The Paradoxes of Cooking

Here is a short narrative that my friend and colleague Roy Chan sent me about his experience growing up with food. Besides being refreshingly honest and thoughtful - and worth reading on account of that alone - it is also ripe for philosophical discussion. Among the many things that struck me, and these are just a few, were:

• The comparison between food and language. Cooking is certainly a form of communication (also, compare to "community" and "communion").
• Is there a cooking gene? Roy seems to have it and some say that I inherited my desire to cook from my mother. 
• Is cooking a paradoxical form of labor and love, as Roy suggests, or do the two go hand-in-hand?
• Why is the word "foodie" nauseating?  

Again, these are just the first few topics of discussion that spring to my mind. I would love to hear what the rest of you think. I'm sure Roy would as well.

Roy's Post:


"Most of my childhood Saturday afternoons were spent firmly planted, in musty pajamas, on the living room floor with the television turned to PBS. Every weekend I indulged in a marathon of cooking show viewing – Jacques Pepin, Jeff Smith, Graham Kerr and Julia Child (of course) among the idols whose studio kitchens, framed by the dimensions of our modestly sized TV set, were the altars upon which I rested my pious eyes. The sheer consistency of my weekly ritual was enabled by the fact that I was a poor, bookish, irreducibly foreign-looking and foreign-acting nerd desperately lacking in the skills of making friends (a deficiency, I fear, haunts me to the present day). By the time I was 12 I could explain the correct way to separate an egg, define the components of a mirepoix, and recommend the best utensil for zesting a lemon.
This was all, however, just like the facts and trivia I devoured in school, a kind of intellectual knowledge – I never actually reproduced the soufflé or gravlax I saw Frere Jacques make. We were poor, and our grocery shopping mainly consisted of trips to Chinatown where we got the cheap provisions of a southern Chinese kitchen. I never received an allowance, and I never dared ask my parents to buy me crème fraiche or thyme or any of these Western, and therefore, fundamentally exotic and strange ingredients.
But cooking was in my blood, quite literally. My father trained in Hong Kong as a chef, and worked all his life cooking in Chinese restaurants. He could stir-fry, steam, deep-fry, red-cook and boil with the best of them. You’d think that he would’ve been eager to teach me his skills, but for him cooking was only ever a mid-level skilled profession, a means to make a living in a country for which he had no other skills. Cooking, no matter how exquisitely done, was labor, hard, back breaking work, years of your life sweated out from your pores, your lungs damaged from the constant fumes of burnt oil, your arm scarred and damaged by the same oil (my father still sports a pretty impressive scar from spilled grease on his arm – it took weeks to heal). I don’t recall him ever once giving me a cooking lesson, more than anything because he didn’t want me to take up his profession at the cost of a proper American education. He was always bemused by my fascination for an activity that for him had long already become drudgery. It was actually my mom who gave me cooking lessons, rudimentary exercises in stir-frying that consisted of cutting, marinating, frying ingredients in batches, then combining them with a corn-starch slurry. It was basic, unglamorous, but failsafe and occasionally quite tasty.
The evidence that cooking was drudgery was the rather poor quality of our meals at home – Dad left his skills in the restaurant kitchen, but at home, he and mom were more than willing to skip every corner they could manage. They both worked evening shifts, so my brothers and I would come home to a plate of, say, sautéed chicken wings in a plate laying on top of rice and water in the rice cooker. We pressed the button, waited half and hour, and our rice was done, and our chicken was reheated through – that is, bathed in hot, relentless steam that turned our plate of wings into a soup, the salty flavor from the caramelized skin leached out into the puddle in which they were submerged. We ate with little complaint, because, to be honest, this was our food, and we had little other sense of reference.
I remember in eight grade finally receiving a small wad of cash from my mom, maybe at most ten dollars. I convinced myself I would embark on an ambitious project – a lemon meringue pie – even though I had never baked ever in my life. It was time to put theory into praxis. I went out and bought the requisite ingredients – flour, unsalted butter (we always only bought salted) and a few lemons. Buying those ingredients felt exhilaratingly dangerous, a walk on the wild side in truly unknown territory, and wondering if, after the ordeal was over, I’d come back the same person again. Like MacGuyver’s ingenious repurposing of “household materials,” I improvised for all the equipment I lacked. I used a knife sharpener that had long lost its handle as my roller; I washed out an old, rusty pie tin that we used to cover the electric ranges to carry our pastry. I remember starting on the project the minute I came home from school and ate dinner – making the crust, baking it, letting it cool, then making the filling, then baking that, then making the meringue; the process took all night. We used our oven to store old pots and pans, and my brother advised me that it would not be a good idea to heat it with our parents out, so I used an old toaster oven. By the time the pie had baked and cooled, it was already well past our bedtime, but my two brothers and I each shared a quarter, and agreed that it was quite good. Of course, we’d never had homemade lemon meringue pie before, so our judgments were unqualified. While we slept, my parents came home in the middle of the night. A last quarter of pie was waiting for them in the refrigerator. It was gone when I woke up in the morning and left for school. When I came home, my mother, on the way out for her evening shift, declared that both she and Dad had loved our pie, and that I was truly “brilliant.” Fewer things made me feel prouder.
I have been passionate and obsessed about food ever since I was a child, fueled by my obsession for cooking shows, puzzled by my father’s reluctance to display his formidable skills except during holidays, and, once I started earning my own petty cash, funded by solitary trips to dozens of Seattle restaurants, trying to see how far my palate could go. My relationship to food is thoroughly ecumenical, a flashback to a childhood that saw fresh abalone for Fourth of July, and a can of chili dumped into a bowl and plopped in the rice-cooker that, after 40 min., became kidney bean soup on most other days. To me, food consists of a very simple binary, and that binary isn’t “real” vs. “fake” as some of the most self-righteous ideologues would claim, or local vs. mass produced, or authentic vs. bowdlerized. For me, food is either good or bad, and the only criteria for that is personal taste. What accounts for culinary taste I’m sure can occupy Kantians for millennia, but I choose not to pore over it too much. I spent a good long seven years in the Bay Area where the gourmands were in a pissing battle of attrition over who had better taste in arugula as a way of establishing some inchoate sense of cultural and symbolic superiority.
Ever since I’ve lived on my own I’ve always cooked for myself, and for others. As I’ve intimated above, sociality never came to me easily, and only rather late in my life. Cooking for others was a way of saying something about myself without having to say anything. Food was and is my wingman. I think of countless dates where I’ve tried to impress someone with a stew, or a ragu, or even, in one rather frightful case, Chicken Manchurian, often disappointed that enthusiasm about the food rarely translated into enthusiasm for the host who cooked it. But romance aside, cooking has been a main venue to stretch the boundaries of sociability. Cooking is a form of labor done for others, which in turn becomes a signifier of trustworthiness, companionship, interest.
For me it’s the paradox of cooking as a form of labor and love that most intrigues me. All cooking requires effort, trudgery, work; it is a form of labor we perform in order to survive (lest we want to die at 50 from a massive heart attack caused by a lifetime of eating out). Countless housewives of the 1950’s resented being stuck in the kitchen, day in, day out. My mother was so unenthused by cooking she made my father do it. I come home at night, exhausted from a trying day of teaching, examining the prospect of an evening spent grading, and the idea of making a Bolognese sauce from scratch suddenly seems unappealing. My father continues to suffer many ailments as a result of decades spent in a torturously hot kitchen that might very well have been described in Dante’s Comedy.
And yet, there is also the pleasure I feel when, even after an exhausting day at work, I decide to chuck grading to the side and make a seafood risotto. The ability to engage the senses, to enter a realm of delightful focus, the happiness registered in a new friend who’s sampled my chocolate cream pie, these bring out the genuine pleasures of cooking, of labor as demonstration of skill. There is an immense satisfaction when you see how all of the skills you’ve developed over years of trial and error work their magic in nearly unnoticeable fashion as you embark on a new recipe, how your very experience of your body transforms from egghead to domestic iron chef. There is a rhythm of movement, and a counterpoint of the senses, that turns cooking into a dynamic mind-body experience.
But then there are all the mistakes, the offal stew that smells like a sewer, the egg that just won’t separate at all, the missing, key ingredient in the so-called high-end store. The problem I have with the new icons of food these days is how they completely play up the “love,” “pleasure” and “joy” of cooking without acknowledging the labor, trudgery, and yes, even boredom, that cooking also involves. I don’t understand why every TV food chef is peddling not just their recipes, but an entire lifestyle, an entire ideology, and an entire set of consuming behaviors, that seem so extraneous to what they’re actually dishing up. The overweening emphasis on food as a token of a life of sophisticated ease often feeds an illusion of luxurious optimism that is so far removed from the great majority of humanity. The “foodies” (a word that still nauseates me) in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto can bitch all they want about salads vs. salumi, and yet just a few miles away in Oakland’s ghetto the underclass struggles to put basic canned and boxed goods on the table. It frustrates me when food itself is transformed into false consciousness.
I think back to my father, for whom cooking was labor so exhausting that he couldn’t wait to retire once his Social Security kicked in. Cooking was never a “joy” for him; I can’t remember the last time my parents ever invited someone over for dinner. When I went off to graduate school, my father was furious that my mom had bought me both a saucepan and a skillet. “What does he need so many utensils for? Can’t he save time and eat at a cafeteria?” he wondered aloud. My enthusiasm for cooking still puzzles him to this day. But then I think back when I was a child, and my parents were having one of their frequent rows, a culmination of slight, but accumulated, misunderstandings and perceived betrayals of trust. I remember thinking how it might be better for my parents to split up, and congratulating myself on my mature point of view. I suggested this to my mother, and she was horrified. “Why would you ever want us to divorce?” she asked. I offered that our father, often a quiet, despondent, even cold person, didn't truly love us (hadn’t Oprah taught us that love had to be expressed profusely and verbally)? My mother roared back at me. “Who makes your dinner every night?” She glared at me with indignation. I stepped back.
Every time I go home my father tries to whip up something special for me, something better than the bland dinners I grew up with. My father is old now; his rhythm, timing and especially sense of taste have long since faded. He takes very little pleasure in eating himself; a serious case of diabetes has strongly curtailed what he can have and so he usually eats a slurry of leftovers diluted in broth while saving the better stuff for us. When I eat his food, I can catch a fleeting hint of the brilliance with which he once cooked during Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthdays, those occasions when we were relieved to be released from our culinary monotony. My mother complains that his cooking isn’t what it used to be. And yet, even when a dish seems slightly off, I remind myself of how my mother yelled at me and defended my father, and I remember that love need not always express itself in cloying, overly rehearsed words, or in a stifling embrace."