In Defense of the Toilsome Drudgery in Thinking with Words and Pictures

There’s a moment that I think everyone encounters in their relationship with food. It looks like this:

• A new and exciting food-thing appears in your life
• You experience a desire to satisfy your curiosity or fulfill an assumption of tastiness
• The delight of your brain thanking you for this new source of happy neuro-chemicals
• Lowered impulse control thanks to said chemicals and 2nd+ helpings
• Eventual physical and emotional pain leading to regret and a reframe
• Failed aversions and ongoing shame (and shame about shame)
• Normalization of moderation in consumption (or not)
• Desire to spend time preparing real food
• Experience varying degrees of success
• Attain competency and an equilibrium
• Repeat

I think about this cycle much more lately now that we’re teaching our kids how to cook and prepare foodstuffs. We’ve recently gotten the fermentation bug (sorry). It’s proven to be a useful lesson in delayed gratification, patience, and control. We’re waiting for a beautiful red cabbage to complete its transformation into sauerkraut, and for our first baby sourdough starter to learn how to walk.

These are slow and steady ways. They cannot be rushed. There is no substitute for the required time. You can fake it, but everyone can taste the difference if they’ve ever had the real thing. I am gratified every time a child says “We should make our own ______ every time! It’s so much better.” This was after I made fried chicken sandwiches for the first time. Pats back.

There were many mistakes made on the way to that fried chicken win. I had to learn a number of fundamentals in order to form an opinion of what I wanted to produce. When you’re surrounded by pre-processed food, it’s a challenge to form knowledge that leads to perspective tied to anything beyond food wrapped in logos. Mind you, I’m no purist. I don’t advocate to first invent the universe for your pie. But there’s no denying the pull and desire to have knowledge that is grounded in place, people, and time. Food is a universal window into how we manage it.

This is how I think about sense-making in my work, and how we decide what matters, and who or what must bear the weight of that decision. I was trained to think with words and pictures, in systems, flow, and emergence. I had to map out orders of impact and influence. I studied stress management in order to better manage the fear of illuminating uncertainty present in every observed and hidden interaction. They don’t tell you the cost of learning Critical Theory v. Consensus Theory until you can’t un-see it all and try to hold the tension before understanding the nature of power and the role of hierarchy.

I’m at the point with the token generators, that I’m tired of the failed aversions and I’m drawing closer to normalizing moderation and a return to preparing real food.

Anthony Bourdain taught me about “Mise en place”; I even more firmly believe that you must develop your perspective with your own words and pictures before reaching for the kitchen power tool to produce something for consumption. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re either going to hurt yourself or waste everyone’s time and trust because you couldn’t be bothered to do the work of developing your sense of (again) people, place, and time.

Cooking in restaurants and my own kitchen, being a dishwasher and bus boy, I witnessed waste and taste. I saw not just what people were eating, but as they helped their grandma up and out the door (maybe for the last time), why they were eating.

So yeah, I’m no purist. Use the giant stand mixer to whip up your feature if that’s what is called for. But you had better bring a perspective that tells me you understand the tradeoffs. I want to know that you can make that soufflé by hand with a whisk as well.

There is a lot of slack in the system right now thanks to speed of generation-of-things. It amplifies what discipline already exists (or worse, whatever you're already undisciplined at). After indulging myself for a while, I’m returning to the posture to have a place for everything important, and everything in its place.