| Several years ago, I listened to a couple of talks given by Alan Watts, one of my favorite writers. They were titled “The Art of Cooking Sincerely” and “Cooking with Reverence”. Since this was around the time I was beginning to host events, they sounded interesting and relevant. I actually liked them so much that I decide to write everything down because I’ve found that I can better absorb and reflect on information that I read. I just tried finding the videos, but they were taken down, so I’m glad I have them to share with each of you. Since they are fairly lengthy talks, I will just share the parts that stood out to me. Although Watts gave these talks over 50 years ago, both still apply today and eloquently articulate the importance of engaging in the means by which we fuel ourselves, which is part of what I have always described as the purpose of Community Dining, along with connecting people through shared meals and strengthening social bonds. For those who are interested in reading the whole transcript, I can share the remainder of them. The Art of Cooking Sincerely “When it comes down to a very, very fundamental biological science and art, the art of so rendering food that it becomes extremely well absorbable, we have our qualms and we don’t really go to it. And yet you see as I suggested in a previous talk here, the human being is like a whirlpool in water. The human being is a pattern of life, which is a particular form of activity in a stream, but the human stream consists of water, milk, and wheat, cow, vegetable. All foodstuffs whatsoever are in the process of being processed by us. In your lifetime, you have processed innumerable tons of groceries and therefore, you are what you eat. Every fiber and cell of your bodies is beefsteak and potatoes and so on in the course of being processed humanly. And therefore, those people who stand at the entryway whereby the stream enters the human organism and becomes changed into our form is in a very responsible position, for as a cook standing at the kitchen range, you are most veritably a priest at an altar and if you do not realize the priestly and magical nature of your function as a cook, you are doing the human race a great disservice. And the trouble is of course that the average person who cooks in our culture is a harassed housewife who has to do this every day to get meals ready for children and adults who are fundamentally in a hurry to do something else other than eat. Breakfast in the morning is usually a madhouse because everybody has to get up to get the children off to school in time and get the husband of the family off to work in time and this is usually postponed till the last minute among other reasons because of course going to bed the night before was postponed till the last minute because there was some fun going on the night before because of which one had to hurry through dinner in order to get out to it whatever it was. And we do tend to regard meals as medicine rather than diet. We will take packages of ordinary foodstuffs and we will find on them in small print the same sort of chemical analysis of what’s in it as you get in a bottle of pills. Every package of food has to have its content spelled out you see as if it were medicine. You die say an ordinary envelope of gelatin, and there’s a chemical formula on it because we are looking at this food for what good it will do for us. We are firmly of the opinion, therefore, that we eat in order to live rather than that live in order to eat. Therefore, the pleasures of the table, the art of the kitchen, is simply relegated to being a means to an end. It enables us to continue our biological existences in order to what? Make money, or be cultured. And people who listen to music, or go to plays, or read books with a motivation of becoming cultured people never listen to the music, don’t understand the play, don’t really read books because they always have one eye on what kind of person this activity is turning me into, what status it gives me. Therefore, one never really does it. So in order to be human, in order to be cultured, and civilized in the highest sense of the word, it is absolutely necessary to every-day life that we take the art of cooking sincerely, that we regard the process that goes on at the table as one of fundamental spiritual and religious importance and make it a yoga. Not only what goes on in the kitchen, but also what goes on at the table itself must for us become an occasion where we regard ourselves as involved in one of the most important, worthwhile things that we do because you see if you only eat in order to live, you will not digest your food properly. You will bolt it, wolf it down just to stop the gnawing. I remember not so long ago that for my sins, I was lecturing in the state of Virginia, and I was in colleges most of the time see, and I was condemned therefore to eat the offerings of college cafeterias and sorority and fraternity house cooking, and it was so abominable that I literally starved. You may say I’m fussy, but I will not eat unless I am literally starving, and have been starving for days and days when anything will taste good. But a normal person should not be asked to eat the incredible messes of ruthlessly boiled vegetables, meat that has suffered in electronic purgatories for hours, and is served to you in a gray that is made in water, bullion cubes, and library paste. This is simply not fit for human consumption, and the fact the whole academic world without question – faculty and students – eat this notorious garbage is of course rotting their brains and making them highly uncivilized. It’s just unpardonable. There’s no excuse for this at all. And part of the reason is that college kitchens are supervised by dietitians as distinct from cooks. And these two classes of persons are really mutually exclusive because the dietitian thinks of food in terms of its chemical content, in terms of its calories, its vitamins, its proteins, and so thinks through a test tube, whereas an accomplished cook thinks with his tongue, and with his belly, and with what fundamentally is good for his gut. And he comes from a long tradition, be it of French cooking, or of Chinese cooking, or of Indonesian cooking, Indian cooking, or whatever it is. He has a long, long historical tradition behind him of excellence. And the French cook – no one is more proud, no one is more delighted with his art, and the vintner who goes with him is also equally important of a person in seeing that human beings remain civilized at the table and that the table is not simply treated in the same way as the bathroom. The bathroom is the output room and is always sort of relegated to unconsciousness because we don’t like to admit that we do these things. And so when you carry the bathroom attitude to the kitchen, as I suggested already, the kitchen begins to look like a bathroom because it is just the input room and no real reverence is accorded to the art of cooking. Well, I think that if we want to have a true civilization, and we want to be people of great culture and great humanity, a lot of it begins in the kitchen and goes on around the eating table. And so as Lin Yutang once beautifully put it, “A fish which has died for you and is not well cooked has died in vain.” Here you see we face a serious ethical problem: since we do depend on all these other creatures for our life, what is our responsibility towards them? You can’t avoid this. You can become a vegetarian if you’re squeamish about it, but that’s only a gesture. You’re still destroying living beings. To eat apples, tomatoes, cabbages, lettuce, all those things, you’re still destroying other forms of life. And so the only possible good ethical response to finding ourselves in this situation is not only of course the obvious one of putting to good use the energies which we derive from them, but also the immediate respect – shall I say your grace for Thanksgiving – of honoring what we eat by cooking it to perfection.” Cooking with Reverence “The death of all creatures which give other creatures life is the ongoing process of love, of self-offering, which constitutes the very nature of the biophysical world. And therefore, if you say grace before meals, what you should really thank is the dead cow, the dead fish, or the crushed grain, which you are about to eat, and say to this, “Thank you very much for allowing your life to be transformed into mine.” And so the natural outcome of grace is eventually to allow your life to be transformed into the life of other beings, be they ever so humble, be they merely bacteria or worms because they in their turn are a sort of yeast from which life continues to go on. So now all those of you here who are at any time engaged in cooking must become aware of the high pittanty of this art and of the possibilities in it for yoga and self-realization. No more must you ever throw something together to stop the gnawing feeling. There is no point whatsoever in cooking without giving yourself adequate time for it because you will find that time spent on other things to such an extent that it affords no time for cooking is a way of wasting your life on abstract flipperies instead of things of true material consequence. Anybody who cooks should therefore set aside a sufficient time of the day to do it to perfection. There is no point in cooking at all unless one cooks perfectly because to do anything less than that is a serious irreverence to the fish, to the dead animals, and to the crushed grains that we use. I don’t want to sound moralistic as if naughty, naughty to be irreverent to these creatures. I’m merely saying that if you aren’t reverent towards them, you will not eat well because the process of transforming these valuable living elements into great dishes is really worth it. But the basic thing in being a good cook is that you must love the natural elements which go into it. In other words, when you get spread out on the chopping board various meats and vegetables, eggs, and so on, you must start by feeling of love for those things. Roll the vegetables in your hands. Look how exquisite they are. When you slice, say a purple onion, look at the lines, the patterns in what is then displayed. Look at a fish laid out in front of you, the wonderful music in its scales, what a beautiful thing it is, the way the bones are formed. When you slice meat, look at the marbling in it, the quality, the color. Relish all that, sniff all that. And if you love those raw materials, you will be able to cook because cooking is a process of loving. It is a transformation through love of these raw materials into assimilable and truly edible form. And a person therefore who is engaged in the ritual of cooking will never make the mistake of hurrying. Now there are moments in cooking when you have to have your wits about you because timing is terribly important as in boiling an egg, as in making a soufflé, as in making certain sauces, as in frying with butter where the butter has to be at a certain temperature and musn’t be allowed to burn. Cooking certain kinds of pastry requires perfect timing, but perfect timing and hurrying are two completely different things. Hurrying in cooking is always a failure. Instant coffee is a punishment for people who are in too much of a hurry. There is only one way of cooking coffee – that is perfect, which is jungle coffee where you put coffee into cold water, but you see, you’ve got to watch it. And the moment it begins to come to the boil, you turn it off. It must never boil. And then you stir it, and you put the lid back on the pan to keep the heat in and you allow a little time for the grounds to settle and then pour it off through a fine strainer in case any ground should be left through, and you have got absolutely perfect coffee, but it takes your presence of mind. It takes watching to do it. Also does boiling eggs, which is a very subtle art. There is no formula for boiling an egg because there are too many variables to enter into it. What is the temperature of the egg? What is the quality of the egg? How hot your flame is. How high you are above sea level. When do you think water begins to boil? All sorts of questions like that go into the boiling of an egg. And no egg timer will by itself teach you to boil an egg. You have to get a feel for your own stove, for your own kitchen, for your own climate, for the kind of eggs you buy from market, and then eventually you will know almost instinctively how to boil an egg. So I would say then the basic attitude is one of concentrating not by sort of forcing your attention on things. That’s not the way to concentrate. I think the attitude of concentration is very well shown if you watch the conduct of the Japanese tea ceremony, the whole idea of which is that the simple act of serving powdered green tea in hot water which is whisked can be so utterly delightful and that the contemplation of the bowls and the bamboo instruments that are used in this procedure can give such aesthetic relish that is worth dallying over and spending two or three hours just doing that.” “Biological existence is such that you have to kill to live. And vegetarians have no way out because plants are also forms of life, and to the degree that they are aware – and they are aware to a certain degree, they think they are human. And when you chew up plants, you are making a very painful experiences for cabbages and carrots and things like that, and you can’t get out of it. And the only possible solution of the dilemma that we are in ethically – that we have to eat in order to live, that being is killing. The only possible solution to this dilemma is to reverence food and to cook it as well as possible and enjoy it to the full. There is no other ethical response that is in any way possible to this situation.” |
