Charlie Ayers looks displeased. A frown spreads. “Look at that, they serve good coffee, but with refined sugar,” he tuts, and stirs the white sugar lump into his espresso anyway.
To anyone else, the type of sugar in a sugar lump offered in a Californian restaurant probably wouldn’t matter much. But Ayers has a mission: to change the way people eat. He’s a revolutionary, in his own small way, who believes in a brighter future of better eating habits for all. And as starry-eyed as that sounds, it seems that he might be on to something. Already he has converted some of the brainiest bods in America.
For the past six years Chef Charlie, as he is known, has been in charge of the cafeteria at Google, the progressive company that operates the largest internet search engine in the world and is one of the great success stories of that mecca of cyber-technology in Northern California, Silicon Valley. When Ayers began work there as head chef, he was cooking for a staff of 40. His job was to provide intelligent food for some of the world’s most intelligent people, a matter that his bosses took very seriously. When he left, earlier this year, he was overseeing 40 chefs producing 4,000 organic and wholesome meals every day.
From its beginning in 1998, Google was innovative. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to create a Utopian society for their staff (known as Googlers) so that they would never want to leave the company. They brought in masseuses, doctors, dentists, valet parking, entertainment — and the technology engineers were even given one day off a week to allow them to pursue their own creative ideas. But most important of all, there was to be good, healthy food. Google’s workers were some of the brightest graduates in the world, and the idea was to feed their brains while filling their stomachs.
“I took a huge group of people and turned them into foodies,” says Ayers, 39, with pride. “These were brainy kids. But as intelligent as they were, the most innovative food some of them had ever eaten was a burger. I introduced them to new foods and broadened their horizons. I also showed them how to eat healthily, and why it was important to choose organic food. With every dish came background information on how the food was caught, produced or harvested, so that they could learn about the origins of the food. I believe it’s important that we all think about what we’re eating. Right now there are a lot of people in the world who aren’t thinking for themselves.”
Having fired up the revolution at Google, Ayers is pushing his agenda forward by branching out on his own and opening up three new cafés, funded by his former bosses at Google. They will be high-tech automated cafeterias where the emphasis will not only be on the organic and healthy but also on sustain- able foods, foods that are not draining the Earth’s resources.
Discounts will be offered to customers who pedal on stationary bicycles hooked up to a generator, thus helping to power the restaurant. And only locally produced fruits and vegetables that are in season will be served, to avoid unnecessary transportation fuel costs. “I don’t see myself as a trendsetter because this movement is already taking place,” Ayers says, matter-of-factly. “It’s like the old clich é: ‘The revolution is now.’ But I am committed to making my small part of the planet better. I want to raise consciousness so that people become aware of better ways to eat and also to do things.”
Ayers is holding forth in a small restaurant in Palo Alto, a chichi town in the heart of Silicon Valley. His first cafeteria, Calafia, will open here next year. With its tree-lined streets and village atmosphere, this might seem an unlikely spot for a cultural overthrow, but there is sound thinking behind it. Around the corner is Stanford, one of the country’s leading universities, where America’s brightest students will be prime targets to discover that a portobello mushroom burger is more delicious, not to mention nutritious, than anything McDonald’s could offer. With its wealthy, tech-savvy workforce, trends started here have a habit of going global.
Ayers is a quiet, self-effacing man. For someone who is committed to healthy eating he could do with losing a few pounds but — he says with a sigh — it’s not easy to avoid food when you are a chef. He trained at the prestigious Johnson and Wales culinary school on Rhode Island, and even worked for a time as the personal chef to the band the Grateful Dead. But his mission to educate began at Google, where he discovered the joy of introducing new foods to the staff.
Because so many of the Googlers were recruited from around the world, Ayers reflected that in his menus. “I did a lot of Moroccan and North African foods — lamb curries, couscous and roasted parsnips. And then I’d play with regional American foods, like serving a North Carolina barbecue, which has a vinegar-based sauce. Or I might do some Jewish food — matzo-ball soup and brisket.”
The bottom line for all the food was that it had to be healthy and organic, designed to keep the workforce fit. There haven’t been any studies yet into the effects of eating non-organic food for a whole lifetime. But Ayers is insistent that the anecdotal evidence is enough for him to insist on only organic produce. “Also, I choose foods that aren’t high in saturated fats, leaner cuts of meat. No refined sugars. Less salt.”
While he was at Google, Ayers cultivated relationships with farmers to ensure that he got what he wanted. All beef was grass-fed, because he believes that other types contain too much fat; all pork was nitrate-free because nitrates have been proven to cause colon cancer. All fish — and he used a lot of it because scientific studies have proved that fish helps the brain to function best — was caught wild, rather than farmed, because it tastes better.
Ayers left Google because he felt that the time was right to move on. “I wasn’t cooking any longer,” he says. “I had five sous-chefs, 40 cooks, and I was in an office and going to more meetings than cooking. When we started I was doing everything — baking all my own breads, pastas. It was time to get back to cooking.”
He hopes to continue educating people through his cafeterias, and he will offer foods that have been scientifically researched and proven to be good for you. “We have a nutritionist that we are working with,” he says. “And in some dishes we’ll be using ingredients that help to increase metabolism so that you digest foods quickly. For example, did you know that if you use mangoes and papayas along with citrus foods, it speeds up your metabolism?” Speeding up the metabolism aids the digestion of food and helps people to lose weight.
He will also be using ingredients that he sees as foods of the future, foods that do not deplete global resources to produce — a small grain from South America called quinoa, which has all the nutrients of beef, poultry or fish and tastes delicious; seitan, a fermented wheat gluten that has a meat-like texture, and tempeh, which is made from soya beans.
Even the containers and cutlery he will be using for his takeaway section will be entirely biodegradable, made from corn starch, potato starch, vegetable oil and sugar cane.
And, to ensure that the word is spread, he intends to host cookery workshops at the cafeterias — one for families, to ensure that the next generation is prepared for the future, and one for singles.
He’s passionate about his subject — and what motivates him, he says, is that he cares about the world his 8-year-old son will grow up in. He is also fiercely committed — so much so that he didn’t even need to produce a business plan for his former Google bosses, who offered him more than $4 million to help fund the enterprise.
“We can make the world a better place,” he says emphatically. “I believe that we really can.” The revolution, it seems, is on.
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Charlie's favourite recipe
Carrot almond salad
Serves 4-6
680g organic carrots, shredded
280g toasted, flaked organic almonds 180g organic spring onions, cut diagonally
140g redcurrants
3 tbsp toasted cumin seed, ground into a powder
470ml rice wine vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Put the carrots, almonds, green onions and redcurrants into a large salad bowl, sprinkle over the toasted cumin-seed powder, add the rice wine vinegar and toss the salad thoroughly. Season to taste and serve.
