culture

It’s Okay To Not Know

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The rain is coming down in fits and starts outside. I’ve had to break out my Irish sweater and cloak for the first time this year, but the sky pivots between sunshine and downpour. As it is, I’ve settled for the moment with shedding my cloak, rolling up the sleeves of the sweater, and watching the weather through the window of Holmans. The young bartender calls me “hun” as she fixes up a martini (dirty, extra dry, Beefeater Gin because I’m not trying to be spendy. She tips some extra “Dirty Sue” in there, but I’m alright with it.)

Back to settling in. Back to winding down. Back to being inside, taking stock, and taking a breath.

How’d we manage the summer? How’d we manage the year? How’s it all going? What’s different? What needs to be different?

Sitting where I am, when I am, the confluence of an election in the US, the change of the seasons, the change of weather, and the (Jewish) first anniversary of October 7th isn’t lost on me.

Photo by Hedaetul Islam on Pexels.com
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How Cooking Became a Flex

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“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable stages, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where stages. For instance, the first stage is characterized by the questions “How can we eat?” the second by the question, “Why do we eat?” and the third by the question “Where shall we have lunch?”

-Douglas Adams,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy #2)

If you are biological, you need to eat. You need to consume the energy you need to live somehow, no way around it. Plants photosynthesize, animals graze or hunt, and humans go to Wawa. It’s part of the whole “being alive” thing.

For most of our history as a species, what we ate was of greater concern than how we ate it. Douglas Adams hilariously but accurately described it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide quote I gave above. What Adams left to food historians, sociologists, barstool philosophers, and other nerds like myself to debate was how we felt about the act of cooking. Even within the lifetime of the last couple of generations here in the USA, the change in how we as a culture approach cooking and food in general has been massive.

If one is curious enough, one can twist out the wild story from the influences of changing cultural norms, gender roles and expectations, technological developments, and world events like twisting yarn out of cobwebs.

Several books and personalities have investigated this question in depth before- I’ve dipped a couple toes in that ocean myself. I’ll link some of those books throughout this post, but I want to focus on one interesting aspect of it- when and how did cooking for yourself become something to brag about?

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Food and Drink- Keeping it Local

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Growing up in my wine enthusiast father’s house, I started learning about alcohol at 13. My sisters and I were passed small sips of whatever he and my mother were drinking, gently quizzed on what we tasted and smelled as far as our early-teen brains could describe ”flavor notes,” and then given an instructive lecture on that particular wine, where it came from, what caused those flavors, and the idea of terroir– that you could taste the unique chemistry of the soil and climate in the products of it’s earth.

I can tell you now that, despite my father’s instruction, I never really fell in love with wine. Unless it’s especially unusual, I will always enjoy wine as “interesting fun grape juice.” Unless it’s terrible, then I just don’t finish.

My dad was not speaking into a void though. What he said DID land and plant a seed, although it grew to be more inclined to beer and liquor, which I can say I then cultivated with the hearty fertilizers of sociology, history, anthropology, and being really damned curious when faced with the unfamiliar-but-promising.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
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Thoughts on Belonging

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We all want to belong. To something greater than ourselves, to have a community, a tribe, even just to have a family, biological or chosen.

The last few weeks have been a serious trial of my personal sense of belonging. Getting (mostly) off of social media has helped stem the tide of belabored bullshit. “You are either with us or against us,” whatever the “us” is, is a big red flag for whether you actually belong to a certain group or whether your belonging is conditional on saying and doing the “right” things.

Work in the kitchen has provided a sense of place and community. Kitchens ave historically been my “safe spaces” and sanctuaries. Everything has a place, a purpose, and my belonging in them is undeniable and absolute- by my experience and skills if not myself.

“Matt the Baker” is only part of me though, and leaning into that solely for my sense of belonging is dangerous. I am also an American, a Jewish man, more a leftist than anything else politically, and fundamentally a human being.

“Belonging” to any of those things has been intensely difficult lately, but I still feel the need to have a tribe and not be a “man without a country” when things get tough.

We have to learn to belong, first and foremost, to ourselves.

A black and white portrait of a woman with her eyes digitally smudged out
Photo by Thiago Matos
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Connecting By Disconnecting

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The world feels like it’s exploding.

If you are like me, you are constantly fighting with yourself between staying informed even at the risk of marinating your brain in Sensationalist Hate Broth of social media, and burying yourself in tiny comforts and ignorance until it goes away.

I have my own opinions of Israel vs. Hamas, and since October 10th I have felt the need to share them as loud as possible. Maybe, just maybe, at the cost of my peace of mind and sanity I could get people to stop being pissy and angry and screaming past each other so that maybe- MAYBE- we could all make sure the violence, madness, and death stops.

Wasn’t gonna happen. There’s room for every voice and opinion on the internet, but social media in particular isn’t built for connection or communication. It’s built for engagement- for keeping us doomscrolling and “interacting” and staring at ads and being on the platform for as long as possible.

Things that make sense don’t help that. Patience, compassion, complexity, and nuance don’t jive with that goal. Anger, rage, hate, pain, and self-righteousness do. After marinating in that hellbroth for way too long on a false hope, I made the call to back off for my own sake. I post for this blog, I answer messages, and (every now and then) I watch funny videos. That’s it.

There’s ways to bring happiness and reason to the world, but screaming on social media sure as shit isn’t one of them. By backing off, you get the brainspace and emotional bandwidth to find them on your own.

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