An international pressure cooker

At past summits, food was treated as an element of international pageantry; menus were distributed to the public beforehand, advertising the next day’s terrines and tapenades. But this year’s food comes wrapped in state secrets. Ingredients were purchased anonymously, so suppliers probably will never know they provided food for the event. Menus were kept secret from the kitchen staff. And the resort’s executive chef, Rogers, has learned to work under the watch of food-safety and counterterrorism experts, who whisk samples away to labs on the premises. Sometimes they fly samples to a lab in Atlanta.

Rogers just keeps cooking. He can’t think of any event, ever, that’s put more weight on his shoulders. ‘‘I more or less block it out,’’ Rogers, 43, says. ‘‘You can’t afford to look around while it’s going on.’’

The tension has been compounded by the post-9/11 world, where poison is seen as a viable strategy for terrorist groups. With every passing administration, White House measures to protect the President have become stricter, said Tony Vallone, a Houston restaurateur who has served six presidents, including George W Bush.

Bush caused a stir last year when he took Secret Service agents to oversee his food when he visited Buckingham Palace, according to a London newspaper; in Thailand, Health Ministry officials reportedly injected his food into laboratory mice before serving it to him. The greatest protection is randomness; whenever possible, Secret Service agents select food for the President from a large number of plates, says William Carter, a former agent.

At a large-scale event such as G-8, where guests once wandered among open buffet tables featuring cuisines of the host nation, security becomes more complex. About 5,000 meals will be served during the Summit. Food passes through many hands on the way to the table, and each additional handler increases the risk of intentional sabotage. ‘‘People are the big vulnerability, frankly,’’ says John Parachini, a security analyst at Rand Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California.

That scrutiny has transformed Rogers’s kitchen. Every morsel of food was swept from the premises, says Barry Bennett, a spokesman for the G-8 Summit. Then food was gathered from suppliers all over the nation through intermediaries, the same way Air Force One acquires its food. ‘‘It gets drop-shipped to a place and then it comes to us, and no one knows who ordered it,’’ says Bennett. The kitchen staff is not informed of the day’s menu until the last minute, when all the necessary ingredients are provided.

Last weekend, as the Summit approached, an invisible security barrier rose up around Sea Island so that no food could move on or off the site. Even Rogers himself has been scrutinised. He, along with 200 cooks he selected to work under him, supplied their Social Security numbers and submitted to full background checks.

There is reason for such precautions, says Peter Chalk, an analyst for Rand Corporation: throughout history, cooks have been co-opted or coerced into poisoning world leaders. In Colombia, cooks have drugged their employers so that kidnapping gangs could abduct them, Chalk says. Leaders highly anxious about assassination attempts, such as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, routinely have kept cooks among their closest confidants.

By the eve of the Summit, so many hurdles were already behind Rogers and his staff—a 10-hour food tasting by White House staff, the waves of menu changes, the delivery of 14 trailers’ worth of food. The menus have taken into account the individual dietary needs of the G-8 leaders, who will eat three lunches and two dinners together, Bennett says. The leaders will dine with others at a table for 15; more than 200 other staff will eat on the island—a total of 5,000 meals, according to Rogers.

It’s like eating an elephant, the chef says. Try not to think about it. You just have to take it one bite at a time. — (LAT-WP)