Life in Brownian Motion

by Owen Franken '68

Note: You can see more of Owen Franken's photos by clicking on the links below and by viewing an additional page of photos.

Inspired by the advice of my junior year philosophy professor, John Graves, to follow my own path, I left physics after graduation, and have essentially spent 30 years travelling the world, meeting people, eating and drinking, photographing all of this and getting paid for it. Most recently this included a quick trip to Seville touring ham bars with my wife, ten days walking in the Algerian Sahara, and a family mini-vacation in Turkey. This over a four week period.

Some recent projects are Fodor's Escape to Provence, published in 2000, The Escape to Provence 2002 Calendar, Escape to the Riviera, out since June, and The Paris Cookbook by Patricia Wells, the New York Times food writer, out this fall.

Bill Clinton and Annemiek Franken-Determann.

My subject matter became "daily life in the world" and for a time, "hard news": wars in Central America, electoral campaigns in the United States (McCarthy '68 through Clinton '92), Woodstock, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the overthrow of Ceaucescu, the flight of Baby Doc Duvalier from Haiti, commando training in Palestinian refugee camps, Phillippine guerillas, the Cuban Boat Lift in 1980, Chinese economic reform. And too many Presidents. My first day in the White House was Nixon's last--one of my happiest days.

As a professional photographer, I have always worked freelance, preferring freedom, independence and flexibility, to security. This is my personality. It means being totally open to whatever presents itself, to new people, to the unexpected adventure awaiting at every turn. I often met people (whenever possible, interesting attractive women) and stayed with them--I learned a lot about wherever I was, making friends around the world. As a "houseguest," I offered to be the chef. (I have cooked on the street in Chengdu, Szechuan, and in Bangkok, teaching french sauces to a sea food cook.) So I learned how to cook and eat native. I became, in my travels, a serious food person--at the stove and at the table.

I love to eat, and especially, I love street food, and I will eat anything. Here are a few of my "favorite food stories."

Spider and scorpion plate.

My fifteen-month-old daughter and I shared scorpion and spiders on the street in Bangkok. She hated the scorpion but rather liked the spider (tastes just like shrimp), and loved the roast wild cat on the same trip, a month later in Burma. We think it was lynx. It was too small for snow leopard.

The best lamb ever was this April in Algeria. I had just spent ten days in the desert with a friend, Pierre Gagnaire, a three-star chef in Paris (maybe the best chef in France) and four of his friends, three Tauregs, and fourteen camels. The last night before returning to Paris was Pierre's birthday, and a grand "Mechoui" was organized--an entire spicy roasted lamb, flattened out on a huge platter, with succculent, tender meat we could eat with our fingers--a lamb lover's dream. We just dug in. There was magic under the moonlight in the desert, Algerian wine flowing, not wanting to return to civilization.

Roast pork in Bali while travelling throughout Indonesia with a girlfriend, photographing for an Indonesian travel agency. I had an assignment from Junior Scholastic to produce a story about the life of a Balinese ten-year-old. (I did the same sort of thing in French Polynesia. This and polynesian food stories for various magazines paid for my honeymoon). I met a Lagong dance teacher--her ten-year-old niece was one of her pupils, and so became the story. The Balinese, being Hindu and not Moslem, eat pork, and their roast pork is beyond belief. Being the food maniac, I asked the family if they would make us all a Balinese roast pork if I bought the pig. Absolutely! So off we went to the village market, we picked out the little porker, and walked it home. All the herbs were in their garden, they set up a roasting spit, and after five hours of chopping homegrown ginger, shallots, turmeric, many unknown things, the women decorated the pig (the Balinese decorate everything) and we all shared our unbelievable Balinese roast pig. And I had my photo story.

The best duck was also in Bali, in a rice paddy nearby. A woman had a table there, and if you knew about her (I talk to people about food, so I did), she would cook for you. Her masterpiece was 24-hour buried Balinese spiced duck--my friend's unforgettable birthday meal. Lots of stars and frog chirping. (The best frogs were on the street in southern Thailand, and also small "kicker kebabs" in Vientiane. Bernard Loiseau's are pretty great, as well, in Burgundy, with purées of garlic and parsley. My favorite snails were in Nampak, Laos, and not Burgundy, as one might expect.

Rat, bat, and dog at one sitting in Menado, Sulawesi--also pangolin (an anteater) in Guilin, China and dog sausage near Hanoi. I can see the ad campaign: "A Russian '60's jeep, fifty kilometers from Dien Bien Phu. Tasty dog sausage and Huda Beer. It doesn't get any better than this!" There is also an amazing menagerie restaurant of wild animals outside of Ho Chi Minh City. Cages rather than menus, kind of like going to the zoo for dinner. I remember keeping it simple and having cobra, rather than fruit bat. A large fruit bat, I discovered, has a very cute face, hard to imagine eating it. On the other hand, I love rabbit. I make a mean rabbit with olives, although the best was made for my birthday dinner by the wife of a Tuscan ceramic artist.

Softshell crabs and barbeque (Dreamland in Tuscaloosa) are the two things I miss most about America. My dad's softshelled were my favorite crabs, followed by garlic crab in My Tho, in the Mekong Delta in '93 (shared over Mai Tais with a former Vietcong of my age with whom I recounted my anti-war activity while he shared his battle stories.) Vietnam is my favorite country and Hanoi, my favorite city. And Halong Bay one of the most beautiful places, along with Macchu Pichu, and Iguazu Falls on the Brazil/Argentine border.

The best snake meal was in Guangzhou, at "The Snake Restaurant" (the Chinese are descriptive). In the window are jars and jars of preserved snakes. "This is gonna be good!" You walk in, a bunch of guys on the floor are catching and chopping the heads off of dozens and dozens of fleeing cobras and god knows what else (I am not a snake expert--except to eat them, I avoid them) and launching them into baskets. Upstairs is the restaurant with snake menus, written down and on the wall ("special today...viper tartare"). I can speak some Mandarin but I am not too good at reading. So I just pointed at three places on the menu. An old trick. Everything is going to be interesting, even, or especially, if you don't know what it is. My wife, seventeen month old son, and I sat at a round table with three local couples and when our three platters came out, in classic chinese restaurant style, we shared our snakes with them and they shared their snakes with us.

Best chicken (back to the mundane)--"Jedah kebabs" in Isfahan, Iran, probably the most beautiful city I have ever seen. Incredible tiled mosques, and in a hole-in-the-wall workers' restaurant, (then, 1970, serving beer) absolutely brilliant spicy skewered chicken.

Other favorite chickens--ties for the best southern fried chicken: in Mrs. Gilroy's house in Montgomery, Alabama. I was spending a week photographing a public high school--a girl in the journalism class took me to Mrs. Gilroy's for lunch. She had a table for eight and you had to know about her. Unforgettable fried chicken at churches with Jesse Jackson in the Mississippi Delta during a 1982 voter registration drive. Every church visit was followed by rocking gospel and amazing food, three times a day for a week. I never ate so much great chicken in my life. If there were only frequent fryer miles. The third Great Southern Fried Chicken experience was at a family reunion of Rosalind Carter, in Plains, during the 1976 campaign. They were white but they had soul.

I found delicious iguana soup (tastes like alligator) in the El Salvadoran countryside while covering the civil war in 1982, and tasty guinea pig in Ecuador doing a travel story for KLM. I brought two frozen ones back to Paris (they pack small) and told my wife and son what it was only after the meal. And monkey stew in the Amazon.

Having survived eight years of Reaganism, I moved to Paris in 1988. I broke up with a woman in Washington, and had no reason or desire to stay in the United States (I could write pages on why I am happy to be an expat.) I tell people here that I moved to France for the oysters, not far from the truth. I met my wife in a bank machine line (I always liked talking to attractive women) and here I stay.

Tunui Franken planting rice with the Yao in northern Laos.

Our home in the center of Paris is an eclectic museum of folk art and food arts with things collected on all my travels. Since moving to France, much of my work, logically, has concentrated on food and wine, beyond the great chefs and restaurants, producing stories about the origins of food, showing the process all the way to the table. (see my website) So my favorite work has included markets and street food, ham curing in Parma and San Daniele in Italy and in Jabugo and Guiljuelo in Spain (the best in the world), hunting white truffles in Italy and black truffles in France, olive oil harvest and production in Liguria and Provence, saffron harvest in La Mancha, wine making in France, Italy, and South Africa, cacao in Ecuador and Ghana, cloves in Indonesia, rice all over Asia (My son and I learned wet rice planting from Yao villagers in northern Laos.)

Tough work but someone has to do it. The reward for all this is the cooking and eating and drinking and sharing with my friends.

Who knows where the next culinary adventure will be?

See more of Owen Franken's photos.

Owen Franken abandoned physics sometime in his senior year. Strongly against the war in Vietnam, he became a McCarthy dropout for the second term in 1968. Senator Eugene McCarthy was challenging President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, and his Press Secretary asked Franken to travel the country with the campaign, and to document it. This documentary became his Senior Thesis (in Course 8!) under Minor White, replacing "The circular polarization of 53.6° KeV X rays from Virgo A."

After McCarthy, radicalized, he did serious anti-war work, which, ironically, kept him out of the army. He had a "dangerous" record as an effective speaker, organizer, and trouble maker, once even getting into a shoving match with Paul Gray (Gray won). With an American flag headband, shamelessly politicizing the other potential inductees at his draft physical, ("MIT, huh? Don't even think about failing the intelligence test," they put Franken in a separate room. "We ran out of chairs.") he received a permanent 4F on the spot--he was one pound underweight, but they told him "We will be very happy never to see you in here again." With a 1Y, the U.S. Army was required to recall him in six weeks.

So, safely out of the army, he could travel at will, and he is travelling still. His work has illustrated the pages and covers of Time and Newsweek, Saveur, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure, National Geographic, Forbes, Business Week, The New York Times Travel and Dining sections, and endless clients worldwide. He works with the photo agencies Corbis and Stock, Boston, and his work can be seen in cyberspace at the easy to remember (for him, at least) owenfranken.com (and by entering "owen franken" into search engine boxes.)