The Reservations of Free-ranging
On existential queries and their ties to the every day.
Dear Tamar:
Why do people cook?
Dear Free-ranging,
You sent me this question a year ago. I’ve returned to it many times, unsure how to proceed. On the day my last column came out, wildfires consumed Los Angeles, over 100,000 people had evacuated and five had died—numbers which have grown. I was both too far away from and too close to what was happening. Everything felt at once trivial and grave.
I could bring myself to attend to your question, though, because it’s an existential one: Why do we do what we do? More specifically, you ask: Why do we meet this existential need the way we do?
I’ve been writing a book for which I’ve documented a daily moment of joy encountered in or near the kitchen. I’m editing the manuscript now—it’ll be out before the year is up—and I’m humbled by seeing how reliably the joy arrived, often in the middle of a run-of-the-mill culinary task, like cracking eggs or boiling potatoes. The book isn’t organized around the question: Why do we cook? But many of my entries end up providing tacit answers to the question. So I’ve gone through the book, and made a list of why I cooked, over the course of a year.
To mend things
To feed children
For a reason to stand up when gravity proved almost too strong
To be of service, to be useful, to provide
For the cheapest way to gather people and get them to stay
Because someone is sick
Because it snowed for the first time
To make friends
For a physical manifestation of transmogrification/tangible evidence of my ability to transform material
To make something taste like I like it to
To make children smile and feel as though the world is abundant
For the smells
For somewhere to put the butter
It’s basically the only way to spend time with cabbage.
Because you can’t buy cinnamon toast.
To have something to do with the noodles
Because it fosters a useful mess.
Because: wine
For memories—to inhabit old memories; also to make memories to keep
The sounds
It is the only way to get close to: russet apples, Pecorino, salt-packed anchovies, chicories, ricotta, Thai birdseye chilies, aji limon, a range of olive oils, and at least a thousand other bits of creation
For a deep understanding that potato chips are not junk food
To get close to skate, grapefruit, artichokes, oyster mushrooms, and at least another thousand chunks of the cosmos
To write menus
To appreciate a donut
To join the ancient and eternal community of cooks, who have no criteria for membership other than cooking
Bacon
For something to care about
To look at ingredients, to look at food, to look at cutting boards, knives, little dishes, peppercorns, linen napkins, tapered candles, cut crystal glasses, salt cellars
To repeat what one’s parent did, or what one’s cousin did, or what all the people do in the country where one’s parents and grandparents were born
To teach a child
For clams, whenever
Out of love for things
Out of love for people
Eggs—buying them, contemplating them, cracking them, cooking them, serving them, eating them, and for their shells
For a chance to use Sharpies
To extinguish sadness
To mess up in a low-stakes scenario, even when it feels like a high-stakes scenario, even when other people (like children) are convinced and try to convince you it’s a high-stakes scenario
To make something of what’s left
To witness dramatic physical changes
To experience quotidian salvation
To imagine, to create, to compose
For the sweetness it brings
To avoid packaging
To love something, to organize your love around something, to find a shape for your love
For a chance to solve problems
To use the green garlic
To appreciate the poetry of pork
To understand bay leaves
To use one’s senses
For perspective
For soft focus
To understand star anise
For the joy of making, the pleasure of making, the satisfaction of making
To make Caesar salad
So that when things are bad, you can make some things or some part of things good
To save things, to be like creation, recycling matter
To take delight in a necessity
So you can make do
So you can make your child biscuits early in the morning
To taste good things
To watch people make happy noises and smile and become their softer selves
Because when you cook, you don’t give anything away. You gain, and the eaters gain. Everyone thinks they’ve gotten the better end of the deal; everyone is right.
Because it’s an act of faith
Because usually, while doing it, there is joy. Joy springs out of unexpected moments, like slicing garlic, watching drops of water run over leaves, smelling rice cook.
Because we are human, and to put our mark on our worlds is a human impulse.
Dear cook, I don’t know if any of that answers your question. It’s helpful for me to see, it’s a helpful reminder; it’s a helpful reminder that even when it seems like there’s nothing useful to do, nothing to do to help, nothing to do that is normal or useful or rational, cooking is likely to be some of that, to someone, at very least to the cook.
I posed this question at a time when I had misplaced my why and your Substack seemed as a place as any to look for it. Your response has reached me on my birthday and today I am cooking a a multi-course meal for 8 friends. So while I may not be currently searching, your answer brings such a smile to my face.
And the humour in me hitting ‘send’ before typing out my full moniker is not lost on me.
Signed - the Free-Ranging Foodie
Beautiful.