Simple food is rarely easy. Less to hide behind is less room for error. This is a universal property. Yet still, it seems to become more and more difficult as time passes, for the wrong reasons.
Certainly making a lot out of very little is a miraculous skill in and of itself (identified as such in the Bible, for instance). M.F.K. Fisher writes in her foreword to Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, that there may be a time in the future where we eat expertly cut carrot curls (the kinds you find on top of food in small bowls at your local, expensive Japanese restaurant), not because we can, but because we have to. An unfortunately eerie message.
Now then, what does this have to do with the carrot? Why would it make any difference, given equal weight and freshness, if the carrot was in the shape of a curl, swan, a double helix, or just grated on top? The curl stands up for many things that avoid clear definition, such as the attention and standards of those responsible for the dish, the time and expertise of the person making it.
Perhaps according to some linear, materialistic understanding of nutrition, there is no difference: a carrot is a carrot is a carrot; perhaps a calorie is a calorie is a calorie (it isn’t). BUT experientially it makes a difference. And experience shapes our reality at least as much as reality shapes our experience. If nothing else, elaborate garnishing will make people pay more for your food.
Then again, food obviously has a material value, and a big, necessary one at that. Namely, it energises our physical body. And sometimes a carrot really is just a carrot. Even still, the world isn’t fundamentally a material place, if you get down to it. And the immaterials are where even food, the everydayest of the everyday, is allowed to rise above. The orange hero of our story is, for the most part, just a lighthearted symbol for care and attention to detail; of creating abundance out of very little. Which, taken literally, is a divine act. Certainly with an understanding that love is the most important ingredient of any meal, all this would be perfectly unsurprising.
The qualitative difference of restaurant food and home cooked food seems to be an easy access point into feeling what nourishment actually does for us. Fundamentally we tend to find nourishment to be more important than straightforward nutrition. That is to say, we are naturally more drawn to it. When push comes to shove, when you’re weary and sick at home, you don’t want a restaurant meal delivered to your door. You want grandma’s chicken soup.
We’ll do well to remember that restaurant food mostly does not compete on nutrition (though for different reasons to those usually posited). The food, and dare I say the whole experience, feeds different aspects of ourselves, vanity not being the least among them. Not knocking on restaurants or eating out; it’s a great thing to do. Sometimes it really is nice to have someone else do the dishes. Nor am I saying restaurant food cannot nourish, but this is difficult to scale. HOWEVER, anyone with a well functioning belly brain and half-a-heart knows that the nourishment of a good, well-intentioned home cooked meal is not on the same planet.
(And this is one of the reasons why talk of “pill food” pisses me off. The idea that you could take out the “nutrients” from the food and expect to end up with a similar result just appears obviously preposterous. My hunch is that this approach could perhaps facilitate survival, but that’s about it. And that’s a kind of life I refuse to lead.
Personally, I’m interested in something beyond survival.
Perhaps there’s uses for food pills in extreme situations like wartime, but only as a temporary evil, and only if absolutely necessary. Really, this is another topic in and of itself, so more on it later.)
For years I’ve had a hypothesis rolling around in my mind, that we begin digesting our meals long before we ever settle in front of a bowl. Certainly everyone knows the saying “we eat with our eyes”, but it seems to me to be much more literal than usually taken. We also have a vast unconscious landscape in ourselves, and I find it tough to believe from an evolutionary standpoint, that this machinery wouldn’t gleefully kick into high gear at the first sign of available nutrition, in order to better prepare us to make use of it, come feeding time. As if what we’re about to consume signals us to induce a complicated whole-body “drooling” response, a la Pavlov.
Taste is by-and-large understood as the most malleable sense. Ever tried tasting anything with a stuffy nose? Of course you have, and what a dull experience that is! Certainly people in the business of selling food, fast and otherwise, know a lot about the practicalities of these sorts of things: the kinds of colours, shapes, sizes, sounds that make our appetites tick. It ticks our boxes that screen for nutrition, without necessarily providing it. Not even to speak of nourishment.
In some sense, we are talking about the physics and metaphysics of food here. And our collective understanding neglects the latter, even when we rely on it in hardship. Obsession over the former somehow seems to bind our mind to it, which makes us blind to the latter. Although, perhaps it is neglected for understandable reasons. Many people, even right now seem to struggle with their nutritional needs on a base level, in such a way that bringing up anything with the slightest whiff of metaphysics feels crass.
Developing a certain resourcefulness in home cooking is something I’ve always enjoyed. Making do with what’s at hand. It lines up with our cultural history as a food warming species. This is how almost all people in history have had to operate almost all the time. Far as I understand it, the broad strokes history of human eating has been hyper local, not because it was what anyone intended for, but because it was the only option, barring preservation methods. Trying to stretch out a near empty pantry can be a fun creative exercise.
Until it has to be done day-in, day-out. This gets us to another one of my theses:
It SHOULD NOT be necessary for a human being to obsess over their food in order to be able to live good life. This is one of the reasons societies ever formed, no? I enjoy focusing on it to a degree, but one of the reasons is that others wouldn’t have to. Yet, this is the way we are moving back to. Except this time it isn’t about infrastructure, but nourishment.
By and large food is becoming worse and less nutritious, and consequently getting the things we want and need out of it is becoming more difficult. Whether this has to do with degrading soil quality, species a-typical animal feed, antibiotics, or what, I couldn’t exactly tell. Husks of what these things should be. Which is not to say there isn’t good stuff still available. There is, but it takes a long(er) time, more effort, or is otherwise scarce, which means more expensive. In a way, this coerces us into obsessing over it, directly or indirectly.
Again, I’m not sure as to the mechanism of why it seems like obsession over nutritional value makes us blind to the value of nourishment. It does make me wonder, though, could we help ourselves by explicitly focusing on nourishment.
The best spoonful of porridge I’ve eaten was had after a full night of walking with 50kg of gear on my back. Hunger is the best sauce. I’ve also rarely been so grateful for a spoonful either. Funny how that lines up…
To re-iterate, at this point it seems obvious nourishment goes to the heart of the matter. But how could it be scaled? It is a huge cliché, but many of us have experienced it: of meals and dishes being greater than the sum of their parts. At home, at restaurants, in nature. Whatever causes this, approaches the common ground of all the best things in life. Perhaps even containing the key to our future in a world where the seeds of existential crisis appear to be planted into every crack in the pavement.