Cooking was having a cultural moment even before the number of media platforms went haywire. There are still traditional cookbooks, selling like hotcakes to people who allegedly don’t even cook. Then there are the 23 or so cooking channels on your cable box or streaming service. And let’s not get started on the websites and the YouTube channels, the significant ink given over to cooking in our newspapers of record like the New York Times. There are films, from Jon Favreau’s aptly named “Chef” to “Julie and Julia,” based on the real life work of Julie Powell, who shockingly died just over a week ago.
Cooking even gets featured in current affairs, from the tragic suicide of the chef and adventurer Anthony Bourdain to the humanitarian work and political daring of Jose Andreas, the native Spaniard, naturalized American, whose work includes World Central Kitchen and a pugilistic relationship with our last president. Since 2010, World Central Kitchen has responded to countless natural disasters, set up kitchens during the pandemic, and is currently operating eight sites on the border between Poland and Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Ievgen Klopotenko is cooking away at his restaurant in Kyiv. As reported by Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian, he was first known for cultural openness, a sort of Ukrainian Jamie Oliver trying to make school lunches more nutritious and more appealing, including the introduction of foreign dishes like curry, shepherd’s pie, and mac and cheese. Today, he focused on native dishes, and fighting Putin’s attempt to erase Ukrainian culture the best way he knows how, from the kitchen.
For all of its problems, and there are plenty of them, one of the gifts of globalization has been culinary diversity. I have the French cookbook on the shelf, but it is joined by books full of curries, Moroccan dishes, street food from African and Asia, and of course, the American South. We’ve come a long way since Julia Child premiered her show “The French Chef” the year I was born.
Home cooking has largely evolved with technology, as storage and transportation allowed us access to foods we might have never encountered, much less attempted on our own. Restaurant cooking had one major revolution, when Auguste Escoffier brought his military experience to bear on the organization of the kitchen at César Ritz’s Savoy in London, creating the “brigade de cuisine” that is still used to this day, more than a century later. Escoffier was thoroughly corrupt and absolutely genius, so significant a figure in the culinary world that he becomes Auguste Gusteau in Pixar’s 2007 film “Ratatouille.”
Of course, food is a faith issue, and I’m not just talking about to sometimes quirky dietary restrictions that developed in ancient times or the notion that gods eat and therefore require food sacrifices, whether the one God of the monotheisms or the many gods of polytheistic and ancestor-worshipping religions. Though I do always get a kick out of the suggestion that the original grain offering to Yahweh was actually beer.
No, food is a faith issue because it is a communal issue, and because meals are at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition. For all that Hanukkah and Yom Kippur may mean in that tradition, it is the Passover with the meal that is central, the escape from Egypt that forms them as a people, the Mosaic Law connected with those events that defines their orthopraxis. And for all we might talk about Christmas and Easter, even having traditional family dinners on those days, neither has a meal directly connected with it in scripture. The closest is the breaking of bread that reveals Jesus at Emmaus, but that points back to the cntral rite of Christianity, the only rite Jesus gave us, which is communion. Every time you break read and share a cup, remember me, which was every time they gathered, for it wasn’t Jesus cookies or Wonder Bread, it was a meal.
But even apart from the cultural and religious context of cooking and eating, there is still the absolute wonder of this thing we do. Pandas, as cute as they are, just eat bamboo. Koala’s, equally adored, pretty much just eat eucalyptus leaves, which is such an inefficient diet that they sleep most of the time. Give koalas some chop suey, and who knows what sort of dominant species they might become!
But seriously, somewhere a very long time ago, some early hominid discovered cooking. It was no doubt happenstance, but it changed everything. Cooking made nutrients more available, leading to bigger brains and new forms of cooking, a feedback loop that leads all the way to Auguste Escoffier, Jose Andres, and that ultimate oxymoron, the English chef. Seriously, Jamie Oliver and Nigel Slater excepted, they deserve their reputation.
Just think about the improbability of our dietary habits. Who looked at a tree and thought, “gosh, I bet the inner bark would make great breakfast rolls?” And yet, we have cinnamon. And while it conjures a whole tragic-comic scenario, who figured out which parts of the pufferfish gave you that tingly sensation on your tongue and which parts killed grandma?
Cooking is a miraculous thing, and a joyous thing, an act of cultural expression and sometimes of resistance. No wonder nations fight over dishes, like the ridiculous battles over which nation created curry, a catch all term from colonialism that referred to all spicy sauces from South Asia, with or without curry leaves. Though Ievgen Klopotenko’s battle to claim a Ukrainian “borscht” definitely falls into the category of “why?”
We might be slightly more appreciative of food these days, given some shortages related to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, human-caused climate change, and America’s corporate kleptocracy, not to mention Covid’s odd capacity to rob us of taste and smell, but mostly we are doing okay. And this isn’t a sermon about “feed the hungry,” though yeah, there’s that. Nor is this a sermon about food and climate change, though yeah, there’s that.
This is a sermon about beauty and miracle and that taste when a really good port follows a really good chocolate mousse, because some human figured out chocolate, and chocolate is truly odd and improbable, and some human drank the juice of grapes that had gone off, and there’s dessert. Who thinks of these things?
Now look, there are folks who are hungry. And there are folks who have screwed up relationships with food. But for most of us? Well, we make decisions, not always great ones. But food, glorious food, can be a spiritual practice, in the preparation, in the sharing, and in the enjoyment, a reminder of the incredible traditions we have received, from our own people and from people so very different from us and so very amazing, fusion cuisine for a fusion people.
Savor. Share. God is good. Please pass the gravy. Amen.