Day 27: Food

Over the years I have come to love the art of cooking. Human beings have very few true, physical needs: air, water, food and shelter come to mind. A little heat to warm the shelter, maybe, but that’s about it. There is not much room for creativity there. Air is plentiful and free and pretty close to the same everywhere. Even when we catch a new note, the cleanliness of a mountain breeze or the dampness of a Midwestern summer, we quickly become accustomed to the new wrinkle. Each breath subdues the magic a little more until it’s just one more thing to take for granted. Water is the same; we can dress it up, but as soon as it becomes more than water I start to lump it in with food. Beer straddles this line nicely.

Shelter offers a little more variety. Here we can try something different, if we have the means, dressing up our surroundings with color and shape. Each home has its own architecture, in most neighborhoods, or else an apartment complex at least has its own layout, different from that of one’s friends or families. Within each our design can really take hold. Every item placed changes the environment and art and light complete it. Even our homes, though, soon become common to their residents. Another’s home might still surprise us on each visit but our own quickly becomes taken for granted.

Food is another story. Every meal is made anew, every dish a chance to add in some wrinkle, some variation on an old theme. Food is like music that way. Some prefer to play the old standards and play them right. Others like to throw in a new note, or bend an old one, each time through. Either way every meal is an act of creation. It’s the closest most of us will come to daily art short of taking on a forty-day writing challenge.

My cooking tends towards new challenges. I don’t have a ready audience most nights so when I do I try to make the meal something special. Somehow “special” has morphed in my brain to mean “brand new” and the challenge is on. This is great. Each new dish is a battle to try and achieve a vision of what the meal should be. I am a rampant perfectionist in this area, but it’s not out of a need to be right. Rather, I simply want to get better, to learn the art at a deeper level, and to do my guests the honor of something wondrous. And it is wondrous, this act of giving another person energy and life. It’s stunning that we so casually pass off this duty to the drive-through workers of our land. There are times when such quick and convenient fare is fine but there is still something about making that contract, an agreement to let someone else’s cheap calories enter your own body, and that sits ill with me.

Maybe that’s just the Taco Bell.