Murder in the Kitchen

A Living Body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: The shape alone is stable, for the substance itself is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particular and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar and pâté de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement--and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry and music. And philosophy.

A philosopher, which is what I am supposed to be, is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take for granted, a person who cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest facts of everyday life are unbelievably odd. As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am even more amazed that I am a maze--a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy. But what really gets me is that almost all the substance of this maze, aside from water, was once other living bodies--the bodies of animals and plants--and that I had to obtain it by murder. We are other creatures rearranged, for biological existence continues only through the mutual slaughter and ingestion of its various species. I exist solely through membership in this perfectly weird arrangement of beings that flourish by chewing each other up.

Obviously, being chewed up is painful, and I myself do not want to be chewed up. Thus, the whole scheme bothers my conscience. If the morticians don't get me first, will my being eaten up by germs and worms be fair compensation for the countless cows, sheep, birds and fish that I have consumed during my lifetime? I wonder: Is this entire biological arrangement of mutual mayhem an insane and diabolical contraption that moves faster and faster to a dead end? I have seen plants infested with green fly, one day swarming with plump and succulent little bodies; the next, gray dust on dry stalks. Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death and in which victory equals defeat.

Man can easily go the way of the green fly, because man, as he becomes expert in technology, is seen to be more predatory than locusts or piranha fish. He is devouring, destroying and fouling the whole surface of the planet--minerals, forests, birds, fish, insects, fresh water--all are being converted into suburbs and sewage, rust and smog. Meanwhile, the total conquest of his natural enemies, from tigers to bacteria, allows his own race to swarm itself out of living space, and, through fear of his own rapacious kind, he wastes a huge proportion of his wealth in the manufacture of weapons, ever more deadly and ever more obsolete as technical skill increases. Many prehistoric animals became extinct because of overdeveloped weaponry--the sabertoothed tiger through the unmanageability of its immense shearing teeth and the titanothere through the unsupportable weight of its colossal nose horns.

One can, perhaps, accept the idea that as the individual dies, so must the species. Thereafter, the energy of the universe will appear in new (continued on page 268) Murder in the Kitchen (continued from page 225) patterns and guises and dance to different rhythms. The show will always go on; but must the going on be so intense an agony? Must the price of life always be soft, sensitive flesh and nerve squirming under the crunch of sharp teeth? If so, then, as Camus said, the only serious philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide.

Again, therefore, the philosopher wonders: Short of suicide, is there any way out of this vicious circle of mutual killing, which, in any case, seems to be suicide in the long run? Is there any way of avoiding, mitigating or generally cooling this system of murder and agony that is required for the existence of even the most saintly human being?

Vegetarianism, for example, is no solution. Years ago, the Indian botanist Sir Jagadis Bose measured the pain reactions of plants to cutting and pulling. To say that plants don't really know that they are in pain is only to say that they can't put it into words. When I pointed this out to a strictly vegetarian Buddhist, Reginald H. Blyth, who wrote Zen in English Literature, he said, "Yes, I know that. But when we kill vegetables, they don't scream so loud." In other words, he was just being easy on his own feelings. Buddhist and Hindu monks have carried the attitude of ahimsa, or harmlessness, to the extreme of keeping their eyes on the ground when walking--not to avoid the temptations of lovely women but to avoid trampling on beetles, snails or worms that might lie in the path. Yet this is at root an evasion--a ritual gesture of reverence for life that in no way alters the fact that we live by killing.

Searching my own conscience as to how I should respond to this predicament, I find three answers.

The first is to admit that deciding to live is deciding to kill and make no bones about it. For if I have really made up my mind to kill, I can do it expertly. Consider the agony of being halfway decapitated by a reluctant executioner. Death must be as swift as possible and the hand that holds the rifle or wields the knife must be sure. Incidentally, you wouldn't want your surgeon to be so sorry and concerned for you that his hand trembles when he opens your abdomen.

The second is that every form of life killed for food must be husbanded and cherished, on the principle of "I love you so much I could eat you," from which it should follow that "I eat you so much that I love you." This principle has been most seriously neglected by hunters in the past and by industrial farmers and fishermen today. To cite only two examples, modern techniques of whaling are in danger of abolishing whales, and industrial poultry farming is flooding the market with nonchickens and pseudo eggs. The wretched birds are raised in wire cell blocks, fed on chemicals, never allowed to scratch around in the sun, and taste just like that. Whatever is unlovable on the plate was unloved in the kitchen and on the farm.

The third has been expressed by Lin Yutang as follows: "If a chicken has been killed and it is not cooked properly, that chicken was died in vain." The very least I can do for a creature that has died for me is to honor it, not with an empty ritual but by cooking it to perfection and relishing it to the full. Any living thing that becomes me should enjoy itself as me.

The proper love of animals and plants, and of other materials upon which our life depends, is nurtured in the kitchen. Yet one look at the average American or British kitchen shows that it is not a place of love. Stuck off in a constricted corner of the house, it looks like a bathroom or surgery--white, cold and dowdy, though sometimes glossy and militantly clean. Such kitchens are, like toilets, mere conveniences, where food is dutifully rendered chewable and assimilable because it is good for you. And everything that comes from such kitchens tastes as if it were good for you--scrubbed with soap, wiped off with rubbing alcohol and thoroughly disinfected in boiling water. This is a rule of almost mathematical exactitude: Colorless kitchen equals tasteless food.

There is another kind of kitchen, featured in many of the newer suburbs, that is disguised to look like something it isn't, as if the kitchenness of kitchens were a matter for shame. These are the duked-up, coordinated, decorated kitchens that feature plastic countertops that are supposed to resemble wood and deceive no one, refrigerators painted to look like Early American storage chests, "decorative" copper pots hung out for display and never used for cooking, synthetic floor coverings that are supposed to resemble flagstones, and a host of other pitiful deceptions as transparently phony as the so-called edibles that are served forth from them. These are the rooms presided over by the kind of wife who is the instant customer for all those instant foods that presumably emancipate her from the degrading chore of cooking. These kitchens, like the women who inhabit them so reluctantly and like the meals they sling together, are tragic evidences of almost total miseducation.

Both these sorts of abominable kitchens are not the result of poverty. They reflect the fact that the richest and most powerful civilization on earth is so preoccupied with saving time and making money that it has neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure. The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material--a person devoted to the enjoyment of the physical and immediate present. By this definition, most Americans are abstractionists. They hate material and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and clouds of poisonous gas. As a people, our ideal is to have a future; and as long as this is so, we shall never have a present. But only those who have a present, and who can relate to it materially and immediately, have any use for making plans for the future; for when their plans mature, they will enjoy the results. Others, with their eyes fixed on the tomorrow that never comes, will bolt down all times present--forever--along with a vitamin-enriched Styrofoam called bread.

Much may be learned about a civilization from its staple food, which, in our case, is supposed to be bread. Real bread is a solid and crusty substance with an aroma evoking visions of farm kitchens, flour mills, sacks of wheat and rolling, waving fields of grain, god and gentle in the lazy heat of a late-summer afternoon. Few Americans have such associations and our bread does not suggest them, being a virtually weightless compound of squishy and porous pith injected with preservatives and allegedly nutritive chemicas. It is not so much white as ideally and perfectly colorless, and approximates--as nearly as human genius can manage it--the taste of absolute nothingness. It is a compact of air bubbles, each contained in a film of edible plastic that has been synthesized from wheat or rye, as one gets casein from milk. In contact with liquid, be it gravy or saliva, this plastic film disintegrates at once into a cloying and texture.ess paste exactly like the revolting white slime that is fed to babies and that most babies, quite understandably, spit back into the spoon.

To begin with, the wheat is grown, unloved, by industrial farming over millions of featureless and treeless acres in such wastelands as Kansas and Nebraska, and is sprayed by airplane with Flit and Bug-Ded. It is then shaved off the face of the earth with immense mechanical clippers, winnowed and ground into a flour, which, by washing with detergents and stewing in disinfectants, is converted into tons of pancake make-up. In vast automated baking factories, these mountains of pure chalk dust are mixed with pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, paraaminobenzoic acid and artificial flavorings, whereafter the whole mass is bubblized, stablized by heating, sliced, wrapped in wax paper and shipped out in the form of sleazy cushions that are unfortunately, too small and too perishable for use as bolsters. You may think I am exaggerating but according to a recent issue of Scientific American, someone has patented a process for the manufacture of continuous "bread" that flows through electronic ovens like tooth paste from a tube. "A steady stream of ingredients is mixed, the dough is kneaded and carbon dioxide is pumped into it to make it rise. (Yeast may be added, but only for flavor.)" The resultant product, of course, has no end crusts.

Several years ago, a reader complained about this so-called bread to Consumer Reports, a generally admirable magazine designed to protect its subscribers from cheating in the market place. But instead of submitting the product to the judgment of experienced chefs and gourmets, C. R. called in dietitians and chemical analysts, who reported that this miserable substance was, indeed, "rich in vitamins and nutritious minerals."

Here is the nub of the problem: We confuse diet with medicine and cooking with pharmacology, and thus it comes to pass that the classes of dietitian and cook are mutually exclusive--the former judging by test tube and the latter by nose and tongue. Labels on food packages read just like labels on proprietary medicines. I have just taken a package of ordinary gelatin from the shelf, and it reads:

Analysis: Protein 85-87%. Moisture 12-14%. Ash 1.0-1.2%. Fat 0. Sodium 90 mg./100 gm. or 1 mg. per serving. Carbohydrate 0. Calories per envelope 28.

You may not have the slightest idea what this means, but with all that small, scientific-looking print and those decimal points, it sure must be good for you. Our judgment of food is theoretical and mathematical, rather than material, which is my reason for saying that Americans are not materialists but abstractionists.

The mutually exclusive roles of dietitian and cook are nowhere more apparent than in such institutions as hospitals and colleges. In my particular work, it is frequently my fate to have to take lunch or dinner in the student-union cafeterias of universities all over the country. All are identical. Icebox lettuce with a glob of cottage cheese and a wedge of canned pineapple. Slices of overdone and warmed-over beef that have suffered for hours in some electronic purgatory, coated with a gravy made of water, library paste and bouillon cubes. Peas, corn and carrots--boiled. The pie is a sickening slab of beige goo, flavored with artificial maple sugar, in a crust of reconstituted cardboard, topped with sweetened shaving cream squirted from an aerosol bomb. The effect of this fare on the intellectual life of the nation must be catastrophic. Since university politics are mainly a matter of interdepartmental feuding, the home-economics and dietetics people are clearly way out on top, having conspired to deprive historians and mathematicians, linguists and anthropologists of all zest for life by habituating them to the notion that such supernaturally uninspired meals are the proper diet for scholars.

The problem is that the dietitians who actually supervise such "cooking"--as well as the hapless agents of the FDA and the Department of Agriculture who inspect the forced and faked-up products that go into it--can, indeed, prove that it contains the proper amount of proteins, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins. But this is like judging the worth of music in terms of decibels and wave lengths. "This record certified noninjurious to the human ear." Certainly, it is good for us--in the sense that it will enable us to put up with existence for a reasonably long time. Even sex is becoming acceptable to earnest squares for the same reason: It is good for you; it is a healthy, tension-reducing "outlet"--to use Kinsey's statistical term for counting orgasms--and some wretched hygienist will soon figure out the average person's minimum daily requirement of outlets (.428 would be three times a week), so that we can screw with a high sense of duty and freedom from guilt. Watch your outlet count and keep a chart beside the bed.

But just exactly what is the good to which we aspire through doing and eating things that are supposed to be good for us? This question is strictly taboo, for if it were seriously investigated, the whole economy and social order would fall apart and have to be reorganized. It would be like the donkey finding out that the carrot dangled before him, to make him run, is hitched by a stick to his own collar. For the good to which we aspire exists only and always in the future. Because of our incapacity to relate to the sensuous and material present, we are most happy when good things are expected to happen, not when they are happening. We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come. We are, therefore, a civilization that suffers from chronic disappointment--a formidable swarm of spoiled children smashing their toys.

To our ears, therefore, the assertion that time does not exist must sound insane. Time, we say, is money and, man, that's for real! Yet it is impossible to be in the right state of mind for cooking, eating or for any other art or pleasure without realizing that time is purely abstract. There is, indeed, such a thing as timing--the art of mastering rhythm--but timing and hurrying are as mutually exclusive as cooks and dietitians. Clock time is merely a method of measurement held in common by all civilized societies and has the same kind of reality (or unreality) as the imaginary lines of latitude and longitude. The equator is useless for stringing a rolled roast. To judge by the clock, the present moment is nothing but a hairline that, ideally, should have no width at all--except that it would then be invisible. If you are bewitched by the clock, you will therefore have no present. "Now" will be no more than the geometrical point at which the future becomes the past.

For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones--for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events, in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are, alike, ways of trying to resist the present; and in cooking, they invariably show up in the form of spoiled food. To try to save time, that is, to move as quickly as possible into the future, gives you abstract food instead of real food. Instant coffee, for example, is a well-deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future. So are TV dinners. So are the warmed-over nastinesses usually served on airplanes, which taste like the plastic trays and dishes on which they are served. So is that meat that is not roasted but heated through in 30-second electronic ovens. So are mixtures of grape juice and alcohol, prepared in concrete vats, pretending to be wine.

Even our fruit and vegetables have been rushed, so that however magnificent an apple may seem to the superficial judgment of the eye, it is hard to find one that is not simply wet pith under the skin; and most potatoes taste of the same nothingness as the bread. For a while, I thought this might be because I had ruined my palate with too much tobacco; but when I recently returned to my father's garden in England, I found both apples and potatoes as real as they had been to the untainted palate of a child.

Abstractionists would, if possible, save time by eating the menu instead of the dinner, which is almost what actually happens in those restaurants where one reads:

Fillet of Colorado Mountain Trout, gently sautéed in bread crumbs to a delicate golden brown, with fresh garden peas simmered in butter, light and crisp French-fried potatoes, and lemon wedge.

Sometimes there is even a colored photograph to whet the appetite for the dismal anticlimax of the reality. The last time I ran into this, in a restaurant where they had the nerve to keep an open kitchen, the "fillet of Colorado mountain trout" was a severe rectangle of some off-white substance that rattled when it hit the grill.

Another way of eating the menu is preferring money to wealth--a psychic disorder directly related to the hallucination that time is a physical reality. To be fair, there are still some substantial and excellent products for sale in our supermarkets; but if you are bewitched by money, what happens? You take your loaded cart to the cashier, who clicks out a long strip of paper and says, "Thirty dollars and twenty-five cents, please!" You are suddenly depressed at having to part with so much "wealth"--not realizing that your wealth is now in the shopping bags and that you are going to walk out with it. For the money was a future, a promise to pay, an abstraction now converted into present and substantial reality--and you are unhappy because you have exchanged the expectation of good things to come for actual goods. Just as time is a way of measuring motion, money is a measurement of material wealth and power, a system of bookkeeping; and when this is not understood, a nation with vast material abundance can--as in the Depression--starve for lack of purely symbolic cash.

In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages. Spray your watery tomatoes with wax to make them look real. But then, having made the money, there is nothing real to buy with it, because everyone else is cheating in the same way.

One would suppose that in this richest of all nations, prosperous stockbrokers and admen, plumbers and electricians would knock off work and drive full pelt for routs, banquets and orgies that would make the high life of ancient Rome look like potluck supper at a Methodist social. But as things are, the well-heeled blue-collar people go home to gurgle down cans of an alcoholic soft drink misnamed beer and watch television over hamburgers and catsup. The white-collars live it up by getting anesthetized on martinis and then, perhaps, going to reasonably good French or Italian restaurants with neither taste nor appetite for the fare. In New York, I often stay at a small hotel on a street of celebrated European restaurants. Every morning at six, I am awakened by the banging and thumping of garbage trucks that carry away tons of an immense slosh of leftovers, in which I can just make out the forms of lobster thermidor, oysters Rockefeller, filet mignon aux champignons, poached salmon, moules marinière and coq au vin, slobbered over with almost all the vegetables served the previous evening--since no one ever eats them. Excellent as the cuisine may be, most restaurants in America serve for the eye more than for the stomach, because abstractionists delight in the initial lift of fancy menus and vastly overloaded dishes--suited only to the appetites of growing boys, who cannot afford to eat in such places. The customer wants anticipation; he has no capacity for fulfillment.

The heart of the matter is that we are living in a culture that has been hypnotized with symbols--words, numbers, measures, quantities and images--and that we mistake them for, and prefer them to, physical reality. We believe that the proof of the pudding is in the chemical analysis--not in the eating. This is largely the result of an educational system that is overwhelmingly literary and mathematical, which prepares everyone to be clerks and bureaucrats and provides apprenticeship in arts of material competence only reluctantly--for those considered too stupid for intellectual advancement.

This is not sentimentalizing about the "dignity of labor." It is saying that a culture is hardly a culture at all when it does not provide for the most sophisticated training in the fundamental arts of life: farming, cooking, dining, dressing, furnishing and lovemaking. Where these arts are not cultivated with devotion and skill, time to spare and money to spend are useless. The shops are empty of all but trash, thrown together by slaves working joylessly for cash, with one eye on the clock. Thus, there are virtually no jobs to be had for those who delight in expert workmanship in producing the necessities of everyday life. The jet aircraft and scientific instruments are marvelous, but virtually all houses, cars, fabrics, bathtubs, carpeting, jewelry, suits, chinaware, beds and lighting fixtures are simply phenomenal failures of human imagination. (Incidentally, if you want truly elegant glassware for the kitchen--jars, funnels, decanters, bottles--buy it from a dealer in laboratory equipment.)

In the world of symbols and abstractions--understood in terms of separate and disjointed words--the human person is an isolated thing among other things. One's self is therefore experienced as a lonely center of consciousness and action living inside an envelope of skin. This envelope is an abrupt boundary between one's self and an alien universe, and the main task of life is to join forces with other lonely ones for the conquest of nature--that is, for the violent subjugation of an enemy universe to our wills. Hence, also, our talk of the conquest of space. But as a result of this feeling, we are destroying our environment and fouling our own nest. Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

Yet this particular feeling of personal existence is a delusion. The special branch of science that studies the relation of living beings to their environments--ecology--shows beyond doubt that the individual organism and its environment are a continuous stream, or field, of energy. To draw a new moral from the bees and the flowers: The two organisms look very different, for one is rooted in the ground and broadcasts perfume, while the other moves freely in the air and buzzes. But because they cannot exist without each other, it makes real sense to say that they are, in fact, two aspects of a single organism. Our heads are very different in appearance from our feet, but we recognize them as belonging to one individual because they are obviously connected by skin and bones. But less obvious connections are no less real.

There are, for example, no strings connecting the widely separated molecules in your own hand. There is no visible material joining the individual stars into the formation that we recognize as a galaxy. But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs and stomachs. The former are our external organs, in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If, then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference it that the words I and myself must include both sides. The sun, the earth and the forests are just as much features of our own bodies as our brains. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disaster as leprosy, and many "growing communities" are as disastrous as cancer.

That we do not feel this to be obvious is the result of centuries of habituation to the idea that one's self is only the envelope of skin and its contents, the inside but not the outside. The extreme folly of this notion becomes clear as soon as you try to imagine an inside with no outside or an outside with no inside.

To see this clearly is to acquire a new attitude toward the physical world that includes, first, a profound respect for the intricate interconnections among all creatures, upon which each one of them depends, and, second, a love for and delight in that world as an extension of our own bodies. True, this world maintains itself by mutual killing and eating; but with this new attitude, murder in the stockyards and on the farms will not be compounded with the murdering of food in the kitchen--nor of the landscape by ill-conceived housing, nor of air and sunlight by industrial and automotive farting.

Thus, the one absolutely essential requirement for the art of cooking is a love for its raw materials: the shape and feel of eggs, the sniff of flour, or mint, or garlic, the marvelous form and shimmer of a mackerel, the marbled-red texture of a cut of beef, the pale-green translucence of fresh lettuce, the concentric ellipses of a sliced onion and the weight, warmth and resilience of flour-dusted dough under your fingers. The spiritual attitude of the cook will be all the more enriched if there is a familiarity with barns and vineyards, fishing wharves and dairies, orchards and kitchen gardens. Among the most heart-lifting and persistent of my memories is a row of oak-leaf lettuce seen at midnight under a full moon--jigsaw patterns of edible jade refreshed with minute drops of dew. 1 think also of hiding, as a child, between rows of scarlet-runner beans upon sticks, opening the large pods that had gone to seed and crunching the raw purple-mottled beans. After much searching, the joy of discovering a long, heavy pod concealing itself in the vines.

With this attitude, it is practically impossible to chuck food carelessly into boiling water or to roast, distractedly by the clock, without eager peeks into the oven to sniff and baste. A good cook broods over the range like a doting mother, or like an alchemist distilling the elixir of immortality from rare herbs. The preparation must be as delightful for its own sake as the feast, if the feast is to be worth eating. For the cook is, after all, a priest offering sacrifice, and the stove is an altar. There must be the same devotion and absorption as in performing a magical rite or, if you are not accustomed to such things, as in giving the utmost pleasure to a gorgeous woman, in bringing the full sound out of an exquisite musical instrument or in watching the leisurely sail of your golf ball from the tee to the green.

One can sense the style and attitude of ritual in almost any action that is done expertly, with full attention to the present--as when a surgeon handles his instruments at an operation, when a jeweler repairs a watch or when a pilot prepares for the take-off of a plane. Such is the fascination (i.e., magic) of ritual that Americans, who pride themselves on being folksy, plain and direct, will go abroad in droves to witness a coronation ceremony and be thrilled when a maitre de comes to a cart beside the table and prepares crepes suzette with flaming brandy. We are, indeed, so starved for ritual that thousands of staunch Protestant businessmen who would be horrified if solemn High Mass were to be celebrated in the Presbyterian Church will, nevertheless, join the Freemasons and the Shriners to wear exotic robes and take part in archaic ceremonies.

Happily, there is still in our souls a primitive and essential owe for that central god of the kitchen whose name is fire. Over the past 20 years, the American paterfamilias has been increasingly drawn to the rites of the barbecue and its ceremonial appurtenances--the long skewers, fork and turner, even the chef's hat and the apron. A return to this timeless form of cooking is a clear sign that all is not yet lost and that we are never going to have any real appetite for meals--now available in some drive-ins--where your order is dialed and delivered electrically in 60 seconds. My faith in human nature tells me that our very nerves will force us to realize that there can be no taste at the table without love in the kitchen.