If you sit at my table, I hope you will have a wonderful meal. I hope the food I set in front of you to eat is delicious and memorable. And I hope the conversation that ensues will be engaging and meaningful.
But if, at the end of the night, you leave with a rich, sated feeling, not in your stomach but in a deep within place you can’t describe, I will have inched closer to having done my main job.
Some might refer to it as A Calling, a Purpose or Mission. These words fit, but they don’t resonate fully with me. Instead, I like to see it as the fruit of being fully alive and human.
Food and Drink, at the one end of the spectrum, is sustenance. We need them to survive. We can’t live long without them, and having these basics allow for survival of the species. If we stop there, life will carry on. The body will be sustained. It will stay alive, but will it be fully alive?
But if I go to the other end of the spectrum, Food and Drink can be utterly transcendent. It can unveil a sense of something that words can’t touch. It’s much like music in this way. Music is what Words want to be when they grow up, but they grieve because Words know that Music does not require its services. And there come certain times when the soul needs a mysterious, nearly metaphysical language to communicate with it
Sustenance ———————————————————– Transcendence
And this is where my real work wants to abide.
To cook night after night is an enjoyable profession. I love the act of applying the skill and technique of turning a raw ingredient like an egg into a finished product like a custard, a meringue or aioli. Taking the four basic ingredients of flour, water, yeast and salt and turning them into a heady, aromatic loaf of sourdough that makes you smile just by looking at it, even before you’ve ever taken a bite of it, this joy never gets old. This is how the craft of cooking is rewarding in and of itself.
But do I have the audacity to believe that my craft and what I put on my table might actually extend to an experience way beyond just a quieted appetite?. Can I be so bold and think it might lead to an encounter with The Divine? This may sound a bit dramatic, and it’s because it is.
I’ve turned down past invitations to be on the Food Network’s Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay. It was flattering to be asked, but it wasn’t hard to decline their summon. They were easy decisions because those shows have nothing to do with why I cook. We weren’t aligned and the draw of getting noticed was overshadowed by being convinced of why I set the Table. I set it for you, my guest, not for me to gain accolades. I once chatted with a chef who got caught up in the seductive celebrity of game show cooking and after a couple years of selling his soul to mindless competitive challenges with ridiculous ingredients that didn’t add up to anything other than a victory, he bowed out and went back to his kitchen and said, never again. He drifted from his true north, but eventually got it back on course and learned his lesson.
My guest is the primacy of my cooking, not my food. You will digest what I served quickly and need another meal soon after. But the friends you dine with are longer lasting than my perfectly grilled ribeye. But if that steak, served in an attentive atmosphere that triggers a memory of you and your dad enjoying an irreplaceable moment soon before he died, that’s what I want to anticipate.
We recently did an upgrade on our website, 55degrees.US. The main change you will see is the addition of three circles, Food, Words and Music. These represent the three mediums of art that I love to communicate with. I have played around with each of them over the years and have accumulated a number of works and ideas that sat in random places, unindexed and difficult to access. My Shade Tree noticed this disorganization and said it was time to get them in order. So we did. As your curiosity leads you through the three mediums, we hope you find something to spark your own creativity.
Of music, I don’t think it’s hard for people to recall a transcendent concert, a live performance where time stood still and when it was over, you didn’t want to leave. U2 at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena in November 2001 was mine. The twin towers in New York had fallen three months prior and the 18,000 fans in attendance were feeling the same thing. We all needed to grieve. And the consummate front man that Bono is, saw the opportunity and led a moment that was nothing less than a worship service. Even the front page of the Kansas City Star newspaper the next morning read, “God Was In The House.”
And of Words. Have you ever read something that took your breath away? Have you ever come across an author who assembled vocabulary that expressed a feeling you couldn’t articulate? And now having the words fit to the emotion, you could see and understand? Mine was in March 2020, leaving Dublin, Ireland on a westbound train towards Galway. I opened John O’Donohue’s book of Irish poetry titled, To Bless The Space Between Us. I couldn’t get past the first five poems because my eyes were full of tears. It was that book that led me to begin my typewriter posts.
So why would I not expect food to have the same, visceral impact?
Food, words and music will always be fundamental, human expressions, meant to communicate something deeper, fuller and unseen. In our day of AI driven content, the astute eye and ear will be able to tell the difference. But especially to the artist, the world needs your art. It needs to see what you see, not what an analytical software has synthesized from information scoured through a data center.
AI isn’t alive. You are.