Michael Hebb is often regarded as the originator of the modern underground dinner. Currently, Hebb is a part of the Summit series culinary team, crafting the upcoming program in Los Angeles where foodie-beloved folks such as Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, BS Taqueria’s Ray Garcia and Hitchcock’s Brendan McGill will be talking food, politics and serving up thought-provoking bites. Recently, Hebb and I caught up to talk about the power of gathering communities and how the Greek symposium is reflected in Summit.
Eve Turow Paul: How did you first become interested in organizing dinners?
Michael Hebb: I actually came at food through architecture and studying classics at Reed College. When I was 20 an architect, Mark Lakeman, and I built teahouses for people in Portland. We also built piazzas, gathering spaces, for people in residential intersections, where we inspired and cajoled neighbors to come together and paint their streets.
My takeaway from that was that people have such a profound desire to gather and to deepen the meaning around why they’re gathering. I also realized that architecture is a lot of work. Building tea houses or piazzas or community gathering places or real buildings is just so much work. And the dinner table is already there asking to be re-thought, asking to be reinvigorated . In some ways, I consider it the first architecture. Shelter, in many ways, was provided for us in the natural environment, but the table is a very intentional space created for a communal act of eating together. It’s a pretty wild development in human history.
“The table is a very intentional space created for a communal act of eating together. It’s a pretty… [+] EVE TUROW PAUL, CANVARecommended For You
Turow Paul: Do you know when the first dinner table arrived on the scene?
Hebb: I don’t, but I know that the evolutionary leap from ape to man is actually due to cooking and concentrating calories. Our DNA and our evolution are forever tied to cooking. Apes chew seven hours a day; we chew 24 minutes. By outsourcing our belly to the fire as a place to cook, all of this new energy was given back to our body, and it was essentially bored and it was like, ‘What do I do with all this excess energy?’ And our brains got bigger and our jaws got smaller, so our heads had more room for brains because we weren’t chewing seven hours a day. There’s this direct link between who we are, how we’re evolving, and cooking and eating together.
Turow Paul: Why do you believe the dinner table so open for disruption today?
Hebb: Twenty percent of American meals are eaten in the car. And that doesn’t include how many meals are eaten on the couch or in bed. If you think about the state of the dinner table with those kinds of statistics, it’s pretty clear that a reclaiming and a reinvigoration is timely. And if you think that human connection is necessary for human evolution, then the dinner table does it better than almost any place.
American dinner tables generally collect mail and aren’t necessarily utilized as a place for human connection. I started to dream up ways to reimagine and fill it with energy.
One of the first of those ideas was with my ex-wife Naomi Pomeroy, who is a famous chef from Portland. We started a pop-up restaurant called Family Supper in our living room in 2000. As far as the press is concerned, they claimed it was the first pop-up or underground restaurant. Within about six months of hosting our first dinners we were on the front page of the dining section of The New York Times and they had called it “The beginning of a movement.” There wasn’t really anybody else doing it.
“If you think that human connection is necessary for human evolution, then the dinner table does it… [+] IMAGE BY EVE TUROW PAUL, CANVA
Turow Paul: How does your study of the classics influence your career today?
Hebb: The Greek symposium —Socrates and Plato and Aristotle—have continued to be and were my initial inspiration. Greek culture was formed at the symposium table. From this classical period in Athens, we get the concept of democracy. The concept of a legal system and a justice system also came from that period, and theatre as we know it. And the list goes on and on of things that we gained as a culture from the classical period of Athens. That isn’t just because they were brilliant people; it’s because their ideas had a place to live at the dinner table at these symposiums.
Realizing that if you’re going to create a fertile environment for innovation, for evolution, you need not just brilliant people and you need not just amazing stages, you need this incredibly fertile environment for ideas to be exchanged, for them to be deepened, for the connection around these ideas to happen.
I realized very early on that the table, as an institution, needs to be re-thought and re-instituted in order for us to do the work as a culture that we need to do right now.
The meal serves the purpose of being a kind of magnet. It’s a necessity to eat dinner. It’s a little bit like the water hole in the Savannah, taking advantage of the fact that people are drawn towards dinner and the table, and then deepening that experience into something that’s transformative.
Turow Paul: How does this all relate to your latest project with Summit?
Hebb: At Summit, every single one of the chefs and nutrition experts that will be in attendance is an activist. You sit down with them, and they’ll change the way that you think about food and culture. I guess my goal is that people see that the food is so much more than just something that they put in their mouths.
With Summit being multi-track, the “Choose Your Own Adventure” is just so rich and deep around food during this event that you can only imagine the conversations, connections, new businesses, new initiatives that are going to happen. There are all these beautiful doors that people are going to open, and it’s exciting to see that happen.
Apply and learn more about Summit and the culinary lineup planned for LA2017, here. Scheduled food-centric discussions include “How mushrooms can save the dying bee population” with Paul Stamets, and food will be served by Ghetto Gastro, among others. Also, discover how Hebb cultivates conversations about death through his international program Death Over Dinner.