Playing with Food & Fire
A Burning Passion Over Four Years
K. L. L’am-Li
THROUGHOUT THE PAST FOUR YEARS, from the start of the pandemic, through to the shift in schools, environment and nation, cooking has been one of the few constants within an otherwise hectic world. It started with a simple goal; feeding myself with no-one around, and over the course of 48 months, it’s become an integral part of my identity and a skill that extends far beyond the kitchen.
Playing with your food, playing with fire, and playing with the rules that were meant to be bent is an aspect of life I feel goes underappreciated in the modern context. However, recognition of the culinary world, particularly online, is growing. But with the restrictive nature of the picture-perfect plates, I wonder – has food been restricted to carrying only an aesthetic value for our validation?
No, it hasn’t. I implore you to switch out your fork for a knife and join those that give. I guarantee you – you won’t regret it.
Coming from a Cantonese-Chinese household, food always held an important social aspect in our lives. Whether it was awkward family gatherings at restaurants or feasts and hotpots prepared at home, the expectation was that it was always with people; family friends, relatives, friends of friends invited from halfway across the globe, it didn’t matter. People cooked together, ate together, and chatted together over cups of tea and wine well into the night whenever they could. Half of the business associates we knew were met via a connection of chopsticks and plates rather than the stiff handshakes now associated with networking. It’s not just that we’ve lost the social aspect of meals nowadays, we’ve neglected to pass these things to the next generation of lost and confused youth, and consequently, many people simply don’t know how to form the deep social bonds essential for success once removed from their current environment.
Preparing food is an innately social activity. Now more than ever, it’s an aspect that we need to focus on when we or the ones we love take the time to prepare our meals. Research from the National Library of Medicine, Oxford University and various other institutions have linked not only social benefits to cooking but also boosts to self-confidence, socialisation, and overall quality of life. Considering that developing deep social bonds within a group was once central to survival, there’s no mystery in why humans evolved to integrate such a function into their most basic of actions. It would only work against us if we had done so otherwise – and that’s quite literally what we’re doing as we develop into an increasingly digitised world.
To cook, and even more so to cook well, requires all manner of basic principles and standards; patience, observation, adaptation, and the list goes on. Anyone can follow a recipe to the dot and create an Instagram-worthy photo but it ignores the fundamental purpose of cooking; to feed not only ourselves but others. Our societies have progressed to the point that people can, if they so choose, isolate themselves from the world while still retaining access to all the basic and not-so-basic necessities of life. In Japan it’s called hikikomori; adolescents and young adults who reside almost solely within the confines of their rooms without leaving for months or years. While an extremity, it’s becoming increasingly common on smaller scales, even within our society.
Regardless of how far technology advances, the human condition cannot be supplemented artificially, even with the ground-breaking leaps that AI has made in technology. Human beings require the love and support of others to thrive, and as an activity that has evolved to coordinate with human nature, cooking is one of the strongest strings that ties the individual to the community. Cooking embodies love and cooperation, and even in the most basic aspect of providing a meal, it does so much more than what we see on the plate.
It doesn’t take moving mountains. It doesn’t take a lifetime of culinary experience under a French chef in Paris. All you need is a heart and a willingness to learn, and the world truly does become your oyster.
Bibliography;
Farmer, N., Touchton-Leonard, K. and Ross, A. (2018) Psychosocial benefits of cooking interventions: A systematic review, Health education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5862744/ (Accessed: 11 August 2023).
Social eating connects communities (2017) University of Oxford. Available at: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-16-social-eating-connects-communities (Accessed: 11 August 2023).