Kitchen Therapy - A Culinary Path to Consciousness
Kitchen Therapy – a culinary path to consciousness
A somewhat grandiose opening, but true. The way we feed ourselves is how we become ourselves, both as a species and as a person. Cooking ignites consciousness. When our earliest ancestors learned to use fire for food and shelter, our journey into humanity began; just as an infant being fed and held is able to grow into a child, a person and a part of their community. In cooking, we have the first experience of time, story and agency: we start with raw resources then mix with our creative attention, to feed ourselves ever after.
The nutrients that enable our journey are not just from the physical resources we transform through cooking, or from a mother’s milk, but from the dynamism of their relationship: the alchemy of love. Cooking is our first technology and food our first conversation in the world. Each meal is over and done with all too quickly, but what remains is the meaning, intention and relational nutrition it imparts. By returning to our species’ beginnings and our earliest bonding behaviours, perhaps we can answer the cataclysmic questions our hyper-individualised, super mechanised, ultra materialistic our current world is posing.
That’s the basis for Kitchen Therapy, to reclaim the quantum magic that is held in the way we feed ourselves. Nature doesn’t make mistakes in her menu plans, the way we eat cultivates who, how and why things become as they are. Food is the root of existence. Our cuisine develops and expresses our culture – vibrant Moroccan tagines, one family’s porridge recipe, that personal comfort dish. Food is a powerful container. It carries meaning, it carries purpose and most importantly, it carries potential. It is the vehicle in which we travel through life, a constant companion who grows and changes with us. It is the bridge across which you and I can meet, live and love. A place we can transform the world through synergistic attention.
The way we cook holds an imprint of our personal ingenuity, whilst requiring social coordination that provides the recipe, resources and mutual respect we need. It is the heartbeat of community. Our word company is from the Latin, ‘con-panis’, with bread. This grain and water mix that turns up in various shapes and forms the globe over, speaks of our shared heritage, spiritual connection and personal expression.
During my therapeutic training, considering the power of relational exchange, I learned about quantum entanglement. That is when connected objects have ongoing corresponding behaviour with a myriad of outcomes; behaviour which changes under observation. Again, this cannot be held onto (as soon as we try to grasp the theory, it will alter by virtue of being described). The magnitude of its implications defies understanding. And yet, a cook tasting the fruits of their labour, or a child gulping milk charged with loving kindness, knows just how quantum entanglement works.
I hope you will forgive my fumbling foray into physics, an area I get lost in. What I do know, from both cooking a meal and feeding an infant, is that there is magic in both these encounters. As a meal sizzles into being, its different elements calling and encouraging one another to play, so an infant emerges from the ether, gathering their various ingredients for life together. A cook and a parent are the lightening conductor, the wooden spoon for the orchestra of life arising. The meal, like the child needs your attention in order to grow. They need to be enjoyed. What happens in these interactions is beyond words, slipping like steam between states of being.
For prehistoric people, finding out how to make and manipulate fire, meant transforming resources into edible elixir from time consuming, poisonous or intractable base matter. Fire enabled and encouraged exponential leaps of growth. It is the seat of our consciousness. Incredible. Enchanting. Empowerment.
Our world is hurtling into machine time. This consumerist, AI led culture running on quantum computers and human alienation… could do with taking a breath. We’d do well to travel back to early people, or today’s small people, and ask how life works. We are so oriented towards the quantifiable (marketable), physical outcomes of our activity that we are losing sight of the psychological and spiritual necessities of life. Which new supplement, diet plan or magic pill will fix us, misses the crucial element of love which contains the nutrients we need. Love is a simple word to describe the power and potency of meaningful connection, reciprocal need and ongoing energy. Our culinary path to consciousness.
