Cooking’s a sport in this Rhodes scholar’s book

Chefs often talk about how physically demanding their work is, about how drained and exhausted they feel after standing up, day after day, night after night, in a hot, cramped, pressure-filled kitchen. But I never thought of cooking as an athletic activity until one recent afternoon when a young friend called with the exciting news that he’d just won a Rhodes scholarship -- and told us that when the Rhodes interviewers had asked him what sports he participated in, he’d answered, “cooking.”

Cooking indeed. A native of Los Angeles, 21-year-old Jonah Lehrer worked a couple of summers ago as a line cook at Melisse in Santa Monica, then held similar part-time positions at Le Bernardin and Le Cirque 2000, both in New York, while a student at Columbia University, where he also works in a neurobiology lab under Dr. Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate.

“If he’s worked in something other than a dishwashing capacity in restaurants like those, it’s probably unprecedented for a Rhodes scholar at this point in his or her career,” Elliott Gerson, the American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, told me.

Sports -- physical activity -- has always been seen as an important component of any Rhodes’ candidate’s resume. One of the criteria in Cecil Rhodes’ will establishing the scholarships given annually in his name was a “fondness for and success in manly outdoor sports, such as cricket.”

Rhodes was of that generation of British leader who believed firmly in the important duality of mind and body, convinced that, as Sir William Fraser famously said, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

However, while basketball’s Bill Bradley and football’s Pat Haden and Byron “Whizzer” White, the late Supreme Court justice, were Rhodes scholars, athletic prowess is not actually a Rhodes requirement.

“But we still respect Mr. Rhodes’ wishes,” Gerson says, “in that we look for the kinds of qualities he wanted -- signs of physical vigor and energy, leadership and teamwork.... Knowing what it’s like to work in a world-class kitchen, I’m sure the physical challenges are probably as significant as they might be for many people who fulfill the Rhodes’ will sports criterion in other ways.”

A punishing field

When Gerson told me that, I flashed back to a conversation I’d had while interviewing Thomas Keller of the French Laundry last summer.

“People don’t realize how physically punishing it is to cook,” Keller had said. “I’m 48. I can’t stand on my feet 16 hours a day anymore. I’ve had three knee operations.”

It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but now I suddenly found myself thinking, “Three knee operations? That sounds just like a football or basketball or baseball player.”

Jonah played all three sports growing up in Los Feliz, where his parents still live, and he excelled at track and field at North Hollywood High, where he was a city finalist in the 400-meter run.

But he hasn’t played sports in college, and when the Rhodes interviewers asked him about athletics, “I said being a line cook is very physical labor, very intense,” Jonah told us. “Things like tasting a sauce for salt or feeling a piece of meat to see if it’s done put me in touch with my body in ways very similar to what others get from athletics.”

Because Rhodes deliberations are confidential, there’s no way of knowing what role, if any, cooking ultimately played in Jonah’s selection. (He was one of 32 winners from 981 nominees this year.) But he told us that in both the formal interviews and informal cocktail party conversations, he was repeatedly asked about his interest in cooking.

“They seemed especially interested,” Jonah said, “in just why I liked cooking so much and how that interest had started.”

That’s where my family and I come in. We met Jonah about a dozen years ago, when he was 9, and his youngest sister, Leah, and our son, Lucas, were both about a year old. Lucas and Leah became close friends, and our families did too.

About five years ago, Jonah asked my wife, Lucy, to recommend a good cookbook. I was surprised. Jonah’s is certainly not a foodie family, and they had all seemed mildly amused by my passion for food and wine.

But Jonah’s mother told me that when he was in the seventh grade, he started making spaghetti sauce with meat and onions and tomatoes, “and it wasn’t very long before everyone preferred his sauce to mine.”

Anyway, Lucy responded to Jonah’s cookbook question by asking what kind of food he liked best. When he said, “Italian,” she recommended Marcella Hazan.

“I bought one of her cookbooks and read it from beginning to end that night,” Jonah says. “I’m a scientist, so, at first, I looked at it like a chemistry textbook, with recipes you could follow like formulas.”

Jonah was soon buying other cookbooks, e-mailing Lucy for advice -- and cooking at various family functions.

Two years ago, he said he’d like to spend the summer cooking in a restaurant in Los Angeles. Over lunch with a friend at Melisse, I asked chef/proprietor Josiah Citrin if he could recommend such a place. To my surprise, Citrin said he’d like to talk to Jonah about working at Melisse.

Jonah got the job, and when he went back to Columbia, he parlayed that experience, and some contacts he made, into a part-time job at Le Cirque and then got a similar job on the line at Le Bernardin.

Now, every time he comes home to visit his parents -- as he did over the New Year -- he comes to our house one morning, and he and Lucy cook all day while listening to rock ‘n’ roll music. Our two families have a feast that night at what we’ve come to call “Restaurant Lunah” (LUcy and JoNAH).

Jonah just returned to New York so he can graduate -- six months early -- and finish his lab work. He also hopes to find another restaurant job before heading to Oxford in the fall to get a master’s in English, focusing on the nexus between science and literature.

It sounds like a wonderful opportunity. But Gerson did offer a couple of cautionary notes.

“His experience at Le Bernardin and Le Cirque will not equip him well for Oxford College food,” he said, with a chuckle, “and despite the generosity of the Rhodes stipend [$30,000 a year for two years], I’m afraid that dinner at the nearest restaurant of that caliber would take care of a couple of months’ worth of that money.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.