Essay On Religion And Religion

To what extent does faith, religion, spirituality — a sense of mystery or wonder, maybe — play a role in your life?

For me, the highest power is nature. And I don’t see that as any different to a god. I’m not religious, but I don’t think there’s a way that someone can be aware of the natural world and not be in total awe of it. There’s no way to improve upon nature, so my job, as a cook, is to try to deliver the most unadulterated and delicious form of the natural world. If I find a farmer who’s grown the most perfect tomato, then there’s very little I need to do — or can do — to make it any better. Yeah, I would say that my god is nature — my everything is nature.

In his poem, Ostinato Rigore, Jack Gilbert writes about making heaven for

You almost always start your recipes with a story — something personal that puts the food into context. Story seems to be so central to your approach towards food.

Absolutely. To me, the two greatest loves of my life are food, and stories. As a teacher, I think stories are maybe my most powerful tool in helping people learn — in bringing them to a place they might otherwise have felt intimidated to go. They might think something’s too boring, or too scientific, or too technical, but if I can tell them a story about how I learned that task, and how I messed it up a hundred times, it humanises it — it gives people something to hold onto.

As much as I’m a cook, my work has never been about the food. It’s always been about the land from which the food came, or the way the food affects people sitting around the table. Food, for me, is a way to get to the

There’s this incredible project in Pittsburgh called Conflict Kitchen — they have this space that, every few months, they close down and re-open as a new restaurant, serving the food of a country that the US is in conflict with. Right now, it’s Iranian food, and in the past they’ve had Cuban food, Palestinian food, North Korean food. It’s this beautiful and delicious way of teaching people without proselytising — they’re not lecturing people, they’re just getting to them in the most direct, most fundamental way, which is through something that tastes great.

I’ve ended up as a cook through a series of serendipitous events, but I think that no matter what I would have ended up doing, I would have ultimately made it about bringing people together — about fostering community, fostering goodwill. Cooking is a very straightforward way of doing that, because eating is such a social act. People, by their very nature, want to come together around the table and eat. People are hungry for an excuse to come together and eat — to come together and do anything,