Sex or Money?

Desire, Actualization, and Intellectual Appreciation as Culinary Ingredients

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In college, my favorite drama professor had a longstanding argument about scene interpretation: “It’s always about sex or money.” Character motivation was always oriented along these two primal routes—giving it or taking it, getting it or keeping. All human equations (and a lot of the animal ones, as we found out when interpreting Ionesco) came down to desire—no action was worth putting on stage unless it was fundamentally about want. And stage-worthy wants couldn’t be intangible, either, like being a good person or being lovable. To become real drives, they had to be materially, physically important, a hunger so powerful so that it would incite you to action.

Is that the foundation of how we encounter food in the public sphere? How often are we being provoked—as readers, as consumers, as cooks, and as eaters—to the point of hunger for either sex (love) or money (status) that we will actually cook the thing that is meant to deliver us. For our first class discussion in Writing Cookbooks, I assigned students an article by Adam Gopnik about the push-and-pull between the reader and the cookbook, and the constant production of desire. Gopnik sees the cookbook’s promise as one that offers, above all else, actualization: “You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.” The difference between wanting most things in the real world and wanting in the food world is that you might, eventually, get the sensorial proximity you’ve been craving. Your happy ending is your Happy Meal™.

Yet outside the realm of our cookbooks, we still live in a highly puritanical society, one that has elevated the act of self-discipline and self-deprivation to an art form. Take, for example, the proliferation of “morning routines” on social media, in which people demonstrate their wake-up, exercise, breakfast, and beauty practices as carefully curated regimes as a way to set themselves up for ideal days—people doing material things in order to eventually become their future, better selves. Such obsessions aren’t novel to the 21^st century—the concept of wellness was, even with its roots in Protestant self-flagellation, a thoroughly commodified marketplace in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Yet our mechanism for sharing them is new—we show ourselves enacting these practices as a way of performing our higher aims for excellence, and in turn seeking direct remuneration for our personal practices rather than letting the act be the path to the reward itself. We cook “for the ‘Gram” in part because it offers proof that we did the thing, but also because it allows our private act of pursuing pleasure to become something for public consumption. It constitutes demonstrable evidence that we didn’t just want something, we went out and go it.

The cookbook is a powerful form of literature, one that can actively engage the reader in a contract to follow through on an imaginative, if not a materialized, journey into the realm of taste and pleasure. The cookbook facilitates desire by demanding that we are not passive readers; as Gopnik notes “we actively read the lines and internally act out the jobs.” I often knew in college that I wanted to direct a play once I started moving the characters around in my head, seeing how they would fill up the stage. The cookbook has that same power—we read a line about stewing tomatoes and suddenly their fragrance fills the room. The body, not the brain, keeps pace with the invitations being sent our way.

But assuming that such actions are rooted in mere desire, rather than desire that partners with intellect and knowledge, undermines the central skill—and yes, self-discipline—that good cooking truly entails. If we enter the kitchen with only our mouths and noses to guide us, we will miss all the moments that the act of cooking can challenge us to use our entire ourselves—not just those that sit waiting to be fed, but those that have been fed well and poorly many, many times before. In her work on the philosophy of taste, the scholar Carolyn Korsmeyer urges us to see our encounters with food as intellectually and sensorially provocative, upending traditional hierarchies of aesthetic appreciation and interpretation to demand more of us. Traditional understandings of philosophy have placed the senses of sight and sound above all others, because of their role in developing acquisitive knowledge. We have disdained the notion of knowledge produced through cooking because it engages the more “bodily” pleasures of touch, smell, and taste, senses, as Korsmeyer puts it, “they supposedly direct our attention inward to the state of our own bodies. These senses are considered cognitively dull, and what is more, pursuit of their pleasure leads to self-indulgence, laziness, gluttony, and overall moral degeneration.” (217-218)

Yet what do we do when the physical drive of appetite provokes us into a kind of actualization of the literature we read? Traditional scholarship may intentionally put the cerebral before the corporeal, but will they make us leap out of bed in the same way a good cookbook will? Is there a value in embracing a form of literature where the components that are “good to taste” can actually supersede and outpace the “good to think about”? More often than not, cookbooks don’t want to live on coffee tables, to exist in an artificial gap between the bookshelf and the kitchen countertop; they ask the reader to close that gap, transform their reading into material form. Even when my recipe fails, when the breaded cutlet fails to crisp or the biscuits fail to puff up, I cannot step back and say that it was truly a waste of time. Even when the food is terrible, I have always learned...something.

Recommendation: Finally doing some catch-up on my must-see films list, and got around to watching Tár, albeit with very mixed feelings. Beyond the chillingly specific and gloriously brutalist architecture and costuming, it strikes me as a film that is fundamentally about what we are willing to look for (or through) in the defense of art (or artistic brilliance). I never knew at any moment how to feel about Lydia Tár’s intellectual and artistic talent, because it always felt like a double-edged sword, equally mighty and dreadful, gorgeous and ugly. I’m not sure I’ll be rooting for it at the Oscars (for that my heart belongs to Everything Everywhere All At Once), but I’ll be thinking about it for a long, long time.

The Perfect Bite: As a parent I feel like I’m always falling short of giving my kid food that is both irrefutably good for her and genuinely appetizing to her palate. But I had a rare moment of grace earlier today when my kid gobbled down a full package of roasted seaweed sheets. There’s something so satisfying about eating something that feels feather-light on your tongue but with a distinctively rich, salty flavor that makes everything it touches taste better. She giggled nonstop while stuffing each sheet into her mouth, so my guess is that anything I can sell her as akin to lickable wallpaper may be more popular than I’d think.

Cooked & Consumed: I scored a fresh rabbit while shopping this week, so tonight we’ll do it up French-style via this recipe from David Tanis. On the side, roasted rutabaga (my new favorite low-carb side) and green beans, with seasonally-appropriate Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints and Caramel deLites) straight from the freezer for dessert. Not too shabby.