Cooking, creativity and chaos
By David Walker,
Idealog March/April 2007, page 66. Illustration by Adrian Clapperton
What’s the common thread between Crazy Frog, French cuisine and the British racing industry? Idealog describes some new ingredients in the economic soup
The writer Len Deighton, in his early career, was a cook and a cartoonist. A creative hybrid who wrote factual and fictional books. Before he wrote thrillers, he wrote an excellent cookbook called Ou Est Le Garlic? This was a collection drawn from a cookery/comic strip featured for many years in The Observer. Nice drawings. Basic recipes. Easy to follow. Washable.
At the opening of the book, Deighton takes time to explain why France is such a profound success in the creative industry of cookery. In its essentials, the argument reduces nicely to geography and latitude.
France is the only European nation with two sea coasts: the freezing cold Atlantic in the north, the warm, soupy Mediterranean in the south. The country stretches north to south through several climatic regions. The various geologies and soils encourage many different kinds of agriculture. Out of this geographical mix comes a rich and intensely varied style of food production and, voilà mon brave, creative cuisine.
From that cookery book, I have never forgotten the general lesson that richness and variety comes from latitude, and creativity from a vertical spread of different environments.
Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel points out that Europe, with its north-to-south fluidity of goods and people, developed into a massively rich economy in a way that was difficult for the Aboriginal nations of Australia, operating in a horizontal band of near-desert climates.
This latitude, of course, is a fact that New Zealand perfectly embodies. The maritime variability of our climates and the geographical spread north to south is a huge natural advantage.
“After the Second World War there were just a few nations who could pick themselves up and change their engineering capability. The skills developed in weapons and airplanes had to move into a peacetime role, into something else, like racing cars.”
But are we taking up this natural benefit? At the most literal level, have we developed an agricultural and horticultural richness to rival that of France? Well no, but we’re well on the way. The annual Food Show exhibition at ASB Showgrounds in Auckland, for example, fills me with optimism. Already we have so many dedicated small producers of Mediterranean-type goodies, olive oil, honey, alcoholic lemon drinks, boutique wines, wheat beers and cheeses. We must cherish these regional variants.
In another important book, At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, there is a brilliant diagram of the economy of France. Kauffman, who is a doctor, biologist and truly inspirational evolutionary theorist—a neo-Darwinian of great significance—talks about the French economy as if it were a biological soup.
So, Kauffman explains, we have certain natural products like grapes, wheat, olives and fish, and other raw materials: coal and minerals and so on. But in this mix are other elements—manufacturing facilities, delivery mechanisms, a variety of human skills and potentials. In the view of an evolutionary biologist, all these things are just like detached bits of genetic code in the economic soup. Now and again of their own accord, some of them magically combine to form new businesses.
All of that emerges in an unpredictable way that is miraculous and surprising. From this perspective, raw goods, facilities and services are catalysed by creativity in strange conditions of near chaos. Out of this, ordered patterns grow. Kauffman uses the wonderful expression ‘order for free’. For him, order is not something superimposed and controlled from outside, but immanent in the structure of all biology. Order is waiting to break out in the universe, and more locally into new business structures. By extension, order is latent in the soupiness of national economies.
This is encouraging. We don’t have to do that much to the soup, just keep it bubbling away. If you are a politician or policy-maker, you need to sprinkle a little encouragement, judiciously, here and there. If you are a creative startup entrepreneur, you need to find the other bits of biology and genetic code that will turn your business into a powerful, novel, organic form—and, lo and behold, structures the world has never seen before.
So Deighton, Diamond, and Kauffman are right. We see this phenomenon all the time, a surprising organic growth of individual businesses, building complex clusters of connected facilities.
In the region of the UK where I come from, there is a very important cluster of racing car manufacturers. Until recently, 95 percent of all racing cars in the world were made in just this one small area of middle England. As the old centre of mass production of cars has declined, this other more specialised craft, of building the fastest cars on the planet, has grown. You might wonder why this region is especially favoured. It exemplifies our biological soup argument.
After the Second World War there were just a few nations who could pick themselves up and change their engineering capability. The skills developed in weapons and airplanes had to move into a peacetime role, into something else, like racing cars.
France, Germany and Italy were contenders but they were massively bombed and ravaged. The UK was relatively unscathed. To kick-start the racing car industry we needed racing circuits. Before the war, racing on public roads regularly killed drivers and spectators. We needed a protected, flat, safe, specialised racetrack. What better than the defunct airfields, not scarred and wrecked, but waiting for new uses?
The centres of the new racing car industry clustered around these racetracks, which then became both test facilities and part of a booming spectator sport. The engineering expertise in Birmingham migrated to softer, more rural areas to the South: Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Dorset and Northants. The interconnected web of engineers and suppliers, sponsors and drivers all worked within a 30- or 40-minute drive. This formed a cluster, an intense and busy knowledge community. People changed jobs regularly, moving between makers, suppliers and sponsors. It’s such a rich soup that England has kept its pre-eminence in racing car manufacture for 60 years.
From a New Zealand perspective, we have to be open to historical global experiences and digest the principles from these overseas precedents. We need to be sensitive to the conditions that generate unpredictable coalitions, create those clusters and form specialist industries.
The excitement lies in their unpredictability. I talk to my students about the weirdness of the world. We write our own case studies. We feel like anthropologists navigating the jungle, or more like cooks tasting the creative soup. We look, for instance, at the Crazy Frog phenomenon.
Who would have dreamed of ringtones as a market five years ago? The Crazy Frog, you may remember, was a noise at first, a frog imitating a motorbike engine. A piece of audio freeware from Sweden, just for fun. Another Swede took it up as an animation and the androgynous little cartoon was born. Then Jamster, a fledgling ringtone company, saw an opportunity and launched the Frog on the world. In its first year in the UK the Crazy Frog ring tone earned US$42 million.
Crazy Frog went on to earn even more as a tie-in to an Eddie Murphy movie and a pop chart hit round the world. The rollercoaster ride of the hit animation film perfectly embodied the business dynamic. Phew!
Do I want all New Zealand businesses to be that frenetic and short-lived? No. Do I want all my students to be ringtone animators? No, of course not. I want them to understand the soupiness of the world that generated ringtones. I want them to understand the structural principles beneath the surface of these creative enterprises with new business models such as ring tones (Jamster), synthetic diamonds (Apollo), online auctions (Trade Me), pixel-based ads (Million Dollar Homepage) and organic produce (United Natural Foods).
“If you are a small business, you are more likely to be adroit. So think about home cooking, think about emergence and chaos, think about latitude and its raw benefits, chop your own onions, mix your own minestrone, and be part of the creative soup.”
There are a few things we can do in this chaotic environment. Look for patterns and in technology and human behaviour. Seek to make conjunctions in several well-understood bits of ‘genetic code’ in the economic soup. Study the new models of business. For example, ring tones, in the grand scheme of things, are not really that important—but the business model that made them possible is important. We can anticipate new uses of technology. We can learn from new patterns of behaviour.
To stay ahead of the game, the creative mindset leads you to new perceptions, to discover new clusters and strange patterns—as they happen. You manoeuvre to take advantage of these trajectories. If you are a small business, you are more likely to be adroit. So think about home cooking, think about emergence and chaos, think about latitude and its raw benefits, chop your own onions, mix your own minestrone, and be part of the creative soup.
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