Why I Stopped Cooking
I used to be completely obsessed with cooking complicated and delicious things. Now you’ll be lucky if you get a few olives or a handful of nuts. What happened?
The short version is, I got a life.
With no disrespect to those visionaries for whom food artistry is their real calling in life, the love of cooking for me turned out to be a very temporal thing, rather than an enduring personality trait. In fact, it was one of the things that showed me that we live in a society where no one is changing and evolving in the way that should and could be going on naturally. We call this thing our personality, but really we are continually in flux. We are not meant to be pinned down in fixed ways and held to them.
So what was cooking to me?
Control. Naturally a bony vata body type, I escaped the worst vicissitudes of eating disorders, but there is no doubt that my relationship with food was very controlling. At first it was just straight perfectionism — “IM NOT MAKING DINNER BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE THIS ONE INGREDIENT DEMANDED ON THE RECIPE I AM MAKING AND I WANT TO BE PERFECT.” Later it was far more extreme, related to health and environmentalism. Organic only! Gluten free! Grain free! Ayurvedic-dosha friendly! Healthy only! No seed oils! Neurotic food anxiety as much of the world goes hungry! Perfectionism run riot!
Difference from my parents. My parents have beautiful homegrown veges and some lovely dishes up their sleeves these days, but there is no doubt my family aren’t that bourgeouis thing known as “foodies.” My dad’s speciality is cheese on toast under the grill with the first letter of your name spelled out in tomato sauce. This all changed when I was 17, when I started dating my long-term crush, a want-to-be chef (sadly not a chef now, but he should be!). We used to go home after school and he would make homemade pasta and lattice top apple pies, profiterole towers and pineapple sage salsa. We would watch Jamie Oliver and River Cottage, read Cuisine and Dish magazine, and head off to browse farmer’s markets and the goat’s cheese section at Moore Wilson’s (gourmet wholesaler). There were so many interesting things in their cupboards — date sugar, squid ink pasta, powdered lavender, freekeh, amaranth… exotic names and intriguing substances. Plus, it tasted spectacular. The nerd in me delighted in so much to learn, and the traveller-to-be soaked up the flavours of India, Morocco, Russia, Mexico…
One of the delicious feasts I no longer can be bothered cooking… sorry family… (cucumber and fennel gazpacho, eggplant with coconut yoghurt and pomegranate, hibiscus lemonade, middle-eastern okra, pear and goat’s cheese toasts, flower salad, baby potatoes…)
Trying to win friends and influence people aka be loved. At some point I noticed that if you fed people something delicious, it made them really quite pleased with you. As a chronically insecure person whose number one goal in life was to be liked, cooking was a dream hobby. I would get myself into extreme states of poverty and stress running around town buying the ULTIMATE ingredients so I could cook for friends, relatives, friends of friends… and whilst it worked well in the very short term, it didn’t really shift my ease in relationships or actual capability for intimacy.
I was good at it. Good at reading, good at chemistry, good attention to detail, and a skill for making/crafting beautiful things. It was almost sculpture sometimes… except guaranteed to be loved and enjoyed.
Allergies. I spent a year at 16 either covered in whole-body itchy rashes, convulsed with cramps and vomiting, or drugged into a zombie state on anti-histamines. It is still incredible to me that multiple doctors and a dermatologist didn’t ask a single question about what I was eating. Fortunately, my mother was working as the receptionist at a Chinese Medicine Clinic, and arranged me a muscle testing appointment with one of the practitioners there, behind the back of my scientist father. I was highly sceptical — lord knows how we get so closed-minded so young — but I gave it a go. He made me hold secret vials in my hand and tried to push my arm down, noting when sudden weakness came in. “This is bullshit,” I though, itchily. “Stop eating dairy and eggs,” he said. I did. All the symptoms disappeared within a week and never came back. But I had to get interested in dairy free alternatives, and that meant becoming a better cook.
Becoming a vegetarian. At 23, my boyfriend brought home a book from work called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I kind of knew what it was going to say, but not really. The argument he made was too well researched and persuasive for my tender heart. “I’m a vegetarian,” I declared. My partner had read the book and had not been so impressed. His favourite hobbies were eating, smoking weed and eating, and watching cage fighting while eating, and he had been looking forward to going to “The Fat Duck” restaurant in London with me. “You’re ruining our life,” he said. In turn i accused him of being incapable of empathy and overly controlling. We split up. To be fair, I had just given him a cookbook called MEAT and a huge carving knife for his birthday, so I can see that it would have come as a shock. It was set: vegetarian was my new identity. I traipsed around Europe on my own, proudly hungry if there were no (mostly) dairy-free egg-free veggo food around (yes, even in Paris). It was a downward purity spiral, where the more hungry I got, the more angry I would be at the lack of options, and the more angry, the more determined not to buy their shitty pork rind crisps or whatever it was. Of course, there was plenty of gourmet dishes along the way through Italy and Spain, and I loved being by myself and eating whenever and wherever. Pistachio gelato… eggplant pizza… pernod pastries… pumpkin risotto with chestnuts and field mushrooms… chocolate croissants in the bath…
I felt shit. This is really the main one. Like every other person, I didn’t feel good in myself. I felt seperate from life, unlikeable, a secret scabby loser, awkward and like something was wrong with me. I had no way of processing my emotions or releasing childhood karmas. They were all stored in my body as numb, stiff awkwardness. I didn’t have a window on my own beauty and power. I didn’t have anyone in my life who looked past the surface and saw me just as life itself, already whole. And so the stimulation of eating, of flavour, of comfort, of carbohydrates and fats, soothed my emotions. Anxious? Eat. Tired? Eat. Bored? Eat. Lonely? Eat. I was a chronic snacker, I dealt with anxious clenched jaw using crunchy food, and i was completely unaware that I was leaning on food as a total emotional prop. Because everyone around me was doing it too, and besides, I wasn’t getting fat. (Just terrible skin, bad digestion, socially awkward stinky farts, erratic energy levels…) And I wasn’t capable of enduring intimacy or wise choices in my relationships, and so food was my key source of serotonin and intimacy.
Creative outlet. Ok, maybe this is the first-equal main one. My low self-esteem and self-doubt (and tender age) meant I wasn’t fulfilling my talents and ambitions. I was set back by the least rejection and extremely wobbly about my own abilities. Cooking gave me something creative to do that seemed worthwhile, that I could be very accomplished at without too much self-doubt. Once I got vaguely competent, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And being female, there was no uphill battle to get access to the kitchen or the role of chef. It was expected, even.
So what changed? I could have kept on in this patterning for life, and maybe some small parts of me always will. But something did happen that changed the direction of this karmic train.
I picked up a book called ‘Yoga of Heart,’ by a person called Mark Whitwell, on the second-hand shelf at the little dairy near my house. Near the back of the book, I came across these words:
Only when the pleasures of breath, movement and intimacy are installed as a natural part of a person’s life is it easy to minimize diet. In fact, it happens naturally, because the pleasure of eating appropriately is greater than the forced pleasure of overeating. We are no longer consoling a pleasureless life with food.
What a killjoy, I thought. Why would I want to minimise diet? I’m not overweight, and my family bonds over eating too much together and needing to lie down. What could be more pleasurable than eating? It’s cute to overeat, to comfort eat.. we make jokes about it in our online bios, we bond over it, there’s nothing wrong with it… is there?
Aggravated and yet fascinated by this and other arguments in the book, I flew to Mark’s teacher training in Fiji to argue it out in person. Because if an idea gets under your skin, you must resolve it clearly for yourself beyond doubt.
What I discovered over the course of those few weeks, and since, is that there is indeed a pleasure available to us in our lives that is far, far greater even than pistachio gelato. Greater than beetroot chocolate cake with Valhrona icing. Greater than kumara chips with plum sauce. Greater than vegan profiteroles with coffee cream filling. Whaaaat????
I discovered that in spite of previous spiritual explorations, I had a huge dependency on eating and cooking food in general, and snacking and fried potatoes in particular, for creative fulfilment and emotional coping. And there was absolutely no point in all of the combative and denial based-approaches people were trying out there to break their dependencies on various food habits. Because our systems were just crying out for a little bit of pleasure…
And this is a pleasure that is so easily available to us: our breath. We are not really breathing. I learned how to take a real inhale, a real exhale. How to participate in the breath, as the vital quality of our life, something that is always given. Yogic breath and movement over time brings feeling back into the body and wow, there is so much to feel. I was walking around numb from the neck down. We are actually these incredibly sensitive beings, designed for relationships of love and subtlety. And yet there was a huge backlog of emotions to feel too, huge exhaustion and many tears, and so I can understand why people are afraid to step into intimacy with their own experience.
Actually, I wasn’t expecting the kind of changes that did occur. But as I kept on making space for the intimate relationship of body and breath, and as that flowed naturally into real person-to-person intimacy, things did change.
And I’m not sure I’m all too happy about it! For example, in 2014 I travelled to Japan to speak at a conference on Romantic poetry (the time period, not stuff about relationships!) in Asia. I read that the most sublime traditional Zen Buddhist feast food was available deep inside a monastery in Kyoto, so after the conference I made my way there, stopping en route for other delicacies. (My travels were just joining the dots between eating establishments.) Sure enough, it was the most exquisite, flavourful, pure, sublimely delicious meal I had ever tasted in my life.
I cannot describe how delicious this meal was. 2014. Tenryū-ji Temple, Kyoto.
Fast-forward to July 2019, and Mark was teaching a series of workshops in Japan, which I was helping with. Brilliant, I thought. We can go to THE BEST FOOD IN THE WORLD PLACE. So we did. And….
The disappointing return visit.
…guess what. The food was the same. I could taste that it had not at all decreased in quality. It was prepared with the same exquisite care — more, if anything.
And yet… it was just not that good. The tastes that had held me spellbound in ecstasy tasted like… just flavours, limited to my mouth. What a tragedy!
And yet it’s not. Because the reason the food was really not that exciting… was because I’d been so lucky to unlock the far more pervasive and holistic whole-body pleasure that I know we are all really capable of. Trust me, the best food in the world pales beside the pleasure that is possible in your body. Intimacy. Drinking from the cool clear water of your soul/spirit/breath. (Re-spire / In-spire /Spiri-t).
There is so, so much pleasure available to each of us, and it is truly egalitarian, truly free, and truly free of addiction or dependency. Everything else pales in comparison.
The problem is, knowing and feeling this, it becomes impossible not to put one’s resources and creative efforts towards sharing it. It’s so simple! Move and breathe and feel that you are alive! Give your body all the intimacy it is craving! Become radiantly fulfilled with relationship as a bonus, rather than begging for scraps under someone else’s table!
Working out ways to share this Yoga with as many people as possible, breaking down barriers to access and education, is a real creative work. Finally, something to do that is not about ME, not about impressing anyone, what a relief! Seeing the real impact these tools have for people is all the motivation I need to get over any doubts or fears.
And it’s urgent. We are living in a time where most people are suffering a psychopathic level of dissociative numbness, through no fault of their own, but as a protective mechanism against modern life. And because we are not feeling, we are hurting ourselves, each other, and destroying our home and fellow inhabitants. Intimacy with life is what heals this dysfunctional inheritance.
And so therefore, I don’t need cooking in my life any more to meet those needs — for creativity, for purpose, for impressing people. To feel like I am accomplishing something, am accomplished.
The urge to snack was a longing for intimacy. The urge to overeat was a longing for intimacy. The urge for strong, competing, stimulating flavours was a longing for intimacy. The need to feed others and make them happy was a longing for intimacy. The drive to make complicated things perfectly was a longing for intimacy. Our longings are holy, as long as we honour the profound depth of feeling that they are searching for. As long as we refine our pleasures to the fine silver thread of feeling that is at the heart of our aliveness.
So I’m afraid it’s no more coconut-blueberry vegan cheesecakes from me, no more hand-rolled cassava gnocchi. I have other things to do.