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gershwinn · 5 years ago

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Lili Reinhart Never Had a Backup Plan

A fan favorite on the wildly popular teen soap Riverdale, Lili Reinhart has major movie stardom in her sights. And if you ask nicely, she just might read your horoscope.

Refreshingly, Reinhart is not vegan, gluten-free, keto, or on a macrobiotic diet. She is a self-described picky eater and considers this a treat. "No one wants to go [here] with me," she says, excitedly, when we sit down. Though Reinhart is dressed unfussily, in a faded black tee, Topshop denim jacket, jeans, thin hoop earrings, and a taupe baseball cap pulled over her buttery blonde hair, she is promptly approached by a woman at the next table. There's a lot the cap isn't hiding. Off-screen, Reinhart's eyes look as wide, upturned, and full-lashed as a Disney princess's; her clear, milky complexion is dotted youthfully with freckles; and her dimples seem to take turns showing off: a slight divot in her chin, then twin creases that show up on either side of her face when she's amused.

The woman leans over and asks Reinhart if she is on TV. Reinhart's lips tighten, and a wince flickers at her eyes, but she gives a polite smile and nods slowly. The woman plows on. Her son is a big fan, she says, motioning to a grinning boy beside her. He's an aspiring actor, and they're in town from Texas to give it a try. Reinhart relaxes a bit. She asks what part of Texas they are from, sincerely congratulates the boy on his endeavors, and turns to resume our interview. Reinhart says this moment — and others like it — is more full circle than she would care to admit.

"It's funny. I went to this Cheesecake Factory with my mom when I was, like, 15," she says. "We had flown in for an audition. I was sitting at the table over there, and I remember I got the email that I didn't get the part." Also around that time, Reinhart recalls spotting Zac Efron in a doctor's-office waiting room and surreptitiously snapping a photo of the actor. "I feel so gross about it now," she says. "It is flattering, but it also makes you feel like a zoo animal. Even when I'm sitting in the cast greenroom, if [someone is] holding their phone up like this, I'm like, ‘What are you doing?' I've become very paranoid."

I ask what she thinks about that F-word: fame. She changes the subject. "Cute boots," she remarks. I am flattered and launch into a monologue about how much I love Primark, specifically the one in Madrid, before realizing what she's done and ask her once more to talk. About. Fame. "It's so weird," she says, finally. "I don't really think about it until I'm around people. I don't think about it until I see young women, because those are the people that recognize me. Then all of a sudden, I become very aware."

True to her word, I notice Reinhart physically tenses up every time a teenage girl — or worse, a group of teenage girls — nears us. But when she's not on high alert for high schoolers, Reinhart is unguarded to a degree I would not expect from any stranger, much less one whose privacy is under constant scrutiny. For starters, she texts me directly, rather than having an assistant or manager handle our communication (standard for most celebrities).

Later that night, we decide on a meeting location for the next day. "As long as we go somewhere with eggs, I'm happy," she texts, before we settle on Dialog Cafe in West Hollywood and push back the time — neither of us feels like showing up before 9 a.m. Reinhart has an ease and openness in conversation that makes talking to her feel more like a slumber party than an interview. She volunteers thoughts on cute babies (just her goddaughter, for now), romantic love (something she prefers to fall into rarely, and fiercely), taking a spouse's surname (she favors hyphenation), and being the "grandma" of her friend group.

"When I get drunk, my friends act like it's a national holiday," Reinhart says. She offers up snippets from her camera roll and Instagram direct messages: photos of the hot-air balloon ride her boyfriend, Cole Sprouse, took her on for her birthday, and a dog she wishes were up for adoption — a shaggy shelter pup with no eyes. And just when I think I couldn't feel any more like the real-life Veronica to her Betty, she asks me if I want to go shopping.

Reinhart leads us by memory through a sprawling Barnes & Noble, up to two flights of escalators, then over to the left and back toward the windows, until we end up in the self-improvement section. Reinhart used to come here with friends, back when she first moved to L.A., and spend time poring over books like The Secret Language of Your Name. She tells me the provenance of her given name: Daniel and Amy Reinhart of Cleveland fell in love, got married, and named their second daughter after the actor Lili Taylor. There wasn't any special connection. "They just liked the spelling of her name. It's the French spelling."

Reinhart drags a dictionary-thick tome from the shelf. "This is a book that I own," she says, handing it to me. It's as weighty as a textbook — it has to be, because it guarantees deep and profound knowledge about absolutely everyone, based on their date of birth. She helps me look up mine, which is hilariously titled the Day of Sensual Charisma. Hers is September 13, which the book has ordained the Day of Passionate Care. She reads the entry aloud. "Resilient determination. That sounds about right," she says. "This part is very true: ‘They may face great obstacles to their success, but not for a moment will the outcome be in doubt for them.' I always knew this is what I was going to do. I never had a plan B." It might be difficult to imagine what the aforementioned "great obstacles" have been, considering the fact that she had landed her role on Riverdale by the age of 19.

But being young and female in just about any work environment can have its dark side. Reinhart was 16 when an adult work associate attempted to force himself on her. "I felt physically pinned down to the ground while someone dry humped me, basically," she says. She has spoken publicly about the assault before — but in retrospect, she believes those statements were premature. "I think I shared my story…before I had really understood it," Reinhart says. "I kept thinking of it as something physical, but it was more so a psychological abuse...that spanned a couple of months. I went along with it and was trying to get his approval because we were working together…. I wanted my work environment to be easy."

She was also a minor at the time, being exploited by someone in a position of power. It's clearly difficult for Reinhart to recount. When trying to recall details — how long it went on, whether verbal abuse was involved — she speaks evenly, but frequently pauses and tells me that that time in her life is "blurry" or that she's "locked it away." "What makes me hopeful is people like [Supergirl and Glee actor] Melissa Benoist sharing her story of domestic abuse with the world, because I think she helped a lot of people by doing that. When people come forward about a sexual abuse experience or physical abuse or them struggling with a disorder, they're encouraging other people to not suffer in silence."

Another personal obstacle Reinhart has been vocal about is mental health. She recently read an article she can't get out of her head, about a child under the age of 10 who ended his life after being severely bullied. "Now more than ever, we need to be bringing the idea of mental health into schools and teaching it," Reinhart says. "It's about communicating clearly." She recalls experiencing crippling anxiety when she was growing up. "I felt very alone. But I was not being bullied, which made it really hard for my parents to understand," Reinhart says.

Her high school experience couldn't have been more different from that of Betty Cooper, who drifts easily between cheerleading, running the school newspaper, and solving mysteries, with a cadre of unusually attractive friends by her side. "I went through a semester when I didn't have any friends in my lunch period, and I didn't want to sit in a huge cafeteria by myself, so I would find classrooms to go sit in alone, or spend time in the bathroom, just chilling," she recalls.

By the time Reinhart began working (she supported herself as a waitress and a Pier 1 sales associate before she landed Riverdale), she was just trying to get through the week without having a panic attack.

Now that time in her life is growing distant. And she'll get to go to prom for the first time, on this season of the show. "Three and a half years ago, I had no money. I didn't have a love in my life like I do now. I didn't have any sort of confidence that I was on the right track, and now I have those things," Reinhart says. And her momentum shows no signs of stopping. The week after our interview, she filmed her first commercial for CoverGirl, which recently signed her as one of its faces. A forthcoming collection of her poetry, Swimming Lessons, will hit bookstores this May.

Pay, or equal pay, has been an issue and probably will continue to be. But Reinhart is prepared. "Cami [Mendes, who plays Veronica] and I have had to deal with that from Riverdale," Reinhart says.

"Going into projects in the future, I'm much more aware of it. So is my lawyer." She's also learned from the experiences of women like Michelle Williams and Taraji P. Henson. "I was taking notes," she says. "Taraji Henson had said something like, when she renegotiated for Empire, she knew her value to the show. She knew what that value was, and she demanded it." Reinhart pauses, choosing her words, sounding more sure of herself with each sentence: "I do know the value that I bring as someone who attracts an audience. And I'm not going to accept less than what I think I'm worth. And it's okay to fight for what I'm worth."

Source: Allure

#This is long but I don't care bc this interview is amazing!!!!#holy shit so much #in there #from the growin up stuff #dealing with fame #her mental health #knowing her WORTH #GO LILI #god the me too thing always hurts my heart #every time its brought up #her strenght tho #lr #lr allure #tldr: that love quote?#hit me right in he feels as it should #OH and hypenation?? thanks death

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minah-delacroix · 5 years ago

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7 DAYS, 7 DATES Inside the world of Suho Kwon

A week in the life of quidditch star, Suho Kwon Delacroix

By Sarah Hughes- Freund

Beyond the paparazzi flashbulbs, masterful personal branding, and fashion and sporting prowess, lies the day-to-day business of family life. Quidditch champion, Suho Kwon gives us a sneak peek of his daily life as part of the greatest wizarding family of France.

DAY 1 : ROMAN HOLIDAY

Suho Kwon and his sister Minah pose in a high fashion impromptu shoot and sit down for a Q&A during a trip to Rome, where they traveled to attend the launch event of Agnes Seybrook’s jewelry collection, Lumière. The French stars open up about a wide range of topics from their Parisian residence to their pet peeves and biggest inspiration.

At this year’s BAT Gala in May, our friend, CHARMED alumnus André Leon Talley welcomed Minah Delacroix and Suho Kwon to the red carpet by enthusiastically proclaiming them the future of fashion. We happen to agree with him—and not just because the two of them project a classic, yet avant-garde aura that happens to align with the fashion industry’s present tastes— we believe that Elise Delacroix and Junho Kwon’s children are the future, and we wouldn’t necessarily even narrow the claim to fashion alone.

The last name Delacroix instantly brings to mind fashion house Maison Delacroix, which has become one of the biggest names in the industry throughout the last decades. In recent days, it is the younger generation of the family who dominates the fashion scene with Minah Delacroix toggling between the debut of her first clothing collection in Paris (a collaborative project with fashion powerhouse Lana Paradis), photoshoots for muggle luxury brand Dior—the 22-year-old recently became the brand’s youngest global ambassador— and the rumors of an upcoming business partnership with Enzo Saint Pierre.

The latest to add fashion to his CV, though, is no other than quidditch player and Minah’s older brother, Suho Kwon, who only a few years ago founded the successful sports brand, Quidditch Republic.

Of late, it’s been his personal life —and not the fact he signed up a millionaire contract with U.S. apparel emporium, Power Play—, under the spotlight, after a supposed split with long-time rumored girlfriend, Claire Dancourt, Suho was spotting passionately kissing none other than quidditch prodigy, Emma Muller.

Suho, who started his career in the quidditch pitch at age 16, already has five German League Cups and three European Championships under his belt, as well as captaining the South Korean National Team on the latest World Cup, on which they reached the final after having cleared Norway, vice-world champions, in the quarterfinals, in record time. Yet when your mum is the heiress of the Delacroix Group, your sister is Minah Delacroix and your dad is one of the most important figures of the British Ministry of Magic, making out with one of the most famous women in the world isn't quite as crazy as it would be for pretty much anyone else.

Sitting in a room of his sprawling holiday home in Rome, before the launch of Lumière —the latest enterprise of his second cousin, Agnes Seybrook—, Suho is down-to-earth, offering up champagne and Cauldron Cakes ("no seriously, take some!") as we chat about his love for fashion and how much he’s learned growing up with a house full of female figures. "I’m lucky to have been raised by great women and have them supporting me through thick and thin“ Suho says. "I love them, I think there should be more women like them in positions of power.”

On his sister, Minah, Suho says “She is an inspiration to me. When it comes to fashion, she’s always giving me little tips and making sure I understand that fashion is a way bigger world than what everyone sees. There are so many different components that allow a project to move forward and so many different people involved in the process.“

Reminding me that an industry friend said Minah was one of the nicest models he'd ever worked with, I tell Suho and he lights up. "That’s all I could hope for," he says smiling proudly. “That goes back to how we were raised. As our dad always taught us that you should treat everyone the same, whether it’s the president, a coworker or someone working under your command. I’m glad people regard my sister that way”.

Just on cue, Suho’s younger sister and socialite, Minah Delacroix walks through the door in route to her room. She wears a pink satin robe, slippers and her shower-wet hair pulled into a bun. She initially seems flustered, but when I ask, she kindly agrees to an interview. “This is for Suho’s cover story right?” She asks politely enough for me to understand that she won’t be answering questions that take the spotlight away from her brother. Twice reassured, Minah sits on a velvet sofa next to her brother in a leisurely, offhand way, and pours her cat, Minho, in the empty spot beside her.

Nevertheless, Suho appears skeptical “We’ll have to see about that” he predicts “She’s always in center-stage without even trying”.

Without further ado, we move onto an interview where I ask a few questions to the most famous French siblings of the Wizarding world.

Q&A

CHARMED Magazine: I’d love to ask a few questions about your personal life: Do you two live together or separately when you’re in Paris? Suho: I have my own place few blocks down the family residence; it’s sort of a necessary thing, I think, as we get older especially. It kind of happened coincidentally —the building went on sale while I was in Paris, so we went to visit it with my family and we loved it. I still spend a lot of time in the family home, but it’s important that I have my own separate space. Minah still stays with our grandparents and aunts when she’s in Paris, but she has her own apartment too. Minah: I do, but it’s just more convenient to stay with the family. It makes Paris feel more like home.

CM: Since you grew up together, you obviously must have a major shared interest. Which one is it? M: Quidditch undoubtedly. It is probably obvious for Suho given his career choice, but I love quidditch as well. I got my first broom as a toddler and started playing during my first year in Beauxbatons. S: As children, we played a lot together. I used to train Minah to become a chaser, like me, but in the end, she worked better as a beater. M: Suho is one of those typical brothers who believe his little sister wants to become exactly like him, so when he decided he wanted to be a chaser, he also decided I’d be one too. He used to drill me on free throws, but he hated it when the quaffle touched the hoop before gliding trough because apparently, players who scored that way lacked elegance. If I ever made a throw that bounced on the hoop before scoring, he'd yell ‘doesn’t count!’. It was frankly ridiculous.

CM: Other than quidditch, is there any other way you bond with each other? S: We’ve grown up together, so it’s kind of inevitable that because we’ve shared the same experiences, we’ve also developed similar interests. M: On our downtime, we love going to movies and just being able to enter someone else's creative world. We love it, but we don’t get to watch very much of it. Although we watch all the stuff our friends make S: Another thing we connect over is food. Growing up, we always had dinner together as a family. Obviously, as we’ve gotten more intense with our careers there’s not always the opportunity to do that, but when Minah and I are in the same city, we’ll eat all meals together. That being said, we’re not the same. I’m way more into following sports than Minah is. She has separate interests as well. M: I think I have more of an interest in fashion, but that’s not to say that he doesn’t have an interest in fashion. S: I’m super into fashion! Maybe not in a traditional or expected way, but I love it as well.

CM: Speaking of fashion, which one is more fashion-forward? S: I want to say Minah, but actually, we both are very fashion savvy. I guess it’s more evident for her since she’s one of the faces of the family business and pretty much everybody's fashion muse, but I’m into fashion as well. I have my own sportswear brand and we recently signed a partnership with Power Play. We're doing well. M: I think I would pick Suho. He is probably even more picky about what he wears. When we were younger, Suho and my cousins Gabe and Agnes (Seybrook) actually made up a fashion clique they dubbed the “7 Brand Club”. It was hilarious, they only wore clothes from seven luxury brands and they would brag about it. Thankfully they forgot about it now that they’re all grown up, but I always tease them about it.

CM: Well, it sounds like an interesting group! We all know that siblings sometimes drive each other crazy, and you two spend a lot of time together, so I would love to know how you get on each other’s nerves. S: I think I get on her nerves more than she gets on mine, naturally. I’m her older brother, so I give her a hard time sometimes. M: He has a great sense of humor, which I’m sure so many people appreciate, but sometimes I’m like, ‘Okay, okay, I get it, you’re funny.’ He’s also very overprotective at times and granted, it is nice to have him worrying about me, but when he fusses over the minimal details, it can be unnerving.

CM: Is that your biggest pet peeve about him? What do you love most about him? And viceversa M: In general, Suho is just easy to get along with. I love how genuine he is and how unapologetic he is about it, despite it all. My biggest pet peeve is related to his overprotectiveness… he basically calls non stop when I don’t pick the phone. It’s so annoying, but we’re both bad at staying mad at each other, so whatever happens, we confront each other, forgive and move on. S: To me, I guess, Minah is the person that can make me happy no matter what I’m going through. She really makes everything seem easy. Pet peeves... I don’t know. She is seriously the best, but she never picks the phone and is terrible at texting back. [Laughs]

CM: Onto the most serious topics, the positive path and the trajectory that you guys are on, where does that come from? Who are your biggest inspirations? M: My family in general. Growing up, all I saw was my aunts trying to be the best version of themselves and people coming to my grandparents for wisdom or guidance. It has been very inspiring to grow up in such an environment where everybody is just so accomplished. S: I 100% agree with Min on that one. Our parents and family are definitely my biggest role models. And that’s where we both pull all of our inspiration from.

CM: How would you describe your relationship with each other? M: Suho and I are very similar in a lot of ways. Being close in age has put us right next to each other for a lot of things in life, so he’s always been my greatest supporter and something akin a parent to me. At this point, we’re both very focused on our own lives, projects and whatnot, but my relationship with him is sacred to me, so I try to spend as much time as possible with him. S: We’re each other's support system. If I’m down, Minah is that one person that makes me laugh and turns things around the quickest. I know how cliched it sounds, but we truly are best friends. I mean it.

CM: It’s beautiful that you guys are in such lockstep. Minah, talking about your brother you said that you felt like the two were almost like twins, like you could finish each other’s thoughts. Were you guys always that close? M: We’ve always been incredibly close, but at the same time our family never pushed us to do it all together. I guess we’ve got time apart in order to realize who we really are individually and in the process we’ve developed this close bond and trust for each other. Suho really is an amazing brother, he knows me very well and understands my motivations better than anyone else.

CM: Do you have a favorite memory of each other? M: I just thought of the time we had to be homeschooled. Neither of us was good at focusing on it, quite honestly it was a drag. We’d pretend that we were doing our school work, but the moment our aunts turned their backs, we’d be running around the manor and terrorizing the house staff. I don’t know if that’s my favorite—but it’s definitely a special one. I also loved being in the same quidditch team as him during high school. As the chaser and beater, we carried a big part of the team’s dynamics. We know each other so well that any time one of us made a mistake during practice, we would look at each other and laugh really hard. Of course, a mistake was unforgivable during an actual match for Suho, but it was fun to play together. We complemented each other very well, I’m actually getting emotional talking about it. S: Minah was just ruthless, it was amazing to see her play and I think I agree with most of the things she just said, but personally, I think traveling to Korea together, for the first time was a very unique experience. We both got to experience so many things, meeting our paternal family, visiting all these crazy places and just having each other to rely on. It was just awesome. I’ll forever remember that trip.

CM: Has there ever been, like, some sort of feeling of competition between the two of you? S: We never really felt competitive because Minah has always been better than me at everything. There’s been no competition. M: [laughs] Oh, no! That is so not true. S: It is, Minah was into modeling and basically under the spotlight from a very young age, so I was like “My younger sister is, like, 5, and she’s making all these cool stuff. What’s happening?”. Minah had an entourage of people behind her while doing photoshoots and then she would go to school, learn languages and play muggle sports and I was all like “I’m underachieving.” Minah has always been special and whatever she wanted to do, she did it amazingly. She is a natural, and never forces anything at all. Minah just didn’t have as big as a passion for quidditch as me. But if she did, she could be doing what I’m doing right now and she would be so much better.

CM: Finally, Describe each other in three words. M: “Hilarious”, “supportive” and “loving”. S: “Creative”, “powerful” and “unique”. No, wait, three words it’s not enough, I have to add “inspiring” too.

****

#magazine #edits #oc #minah #suho #delacroix family

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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Who Will Save the Food Timeline?

The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian.

In the long timeline of human civilization, here’s roughly how things shook out: First, there was fire, water, ice, and salt. Then we started cooking up and chowing down on oysters, scallops, horsemeat, mushrooms, insects, and frogs, in that general chronological order. Fatty almonds and sweet cherries found their way into our diet before walnuts and apples did, but it would be a couple thousand years until we figured out how to make ice cream or a truly good apple pie. Challah (first century), hot dogs (15th century), Fig Newtons (1891), and Meyer lemons (1908) landed in our kitchens long before Red Bull (1984), but they all arrived late to the marshmallow party — we’d been eating one version or another of those fluffy guys since 2000 B.C.

This is, more or less, the history of human eating habits for 20,000 years, and right now, you can find it all cataloged on the Food Timeline, an archival trove of food history hiding in plain sight on a website so lo-fi you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a GeoCities fanpage. When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” There is history, context, and commentary on everything from Taylor pork roll to Scottish tablet to “cowboy cooking.”

A couple of years ago, I landed on the humble authority of the Food Timeline while doing research on bread soup, a kind of austerity cuisine found in countless cultures. The entry for soup alone spans more than 70,000 words (The Great Gatsby doesn’t break 50,000), with excerpts from sources like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food, John Ayto’s An A-Z of Food and Drink, and D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully’s Early French Cookery. Before long, I fell into the emotional condition known as an internet K-hole, following link after link after link for hours on end. From olla podrida to hodge podge to cassava to taro to Chex Mix to Johnnycakes, the Food Timeline covered everything. Did you know that mozzarella sticks go as far back as the Middle Ages, but back then they called them “pipefarces”? I bookmarked the site and returned to it time and time again, when I was researching, writing, or just bored and hungry.

Despite the Food Timeline’s incredible utility, few people I spoke to had ever heard of it. Those who had always marveled at its breadth. “Oh my god, it’s nirvana,” Taste of the Past podcast host Linda Pelaccio said to herself when she first stumbled onto the Food Timeline. Sandy Oliver, a food historian and fellow fan, was stunned by its completeness and simplicity. “It was one of the most accessible ways of getting into food history — especially if you were a beginner — because it was just so easy to use,” she told me. “It didn’t have a hyperacademic approach, which would be off-putting.”

When Oliver learned that the thousands of pages and countless resources on the Food Timeline were compiled and updated entirely by one woman, she couldn’t believe it. “Oh my lord,” she thought. “This is an obsessed person.”

The Food Timeline, in all its comprehensive splendor, was indeed the work of an obsessed person: a New Jersey reference librarian named Lynne Olver. Olver launched the site in 1999, two years before Wikipedia debuted, and maintained it, with little additional help, for more than 15 years. By 2014, it had reached 35 million readers and Olver had personally answered 25,000 questions from fans who were writing history papers or wondering about the origins of family recipes. Olver populated the pages with well-researched answers to these questions, making a resource so thorough that a full scroll to the bottom of the Food Timeline takes several labored seconds.

For nearly two decades, Olver’s work was everyone else’s gain. In April of 2015, she passed away after a seven-month struggle with leukemia, a tragedy acknowledged briefly at the bottom of the site. “The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015, her obituary), reference librarian with a passion for food history.”

In the wake of Olver’s death, no one has come forward to take over her complex project, leaving a void in the internet that has yet to be filled — and worse, her noble contribution to a world lacking in accurate information and teeming with fake news is now in danger of being lost forever.

It isn’t often that we are tasked with thinking about the history of the food that we eat, unless it shows up in a Jeopardy! question or we ask our informal family historians to detail whose mother passed down this or that version of pound cake. But there are plenty of reasons to pay close attention: for curiosity’s sake; for deepening an appreciation of and respect for cooks, food, and technique; and for gathering perspective on what came before us. “Very few (if any) foods are invented. Most are contemporary twists on traditional themes,” Olver wrote on the Food Timeline. “Today’s grilled cheese sandwich is connected to ancient cooks who melted cheese on bread. 1950s meatloaf is connected to ground cooked meat products promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which are, in turn related to ancient Roman minces.”

The problem is that these days we’re overloaded with bad information that can be accessed instantaneously, with few intermediaries running quality control. “I think it’s a little too easy to turn to the web,” Oliver, who was also a longtime friend of Olver’s, told me as we talked about the legacy of Food Timeline. “What I worry about is that people aren’t learning critical thinking skills. Once in a while I run into someone who has never used a primary source — wouldn’t know it if it hit them on the head. Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.” Or, if not a library, a mammoth resource compiled by a certified reference librarian herself. Whenever a reader would write in asking a question, or when Olver herself would become interested in the provenance of a certain food, she’d turn to her personal library of thousands of food books, and her litany of professional resources and skills, and write out detailed answers with sources cited on her website.

As Olver emphasized proudly in a 2013 interview on Pelaccio’s Taste of the Past podcast, when you Google “food history,” the Food Timeline appears first in the search results, even though she never “paid search engines for premium placement, solicited reciprocal links, partnered with book vendors, or sold advertising.” Over the years, thousands of emails poured in asking Olver for help finding the specific information they were looking for, like the history of a weird cheese or a grandmother’s pie recipe.

“One of my favorite groupings of people are those who are looking to recover family recipes,” Olver explained to Pelaccio. “I love that! As long as you can give me a little bit of context, then I have some direction.” She would often cook the recipes people sent her so she could gain a better understanding of the legacy of certain foods. Occasionally, she would struggle to come up with an answer to readers’ questions. “If anybody out there knows the answer to this, please let me know,” she began on Pelaccio’s podcast. “I’ve been asked repeatedly over the years for a recipe for ‘guildmaster sauce.’ It is mentioned on some of the old railroad menus and on fancy dining car menus, but we are not coming up with a recipe or other references.” She never got the answer.

“One of the reasons she wanted people to learn about food was for the simple basic fundamental fact that it kept people alive,” Sara Weissman, a fellow reference librarian at the Morris County Public Library and occasional Food Timeline collaborator, told me. “It was that simple. There was no pretension about it.” Olver found food to be a universal subject of interest — everyone had something to share and everyone had something to learn.

“Yesterday I took the entire day off from work because I wanted to research seitan wheat meat,” Olver told Pelaccio. “My whole site is really driven by my readers. What is it that they want to know?”

The Olvers’ former family home is a modest colonial that sits on a shady suburban street in Randolph, New Jersey, about 10 minutes from the Morris County Public Library, where Lynne worked for more than 25 years. It is fastidiously clean and welcoming, and Olver’s library was still the focal point of the house when I visited a little more than a year ago. As she amassed primary sources to build out the Food Timeline, the sitting room filled up with bookshelves to house her more than 2,300 books — some dating to the 17th century — as well as thousands of brochures and vintage magazines, and a disarrayed collection of other food ephemera, like plastic cups from Pat’s and Geno’s and a tin of Spam. “One of 10 top iconic American manufactured foods, SPAM holds a special place on our national table & culinary folklore,” Olver wrote on the Timeline.

Despite Olver’s intense fondness for it as an object of inquiry, Spam did not hold a special place on her palate; she never tried it. A picky eater, she detested lima beans, pistachio ice cream, calamari, slimy textures, and anything that even edged on raw. When she was in high school in the early ’70s, her favorite dish to make was something she called “peas with cheese,” which is as simple as it sounds. “She would take frozen peas and she’d melt cheese on it, mostly Swiss,” then cover the messy pile in Worcestershire sauce, Olver’s sister, Janice Martin, recalled. “We called Worcestershire sauce ‘life’s blood.’ It was coursing through our veins.” (Sadly, the Timeline does not include an entry for peas with cheese.)

Making peas with cheese as a teenager was the beginning of what would become a lifelong interest in food for Olver. Libraries also captured her attention early on: At 16, she took her first job as a clerk in the Bryant Library in Roslyn, New York, shelving books in the children’s department. There, she was mentored by two older librarians, whom she loved. “She was an introvert,” Olver’s sister told me. “When it came to research, she was fascinated by ferreting out information that nobody else could find.” In 1980, she graduated with a degree in library science from Albany State University, where she also worked as a short-order cook, making sandwiches for students and faculty at a university canteen.

“Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.”

Olver and her future husband, Gordon, met at Albany State and married the year after Olver graduated, in 1981, after which they worked in Manhattan (Lynne at a law library, Gordon in reinsurance), then Connecticut. They eventually had two children — Sarah and Jason — and settled in New Jersey in 1991, where Olver found a job as a reference librarian at the Morris County Public Library, eventually becoming the head of reference, and finally director of the library.

It was during Olver’s time as a reference librarian that the seed was planted for the Food Timeline. It began as an assignment to explain the origins of Thanksgiving dinner to children, to be published on an early incarnation of the library’s website. Around the same time, Olver was asked to write a monthly print newsletter to share library news, which she named Eureka!. One section of the newsletter was devoted to “Hot Topics,” as Olver and her colleague Sharon Javer wrote in the first dispatch. “Each month, this lead feature will focus on a particular theme: holidays, New Jersey events sources, census data, and so on. Included in this sizzling section will be answers to arduous questions, practical pointers and many marvelous morsels of information.”

Eureka!, in a sign of things to come, began to take over her life. “I remember one time saying to her, ‘How come we’re buying all this colored paper?’” Gordon, her husband, told me. “The library wouldn’t pay for the paper, so she was buying it on her own. When the library realized it was taking so much of her time, they asked her to stop. Meanwhile, she had put so much time and effort into it that she said to them, ‘Just pass it over to me, I’ll take it.’”

When the family got a Gateway computer in the late ’90s, Olver began teaching herself HTML, and by 1999, she was combining her interest in the Thanksgiving dinner project and the Eureka! answers column into a hybrid website she called the Food Timeline, where she could focus on providing well-researched food history on her own time. An archived version of the 1999 Food Timeline still exists and looks — unsurprisingly — more or less the same as the one now. “We still hand code html & today’s readers comment the site is ‘ugly,’” Olver wrote under the site’s “Market Strategy.” “We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale. Conversley? [sic] FT looks so old it’s become vintage.”

Olver wrote everything on the Food Timeline with a royal “we,” including her responses to readers’ emails, despite the fact the project was largely hers, with an occasional assist from others. “‘I don’t want anyone to know that it’s just me,’’’ Sarah recalled her mom saying. “She wanted people to believe that it was a network of volunteers,” because she felt that it lent the site more credibility.

“We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale.”

While Olver worked at the county library by day, by night she was creating an online resource for anyone who wanted to know more about Johnny Appleseed or chuck wagon stew or the origins of Sauce Robert. By the website’s first anniversary, Olver was already spending upwards of 30 hours a week on the Food Timeline, compiling and posting all the information she was digging up and answering readers’ questions about the origins of their grandmothers’ crumble recipes. “If you came in the house and you wanted to know where she was, and she wasn’t cooking, she was in the office on the computer,” Gordon recalled.

Eventually, even the cooking fell behind. Olver’s children came to expect burnt grilled cheese sandwiches at meals Sarah said. “She would be like, ‘I’ll leave these [on the stove] and go do my work,’ and then she would forget because she was so into what she was doing.”

Over time, the audience for the site expanded, and Olver’s subtle form of fame grew with it. She was named a winner of the New York Times Librarian Award in 2002, and, in 2004, Saveur put the Food Timeline on its Saveur 100 list of the best food finds that year. In the mid-2010s, she was asked to contribute to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and consult for America’s Test Kitchen.

Sarah and Jason recalled taking their mother to a cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan during that time period. “She was so excited about the teacher of this class because she had heard of her through her research,” Sarah told me. “When we got there, the teacher was like, ‘I’m looking at my roster of students and I see that Lynne Olver is here. Where is Lynne Olver?’ Mom kind of timidly raised her hand, and this chef was like, ‘I’ve been dying to meet you!’” The chef who left Olver starstruck was just as starstruck to meet Olver.

For years, Olver lived something of a double life. As the director of a mid-size suburban library, she was known to hand out PayDay candy bars to her staff on pay day and shovel snow from the building walkway during snowstorms, while as the founder of Food Timeline, she brought her computer on vacation, dutifully responding to readers’ food history questions within the promised 48-hour window. “I think she started on the internet as a way to reach a lot of people,” her sister said. “A lot of people who wouldn’t go into the library.”

The night before her wedding, in September 2014, Olver’s daughter, Sarah, noticed that her mom wasn’t acting like herself. While the family was sitting all together in the living room, Olver got up to go to the bathroom; minutes later, she was in the throes of a seizure. Sarah called 911, and Olver was taken to the hospital. The family stayed with her until doctors sent them home in the early hours of Sarah’s wedding day. The wedding had to go on, though Olver was too sick to attend. Doctors diagnosed her with leukemia the next day.

Olver had known for a while that she was sick, but didn’t want to ruin the wedding, so she had put off telling anyone. “She’d be like, ‘I’m dying, but let me put everyone else first,’” Sarah said. Olver was kept in the hospital for two months, but fought hard to be home for Thanksgiving. “It was my first time cooking Thanksgiving dinner because she wasn’t feeling up to cooking — and I ruined it,” Sarah said. “The turkey shrunk off the bone. That was one of the only things that made her laugh in a really long time.”

“Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best.”

When she was diagnosed with leukemia, Olver used the Food Timeline’s Twitter account to grumble about the food in the ICU at Morristown Medical Center, where she stayed until she was transferred to specialists in Hackensack two months later. “It was a chicken cutlet with some kind of sauce on it,” Gordon recalled; the post has since been taken down by the family. “She said, ‘This sauce, I don’t know what it is, I’m not eating it. It doesn’t look very good. It’s not a natural color.’”

Following her stay at the hospital in Hackensack, Olver returned home to wait for a bone marrow transplant. “She had to use a walker because balance was a problem, but very shortly after getting back from the hospital, she was walking around and doing all of her Food Timeline stuff again,” Gordon explained. She was responding to emails, diving back into her research. “On her birthday, March 10, she said, ‘I had a glorious day.’”

The reason? “Someone had written in with a question that she liked.”

A little over a month later, Lynne died of leukemia, only one year short of her retirement from the library. She had been planning to spend her retirement working on it full time: Earlier that year, she had renewed the Food Timeline domain for 10 more years.

A year after Olver’s death, her family began to discuss what would happen to the Food Timeline and who could take it over. “What we know is that we couldn’t do it justice ourselves,” Sarah said.

To anyone willing and able to maintain Olver’s vision of an ad-free, simply designed, easy-to-access resource on food history, the family members say that the website and her library are theirs, for free. A couple of people have put forward their names, but the family felt that their hearts weren’t in the right place. “One woman had shown us what she had done with her website and it was just full of banner advertisements,” Gordon said.

“It has to uphold her vision,” Sarah added.

Olver’s book collection — if a price were to be put on it — would be worth tens of thousands of dollars, Gordon estimates. So far, there have been no takers for either the books or the task of keeping the site going.

“The Culinary Institute of America initially expressed interest,” Gordon said. “But three months later, they came back and said, ‘We don’t really have the ability to take that volume of texts and dedicate [the task of updating the site] to a specific person. I said they were missing the point; I wasn’t looking to give them the books unless they wanted the website, too.”

The Food Timeline was — and still is — a great democratizing force. “I think Lynne liked that the internet was for everybody and by everybody. Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best,” Lynne’s sister, Janice, told me. “If you hold the knowledge and you can help everybody get it, that’s where it’s at.” Lynne Olver, an award-winning reference librarian, wanted everybody to know exactly what she knew.

“I would second anybody who says that they want Food Timeline to be brought up to date, who know how to keep that valuable digitized information where people can get their hands or their minds on it,” Sandy Oliver told me. “I’d hate to think Lynne had spent all those hours doing all that work and have it just slide into oblivion. I’d love to see it continue in whatever useful form it can.”

Dayna Evans is a freelance writer currently based in Paris. She last wrote for Eater about the rise of community fridges across the country. D’Ara Nazaryan is an art director & illustrator living in Los Angeles. Fact checked by Samantha Schuyler

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2AEYzmX https://ift.tt/3gQZZdN

The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian.

“Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.”

“We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale.”

“Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best.”

The reason? “Someone had written in with a question that she liked.”

“It has to uphold her vision,” Sarah added.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2AEYzmX via Blogger https://ift.tt/2AHBVKT

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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sorosoroso · 5 years ago

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Article for Connect Magazine

I had a chance to write about a music artist I really love, and it will soon be published in Connect Magazine, which is a community driven project where expats living in Japan contribute articles about Japanese culture and everyday life. The issue my article will debut comes out in a few days. It is totally free to read and available online. Please enjoy below!

A Folkin’ Good Time: My Journey from Japanese Traditional Folk Music to 8-bit Technofolk

I stumbled upon Japanese traditional folk music the same way a horror film heroine might trip into a dark, deep pit in an old, creepy mansion: by accident.

And much like said heroine who suddenly wakes up in said mysterious, deep pit, I don’t even know how I got here. The last thing I remember is wondering about Japanese instruments and typing in “Japanese traditional songs” into a YouTube search bar, before being sucked in by the strums of shamisens and the dynamic vocals of Japan’s traditional folk singers.

Although it’s usually put under the umbrella term “min’yo”, there is no exact name for the genre Japanese traditional folk music belongs to. Sometimes they’re called inaka bushi (country melody), other times they’re called inaka buri (country tunes) or even hinata uta (rural songs). However, I think min’yo, whose kanji translates to roughly “the people’s chant”, is a weirdly accurate description of these simple, yet intriguing songs (and for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to be referring to them as min’yo from here on out).

In the same way certain foods or adorable mascots are part of certain prefectures’ identity, min’yo songs are another way for many regions in Japan to further distinguish themselves. Originally sung by lower class people, their purposes vary from work songs sung while toiling away in fields, to sacred religious chants performed during ceremonies. Many songs tend to have imagery of nature or details of everyday life, and often incorporate special dances or instruments during performances.

Take for example Japan’s oldest min’yo song: Kokiriko-bushi. Hailing from Gokayama village in Toyama prefecture, Kokiriko-bushi illustrates the natural flora and fauna of the village during the harvest season. A performance of Kokiriko-bushi is visually intriguing as well; performers move slowly across the stage in uniquely shaped straw hats, as others play the iconic binzasara instrument: an accordion-like apparatus consisting of many wooden slats that clack together to create the “dedereko-den” chorus of the song.

I fell in love with how all these elements came together into a cohesive experience. More compelling, though, were the powerful emotions behind each song. Each one seemed to condense the essence of feelings like sadness, happiness, or loneliness in a way that you could empathize with, despite the language barrier.

My appreciation for min’yo grew extensively throughout college, and during long hours of nighttime studying or downtime between projects and papers, I often listened to min’yo playlists to keep me company. Whether it was the more New Age, emotional ballads of Ikue Asazaki, or lo-fi recordings of televised performances from the 90s, I listened to it all. I wasn’t too picky, and even if I didn’t always understand the words, I let myself get swept away by the vibrant energy each song and performer exuded.

Unfortunately, my college roommate and study buddies didn’t quite share the same enthusiasm for min’yo, and I don’t blame them. I completely understand that min’yo isn’t exactly easy listening for a lot of people. It can be a bit grating at times, with tunes that don’t follow traditional Western note progressions, not to mention the sometimes startling kakegoe (call-and-response) that seemingly jump out of nowhere.

Older Japanese folks didn’t understand why I enjoyed the genre so much, either; even they found min’yo to be a relic of the past that didn’t quite have the chops to withstand the more international appeal of modern-day songs. For a lot of people, min’yo was something that only a few Japanese people sang, and even then only to demonstrate Japan’s nostalgic, rustic charm. I found myself having to agree with them. It seemed that min’yo was reserved for special occasions, like cultural events or TV specials, and so many recordings I enjoyed were decades old. Perfect preservation of the genre seemed to be the goal, and innovation was limited, if present at all.

And then I discovered Omodaka.

I was looking for more min’yo to listen to on the Internet (as per usual), and during a mindless return to YouTube’s homepage, I noticed a distinctive thumbnail.

A punchy, vibrant red background emblazoned with a stark white, minimalist graphic of an arrowhead flower; that’s all there was to it. The title was equally as simple: “Hietsuki Bushi”, uploaded by “Omodaka”. At the time, I had no idea what any of those words meant, but I was riding high on my min’yo video binge, so naturally I clicked.

Imagine my surprise when, instead of hearing the bare twangs of shamisen like I was expecting, I was hit with a lush, multi-layered 8-bit melody mingling with a classical guitar’s gentle strums. Before I could process what I was hearing, a loud, piercing, siren-like horn cut through, and jarring though it was, I only became even more entranced in whatever the hell YouTube just recommended me. I was totally immersed.

Then the vocals kicked in.

To hear the powerful voice of a trained traditional folk singer sing about a tragic love story from the Kamakura era was absolutely breathtaking, especially with the blips and thrums of the 8-bit chords accenting it every few measures. The singer’s notes swooped up and down with confidence, working alongside the digital landscape of the background music to convey the melancholic longing of the narrator. I’d never listened to such a wonderful marriage between traditional and modern musical aesthetics before, and as soon as the video finished, I was already eager for the next song.

As it turns out, the skilled vocals I’d heard on Hietsuki Bushi and on subsequent tracks belonged to classically trained folk singer, Akiko Kanazawa (whose min'yo rendition of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” is definitely worth checking out), but listening to her other works, it was clear that someone else had a hand in the skillful mixing of chiptunes and traditional folk standards I was hearing. After a few music videos and a deep-dive Internet investigation, I soon discovered that Omodaka was not just a one-off, eclectic min’yo mashup duo, but a collaborative project that combines traditional Japanese music with contemporary visual artists. But, behind all of it is one man—electronic music producer and DJ, Soichi Terada.

An accomplished house techno artist and founder of record label Far East Recording, Terada has enjoyed listening to min’yo music since childhood, but felt he “couldn’t say that [he enjoyed min’yo]” to his friends because they weren’t interested in it. He experimented with min’yo/ house fusions, and over time, Terada developed a distinct sound that would define his label. Later on, spurred by a desire to collaborate with visual artist friends, Terada launched the Omodaka project in 2001.

The Omodaka project usually involves Terada’s friends creating fantastical, even psychedelic, animated music videos for his “techno folk” songs (a term Terada has coined to describe this niche genre). My personal favorites are “Yosowya-san”, with its side-scrolling 8-bit exploration of Japan’s gambling culture, and, of course, “Hietsuki Bushi”, an adventure of a love confession thwarted by portal jumping spacemen and a farmer/lion/bird chimera. Oh, and aliens. There are also several albums released under the Omodaka name too, each filled with songs beyond the wild, color bursting music videos.

Where the Omodaka project really shines, however, is during live performances. They are an unabashed bonanza of pure theatricality, with projections of Omodaka’s music videos flashing behind Terada as he waves around props like paper lanterns or bamboo flutes all throughout his set. Even Kanazawa makes an appearance during performances, singing to the audience virtually through the use of TV screens set up around the stage.

Especially striking is Terada’s costume when he performs as Omodaka. Instead of his trademark, brightly colored shirts, Terada comes onstage wearing a white, plastic mask, a shaggy black wig, and miko (Japanese shrine maiden) religious robes. As Omodaka, Terada transforms into an uncanny, barely human, androgynous entity whose only goal seems to be to get the audience’s blood pumping to some good ol’ technofolk.

Best of all, when you look into the audience during an Omodaka show, it doesn’t consist of solely geriatric Japanese; it’s diverse and, importantly, it’s young. I’m certainly no expert in methods of preserving a cultural property like min’yo, but I think that Terada is taking a step in the right direction to make sure min’yo will stick around for a bit longer. Sure, perhaps some purists may condemn Terada’s genre mixing as sacrilegious to everything traditional folk music stands for. However, when I see the audiences during Omodaka’s performances sway their bodies to Kanazawa’s trilling and yell back kakegoe to Terada, I feel that wonderful energy that drew me into min’yo in the first place. All I hope is that some of these people will also go back and listen to the music that led to the Omodaka project, and appreciate the unique sound of min’yo, too.

If you would like to check out the Omodaka project or Terada’s other works (he’s composed music for video games as well!), I highly recommend looking at his label’s YouTube channel: “fareastrecording” (all lower case, no space). If you search “Omodaka - Topic” in the search bar, YouTube even has a curated playlist with Omodaka’s entire oeuvre! Omodaka is also on Spotify. Furthermore, Terada regularly updates a Twitter account which announces future performances and other exciting news, like the October 28th release of Omodaka’s newest album in five years!

#>2000 #omodaka #minyo #article

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denisewilliams · 6 years ago

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Dealing with Difficult Customers

By Dave Kahle

It is easy to work with people you like, and it is even easier to work with people who like you. But that’s not always the case. Sooner or later, you’ll have to deal with a difficult customer.

Difficult customers come in a wide variety. There are those whose personality rubs you the wrong way. They may not be difficult for someone else, but they are for you. And then there are those who are difficult for everyone: Picky people, know-it-alls, egocentrics, fault-finders, constant complainers, etc. Every sales person can list a number of the types.

But perhaps the most difficult for everyone is the angry customer. This is someone who feels that he or she has been wronged, and is upset and emotional about it. These customers complain, and they are angry about something you or your company did.

There are some sound business reasons to become adept in handling an angry customer. Research indicates that customers who complain are likely to continue doing business with your company if they feel that they were treated properly. It’s estimated that as many as 90% of customers who perceive themselves as having been wronged never complain, they just take their business elsewhere. So, angry, complaining customers care enough to talk to you, and have not yet decided to take their business to the competition. They are customers worth saving.

Not only are there benefits to your company, but you personally gain as well.

Become adept at handling angry customers, and you’ll feel much more confident in your own abilities. If you can handle this, you can handle anything. While anyone can work with the easy people, it takes a real professional to be successful with the difficult customers. Your confidence will grow, your poise will increase, and your self-esteem will intensify.

On the other hand, if you mishandle it, you’ll watch the situation dissolve into lost business and upset people. You may find yourself upset for days.

So, how do you handle an angry, complaining customer? Let’s begin with a couple tools you can use in these situations.

RESPECT.

It can be difficult to respect a person who may be yelling, swearing or behaving like a two-year-old. I’m not suggesting you respect the behavior, only that you respect the person. Keep in mind that, 99 times out of 100, you are not the object of the customer’s anger. You are like a small tree in the path of a swirling tornado. But unlike the small tree, you have the power to withstand the wind.

What is the source of your power? Unlike the customer, you are not angry, you are in control, and your only problem at the moment is helping him with his problem. If you step out of this positioning, and start reacting to the customer in an emotional way, you’ll lose control, you’ll lose your power, and the situation will be likely to escalate into a lose-lose for everyone. So, begin with a mindset that says, “No matter what, I will respect the customer.”

EMPATHY.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and try to see the situation from his/her perspective. Don’t try and cut him off, don’t urge him to calm down. Instead, listen carefully. If someone is angry or upset, it is because that person feels injured in some way. Your job is to let the customer vent and to listen attentively in order to understand the source of that frustration. When you do that, you send a powerful unspoken message that you care about him and his situation.

Often, as the customer comes to realize that you really do care and that you are going to attempt to help him resolve the problem, the customer will calm down on his own, and begin to interact with you in a positive way.

Here’s how you can use these two tools in an easily-remembered process for dealing with angry customers.

CRACK THE EGG

Imagine that you have a hard-boiled egg. The rich yellow yolk at the center of the egg represents the solution to the customer’s problem, the hardened white which surrounds the yolk represents the details of the customer’s situation, and the hard shell represents his/her anger.

In order to get to the yolk, and resolve the situation, you must first crack the shell. In other words, you have got to penetrate the customer’s anger. Then you’ve got to cut through the congealed egg white. That means that you understand the details of the customer’s situation. Finally, you’re at the heart of the situation, where you can offer a solution to the customer‘s problem.

So, handling an angry customer is like cutting through a hard-boiled egg. Here’s a four-step process to help you do so.

LISTEN.

Let’s say you stop to see one of your regular customers. He doesn’t even give you time to finish your greeting before he launches into a tirade.

At this point, about all you can do is LISTEN. And that’s what you do. You don’t try and cut him off, you don’t urge him to calm down. Not just yet. Instead, you listen carefully. And as you listen, you begin to piece together his story. He ordered a piece of equipment three weeks ago. You quoted him X price and delivery by last Friday for a project that’s starting this week. Not only is the equipment not there, but he received an invoice for it at a different price than was quoted.

“What kind of shoddy operation is this?” he wants to know. Do you understand how important his project is? Do you know how much time and money is at stake? If he doesn’t get his equipment and something happens to this project, you’re going to pay for it. He knew, he just knew he should have ordered the equipment from your competitor. What are you going do about it?

Now you have the basic story. Hopefully, after this gush of frustration, there will be a pause while he comes up for air.

More often than not, once the customer has had an initial chance to vent his rage, it’s going to die down a little, and that’s your opportunity to take step in.

Even if he has started calming down on his own, there comes a moment – and I can almost guarantee you’ll sense it – to help calm him down. Try something along the lines of: “It sounds like something has gone wrong, and I can understand your frustration. I’m sorry you’re experiencing this problem. Let’s take a look at the next step.”

Try to calm yourself first, and then to acknowledge his feelings. Say, “I can tell you’re upset…” or, “It sounds like you’re angry…” then connect to the customer by apologizing, or empathizing. When you say something like “I’m sorry that happened. If I were you, I’d be frustrated, too.” It’s amazing how much of a calming effect that can have.

Remember, anger is a natural, self-defensive reaction to a perceived wrong. If there is a problem with your company’s product or service, some frustration and disappointment is justified.

This is so important, let me repeat it. First you listen carefully and completely to the customer. Then you empathize with what the customer is feeling, and let him or her know that you understand. This will almost always calm the customer down. You’ve cracked the shell of the egg. Now, you can proceed to deal with the problem.

IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM.

Sometimes while the angry customer is venting, you’ll be able to latch right on to the problem because it’s clear-cut. Something is broken. Or late. Or he thinks a promise has been broken.

But sometimes in the middle of all that rage, it’s tough to comprehend the bottom-line issue. This is a good place for some specific questions. Ask the customer to give you some details. “What day did he order it, when exactly was it promised. What is his situation at the moment?” These kind of questions force the customer to think about facts instead of his/her feelings about those facts. So, you interject a more rational kind of conversation. Think of this step of the process as cutting through the white of the egg to get to the yolk at the center.

It’s important, when you think you understand the details, to restate the problem. You can say, “Let me see if I have this right. You were promised delivery last Friday because you need it for an important project this coming week. But you haven’t received our product yet. Is that correct?”

He will probably acknowledge that you’ve sized up the situation correctly. Or, he may say, “No, that’s not right” and then proceed to explain further. In either case the outcome is good, because you will eventually understand his situation correctly, and have him tell you that “Yes, that’s right.”

And at that point you can apologize. Some people believe that an apology is an acknowledgment of wrongdoing. But you can appreciate and apologize for the customer’s inconvenience without pointing fingers. Just say, “Mr. Brady, I’m sorry this has happened.” Or “Mr. Brady, I understand this must be very frustrating. Let’s just see what we can do fix it, OK?”

AVOID BLAME.

You don’t want to blame the customer by saying something like “Are you sure you understood the price and delivery date correctly?” This will just ignite his anger all over again because you are questioning his credibility and truth-telling.

And you don’t want to blame your company or your suppliers Never say, “I’m not surprised your invoice was wrong. It’s been happening a lot.” Or, “Yes, our backorders are way behind.”

In general, you AVOID BLAME. Which is different than acknowledging responsibility. For example, if you know, for a fact, a mistake has been made, you can acknowledge it and apologize for it. “Mr. Brady, clearly there’s a problem here with our performance. I can’t change that, but let me see what I can do to help you out because I understand how important your project is.”

RESOLVE THE PROBLEM.

Now you’re at the heart of the egg. You won’t always be able to fix the problem perfectly. And you may need more time than a single phone call. But it’s critical to leave the irate customer with the understanding that your goal is to resolve the problem. You may need to say, “I’m going to need to make some phone calls.” If you do, give the customer an idea of when you’ll get back to him: “Later this afternoon” or “First thing in the morning.”

Then do it. Make the phone calls. Get the information. Find out what you can do for this customer and do it. Then follow up with the customer when you said you would. Even if you don’t have all the information you need, call when you said you would and at least let him know what you’ve done, what you’re working on and what your next step will be. Let the customer know that he and his business are important to you, that you understand his frustration, and that you’re working hard to get things fixed.

Use the tools of respect and empathy, and the “crack the egg” process, and you’ll move your professionalism up a notch.

About the Author:

Dave Kahle is one of the world’s leading sales authorities. He’s written twelve books, presented in 47 states and eleven countries, and has helped enrich tens of thousands of sales people and transform hundreds of sales organizations. Sign up for his free weekly Ezine. His book, How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime, has been recognized by three international entities as “one of the five best English language business books.” Check out his latest book, The Good Book on Business.

from Commence CRM http://www.commence.com/blog/2018/06/05/dealing-with-difficult-customers/ from Commence CRM https://commencecrm1.tumblr.com/post/174605247874

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joshuamagno · 6 years ago

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Dealing with Difficult Customers

By Dave Kahle

It is easy to work with people you like, and it is even easier to work with people who like you. But that’s not always the case. Sooner or later, you’ll have to deal with a difficult customer.

Not only are there benefits to your company, but you personally gain as well.

On the other hand, if you mishandle it, you’ll watch the situation dissolve into lost business and upset people. You may find yourself upset for days.

So, how do you handle an angry, complaining customer? Let’s begin with a couple tools you can use in these situations.

RESPECT.

EMPATHY.

Here’s how you can use these two tools in an easily-remembered process for dealing with angry customers.

CRACK THE EGG

So, handling an angry customer is like cutting through a hard-boiled egg. Here’s a four-step process to help you do so.

LISTEN.

Let’s say you stop to see one of your regular customers. He doesn’t even give you time to finish your greeting before he launches into a tirade.

Now you have the basic story. Hopefully, after this gush of frustration, there will be a pause while he comes up for air.

More often than not, once the customer has had an initial chance to vent his rage, it’s going to die down a little, and that’s your opportunity to take step in.

Remember, anger is a natural, self-defensive reaction to a perceived wrong. If there is a problem with your company’s product or service, some frustration and disappointment is justified.

IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM.

Sometimes while the angry customer is venting, you’ll be able to latch right on to the problem because it’s clear-cut. Something is broken. Or late. Or he thinks a promise has been broken.

AVOID BLAME.

And you don’t want to blame your company or your suppliers Never say, “I’m not surprised your invoice was wrong. It’s been happening a lot.” Or, “Yes, our backorders are way behind.”

RESOLVE THE PROBLEM.

Use the tools of respect and empathy, and the “crack the egg” process, and you’ll move your professionalism up a notch.

About the Author:

Source: http://www.commence.com/blog/2018/06/05/dealing-with-difficult-customers/

from Commence CRM https://commencecrm1.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/dealing-with-difficult-customers/

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cecillewhite · 7 years ago

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10 Ways to Lose at Selling Learning Systems: For LMS Vendors

LMS vendors, I owe you a post. It’s hard to believe nearly two years have passed since I last shared tips for selling learning systems. But since the LMS market is on fire, you’ve probably been too busy to notice. I hope you’ve been too busy winning.

We’ve been busy. This year, in addition to launching “The Talented Learning Show” podcast, writing 20 in-depth articles, hosting 5 webinars and developing several commissioned industry reports, we’ve been up to our eyeballs in an endless series of comprehensive LMS selection assignments. In fact, we just concurrently completed two full-scale LMS selection projects in the last couple of weeks — one for a corporate extended enterprise client and another for an international professional association.

In the Talented Learning selection process, we always work with our clients to first accurately define their requirements and then we recommend 4 super-qualified, matching vendors to evaluate in a formal RFP selection process. (Learning systems buyers are always more successful when they invest their time evaluating qualified vendors for their business situation vs. qualifying vendors).

With 8 total finalists, my head is still spinning from analyzing a thousand plus pages of RFP response documents, sitting through 24 hours of demos and critically (sometimes ruthlessly) evaluating a diverse cast of sales characters as they pitch their solutions.

The LMS Sales Process: What Counts?

READ OUR 2017 AWARDS POST!

As you may know, this isn’t my first sales rodeo. Before founding Talented Learning, I was an LMS sales guy for 13 years and competed in hundreds and hundreds of learning systems sales opportunities. I won and lost my fair share but was unaware of my level of effectiveness in relation to my sales peers.

Sales reps rarely get a chance to see peers in action, so it’s difficult to compare your sales prowess based on anything other than annual sales volume and the tidbits shared by the common solution architects. Now as a selection consultant, I have a better view than most of the best and worst sales people from all over the world. It’s fascinating side benefit of my job.

What do I notice? The list is deep, wide and critical. For example:

How quickly do sales reps respond to inquiries?

How deeply do they understand my client’s business needs?

How thorough are their questions?

Do they seem fully prepared for demos? How do they demo?

How candid and honest are their answers?

Are they on time?

Are they leveraging their executives – circling the wagons?

Are their clothes pressed, shoe shined and hair combed? (Yes, I really need to say this unbelievably).

What is their level of knowledge about their own solution?

That’s just a small sample from my thousand point checklist. I may be a tough critic, but when I see a stellar sales performance, I’m quick to give credit. On the other hand, when I see a train wreck, I’m equally quick to notice, chuckle and not invite them to compete for awhile. I rarely share criticism directly with vendors unless I’m asked, or unless I’m in the mood to write. Lucky for you, today I have plenty of fresh feedback from my recent experiences!

Why Sales Performance Should Be a Priority

Selling learning systems was and is never easy. The quickest selection processes take 90 days and require a ton of work. There can be only one winner and second place is worse than 40th. With 700+ learning management systems as competition, continuous sales improvement is the hidden-in-open-view key to a learning systems company’s future. Sometimes, a salesperson can do everything right in the sales process and still lose, but that doesn’t happen as often as salespeople like to think or tell their executives.

It also turns out that buyers are picky. Go figure. They are going to spend a few hundred thousand dollars and put their professional reputations on the line with the ultimate vendor selection. The reasons why they buy and don’t buy are often subjective are much deeper than any feature, function or cost.

Top 10 Ways to Lose an LMS Deal:

The problem about winning though is that it is time consuming. Both during the sales process and after. If your organization is winning too many deals and as a result you are too busy, here are some top ways I’ve seen work recently to efficiently lose a deal.

1) Rather than customizing your RFP response, just reuse a boilerplate proposal. Be sure to avoid specifics about the opportunity at hand.

2) Skip the spellcheeck.

3) Structure your pricing in an overly complicated manner that does not address the specific requirements in the RFP. Don’t forget to itemize plenty of low-cost options that are actually mandatory, so buyers are forced to untangle these features and debate the merits and cost of each.

4) Avoid research to profile your buyer. Don’t bother investigating their industry, their business strategy, their positioning, their brand names and other publicly available information. Ignore LinkedIn information about their organization and leaders.

5) Don’t illustrate a deep understanding of the business need in your RFP or product demonstration. Instead, assume all purchasing scenarios are essentially the same and you’ve seen these challenges before.

6) In the final demo, ask lots of discovery questions and try to tailor your demo on the fly.

7) Freely use the phrase “you can have anything you want,” or “that will require a slight modification,” but forget to note that your proposal doesn’t include the time or cost to satisfy any of these requirements.

8) If you don’t meet a requirement, purposely misrepresent it. This is one of my favorites. It often plays out like this: “Yes, we meet this requirement…” (And from this point forward, drone on with a convoluted-confusa-answer that describes something else entirely, hoping the buyer isn’t reading or listening closely, or an LMS selection consultant isn’t working on their behalf).

9) Deliver a “spaghetti-on-the-wall” demo where you throw every feature of your system at the buyer and hope something sticks. You know this is happening when the presenter says, “I don’t know if you need this particular feature or not, but let me tell you all about it just in case.” and then describes it excruciating detail.

10) In the final demo, when prospects ask a question that exposes a requirement gap, promise you’ll follow-up with an answer – then conveniently forget to close the loop.

Conclusion

Selling learning systems has always been challenging, but it’s even more so now. With so many niche players and so many ways to apply learning platforms, you’re likely to face stiff competition from across the spectrum. It’s impossible to keep ahead of every potential competitor, so selling against competitors if fruitless. You have to be selling for the client through the lens of solving their business needs.

The best salespeople approach their performance like elite athletes, systematically defining then optimizing their abilities for each and every of the many elements in the sales process. You can’t win an LMS deal by excelling in only one step, but if you continually improve each step, eventually you’ll win more than your fair share.

Finally, be ruthless in qualifying opportunities – in or out. If it’s “out,” don’t stretch. But if it’s “in,” don’t waste the lead by making junior sales mistakes. Aim for the win every step of the way. Chances are you will stand out from the crowd and achieve your goal of being too busy winning.

Thanks for reading!

Want more LMS insights? Check this on-demand webinar:

Insider’s Guide to LMS Selection Success

The LMS landscape is crowded, complex and difficult for potential buyers to navigate. What should learning technology buyers do?

REPLAY THE WEBINAR NOW!

Join Talented Learning Lead Analyst John Leh and Docebo North American Sales Director Corey Marcel as they explain what you should know before you choose the right LMS for your organization. You will learn:

What an effective LMS selection process looks like

The factors that matter most in choosing a learning platform

Where to find the most reliable LMS vendor intelligence, and

How to avoid common LMS selection missteps

If you’re selecting a new LMS this year (or are only thinking about it), replay this on-demand webinar, and start putting your selection strategy to work!

Need Proven LMS Selection Guidance?

Looking for a learning platform that truly fits your organization’s needs? We’re here to help! Submit the form below to schedule a free preliminary consultation at your convenience.

First Name*

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The post 10 Ways to Lose at Selling Learning Systems: For LMS Vendors appeared first on Talented Learning.

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thenextcloset · 9 years ago

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THE CLOSET OF BIBI VAN DER VELDEN

Bibi van der Velden, born in New York, always had a true heart and passion for design and fashion. She gave us a few moments of her time and told us all about it.

SHOP THE CLOSET OF BIBI HERE

''The ability to be creative and to sculpt, are definitely also favourites in life.''

Name a few of your favourite things in life

Well, obviously my children and my family. But also my work, because it’s such a big part of my life and who I am. Furthermore, the ability to be creative and to sculpt, are definitely also favourites in life. What role does fashion play in your life?

Although I do not approach my jewellery designs as a fashion object, they are definitely linked to fashion in a certain way. The points of sale are often strongly connected to fashion. For example, my designs are sold at Dover Street Market and Bergdorf Goodman.

For me personally, fashion is absolutely a way of expressing myself. Fashion is something that I find interesting and I enjoy to play around with. I am also a collector, so from a collector’s point of view I find it interesting because there are so many elements that inspire me. I have a big collection of vintage, antique and embroidered items. The embroidered jackets that I design are more a kind of side project and linked to this passion (find the item here).

Describe your style in three words

Eclectic, details & sculptural.

What is your golden rule of styling jewellery with fashion?

Don’t take yourself too serious, try to mix different forms, materials and styles. An element of humour is really important. Try to avoid sets at all costs! I am a big fan of mixing stuff up – so the vintage jacket, distressed denim but wear it with crown jewels. If you are wearing complicated stuff, try to go for more basic jewellery perhaps.

New York or Amsterdam?

Amsterdam, of course, that is where I’m based.

I do travel a lot for my work. Amsterdam is a perfect home base to have, because of the high quality of life and its accessibility. The city is small and everybody gets around by cycling on bikes. This makes it very easy and quick to reach different destinations in one day. Tell us more about your home (old school)

My husband and I had been searching for a project for quite a while. Finally, we found this old school. This was exactly the kind of project that we were looking for. A lot of light, height and room for us to go wild in, in terms of design. We renovated it over a few years. The redesign was so much fun, we were able to create a space exactly according to what we needed, wanted and what we liked. The living room is situated in the former gym: ’ the kids are climbing and swinging on the ropes all day, it’s perfect’.

''Make the clothes fit you, instead of the other way around''

What does sustainability mean to you?

When it comes to fashion my advice is: Make the clothes fit you, instead of the other way around. Meaning, remake your clothes, buy vintage and style it to your own personal taste. This is something which I do a lot, I have a favourite seamstress, Aggie, she re-makes a lot of my clothes into a design of my taste.

Next to this I am an ambassador to support the sustainable path of gold mining. I am involved in many ways constantly considering how we are treating this planet. Not only by making the smallest impact possible, but also considering how can you can give something back and make a (sustainable) contribution to the world. Describe one ordinary day at work for you (if there is one..) The interesting thing about my work is that no day is comparable or the same. For example last week we had to visit paris fashion week, we have started to design a new collection and recently I travelled to Thailand for production. It is all very dynamic. Also, currently I am starting something new: a platform Auverture. It is an online platform showcasing niche fine jewellery brands. The focus lies on story telling around the products and collections by diverse designers.

''The fun thing about inspiration is, you can literally find it in anything. Usually, in the most unexpected places.''

Where do you get your inspiration?

The fun thing about inspiration is, you can literally find it in anything. Usually, in the most unexpected places. One thing that definitely inspires me, are materials. So I source a lot of materials: that is often my starting point. I start to create something around a specific material. Also, nature is a big source of inspiration to me. Nature is something that never ceases to fascinate me. It is a never ending source of inspiration.

How does fashion connect to your jewellery design?

My design approach comes from a sculptor’s point of view. The design stands alone and does not need a body (context) to come alive. But as I explained before, there is a certain link to fashion of course. However, when designing my jewellery I try to stay clear from what’s in fashion, because the designs that I make should be timeless and therefore able to travel a lifelong journey with you. They are definitely not something of which you get sick when it goes out of fashion.

Tell us a bit more about your latest collection

My latest collection is called the Galaxy Collection. A beautiful collection with peacock coloured Tahitian pearls combined with rose-gold and blue sapphires. It has everything to do with the galaxy and the waning of the moon. In a few months time we are launching six new collections, always an exciting period!

Where do you see your jewellery brand in 10 years?

Bibi van der Velden is an exclusive fine jewellery brand. We make limited edition or one off’s. We’re very picky where we sold, now our main market is based in the US and Europe. We are expanding in Asia. Auverture, being a website, is going to be more widely accessible. Whereas Bibi van der Velden is a covered brand that is only exclusively available in certain top stores. This will also be our main focus for the upcoming 10 years and that is how we want to grow.

Any tips or advice for young entrepreneurs in design?

Never give up, you have to have a lot of persistence. Stay optimistic the first few years and never, never take no for an answer. But try to approach people in a fun and friendly way. Finally, do not start your own business just because you want one, you need a good idea/product, so be honest to yourself.

The one closet that you would like to own would be from..

Iris Apfel.

Starring: Bibi van der Velden, explore Bibi's jewellery designs here

You can also follow Bibi on Instagram right here Photography by: Iris Duvekot By TNC creative: Kim Erich

#thenextcloset #tnc #amsterdam #bibivandervelden #theclosetof #jewellerydesigner #paul & joe #Iro dress #christian louboutin #Antik Batik #maison scotch #netherlands

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian. In the long timeline of human civilization, here’s roughly how things shook out: First, there was fire, water, ice, and salt. Then we started cooking up and chowing down on oysters, scallops, horsemeat, mushrooms, insects, and frogs, in that general chronological order. Fatty almonds and sweet cherries found their way into our diet before walnuts and apples did, but it would be a couple thousand years until we figured out how to make ice cream or a truly good apple pie. Challah (first century), hot dogs (15th century), Fig Newtons (1891), and Meyer lemons (1908) landed in our kitchens long before Red Bull (1984), but they all arrived late to the marshmallow party — we’d been eating one version or another of those fluffy guys since 2000 B.C. This is, more or less, the history of human eating habits for 20,000 years, and right now, you can find it all cataloged on the Food Timeline, an archival trove of food history hiding in plain sight on a website so lo-fi you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a GeoCities fanpage. When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” There is history, context, and commentary on everything from Taylor pork roll to Scottish tablet to “cowboy cooking.” A couple of years ago, I landed on the humble authority of the Food Timeline while doing research on bread soup, a kind of austerity cuisine found in countless cultures. The entry for soup alone spans more than 70,000 words (The Great Gatsby doesn’t break 50,000), with excerpts from sources like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food, John Ayto’s An A-Z of Food and Drink, and D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully’s Early French Cookery. Before long, I fell into the emotional condition known as an internet K-hole, following link after link after link for hours on end. From olla podrida to hodge podge to cassava to taro to Chex Mix to Johnnycakes, the Food Timeline covered everything. Did you know that mozzarella sticks go as far back as the Middle Ages, but back then they called them “pipefarces”? I bookmarked the site and returned to it time and time again, when I was researching, writing, or just bored and hungry. Despite the Food Timeline’s incredible utility, few people I spoke to had ever heard of it. Those who had always marveled at its breadth. “Oh my god, it’s nirvana,” Taste of the Past podcast host Linda Pelaccio said to herself when she first stumbled onto the Food Timeline. Sandy Oliver, a food historian and fellow fan, was stunned by its completeness and simplicity. “It was one of the most accessible ways of getting into food history — especially if you were a beginner — because it was just so easy to use,” she told me. “It didn’t have a hyperacademic approach, which would be off-putting.” When Oliver learned that the thousands of pages and countless resources on the Food Timeline were compiled and updated entirely by one woman, she couldn’t believe it. “Oh my lord,” she thought. “This is an obsessed person.” The Food Timeline, in all its comprehensive splendor, was indeed the work of an obsessed person: a New Jersey reference librarian named Lynne Olver. Olver launched the site in 1999, two years before Wikipedia debuted, and maintained it, with little additional help, for more than 15 years. By 2014, it had reached 35 million readers and Olver had personally answered 25,000 questions from fans who were writing history papers or wondering about the origins of family recipes. Olver populated the pages with well-researched answers to these questions, making a resource so thorough that a full scroll to the bottom of the Food Timeline takes several labored seconds. For nearly two decades, Olver’s work was everyone else’s gain. In April of 2015, she passed away after a seven-month struggle with leukemia, a tragedy acknowledged briefly at the bottom of the site. “The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015, her obituary), reference librarian with a passion for food history.” In the wake of Olver’s death, no one has come forward to take over her complex project, leaving a void in the internet that has yet to be filled — and worse, her noble contribution to a world lacking in accurate information and teeming with fake news is now in danger of being lost forever. It isn’t often that we are tasked with thinking about the history of the food that we eat, unless it shows up in a Jeopardy! question or we ask our informal family historians to detail whose mother passed down this or that version of pound cake. But there are plenty of reasons to pay close attention: for curiosity’s sake; for deepening an appreciation of and respect for cooks, food, and technique; and for gathering perspective on what came before us. “Very few (if any) foods are invented. Most are contemporary twists on traditional themes,” Olver wrote on the Food Timeline. “Today’s grilled cheese sandwich is connected to ancient cooks who melted cheese on bread. 1950s meatloaf is connected to ground cooked meat products promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which are, in turn related to ancient Roman minces.” The problem is that these days we’re overloaded with bad information that can be accessed instantaneously, with few intermediaries running quality control. “I think it’s a little too easy to turn to the web,” Oliver, who was also a longtime friend of Olver’s, told me as we talked about the legacy of Food Timeline. “What I worry about is that people aren’t learning critical thinking skills. Once in a while I run into someone who has never used a primary source — wouldn’t know it if it hit them on the head. Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.” Or, if not a library, a mammoth resource compiled by a certified reference librarian herself. Whenever a reader would write in asking a question, or when Olver herself would become interested in the provenance of a certain food, she’d turn to her personal library of thousands of food books, and her litany of professional resources and skills, and write out detailed answers with sources cited on her website. As Olver emphasized proudly in a 2013 interview on Pelaccio’s Taste of the Past podcast, when you Google “food history,” the Food Timeline appears first in the search results, even though she never “paid search engines for premium placement, solicited reciprocal links, partnered with book vendors, or sold advertising.” Over the years, thousands of emails poured in asking Olver for help finding the specific information they were looking for, like the history of a weird cheese or a grandmother’s pie recipe. “One of my favorite groupings of people are those who are looking to recover family recipes,” Olver explained to Pelaccio. “I love that! As long as you can give me a little bit of context, then I have some direction.” She would often cook the recipes people sent her so she could gain a better understanding of the legacy of certain foods. Occasionally, she would struggle to come up with an answer to readers’ questions. “If anybody out there knows the answer to this, please let me know,” she began on Pelaccio’s podcast. “I’ve been asked repeatedly over the years for a recipe for ‘guildmaster sauce.’ It is mentioned on some of the old railroad menus and on fancy dining car menus, but we are not coming up with a recipe or other references.” She never got the answer. “One of the reasons she wanted people to learn about food was for the simple basic fundamental fact that it kept people alive,” Sara Weissman, a fellow reference librarian at the Morris County Public Library and occasional Food Timeline collaborator, told me. “It was that simple. There was no pretension about it.” Olver found food to be a universal subject of interest — everyone had something to share and everyone had something to learn. “Yesterday I took the entire day off from work because I wanted to research seitan wheat meat,” Olver told Pelaccio. “My whole site is really driven by my readers. What is it that they want to know?” The Olvers’ former family home is a modest colonial that sits on a shady suburban street in Randolph, New Jersey, about 10 minutes from the Morris County Public Library, where Lynne worked for more than 25 years. It is fastidiously clean and welcoming, and Olver’s library was still the focal point of the house when I visited a little more than a year ago. As she amassed primary sources to build out the Food Timeline, the sitting room filled up with bookshelves to house her more than 2,300 books — some dating to the 17th century — as well as thousands of brochures and vintage magazines, and a disarrayed collection of other food ephemera, like plastic cups from Pat’s and Geno’s and a tin of Spam. “One of 10 top iconic American manufactured foods, SPAM holds a special place on our national table & culinary folklore,” Olver wrote on the Timeline. Despite Olver’s intense fondness for it as an object of inquiry, Spam did not hold a special place on her palate; she never tried it. A picky eater, she detested lima beans, pistachio ice cream, calamari, slimy textures, and anything that even edged on raw. When she was in high school in the early ’70s, her favorite dish to make was something she called “peas with cheese,” which is as simple as it sounds. “She would take frozen peas and she’d melt cheese on it, mostly Swiss,” then cover the messy pile in Worcestershire sauce, Olver’s sister, Janice Martin, recalled. “We called Worcestershire sauce ‘life’s blood.’ It was coursing through our veins.” (Sadly, the Timeline does not include an entry for peas with cheese.) Making peas with cheese as a teenager was the beginning of what would become a lifelong interest in food for Olver. Libraries also captured her attention early on: At 16, she took her first job as a clerk in the Bryant Library in Roslyn, New York, shelving books in the children’s department. There, she was mentored by two older librarians, whom she loved. “She was an introvert,” Olver’s sister told me. “When it came to research, she was fascinated by ferreting out information that nobody else could find.” In 1980, she graduated with a degree in library science from Albany State University, where she also worked as a short-order cook, making sandwiches for students and faculty at a university canteen. “Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.” Olver and her future husband, Gordon, met at Albany State and married the year after Olver graduated, in 1981, after which they worked in Manhattan (Lynne at a law library, Gordon in reinsurance), then Connecticut. They eventually had two children — Sarah and Jason — and settled in New Jersey in 1991, where Olver found a job as a reference librarian at the Morris County Public Library, eventually becoming the head of reference, and finally director of the library. It was during Olver’s time as a reference librarian that the seed was planted for the Food Timeline. It began as an assignment to explain the origins of Thanksgiving dinner to children, to be published on an early incarnation of the library’s website. Around the same time, Olver was asked to write a monthly print newsletter to share library news, which she named Eureka!. One section of the newsletter was devoted to “Hot Topics,” as Olver and her colleague Sharon Javer wrote in the first dispatch. “Each month, this lead feature will focus on a particular theme: holidays, New Jersey events sources, census data, and so on. Included in this sizzling section will be answers to arduous questions, practical pointers and many marvelous morsels of information.” Eureka!, in a sign of things to come, began to take over her life. “I remember one time saying to her, ‘How come we’re buying all this colored paper?’” Gordon, her husband, told me. “The library wouldn’t pay for the paper, so she was buying it on her own. When the library realized it was taking so much of her time, they asked her to stop. Meanwhile, she had put so much time and effort into it that she said to them, ‘Just pass it over to me, I’ll take it.’” When the family got a Gateway computer in the late ’90s, Olver began teaching herself HTML, and by 1999, she was combining her interest in the Thanksgiving dinner project and the Eureka! answers column into a hybrid website she called the Food Timeline, where she could focus on providing well-researched food history on her own time. An archived version of the 1999 Food Timeline still exists and looks — unsurprisingly — more or less the same as the one now. “We still hand code html & today’s readers comment the site is ‘ugly,’” Olver wrote under the site’s “Market Strategy.” “We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale. Conversley? [sic] FT looks so old it’s become vintage.” Olver wrote everything on the Food Timeline with a royal “we,” including her responses to readers’ emails, despite the fact the project was largely hers, with an occasional assist from others. “‘I don’t want anyone to know that it’s just me,’’’ Sarah recalled her mom saying. “She wanted people to believe that it was a network of volunteers,” because she felt that it lent the site more credibility. “We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale.” While Olver worked at the county library by day, by night she was creating an online resource for anyone who wanted to know more about Johnny Appleseed or chuck wagon stew or the origins of Sauce Robert. By the website’s first anniversary, Olver was already spending upwards of 30 hours a week on the Food Timeline, compiling and posting all the information she was digging up and answering readers’ questions about the origins of their grandmothers’ crumble recipes. “If you came in the house and you wanted to know where she was, and she wasn’t cooking, she was in the office on the computer,” Gordon recalled. Eventually, even the cooking fell behind. Olver’s children came to expect burnt grilled cheese sandwiches at meals Sarah said. “She would be like, ‘I’ll leave these [on the stove] and go do my work,’ and then she would forget because she was so into what she was doing.” Over time, the audience for the site expanded, and Olver’s subtle form of fame grew with it. She was named a winner of the New York Times Librarian Award in 2002, and, in 2004, Saveur put the Food Timeline on its Saveur 100 list of the best food finds that year. In the mid-2010s, she was asked to contribute to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and consult for America’s Test Kitchen. Sarah and Jason recalled taking their mother to a cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan during that time period. “She was so excited about the teacher of this class because she had heard of her through her research,” Sarah told me. “When we got there, the teacher was like, ‘I’m looking at my roster of students and I see that Lynne Olver is here. Where is Lynne Olver?’ Mom kind of timidly raised her hand, and this chef was like, ‘I’ve been dying to meet you!’” The chef who left Olver starstruck was just as starstruck to meet Olver. For years, Olver lived something of a double life. As the director of a mid-size suburban library, she was known to hand out PayDay candy bars to her staff on pay day and shovel snow from the building walkway during snowstorms, while as the founder of Food Timeline, she brought her computer on vacation, dutifully responding to readers’ food history questions within the promised 48-hour window. “I think she started on the internet as a way to reach a lot of people,” her sister said. “A lot of people who wouldn’t go into the library.” The night before her wedding, in September 2014, Olver’s daughter, Sarah, noticed that her mom wasn’t acting like herself. While the family was sitting all together in the living room, Olver got up to go to the bathroom; minutes later, she was in the throes of a seizure. Sarah called 911, and Olver was taken to the hospital. The family stayed with her until doctors sent them home in the early hours of Sarah’s wedding day. The wedding had to go on, though Olver was too sick to attend. Doctors diagnosed her with leukemia the next day. Olver had known for a while that she was sick, but didn’t want to ruin the wedding, so she had put off telling anyone. “She’d be like, ‘I’m dying, but let me put everyone else first,’” Sarah said. Olver was kept in the hospital for two months, but fought hard to be home for Thanksgiving. “It was my first time cooking Thanksgiving dinner because she wasn’t feeling up to cooking — and I ruined it,” Sarah said. “The turkey shrunk off the bone. That was one of the only things that made her laugh in a really long time.” “Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best.” When she was diagnosed with leukemia, Olver used the Food Timeline’s Twitter account to grumble about the food in the ICU at Morristown Medical Center, where she stayed until she was transferred to specialists in Hackensack two months later. “It was a chicken cutlet with some kind of sauce on it,” Gordon recalled; the post has since been taken down by the family. “She said, ‘This sauce, I don’t know what it is, I’m not eating it. It doesn’t look very good. It’s not a natural color.’” Following her stay at the hospital in Hackensack, Olver returned home to wait for a bone marrow transplant. “She had to use a walker because balance was a problem, but very shortly after getting back from the hospital, she was walking around and doing all of her Food Timeline stuff again,” Gordon explained. She was responding to emails, diving back into her research. “On her birthday, March 10, she said, ‘I had a glorious day.’” The reason? “Someone had written in with a question that she liked.” A little over a month later, Lynne died of leukemia, only one year short of her retirement from the library. She had been planning to spend her retirement working on it full time: Earlier that year, she had renewed the Food Timeline domain for 10 more years. A year after Olver’s death, her family began to discuss what would happen to the Food Timeline and who could take it over. “What we know is that we couldn’t do it justice ourselves,” Sarah said. To anyone willing and able to maintain Olver’s vision of an ad-free, simply designed, easy-to-access resource on food history, the family members say that the website and her library are theirs, for free. A couple of people have put forward their names, but the family felt that their hearts weren’t in the right place. “One woman had shown us what she had done with her website and it was just full of banner advertisements,” Gordon said. “It has to uphold her vision,” Sarah added. Olver’s book collection — if a price were to be put on it — would be worth tens of thousands of dollars, Gordon estimates. So far, there have been no takers for either the books or the task of keeping the site going. “The Culinary Institute of America initially expressed interest,” Gordon said. “But three months later, they came back and said, ‘We don’t really have the ability to take that volume of texts and dedicate [the task of updating the site] to a specific person. I said they were missing the point; I wasn’t looking to give them the books unless they wanted the website, too.” The Food Timeline was — and still is — a great democratizing force. “I think Lynne liked that the internet was for everybody and by everybody. Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best,” Lynne’s sister, Janice, told me. “If you hold the knowledge and you can help everybody get it, that’s where it’s at.” Lynne Olver, an award-winning reference librarian, wanted everybody to know exactly what she knew. “I would second anybody who says that they want Food Timeline to be brought up to date, who know how to keep that valuable digitized information where people can get their hands or their minds on it,” Sandy Oliver told me. “I’d hate to think Lynne had spent all those hours doing all that work and have it just slide into oblivion. I’d love to see it continue in whatever useful form it can.” Dayna Evans is a freelance writer currently based in Paris. She last wrote for Eater about the rise of community fridges across the country. D’Ara Nazaryan is an art director & illustrator living in Los Angeles. Fact checked by Samantha Schuyler from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2AEYzmX

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