This weekend, Sunday October 16, is World Food Day, an opportunity to look at the origin of what we eat, where it comes from, how it is produced, and, above all , why we want to eat it. In short: how are food trends born? And the subject fascinates chef Alexia Duchêne.
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At 26, she has more than a decade of work behind her. Hotel school at 15, first service at 16, at 23, she finished semi-finalist in season 10 of Top chef, and, since then, she has continued to multiply projects aimed at making cooking accessible, understandable, to be explained in order to better savor.
This is what she does in a podcast she launched this summer, L’envers de l’assiette, an exciting podcast mixed by Brut where Alexia Duchêne tells us, for example, how the Kellogg brothers invented breakfast. ? How did the banana impose itself in our shopping carts, when it does not grow here? Or again, how the mafia gets involved in the production of mozzarella in Italy, and the drug cartels in that of avocado in Mexico?
Threats, kidnappings and assassinations… The lawyer business is controlled by a powerful Mexican cartel: the Knights Templar. Alexia Duchêne tells you about it in the podcast L’envers de l’assiette.
Listen on all platforms: https://t.co/bvg94WpysC pic.twitter.com/4318JDSqBJ
— Brut FR (@brutofficiel) July 27, 2022
As Alexia Duchêne repeats, food represents 8,000 billion dollars in turnover in 2021 worldwide. It is worth knowing at what price the trends are made? She, in any case, can no longer cook while closing her eyes. “At homeshe says, we ate neither local nor seasonal, nor looking at the origin of the aubergines in winter. It was when I started working that the question of the route of the products, of their social and ecological impact arose and it became unavoidable..”
Alexia Duchêne says she doesn’t teach anyone a lesson, that yes, it happens to her “to prepare a pineapple in winter in Europee”, that the goal is not to ban bananas, chocolate, avocado, it’s just to know, to inform, to highlight what the agrifood giants would like to keep hidden. And that appeals. Alexia Duchêne says she didn’t expect such success from her podcast, she is thinking about offering a season 2 in the coming months and continuing to reveal the upside of the plate.