Cooking at Home with Milo and Voltaire
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin." -Voltaire
Prelude: A Universal Ritual
In the not so distant past, archeologists unearthed an large structure of human construction, dating back thousands of years; Two stone pillars (10+ feet high) stuck straight out of the ground, joined atop by a crossbeam, with a channel below the center of the of the structure that flowed outwards. They did not understand what they found. And then, archeologists found virtually the same structure again. And again. And again.
From Italy to Egypt, this structure kept popping up in a uniform design, with no identified use, spinning the wheels of many an imaginative historian. It couldn’t have been built by one person: Too big. It must have been connected to some large contiguous culture: It was basically the same everywhere. It also seemed liked it demanded some formidable engineering with all that massive stone. But what could be its function? As with all things big and unexplained to a historian, to them, it was probably a religious thing.
I mean, what the hell else could it be…
Do you know what to do with this thing?
Some speculated that it was a device for human sacrifice. Others were a little more benign, suggesting it was merely symbolic, like the cross is to the church. Imaginative fictions were spun and spun, going down such exuberant rabbit holes, claiming it was evidence of an extinct world religion rediscovered, to recontextualizing the Roman mythos to relate to Babylonian rituals in the light of… this thing.
Only one issue: nobody from the time wrote anything about these things. They weren’t referenced in any religious texts. Mostly because they weren’t religious at all.
They were olive oil presses.
Shockingly Common Humanity
A small disclaimer: I lifted that story from the introduction to a lecture series that I listened to on Audible, while high, and I never quite finished the lecture series (because I got high.) I may have muddled some of the details of the story in recall. Not proud, just being honest.
Still, my recollection has conserved the only takeaways that matter from this story:
Despite how universal our experiences, desires, needs, and feelings are, there is an impenetrability to a life you haven’t lived.
Food is the fucking best.
They seem unrelated, but they really are not.
Taste, Ignorance, and War
“Reason is and ought only be the slave of the passions.”
-David Hume
In the study of history, the most surprising thing I’ve found is how human we all are, and how alien we perceive other people to be in spite of ourselves. Baked into every conflict, every era, and every turn of culture is this simple constant. We are terminally human in our constitution. And at the core of our humanity is the flame.
Cooking.
Cooking is a uniquely human endeavor, and is very likely the first demonstration of our aesthetic sensibilities. It’s commonly recognized in anthropology and evolutionary biology that the exploitation of cooked meats made us tremendously more fit on the Savannah. In history, we collectively understand the manipulation of wheat (via mills and fire) to be a requisite development in population-sustaining agriculture, and thus civilization itself. It truly is no small matter that we care about our food exploration.
Gastronomic exploration may be the thing most unique to humanity. Beavers may not make rockets, but they engineer. Dolphins like to get high on pufferfish toxin. Ants make civilizations. Birds sing in mating rituals. But no other organism yet identified on earth cooks, least of all to improve taste.
We, however, wage wars for the delicious. We conquer. We pillage. We enslave. In some very real way, I suspect the initiating factor in establishing global trade was to escape the hell of eating gruel every day until you died of being bored by bland food (and tuberculosis). Ask the colonizers. They know what I’m talking about. You do too.
“I’d kill for a burger right now.”
Common aphorism, no? It only takes 15 minutes of Zone 2 exercise to get your average software engineer to that point, so you ought to thank God that it is substantially easier to go to In-N-Out than it is to appear in court for serial killing.
But I digress.
Cooking is fundamentally, exceptionally, and exquisitely human. We all share the love for well-cooked meal, and the empathic understanding of that truth of experience is extended all the way to a death row inmate’s last meal. It is because of love that it is customary to take requests for the last meal. That is one of the deepest reflections of how food is central to our humanity.
Diplomacy throughout the ages has always centered around the dining table because through trade disputes, broken treaties, and resource conflicts, we all are certain to appreciate a banquet. I may not understand your language, your nation’s struggles, your food, or your motivations. Your cannons may face my border walls, your cavalry may be at the ready, and your minister of war may be in the next room over, drawing supply lines on a map that details my hometown. However, if I’m eating at the table you feed your children at, and neither of us get poisoned… something must be going right in our relationship.
It is a totally essential element of our common humanity, however errant and fickle such a thing may be. And common humanity is errant and fickle. Many of us go through our entire lives with only the faintest idea of how our parents nurtured us, why they hurt us, and how much they loved us. Many of us will never see both sides of a war in earnest. Many of us will never know why our ex-lovers’ affections faded.
We are born naked into cold air, understanding nothing around us, and in brief reprieves of mutual mercy, our connection to each other reminds us that we have a place in the world. Our closeness, to kin and to strangers, is as precious and rare as anything in the universe, and must be cherished almost to the boundary of greed.
Aloneness, however, is the bread and butter of life. Only you can truly know yourself, and even that isn’t so reliable. Your tastes are never quite remembered by others so well as you can articulate them, and you can never quite articulate them with total consideration of your palate. And however good you are at knowing your friends, there is a world within them that they could never reveal to you even if they expended their whole life to do it.
Togetherness, while it is our highest form of being, is also something of a futile aim. It’s never quite achieved the heights of how it’s been imagined, and isn’t exactly durable, especially at scale. A consequence of how having a perspective forces an ignorance of everything out of view, we’ve never been able to rely on harmony.
On the small scale, we are prone to bicker with loved ones and snap at strangers when we don’t understand each other. We are often found at pains to help someone who is suffering, yet completely impoverished in action or speech. Conversations often move not like a symphony, but rather a cacophony when opinions are in conflict. Failing even a cacophony, when interests are unshared or unknown, it will produce an uncertain, arrhythmic, disjointed mess of dry answers to unenthusiastic questions that will force both parties to question how human they really are.
Our ignorance scales better than our wisdom. Even when nations are in perfect agreement about values, that convergence becomes friction because resource ownership becomes the point of contestation. At that point of war, we understand just about everything about each other. Spies relay the culture, the resources, the political tensions, and the technology. Beneath that is just the human core we share. We just redact all understanding of pain that isn’t tactical. When you amputate the warmth of mutual understanding and poison it with malicious intent, it just becomes a playbook on how to maim. It’s a weaponization of empathy.
We love to fall apart.
If harmony isn’t reliable, solace may be found in solitude. Solitude is a skill, not a trait. You have to know how to make yourself happy. You, and only you, are capable of doing that. To have the capacity to spark your own joy is to have a warm life, and I can think of no better, more reliable way to start than to learn how to cook for yourself.
At Least a Quiche:
“The sage prefers what is within to what is without.”
-Laozi
Cuisine is at least a third of the character of any household, and yet, the vast majority of people can’t do anything with food. Their excuses are mostly nonsensical, making reference to cost (prepared food will always cost more), innate inability (cooking is a skill that anyone can develop reliably and cheaply), and time (hours worked to pay for food are hours spent).
My argument for home cooking as an essential component of a good life is very plain: Food is the most wholesome and reliable of life’s simple pleasures. Unlike many sources of joy, food can be pursued entirely by yourself. It serves to be able to please yourself.
Why rob yourself of that?
To not know how to feed yourself is a form of self-neglect. We really ought to look at it like a sickness because, well… it kinda is. In the nations where food has been commercialized, malnutrition and related second-order conditions (congestive heart failure, obesity, and diabetes) have gone up dramatically.
This is best demonstrated with Mexico and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Before Uncle Sam came to town, the obesity rate was 10 percent in Mexico. After 30 years of costless import of American commercial food, Mexico’s obesity rate more than tripled, ballooning to 35%, coming pretty much neck and neck with America’s own obesity rate. The consequences of the altered food culture on quality of life are measurable, massive, and overwhelmingly negative. The morbidity of commercialized food production cannot be overstated.
The decline of home cooking is not just a traditionalist lament of changing fashions. It is truly a crisis of body and spirit. It’s a global degeneration of one of our core love languages, and that is reflected in our poor health, both mental and physical. Luckily, the prescription could not be more clear, appetizing, or rewarding: Do yourself a favor, and learn how to make one of your favorite meals.
I want to emphasize that I am not asking for everybody to go to culinary school. My proposal is not about an elitist critique of boxed mac & cheese. You don’t need exquisite knife skills. You don’t need every appliance in Williams Sonoma. You don’t need a recipe book. You don’t have to be great in the kitchen. Hell, you don’t even have to be good.
You just have to try.
If you’re telling me you can’t find a frying pan and 6 hours of free-time, I have to believe you’re being stubborn for no reason. Believe in yourself: you can make a quiche. It’s eggs, milk, spinach, bacon and a store-bought pie crust. 15 bucks for at least 4 meals, and barely more difficult than a breakfast sandwich.
Ultimately, you should have at least one dish that you can do well. Something you can use to take care of yourself when you are down. Something you can use to express affection to others. Your cooking is symbolic of the care you give to yourself, the hospitality you give to others, and the love you express to your kith and kin.
Don’t shortchange its importance in your life.
Just pick a dish and whatever recipe you can find for it. The simpler, the better. If you fuck it up the first few times, fine. So be it. Just try to get better at it. Whatever you do, don’t give up on the endeavor.
You can do it!
Love is But a Spoonful:
“The people who give you their food give you their heart.”
-Cesar Chavez
If you’ve never seen someone’s face light up from something that you cooked for them, I implore you to seek that. The truth is that it’s oft-neglected, low-hanging fruit. We all have the capacity to be that joy for someone else, and for some awful reason, we default to being nothing to them. Rebel against that apathy, for love is but a spoonful.
If I knew what was good for me, I would be a simpler person. I wouldn’t bitch and argue about politics. I wouldn’t shit-talk people. I wouldn’t really talk much at all. My food speaks clearer than my words.
Something is very special about giving food. It’s a restorative act for both parties. When you give, it’s made potently obvious how much good you can impart in a single act. When you receive, you cannot escape the truth that you were worth consideration and effort. It is better than just “optimistic.” It’s actually good.
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
-Charles Bukowski
If I die having moved people in one way, I hope that people would hold the small act of kindness high above basically everything else. I hope that good-natured people would sooner reach for chicken noodle soup for a sick friend than they would a ballot for a sick nation. I hope that the simplicity of goodness would be venerated, and that the complexity and scale of politics would be disregarded.
Everything else is for naught without the basic gift of face-to-face decency.
Cultivate Your Garden:
“Let us work without reasoning. It is the only way to make life endurable.”
-Voltaire
There is not much productivity in vigorous debate on global politics and philosophy. It’s really the vice of a latent mind. As they say, “Idle hands are the devils playthings.” Ask, after your next argument about such things, “Who was the beneficiary of my screed? Did my words save the world from poverty, pestilence, tyranny and war? Or was I just nasty to someone who is very close to me?”
I hold food in such high esteem because, unlike most things with the aim of “making the world better,” it actually works. Working on food is working on your nurturing side. If you want to “make the world better” without working on being nurturing, kind, and loving, you may want to ask yourself if what you really care about is power. If you do care about being loving, kind, and nurturing, start with what you can, where you can: Cook yourself a meal worth eating.
Learning how to dice an onion is a endeavor more fertile than you could possibly know. It’s working where work counts. Improving the home. Improving health. Improving relationships. Improving on the everyday joys that constitute life as it is actually experienced.
It bleeds over. The skills you learn, and the perspective you foster by taking care of yourself are all applicable to the care of others too. It’s the grounding that matters. There may be no goodness no more real than to feed your family and friends with total gratitude for the opportunity to make their day. Make yourself useful by generating smiles, not political fervor.
Good food in the home is to make your partner’s life comfortable, and your child’s life healthy. Good food in the home is to create an sanctuary. Good food to give is good love to give. Good food is laughter, nurture, togetherness, resolution, self-care, and joy, all in one delicious package. Good food may be the most pure good in the world.
I implore you: make something tasty for someone.