One person, one vote: help small farmers train at Le Cordon Bleu
I met Junru last year, when the Bird Architecture Crew was building a bird's nest at the Agricultural Expo. In the final week, Junru came from Nan'ao to our bird's nest to help build a house using natural building methods, and along the way he cooked lunch for us. From the look on his face as he cooked, it was immediately clear that he took complete joy in cooking, and even more joy in letting people taste the food he had prepared.
Yet for me, a truly good chef is not just that. He must also be able to read the voice of the ingredients, and a chef's most important job is to find a way to convey the voice of the ingredients to people.
Junru may not be a chef who grew up trained as a professional chef, but he is absolutely a cook skilled at listening to ingredients, because he is also the farmer who cultivates them. In today's society, how many chefs can keep company with their ingredients from the very moment they are born, all the way until they become dishes that people eat?
I am very much looking forward to sending a natural-farming farmer who works with the most environmentally friendly methods and the most caring attitude toward the land to Le Cordon Bleu. A chef who clearly knows the past and future of his ingredients, and who is also a farmer, is exactly what Taiwan, in the midst of its food safety chaos, needs most right now, isn't he?
Now Junru has a chance to go abroad to study culinary arts, and all that stands in the way is your vote and mine! Below is what Junru wrote about his thoughts on cooking. Please join us in sending a small farmer to Le Cordon Bleu!
I want to gather everyone's support for their passion for cooking to help me get into Le Cordon Bleu to study
By Junru
If I were to describe in detail my love for cooking, I would probably have to start from when I was very, very small.
I remember that when I was four years old, I liked to grab a little stool, and ignoring the adults who said it was dangerous, I insisted on squeezing into the kitchen to watch my grandmother make one dish after another.
At ten, I still did not know how to turn on the gas stove, but I commandeered the grill plate the adults had not yet put away after the Mid-Autumn Festival, along with a bowl of rice and an egg, and that became my first cooking experience.
In sixth grade, I became obsessed with making cakes (actually, with whipping egg whites). Whenever a holiday came, I would hug a bowl of egg whites and whisk and whisk with a whisk, yet I never understood why they would not whip up.
After going through the heavy schoolwork of junior high, senior high and university, I had almost forgotten my love of cooking. It was only after leaving school and coming to the countryside of Nan'ao Township, where ingredients are never in short supply and where there is always someone to eat up everything you cook, that I picked up my spatula again and built up my confidence. Not only the home-style dishes I used to make often, but all kinds of handmade noodle dishes became common items on the table.
Later I carried my spatula everywhere, to Nan'ao Natural Farm, Bird Architecture, Haoban, Backpacker Dog, Shike Travel Stay, Hushan, the tribes of Hsinchu and many friends' homes. As long as there was a kitchen and ingredients, cooking for everyone was something that made me happy and made everyone else happy too.
Thinking back, the friends who have eaten my cooking must number in the thousands by now. You are the footprints of my cooking. No certificate or license is needed as proof; you have witnessed my love for cooking.
Now I want to gather the strength of all of you friends who have eaten my cooking.
If you have eaten my cooking and identify with my passion for it, then from today until October 5, one vote per person per day could send me to that overseas temple of cuisine, Le Cordon Bleu, to continue my study of and passion for cooking, to let me become the person I want to be, so that one day I can have the power to achieve my dream.
Whether as a farmer or as a chef, my dream is simply to let more friends and more children understand the beauty of real food, to no longer eat over-processed foods, and to no longer eat chemically flavored foods. That is all.
Please, everyone!
How to vote: after clicking the link (http://www.lecordonbleu.tw/video-14-23), please press "Vote for him" at the bottom left of the screen.
Let me tell you a little secret: I want to thank my grandmother. I grew up watching my grandmother cook and eating my grandmother's cooking (however many years I have lived is however many years I have eaten it). If not for that kind of immersion, I probably would not be able to make delicious dishes. In the end, this is a kind of culinary inheritance, the inheritance of the taste memories of childhood.