no. 74: double starching

a very serious essay about food and value

This post owes much to the ideas of feminist economists like Nancy Folbre, the writing of L.M. Sacasas, and a long ago question from Josh Berson. I know only one of them personally, but am grateful to them all for the inspiration.

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The first time Spencer and I met, he asked a question I’d never heard before. “Is cooking mystical for you?” 

Because I am a godless communist, and spiritual as a stapler, I said, “no.” Because I was speaking with an engineer, I went on to elaborate that I don’t think there’s anything about the process and skill of cooking that is “neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence.” I believe there’s nothing about cooking that makes it inherently different from doing a cartwheel or playing the violin or making a cabinet or interacting with our physical world in any other way. But the question stayed with me, because it was so unexpected and so apt. 

One of my favorite examinations of the mystical in food is Reem Kassis’ poetic examination of nafas – Arabic for “breath” but also “an energy some people possess that makes their meals not only good, but exceptional.” In it, she points out that

“This idea that the cook imparts something intangible to the food is found in other cultures, but the focus tends to be on the hand, rather than the spirit. In Korea, the concept used to account for food that tastes better coming from a specific cook is ‘sonmat’ — ‘hand taste.’ Across India, many phrases attest to the same effect, from ‘haatachi chav’ in Marathi (‘hand’s taste’) to ‘maza haath mein hota hai’ in Hindi (‘the taste comes from the hand’).” 

I find this pure romance – not undesirable, but an insufficient explanation now that we have the sciences of physics and chemistry and biology. The most telling thing is the phenomenon itself, that so many cultures have an idea like nafas.

In 2017, someone hired me to open a Japanese restaurant (which was an odyssey in its own right). My client wanted sushi on the menu, and I’d never done sushi before, so I started by doing some research on how to make sumeshi, the rice that serves as the foundation for sushi. Here is a selection of advice from the most trustworthy sources I could find in English: 

Wash the rice until the water runs clear. Don’t wash off all the starch. Don’t wash the rice at all. Soak the rice for only a few minutes. Soak the rice for up to 2 hours. Wash the rice 30-60 minutes beforehand, but don’t actually soak it. Use an iron cooker and pile weight on the lid so no steam escapes. Use a clay pot so steam can escape. Use well water. Use filtered water. Use bottled water. 

This cacophony doesn’t even begin to account for the advice on what kind of rice to use. There are clearly many ways to cook rice that’s widely considered to be of the highest quality. The only thing the recipes have in common is that they’re all aggregations of tiny details, responses to comparably miniscule changes in ingredients and environment. To quote the New Testament of English-language books on Japanese cooking:

“One chef is responsible for nothing but boiling rice… The rice cook washes the rice in a stone sink, puts the grains in a flanged iron rice pot with heavy wooden lid (sic) of ancient origin, uses only fresh well water for cooking, and carefully tends a wood-fed-stove, always adjusting the embers to control the heat. It is said that it takes 20 years to acquire enough experience to make truly perfect rice. This may be an exaggeration, but who can judge?... It is difficult to prescribe an exact formula for the size of pot and the amount of water to use in cooking rice because there are so many variables. Assuming that our interest is only in short-grain rice, we must still consider whether it was grown in a flooded paddy or dry field, whether the rice is newly-harvested or whether it has already been on the shelf for some time, whether the climate is hot and muggy or desert dry. These are all factors that the rice chef, with a many-year training period, would have no trouble in dealing with.”

I cooked several sacks of rice that fall. I wound up installing a rice pressure cooker at the restaurant, because I concluded that the best means I had to ensure the quality of the sumeshi were to dictate precise weights of rice and water, and to cook the rice under pressure. The thing was gas-fired and had its own stand, and the only moving part was the gas valve. It looked like it was designed in the 70s, but it was the only commercial rice cooker I could find that had a pressure control (consisting of three different weights to put on the steam vent). Its ruthless, circuit-free simplicity echoed the advice I found in my reading: the path to perfect rice lay through completely manual control of the heat and cooking time. We used Kokuho Rose, washed it very thoroughly, and cooked it in a rice net because that was the only way we could keep up with the volume. We didn’t vary the cooking time or the water ratio – we didn’t have a dedicated rice chef, or a many-year training period. 

The lesson I took from my three month carbo-coma, and from the accumulated arguments of generations of sushi chefs – not to say every cook in every culture who’s boiled a pot of rice for their household every day – was that cooking remains a mostly opaque activity to cooks, if not to scientists. Google Scholar now has a sheaf of papers on the effect of pressure cooking rice, but none of the sushi chefs whose advice I was reading had read them. When Jiro Ono (of Jiro Dreams of Sushi) weighs down the lid of his rice cooker like it’s going to blow away, or turns the fire up or down, he’s not doing it because he has an explicit understanding of the physical and chemical processes by which the rice takes on firmness, fullness, and luster, but because he trusts in his attention to detail. There’s a level on which cooking rice is a matter of ritual. Cooking as a field of knowledge doesn’t transcend human understanding, but cooking as an activity almost always transcends the understanding of the cook, and this is important. 

It matters because we no longer know how to think about cooking without also thinking about efficiency. In a restaurant, the desire for efficiency stems from the profit motive. In the home, cooking has long been defined as drudgery, a necessary chore that keeps us from “what really matters” (the definition of which is both highly malleable and highly contested). Once efficiency enters the equation, every one of those tiny steps that results in top quality rice is either a chore or a luxury, because they require the cook’s time and attention, however fleetingly. They’re either activities that can be avoided by being efficient so the home cook has time for more “creative” or “valuable” work, or tasks we undertake for the enjoyment of those who can buy our labor. 

I think this understanding is where we get the allegory of nafas, for the passing of time is obvious and measurable, but the application of attention and desire and skill, of human consciousness, is not. And what is your attention if not something of yourself?

We’ve all eaten food made with time but not attention: we’ve all watched a reluctant cook in a deli or fast food restaurant torture a sandwich together, lettuce going everywhere, bread askew, not so much handling the food as fending it off. We can say how much time they spent cooking, but not how much attention they failed to give the task at hand. 

The best sandwich maker I’ve had the pleasure to watch plied his trade in a deli in Siracusa. The place was on the docks, and it had no menu but it had a deli case, and a guy behind it making sandwiches. A cruise ship had just tied up literally 20 yards from his front door, and the shop was heaving with people who would never pass this way again, and everybody wanted a sandwich, because clearly there was nothing at all to eat on the cruise ship. 

And this lone cook was assembling sandwich after sandwich with the fervid verve of Mick Jagger on stage, his hands strutting through the deli case, communing with his fillings while the shop roared at prison riot pitch around him. Everyone but us was speaking Italian, and maybe they were yelling things like “no pickles please” but if there were instructions coming in, I think he was ignoring them, because you can’t modify the order when there is no menu, and he was clearly making everything up as he went, for no two sandwiches we saw were the same. 

This was our sandwich. 

It was a sandwich stuffed with a sandwich. The inner sandwich was really like a makizushi, slices of fresh mozzarella (cut a la minute) wrapped around a firmer, saltier cheese, boiled potatoes, roasted eggplant, basil, and fresh tomatoes, all dressed with oil and balsamic vinegar. That assembly was stuffed into an outer sandwich, which started with a sesame sandwich roll hollowed out (also on the spot) to make room for everything, filled with hard cheese, capers, arugula, and dry cured ham, then stuffed with the mozzarella maki. The cook could easily have been dispensing pre-sliced salami and cheese on stale bread to the ravening cruise ship cargo, and instead he was building these monuments. 

I tell this story not only to commemorate that cook and that sandwich, but because my earlier argument – that there’s nothing intrinsic in a cook that makes their food better, and that good food is essentially embodied attention – sounds very close to the cliches about how “you have to cook with love” and “you can taste the love” and all these other lines I’ve had spouted at me by people wearing chili pepper chef pants. That cook did not love any one of us. That cook never saw any of those customers again. He was cooking not with love but with fidelity to his daily tasks, and the excellence of that sandwich was essentially embodied attention. I want to be precise about this distinction, because the prevalence of the cliche muddies a more important truth: that cooking isn’t always love, but is always care work.

Cooking, whether within or outside the home, is a “care [process] done in service of others” and provides others “the ability to pursue the aspects of their lives that they value.” Every meal you cook for someone represents some time they had for themselves. The notion that “you have to cook with love” frames cooking as “labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people” (all these are phrases from Wikipedia’s definition). And while the consumer economy affords us a near infinitude of ways to eat, none of them alter the basic necessity of food, nor the fact that cooking was something primarily done within the home, almost entirely by women who were not remunerated for their work. 

It’s useful to think about cooking this way because care work, as feminist economists like Nancy Folbre argue, is priceless. Not for any philosophical reason, but because there’s no single price for it. Her example from the article I’ve linked is childcare. A large proportion of the total supply of childcare required in our economy is provided without monetary compensation, by parents or grandparents or older siblings. And even when there’s money exchanged for childcare, it’s rarely recorded by statisticians, who know neither what casual babysitters nor billionaire’s nannies are making. As a result, there’s really no trustworthy gauge of the price of childcare today.

The exact same reasoning applies to food. Think about who cooks your meals. Sometimes that person is you, cooking for yourself. Sometimes it’s your roommate or your child or your parent or your metamour or your friend who happens to be hanging out at lunchtime and is handy with a sandwich press. The labor that goes into these meals is never assigned a price, and because prices are how we talk about value in this economy, we literally can’t make a broad claim about what cooked food actually costs. The one thing we know is that the numbers we have substantially understate the true price of meals, because there’s so much unreported labor that goes into their making.

Because food is priceless in this way, its value is suddenly uncertain, manipulable, and plastic. Here are a few common and contradictory claims you’ve probably heard about the value of food and cooking. 

1. Feeding ourselves costs our time and labor, and our time and labor are always better spent on “what really matters.” 

2. Cooking at home is one of the most valuable things we can do, an expression of love, a creative outlet, a means of self-actualization. It’s especially so when undertaken as leisure, in conjunction with capitalist consumption.

3. Food outside the home (and the labor that goes into it) are competing with a “free” alternative, so they have to be cheap to compete.

To the extent that these claims have rhetorical power, it’s because there’s a void into which they readily fit. Since none of us have a concrete sense of what food and cooking are worth, it’s easy to sell different claims about the value of food, and the work that goes into making it. 

So returning to Spencer’s question now, “is cooking mystical for you?” I might answer a question with a question: “what gives good cooking its value?” The question takes us beyond the frameworks offered by economics and money, and into the realm of what human attention is worth – and maybe that is “neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence.” For it seems to me that in this, as in so many other fields, we can say much about how it is done and little about why.