Not Unplugged: Suwalki
When the past isn't as distant as you might hope
Since we’ve been talking about Gdansk, I thought I’d use this month’s Not Unplugged to write about the only other time I’ve been to Poland. It was 2012, and I was on a completely different kind of trip: on an assignment for TIME, rather than for you lovely readers, with a tightly planned agenda, rather than a spontaneous one, and with a bunch of well-known chefs as travel companions, rather than solo.
This was Cook it Raw, a kind of traveling road show for the gastronomic set. With each edition, brought a dozen or so prominent, creative chefs to some far-flung location, introduced them to the local ingredients and food culture, and asked them to cook a meal with what they found. For the first edition, which took place in Copenhagen, the chefs weren’t allowed to use heat in their preparations, but after that, the raw became more metaphorical. From Collio, Italy, to Finnish Sapmí, to Ishikawa, Japan, the events were educational, and deeply fun, and unlike anything else.
Although the schedule was often packed with planned activities–tastings, fishing, foraging, the occasional sauna– the unexpected had a way of creeping in, whether because Ben Shewry becoming so appalled by the careless approach to animal suffering that we encountered in one sushi bar in Ishikawa, Japan that he had to leave or because Alex Atala was literally kidnapped by Slovenian bear hunters. In Poland it came in the form of the dark past, breaking through the skin of the present.
We had spent the first night in Warsaw, before traveling the next day to what would be our accommodation for the rest of the trip ,a lodge in Suwalki, which is a province in the northeastern part of the country, not far from the borders with Lithuania and Belarus. It was a mostly idyllic few days–mushroom and berry collecting in the forest, duck hunting near the lakes, swimming and canoeing, and bonfires in the evening. Kind of like summer camp, only with better food.
Here’s the story I wrote about it. When I read it now, it all sounds so delightful, which it was. Except.