Do we cook (eat) to live, or do we live to cook/eat?
This might seem like a rather nonsensical question. Obviously we eat to survive, we do not survive and live just to cook. But ask any foodie, anyone addicted to the act of cooking and the activity of eating delicious food, and you will hear another set of arguments.
I know people who eat to live, eating for them is merely a means toward something else; think survival, to gain muscle mass in the gym, to carry on their day. But for me, and I am sure any foodie out there, eating and cooking is the end itself. This is rather philosophical and full of jargon. What it simply means is that we enjoy cooking and eating for no other reason than enjoying the process of cooking and the activity of eating. Stated still otherwise and even simpler, we enjoy eating and cooking period.
We do not eat to survive, even though this is important and necessary for obvious reasons. But eating is more than just that. It has become a way of life.
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There is a type of torture and insanity going on here. Eating for the sake of survival or the sake of just filling one's stomach so that it does not rumble, is to the foodie and the person enjoying the act of cooking a sin. Or, it becomes a missed opportunity of the finite amount of meals one can eat and prepare. When cooking becomes a way of life, a way of living, it becomes a sin to not cook, to not engage in the practice of living this process. But it also becomes a type of torture, a type of insanity in the sense that one's whole life begins to revolve around it. What will I cook tonight? What elaborate dish will my mind crave and then my body? Those who enjoy cooking will rarely settle for a simple dish. It always has to be somewhat extra, somewhat elaborate. For the outsider who does not enjoy cooking, the process is basically a masochistic process.
This masochism, this torture of the self, is rarely worth it for those outside the privileged circle of friends who enjoy this form of self-torture.
Why make bread when you can buy it? The usual question ensues.
Because... and rarely one would give an answer that the other would agree with or understand. Only to the fellow baker would the torture of the baking process make sense, only to the fellow baker would the absolute insanity of a three day process appeal.
No reason would suffice to the person who does not endure the torture of making their own bread.
Yet we carry on. We endure the ridicule of the other who merely eats to sustain their body, who gives their body the bare minimum that they require to stay alive. Yet we carry on with process of grinding our soul and our mind, finding new recipes and trying new techniques. We fail, yet we enjoy that failure as if we were kings and queens of a different era. We fail, yet we enjoy the spoils of our making even though it did not live up to the standard of the image we saw online. Because in every failure we are one step closer to making it a reality. The loaf of bread that did not rise is the very stepping stone towards the next loaf that might resemble one bought at a French bakery. But without the failure, the perfect loaf cannot exist. There is method in the madness, in the insanity of failure.
The insanity of cooking a meal that only you will ever enjoy is a short lived fleeting experience that only ignites a passion for the next event, the next meal. This is basically an addiction, a process that will start anew each and every day until you cannot cook your own meal.
The baker will never settle for a loaf of bread that he/she did not bake themselves. The insanity of cooking is the most beautiful form of madness and torture and I gladly participate in it.
For now, happy cooking, and keep well!
All of the musings and writings are my own, albeit inspired by the madness of cooking. The lovely photographs were taken with my Nikon D300 but by my fiancé, 