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Five things I learned at the IACP conference
Well, that was fun.
The International Association of Culinary Professionals’ annual conference wiped me out as much as South by Southwest Interactive Conference, but I learned so much and met so many enthusiastic food folks that it made all the panels and social events worth the energy and time away from home.
I sat down to write the top five things I learned that you might be interested to learn, too, and here’s what I came up with:
Taco Bell, Domino’s and a number of other national brands have figured out how to turn even the most negative publicity into a positive outcome for their companies, and this whole “contrition is the new PR” isn’t going away any time soon.
Before Cortez arrived, the Aztecs used corn as a currency.
Chicory, which famously gives a special kick to coffee in New Orleans, comes from the root of endive and has been used as a coffee substitute or enhancer for centuries.
Tea rooms, restaurants where women could eat without an escort in the pre-Civil Rights days, are a nearly forgotten element in women’s history. Millie Huff Coleman of Atlanta, who started a master’s program in women’s studies when she was in her 60s, is trying to change that.
The unspoken rule of succeeding in the food world — well, any industry, really — actually has a name: The Pork Chop Theory. Cookbook author Virginia Willis shared Nathalie Dupree’s advice that stems from the idea that if you put one pork chop in a pan, it’ll burn, but if you put two, they’ll feed off the fat of one another and cook up nicely. “Loving what you do is more important than money as long as you are supporting yourself as well as your contemporaries in other fields,” Dupree said in a recent interview with Monica Bhide. “The more we see there is room for all of us, and that another person in the field enlarges it and makes more for all of us, the better the field will be. Competition makes everyone grow.”
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