Food, As An Experience

About four months ago, I visited my home state of Illinois, a state that I hadn't seen in about a year's worth of time. I was there to visit both sides of my separated family, and tried to plan things out so that I'd see each half for half of the time that I was visiting. It was kind of strange how I planned it, in retrospect. I stayed with my mother and sister for the first couple days in a suburb called Batavia, outside of Chicago. After that, I rode down to Springfield with my sister in her new, red car, and stayed with my father for a few days before I went back up to Chicago to see my mother again.

Now, I'm not one to brag (genuinely, at least), but my mother's father, my grandfather, is an exceptional cook. He and his wife travel the world and eat well, then share their experiences with the family through their cooking. Since I and my sister are out of my mother's house and she's had time to be free from motherly obligation, she's taken the time to work on her own culinary adventures. When I visited last June, I noticed that she'd started subscribing to a magazine called "Bon Appetit".

I know how marketing works, and I'm very aware of how photography will make or break an advertisement. The pictures in this magazine got me drooling before I even made it halfway in. Roasted meats, grated cheeses, a spattering of water upon fresh tomatoes. Everything looked amazing, and after subsisting on my own very plain, simple diet, I started to second guess myself. So I humored this magazine, and I read the recipes.

"You mean I don't have to have a grill?" I remember thinking. The ingredients were simple, and for a lot of their recipes, not too costly. Part of me wonders if, as children, most of us never wonder how our food is made because our lives are so simple. There's an excerpt from the movie "Fearless", that I believe is fairly relevant to this idea. In the movie, a Japanese martial artist (Tanaka) is discussing his passion of tea with a Chinese martial artist (Huo), and it goes something like this:

Tanaka: Mr. Huo, according to what you say, you don’t really know the nature of tea.
Huo : It’s not that I don’t know. I don’t really want to know. Because I don’t care about evaluating teas. Tea is tea.
Tanaka : But each tea has its own character and properties.
Huo : What is the purpose of grading? These many teas are grown in nature, all of them. Is there a discernible difference?
Tanaka : Yes, once you learn this, you can tell the difference between the teas.
Huo : What you say may be right, but the way I see it is, the tea doesn’t judge itself. It’s people that judge its grading. Different people choose different things. As for me, as far as I’m concerned, I just don’t want to make any choice.
Tanaka : Oh, is that so?
Huo : Drinking tea is a mood, really. If you are in a good mood, the grade of tea doesn’t matter.
Tanaka : I've never looked at it like that. I understand that there are many wushu fighting styles. Are you saying that no style is greater than another?
Huo : That’s what I’m saying.
Tanaka : If that is true, I want to ask you: If wushu does not differ in any way, why do we fight each other?
Huo : I believe for all the styles of wushu, there is no single one that is superior. All of those who practice different styles of wushu, they would naturally have a different level of skill. Through competition, we can discover ourselves.

Profound? Debatable. True? From my experience, I couldn't agree more, and I want to make the argument that this kind of philosophy could be true about food in general. I know that if I'm in a sour mood, I tend to eat my food quickly while my mind bothers with distraction. If I'm in a good mood, retrospectively, I might take the time to savor and enjoy what I've chosen to eat. However, Tanaka does have a point that food has taste, and with taste comes variety.

After I returned to my townhouse back here in Houston, I willed that I would stop eating the same meal every night (which consisted of baked chicken, mixed greens out of a can, and beer), and open my mind and try to learn how to cook with diversity. I started this journey by purchasing my first Bon Appetit magazine, and grazed over the recipes before I found a very simple one, that consisted of white fish with tomatoes and basil. I'm very happy to say that it was my first successful venture into cooking, and has become one of my "go to" meals since then.

But I didn't stop there. I've since subscribed to the magazine, and have cooked at least two things out of every issue I've received. My roommates and I have taken to a habit of visiting a farmer's market every Saturday morning, where the same cheerful woman sits under a canvas canopy, eager to sell her various produce and make light conversation with us. Keep in mind, this isn't the block-long farmer's market in San Fransisco, teeming with people as they scramble for the choicest of what they can reach. It's a very small setup, with one or two people actually getting payed for their work, which includes the former woman.

I want to say that I'd never thought I'd live this kind of lifestyle in Houston, Texas, but I love it. Getting up early, sipping coffee while we drive about twenty minutes to the "market", sharing a bit of dialogue with the familiar woman before leaving. Then, after that, taking what we buy and making it into a meal that will feed three people for two days. It's inspiring to me, and after our last meal, I'm happy to say that I'm enjoying this cooking thing, and I'm mostly making this post today to encourage other people to get into it. For the sake of inspiration, I've got a couple pictures below of what I and my roommates have cooked in the past few weeks, however, I don't want to seem like an egotistical yuppy, so I'll spare you the details. If you're curious, though, feel free to ask me via keystrokegraffiti@gmail.com! Bon appetit!