The Non-Cook Manifesto
Ninth Installment
Ninth Installment
WORKING DEFINITION OF THE TERM NON-COOK
A non-cook is a person who does not think of herself or himself as a cook.
EATING DOES NOT CUT THE MUSTARD
Food and cooking culture -- the whole food and cooking thing -- is everywhere: media, conversation, commerce, the table. It can scarcely be avoided, unless you find someplace to hide. I have chosen to hide behind being a non-cook. It’s a good spot, except for the isolation. That part isn’t so great. You know that left out feeling? I have that. Just like in middle school. I’m not sure if the left out came before the hiding or the other way around, but I’m afraid if I come out of hiding I’ll feel even more left out. Yet feeling brave, my first step is this question: How can a non-cook find a sense of belonging in food and cooking culture? Forget the actual cooking --- that’s a lost cause. Cooking does not give me a sense of belonging – it gives me a sense that something is burning. What about cook related activities? All those things on the outskirts of cook: watching America’s Top Chef on tv, buying Gweneth Paltrow’s book, researching gazpacho on the www, subscribing to Peter Barrett’s food blog, shopping at a cook shop for a better garlic press, going to the farmer’s market and eves dropping on other people’s conversations about foods I’ve never heard of. But no. No cook related activity feels appealing or natural. No cook related activity beckons, nothing welcomes; I cannot seem to attach. Am I the one doing the rejecting? Then what’s this lonely, missing-something feeling? Why does it seem like a stone soup, and I don’t have anything to put in there? There must be a way. I refuse to believe that in the culture of food and cooking that has spread coast to coast like a super adaptable plant species (Is cooking it and eating it the only way to conquer it?) there is no role at all for the likes of me. Feeling at a loss, I turn, naturally, to eating. Eating might seem like a solution to the non-cook participation in food and cooking culture problem, but actually, it’s a can of worms. Maybe it’s a can of worms that has aerated the soil in a local organic vegetable garden, where since worms eat dirt and you are what you eat, the worms have become local organic worms, which are of course edible and even a delicacy in the hands of the right passionate, innovative chef committed to using only fresh locally sourced ingredients. Maybe by mentioning this very special can of worms I could be totally in like Slim by dint of pioneering the use of edible worms in everyday language. I can’t cook, I can’t get into any of the many outlets for cooking enthusiasm, I can’t talk food or cooking (that’s probably the biggest one I really cannot do), but I can write down a cliché! Maybe a proverb, too. Take the whole thing with a grain of salt? This avenue for belonging seems both dubious and remote. However, if I could seek out the restaurant owned and operated by the worm chef mentioned above, carefully consider the menu, ask one or two intelligent, informed questions (discovering that actually the worms do not come in a can but are individually gathered from the soil and placed in recycled ball jars), settle on ordering the worms, and then clean my plate, my search for participation would be over. Adventurous, considered eating it is! Done and done! But I can’t really do that. I can’t go to a special restaurant, or learn and care and get curious about ingredients, or acquire acquired tastes. Can’t can’t can’t -- closely aligned with won’t won’t won’t, the result of which is don’t don’t don’t. Meanwhile: Regular old eating doesn’t seem to count anymore. After all, look what lengths others go to in service to healthy eating, delicious eating, interesting eating. Or at least, regular eating only counts if you truly appreciate it, if you truly appreciate the simple, plain pleasure of a humble in-season vegetable seasoned simply with simple seasoning and served with simple, quiet respect for the down to earth, yet unimpeachably virtuous and of course very, very simple pleasures in life. But we do not always appreciate, do we? Sometimes we do not even taste because we have preexisting, non-conforming standards of what we will allow to pass our lips. Sometimes our pallets are lame and the substance of the appreciation can never hope to equal the substance of the food. Sometimes we do not appreciate because we do not care enough about food, or it’s simplicity, and you can probably tell when we’re pretending. Further: Bad eating double doesn’t count. Don’t talk in public about your non-organic worms sucked with industrial suckers from genetically engineered dirt, treated in a vat with synthetic worm hormone for color, processed with anti retardant to retain freshness, then packed in plastic-lined cans produced in a carbon spewing factory and shipped around the country in fossil fuel guzzling trucks to enormous super market chains that push sugar laden products to toddlers riding backwards in grocery carts. If there’s effortful and informed eating, regular eating, and bad eating, there’s also weird, borderline eating. On the last I can say: demerit for the half a box of wheat thins I ate for lunch the other day. Demerit, also, for the bizarre closet eating: you’re not supposed to eat spoonfuls of raw flour from the bag late at night, even if it happens to be whole wheat. That is not what is meant by simple. What are the differences among an outcast, a loner, a rebel, and a person with lousy eating habits? Much as I can hope that eating might be a reasonable chance at belonging, it looks like there’s no hope for me there. My eating just does not cut the mustard. I sometimes feel bad about that. I sometimes feel like I’ve given up my seat at the banquet* and wound up under the table, hiding from the grownups. |
* If any one has ever tried to save me a place, it is my beloved husband. More about him from my point of view here (scroll down to THE PARALLEL UNIVERSE) and here, and from other people's point of view (on the topic of cooking) here and here.