Three Videos From The MAD Vault
In the weeks leading up to MAD4, we’ll be sharing videos from the last three symposiums to refresh people’s memory and get them in the mood for what’s to come in August. Today, we unearth three very different presentations from MAD3: the talks of author Jon Reiner, glaciologist Jason Box, and Aboriginal forager Josh Whiteland.
At MAD3, New York’s Jon Reiner reminded the audience that it actually takes guts to be vulnerable and consider your weaknesses. “When I went through the experience of not being able to eat for six months due to complications of my Crohn’s Disease, I wanted to tell people that I had finally seen the beauty of stoicism and discipline,” he said. “But instead I saw that I was weak and that I hated my situation.” While sick, Reiner was unable to handle sitting at the table with his family as they ate and he couldn’t.
The ordeal made him realize what he truly loves about food: the human and emotional experience of sitting down at a table and sharing a meal with those you love. While showing pictures of Katz’s Delicatessen and West Village institution the White Horse Tavern, Reiner explained that “I really came to understand that food was how I made sense of my life.”
You can read more about Reiner’s experience with Crohn’s disease in a MADFeed interview, and, of course, his book, “The Man Who Couldn’t Eat.”
The renowned Glaciologist Jason Box spent over one year of his life camping on the Greenland ice sheet and contributed to the global warming report that earned Al Gore a Nobel Prize. At MAD, he described how human action — or inaction, depending on how you look at it — is negatively impacting the environment. The most compelling proof comes from the ice sheet, which is three times the area of France.
During his presentation, Box showed videos of unfathomably large glaciers, some the size of New York City boroughs, tumbling into the sea, and provided evidence of the unprecedented levels of melting currently underway in Greenland. Despite the bleak data, Box explained that small changes and awareness can re-stabilize the climate.You can follow Box’s work at Dark Snow Project, a first-of-its-kind crowd funded effort to study the Greenland ice sheet, online.
The forager and guide Josh Whiteland is based in Western Austalia, where he works to promote the use of underutilized ingredients in the local society. His company Koomal Dreaming organizes cultural tours of the Bibbulgum and Wardandi regions, which boast quandong, emu plum, saltbush, emu, and kangaroo. In interviews, Whiteland has argued that Australian chefs are largely ignorant of native ingredients. “The resources are there, but for the individual to [develop] awareness about bush plants, fruits, vegetables and spices, they would really need to immerse themselves within the culture and the land. Then you’ll have a really clear understanding of what is available.”
At MAD, Whiteland welcomed the crowd as they trickled into the tent by playing the didgeridoo, before launching into a presentation on his work.
