Shelly B.:

It has been said that human beings are animals, like our relatives, the primates. As animals, three simple acts enable our survival: eating, fucking and a third act less fun than the latter. Newborn infants instinctively reach for the breast, the source of food and a salient actor in the perpetuation of the species. Like all animals, we must eat to survive.

We differentiate ourselves from other animals not in the possession or lack of a soul, nor in our affinity for laughter---dogs laugh too. Rather, humans are the sole species that cooks their food. Since cavemen discovered fire, the simple act of lighting a flame under a pot has brought people together to share meals.

That most peculiar of human institutions, religion, is predicated on the consumption of well-cooked food. The hungry days of Ramadan are filled with frantic preparation of the nightly feast. Jesus' last supper, a Passover seder, must have been some meal to have been worthy of the famous painting. Chinese New Year, a significant festival for at least a billion people, is marked by the preparation and eating of delectable foods like uncut noodles, turnip cakes and Yusheng. Indeed, cooking is an act of time and place.

Cooking traditions reflect local ingredients, methods established through years of trial and error, cultural preferences and shared history. Peppers, for instance, traveled from Turkey to Hungary to Thailand, where they became integral to these respective cuisines in very different ways. Italians are still fiercely regional, proud of the local wines, cheeses, pastas they still prepare as their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did. For Italians, regional cooking intimately exemplifies family, tradition, place.

Americans, with our ingrained Puritanism and our frenetic urban existence have forgotten how to cook well. Those who can afford it pay others to cook well for them. Those who can’t dump a can in a casserole and call it dinner. We products of the era of TV, ads and cheez whiz microwave a frozen monstrosity and call it food. We've forgotten how to cook as our ancestors did. Efficiency, freshness, tradition have yielded to waste, preservatives and convenience.

Like lost children, we watch a British fop with a faux Cockney accent evangelize his gee-whiz cookery as the cure for obesity. We worship a California food queen, mindlessly humming the mantra "Local. Sustainable." We watch TV cooks deconstruct dishes, reducing ad absurdum dishes exotic to the American palate. And here we are, with our chain supermarkets and convenience stores. Cooking well? How do we begin?

Cooking well means looking to the past. Searching out old cookbooks. Consulting the gatekeepers of culinary tradition, mothers and grandmothers. Traveling to places where people still cook. Learning to can, preserve, pickle and ferment.

Cooking well awakens us from our torpor, igniting our palates, spirits, minds. To eat a well-cooked meal is to savor at once the ethereal and the sensual. Perhaps humans are unique in our enthusiasm for sex and eating. When done right, they’re really the same thing.

Sophie T.:

I think the ideas of cooking well and eating well should start at home. Like you said, you have rediscover how your ancestors cooked, and what they cooked. What's "poor people food" and how to season food perfectly without having to taste it a gazillion times during the preparation.

There's nothing better than to let your little kid participate in making supper. They can beat the eggs for their omelet or pancakes, they can pour flour into mixtures and spread olive oil and garlic on a side of salmon, and they most certainly can dip their fingers in batter and taste it. It's amazing how a real food lover grows out of experiences like that.

Shelly B.:

Thank you, Mel and Sophie!