Dave's latest effort, The Secret Ingredient, is probably the hardest to read of all his books, saving only The Code of Life, which he wrote in a combination of Navajo and a computer language he invented. But Ingredient isn't difficult because of its language—in fact, its fluid, jaunty English is eminently readable. What makes the book so difficult is what it leaves out. But perhaps that can't be explained until I set out what it includes.
The book follows Michael Taudré, an up-and-coming American chef who goes on a destructive drug- and alcohol-fueled bender in Lebanon and ultimately has to be rescued by American intelligence agents. Taudré is given a choice: he can be turned over to the Lebanese authorities to face the music, or he can work for the CIA. Taudré opts for the latter, and ends up at a "dark site" where prisoners are being held and interrogated.
At first Taudré is merely asked to make sure the prisoners get (barely) enough nutrition to survive, but after a few months of tedium, he proposes a new approach. Instead of the harsh interrogation techniques that the Americans have been using, he suggests "key ingredient torture," in which the prisoners' food is almost, but not quite, complete.
Taudré serves them pizza with no salt in the crust, tomato sauce with no garlic, and chocolate chip cookies with no chocolate chips. (At first, Taudré bakes chocolate chip cookies with raisins instead of chocolate chips, and when they realize his duplicity, the prisoners howl in anger and abject misery. But this proves to be too much even for the hardened CIA operatives at the site, and they secretly inform their commander. Their whistle-blowing is passed up the chain of command, and the administration quickly dispatches a human rights ombudsman who immediately puts a stop to the practice.)
The results are impressive. Food that is missing a key ingredient creates an "uncanny valley" effect, in which the prisoners are paradoxically tormented the closer the food gets to perfection, while still falling short. The intelligence flows, at first haltingly, and then in torrents. But the effect doesn't last, or at least, it doesn't keep working with the same foods. Taudré is forced to push his creations to a higher and higher level of culinary sophistication, while still omitting crucial ingredients. His gel of lamb and coriander is perfect—or at least it would be, if he included capers. His soufflé of duck and tarragon is better than anything he ever served in his restaurants—except that the dish is incomplete without slivered almonds on top. The prisoners, racked with deprivation, millimeters from culinary perfection, spill out their guts in a mad race for something, anything that can scratch the itch his preparations have left on their palates.
What the CIA doesn't realize is that this is all an elaborate charade. Once Taudré has moved past his early forays into saltless pizza crust, the food is actually perfectly delicious, and the prisoners are merely pretending to be tormented. The intelligence they are divulging is either untrue or is information that they don't mind the Americans having. The difficult part of the ruse is that the CIA agents insist on knowing which crucial ingredient Taudré is leaving out, which means he has to find a way to tell the prisoners which ingredient to lament the absence of. Ordinarily he simply blinks in Morse code, but on occasion the prisoner is blindfolded. Then Taudré has to find a way to lead the prisoner to the right ingredient without tipping his hand to the CIA—these are the funniest scenes in the book, as Taudré comes up with outrageous ways to hint at the missing ingredient. ("Do you find anything... faulty in the salad dressing?" he asks, referencing Basil Fawlty, John Cleese's character in the highly regarded British TV comedy Fawlty Towers.)
But who is conning whom? As the prisoners come to respect Taudré and appreciate his Herculean efforts to protect them, they come to feel remorse for their earlier anti-American actions, and they genuinely want to give the Americans the information they need to shut down violent terrorist operations around the world. Were the CIA agents really taken in by Taudré's machinations? Or were they manipulating him and the prisoners all along?
Dave must know that this fantasy is hard to swallow. The reality is that every day, the American government tortures an unknown number of people around the globe, many of whom are probably innocent of any wrongdoing, or hands them over to odious regimes that do our bidding in exchange for military support. The book never addresses this tension head on, it simply builds a fantasy world that is so perversely cartoonish and soft-edged that it forces our minds back onto the reality of American torture. There are times, reading the book, when I couldn't stop laughing, and then suddenly I couldn't stop crying. It's a beautiful world that Dave has built, but its impossibility makes it a painful thing to contemplate—really, it makes it an obscenity, like an impressionist painting of a concentration camp. But maybe in these dark days a little obscenity is what is called for.
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