TTT Interviewee: Michael Batterberry Session #2 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: May 27, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It is May 27, and I’m with Michael Batterberry in his offices at Food Arts in Manhattan. Good afternoon. Batterberry: Good afternoon. Q: We were talking about Food and Wine the other day, and I think you wanted to tell me some more about the three-tier system. Batterberry: The three-tier approach, which could apply either to costs, so if we presented, let’s say, things for the tabletop, china, silver, so forth, flatware, and there was a kind of theme, we would present the cheapest possible, the cheapest and most imaginative, and then mid range, and then the sky’s the limit for people who liked to splurge from time to time or who liked to collect things for the table. That would be one example of three range costs, expenses. But it also applied—and I think it worked very well—for the complexity of difficulty of the dish. So if, for example, we were doing pâtés, we would start with a very simple chopped liver, a very good recipe for a simple traditional chopped liver. The next tier of complexity might be a pâté campagne, French country pâté, quite simple, and with suggestions obviously about serving it with cornichons, whatever. The third would be for people who have garnered that sad classification of “food hobbyist.” Awful expression. Anyway, for people who really love food, no amount of time is too much for them. They just love it. They like the challenge. They love the results. They take pride in it and so forth. So we would do from the down and dirty fastest; good; middle range; and then, “Okay. You want to spend the whole weekend doing this? If you like, you can do this in steps,” and so forth and so on. And that spoke to different people, and sometimes it spoke to the same people who just didn’t have the time, but might some other time. Q: You started it in 1978? Batterberry: Yes. Q: And so how did that relate to what was happening at that time? I mean, you must have sensed that there was a wide range of— Batterberry: Well, what we had sensed and what we were telling the putative investors when we were raising money for the magazine for those years was that—I always use this as an example, is that so many young men, young guys were going off to college with woks. Gender taboos were being shattered, and it was no longer considered woman’s work to be in the kitchen, necessarily. If men felt like doing it, well, go right ahead, rather than just standing around [over a barbecue pit] with an apron saying “Genius at work.” At the same time, rather like Nora in Doll’s House, young women were slamming the kitchen door behind them because it was emblematic of their being indentured to domesticity, and so it was rather like bra burning at the time, you know, to say “No, I don’t cook. I’m not interested in cooking.” So this was reflected—and I know that I did tell you this before, about the initial makeup of the subscribers—in that there were so many young men in their twenties who were subscribing to Food and Wine, which was what we had foreseen with hope and were proven right, even if it always remained a stumbling block for the potential investors, because they said, “Well, maybe you’re right,” but indeed we were. Q: How did that relate to what was happening in restaurants at that time? Batterberry: Well, various things were happening in restaurants. Young people were traveling in much greater numbers because they could go coach on jet, and they were seeing much more of the world than their ancestors had, and that entailed eating. They were tasting the world. Each successive generation has become much more open to flavors of the world. There used to be—I find it difficult to grasp from this point in history, but, you know, that “foreign food,” in quotes, was shunned by a lot of mid Americans, because it’s why people changed their names if their names were too foreign, or they ate the dishes of their ancestors at home but they didn’t when they were out because it was immigrant food, and that had a certain stigma attached to it, which was ridiculous. And smelly food. People would go, you know, “Oh, garlic.” They backed away from it. Well, that, of course, has totally changed, and what a relief. This was part of the transitionary period. You also had such large numbers of young people who were more aware of what it was they were putting into themselves, and that was the reflection of the so-called greening of America at the time. It was the young people who taught their parents to read labels on the back of things, to be more nutrition-conscious. That was the very first wave of what now is pandemic, and it was the young people who did it. I remember we used to go to New Hampshire for sometimes months on end, in the north of New Hampshire, and an old family house when we were writing books, to finish books, and we remember the first so-called—the locals all called it a health food store, disparagingly, when, in fact, it was natural foods store, and it had countless old herbs and spices, you know, in large glass jars. Q: Very old. Batterberry: Yes, very old, but very numerous which was very sweet. Sometimes had no animal protein, except for cheese, only no flesh, no animal flesh protein, and they were in touch with the local farmers as well. I mean, there was no concerted movement to champion the local farmer. It was just they wanted the freshest and local, and also in those days it was cheaper. Q: Whose family house was this? Batterberry: Ariane’s father was a doctor and scientist, and he had gone to many scientific conferences, small conferences in Europe, particularly in Austria and Switzerland and so forth, and he loved these little conferences in mountain houses. So this led him to buy a house that had to be built from the ground up, practically, by Dan Kiley was the architect who later became a very famous landscape architect. His name was Dr. Simon Ruskin, and that was Dr. Ruskin’s reason for—and also he wanted a country place for his children. So Ariane saw the 1960s there, and I too, because I first went to New Hampshire, before we were married in the 1960s and saw it was an extension of New England sort of Bostonian conservatism, and that was reflected in the food supplies. But then you saw—bang—this was the first ray of the future in this very large, very large store, because it was very cheap—it was like a big barn—with the sort of food that people demand today. Q: You mean in terms of produce? Batterberry: Yes, fresh produce and variety of herbs and spices, even if they were, as I say, a bit elderly. You know, interesting breads, local butter, so forth. Q: Did you get to know any of the farmers at that point? Batterberry: Oh, we did. There was an architect who had, I think, several wives and girlfriends and therefore numerous children, and they all worked on a very large farm that he had, and it was more than a farm stand. You could drive to the farms particularly on certain days, and these attractive kids who were out in the fields all summer would sell you a wide variety of stuff. But in terms of, let’s say lamb—and I love to cook—we’d have to order it ten days in advance, and then they’d pick it up in Boston, because nobody [else wanted it]—I mean, they raised lamb up there, but they turned lamb into sweaters instead of into dishes. I guess the great luxury food product was S.S. Peirce in a can because it had this coat of arms on it. But that’s all changed. It’s wonderful. In any case, that was an early transition. For the first anniversary of Food and Wine, there were two elements to it which I think are really significant, in looking back. Well, first of all, let me explain. We saved this drowning promotion, a gastronomic promotion that had been half organized, as it turned out, between New Orleans, Louisiana, and France, and it was the old and the new France meeting. And Paul Prudhomme, who was known but not so widely known in those days and was an impressive figure, was the host chef in New Orleans, and they had signed on some rather young what would be called rising star chefs today, but nobody used that term then, to bring them to New Orleans. I think the great-grandson of Victor Hugo was involved in this, Pierre Hugo, and he was a silversmith and silver designer, and therefore he designed all these extravagant brochures for this thing and spent all their budget. So they were in terrible financial straits, and they thought that the whole thing was going to cave. We heard about this, and about Melvin Masters, who later had Jam’s restaurant—Melvin and Janie Masters, an English couple, he was a wine importer and a budding restaurant impresario, as was she, and were a really wonderful couple, and Melvin was involved in this and we got together with him. It was through Melvin and through Peter Meltzer, who was then our wine editor, who was still in his twenties, that we took it over for them so that they wouldn’t have total loss of face. It was called La Jeune Gastronomie-- young gastronomy. So we said, “Great. Let’s stage it in New York.” So we went to Werner Leroy, who had the Tavern on the Green, and we didn’t know Werner very well then, but he was extremely open to this idea of staging a kind of food festival there in honor of Food and Wine’s first birthday. And what we said was, “All right, we’ll expand the American chef list to include a woman.” We had been told about Alice Waters by both Jim Beard and Mary Frances Fisher. So we contacted Alice, and she said, yes, she would like to do that, the idea being that each one of the featured chefs would do either lunch or dinner over a period of three days, alternating with the French. Then we said, well, as Italian food was suddenly receiving the kind of recognition and respect that it hadn’t before, it was getting out of the red sauce ghetto of restaurants—Northern Italian, of course, was the phrase of the moment—we said, “We should have a great young Italian chef.” So Tony May, who was one of the principle founders of Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani, the Italian restaurateur group here to promote the image, to raise the image of Italian food in this country, which they did with enormous success over the years, particularly Tony. He recommended that we get Pierangelo Cornaru from Bergamo, who had just won the Cuocco D’Oro Prize that year, the Golden Chef Award in Italy, as the best young chef in all of Italy, and so he came. It was great. It was just wonderful. And so this was the first time that American chefs, meaning Paul and Alice, now who, of course, are icons both, but weren’t then, that they were cooking on an equal footing with the French chefs, with the Charvet brothers from Aix-en-Provence and Alain Dutournier from Paris and Pierangelo from Italy. And the American press assumed, along with everybody else, even the food press did, that of course because they were Europeans that they were going to be better. They came from a longer tradition and so forth. How could Americans really take the stage with them? Well, the Americans just blew them away, and the Europeans were absolutely shocked. Shocked. Shock and awe, when they saw what Paul and Alice did. Q: What was so special about what they were doing? Batterberry: Well, it was simply so good. It was so personal. It was so fully formed. One was Creole Cajun, much elevated through the prism of Paul’s cooking, and I remember what some of the things were to this day. I mean, he did a seafood sausage, a kind of andouille, with a buerre blanc sauce and that was the first course, and then he did beef with what he calls a debris sauce, which is made from the sort of semi-charred bits in the pan and so forth, wonderful [savory bitter] taste, not bittersweet. And then there were some cheeses, and then the [dessert] Cajun Cottages, which the pastry chef had made of chocolate. They looked like Li’l Abner shacks, and the roof was--you could lift the roof, and they were filled with small Creole strawberries that had been picked the day before. And then a waiter passed about with a warm liqueur sauce, and ladled over [the roofs] so that they melted, and the strawberries [peeked] through the chocolate. I was seated next to the young Italian Pierangelo Cornaru at that particular—these were black-tie dinners. We went all the way, and Werner had wonderful flowers on the tables, and we had a mixed group. People like Andy Warhol were there and so forth. It was a great New Yorker group. And he turned to me and he said, “Oh, like Vietnam,” when he saw this house melting under the napalm sauce. Anyway, I said, “Let’s not repeat that, please, at the table. Thank you.” Anyhow, the other element was that there was a reception for a thousand to kick this off, as a cocktail party with wines and spirits and all American hors d’oeuvres, which is to say 90 percent of them were American cheeses. [We’d met] a young man named Howard Solganik from Dayton, Ohio, who was in his early twenties and was a pioneer in terms of American food retailing. He had started a shop in Washington called the Georgetown Wine and Food Company, that was ahead of its time. It only lasted a couple of years. He had got into a used car and bounced around the country, all over the back roads, finding things that he thought that people who were stationed in Washington, who were from those different parts of the country, would be happy to find in D.C. So he had a wonderful catalog of places that he’d discovered. So all the cheeses were American. The press that we got was amazing. The Washington Post began—this was sheer luck—began its Sunday food section that weekend, and Bill Rice, who was the food editor then, came up to one of these meals and—I’ve forgotten, it had a very snappy headline he gave it, and they gave us the whole first page plus jump, reviewing this idea of American chefs [cooking on the same footing] with European chefs. Q: Who were the American chefs at that point? Batterberry: Aside from Paul and Alice? Q: I mean not necessarily here, but in general. Batterberry: Well, this is what we were able to introduce to the American public [in the magazine], really. We sort of pinpointed the ones in different parts of the country who were doing what was essentially the same thing. They were taking regional food and reinterpreting it by applying chef standards and techniques to what essentially was probably “mom’s cooking” in different parts of the country. [Or you could possibly call it] “tribal cooking.” The most numerous group was the Southwest one, and that was Mark Miller, Steven Piles, and Robert del Grande, and I guess Dean Fearing came a little later, John Sedler and Vincent Guerithault, who had Vincent on camelback, and Jean Louis Palladin had started it in Virginia by weaving his own network of suppliers in Amish country, Jamison lamb and so forth. Vincent told me that he was egged on by Jean Louis, who was everybody’s favorite. Jean Louis said to him, “You should do American Southwest!” And he said, “But I’m French. I don’t know what to do.” He said, “What should I do?” And [Vincent ] said, “Oh, allez, allez put foie gras in a chili.” [laughter] He said, “So I put foie gras in a chili. Everyone loved it.” But then he did his own things. Then in New England there was a group—I think the most prominent really is Jasper White. There was a group of them that worked at a hotel, Lydia Shire among them, and Jasper did the same thing with New England food. He made chowders sublime. I remember one of his first courses at his restaurant was Boston brown bread that was baked in a coffee tin and sliced. It was served to support essentially gravlox made out of Atlantic salmon, with heavy sour cream from a New England dairy, that kind of thing. It was Jasper who really championed the [New England] corn-fed hams and the corncob smoked hams. That was it. Q: This was 1979. Batterberry: Yes. Q: So these were not people who had gone to culinary school primarily. These were people who had entered food in different ways. Batterberry: Some of them went to culinary school. Some of them were the very first CIA grads. But numbers of them—I mean, Alice was an anthropologist. Mark Miller was an anthropologist. Robert del Grande has his doctorate in biochemistry, etc., etc. Anne Rosensweig, similarly was an anthropologist. Yes, because among the taboos that were being shattered along with gender taboos was the social taboo of becoming a chef, because I can’t tell you how many people thirty years ago would call me and say, “Oh, my son has just graduated from Brown, and now he says he wants to be a chef. Will you please talk to him?” Meaning would I please tell them not to be a chef. And I’d say, “If that’s what you expect me to say, don’t send him to me, because there’s a whole new world out there.” That was a huge change. You had educated people and, not to put too fine a point on it, people who came from comfortable backgrounds that [supported] them—they [may have] seen a lot of the world with their backpacks, but nevertheless, they had the wherewithal to travel. It was a very heady time. Q: All this was happening at a time when actually you couldn’t hold onto [Food and Wine] all that long, so that must have been somewhat disappointing. Batterberry: Oh, it was very disappointing in that respect. It certainly was. However, I’m still naïve enough to think all things happen for a reason. [laughs] And generally it’s true. Having to sell Food and Wine because our investors wanted their money back was, in a way, a long-term blessing in a way, because otherwise there would be no Food Arts, and essentially what Food Arts is, is a consumer magazine for professionals. It is a trade magazine, but it’s unlike anybody’s idea of what a trade magazine is meant to be. It’s not clangy. It’s just on a different level for professionals, people who have foreknowledge, which is a great blessing if you’re an editor or writer. You can assume that they already know a certain amount of things; you don’t have to start from scratch. That is the greatest challenge in food publishing for the general public: how do you reach the person who has been cooking all his or her life and those who have just come to it in the last months or years, without talking above or below heads. Q: Before we get to Food Arts, why don’t we talk about what happened in the in-between period after Food and Wine closed, and how you set up Batterberry Associates. Batterberry: Well, we had consulted. Sometimes I can’t even remember some of the people who received our infinite wisdom. I can, but, you know, I’d to think hard about it. It was a curious period because we had been contributors to different magazines. We had been on the masthead of Harper’s Bazaar, as I told you, as the contributing arts editors. Those roles gave us a sounder or a steadier footing as consultants in a curious way. We had a lot of colleagues in the publishing world, both in books and in magazines. We stayed abreast of what was going on in the industry in a way that we don’t anymore. Now we just focus on the magazine. We knew Charles Rollo, who was the senior editor at Time, Inc., and a very, very distinguished European Egyptian, and we used to see him socially. He called us and said there is this new project going on; it was Teletext. I believe that was Charles, because we did several things with Time, Inc. and Time Life, and that is how we came to meet Sean McCarthy, who has remained a very close friend—one of the great gifts to that was a very deep friendship—who was the director of the Teletext experiment. There was another man named Peter Gross, but Sean was really sort of the creative genius. Q: And what was this Teletext magazine intended to be? Batterberry: What it was, it was downloaded. There were sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen so-called magazines that were weeklies. By today’s Internet standards, they were extremely rudimentary, I mean, if not outright crude, but they were very good for the time. The colors were very limited. The palette was—I think there were only something like twenty-two hues that you could use. And it was downloaded from satellite. Q: Onto a television set? Batterberry: Yes, and they had identified a gizmo that the Japanese had developed, that could adapt any television set to make it a receptor. You had a little keypad, and once you were plugged into the system, whatever your TV set was functioned as your computer screen. So Time, Inc. thought, obviously as they were Time, Inc., that people would be using this new medium for news headlines and updates and finance, sports, weather, etc., all the obvious things. Q: This was when? Batterberry: This was in the early eighties, the early to mid eighties, started it. It was enormously expensive for them. I mean, it was a huge budget. This was at a time when there [turned out to be] a famous internecine war between print and new media. They had put aside a budget, I think of almost 200 million dollars, for a cable magazine, and then it turned out that not enough cable had been laid. It was jumping the gun. In any case, to get back, they had a twenty-three-hour newsroom with twenty-three hours a day updates, and on the twenty-fourth they slept, I guess, and all these different magazines for different interests. At the last minute, they said, “Ooh, we don’t have anything for the little lady. We don’t have any food, cooking for—,” so they in-house devised a publication. It was called Dining In. They weren’t happy. They knew that it needed help. So we were called in and we were shown what they had done, and indeed they needed help. They needed so much help that we looked at one another as if to say, “We can’t tell them all in one fell swoop what needs to be done here. We’ll simply call every couple of days, ‘Oh, and by the way, if you’re going to make those changes, you could do this.’” So after about ten days, they said, “Would you just come in and just do this?” And they gave us a budget, a nice budget to hire—we got Maurice Moore-Betty, who had a very good cooking school here, to develop the recipes, to test the recipes in his kitchen. Peter Meltzer did the wine pairings. It was subdivided into little features, if you would. One was Global Gourmet, food from around the world, a kind of international menu with some recipes. One was Health. One was Dining Alone, recipes for one, etc., etc. And so there were a number of these kind of subcategories. Q: What was the idea, that people might subscribe to the whole series? Batterberry: They were putting this in a test market in Orlando and San Diego for two years. The idea was then to roll it out nationwide. Q: And people would pay for it? Batterberry: Yes. What made it possible was the Japanese brought in the gizmo at an affordable price so they could supply you, if you were a subscriber to the service, with the adapter for your set. Q: It took an adapter to your own television set. Batterberry: Yes. You had to have this thing. It was almost like a cable box, only smaller, but in principle, it was a parallel to a cable box. Anyway, the Japanese swore that they could bring it in for a certain price. Well, as this progressed, the Japanese said, “No. As a matter of fact, it’s going to cost more and more and more.” Then there was a confluence of factors. They tested it for well over a year, spent millions of dollars on this, and to their dismay, in a way, they found that of all these different magazines they had up, there were only three that the people who were using the services wanted to see more of and used frequently, and the top one. Because this was at the time when electronic games were at their first fever pitch-- they had devised electronic games for different attention spans and so forth, so electronic games, I believe, was number one. Number two was food, and three was—makes no difference. The top three were games, food, and what was lumped together as entertainment. There was everything from movie and television listings, to movie reviews and book reviews and celebrity gossip and so forth. All the other stuff was way down in the middle, but, you know, people said, “Fine,” but they weren’t really using it. They weren’t using the news in the way that Time, Inc. believed was their strength. So this, combined with the cable magazine burning through half of their initial budget in one year, a lot of these different things conspired. They said, “Okay, we have to shelve it.” But it certainly reassured us about the public interest in food, and we also got name chefs on board. At this time, Ariane and I had an idea, “Okay. Let’s do something called The Living Cookbook, and we will collect recipes.” Is this taking too long? Q: No. Batterberry: Essentially I was able to do something that they hadn’t done before at Time. [We were curious as to] why people would be looking at this on a screen if they could look at a newspaper or a magazine. Something had to happen that couldn’t happen on a piece of paper of an interactive nature. So I said, “Let’s break recipes into little bites,” if you will. I always use the example of the lattice-top rhubarb pie. Now, a lot of people know how to make a lattice top; a lot of people don’t. So if you didn’t know, you pressed a certain number and you got a simulated animation which was done by an animation artist, of how you made the strips and criss-crossed them and so forth. Similarly, if it said “trim rhubarb” and you didn’t know what that meant, you pressed a corresponding number and you saw the leaves and the poisonous parts being eliminated. And some of them were fun. I mean, peeling garlic, it went “Bam!” [when slammed by a knife blade ] and so on. People loved watching these things. They watched them just to watch them, even if they weren’t going to cook, and kids loved watching [these little animated demos]. I said, “We have to do this and we have to not start scrolling from the top again.” Everything was still sort of rudimentary. You have to be able to get right back where you left off, or otherwise people are going to get mad. [None of Time’s] young space cadets wanted to develop new things [with the equipment at hand], they just wanted new toys, and said, “No, we can’t do that.” I said, “Do it. Please, just do it.” They were able to do it. Well, of course it had applications across the boards for all the other magazines for getting in and out and back again. But it was the most entertaining and practical for the food one. So having learned that, and that people really responded, I mean, they did multi-million-dollar tests for us. We went to Craig Claiborne and James Beard, and essentially they were willing to give us their life work for electronic reproduction if we could get this together. But it was too soon. They were too old. You know, it wasn’t going to happen in their lifetime, really. But nevertheless, they agreed to that, and we spoke to Milton Glaser to see if he would entertain the idea of possibly designing it. Well, I don’t think he was that interested, but he was interested in what we were doing and in hearing about it. This slowly evolved. I cannot remember the details of this. There was a young man who was with one of the—oh, what do you call them? Sort of the news service, the syndicators, column syndicators, who was a whiz kid in this brand-new computer field. Mark Burns was his name. We got together and he told us about what the possibilities were in computerized media, and we told him about our idea for this Living Cookbook, because we thought, you know, if you had all the techniques in the world accumulated in one service, you could simply adapt any recipe of anyone’s collected wherever to that kind of system. So this grew into—then we have a Chinese friend, a brilliant younger friend named Kimball Chen, whose father was in petroleum transport and he was very, very secure and had good financial connections. Kimball was very interested in electronic media of all sorts and electronic businesses, computerized businesses. And so we came up with another thing, but it grew from that. Oh, in the meantime, I’ve completely forgot, Mort Persky, whom I told you about, who had been my guru over at Playboy, was involved in a company—I can’t even remember the name of it. It was Sears and CBS and somebody else, and they were up in White Plains, I think, and they were getting into computerized media and there was a food element to it. So we were brought in as consultants to that, contributing consultants. Then we got to this next thing, and what do we call it? Teletext. That was Teletext. The other one was—Ariane I have to ask. This is awful, because we spent two years on it. The idea was to install in supermarkets an electronic food magazine that would give recipes every week, and some of them would be tied into coupons, and you’d be able to touch-screen the recipes you wanted, and out would come the coupons that would help you save money on reproducing that recipe. Q: That’s amazing. Batterberry: And we went to [financier] Jimmy Goldsmith, who then was the Grand Union’s tycoon, among others. He thought it was very interesting. We were out there doing this, but at the same time Food Arts was—I have to work backwards, because Food Arts came out in’88, but it took us three and a half years to get the money, so it was in the middle of 1984 that we started, really. I put together the editorial plan. Ariane put together the business plan. Q: Before we get there, you mentioned James Beard and Craig Claiborne being willing to work with you on this. Beard was a friend of yours, but you had also worked with him on your Good Living project. What was that and when was that? Batterberry: Good Living was—all these kind of things washed on the same shore. That was about 1982 or ’83. It was immediately after Food and Wine, and, yes, we interviewed Jim in his house. That was filmed by the Maysles brothers. Q: What were you filming him doing? Batterberry: Oh, demos, chatting. I have a lot of stuff that never made into that edited half hour, because it was all so—there was Jim, there was Paul Prudhomme and Martha Stewart. He did a demo of a flank steak, as I recall, marinating and cutting it. He did a couple of simple demos in his kitchen, and we talked about food and things that he liked, and what would be his favorite simple meal, that old chestnut of a question. But it was a large can of caviar and a bottle of frozen vodka and fresh blini and drawn butter, that kind of thing, and it was charming. And then you got a little bit of a look at his house. Q: And what was the idea for the Good Living films? Batterberry: Good Living was about living well, with the emphasis on food and drink, and people who lived well, who cooked well. Martha showed how she stenciled the floors as well as she did a cooking demo. She carved a red cabbage into a container for a dip for crudité and that sort of thing, and she made a fresh sweet mustard sauce, that kind of thing. Q: But you were working exclusively with Beard or with all three of them? Batterberry: All three. They were all three in it [each on location, in Greenwich Village, Louisiana, and Connecticut]. Q: And the idea for this Good Living series was as films that would be distributed? Batterberry: [Yes, this was the pilot for a series]. We were taken on by Public Television at the behest of a man named Jerry Toobin, who was head of Channel 13 here. Channel 13 took it for thirteen months, appropriately. It was handled by a couple of different outlets. Charleston took it on, and they kept saying, “Oh, don’t worry about this. It took us three years to get the money for our series on China.” We never flagged. We were determined to do it because we had to raise over $100,000 to do the pilot, and most of that money came from Marline, who had been one of our investors in Food and Wine, and they were loyal to us. Q: And your role in this pilot was as producers? Batterberry: Producers, and we were on screen, interviewing. Q: Was the film shown as the pilot? Batterberry: It was tested. It was tested by Vic Media, and it was tested in New Orleans and Boston and several places, and it got very, very good ratings, very good ratings, but the problem was that it was film, not video, all on location, and very expensive. And we didn’t want to do just one interview per segment. The idea was to do three. It probably would have been best with just two, but it went on and on and on, and Public Television kept saying, “Oh yes. Don’t lose heart.” Well, at a certain point we were really tired of raising money. We said if we were raising money, let’s raise money for something that’s definitely going to happen, and so we were pursuing Food Arts at the same time. Q: Tell me how that came about, Food Arts, or what your idea was for it. Batterberry: Well, to go back to what you asked me about, were we disappointed, some of the other magazines began to do a few more things about chefs, but nobody was doing something for the food world itself, as a publication, that had the style that you associate with the restaurant world. We had a lot of professional readers of Food and Wine, who said to us—now mind you, I really like what Dana Cowan does with Food and Wine now. I think she’s done a terrific job. But it really tottered along for a while because they dumbed it down after we went our way. Q: So your idea for Food Arts was? Batterberry: Food Arts…We knew there were trade publications. We had never really investigated them. We’d never been in the trade field. We simply assumed that someone had to be doing a magazine that answered the interests of this broad sweep of people who were now in the food, hospitality, whatever, worlds, where what they had in common was they all fail or succeed on the quality and popularity of their food. Well, there wasn’t one. We looked at them, and they tried to be all things. They would pay lip service to what is called, in the trade jargon, you know, table service—but didn’t, not really. Who cared how many chicken nuggets had sold last month? There were charts and that sort of thing. It certainly wasn’t of interest to the readers that we knew were there, because we knew them. We knew many of them. So we made a magazine for them. Q: And this was the late eighties? Batterberry: It was the late eighties when it finally came out, but we started it— I drew up the editorial. Ariane and I had the dummy done a couple years before. So it was mid eighties. Q: And the state of restaurants in general at that time was healthy? Batterberry: Yes, you could see it was growing. It was nothing like it became, but more and more young intelligent people were going into the field who wouldn’t have one generation before, and this was true of the hotel world as well as the restaurant world. Q: So when you drew up the plan for the magazine, it was generally what? Batterberry: In what sense? Q: It was for the people in the food world, people in the hospitality business? Batterberry: It was for chefs, restaurateurs, high-volume caterers, which is to say hotel dining, banquet departments, cruise lines, resorts. The first whiff of good food was coming out of casinos, etc. There is quite a little universe. Q: It was a very new idea, though, wasn’t it, to take essentially what could have been a trade magazine and present it as a real magazine? Batterberry: Totally. Oh, and the competition. The people who were already in it. The other magazines had all started as various fast-food magazines, with the exception maybe of one, and they tried to push us out immediately by painting us as elitist, as if, you know, our only readers were, you know, Sirio at Le Cirque. Well, no. Our readers serve between 13 to 14 billion meals a year. Q: Currently? Batterberry: Yes, and that’s been for quite a while. For us, what defines trade, what defines our readership, is that they all have table service and wine and spirits. Q: And what other kinds of features were you envisioning? Batterberry: What we do now. I mean, if you look at the dummy now, it’s amazingly like—it really is an outline for Food Arts today. All the things that we know, that we talk about when we’re with our friends in the business. Where have you been traveling? What was going on? Who’s the hot new chef in Malaga? What’s the latest equipment that really has ramifications for the future? What are the design trends? Let’s talk about food history, tabletop, drink. And above all, though, we like scoops, pointing to the new things as they happen and being the first there to tell them. On the strength of that, for a while Ariane and I did a quarterly column for USA Today based on what was in Food Arts in terms of trends. Q: This was really a long time ago, in a way, and it’s lasted consistently and grown since then. Batterberry: Oh yes. But I’ll tell you some of the things that weren’t initially there. Certainly health and nutrition was not, because everybody thought a nutritionist was somebody with a hairnet, you know. We just didn’t think that was for us; that was more for an institutional magazine. Well, no. And agriculture. A number of people said to us, “Aren’t you committing publishing suicide by talking about things that might be at odds with food manufacturers? Are you going to alienate advertisers?” That was just a risk we had to take. We said, “Look. We’re not slamming them. We’re simply saying this is a movement.” It wasn’t called sustainability then. Organics had been around since the late sixties, and we didn’t stress that so much, but whenever somebody bought a farm on the outskirts of town, whether it was [a restaurateur like] Gordon Sinclair in Chicago or whoever, yes, that was of interest. And endangered seafood, etc. And so we began cover that in a way and skirting the politics of food. And certainly the person who gave me the courage to do that more was Gus Schumacher. Having him, number one, as an advisor and his having been the Under Secretary of Agriculture under Clinton’s administration, having his knowledge, plus his knowledge of the world through the World Bank and agricultural policy around the world and needs. He’s on our masthead as our agriculture contributing editor. Who else has that? No one. Q: How did you meet Gus? Batterberry: We met Gus back in the eighties through Tiziana and Hugh Hardy, the architect. They have a country place in Massachusetts. Gus was then the Commissioner of Agriculture of the State of Massachusetts, and Tiziana Hardy raises exotic poultry and is very interested in proper farming, etc. The Hardys had met Gus a number of times, and we met at a Sunday lunch there and struck up an acquaintanceship, and then this is something that grew. To me it was so interesting. I had never been in contact with someone of his sort of august office, if you will, in federal government. He wasn’t federal government. What am I saying? But, you know, the Commissioner of Agriculture, that was just out of my circle. Mine was more culinary and literary. So I was delighted. Q: And, of course, he had come from a farm background. Batterberry: He came from a farm background, and he knows the world and he’s very wise and has this burning need to help farmers, to help to keep the small farm system going, whether it’s by helping new waves of immigrants find farmland and integrate them into the local communities, etc., or what. So what eventually happened was, what really turned me on about Gus was that he had started this program. He freely admitted he didn’t know anything about restaurants and chefs, except that he liked them. There were a lot of small farms that were failing in Massachusetts in the eighties, and as the Commissioner of Ag, he felt, well, why not try and get the two together and see if we can weave some sort of mutual support system. Apparently it was very awkward at first, the first couple of meetings, but then it took. It was such a paradigm, a sort of template, and so easy to copy if you have the stamina and the will to see it through. Then we didn’t see each other for a number of years, until I heard he was in Washington with Clinton, and we had lunch. I won’t go through the whole thing, but it was clear that we were still very much on the same wavelength. I said, “Gus, why not—” He had an organization then that was federally funded, called the Immigrant Farmers Initiative, which was, as I just said, to place immigrants or help immigrants find farm positions or land. With Food Arts we could broadcast this to a whole country of chefs, encouraging them to support the local farm systems and sort of follow his lead, and would he be interested in doing this through Food Arts. So this is how we came together, and we decided to drop “immigrant” from it and call it the New American Farmer Initiative, so as to include women. Then I got Michel Nischan, who was the chef at the W [hotel] at Heartbeat, cooking healthy food that didn’t have little asterisks all over it, he became the host chef for that and we started a project, the three of us together, in New York bringing the food of immigrant farmers from Massachusetts to New York restaurateurs—chefs, rather, which was very, very hard. Q: It was hard, as I recall, because the distribution was one of the major problems. Batterberry: Absolutely. Even things like parking a van outside for too long if you were delivering something. But nevertheless, it was successful enough to keep the ball rolling and the organization rolling ahead, and Gus was able to get some Endowment funding for it. Then it’s changed its name and it now has evolved into Wholesome Wave. Q: The initiative? Batterberry: Yes. Q: Wholesome Wave being the foundation? Batterberry: I believe Gus’ title is chairman now, and Michel is the President—I don’t know how it goes, the titles exactly. I can find out. Q: But the idea behind the foundation is what? Batterberry: It is to make local farm food available to people who would not be able to afford it otherwise. It is to integrate into local school systems, colleges, etc. The latest development, which is really so promising, even in this difficult economic era, period, they are getting some solid funding for it. I’m on the board. I think we’re having a board meeting soon to see how this latest development is faring, which essentially it is doubling the value of food stamps when used in farmers’ markets. This idea has resonated with a lot of philanthropic groups whom I see supporting Wholesome Wave into its next stage. Q: How much of this kind of activity were you able to have written about in the magazine? Batterberry: Oh, we did drip, drip, drip, drip, you know, like drip coffee. I think a major story every once in a while is needed on whatever subject you think is deserving. However, I do believe in repetition, just showing different facets of a subject that people don’t know enough about and should know more. Rather than slamming them over the head with something preachy, is to give them—all right, and then give them some serious, such as the article that you wrote. Q: This is unusual material, nevertheless, to put in a magazine. The magazine essentially was supported by your advertisers, yes? Batterberry: Right. Q: And the advertisers obviously were not small farmers. Did you have any difficulty with that? Batterberry: Far fewer incidents than I ever would have dreamed, because what it is now, now it’s an issue of sustainability. It’s all part of the bigger picture. Everybody wants to get on board. Last year when we did that special issue, the special report on the state of food and sustainability, we had a special advertising section in which advertisers could describe their positive efforts and activities in response to sustainability. Q: This is a pretty big shift in thinking from when you first started certainly Food and Wine. I don’t know if it shifted your thinking, but in terms of advertisers and readers. Batterberry: Well, the huge change, and this is what we’ve also drip, drip, drip, dripped over the years, is that the chefs now make the decisions. Chefs didn’t make decisions in earlier generations of policy nature or what equipment they were buying. This was in the hands of the owners or whoever else, and they really were not treated with enough respect. That’s totally changed, and advertisers, rightfully, want to know the chefs and the restaurateurs because they understand that those are the people who make the purchasing decisions. It’s a completely leveled playing field. Q: So to the point of view of money, in terms of getting out the magazine, do you have any difficulty getting enough from advertisers? Batterberry: Oh, advertising is always a challenge, that famous euphemism. The last few weeks, as an example, serves as an example. We have the goodwill of the advertising community because Food Arts as a magazine, as a publication, generates goodwill. We talk about the positive. I believe firmly in showing what works rather than sniping at what doesn’t, because it’s more useful information, not candy-coating anything. We have a conference that we do now every year with the Culinary Institute of America out at Graystone in California, which is for F and B directors of major hotel chains, cruise lines, and so forth, with wonderful speakers and involves a bit of culinary in terms of tastings, but it has to do with subjects of common concern and interest to all of them. Some advertisers sponsor this because they want to meet these people. So everybody benefits from it. And similarly at the restaurant show in Chicago, we just had our eleventh annual fundraising barbecue with S.O.S., Share Our Strength, fighting hunger, and we, at this point, have in the past ten years raised well over a million dollars for them by bringing sponsors. Sponsors can have stands at this barbecue, which is billed as a competition. It’s a very friendly competition. It’s fun. People love this party, and it’s only open to chefs and restaurateurs and hotel operators. So, again, advertisers love to be sponsors for this, and to be sponsors they’re advised also to give. Usually it’s $10,000 to S.O.S., as well as setting up a booth with chefs and so forth, as a contribution to the party itself. Food Arts is a player, and our readers know—this sounds fatuous, but it’s true—our readers know we love them, that we really respect and like them, that it’s almost like a club journal. Q: When it started, though, would you have envisioned that sustainability, hunger, issues like that would have been part of your mix? Batterberry: No, I did not. We did not. Q: So that’s been one of the really big changes. Batterberry: Huge. Huge. Certainly we didn’t foresee speaking about health issues so openly either, gender issues, social issues, diversity. Ten years ago we had a [racially] diversity cover shot in Washington, and I’m so gratified, enormously gratified by that that things had developed in such a way that maybe we can part of that and promote the proper things. Q: There’s something else that’s changed somewhat over the years is the James Beard Foundation. I’m not quite sure to what extent you’ve been involved in that. Batterberry: Well, this is a very difficult subject for me in a way. I’m all for the Beard Foundation. I declined to be on the board twice, under two different regimes, for a very simple reason, that I think some people find difficult to grasp or even believe, and that is the people who aspire to Beard Awards feel that you have some magical inside track if you’re officially connected to the Foundation itself. And when we were judges, I was very uncomfortable with the number of times I was approached by people--that really surprised me, who some of them were—asking didn’t I know the way to get a nomination or so forth and so on, and I would say, “Look. No. This is all above board. This is how it’s done.” Numbers of people don’t believe that. This is a challenge to the Beard Foundation. And, of course, it didn’t help having the scandal. Ariane and I feel very strongly that in a way that Len Pickell took a fall for a number of people in that he wasn’t alone in sort of grandiose travel program and so forth, you know, finding people for the Beard House, but I don’t want to go there. It’s over with. Dorothy Hamilton did a very good job of scooping it up with Thomas Keller and a few others, and that’s when they asked me to be part of that, and I said, “No. Please understand that we’ll do whatever we can at Food Arts to say positive things about [and support] the Beard Foundation, report who won the significant awards and so forth.” Q: The Foundation was originally set up to keep James Beard’s name alive, but it’s come to represent different things now of a larger empire. Batterberry: Well, Julia Child—yes. Barbara Kafka was in on it, was very close to Jim. Barbara didn’t stay there very long. I don’t speak ill of the dead, but Peter Kump, he did many positive things for the industry, but Jim would spin in his grave, because the one thing he loathed was being exploited. And there were a number of people—you should hear Jeremiah Tower on the subject—you know, who suddenly were Jim’s best friends. Afterwards Jeremiah said, “Well, it’s amazing I never saw them there at dinner.” Exaggerated intimacy and discernable personal gain. Q: Nevertheless the Beard Awards do represent certain stature in the industry. Batterberry: They do [most certainly]. Q: And I wonder how you feel about having them in the name of James Beard, how appropriate is that? Batterberry: Oh, I think that he would love it, really, truth to be told. Sure he would. He loved good restaurants. He loved being part of the scene, and he was good at it. I mean, he was a sought-after consultant I mean, the Four Seasons [et al]. Q: And in the overall, if you had to pick one person to be representative of this, the good things of this industry, does it make sense to have him— Batterberry: Yes. Q: —I mean, the energy and— Batterberry: Yes, it makes—you know, he was a shaman. He’s from Oregon. He’s a man of the world. Oh, how he would have loved to have been part of the Obama age. I mean, absolutely. He was such a staunch Democrat. He and Ariane would go on for hours about Democratic policy to what was happening, Democratic Party gossip. He loved a lot of different things. He loved the arts. I can’t think of anybody better, certainly. I do think that Craig Claiborne is tragically underestimated and forgotten now, because I think he contributed hugely to the progress of food in this country, too. Q: Through the cookbooks? Batterberry: Through the cookbooks and I think it was Craig who established modern food journalism. Q: And that’s a subject for another time. Thank you, Michael. [End of interview] Batterberry 2 - PAGE 1