Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and adamized studios.
I remember vividly going to the Palace a fantastic meal. I've had many such meals, especially when I was Vice president, Formal banquets in China and the Great Hall of the People. I don't think I've had an Italian state dinner. I wish I had.
Vice president for I really please that you're here, and that you're in Tennessee and I'm in London. We're going to find a connection. Do you cook?
I don't. I've been pretty much a vegan for eight years now. I occasionally supplement it with some sustainable seafood. But yes, I don't consider myself a great cook Ruthie by any stretch of the imagination. But during the pandemic, make like a lot of people, I picked up a few new skills just because the chance to go out to restaurants was foreclosed, and I'm surrounded by a lot of fresh food here at the farm. So yeah, I've done my best. And do your children cook, Yes, they do.
They're all good cooks, including my son, my youngest, who learned cooking from his grandmother. My mother. I remember when he was quite young, she taught him how to make bread. She had her own bread recipe that was just absolutely delicious, coming hot straight out of the oven, and he loved it so much that he got her to teach him how to make it. But yes, all the others do as well. I would say they're good cooks.
They are they vegan as well.
No they're not, but they've cut back on red meat for sure.
You've chosen we've chosen together a recipe for the soup Papa pomodoro. Then I think you might have had it the last summer that you were in the River Cafe. So would you like to read the recipe for Papa alpalmadoro.
Four kilograms of ripe plum tomatoes peeled, seated and chopped. Two garlic cloves sliced, two hundred and fifty milli liters of olive oil, one stale sour dough loaf, crust removed, one large bunch of fresh basil leaves torn, Heat three tablespoons of olive oil in a saucepan. Add the garlic and fried gently. Then add the tomatoes. Simmer for thirty minutes,
stirring occasionally, until the sauce is thick season well. Add six hundred milliliters of water and bring to a boiled Add the bread cut into chunks, and stir until the bread of sorbs the liquid cool slightly, adding more water if necessary. Stir the basil into the soup with the remaining olive oil. And this dish is best served at room temperature.
I know what I like about this recipe. I like the fact that it's only made in the summer, when the tomatoes are right, It only has four ingredients, and it has such a simple taste of Italy. It reminds me of Italy. I was thinking about the way. One of the other things about Italian food is that it is so regional, and if you're in Tuscany, you eat something that you probably would never have if you were in Naples and in Venice, you might have a risotta
that nobody in Pulia would have heard of. And I was thinking that about Southern food. Because you grew up between Washington and Tennessee, between a hotel and a farm.
That is exactly right. Every single year of my life I went back and forth. My father was in the US House of Representatives when I was born, had been for ten years and went to the Senate when I was four years old, And so we went back and forth. As soon as there was a spring vacation or a Christmas vacation, off we would go driving back to Tennessee. Yeah, it was quite a contrast to enjoy the food on the farm and fresh from the garden and then go back to the old Fairfax Hotel in Washington, d C.
Owned by a distant cousin. But the food in Washington, d C. Was quite different from that in Tennessee. But in my mother's kitchen it was pretty much the same in both locations.
How did she cook in the hotel? I have this image of being a kind of eloise in the plaza and ordering room service. Would you have family meals in the hotel? Or was it an apartment at hotel?
It was a small apartment, two bedrooms. My sister and I shared a bedroom, one bathroom in the entire apartment, a small kitchen. It did have a dining area and a living room, and that was it. It was a very small apartment. I don't really ever remember, believe it or not. I really don't ever remember getting room service.
Because now we equate room service with the hotels. Would do your mother cook? Who cooked in your house?
My mother was a good cook. She was a lawyer, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School back in the nineteen thirties. My sister, when she got older, was a good cook as well. I remember one time when my mother and my sister both went on a tear competitively making sioux FLEs. They just became entranced with the whole notion. And for several weeks I would come home from school and there would be a one or two different small suit there.
Sounds good to me and nice thing to come home to. And then going down to the farm. So was that well, talk about the farm, but also Southern cooking because being an American like you, and you think about the identity, you know there may be Midwestern food, or there's specific Northwest food or upstate New York food. Would you say that going to Tennessee there was a kind of real basis of food from the South.
Fried chicken and barbecue, fresh vegetables. We would pay attention to when the new corn was ready, when the vegetables were coming in, and we had a big garden on the farm. My grandmother also had a garden which she worked in pretty much constantly, and she canned food. I don't remember ever eating any of her canned food, but she was of the generation that really prepared for what might come by canning lots of food in her cellar, and I would help her occasionally. But Southern food has
changed over time, very influenced by Black American recipes. I don't know that the full credit for Southern cuisine that should go to Black Americans has been widely understood, but it certainly is the case nowadays. Of course, Nashville Hot Chicken is a distinctive brand that has gone far and wide. Barbecue is still identified with the South, and Tennessee takes a lot of pride and it's barbecue. I had a
barbecue team when I was in the US Senate. Every year they have a huge barbecue contest in Memphis, Tennessee. It's a wonderful content.
How many how much you can ort, how delicious it is, What do you think was the well?
The judges primarily graded on taste, but the presentation was a factor. But I was in the Senate, so the point of it was not necessarily to win the contest, but to meet all the people who came by.
Well, that is food as a connection, you know, because on the farm, when you talk about the corn coming and eating it right away, and the probably the potatoes, all the produce from the farm is one of the
great luxuries of life. If you can eat a potato when it's just been dug up, if you can have I grew up in upstate New York and we didn't have a farm, but we always knew that if we were having the corn for lunch, we'd buy it in the morning, and if we were having it for dinner we'd have it we'd buy it late afternoon from the farm store. Was that sense of the immediacy of farming and cooking. Do you think that is something that has
stayed with you? And now you have the farm, don't you You changed it radically.
Yes, the family farm is now my farm, and starting a eight years ago, I converted it to a regenerative agriculture farm. We also have livestock. I'm a vegan cattle farmer. They are not many of us, but rotational grazing, where you manage the livestock in cooperation with the vegetables and fruits, really is an effective way to make the soil healthier and make the farm successful. You know, regenerative agriculture is a farmer lad movement, and it has also led to
some new food chains. We sell at farmers' markets and we sell to local chefs in Nashville, and we have several hundred boxes each week that go through a program called Community Supported Agriculture, and we deliver the boxes so we give twenty five percent of them to the food Bank in Nashville, particularly during the hard times of the pandemic. It's a connection that I established when I was a boy.
Every summer of my life I worked on this farm and really developed quite an attachment to it, and then moved back to Nashville and to the farm which is outside of Nashville when I made a transition into the business world involuntarily, but I've really enjoyed it a great deal.
We opened the River Cafe after being closed for four months. It was very emotional. You know, people connect, you know. I would say, if you go down the list, you would say, of course, you know, education, schools, they would say, libraries, you would say healthcare. You would say, there were so many priorities in the city. But what has been very moving to me. Is how important going to a restaurant is. It's not just the food, it's connecting with your friends.
It's sitting at a table and being able to focus on who you're with and the conversation. As a child, let's go back to the beginning when you were growing up. Was going to a restaurant a special occasion?
Yes, it was a special occasion. But in Carthage, Tennessee, the restaurants and cafes were really more basic like diners more or less meet and three. Do you have that expression in London? A meet and three where you go through a cafeteria line. But it was always fun. We would go after church to the city Cafe in Carthage, Tennessee every week.
That would be part of the tradition that you would go to a cafe after church. That's very nice.
And what I look for now in a restaurant is a place with wonderful food first of all, and a wonderful ambiance and a good feeling and wonderful friends that you make over the years. There is something special about it. And I have become close friends with quite a few
of the chefs in Nashville. Nashville is becoming a foody city and there are a lot of really great chefs that have come and every year here at the farm, I have a conference in the fall after the harvest called the Climate Underground Conference, which looks at the health of the soil, the economic health of the farmers and
the chefs. And of course during the pandemic, a lot of restaurants have struggled so much, but the chefs that have become friends over the years have really stepped up to provide food for populations in the community that really fell on hard times during the year twenty twenty and in many communities it's a remarkable development that chefs became a new variety of superhero. There are many of them that filled the breach and fed people that were hungry and somehow made it all work.
Yeah. I think that here as well, and certainly in my own restaurant with the young chefs. There's so many initiatives that we did with food banks. We have a hospital very near us and we were cooking for the doctors in the hospital, and I think it really gave us all someone You know, how fortunate we are that way have a skill can be used for a social purpose.
And I think that food as politics. You know, there's very little separation, is that between what we're all trying to do and to make the world a better place. But I think it is interesting the way how a government and how society looks at feeding the people who need help.
Absolutely, and there are so many of these so called food deserts in communities black and brown and indigenous communities where you might get a kind of a gas station that has a mart by it that sells slim gems, some kind of jerky and snacks and food that's not very healthy for you. And there has been a growing recognition in those communities and others that we would all benefit by developing a healthier connection to the sources of our food and paying more attention to the way it's
harvested and prepared. And where schools are concerned, I have partnered with Alice Waters, so I'm sure you know in Berkeley, and one of her programs is called the Edible Schoolyard, which has gone beyond the pilot phase and is now being expanded into the University of California system and in school districts around the country to educate children in school about gardening and about growing food and preparing food and moving past this era when people thought food came from
the grocery store and didn't give any thought beyond that. And of course it's so much better and healthier in every way when people take responsibility for eating enough fresh vegetables and fruits, and cutting back on meat consumption and really paying attention to the health of the meals they consume.
Especially children. I remember Longo walking down the street in Paris and there was an outside in coal maternel, which is a you know, a nursery school for children probably between three and five, and they had the menus for the week, and it was so moving to see that they started with a salary remolague and then they had a suit to pois soon I mean, really quite sophisticated and tasteful and thought out food, and then a main course, and they even had for these little kids a cheese course,
you know, and then a fruit and I thought that was a glimpse. I took a photograph of the way society values and educates the children that are growing up. That says a mark of their priorities. And I know that we have hope now for advancing that with Alice, and we actually cook every year in her benefit in New York. And again, you know, she's a force, she's a phenomenon, and we all just needed to work on I think, you know, poverties education food. What was food
like in the White House? Because my knowledge of the White House was watching the West Wing and seeing Toby and all these guys go down to the Kent team, and I was wondering, did you work over food? Would you entertain and talk about policies over food or was it quite a separate thing over sandwich?
I would say it was mostly separate, but it was not at all uncommon to work over meals. And former President Clinton and I had a weekly luncheon just the two of us that was never missed on the schedule. And the food, I have to say, was excellent. You know, each president or first Lady, I guess the proper analog would be first gentleman when we have a woman present.
Traditionally first ladies have picked the White House chef. And during the years when I worked as Vice President in the White House, so food was excellent.
And do you think going back to the farm and sustainability and your work on climate change and your books and your writing and your constant campaigning for trying to save our planet. Would you tell me more about how you see the sustainability and what we can do. I thought it was impressive that you said it's not it doesn't have to be placed as a burden on the individual, which I think we all want to share that responsibility.
But that on policy, which is what we all look towards, is how can the policies that you've established on your farm, how does that policy reach a global network a larger audience.
Well, agriculture can be one of the biggest solutions to the climate crisis. It cannot solve it by itself, for sure, and the main task is to stop burning all the fossil fuels. So we are putting more than one hundred and sixty million tons of man made global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day. But it was not until nineteen fifty that the majority of the greenhouse gases the
global warming pollution came from something other than farming. And it was not until the nineteen seventies until the majority of the accumulated global warming pollution was no longer from agriculture.
What happened was, in part the use of heavy plowing, and the kind of a reductionist model for growing food that says, you know, just get rid of everything except what you want to grow, and then use heavy chemical inputs and insecticides and herbicides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which was only invented in Germany one hundred, ten hundred and fifteen years ago. In that stretch of time, we have seen a massive outgassing of CO two from the top soils.
Forgive me for going on on this moment. People talk about planting trees to pull CO two back out of the atmosphere, and it's something we certainly need to do, but we also need to remember that if you look at all of the carbon and every tree in the world, plus every plant in the world, there's three times that much carbon in the first ten centimeters of top soils
around the world. And by sharply reducing the amount of plowing and using natural fertilizing techniques and natural pest control techniques and using cover crops, always keep roots in the soil, don't let it lie loose, use perennials where you can use rotational grazing agro forestry. These techniques can reverse the flow of global warming pollution out of the soil and actually put a large amount of CO two back in
the soil. So regenerative agriculture not only produces healthier foods and healthier communities, but it also contributes to a healthier planet by becoming a key part of our arsenal in combating the climate crisis.
I get asked a lot, and we can answer every question. You know, we only fish from the British waters, and nothing comes by playing to the River keV except for the mozzarella from Naples, you know. And so we're all working on this. But how do we make this a movement of conscious change?
Well, it's difficult. Ten Chefs and restaurateurs can play a key role in providing information to their customers, contributing to their knowledge about where the food comes from and how it's prepared. For processed food, there is now a movement in some countries to require a labeling of foods. We already have it in so many places concerning the nutritional content of the food, but now some jurisdictions are requiring CO two labeling, which is a big help for those
of us who are interested in that. And you can't go on a detective hunt every time you buy something off the shelf or order addition or restaurant. So if there is a new standard by which the purveyors of food volunteer the provenance of the food and pay attention to it and then communicate about it, then that's some more general knowledge of how important it is to connect to healthy food that's grown in healthy ways.
I would love to come and see your farm, and I think it's so interesting that you are doing this and being a vegan, working on your farm, making your farm different and showing by example, and as with everything you do, I have so much respect for it. And I think that apart from being a farmer and a politician, I know that you're a really good eater. I do know that because I've seen well.
You know, the way I keep ordering more of your food may not be a good standard to go by, because you're This will sound like flattery, and I guess it is, but it's also true. Your food is delicious, so it helps.
I think the.
Witnessed me eating a lot of yourn I love it.
But I think also that Italian food is very Whenever we have we have more and more vegans and certainly vegetarians coming in, and actually the diet is very healthy. It is. You know, when you walk into our restaurant, there's always vegetables on the bar, you know, whether they are artichids in season ors finished. And I think we all go to food for excitement and for communication, as you say, for memories of our childhood, and we also
go to food, I think very often for comfort. And so my last question to you is, really, if you had to define a certain food that you enjoy eating as a food that you go to for comfort, would you tell me what that would be.
I would prefer one of your thin vegan pizzas, yeah, accompanied by I don't know the name of the dish, but it's fried zucchini.
String ki flowers.
Yeah, zucchini flowers. That's what I always start with at River Cafe. And I was alerted that you might ask about my favorite comfort food, and honestly, that is what immediately sprang to mind.
Well, it's always there for you, comfort or not, whatever is needed. Thank you so much again, and much love to you. Thank you well.
You have a standing invitation to come and visit Canny four Farms here in Tennessee. Would love to host you and look forward to seeing you in person at the River Cafe soon.
Thank you, so much, so much, love to you, Thank you. This holiday season. If you can't come to the River Cafe, the River Cafe will come to you. Our beautiful gift boxes are full of ingredients we cook with and design objects we have in our homes. River Cafe Olive oil, Tuscan chocolates, Venetian glasses of Florentine Christmas cake made in our pastry kitchen and more. We ship them everywhere. To find out more or to place your visit, shop Therivercafe dot co dot uk.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows