Eats Feature

Viva La Food Revolution!
Chef/artist/teacher David Warda tries to change
Cincinnati one plant-based meal at a time
Interview by Maija Zummo

People are obsessed with food, David Warda says, citing huge interest in the Food Network, cookbooks and celebrity chefs.

David Warda holds court at Madison’s for a Sunday cooking demonstration. Photo By: Graham Lienhart

Best Short list of Restaura “I think there’s a great hunger right now, and I think that the hunger is not just for taste,” he continues. “I think that what we’re hungering for is the missing ingredient.”

Wearing an unassuming black T-shirt, Warda stands in front of an attentive group of women — mothers, daughters and friends — and one other gentleman. You can see the tip of a bright red Croc peeking from behind a stainless steel rolling cart as he glances down at his large stomach, laughing.

“I’m just checking to make sure I don’t have a big ring of flour on me,” he says.

That’s the danger of combining black T-shirts with big bellies, especially when you’re leading a baking class.

Warda has been many things: an artist, a chef, a father and, more than once, a teacher, as he is now. He’s leading a class on a recent Sunday afternoon at Findlay Market, eager to sow the seeds of a food revolution in the minds of his willing, paying pupils.

As the product of a large Assyrian family, Warda was always surrounded by ethnic Middle Eastern cuisine, even in his heartland hometown of Flint, Mich. He recounts how his father insisted on eating only authentic Assyrian food and how he used to watch his mother and female relatives cooking, listening to their gossip and snagging samples.

“When I was in college, I figured out I was never going to have my cultural food unless I made it myself,” Warda says.

He also figured out there had never been an Assyrian cookbook, so he embarked on a 10-year journey, researching and compiling recipes from his and other authentic Assyrian families to create the definitive and only cookbook on Assyrian cuisine: The Assyrian Cookery, now out of print.
“(The making of the cookbook) should have gone to a woman,” he says, “because in my culture men don’t cook. But they lost their chance after 5,000 years, so I went forward and did it.”

Produced in part with the British Museum, Warda’s cookbook combines family photos, artwork from the museum’s collection and recipes he toured America to find.

“I became a cook while doing this book,” he says, mostly because he had to practice the recipes before publishing them.

Before becoming a full-time chef, Warda spent time as an art teacher here at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, using his degree in theatrical costume design. And then something intervened.

“When my son was 8, he came home from spending the night at his best friend’s house and said, ‘Dad, I’m never going to eat anything with a heart again except artichokes,’ ” Warda says. “Children lead you on paths you’d never go down otherwise, so all of a sudden I wanted to cater to him and I learned everything I could about vegetarian cooking to serve him.”

Once again Warda was back researching cuisine, reading cookbooks and even going so far as to attend a macrobiotic cooking institute when his son turned vegan at age 12.

“It’s so interesting in Cincinnati that vegetarians are considered some sort of fringe group or that it’s some sort of trend,” Warda says. “In this world we’re divided along so many lines from class and culture to politics and religion that even within the food world there’s all these other divisions, but plants are the common denominator. Most people think of vegetarianism as giving something up, and, if you ate some of the food that chefs who hate vegetarians cook, you would believe that’s true because there’s something lacking.”

Warda says he was once told by a local restaurant owner that “real chefs” hate vegetarian cuisine. But he’s out to change that frame of mind.

He’s partnered up with an old friend, Bryan Madison from Madison’s Produce, to create a cooking class series they’ve been doing since January. It teaches people how to make their own plant-based regional meals.

He’s also started producing “Grab and Go” food items, which are seasonal, regional treats from salsas to soups that Warda makes in-store. Some items are offshoots of what he creates for the cooking classes, and others are just customer favorites.

“What Bryan allows me to do is to be on-site,” he says.
And being on-site means that Warda is a community chef. He’s there to answer questions, to give advice and to inspire.

“I’m very interested in the transformative power of food,” he says, “and using food to create community and to give people a sense of well being. Cooking is a way to transfer human energy.”

For the past year Warda’s been cooking dinner several days a week for Caracole, the local program that provides housing and supportive services for individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

“They basically relied on frozen foods or prepared foods, and I went in there and did everything from scratch, cooked on-site,” he says. “Instead of people making food at home and just dropping it off, these residents would come down and say, ‘That smell just came under my door and woke me up.’ It changed the whole atmosphere, the whole environment.”
Warda can pinpoint when he believes cooking went from being an invested, communal practice to being prepackaged and mechanical: When women left the kitchen for the work place.

“No one replaced them,” he says. “Women would cook for you and care for your well-being. They had a vested interest in your health and your presence. When that food wasn’t made anymore, when it was made by a stranger or a machine or produced for profit rather than for love or for nurturing, it was missing what people hunger for. That’s the whole obsession with comfort food, and it’s not going to come from a restaurant.

“You have to have a cook who thinks about you and makes a connection to the ingredients, someone who is engaged and is connected to the process and thinks about the outcome and thinks about who’s going to eat this food and how they’re going to react and how they’re going to feel once they have it inside their bodies.

“The interesting thing about food and art is this: When you go see a painting or a piece of theater, it enters through your eyes or your ears. With food, it becomes you. This art actually becomes part of your body. And that is the ultimate embracing of an art. It’s important. It’s spiritual. It’s necessary.”

Warda believes that everyone must cook and can cook. That’s why he’s devoted so much of his time to teaching cooking classes.

Before teaching at Findlay Market, Warda spent 12 years teaching cooking classes at Jungle Jim’s. Without a formal culinary education, he absorbed information and honed his skills by picking up advice from the store’s well-educated, highly-trained cooking professionals. His informal teaching style — and tendency to tell elaborate stories while cooking — garnered him a reputation and a loyal following of foodies.

As a teacher, Warda believes in the public dissemination of information. There are no secret recipes and no guarded techniques.

“The only difference between me and a regular person is that I know what to do with all the stuff,” he says.

He also believes that in searching for nurturing food and trying to replicate what they see on TV or in restaurants, “People don’t know how to cook on a budget anymore.”

Which is why Warda embraces what he calls “classless cuisine,” which refers to foods that aren’t exclusive to one economic class or another — for instance, mashed potatoes. By themselves they’re classless, but mashed potatoes with lobster start to become something else.

“I think that if it’s affordable and available, that’s the beginning of it,” he says. “As the gas prices continue to rise, we’re not going to be so dependent on nectarines that come from Chile or Guatemala.”

During a three-week session at Clarke Montessori school, Warda showed a group of 10th and 11th graders everything about the cooking process, starting with how and where to shop, how to mince an onion and, most importantly, how to feed your family on $3 a day. Hint: It all starts in the pantry.

“I would bring in a peach from Chile and I’d say to them, ‘Where did this peach come from?’ ” he says. “And then I would track all the job descriptions of everyone who touched this peach and all the fossil-fueled equipment it took to bring it here. What do you end up with? An overpriced, tasteless peach. Why? And all the damage it’s caused, all the oppression. We hadn’t taught them, so they were unconscious. That’s the failure of our system.”

Warda taught the students to focus on regional and plant-based foods instead.

“In Ohio, we can get everything,” he says. “This is the Garden of Eden. We just have to know how to get to it.”

According to Warda, Findlay Market is part of this garden. It’s where regional, organic produce, open minds and groups of people come together for a food experience.

“Findlay Market needs to survive,” he says. “It’s the only place in Cincinnati that resonates, and the reason it resonates is because there’s this mix of class and culture that doesn’t exist anywhere else in this whole divided city. You’re getting people here using food stamps and you’re getting people who are buying the $20 a pound cheese, and they’re together. Food brings all these people together.”

And then there’s Warda, standing in the middle, an instructor and a veggie visionary in red Crocs leading a food crusade based on simple ideas of the public exchange of information and eating what grows around you.

“This is the last career,” he says. “This is all I really want to do anymore. It’s all I think about. I want to teach food, and I want to cook food.” ©