Column

Culture

Eating

Hospitality

1 April 2024

6 min read

We could all benefit from hospitality’s bear hug

In a compelling series, The Bear offers a richer and nuanced redemptive journey.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A tired-looking chef turns around to look across his shoulder.

Jeremy Allen White plays Carmy.

FXP.

I only need to watch a few minutes of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen to remind me that toxic environments not only still exist, but all too often are glorified. From bitter previous experience I know that employers can bully, lie and manipulate those beneath them, and apparently get away with it. I have sadly seen how the Christian virtues of turning the other cheek and forgiving your enemies can serve to collude with a toxic environment. However, I also dare to hope that another Christian virtue – that of hospitality – can foster quite a different environment. I have been thinking about this a lot recently as it tallies with themes explored in another chef show - the global smash-hit multi-award-winning US TV series, The Bear.

The drama is set in the high-intensity world of the Chicago hospitality industry. The story revolves around a character called Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White. Carmy has made his name in gastronomy and has won and retained multiple Michelin stars. But when his beloved brother Mikey commits suicide, Carmy returns to Chicago to take over his brother’s failing sandwich shop called “The Beef.”

Putting a grieving world-class chef in the middle of a bankrupt dysfunctional sandwich shop in the cheap side of Chicago is a great concept for an intense drama. It is set up to be a classic rags-to-riches journey and so we wait to see how, with a bit of spit, polish and hard work, transformation against the odds is possible. Although, inevitably, the narrative arc of the show does follow the well-trodden American Dream theme of outsiders whose hard work turns things around, this is not a simple tale. There’s a richer and more nuanced redemptive journey offered in this compelling series.

The show has won critical acclaim and I believe it is due in part to the fascinating combination of three important overlapping hospitality themes that each offer us some signposts for changing the culture of toxic environments. They also happen to point to how Christian hospitality teaching is as relevant today as ever.

The vulnerability of hospitality

“The more I learn about Michael, the less I understand.”

Ebraheim

Everyone in the relational ecosystem of this television show has a major flaw. There are no messianic figures. Everyone is carrying great deal of pain and vulnerability. The ever-anxious Carmy is a recovering addict and finds solace in total immersion in his work. The rising-star sous-chef, Sydney, played by Ayo Edebiri, is grieving the loss of her mother and the serial failures of her previous businesses. The emotionally illiterate cousin, Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is becoming alienated from his wife and his daughter and as a result causes physical or relational chaos everywhere he goes.

Watching this show is a journey to the dark side. The pyscho-social dysfunction of the characters matches the organisational and financial mess of the sandwich bar itself. Everything goes wrong: crumbling walls, failed safety inspections and the self-sabotage of the staff team. It’s great viewing at the end of a difficult day: any minor chaos I am experiencing is relativised by the all-consuming disarray of The Beef.

Despite their flaws, we find ourselves rooting for the characters. Hollywood seems to have borrowed this idea from the Christian faith: never underestimate the underdogs. From its earliest days the church was made up of a seemingly socially impossible group of people: a suspicious collaborator, a trouble-making insurgent, as well as other socially stigmatised men and women. You don’t have to spend long in a local congregation of Christians to encounter the same social paradoxes. The unlikely, often uncomfortable gathering of believers from different walks of life is both the beauty and the bane of the church. People are both sharp and sweet, weird, awkward and challenging and yet somehow there’s not only something irresistibly moreish about their company, but the persistent belief that these are the ones who will ultimately be vindicated, honoured and rewarded.

The hope of hospitality

“I think this place could be so different from all the other places we’ve been at.”

Sydney

The continuous omnishambles of The Beef feels like a mirror of our own political moment. Swapping the leader at the top does not resolve the systemic problems. There is no overnight transformation. In fact, things must get worse before anything changes for the better. Personal existential demons need to be faced before the restaurant can begin to be turned around, and, even then, they still need an end-of-season miracle.
So much of our public life, whether it is in the politics of the church or the politics of our nation, looks like the early chaos of The Beef. A fancy new menu, a charismatic new leader, a new shiny piece of technology or even a quick-fix new work regime cannot take away the anger and the misery and the brokenness. What does seem to pay dividends in the show is the gradual inculcation of a culture of dignity, respect and commitment to one another.

Every employee at The Beef begins to refer to one other as “Chef.” This recognition of the value of the other, the regular voicing of the importance and equality of your fellow employees is part of a gradual culture change in the restaurant. The change in language is not a magic bullet for the transformation but rather a small, but important, expression of new culture of dignity that is being established. This same kind of culture change is urgently needed in our church and nation. Finding ways to express respect to one another might not be a bad place to start.

It becomes one of the highest honours for the cooks to prepare the “family meal” where the staff gather for food together after the shift is done. It turns into a moment of communion and reconnection in the chaos of the day. It reminds me of how the Lord’s Supper was always meant to be – a reason to come together and remember and hope.

The power of hospitality

“I’m gonna fix this place.”

Carmy

Season 2 tells the story of creating a Michelin-Star-worthy restaurant in the transformed shell of what had been The Beef sandwich shop. Most of the dysfunctional characters go on a series of journeys of discovery and transformation. One of the chefs goes to Denmark and learns the power of discipline and how to produce micro-cuisine. Another goes on a weeklong haute cuisine boot camp at the highest quality restaurant in the world. Beginning with the simple task of washing forks he is gradually inducted into the culture of excellence and service of the restaurant, where nothing is too much trouble in their aim to give guests an unforgettable experience of hospitality. Richie’s 45-minute make-over is the worst and best episode. The transformation is too complete too quickly, but its message is clear: there is hope for even the most dysfunctional person.

“You have this minute when you’re watching the fire and you’re thinking: If I don’t do anything, this place will burn down and all my anxiety will go away with it. And then you put the fire out. Then you put the fire out.”

Carmy

As I binge-watched this series, I found myself thinking long and hard about the church. I have tasted the toxicity that too often seeps in and spreads pain, causes harm and thwarts whatever good they are trying to do. I have also tasted the opposite, when the church has extended welcome to the homeless, refugees or children in care, and people encounter hope and transformation. When I feel like giving up on the church, I remember how delicious that really is and am re-motivated to do whatever I can to make it the best place in town.

Article

Culture

14 March 2024

5 min read

What AI needs to learn about dying and why it will save it

Those programming truthfulness can learn a lot from mortality.

Andrew Steane

Andrew Steane has been Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002, He is the author of Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion.

An angel of death lays a hand of a humanioid robot that has died amid a data centre

A digital momento mori.

Nick Jones/midjourney.ai

Google got itself into some unusual hot water in recently when its Gemini generative AI software started putting out images that were not just implausible but downright unethical. The CEO Sundar Pichai has taken the situation in hand and I am sure it will improve. But before this episode it was already clear that currently available chat-bots, while impressive, are capable of generating misleading or fantastical responses and in fact they do this a lot. How to manage this?

Let’s use the initials ‘AI’ for artificial intelligence, leaving it open whether or not the term is entirely appropriate for the transformer and large language model (LLM) methods currently available. The problem is that the LLM approach causes chat-bots to generate both reasonable and well-supported statements and images, and also unsupported and fantastical (delusory and factually incorrect) statements and images, and this is done without signalling to the human user any guidance in telling which is which. The LLMs, as developed to date, have not been programmed in such a way as to pay attention to this issue. They are subject to the age-old problem of computer programming: garbage in, garbage out.

If, as a society, we advocate for greater attention to truthfulness in the outputs of AI, then software companies and programmers will try to bring it about. It might involve, for example, greater investment in electronic authentication methods. An image or document will have to have, embedded in its digital code, extra information serving to authenticate it by some agreed and hard-to-forge method. In the 2002 science fiction film Minority Report an example of this was included: the name of a person accused of a ‘pre-crime’ (in the terminology of the film) is inscribed on a wooden ball, so as to use the unique cellular structure of a given piece of hardwood as a form of data substrate that is near impossible to duplicate.

The questions we face with AI thus come close to some of those we face when dealing with one another as humans.

It is clear that a major issue in the future use of AI by humans will be the issue of trust and reasonable belief. On what basis will we be able to trust what AI asserts? If we are unable to check the reasoning process in a result claimed to be rational, how will be able to tell that it was in fact well-reasoned? If we only have an AI-generated output as evidence of something having happened in the past, how will we know whether it is factually correct?

Among the strategies that suggest themselves is the use of several independent AIs. If they are indeed independent and all propose the same answer to some matter of reasoning or of fact, then there is a prima facie case for increasing our degree of trust in the output. This will give rise to the meta-question: how can we tell that a given set of AIs are in fact independent? Perhaps they all were trained on a common faulty data set. Or perhaps they were able to communicate with each other and thus influence each other.

The questions we face with AI thus come close to some of those we face when dealing with one another as humans. We know humans in general are capable of both ignorance and deliberate deception. We manage this by building up degrees of trust based on whether or not people show behaviours that suggest they are trustworthy. This also involves the ability to recognize unique individuals over time, so that a case for trustworthiness can be built up over a sequence of observations. We also need to get a sense of one another's character in more general ways, so that we can tell if someone is showing a change in behaviour that might signal a change in their degree of trustworthiness.

In order to earn our trust, an AI too will have to be able to suffer and, perhaps, to die.

Issues of trust and of reasonable belief are very much grist to the mill of theology. The existing theological literature may have much that can be drawn upon to help us in this area. An item which strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the connection between suffering and loss and earning of trust, and the relation to mortality. In brief, a person you can trust is one who has ventured something of themselves on their pronouncements, such that they have something to lose if they prove to be untrustworthy. In a similar vein, a message which is costly to the messenger may be more valuable than a message which costs the messenger nothing. They have already staked something on their message. This implies they are working all the harder to exert their influence on you, for good or ill. (You will need to know them in other ways in order to determine which of good or ill is their intention.)

Mortality brings this issue of cost to a point of considerable sharpness. A person willing to die on behalf of what they claim certainly invests a lot in their contribution. They earn attention. It is not a guarantee of rationality or factual correctness, but it is a demonstration of commitment to a message. It signals a sense of importance attached to whatever has demanded this ultimate cost. Death becomes a form of bearing witness.

A thought-provoking implication of the above is that in order to earn our trust, an AI too will have to be able to suffer and, perhaps, to die.

In the case of human life, even if making a specific claim does not itself lead directly to one's own death, the very fact that we die lends added weight to all the choices we make and all the actions we take. For, together, they are our message and our contribution to the world, and they cannot be endlessly taken back and replaced. Death will curtail our opportunity to add anything else or qualify what we said before. The things we said and did show what we cared about whether we intended them to or not. This effect of death on the weightiness of our messages to one another might be called the weight of mortality.

In order for this kind of weight to become attached to the claims an AI may make, the coming death has to be clearly seen and understood beforehand by the AI, and the timescale must not be so long that the AI’s death is merely some nebulous idea in the far future. Also, although there may be some hope of new life beyond death it must not be a sure thing, or it must be such that it would be compromised if the AI were to knowingly lie, or fail to make an effort to be truthful. Only thus can the pronouncements of an AI earn the weight of mortality.

For as long as AI is not imbued with mortality and the ability to understand the implications of its own death, it will remain a useful tool as opposed to a valued partner. The AI you can trust is the AI reconciled to its own mortality.