Technorama Drama

By Mark Stech-Novak, Guest Author -- Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, 9/1/2005

Mark Stech-Novak, Principal Mark Stech-Novak Restaurant Consultation & Design, Oakland, Calif.

Walking back from our local Sunday farmer’s market, I was telling my 10-year-old son about my apprenticeship in France. I would spend three hours at a stretch in front of two small live-fuel broilers in a dim basement kitchen, with cooks tight to either side of me. I couldn’t move. Some winter days, it was cold and there was enough air circulating from a grate in the wall to make the temperature comfortable. On hot days it was like being roasted alive. But I learned how to grill meats and fish and those antique grills worked like a charm.

My good fortune made those days limited and I was off to work at another restaurant with a state-of-the-art (for 1972) kitchen that was situated on a river, surrounded by water, light and fresh air. I could sit on a deck and pluck the feathers from wild fowl while watching people water-ski. We all worked 16-hour days, but at the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. There were, and are, always trade-offs in life.

In this issue, FE&S’ cover story addresses new technology, the cutting-edge in new ideas for our industry. Every day there is a new and just-that-bit-better device for something. Ah, the wonders of capitalism. But for every new and improved something, an old, blander version ends up on the junk heap. The optimist says, “Technology is inevitable, man will always want and build the better mousetrap.” The pessimist says, “Mousetraps are perfectly wellsuited for their job as is.” The pragmatist in me wants to ask, “When can we have a completely biodegradable mouse repellant?”

Perhaps it is pushing the analogy a bit far, but I think sometimes we’re the mousetrap builder and sometimes we’re the mouse in a trap of our own device.

A cautionary tale is one where a client of mine was fully convinced that a vendor’s new and technologically wonderful equipment was going to do everything the vendor said it would. It certainly did but only for half the time. The other half of the time it was broken and sitting idle, waiting for parts. We replaced that equipment with not-so-new, and not-so-wonderful old workhorses that work all the time.

What is inexorable, inevitable and the bane of all who sit on their old workhorse laurels is that someone else will make that new technology work a bit better and will take it to the next level. This is true of everything we deal with in our industry.

There are things we can live with and those we can live without. We can live with good coffee, but we can live without single-serving pods in retort pouches, packed in plastic trays, packed in cardboard boxes inside other cardboard boxes. We can live with cell phones, but do we need to live with disposable ones? New ideas are inevitable but some of their incarnations are not.

The hand-held blender, the Paco-Jet, variable-speed hood controllers, the silicon pan liner, and the list goes on and on of innovations that have become indispensable to modern cuisine. The evolution revolution in foodservice technology and related industries is just beginning.

In 15 years time, we won’t flip on the lights in our kitchens. We’ll flip on the glowing walls and ceiling. OLED (organic light-emitting diod) technology will let the chef in Miami appear on that wall in large-as-life size and train the new cooks standing in their New York City kitchen. The cooks will program light pods instead of burners that hold and maintain a series of temperatures ideally programmed for the product, and incinerate the smoke and odor before it becomes volatile. A thermal heat exchanger will bathe the cook in a cool breeze designed to extract excess ambient energy while capturing radiant energy for reuse in heating water. Cooks will adjust their ovens to operate in one of a dozen “spectrums” to bombard food with combinations of heat waves, light waves, microwaves, etc. Printer/depositors will layer foods onto silicon baking sheets to become multi-tiered creations with ingredients and methods limited only by imagination and technical expertise.

This is a far, far cry from the grueling days of my apprenticeship in the early 1970s. The trade-offs will still be there, however. The future concerns will not be the hours or the punishing heat, but the ecological fallout of our disposable lifestyle. We’ll be counting calories but not in our bodies. They will be those used in our stoves and coming from everywhere but the long-gone fossil fuels. Those ‘70s may seem like pretty good-old days comparatively.

In an unsettled world it is an unsettling thought to straddle between the traditional and an unknowable future vision. Between the end-user, the dealer, the chains, the chefs, the designers and the developers there needs to be a consensus that actions and decisions are seen not in just monetary terms, but in terms of impact. Taking global responsibility for the new brainchild you generate is just like taking responsibility for your children: They are yours at age two or at age 20. The marvels we create growing a thriving industry should never blind us to the effects and by-products of that industry. Like a billion-ton butterfly-effect, we, as an industry, do not tread lightly through our day to day. Perhaps we can breed a new “hybrid” foodservice mentality for our innovations and new technology.

We’ll only buy into it if it is less wasteful, less energy consuming and more reliable.

The razzle-dazzle of new technology is no small part of what makes me love this business, and there has never been a more exciting time for innovation. Nor a time when innovation will be more necessary, since the problems we’ll face will be unlike any before. When my 10-year-old son asks me about global warming, resources disappearing, species extinctions and pollution, I tell him that these are issues his generation will need to work on, as well. I would rather have them carry on our work, than curse us for having left the job to them.