Columns
By Marc K. Stengel
We have—all of us, I'm sorry to report—been asleep at the wheel, so to speak. We have become distracted by such banalities and mundane preoccupations as record prices for barrels of petroleum, ho-hum hybrid powertrains and "you're-one-of-us" employee discounts for new vehicles. We are dickering over whether cars and trucks should be bigger, faster, more powerful or smaller, cleaner, more efficient. And so it is, perhaps, understandable why we have missed the waxing implications of the quiet revolution in our midst.
Since the dawn of mechanical land transport (which I suppose means since the first humid belches of steam locomotion from the Trevithick trams linking Camborne and Tuckingmill, Cornwall, in 1796), the horseless carriage has been the blessed child, the inevitable by-product, the evil spawn of the Industrial Revolution. Among a certain humorless contingent, in fact, nothing symbolizes the Rape of Nature by machine more conspicuously, more intimately and more repetitively than the automobile.
Nature is not as defenseless as her defenders would have us believe, it turns out. Quietly, and under a variety of guises and co-optations, Nature is turning tables upon our automobiles and bending their strengths, their properties to her own purposes. Whether we are aware of it or not, the Agricartural Revolution is in full flourish, and it is progressing on many fronts.
"Manifold Destiny"
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It is not too bold to say that Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller are the early prophets—the Elijah and John the Baptist, if you will—of a movement whose far-reaching implications even they did not fully appreciate in 1989. That was the year they published—on a mischievous whim—the first edition of their best-selling Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine (Villard Books).
Revised nine years later under the rubric "New '98 Model, with More Recipes per Gallon," this counter-intuitive cookbook is an irreverent-but-serious guide to haute cuisine on the highways. It is filled with genuinely gourmet recipes and perversely inspired techniques for matching each dish to the most appropriate underhood hotplate.
Consider, for example, the exploded diagrams of various four-, six- and eight-cylinder engines, upon which the best cooking cubbies are indicated: valve covers, fuel-injector housings, exhaust manifolds. Upon close examination and with full benefit of the doubt, Maynard and Scheller appear to make sense. With enough aluminum foil and the proper wrapping technique, why can't Cutlass Cod Supreme and Hyundai Halibut with Fennel bake in savory serenity under the hood?
As the instruction and recipes in Manifest Destiny weave their spell, the space-time continuum begins to warp. Soon, it no longer seems unnatural that the cooking duration for, say, Pat's Provolone Porsche Potatoes should be specified in miles rather than minutes (55 miles, in fact). The Cruise-Control Pork Tenderloin will be ready by Atlanta (i.e., 250 miles), whereas the Blackened Roadfish will be "MRE" (i.e., meal-ready-to-eat) by Manchester (50 miles).
All in the spirit of good fun and buon gusto is the Manifest Destiny agenda. But, as with every revolution on a roll, there's a DHM (deep, hidden meaning) besides. As the authors themselves admit, there are "conservation benefits of cooking with heat that otherwise would go straight toward melting the ice caps. That's right—every Btu you trap in a veal scallop or pork tenderloin is a Btu that won't go toward submersing Micronesia and hitching the Sun Belt up to Manitoba."
Early auto-gastro-environmentalists Maynard and Scheller may be, but from today's agricartural perspective, their foil-wrapped epicureanism seems positively pre-modern and quaint.
Kitchen prosthetics
Every revolution worth its table salt, of course, consumes its children. In a sense, Maynard and Scheller have themselves been served in aspic. It's their premise, after all, that pure car-cookery must harness, exclusively, "excess heat generated by the means of propulsion [their italics]. This disqualifies a lot of other attempts at mobile cookery, or at least relegates them to a different branch of evolution."
This particular branch of agricartural evolution happens to be thriving in 2005. Today, it is possible to equip any vehicle with a kitchen suite of incredible, mouth-watering versatility. And it's all to do with the innocuous 12-volt power ports proliferating throughout vehicles everywhere.
The observant among us will note that as cigarette lighters have quietly disappeared onto the option lists for most vehicles, these little ports have rushed in to fill the vacuum. Can it be any coincidence, then, that with in-car smoking on the decline, behind-the-wheel snack craves are in the ascendant?
How else, in other words, to explain the sudden appearance of appliances like RoadPro's 12-volt Toaster Oven/Pizzaria? RoadPro also offers a 10-cup Quick Brew drip coffee maker with slosh-resistant carafe. Not to be outdone, La Pavoni has conceived the Velox 12-Volt Espresso Machine—with, appropriately enough, a body by Bertone.
It's the Max Burton line of in-car of kitchen prosthetics, however, that has perhaps exiled the underhood ethos of Maynard and Scheller to the eccentric outer fringe. Manufactured by Athena Brands, the Max Burton line includes an in-cockpit stove, an oven, a hotdog cooker, a popcorn popper and a combination smoothie blender/coffee grinder. For the inevitable wealth of leftovers, in-car 12-volt refrigerators are now available from myriad manufacturers for under $100.
Food-for-Oil Alchemy
It's probably understandable why there are not yet any 12-volt deep fat fryers available for in-car use. But in one important sense, they would be most welcome. After it was reported from Wales in 2003 that grocery stores were mysteriously selling out of home cooking oil each and every afternoon, the apotheosis of the Agricartural Revolution finally broke into the light of day. Biodiesel had arrived.
It's no longer just a greasy little secret down at the Hippie Hollow Commune. Folks all over the world are turning their kitchens into biodiesel refineries, then motoring all over town and country in canola-powered diesel vehicles. Talk about a sustainable technology: seed and bean oil transformed into go-juice for cars and trucks. And because the diesel principle is more mechanically efficient than its gas counterpart, biodiesel is more attractive for many reasons than even ethanol alcohol fuel additives derived from corn.
Numerous caveats and complications, of course, guarantee that the Biodiesel Solution is not some polyunsaturated elixir spilling from the Holy Grail. It's not as easy as it sounds, in other words. But it is compelling, both in philosophical and in monetary terms. Technical information and actual fuel-blending recipes are available from, among other sources, the National Biodiesel Board (biodiesel.org) and the "Biodiesel Library" at Journey to Forever (journeytoforever.org).
We're a long way from the steamy origins of mechanical transportation on land. It's been a strange trip so far, winding through the world's coal seams, oil wells and, now, skirting beside rapeseed and soybean fields. But the 12-volt fridge is stocked, the espresso's hot and the valve covers are up to temperature. Undoubtedly, there are several more sumptuous courses to go before this agricartural voyage comes to an end.