent version of it we stretched it for a week and if you know something about the challenge you’re you’re required to basically sustain yourself with a typical budget of someone on snap benefits and that’s not a lot of money so we challenged ourselves to do so by including the requirement that even our gas was included in that budget right so it makes it really difficult and we both enjoy wine a lot so unless you already had bought grapes that weren’t on sale and made your own wine that was not an option right so for a week to try to practice this this sacrificing sort of way of thinking about food and thinking about what it costs for food to be on the table right and these kids can now perhaps go on and if they ever get themselves in that position again they will not reach for that bag of Doritos because that’s the quickest way out or or that really fatty peanut butter right that was made who knows where they might actually buy broccoli they might actually buy flour and make pasta right so that’s connecting themselves in a totally different way about food so these are some examples of how I think I’ve been communicating to the people around me about my passions and my passions are about our teaching and food um here’s another example of that at Stetson University every chance I get I’m shameless about doing cooking demonstrations I absolutely love it in fact I considered bringing a little gas stove here and then I joked about this to somebody just a few hours ago saying if I just set up a typical cooking demonstration setup here I’d be far more comfortable and I would have you know flame going I would have some eggs or what have you and we could make we could tell stories around that that demonstration so every chance I get I do stuff like that I get in front of people and I cook and as I’m doing so I’m always reminding myself why I got into it in the first place and I’m trying to share that that personal experience with the people who are taking the time to listen to me and in this case I’m trying to teach these kids okay your first year students in college your second year students in college chances are you’re going to indulge yourselves in some unhealthy habits out of any number for any number of reasons right here are some options out you don’t have to you don’t have to not do that at all that’s not sustainable right if you if you ask people to just give up things it’s not a good way to ask for something you have to give up things some of the time and as alternatives I said this is somebody at lunch let’s say you wanted people more people to be vegetarians if you just ask them to be so and told them about all the bad things that happened with non-vegetarian you know a non-vegetarian lifestyle it’s not going to be very successful one of the things that we have to do as people who practice this profession is we have to understand that our voice has some meaning so here’s a celebrity chef at Cress you might recognize him from the back of his head right be enjoying his food that I prepared for him and his personal photographer is taking photos of it and a chance is that it’s going to be it was tweeted moments later to thousands and thousands and thousands of fans his tweets are powerful so when I have the opportunity to meet somebody like that I have to take advantage of it and I do I shamelessly do so only because I think I think otherwise otherwise small voices like mine don’t have a chance right which is why I wondered why I was in this meeting in the first place I’m listening to all these amazing people with great bios and managing these huge accounts and changing the world I have not done any of that and probably never will but given the opportunity like this where I can go to the James Beatt house and cook and I’ve fortunately been able to do so on multiple occasions we’re going to do it again next summer but next summer we’re going to change the scene we’re going to take a road trip from central Florida and we’re going to forage our way up the east coast right and we’re going to cook a meal from all the ingredients we source along the way because I can’t be preaching about if I’m not practicing it so I think that’s going to be a different kind of a dinner at the house speaking of the James Beatt foundation this is what got me started into activism if you will I never considered myself an activist but this was the first boot camp organized by the James Beatt foundation in Louisville Kentucky last April and I was fortunate to be part of this amazing group of people all accomplished chefs and then there’s a guy in the checkered shirt they taught me about the fact that chefs have a very valid voice so you would go to a restaurant and wouldn’t think anything about having a meal I mean this is stuff we’re putting in our bodies right so in some in some way in direct way you’re giving a lot of trust to a person to prepare your food that you’re just going to eat not knowing what that might do to your body that’s an amazing amount of trust that you put in somebody so once I understood that that there was this trust that we inherently have developed but with people by by the very reason that we cook for a living and we you know we nourish bodies and souls and minds then it became easy for me to be an activist ultimately the food has to taste good it doesn’t matter how many good stories you tell if the food doesn’t taste good it doesn’t matter it really doesn’t matter so if I were to say well this is a dish I’ve prepared for Chef Remo Bagassi but here’s a composition of a variety of things there’s a roasted red pepper coulis there’s a diverse scallop there’s some exotic mushrooms a roasted grape some house made chorizo a lemon foam some sweet potato chips and a p-tendrel that’s been dressed in passion for the mulchion if none of those ingredients were sourced locally I’d be lying right what’s the point of that fortunately these two of them were now in the perfect world every one of those things would be sourced locally so some we yesterday we went through this exercise of dream big what would you dream if millions of people could be affected by it and people would think you were crazy so yesterday I had a different version my version yesterday was I’d like everybody in the world to be at least bilingual it’s crazy today my version is I’d like all food in the world to be somewhat local all food no matter what was ingested fast food restaurants cafeterias prepared meals at home frozen dinners everything should be somewhat local whatever that means that’s unthinkable it’s crazy but that was the exercise so that’s my that’s my goal this picture more than anything else captures why it’s important to know where your food comes from that’s me trying to sear a piece of salmon at a james beard house event for a high-profile fundraiser for the chef action network last october and I was very proud of what I was making and I thought the food was going to taste good I discovered after dinner that the salmon that I was using to make that dish is not very sustainable and I was scolded in no uncertain terms by at least two experts in front of everybody what are you thinking this is about the chef action network we’re trying to promote information good information about food through chefs and here you are you put this crap on her plate this is farm salmon from a not a very sustainable source they couldn’t have hit me any harder I mean I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m pretending to be up here as if I know what I’m talking about right so I have so much more to learn so the work that has to be done is so difficult but everyone’s how he said this the hard work has to be done the message can be simple the hard work has to be done I’m willing to do it and I you know I want people around me to try to come do it with me so ultimately eat right eat but eat with some thought you know educate yourself educate others around you when you’re able to be activists be advocates and constantly train yourselves as well as others around you because I’m a living example of why you need all of those components I need to educate myself I need to continually advocate what I’m preaching and I have to continually train what I’m doing otherwise my voice has no legitimacy so thank you for your time and happy enjoy happy happy hour