Good evening. Good evening, everyone. I'm Valerie Amos. I'm the director here at SOAS and I'm Absolutely delighted to welcome so many of you This evening for our SOAS centenary lecture and a very warm welcome to those watching from around the world We're live streaming tonight's lecture on Facebook The SOAS centenary lecture series features lectures by high-profile individuals on Subjects that are very close to the SOAS mission We've already welcomed for example Wally Soyinka and Forrest Whitaker and we'll be hosting others as part of the series including Hina Jelani and Muhammad al-Baraday My job is to tell you a little bit about SOAS before we move into the introduction of tonight's very special guest Here at SOAS we are very proud of our diversity with students from over 130 countries We see ourselves as being about building bridges across cultures and communities With a global perspective at the very heart of our approach Our history and events such as this one tonight Demonstrate the important space that SOAS provides for debate discussion and Asking the challenging questions about how we look at our world and That is why for our centenary year we've launched a campaign called questions worth asking For us it's important that our students and academics can keep on asking and indeed answering Today's most pressing questions For example, is there a solution to the world's refugee crisis? What happens after war? Should we all speak the same language? What makes a global citizen? Will there ever be equality? For a hundred years we've been asking searching questions and through this campaign We're seeking further support for our work for example So that we can Have students from around the world who without scholarships for example could not afford to come to science for academic projects and for endowed posts for making sure that we put the student experience Right at the heart of everything that we do and you can learn more about our campaign by going on to the SOAS website So as dot ac dot uk slash questions So let me turn now specifically to tonight We have a newly founded so as student and alumni led social enterprise stories on our plate Which is using food to challenge the marginalization of refugees living in the United Kingdom Central to stories on our plate is a culinary training program for refugees Aimed at overcoming the many barriers refugees face to entering careers in the food and catering industries Celebrating our differences through the shared experience of sharing food Underlines the stories on our plate philosophy And it's a key part of tonight's lecture food is culture And you can find out more of the work of our students and our alumni They will have a stall upstairs in the Brunei suite after the lecture a Couple of final practical things before I hand over Please turn your mobile phones to silent We want you to tweet like mad, so we don't want you to turn them off, but please turn them to silent and When you do tweet and note, I say when not if Please use the hashtag So as 100 I'm now going to hand over to dr. Klein who's the chair of our food studies Center Who is going to introduce tonight's? Very special guest, so put your hands together and give a rousing welcome to Claudia rodin Claudia rodin's first cookbook a book of Middle Eastern food was published in 1968 at the time She'd already been living in England for over a decade Born in Cairo in 1936 she was raised there until the age of 15 In a predominantly French speaking, but polyglot Sephardic Jewish family with links to Aleppo and Istanbul She completed her schooling in Paris and then London where she studied as a martin school of art Following the 1956 Suez crisis and the war between Egypt and and Israel The family had to leave Cairo and her parents too came to live in London a Book of Middle Eastern food Draws heavily on recipes shared by family members and friends living in exile in England and around the world as well as on library research and field research in London among people from all over the Middle East it Was as Claudia later writes in a revised and expanded edition of the book a labor of love written by a young woman and Thralled by her discoveries of her own lost culture The book soon became a bestseller and was described by the renowned American cookbook writer and early television chef James Beard as a landmark in the field of cookery its success has been followed by five decades of cookbook writing research and promotions of culinary scholarship her many often multiple award-winning books include Mediterranean cookery which was published in 1987 in connection with the BBC television series Mediterranean cookery with Claudia Rodin The food of Italy first published in 1989 The book of Jewish food an Odyssey from Samarkand to and Vilna to the present day first published in 1996 Tamarind and saffron favorite recipes from the Middle East from 2000 arabesque some to his food from Morocco Turkey and Lebanon from 2005 and most recently from 2012 the food of Spain Throughout her work Claudia Rodin combines subtle reflections on personal experiences and family histories With meticulous wide-ranging historical and ethnographic scholarship Through her recipes and culinary ethnography She explores the complex histories of migration and settlement Unities and diversities connections ruptures and reconnections that have shaped the that have shaped the people and Cultures of the Middle East the Mediterranean and Europe Through the media of food and words Claudia Rodin invites readers cooks and eaters Not just to learn about these histories of division and connection But more profoundly to taste them and smell them to make sense of them And in this way to make them a part of their own life experiences This invitation is reflected and warmly responded to in an anonymous readers Amazon review of a new book of Middle Eastern cuisine a revised version of Claudia's first cookbook And I quote I am a Turkish woman and most of the recipes Rodin explains in her marvelous book are no strangers to me I have been living abroad now for many years Every time I open Rodin's book. I can smell my grandmother's kitchen Here is a personal. Thank you to Claudia Rodin for me Ma sha Allah 41 times as we say back home Claudia Rodin was awarded a so as honorary fellowship in 2012 In an interview conducted for the occasion Professor Denise Cundiotti of so as declared It would be fair to say that Claudia Rodin by opening a window on patterns of Conviviality and cuisine in the Middle East has done more for an understanding of the region than most area specialists She has used history oral narratives and interviews to build a phenomenal Corpus of knowledge on the Levant the Mediterranean and beyond in a way that illuminates cultural continuities and the circulation of people and ideas She has also popularized her work through numerous high-profile Media appearances and her service on important boards such as the Prince Klaus fund for culture and development in the Netherlands She is a celebrity in the best sense of the word Using her high profile to promote deeper understanding of Middle Eastern cultures Ladies and gentlemen director It is a great honor and immense pleasure to welcome this evening's so as centenary lecturer Claudia Rodin. Thank you Thank you Valerie for inviting me to speak Thank you Jacob for the very kind introduction and thank you all for coming I'm honored and very happy to be associated with so as and the center of food studies I get to hear about the wonderful work that's going on and I can come to some of the events I Was asked to speak about the role of food in culture Everything I was a bit scared when I was asked Because I felt I'm not an academic Anyway, I can from what I hear it's my experiences that I'll be talking about as well but I Start by saying everything to do with food from Agriculture animal husbandry hunting and fishing to the way we cook and eat is culture and Cooking is especially important because it impacts on everyday life for everybody Taste is the most personal of our senses, but it's acquired and cultivated in society Our comfort foods can reveal our provenance and ethnicity or religion Ideology aspirations and even our place in society Taste is Yes Well food is about sustenance and pleasure, but it's also about Hospitality and conviviality and creating bonds between people I come from a society where to entertain a guest is the greatest joy and where Hospitality and offering food is an all-important part of life Among the happy memories of my childhood in Egypt In Egypt other times when we sat on long extended tables the grown-ups on at one end the children at an other and At the other and when we did the rounds visiting relatives on festive occasions We arrived in the house and found everybody of the extended family Sitting in a large circles we kissed everybody and depending on the time of day We were served Turkish coffee with spoon jams meses or pastries. I realized that recipes What the recipes was about roots and identity when I first started collecting them It was in 1956 when the Jews had to leave Egypt suddenly on mass after Suez I was an art student in London and my parents arrived as refugees We were inundated with family and friends passing through on their way to other homelands Everyone was exchanging recipes in a desperate kind of way Give me your recipe for lahmabeah jean. Please your kippenei. Yeah, you're homeless The date preserve. I might never see you again. It will be something to remember you buy Some took out little handwritten notebooks and we sat down together to go through them in Egypt we would never have given me a recipe nobody would There hadn't never be there hadn't been any cookbooks But recipes were jealously kept in families and not given away except with at least one or two mistakes But now we all wanted to preserve something that had made our lives happy in on you In what was a vanished world? It was such a strange thing of thinking we'll never see Egypt again, and we'll never see each other again Now the recipes were a mixed bag Because Egypt had been a cosmopolitan society with many minorities and the Jewish community itself Was a mosaic of families from all over the Ottoman Empire and beyond My grandparents came from Aleppo and Istanbul the women who gave me the recipes said they were always from their mothers or their grandmothers and They would say from Aleppo from Izmir. She was from Istanbul She was from Tunis or Baghdad or Livorno And now these recipes were their badge of identity and they were very proud of them They also added bits of information and stories How as children they were given the task to make listen alas for these are birds tongues Here we call them also. I made them on Sunday And it was all as children. They were given the task to roll tiny bits of pasta as over ovals Of dough between their fingers Some somebody told me do you know How in the Jewish quarter we put the Pants of broad beans of full medames and hard-boiled eggs to cook in the ashes of the fire at the public Baths on Friday night and collected them on Saturday When years later, I eventually put the recipes in a book I wrote in my introduction that the book was the joint creation of numerous Middle Easterners Who like me are in exile either forced or voluntary and it is that it was the fruit of The nostalgic longings for and delighted savourings of a food That was the constant joy of life in a world so different from the Western one And I added that the saying the dancer dies and does not forget the shaking of his shoulders applied to us Actually that saying came from a collection of sayings and Proverbs that my uncle Musa was collecting While I was collecting recipes It was melodramatic, but it had impressed me now the French writer Edgar Morin and Jew from Salonica explained the importance of food for his community in his book Vidal Elysia Vidal and his people Gastronomy he wrote is the kernel of a culture and that for Salonica's For Salonica's pastelikos is the kernel of the kernel For some he said pastelikos is all that is left of their culture Actually pastelikos are little pies filled with minced meat and fried onions cinnamon and allspice and The same lady who gave me the orange cake gave me the recipe for pastelikos She was my my sister-in-law's grandmother Now every community has their own pastelikos When I visited my aunt Yvette in Los Angeles She always immediately opened the freezer and brought up keep a sambu second Baba Rannoush and and she just said Well, that's what we're having of course every time now these are the foods that millions of Syrian refugees year and for today Now to refugees and immigrants food is a link with the past It's that part of their culture that survived the longest Passed on from one generation to another kept up when clothing language and music have been dropped It's also the way that an immigrant community Insinuates its culture in a new homeland because cooking does not require capital Different groups of immigrants to this country have brought great gastronomic Enrichments London once Not the best place to eat. I My I was good.  It was very limited and in the canteens at art school and my brother's Medical school. It was worse than awful. I have to say well Because it's all changed we can say this now now London is is the Is a gastronomic capital of the world where every type of restaurant is represented The Indian and Chinese meals have long been part of the English way of life We are now used to Lebanese Turkish Greek Mexican and many other types of meals including sushi and the Middle Eastern Mese Chicken Tikka Masala was the nation's most popular dish Eclipsing fish and chips until the much hotter Jalfresi became the new favorite a Recent survey relieved revealed that 41% of British households have hummus in their fridge Now, of course, it's not the real More about it later modern English Menus in restaurants and gastropub's are full of bulgur and couscous now for Ikea Tahini pomegranate molasses Harissa and preserved lemon a multitude of spices rosewater and chili Yes Well, we've made all these things our own and use them to create something uniquely ours a Fusion cuisine that represents the interweaving of cultures Now food connects us not only with family and society, but with history and geography I became aware that dishes had history behind them 60 years ago when I asked a librarian at the British Library For Arab cookbooks. He told me to come back next day when he would have found something for me There was nothing contemporary But he gave me a handwritten list of publications. He could show me on medieval Arab gastronomy One was a 1939 translation of a 13th century Culinary manual found in Baghdad by Professor Arbery. He had added poems of the time celebrating food Another was an analysis of a culinary manuscript of the same period Found in Damascus by the French Marxist Orientalist Maxime Rodinson when he was stranded there in Damascus With a French army during the Second World War He used it to explain a court cuisine and a society that Existed more than 700 years before it became his PhD thesis There was also a Spanish translation from the Arabic of a Mach Rebi and Alusian culinary manuscript I was enthralled. I started to entertain friends to medieval banquets Many of the dishes had similar names similar combinations of the ingredients and spices and similar techniques and those I was hearing from people of Then those that I was hearing from people leaving Egypt I was thrilled to find a recipe like the one my aunt Regine gave me for treya Chicken with pasta flavored with a mix of spices And it had the same name as the one in Damascus in the Damascus manuscript. Actually, uh, this recipe was Taken up by by Nigella Lawson in a television in her first television series and she said It came from the book of Jewish food and She said it was one of her favorite recipes So there it's how food passes now not just doesn't take a hundred years to come But it comes quite quickly Now it may all this made me feel that my family had extended roots into an exciting imagined past When I told the cousin in Paris that I found Maxime's medieval study Uh, he said Maxime was a friend of his and he was coming to London Actually, my cousin was Eric Roulot the journalist Who specialized in the Middle East now? So when Maxime came to London, I invited him to dinner and I cooked several dishes that featured in the Damascus manuscript to please him He said he didn't like this kind of food at all He disliked courgettes And or and aubergines and he didn't like lamb and he didn't like the spices or any of the flavor So But he and he explained that he was born into a communist working class Russian Jewish family in Paris and his tastes he said were formed then He said he liked the things like lungs for instance the kind of thing the poor ones at in Paris Now when my three children left home all at the same time I decided to leave on the same day I couldn't bear to stay at home alone and to travel all around the mediterranean in search of food I went a l'aventure I tasted everything I could and asked everybody I met What they had what region they came from what their parents and grandparents did and cooked It gave me a reason to accost people In a pension in a restaurant on a bench and to engage them in conversation People were glad to talk about their food to a stranger In that in those days it was very unusual for people to go and and accost people about food Nowadays what I hear from all my young colleagues everybody's doing it I mean they go and accost all the vendors in Marrakesh Asking them for the recipe as well. Well, the kind of experience I would have On a train in Italy for instance I asked a woman sitting near me What her favorite dishes were and Could she give me the recipe and how she cooked them soon the whole Carriage was coming around From other parts of the train and they were saying that's not how I cook it So I was I just wanted there at that time if I would ask somebody in in London on a train or in How what they cook they would think I was mad and move away But I think nowadays It's not like that and maybe people will all come and say that's how I cook it Because things have changed Now I started with a few contacts and was introduced and passed on to others People in Marrakesh said I have a cousin in fares One in Casablanca. Do you want to go there? I was often invited home to watch people cook Sometimes by strangers There's a certain intimacy in the kitchen that you don't have when you are entertained in the living room When it's quite formal we exchange personal stories Uh now this is an advice to Anthropologists who want people to speak to them Go in their kitchen rather than in the living room Part of the pleasure of researching food for me has been getting to know people being part of their lives for a moment And enjoying the special conviviality around food I had glorious dishes and discovered a world where I felt at home And the Mediterranean became the focus of my work ever since The countries around the Mediterranean are very different There are forests and deserts mountains bays and islands with different histories and cultures Eastern and western Christian and muslim But the regions bordering the sea have a lot in common Often more often more in common with each other than with other regions in their own countries When you drive towards the sea It feels at a certain point that you've opened the door into another world The sky is different the light and colors are different the vegetation and architecture are different And there is a certain way of being and living that is familiar I can say sometimes the way to smile The jokes you have All kinds of things that Well, it's I won't describe now That you recognize the Mediterranean climate allows for an easy going outdoor life for al fresco eating Food festivals street foods and markets. You see some similar produce olive oil olives all these things in the markets Preserves goats and sheeps jesus circuitery Great bundles of herbs Piles of spices the same fruit and vegetables And seafood and the same meats cuts all the offals as well Also, you see clay pots pastels and mortars skewers the custom of Well, the kind of ways of of eating Is also similar the custom of serving an assortment of little dishes with drinks is a feature of life And the meal is a place of interaction Where people talk and it's convivial Now Spaniards say their Mediterranean regions are an area of allegria de vivir Unfortunately, it's not exactly joie de vivre at the moment Every country has its own cuisine And there are difference between town and country and from one town and village to another But you can see similar dishes from one end of the Mediterranean to the other The brandard of salt cod in In Venice is the same as that of Provence and Catalonia The chicken cooked with grapes of Spain is the same as one in Tuscany The octopus stews of Greece and Provence are the same There are broad bean purees Everywhere and aubergine purees as well A tomato sauce with fried onions and garlic is the signature tune of the entire Mediterranean It's really uh for me, uh, I Well, it's the incestuous history with the same occupies and settlers From the Phoenicians Greeks and Romans to Arabs and Ottomans and many other things As well as an intense maritime traffic and trading activity between all the port cities that shape the cuisines around the sea So well every little bit for me what is interesting was every little bit of the Mediterranean has its own culinary stories Italy's great regional diversity is a legacy of the country's division until unification A century and a half ago into many independent foreign states Each with its own history culture and cooking tradition Italian food is also An example of the way cooking reflects life as it was once lived Because that's why I was asking everybody. What did your parents do? What did your grandparents do? Uh many many of the people I lived said that they They were from families of 10 And who lived on the land actually So many people said they were a family of 10, but they only wanted one child And while I was there was listening on the radio and and there was a uh always at that period program saying It was becoming a country of singles People wanted to stay single Because they had enough of all these 10 children families but Well, no because then they became hugely nostalgic of the 10 children families In Tuscany until the 1960s Before peasants abandoned the land for factories A system of sharecropping prevailed by which peasant farmers lived on estates as tenants and cultivated the land Giving half the produce to the landlord as rent Estates were large and divided into fields each housing a family community Peasants were busy all the year growing wheat maize or rice vegetables and fruit Wine was made on every estate and in many also olive oil I have to say neither the wine nor the olive oil was any good It's great now, but that's what they all told me But every farm kept pigs rabbits and poultry and bred a few calves They made cheese and cured pork Uh when the system Of sharecropping was abolished and landowners found themselves without workers They sold their properties cheap to people from Milan and Rome and to foreigners who use the farmhouses as holiday homes Entrepreneurs from the north came to farm in a modern intensive way with tractors and machinery. Thank you The old agriculture of intermingle vines mulberries and olive trees on the hill slopes. It is called promiscuous agriculture With little patches of wheat maize and pulses where the large families of tenants had spent their days Fighting their way through the entanglements to pick everything by hand Were replaced by a single crop industrial agriculture Country life changed dramatically Uh, but the drastically but the dishes that were born in the old life never disappeared And they are now very much in fashion A few small farmers continue in the archaic way of varied mixed Mixed cultivation and their bit of landscape has remained like the background in renaissance paintings Spaniards like Italians are passionate about their cuisines and passionate about their terroirs The late catalan writer Josep Pla has a beautiful way of describing cooking. He said it was the landscape in a saucepan He was talking about catalonia Which has many very distinctive styles of cooking of the sea of the mountains and and of the valleys As well as the cooking of the Barcelona bourgeoisie Who I must admit is more French than Spanish But the ghosts of the past are also there in the saucepans and on the plates Spanish food is full of clues about the country's past But when I told people I was researching the history of their food Hoping to get some information about what they thought was the history of their food Uh, whereas in italy people love telling stories about how a dish came to be in spain I realized that it was a very sensitive subject An olive oil producer in Cordoba Volunteered that there had been a long controversy about Spanish culture Was it roman or was it arab? After a lot of argument. He said it was decided that it was roman At a dinner in Madrid the hostess Antonietta said You have to know claudia that we are of roman and visigot stock She was angry. She said at the way foreigners always noted Always notice moorish architecture Did you see the roman aqueduct in segovia? For centuries the country had wiped out its muslim and jewish past from national memory But now the legacies of the once huge populations of muslims And significant minority of jews had become a matter of interest and fascination fascination to chefs When I visited el molino a restaurant and central of gastronomic research Outside granada where they held courses on the history of spanish food I asked about its origins. What did they say? And and I was told arab and jewish And I asked for an example They gave roast pork And I and then they explained when they converted to christianity They cooked pork in the way they cooked lamb which was to rub it with cumin seeds Now once I went and had the roast belly of pork at finos And there are cumin seeds in the crackling in the cuts So now you know why cumin seeds are there because there are never anywhere else in pork But when I ate berenchenak con miel Fried aubergines with honey in the town of priego de cordoba The chef came and sat with me and I asked him about it And he told me about siriab A Kurdish lute player from the court of harun al rashid in bagdad Who joined the court of cordoba and introduced new music and also new ways of cooking Other chefs in andalusia also mentioned siriab as did flamenco musicians Priego is on the ruta del califato the tourist route of muslim spain So a few restaurants are bringing out the old dishes That have Well more ish as they call it more ish influence Now there's another tourist route in spain It's a camino se farad through areas once inhabited by jews before the expulsion in 1492 Some of my ancestors came from spain my grandmother Eugenia Alfondari who was from istanbul Spoke a medieval spanish called ladino with her friends. Their names were toledano Cuenca carbona león burgos curiel Their dishes had Spanish names and they believed that their ancestors had brought them from spain The way people cooked in spain the ingredients they put together their little tricks their turn of hand So many things were to me mysteriously familiar A flavor an aroma triggered memories and emotions. I never knew I had It's surprising how dishes can appeal directly to the emotions Food like music can touch you and make you cry In december, I was in amsterdam for the awards ceremony. I'm sorry. I'm going from one place to another but it seemed to To Work into what I wanted to stay about culture Now in december, I was in amsterdam for the awards ceremony of the prince clouds fund for culture and development I had written the lodation for kamal musawak and an entrepreneur and food activist In from lebanon. He calls himself a food activist, but now a lot of people are food activist Who started the movement that helped small-scale farmers and artisans Runs farmers markets and food festivals as well as educational programs for schools and catering courses for refugees In his little beroute restaurant called towelette each day a different home cook Usually a woman from a different part of lebanon prepares the specialities of her region and community There are now other towels a few other towels that operate in the same way I have opened elsewhere in lebanon. I received their menus every week by email from kamal I met kamal when we were both judges in a couscous competition in san vito lo capo in sicily now the joint winners were A palestinian and an israeli and they were called up in front of television vision by a b-list actress And and a whole lot of music to hold up the trophy together Everyone was happy now Kamal was my host when I was researching the food in lebanon He took me on excursions to visit artisan producers in mountain villages He stopped we stopped in zahle in the bekaa valley where according to legend the special character of the lebanese mesi was born I was a guest on his tv program with two palestinian women from a refugee camp from an They had an organic peasants cooperative in the south of the country They brought baskets full of fresh produce including lentils on the plant and wild herbs and And wild plants of different kinds as well and they also brought specialties for us to taste A borgo salad with a homemade tomato paste a porridge of wheat and yogurt Lebanon is a tiny country with many different ethnicities religions cultures sunni and shiai muslim drus syrian christian maronite greek orthodox armenian Still hostile and suspicious of each other after their long and devastating civil war But it is also a country with strong traditions of Hospitality and conviviality where gastronomy is an important part of culture and cooking tradition Are linked with identity history and culture Uh, well Being camal around camal Well, I have to say that camal uses that For as his inspiration. He uses all these factors and and and This characteristics For his own mission Now being around him was an extraordinary lesson about the power of food to bring people together and make them feel loved and valued To celebrate identity at the same time as build bridges The farmers markets or places where people from different ethnicities religions and classes Socialized without fear of violence and where farmers get a fair price While forming ties with each other and their customers The towelette restaurants celebrate the culinary diversity of lebanon and bring people from embattled And marginalized communities together camal's message is make food not war It is politics through gastronomy in a revolutionary kind of way At the gala dinner in amsterdam Attended by the dutch royal family Syrian women Refugee who were refugees in lebanon and in holland cooked part of the gala dinner for 300 people They made dishes like kibbeh stewed with quince the kind of dishes that you don't get On standard restaurant menus There was great excitement in the kitchen And they got a standing ovation. Is that what you call When people Clap when the chefs of lead at the end they got a standing of ovation Now a year ago in february I attended another gala dinner at the chiran palace in istanbul Now that was to celebrate the invitation by unesco to the city of gazi anteb To to be part of their creative city's network in the field of gastronomy Despite what the city is going through with possibly 400 000 syrian refugees in their midst and isil fighters passing in and out It had just inaugurated an institute of gastronomy The mayor of gazi anteb said they wanted to protect their famous gastronomy And that their institute at their institute they taught women Disabled people and syrian refugees how to cook professionally Women are not normally accepted in the all male professional kitchens of turkey Erdogan was there He spoke loudly about the terrorist threat and turkeys enemies. They had just been a bomb uh He praised gazi anteb for sheltering so many refugees and congratulated them for their gastronomy But he said that many other histories in turkey Also had great food We were served Dishes of gazi anteb. They are very like those of a lepo But very hot with lots of chili pepper The city was once part of syria My great-grandfather was a young rabbi there before he became chief rabbi of a lepo Gazi anteb is the capital of baklava. By the way, when I was there, I said that my my Rabbi my great-grandfather was a rabbi there And so I have been invited to come and inaugurate the synagogue or it's already Being refurbished, but they needed to do an event But and to bring my my family along Now during the sit dinner I was sitting next to charles perry an american who writes about medieval midi middle eastern foods Three pastry makers from gazi anteb came to thank him for the articles He wrote about them in the l8 times 20 years ago. They still had it pasted up Then someone came to say that erdoğan wanted to speak to charles We were all just And he put on a tie somebody lent him a tie when he came back. He said that erdoğan asked him Do you like baklava? Now in 2010 Food was officially recognized by unesco as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity When they put the gastronomic meal of friend of the french on their list They then had a traditional mexican cuisine A japanese cuisine and the mediterranean diet Diet here me they mean everything around food As endangered cultural treasures that needed valuing and safeguarding I have to say something a little secret that It was the the catalan my catalan friends who have been lobbying for years to have their list of recipes Catalan recipes Included in the intangible Heritage cultural heritage of unesco, but spain has continually stopped them And so they started lobbying instead for the mediterranean diet Because they feel very much that catalonia was the queen of the mediterranean in in in the medieval times, but for a long time it continued To have a huge influence as a as a trading nation, but also it is they who introduced the The tomato sauce fried onions and garlic Well in the last 30 years The mediterranean area has seen the reason why it's endangered and needs some safeguarding Is that in the last 30 years the mediterranean area has seen dramatic changes in social and economic structures The industrial industrialization of agriculture and food production and also globalization Once people cooked what their parents cooked and recipes and techniques were passed from mother to daughter today Even in italy mama no longer spends all day cooking in the kitchen And italians search on the internet for recipes Like they do here Now cuisine traditional cuisine are a fragile living heritage that can easily be lost But does it matter if traditional cuisines are lost? Well, I've been thinking about that in most countries it matters for tourism since part of the pleasure Today of visiting a country is the local food It matters to economies because countries can make easily can more easily sell their traditional products It matters to the world because of the loss of cultural diversity It matters to the local inhabitants because it reinforces their identity Gives them pride and dignity Even the most avant-garde chefs in various novel Who do who practice various novel cuisines who deconstruct and create new dishes Now they are saying they are inspired by their mother's cooking And traditional cuisines by their roots and history and they use local products Local ingredients When I interviewed the late revered Catalan chef Santi Santa Maria He said cooking has to be about sentiment As well as technique and that without ideology It is simply a matter of manual skills and technology His ideology he said was rooted in the life of his peasant family and the progressive politics of his youth He quoted the painter Juan Miro to be universal Miro had said you have to be local The reference points of Santi Santa Maria Of his cooking he said whether memories of his grandparents generation and medieval Catalan cookbooks a lot of chefs say that they looked at old cookbooks and in spain And in italy too they look at medieval cookbooks, but more so in spain Now food in spain is about local patriotism During the Franco regime regional cultures were suppressed and artisan products were discouraged in favor of mass industrial ones That could feed the population cheaply When people fell free to celebrate their regional heritage Organizations formed to preserve their culinary heritage by recording recipes 900 recipes were collected in Catalonia 600 in the Balearic islands of Mallorca and Menorca 900 in Galicia and so on And producers rushed to obtain The origin Denomination of origin for their wines their olive oils their hands their secretary Their cheeses their beans their honeys their lentils their cows their pigs and capons Now come to us The way we cook and eat in Britain has changed for the better When I first came to London in the 50s and 60s Well, it was limited and plain It was also a taboo subject that caused embarrassment Being a chef ranked as the lowest type of job The only time Families went out to dinner in a restaurant was to celebrate a birthday Now interest in food has exploded Cooking is glamorous chefs are venerated Eating out is one of the most popular leisure activities And cooking competitions are the most watched television programs We have a new exciting and vibrant food scene with passionate cooks and artisan and a social elite That has become connoisseurs of food and wine The majority have never however live on ready-cooked meals Granted they're better than they were before And on fast food Now we have an our culinary culture Our elite culinary culture is a global culture It's innovative and subject to constantly changing fashions Chefs are the driving force that create Fashions and inspiration comes from California, Spain, Norway, Italy and our own ethnic cuisine Once grand restaurants were safe if they offered French cuisine Now they have to keep abreast with what is fashionable And food producers are on the lookout for the next big thing Which also has to be organic sustainable ethical seasonal and healthy I won't say clean We follow the fashions and we try to cook like chefs We adopt superfoods and forage foods And we are concerned with health and weight now vegetarianism and veganism or mainstream But the last global trend it seems are to revalue home cooking And our mother's cooking and to cherish regional cuisine It's a response to globalization And it has to do with nostalgia for an old life and a fear of losing cultural identity By the way, those Italian internet sites that I've looked at are full of people's grandmas recipes And sometimes you see a video of grandma cooking As cookery writers, we are used to being asked not me, but everybody else is here Asked to send recipes that are original and different Now, lately, we're asked to for our mother's recipes and I keep being asked for my mother's I've run out of them And to describe our childhood kitchens and their smells Now romantic nostalgia has a smell In Spain, it is the smell of chorizos hanging in attics and in kitchens In much of the Mediterranean, it's of the tomato, onions and garlic frying in olive oil For me, the smells of crushed coriander and garlic frying in oil And also the mingled smells of chicken, turmeric, lemon and garlic Well, that was my mother's chicken sofrito on Friday night When people phone to book a 250-pound tasting menu at Heston Blument Alfatt Dock They are now asked you to name dishes Remembered from your childhood so that they can personalize your dinner And take you back to your childhood before whisking you into the future Now, can any of you afford to see what they make of your memories? Now, have you noticed, just to end, that now food is associated with love Many products are said to be made with love In America, a pot of yogurt, I got, was said to be made with love from milk From cows of a special breed raised with love on fresh grass Now, that was something Now, just I picked up today from Marks and Spencer's New Spring promotion Is entitled Made with Love The gastropub seafood casserole, the beef bourguignon, the beetroot ravioli, the sishu All of these are made with love Now, I have to tell you what you cook yourself For somebody that you care about For your friends is a great way of really showing love I recently participated in a Dutch three-part TV series Entitled Love in Times of Thermal I was filmed making food for asylum seekers with volunteers at the West London synagogue Which they do every Saturday We all sat together at long tables It was how we ended up sitting It was really heartening to see the love the volunteers put into their cooking And a pleasure and moving to see how their spice lentil soup, vegetable couscous and yogurt cake were appreciated Actually, we got a standing ovation Of course, food can also be used to coerce and discriminate To emphasize differences and ethnicity, religion and social status And to separate one group from another In France recently, when schools in areas where local councils were dominated by the Front National They refused to offer an alternative meat dish when pork was on the menu So it was seen as Islamophobic and anti-Semitic Now, just my last word is there is an Arab saying If you have shared food with someone, you can never betray them as you have sealed your relationship before God There is something about eating together that creates a bond It can be used to create community Claudia, thank you. That was an absolute tour de force. I'm tasting like mad From talking about childhood days, right through your travels, through so many extraordinary countries But also linking that to some very contemporary issues in terms of migration Refugees and that sense of loss Which people partly try to deal with in terms of sharing food and recipes So thank you very much for an extraordinary lecture And can I invite everyone to join us upstairs for our reception? But before you do that, let's give another rounding


Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering.next conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to steamy Miami, everybody. Stu and I are really pleased to have Dan Gorman on. He's an enterprise infrastructure architect, IT expert. Dan, great to see you. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Your brother is a CUBE alum as well, so that's awesome. Yes. First of all, your thoughts on this conference. Next, we were talking offline. You go to several of these, you know, a year, which is, you know, I think you said five a year, which is a lot for an IT practitioner. So where do you put next? Where do you think about the Nutanix event? Yeah, so first off, I think that this event is absolutely extraordinary. I've never seen this amount of attendees in a first conference in my career. That should tell you a little about the infrastructure that Nutanix has and the software that they're doing. I think it's absolutely revolutionary in the market. I think they're challenging a lot of the norms, and I think they're bringing an approach to the industry that is really transformational. So you know, obviously, VMware very well. You're experienced expert in that space. And VMware, phenomenal, the enormity of that trend. And, but essentially, we were talking earlier, Stu and I, about, but VMware essentially did is take a massive infrastructure that was just incredibly inefficient and make it more efficient. And relatively less complicated, but still very complicated. Correct. What is, where does Nutanix fit in terms of relative to that sort of state of infrastructure today? What do you see as the Nutanix offering? So I think VMware has done a lot of great things and a lot of great products. Bringing the hypervisor to the market was truly transformational. I think the industry has moved past that and that's sort of the norm, the commoditization of that. And starting to move the infrastructure sort of an abstraction model, where you can move the apps in and out of environments. You can move your infrastructure in and out of hypervisors. But VMware really led that way, and now we're ready to do the sort of the second coming of infrastructure. So I get to ask you then, is it from a practitioner's perspective? VMware will talk about making infrastructure invisible. They'll talk about simplifying everything, orchestration, management, they'll talk about, they'll even talk about multi-clouds and talk about OpenStack and Bracen, Docker, et cetera. So what's different? So Nutanix is bringing web scale and invisible infrastructure to the enterprise. Historically it was very brittle to manage, very brittle to use. You had to have SMEs in those areas. You had to build sort of the business around that when the business might not actually be in the business of doing that. Nutanix is bringing the simple point and click enterprise scale out, a web scale methodology that's been around forever, and they're the pioneers of that. Okay, so they're early, but won't the big oligopoly and the monsters, the whales of the industry just sort of do their own version of that? Will they catch up? Or are they doing that on infrastructure and software that is too difficult to transform? So I think each manufacturer is going to want to make sure that people are in their own ecosystem and that makes them somewhat biased. Nutanix is allowing you to say, hey, I don't care what ecosystem you're in, we're bringing that web scale. You can live within whatever ecosystem you'd like. And competitors will have similar platforms. Evo Rail is one of them. But you're locked into the VMware V-Tax or VCN-6 and now you're in that swim lane. And some customers may not want to have that and have the choice to be able to move around. Well, Vinod Kosla this morning was saying, hey, most customers are risk averse, so they'll keep buying what doesn't get them fired. What do you mean by the V-Tax? Can you explain that to our audience? So the enterprises generally in most cases have a five act charge back model essentially resell that the infrastructure back to their internal units. And all those costs, support costs from the hypervisor to the support of that, to the infrastructure, that all adds into that. And most enterprises will want to collapse that as much as possible to stay competitive with other public cloud offerings. It's important that in some cases where requirements require the users to stay on-prem, that that is a cost point that's attractive. I remember going back to the first year we did at VMworld was in 2010 and cloud was a big topic at the time. Everybody was like, what's cloud? Let's try to define cloud. Amazon was doing its thing and all the enterprise guys are saying, oh, we're cloud too. And I remember the time talking to IT practitioners like yourself saying, how are you going to keep pace with Amazon? How are you going to fund that? How are you going to afford to? And the answer was, well, we're not going to do it alone. We're going to look for partners to do it. And Nutanix is a company that's executing on that. Correct. Is that the right way to think about it? Are you essentially building as an IT practitioner today? Think about your colleagues. Are you guys building essentially an internal cloud that is Amazon like? Correct. And the core components that is having a partner that will work with us as an org where we can say we want to build a cloud that is scalable, it's elastic. It will ebb and flow as our business needs change. And Nutanix has been a perfect partner for that. So, in thinking about that sort of theme, do you feel like when you see you and your colleagues talking to your business constituents, do you get pressure to do the public cloud? Whether it's Amazon, Azure, Google, you get pressure to do public cloud and are you able to credibly say, look, we can deliver the same types of services? Or do you say, you know what? For certain workloads, you should go to the public cloud. For others, here's why you should stay here. Can you help us sort of parse that? Yeah, so I think it's a little of both, honestly. The biggest challenge is sort of the crud environment, the create, reuse, update, delete, where the developers want to move very quickly. Historically, operations has a longer pull in terms of being able to deploy that infrastructure. Building on a Nutanix infrastructure with something like orchestration automation, allows you to sort of catch up to that pace of development that the developers would like. In some cases, public cloud makes great sense. In some case, you have to have it on-prem for certain business requirements. But you must be able to meet that agility that public cloud can provide with all the enterprise security and components around that. So Dan, I'm curious. When you hear Nutanix talk about just making infrastructure invisible, doesn't that obviate the need for an architect? Well, hopefully not. But you still have to build the environment such that it can meet the capacity needs. Eventually, you want to be able to working on higher order tasks. So an architect, traditionally, shouldn't be saying you need this amount of spindles, you need this amount of CPU, compute. We want to be working on the business challenges. Things like we have a feature or product X that needs to be deployed. Here's the infrastructure, we need to do that. It can scale as little or as much as we need. So I think architect role changes a little bit. Yeah, I'd love to get your viewpoint because one of the big advantages we see to this new style of architect, Nutanix, kind of all the Kuipert converge is before, you say, okay, this year, go buy some servers. Next year, maybe it's time for storage. And predicting those individual silos was impossible. And when you need to buy more that migration upgrades, I mean, the whole thing is what I called, it was like the hamster wheel of pain. Every step along the way, there's just pain and everything like that. Does hyperconverge really make it easier, Nutanix and these technologies specifically, to expand and are there enough options out there that you can kind of build this for any application or is there still work to do to mature that? So absolutely, and I think the biggest challenges enterprise face from my perspective today is those big cap expense, right? You come in the beginning of the year, throw down a couple of million dollars, you try and anticipate what the year's growth is going to be. You may or may not hit that. The beauty with the Nutanix model is you can start with a minimum viable product. You say, I need a three or five node cluster. You might be fine, you might not, but if you have to expand, you can do it in chunks that are bite-sized. You're not doing these large capex outlays every time. So I think the model from the enterprise web scale has changed that so that people's budgeting processes even change where we can say, hey, we can stop doing these big bang approaches and start scaling out our compute and storage in ways that are more appropriate for our business or product needs. All right, so you throw out the word scale. I'm curious, what's the largest cluster you've deployed with Nutanix? So we've deployed probably about a eight to 16 node cluster, roughly 100 nodes more or less. So we have a lot of experience around the Nutanix infrastructure. Yeah, there's some people that say, oh no, nobody goes more than eight nodes and so you're here saying that yes, you've done it, works fine, not limitations, anything like that. Correct, and you start to get in the classical debate of separate clusters versus one homogenous cluster. It's classic debate. What's the trade-off, help take us through that debate? So it's interesting because when you start putting everything in one bucket, you start diluting cash, you start creating contention, you start getting the most unoptimal usage workload, other environments can affect workloads and you start losing control of that. On the flip side, if you segregate everything out, yes, you have 100% guarantee of that IO or CPO compute, but now you're at a cost point that's cost prohibitive. So typically what I try to do from an enterprise perspective is weigh those scale up, scale out cluster approach and say, what makes sense for the specific BUs? Are we talking a financial application? Are we talking a logging application? Put all those types of applications on the single cluster. Don't mix a corporate resource with a logging resource, right? So lots of those trade-offs and we work on those every day. Okay, so does Nutanix need more quality of service to be able to expand that into a larger pool or is there something architecturally limiting it or are we always going to have these trade-offs in your opinion? I think you're always going to have these trade-offs. Nutanix does a great job in terms of tiering and IO prioritization. You can use things like VMware's priority groups to do IO limitations, but typically we let the apps try and determine themselves and then make sure that the apps are coalesced in a way that makes sense per cluster. So I wonder if we could come back to this notion of when you're as an IT enterprise architect, how you go about things these days. You got, we were in the keynotes this morning, right? You heard the Gartner guy talking about mode one, mode two, IDCs, platform two, platform three, kind of superficial concepts, but they're good ones because they sort of describe what's happening. It's bimodal notion. So what do you do as an architect? You've got 90% of your revenue in most companies comes from the mode one. You know, everybody knows the grow the business. I'm running the business. That's where all my resources go. I want to grow the business, but I can't fund it. So how do you approach that? How do you architect for the future? So I think the biggest thing that we're trying to do these days is show the cost of IT and the simplification of that. Historically, most enterprises have approached via bolt-on. You'll see a lot of the software companies coming out trying to fix problems that are band-aids on more core issues. So the way we approach that is figure out what we're offsetting, figuring out what infrastructure we're removing, figure out how we're actually saving the company money even though there's a spend there. That's your question. If the CEO comes to you, says Dan, I want to completely transform the company. You know, we know we have to compete. We have all these other forces. We want to digitize our business. We got Uber coming after us, right? I want to transform the company. And I don't want to take the band off slowly. I want to go hard, I want to go fast. We're going to make IT the main spring of that transformation. How much money do you need? If he gave you all the money you needed, could you actually transform the company more rapidly? Is budget a constraint to that transformation? Or is it just inertia of existing processes and skill sets? So I think there's a couple of things in that. Budget's always an issue, right? That's the reality of the world. But if somebody approached me and said, hey, we need to turn this thing on its head. We just can't keep executing IT the way we've been doing it for the last X years. What do we do? Virtualize everything. There are some exceptions, but virtualization first approach. Work with the developers, work with the manufacturers on how do you work with that scale out? Oracle's a great example. SQL Server's a great example. Traditional IT is a scale up approach. It requires operations and architects to work more closely with those product groups. It's absolutely doable. And I think there's a lot of politics and perhaps animosity from changing from what is known to something that's unknown and relatively new. And I think breaking through those emotional barriers generally is most of the fight in trying to get people to understand that. So VMware is obviously the dominant virtualization platform. There are clearly others, Microsoft, Hyper-V gaining, Momentum, KBM, pretty popular. You mentioned Oracle. Oracle early on, would fight tooth and nail, customers wanting to virtualize. Wikibon, we told customers, damn, the torpedo's virtualized. Oracle, what's your experience been with virtualizing Oracle? So outside of OVM, I should say, but happy to take OVM and know that. So it really comes down to working with the DVAs and understanding how to virtualize the database. Traditionally people come out and say, hey, we have a single database, we have a single data file, we have a single way of doing this. And understanding what the data actually is in the database. Can you shard it? Can we start doing partitioning? What does that look like? Coming at it from a smaller node, but more scale out. But that causes DVAs to have to rethink how they're doing data management. And that's scary because you're saying, hey, you've been doing data management this way. We're gonna completely redo that and start all over again. And most people aren't wanting to do that work, right wrong or indifferent. So it can be scary and somewhat threatening. So Dan, Dave did an interview about a year or so ago with CIO of Royal Philips. And he said, I want to consume all of my IT by the drink. It doesn't mean I'm pushing it all to public cloud, but I want it all to be elastic. I don't want to do that huge capex outlay, as they say. And they're doing some interesting to do application, they do Oracle and SAP. What's your take on that? And I guess that's specifically, and also how does public cloud fit into your architecture? So the pay by the drink model is interesting in that when companies are doing charge back, how do you actually capture those costs? In my past, I've worked for public cloud companies and that's a core business. If you don't do it well, the business fails. So really understanding the pay by the drink model as it relates to charging back to the business and what do those clusters look like? From the second component is the management of that. How do you enable the business to do automation and orchestration of the pay by the drink model? In some cases, on the flip side, you can say, hey, business unit, I'm just going to give you your own cluster, allow you to deploy your own VMs and infrastructure. We're just going to make sure the infrastructure's running and healthy. So I think there's trade-offs depending on the business and what the requirements are. Yeah, so do you see IT pulling in that public cloud discussion or the business unit still kind of doing a little bit of the rogue stealth IT mode? I think I see both, right? So there's a case for public cloud, for example, ADP, right? We're never going to do, I would never recommend a company doing payroll in-house. However, there are certain applications that there's their core competency, which should be in-house. And so I think there's actually a mix of both in sort of the new world. So can we talk about data protection? When the world moved to server virtualization, everybody realized storage doesn't like this, right? It broke storage and it broke backup. So a lot of customers re-architected their backup. Does hyper-converged or whatever you want to call it have a similar effect on the way in which you protect data or was that more of a virtualization event? So I think when you talk data protection in a hyper-converged world, you're actually up-leveling the conversation in that historically, when you talk data protection, you're talking about replicating a storage frame in some way and the quiesce in the app. And in the Nutanix world, you're actually talking about the OS or the app. You're talking about application consistency. You're not thinking about the underlying fundamentals. And I think Nutanix has taken that with say, hey, I want to protect this VM. We're not talking about alums. We're not talking about volume groups and it up-levels the conversation that's more relevant to the business. Okay, so that sounds like a yes. You would look at, so is your advice to fellow practitioners to rethink backup and well, obviously you're a fan of the whole hyper-converged thing generally in Nutanix specifically, but is part of the domino effect of rethinking backup? And I think not just backup, but a lot of the way architecture and infrastructure is done and backup is a component of that. And I think that can be scary for enterprises because they have to rethink backups. They have to rethink how they're doing deployments, how they're doing clusters, how they're doing a scale out. And it can be a little bit scary. And I think most enterprises are wanting to understand more before they do it. So carry that through a little bit more. What, I'm going to push the advice button. What would you advise in terms of all those factors from an enterprise architect standpoint you're coming in, Dan the consultant, we're going to pay you a bunch of dough to just tell us what we should be doing. Where do you start? Understand what your requirements are, understand what your assumptions are, understand what your business is. Moving beyond that, what is the ability to virtualize? Can you virtualize your infrastructure? If so, what does your growth rates look like? If you're flat, how does that affect your infrastructure? So really understand the business before you get down into the bits and bytes of it and build the requirements and assumptions out of that. All right, so Dan, you've mentioned virtualization a lot. I'm curious what your take is on the whole containerization discussion. Docker. Yeah, Docker, CoreOS is also a partner in that space. So where are you with containers? Where do you see that fitting? Bare metal, virtualization, cloud, everything. So I think Docker and containerization has been fantastic in the industry. From the perspective of a developer being able to do a crowd environment very fast without having to build an entire heavy VM out of that has been hugely transformational. I think there's some concerns around the management, the deployment, the security, just like OpenStack, right? It's getting there, a big fan of OpenStack, but they still have a lot of hurdles to get through. Things like PCI come to mind, right? When you've got compliance and regulatory, whether TEPA or other, how does that work in? And so I think Docker and containers are sort of their infancy where compliance regulations may be a little more lax, where they're more heavy. I think it requires enterprises to do a little bit more homework and take it more. I mean, today we're mostly stateless apps, so getting some of the heavy-duty GRC compliance, PCI, everything, so a little bit early, so. Agreed. According to Mark Hurd last year at Oracle OpenWorld, might have been two years ago. The shows are flying by here in theCUBE. But he said the average age of the enterprise app is 19 years. Wow. Now, sounds about right. That could be one of those numbers, like 70% of our spend goes to keeping the lights on, who knows, but it feels about right. That's not a surprising statistic. And maybe that needle has moved a little bit, but the average enterprise app is pretty old. Yeah. Claims apps, payroll apps, et cetera. What do you see the world looking like seven years down the road in terms of IT infrastructure? How would you describe it? I think you're going to see a huge shift where sort of the SMEs fade off into the distance. You're going to have a generic platform that's more focused on services and service availability than infrastructure. Hardware's going to come in and out, but at the end of the day, IT's going to be more worried about service delivery. And you're starting to see some of that today with even public cloud email offerings and whatnot. All right, so Dan, I want to take out your magic wand. You talked about a lot of things you like. What still is difficult in your job that you really need the vendors out there to make invisible, make it simple, that would make your life and your peers' life easier? That's a good question. So I think a lot of the adoption is based around other people's experiences. So having other people who are running Oracle Rack and virtualization on Nutanix or other hardware, being able to get that broad industry adoption, I think helps shift those opinions and conversations. Hi, Tim. Well, listen, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Great insights from enterprise architect and IT expert. Stu and I are very pleased to have you on. So thanks again. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back from Miami. This is theCUBE. We're live at dot next, hashtag next conf. Got it? Is that right, Stu? You got it, Dave. Finally, after four hours of broadcasting, I get the conference name correct. Keep right there, buddy. We'll be right back.