Cooking and Gardening: The Dynamic Duo

When I was in college, I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to study. I started out in biology, but after a few semesters lost interest. The actual classes on biology I loved, but the other classes I had to take like Chemistry and Physics, I had a hard time caring about. I also felt like my skills weren’t best utilized studying cells or a specific kind of animal. That’s when I discovered Anthropology and Environmental Science and realized that these were the things I had been interested in all along. Both fields of study take a holistic approach to the subject matter, and therefore, in many ways overlap with each other. In this way, my love of all things natural and all things human could intermingle with each other. I could discover new connections between the two that I hadn’t thought of before. I could search for the answer to the question “what makes us human?” One such connection is our connection to food. Food is the point where humans and nature interact directly, and this is why I decided to pursue a culinary degree as well. Our interactions with food include three things, cooking it and growing it/hunting it, and eating it. In this particular case I will focus on growing and cooking food, as I have touched on hunting in a previous post.

Humans started growing their own food on a large scale during the agricultural revolution since around 10,000 BCE and cooking it since even earlier. This was a huge move from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to stationary farmers and is what allowed villages and cities to start forming. We have now taken that mindset to the extreme. Instead of individual town farmers growing for their own people, we have massive corporations feeding entire nations. You can go to a grocery store in New York and get the same corn as you’d get in a grocery store in California. But there are still some of us who would prefer to grow our own food and cook using ingredients that we know exactly where they came from. For me, the idea to start an indoor garden in the closet in my apartment didn’t stem from a love of gardening so much as it was from wanting to connect to the ingredients I was cooking with.

I think that gardening and cooking are two of the most human things someone can do. It is what sets us apart as a species, conceptually, from other animals. What other animal can take some seeds, plant them in the ground and nurture them until they are ready to be consumed? And then on top of that, takes all those different plants and creates something totally new from them? This is the connection that I think is important to have. From when you first saw the plant as a seed, all the way until you stab at it on your plate. You KNOW this plant. You know exactly how its been taken care of, how long it’s been since it’s been harvested. And in my experience, you enjoy it more and are more proud of it than something you pick up at a grocery store. You want to share what you’ve raised and then cooked in the kitchen with friends and family so you invite them over and cook for them. This brings back community and togetherness in a time of individualism and isolation.

This isn’t a call for everyone to get out and start a garden, not everyone has the means or the want to do so. But if we can get more people doing this, I think it would be a start to a better future. This is how food cultures are formed, from people who understand their food and where it comes from and sharing it with others. I want to make people as excited about food as I am. I think food should be more than just nutrients needed to live. It should be a cultural expression, a creative expression. For me, gardening deepens the meaning behind food and helps create a story behind a dish. It makes food more than just food.