On Cooking
Cooking, technically, is just making food safe to eat and easier to digest, allowing our bodies to do less work to acquire more nutrients. But that’s not why you’re here. Some dictionary definition of cooking is just bullshit, and everyone knows it. Why else are cooking shows so popular? Because people generally understand – even if it’s not in the forefront of their consciousness – that cooking means something. It means something so much more than any dictionary could ever tell.
There’s a reason restaurants are in the hospitality industry. Cooking is a form of hospitality. It’s welcoming and loving and inviting in a way that is almost existential. The same way that someone can be physically attracted to another person, people are attracted to food. What I mean is that good food has an attractive quality. When you’re walking down the street and you smell something, you can automatically tell if it’s delicious or just plain bad (or can you?). If it smells delicious, you want to move towards it. Notice the next time you walk past that restaurant (and I say “that restaurant” on purpose because I know all of you have one in mind) how you subconsciously move closer to it. You want to be near it.
Food can be beautiful, even if it’s aesthetically ugly. Especially if it’s aesthetically ugly, actually. Some of the best food looks like a mash of ingredients thrown into a skillet and flopped onto a plate; tteokbokki, fried rice, hamburgers, escite. Are any of these beautiful? No. And yes. Aesthetically, no; spiritually, yes.
And that brings up why I’m writing in the first place: the spirit of cooking. It’s slipping away. The reason we love food so much is because our parents or grandparents were the last generation of people to really cook! We forged memories around the kitchen and table which sit in that special place between our hearts and our stomachs called “the soul.” Think back: mom’s hot chili after a cold night of football practice; Dad grilling bacon-wrapped, jalapeno-stuffed dove breast for everyone after the opening day of dove season; Nanna’s house that was filled with that beautifully acidic, herbaceous aroma of meatballs that have been simmering since this morning. Cooking is so much more than cooking; cooking is love. Cooking is affection and desire and lust and beauty and all the other wonderful things you can think of wrapped into one action. Cooking is, “I love you,” without having to say those words. For a generation of people who can’t communicate worth a shit, cooking is the ultimate expression of goodwill. So people: get cooking. Find a friend or a loved one and have them over for a dinner party. Make a home cooked meal and bring it to someone and you’ll see tears brought to someone’s eyes. Yes, I’m not kidding, it means that much to people. Have your significant other over to cook; get wine drunk and giggly with them, burn the shit out of that chicken, then order takeout because cooking is so much more than just the food.
