As unprecedented events continue to unfold almost daily, being able to discern what is fact from fiction has become increasingly important and at times, lifesaving. And yet, there is a culture war being waged on both science and fact by misinformation, particularly when it comes to information surrounding the environmental crisis. The global scientific community has made it clear that climate change can largely be attributed to human behaviour, and we are running out of time to stop it. However, climate change deniers with ties to fossil fuel industries, governments across the world and media continue to sow seeds of doubt, obfuscating the scientific realities of climate change and making it so that urgently needed progress cannot be made. At times, it is a grim picture. Baker-turned-glacier-guide Rose McAdoo is trying to combat that through her educational cakes and desserts that explain the natural processes behind glaciology and climate change. For these cakes, Rose, who splits her time between the North and South Poles, draws from her experience both as a baker and as a glacier guide.
Rose first began her career as a baker, baking sweet treats for weddings and birthdays before she turned to cakes as tools for activism. Since 2016, she has made desserts and edible projects that are used as visual aids in workshops and events to highlight the impact of climate change. She has also created cakes with the intention of catalyzing conversation surrounding wider topics such as the refugee crisis in Africa and the U.S. prison system. Earlier this fall, I interviewed Rose about her work and methodology and what her aims are for the future of cake and climate change.
Julia Georgallis:
I’m really excited to talk to you because as a fellow baker I’ve been following you for a little while. You’ve got a really large body of work. As an introduction, could you talk me through your career so far? What are you working on at the moment?
Rose McAdoo:
It’s definitely a large body of work because it has mirrored my career path, which has been long and diverse. I started working in food when I was 14 years old and have worked in the food service industry in various capacities since. [I’ve done] everything from running restaurants, to working in bakeries, to doing large off-site catering events. When I moved to Brooklyn I worked in a chocolate factory and on a rooftop farm in New York. This all eventually led me to work at a cake shop in Brooklyn and that’s really where the skills that I use now really came into play and where I learnt a lot. I worked there for 4 years doing mostly high end wedding cakes and celebration cakes for big events and then took a job offer in Antarctica in 2018. I worked as a chef down there for two seasons and then eventually got put onto the Winter Search and Rescue team, learnt a lot of new skills and that really helped me pivot my career into working more in the outdoor industry and with the sciences. I applied for a job as a glacier guide in Alaska where I had a long running history with, but had never worked as a guide (there) before. That is what I’m currently doing! I just finished my season last week so I’m in my transition period, about to head to Antarctica. I’ve just finished my third season as a glacier guide and those two locations and those two science areas are where I focus my work on now. I’m still doing all the cake work but not necessarily as my full-time profession. I’m managing to work outside and in industries that I love and I’m really learning a lot, then I’m using the cakes to really tell stories about that work. So it feels very full circle but it’s definitely taken a long time to get here and it’s definitely a non-traditional path.
JG:
I think those non-traditional paths take a lot longer. They’re more wiggly and you have to have a lot more confidence to just go ahead and do it!
RM:
Yeah, I definitely did not have very much confidence on various points of that journey but looking back I see how it all fits together. I’m still deeply involved in food but also am now involved in our world and the natural environment.
JG:
How has your own story influenced your work?
RM:
Exponentially! My career path has followed my own interests and curiosity. I wasn’t able to afford college here in the United States so I ended up working and making pastry work about the things that I would like to learn about, so my art and my food process has really followed my own learning journey and lifestyle. It’s very vital to my practice that I only make work about subjects which I have first-hand connections to or experience with, so that really challenges me to not just read an article and make a cake about that, but to go and spend time in the place. I like to build relationships and meet the people and scientists whose work I’m communicating, I even spent three full summers on a glacier in order to understand the changes that are happening.
JG:
Why did you make the jump from pastry and cakes to activism, communication, and working in the field as a glacier guide?
RM:
Working in kitchens! I don’t know, have you ever worked in kitchens?
JG:
Yeah, for the last 9 years!
RM:
It’s exhausting and has crazy hours, you never go outside. It’s my favourite career path, I loved it, but after doing it for 14 years I just wanted to be outside and I was always craving to be hiking and not just being in a one-room basement kitchen with no windows. The cake shop I worked at actually had this huge floor-to-ceiling glass front that overlooked the Statue of Liberty. I remember one night, in particular, where I was really daydreaming while I was baking cakes about how it would be so cool to just take cakes out into the mountains and make wedding cakes on-site for elopements. Then I would daydream even further about making cakes in really wild places. It was a daydream! But it was also really aptly timed with the political shift in the United States in 2016. At that point I had become quite angry about everything that was happening in the country politically, and climate change was one of my many interests. I also became heavily involved in the refugee movement and advocacy around immigration and gun control so that was really the kicking-off point where I wondered whether I could make cakes about other subjects and then use those cakes to communicate a bigger story or highlight my own values and build a better world that I want to see. So I made a dessert collection in 2016, That project gained a lot of traction and got me my first round of personal press and then that made the daydream a bit more realistic where I felt like it could work. I felt very curious to try and make cakes in the outdoors about bigger topics or heavier conversations and so, when I went to Antarctica in 2018 and saw all the passion and time and resources of all of the research teams that work in polar areas, communicating about climate change really moved into the forefront of my pastry work.
JG:
On your website you use this phrase about how food makes big topics more digestible, it seems like a kind of manifesto of yours, what does that mean to you?
RM:
I think being curious is just accidentally being interested in something. If you’re curious about something your guard is down, your sense of wonder has kicked in. And so I think that by using dessert as a medium, people’s guards are down. They’re not necessarily expecting to learn something so it’s actually an easy opportunity to showcase a research project or a microscopic zooplankton that no one has ever heard of, or to teach people about how glacial crevasses are measured out in the field, because we’re not at a museum, we’re not in a lecture, we don’t have our notebooks out, no one’s prepared counter-arguments, we’re just looking at a cake or eating a candy bar, having fun. It’s an easy way to introduce new ideas and visually explain concepts. It’s easier for me as a glacier guide to understand ice falls as a candybar and if it’s easier for me, I’m sure it’s easier for everyone else. So that’s vital to my dessert work at this point. But I think if you can get people curious, you can catch them off guard and then it’s easy from there.
JG:
Because no one’s afraid of a dessert are they?
RM:
Exactly! Data’s boring and cakes are inherently exciting and so it’s a nice way of talking about topics that maybe people aren’t even interested in in the first place.
JG:
What is the relationship, do you think, between food and science in general?
RM:
From the most obvious side of things — food science! Food relies exclusively on science from chemical reactions. Food science is a huge course of study but also food science as large-scale food processing and preservation and ingredient manipulation, there’s lots of science from the get-go. Beyond food science, I’m using food to highlight polar sciences. So it’s actually been really cool as I’ve worked with scientists in the field or attended lectures where researchers already naturally use dessert to explain their science. That has been really cool because as an audience member, they have no idea that I’m there or that I make deserts about glaciers, it’s very much just part of their work. There was a geologist in Antarctica who explained that looking for fossil pieces in Antarctica after all the tectonic plates was as chaotic as looking for a grain of sugar in a dropped piece of cake. One of the science team members that I worked with in Washington talked about how everything is interconnected in our world and compared environmental challenges like extinction to taking one ingredient out of a cake trying to make that cake. If you leave out flour or baking soda that cake is going to look, feel and act very differently. In the same way, if you move one species from an environment or if you remove one piece of the glacier formation equation, it doesn’t work, everything has to be there and it has to be there correctly. What I’m trying to say is that it’s been cool to see scientists using food as a way to explain their own work over time.
In short, I’m just always curious about what the world would taste like, I think of it as an edible canvas. So, for example, what would a rock taste like or what flavours microscopic creatures would prefer, or how you might how data sets in cake. how do you sculpt the cross section of a glacier volcano out of fondant. As I’m learning things I’m seeing them as desserts in my own head, so making that intersection between food and science is really fun as well as challenging and unique!
JG:
It’s a great way to learn. Before I started baking, I didn’t think I was very interested in science and then realised that baking was basically biology and maths! If we were just taught with food, probably everyone would like maths.
RM:
Exactly! Let’s make it relatable, let’s make it interesting!
JG:
How do you approach new projects and what’s your methodology?
RM:
So I usually develop the brief or pitch, I’m always following my own curiosity. I’ve built long-lasting relationships through the work that I’m doing, so this is the third year of my glacier work. I have new ideas on the way but I can tell that I’m not done with ice yet so they’re long-term projects. Throughout the glacier piece I’ve worked on—the glacier collection dessert boxes, glacier-guiding in Alaska, as well as going out into the North Cascades in Washington State with a research team there. There’s been lots of pieces but the glacier project has been this bigger overarching learning experience. There’s seven steps that I go through. The first is getting curious! What do people have false understandings about? What is exciting and timely? From there I try to learn as much as I can by reading articles, following people online, listening to podcasts, watching videos, looking at non-edible art that people make about, for example, glaciers, taking in as much information as I can about that topic. Then I go and experience it in person, so going out into the field, going to that place, if I can participate in some of the scientific elements I will try and do that, form personal relationships, ask lots of questions, sketch out drafts, and then I beta test a lot of recipes in the field. What that looks like is taking small amounts of ingredients into the field. I’ll make test batches of things and photograph and film as a backbone for the project later on so I might use those in bigger events later. The glacier dessert boxes that I made were all recipes that I tested out on a glacier. Once I’ve learned and experienced the place I wait and I sit on it. The waiting originated from having to work full-time while working on all these projects, but it actually helps. Another artist-friend pointed out that she thought the waiting is a valuable part of my process. I like letting it sit and not just sharing it right off the back. It really helps to sort out what you’re excited by, what resonates with you, the stories that you keep coming back to, or favourite photos and memories so time is nice to build it into my process. So taking time away from the project is important. From there, I just create, I go into a sort of manic state for a few days and just produce, typically, a cake collection. I stay up super late, and it’s such a blast and it’s so fulfilling to have had this long relationship with this project, to take the time off and produce a cake or dessert that I’ve been imagining for weeks or months. Then it’s just sharing, so appearing on podcasts, writing articles, speaking engagements and posting on Instagram.
JG:
What’s next and what impact do you want to have with your work?
RM:
My goal is to be on location, working in the field with scientists, as a field assistant and storyteller for their research. And then, I also want to be public-facing. I don’t want to just be in the background doing this work, I want to be able to share this work on a larger scale with art museums and organisations and venues together that maximise the storytelling. I think that scientists are an incredibly passionate group of people but they have to do so much work to get their work done in the first place they often don’t have time for the sharing part of that. Which is such a disservice to their work because, like I said, it’s years and years of research and grant-writing and project development and studying to figure out what you even want to research in the first place. [I want] people to have fun and engage with science, especially right now. Science is being vilified and questioned and doubted. I want the sciences to have a bigger platform and I want scientists themselves to have a space to speak about the work that they’re so passionate about. As for the impact part of it, I’m definitely starting to see some of the fruits of my labours after 6 years, but it’s been really challenging for my work to be seen as a legitimate science communication tool. I want my impact to be reframing the notion that cakes are a cute hobby or pretty wedding decoration. I’m starving to use my work as this legitimate communication tool and as a driver of understanding. A lot of grants for science research mandate an outreach plan and I want my work to be seen as a real tool for doing that. As far as impact, I want to encourage other people to use whatever weird interests they have to do that too and I think there’s a lot of power in using things that people don’t expect or understand to talk about important topics and I’m seeing that more and more. There’s dance shows to be used to communicate Antarctic glacier melt, for example. Art is becoming a little more esoteric with social media in terms of people being able to get their work out there, but I want cakes to be a big part of that story.
