The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [54]
Each time I relished their meals, I wondered whether I could also learn to cook more mindfully—but without spending years in a monastery. My cooking is usually messy and distracted, except when I make soup, because you can’t screw up soup, and something about chopping vegetables and tossing them in a pot restores my calm and equanimity. But I never know how anything else will turn out: when I made my great-grandmother’s recipe for fig-filled cookies shaped like delicate sand dollars, for instance, the friend I was baking with observed that mine came out looking like “mud huts.” My scattered haste in the kitchen is even dangerous: I once sliced off my entire index fingernail along with the onions. And let’s not discuss what I have burned.
I had no idea how to begin to cook mindfully, or really what that meant. I had an image of slow-motion cooking, of a Zen monk taking an hour to slice one carrot, pausing to breathe, focusing on its texture, color, smell, and the miracle of its being alive, as if studying it on high-grade LSD. I pictured it as cooking in a trance, which struck me, given the knives and heat, as quite dangerous, too.
I asked Edward Brown, whose cookbooks are ragged in my kitchen from twenty years of thumbing through for simple, reassuring recipe ideas, about my notion of slow, mindful cooking. He told me that Zen monks like to eat on time like everyone else. “Some people think they’re being mindful by working very slowly, but they’re confusing being mindful with being quiet, still, and composed—which are different qualities,” he said. “You can work extremely diligently and quickly and be mindful.”
Mindfulness, he says, is more about simply being present when you cook, fully engaged with the food and your relationship to it, from the earth it was grown in to the table. It’s being aware of the food with all your senses, and of how you transform it with your hands, knives, herbs, and heat—making it taste alive, nourishing yourself and those who eat your meals. “Your awareness can be in bringing the activity alive and giving it some energy, vitality, and exuberance,” he said.
When you see Brown cook, as in the 2007 film about him, How to Cook Your Life (from the German director Doris Dörrie), he fairly sparkles with that vitality, passing energy from his body and hands to the bread dough, and vice versa. But I wondered how you accomplish that trick of mindfulness, of making your experience and the food you cook come alive, when the temptation in busy times is to put packaged meals into the microwave, carelessly throw together a sandwich while on the cell phone, or for special occasions, fearfully measure and rigidly follow a recipe, hoping it turns out to be perfect.
Being a Zen priest, Brown didn’t offer me any easy answers, only a few ideas to chew on. “Mindfulness is much more about receiving your experience than dictating it,” he told me. “Most people’s habits of mind and activity, when it comes to cooking, are about making it come out the way it’s supposed to, rather than receiving and appreciating it the way it is.” The mindful focus is more on the kale in your hands—its curly leaves, earthy smell, and deep-green color—than on the casserole you hope will come out of the oven crisp and browned at precisely seven o’clock.
Brown offered a quote from Zen master Tenkei about how to cook mindfully: “See with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue.” That sounds obvious, but cooks are often so used to going through the motions, so focused on a recipe, a habit, or the product of our efforts—not to mention a million other distractions—that we forget to stop and experience the food we’re cooking. The nature of awareness, Brown says, is to resonate with the object of awareness; with cooking, it