Smart Food: The CIA Comes to Harvard

For most chefs, the acronym CIA conjures up images of white coats, cooking classes, and soup stocks in the Escoffier tradition at the Culinary Institute of America. Not so for Theresa A. McCulla ’04, the newly appointed coordinator of Food Literacy Project (FLP), a program affiliated with Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS); she spent three years after graduation working as a media analyst and translator for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Using the French and Italian she’d mastered as a Romance Languages and Literatures concentrator, McCulla conducted research for the Open Source Center, an office in suburban Virginia originally created to monitor Russian transmissions during the onset of the Cold War.

She didn’t get to carry a gun, but her work did involve classified information—and she’s still not entirely sure what the consequences of her research really were. “We had two computers under the desk and just one screen,” McCulla says. “There was a little box with a switch on it and hundreds of times a day, we’d push the switch and it’d flip from one computer to the other. We’d have two separate email accounts and two separate Word documents. There was a pretty clear delineation between the unclassified world and the classified world.”

But the computer-and-cubicle limits of the CIA office left McCulla longing for a creative output, so she sent off a dozen letters to chefs whose work she admired. “I was asking for a week of unpaid kitchen experience,” she says. “‘Just let me come!’ I asked. I didn’t care if I washed lettuce.”

A dozen rejections later, she went to dinner at a small steak restaurant in Arlington, Va., a “down and dirty 45-seat place with an open kitchen.” When the chef came to her table that night, McCulla explained her interest in cooking, one fostered by years of helping her family in the kitchen, a semester abroad in Paris, and other gastro-centric international travels. She asked if she could work there. The chef, thinking it over for a moment, replied, “You show up on Saturday and I’ll give you a shot. I guarantee you, you’ll leave after an hour.”

McCulla returned on Saturday and the chef put her on key lime pies and focaccia bread. Instead of leaving after 60 minutes, McCulla stuck around for the next seven months. Working the front station during the busy dinner rush once a week, McCulla became the de facto expeditor. She was in charge of realizing the chef’s exhausting goal of turning every ticket—restaurant-speak for completing every order—in twelve minutes.

“In a restaurant, you’re judged by very different standards,” she says. “I loved it. No one could care less where I went to school. It was, ‘Can you keep up with the tickets as they’re coming in? Can you make a steak?’”

Mid-way through her restaurant stint, McCulla picked up two other night jobs: working for a pastry chef and doing culinary research for the food writer Joan Nathan. For one, she scaled batter and dough, working the 35-pound mixer and experimenting with decorating. For the other, she dove into 14th century French cookbooks looking for the origins of foie gras. (Turns out it may be a descendent of Kosher meat preservation techniques.)

“It got to the point where I was leaving work early and literally changing from my CIA clothes to my kitchen clogs and running over to the restaurant kitchen or the bakery twice a week,” she says. “By the end of the time I could just open the convention oven and put the flat of my hand on the cake and I could just tell by the feel of it when it was done.”

Three years after beginning her work at the CIA, McCulla was ready to quit her day job and move into cooking full-time. Following her husband, Brian D. Goldstein ’04, who is pursuing a Ph. D. in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, McCulla returned to Cambridge. Fortuitously, McCulla came back to her alma mater just as Jessica Zdeb, the former FLP coordinator, was leaving to become an organic farmer in France.

The FLP identifies four key aspects in the full understanding of food: community, agriculture, food preparation, and nutrition. Combining academia with the culinary arts, this position seemed to be an obvious fit for McCulla. As the FLP administrator, McCulla is in charge of the educational arm of HUDS. She hopes to continue Zdeb’s work emphasizing an all-inclusive, sustainable approach to food.

“We want to purchase food from places that are kind to the environment and thoughtful to workers,” she says. “We’re going to verbalize much more clearly what we want to see from producers and we’re going to communicate [these specifications] to the community.”

She’s also hoping to start a film screening and a visiting speakers series to further engage students in the world of food. The research and writing skills she cultivated during her time at the CIA are currently being put to use searching for land for a new farmers’ market in Allston, set to open this spring.

As for the distant future? “I’m always looking for something that’s creative as well as intellectually stimulating,” she says. “Anything that combines both worlds meets the bar. Culinary history? Food writing? I’d actually love to go to culinary school.”

Perhaps the other CIA isn’t that far off after all.

—Columnist Rebecca A. Cooper can be reached at cooper3@fas.harvard.edu.