Essential Lessons from the Kitchen
Everything I know about living a good life can be learned from cooking.
When cooking, I uncover a beautiful mystery, revealing kernels of magic hidden within my body and the living world around me. With a snap, a twist, and a prance I present the breath of immortality in a bowl of broth.
Of course, sometimes I serve with a stumble and tumble into the dustbin. Burnt it again.
Cooking, like anything in life, can be as plain as dice or as profound as sushi rice. But anyway, enough beating around the bush, what’s it really worth? Below are the important life lessons I have learned from cooking.
Lesson One: Listen
Food doesn’t taste how you want it to taste, it tastes how it tastes. Success in cooking requires listening to your ingredients, smelling them, touching them, tasting them, trusting them. The ingredients are our most fundamental guide to good food. When I try a new ingredient or a new recipe, I taste constantly. Taste your spices, taste your doughs, taste things you know won’t taste good. Keep tasting as you cook. Watch how colors, textures, and smells change during the cooking process.
Taste your spices, taste your doughs, taste things you know won’t taste good. Keep tasting as you cook.
Lesson Two: Experiment
Cooking is in many ways similar to practicing any other skill — imitation might bring you to proficiency, but experimentation is the key to mastery. If you want to truly learn the art of cooking, eventually you need to ditch your training wheels and start cooking without recipes. Some people are more comfortable with this than others, and that’s okay. But as long as you are following a recipe line-by-line you won’t fully understand the process.
Experimenting in the kitchen forces you to ask fundamental questions: why should I put the onions in the pan first? Why should I add vinegar near the end? Questioning what you’re doing and exploring new options will open new doors of possibility in the kitchen and in life.
Questioning what you’re doing and exploring new options will open new doors of possibility in the kitchen and in life.
Lesson Three: Forgive
If you experiment in the kitchen, you will make food that no one likes.
Like that one time I made a casserole with banana sauce for my entire house. Luckily, we always had two cooks for house dinners in order to mitigate the risks, and everyone was well-fed (and some people even liked the casserole).
Anyway, my point is, the inevitable failures of cooking present you two options: self-loathing or self-forgiveness. If you cook often enough, the path of forgiveness ends up looking a lot more pleasant. Cooking allows you to learn to forgive yourself when the stakes are usually low. This practice can be transferred to other arenas of life when your mistakes have a bigger impact.
Cooking allows you to learn to forgive yourself when the stakes are usually low. This practice can be transferred to other arenas of life when your mistakes have a bigger impact.
Lesson Four: Interdependence
Cooking is a celebration of our union with the Earth. It brings the Earth inside of us. This is especially true when we learn to grow and harvest our own food. By growing our own food, we close the loop of a basic life-support system and create an ecosystem of which we are an integral component.
By growing our own food, we close the loop of a basic life-support system and create an ecosystem of which we are an integral component.
Cooking is also an entry to learning about other cultures and the interdependence of all humankind. The signature dishes of a culture are a part of them, revealing key events in their history and essential features of their way of life. When we cook and eat these dishes, a link is made to our ancestors who ate the same foods and shared our same fundamental humanity.
I hope this article has inspired you to think about cooking in a new way next time you’re in the kitchen. The kitchen can be your playground and your laboratory — it is a place where you can be yourself, experiment, create, and learn.