Life and Death in the Kitchen

Lately, I have been contemplating why I love the kitchen. What is it that feeds my stomach and my soul? And why doesn't everyone like to cook?
Last night I had a conversation with a friend who hates to cook, gets frustrated and relies on fast food or premade food or just not eating at all. Anything to stay out of the kitchen. For him cooking feels overwhelming and just not worth the effort. After all, there are plenty of restaurants with good food. But I guess at the end of the day I like the space, the activity, the pulse of a kitchen.

There is also a deeper, ancestral feel for me, partly found in the life and death of food. While I have been at school I have cut and cleaned whole fish, accidentally pushing my finger into one of the eyes, and squeezing out its guts when I tried to cut the head off with a dull knife. I could not help but think, it was alive at one point and now I was treating it like a prop in class. Butchering it with no skill and riping its skin from the flesh. Then eating it breaded and fried, maybe even more undignified.

But among all the death is life. Not just in the sustenance that we got from eating the food. In my baking class we would use yeast, a living organism in baking bread. We'd coax the fragile yeast out of its dormancy with warmth, food, and moisture and the living organism would flavor and lift the bread into something it was not before, and could not be without it.

There is so much of what we are in food. The whole history of mankind can be seen on a plate. When I saw Anthony Bourdain speak at Charlotte Shout he said this, "Food, at its best, is the purest representation of a place."

I thought this was so true how a plate of food is a combination of all the cultures that influenced the place and the cook. Then the eater will further make it their own by adding condiments or taking the recipe and changing it to fit their idea of good.

There is so much mental chaos in life: Worry, fatigue, to do lists, and just the frustrations of dealing with people, that for me, going into the kitchen is a relief. A sort of controlled chaos. Moments where you are so concentrated on the present that the past and the future do not seem to matter, at least not for a little while.