Laced With Caution

SEA ISLAND, Ga. — There are eyes on Todd Rogers all the time now.

Standing among the food runners and prep cooks, between the saute station and the garde-manger, are the people the government sent to watch him.

Federal agents have been in Rogers' kitchen for weeks, memorizing his movements so that this week, when he cooks the most important meals of his career, they can detect the telltale flicker of a wandering hand or an unexpected ingredient.

At the Group of 8 summit, when leaders of the world's eight richest nations gather for three days at the Sea Island resort in coastal Georgia, the old art of food tasting is being elevated to a science. 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 in exquisite detail.

At the 1996 summit in Lyons, the president of France ordered grand chef Paul Bocuse to go easy on the salt. Bocuse apologized in advance for the fish souffle, which he felt was under-salted.

But this year's food comes wrapped in state secrets. Ingredients were purchased anonymously, so suppliers may never know they provided food for the event. Menus were kept secret from the kitchen staff.

And Rogers, the resort's executive chef, has learned to carry out the complex ballet of food preparation under the close watch of food safety and counterterrorism experts, who whisk samples away to laboratory equipment on the premises.

Sometimes they fly the samples to a lab in Atlanta. Rogers just keeps cooking. He can't think of any event that's put more weight on his shoulders.

"I more or less block it out," said Rogers, 43, a genial West Virginian in cowboy boots and handlebar mustache. "I guess it'd be like acting. You're focused. You can't afford to look around while it's going on."

The pressure of cooking for dignitaries has been known to corrode minds. As students, chefs are taught the parable of Francois Vatel, a 17th century chef who was ordered to cook several dinners for King Louis XIV. He agonized the first night when a roast failed at one of the 25 tables.

Early the next morning, a sleepless, panicky Vatel was waiting for an order of fish to come in for the next day's dinner. Certain that it would not arrive, he ran to his sous-chef and said, "Sir, I shall not be able to survive this disgrace." Then he went to his bedroom, braced his sword against the door and ran it through his heart.