Like many people with a professional interest in food I watch food shows and have some of my favorites. The show I have always enjoyed most was Alton Brown's "Good Eats". Brown brings a scientific focus to the art of cuisine design. He is also a very personal commentator for "Iron Chef America". My wife introduced me to "Good Eats" many years ago. I was intrigued to learn that Brown was in his 30s before he attended culinary school. He moved to Vermont just so he could acquire a professional chef's skills as the first step in his career goal of developing a better cooking show.
Cooking is one of those skills that we have always had and yet professional culinary arts have really only been around for a couple of centuries. During the middle ages wealthy families hired cooks and in classical Greek and Roman times slaves did much of the cooking. These were full-time professions. But it was not until the 1700s that cooks began setting out on their own to because restaurateurs and to pass on their skills to other cooks. The most famous culinary schools of the world are less than 200 years old.
It is therefore still a wondrous thing, to me, when a young man can start out as a chef and rise up to become the chief executive of a multimillion-dollar corporation in food services by the time he is 40. I should have been so blessed in my life, but we can't all become millionaire CEOs.
We all need to eat and so I encourage people to learn more about the food they eat, even to learn how to cook, no matter what their age. I was thrilled to find a blogger pondering the challenge of exploring the potential of his culinary tastes. This is really what cooking is all about: exploring the potential of the flavors and textures of our foods for without that exploration food becomes a bland stream of obligatory mush that passes from mouth to stomach.
To be human is to seek meaning in everything we do. We need meaning in what we eat. It is as vital and important a meaning as any of our sacred virtues. Indeed, nearly every religion uses food in some symbolic way. Food is not simply a source of energy for our bodies, it is a vital ingredient for our good health, our social spirit, and our sense of self.
