On October 26 2016, I made an enigmatic post with a title only, "Be a Conduit for the Ingredient". Nearly three years later, I think I am ready to expand on that.
"The common, recurring image of our present moment: a person sitting in a parked car, with the engine and the air conditioning running, using a smartphone, drinking a soda and/or eating fast food."
This was the first line written and read aloud in August 2017 by Adam Sobsey (link) in reference to everything he did not want our pop-up supper project (it was the anti-pop-up in many ways), Manifest, to be. In the modern consumerist model of gastronomy, everything is disposable. As a longtime bartender at Nana's of Durham, Adam saw the magnitude of food waste, not just in the uneaten things from diners' plates, but the peelings, scraps, and tops that were discarded, the plastic packaging, the cardboard, the gasoline used by the vendor trucks, etc. At its best, each ingredient speaks with the clarity of a bell through the dish. At its worst, it is a muddle of a McDonald's cheeseburger that is engineered by a massive agribusiness system to deliver sugar, salt, and hormones, not to mention a post-meal stomachache.
Like the economy of the aphorism in the post title, a carrot has a spiritual life that we can either evoke or deaden through food preparation. When I think of respect for the ingredient, I think of Alice Water's rediscovery of the majesty of the garden salad in the 1970's. Lettuces and greens have a fragility and tenderness, not to mention bitterness, that is alive in a way very few people get to eat or appreciate. Like a spiritual medium, we can all become mediums for what an ingredient is saying if we slow down, listen, extend our palates, and finally, taste.
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