Knowing is always bound up in one way or another with the world: a person does not leave their environment to know, even when she is dealing with the most abstract of propositions. Nor does she stop in order to know: she continues.
—Harris 2007, 1; emphasis in original
Recent authors have drawn on reflections on cooking, and reflections while cooking, as a way of capturing life histories, gender relations and gender performances, social change, and political struggle. And in these pages I have suggested some of the ways that cooking helps us understand otherwise submerged gender conflicts and hierarchies within matrilocal families, for example. I have described how watching cooking shows, or simply making moussaka with a little less butter, can index ongoing debates about the existential value of living life “traditionally” or in a “modern” fashion, or finding ways to combine the two. And I have suggested here, and elaborated elsewhere (Vournelis and Sutton 2012), some of the ways that the contemporary political and economic crisis can be read through cooking and through food practices more generally.
But to conclude that cooking provides only a good “window” onto other topics of importance would be to miss my central point: cooking is valued by Kalymnian men and women in and of itself, because taste matters. For Kalymnians, and presumably not only Kalymnians, cooking is an everyday, significant practice that generates so much discourse precisely because it matters. And it is in an attempt to distill some of this significance that I have focused my analysis on understanding the ways that cooking takes place as an interaction among humans, tools, and a larger social and material environment, as well as the ways that embodied skills and knowledges are reproduced and transformed in the course of this repetitive, everyday practice. Cooking, like knowing, is “bound up with the world,” as Mark Harris puts it. What Harris says for “knowing” in the epigraph to this chapter applies to cooking as well: one doesn’t cook by stopping what one is doing; rather, one continues. In this concluding chapter I take another look at some of the questions I’ve raised along the way, and in particular “What is cooking?” (in both senses of the phrase).
Before getting to “what is cooking,” let me briefly return to the question raised in the introduction about the so-called “agency of objects” related to food and cooking. In discussing cooking tools, I have shown the ways that Kalymnians experience the distributed agency of rolling pins, can openers, and outdoor ovens, among other things. Distributed agency, the recognition of the crucial role of these tools in producing certain kinds of actions and results, is clearly displayed in many examples in which Kalymnians described their relationship with tools. It is there in Katerina’s explanation, given in the medial-passive voice, in which neither subject nor object is fully responsible for an action. It is there in the claim by Georgia Vourneli and her mother that “the thin rolling pin and the dough wrapped around it is good for making thin phyllo.” And this is indeed the point: that distributed agency is not a foreign concept to Kalymnians, it flows from an experience in which tools are embedded in a particular materio-social environment, not—or at least not for the most part—objectified and commodified. It is also an environment that, Kalymnians recognize, can actively aid or thwart our intentions, and that we must adjust to, as Katerina did by modifying the can after she had created risky spikes that “could cut your hand.” And there is something in the Kalymnian way of cutting vegetables that recognizes such reciprocity and distributed agency as well—or, as longtime colleague Laurie Hart put it to me, “There is something dialogic about holding that onion in your hand, maybe feeling its resistance with a dull knife as opposed to putting it on a board and using your sabatier.”
At a conference I attended on material objects and the senses when I was just beginning to think about this project, I was struck by the question raised by one of the participants: “What does food want?”1 Personification is, of course, a much discussed and debated trope in anthropology, and we find it as much in movies about non-Western “others”—such as Like Water for Chocolate, in which the protagonist could quite literally cook her emotions into her dishes—as we do in U.S. advertisements with dancing cereal and Keebler elves. The question “What does food want?” puts me in mind of the advertisements for Starkist from the 1970s featuring the talking tuna named Charlie, who was always trying to show that he had “good taste,” only to be informed, “Starkist doesn’t want tuna with good taste, Starkist wants tuna that tastes good.” The idea of a fish that wanted to be eaten always puzzled me as a child. In the more cynical but perhaps realistic present times we are offered no Charlies; instead, a campaign for fast-food chicken sandwich purveyor Chick-Fil-A features cows holding up signs that say “Eat Mor Chikin.” (Apparently communicating cows are as bad at spelling as the company founders.) Indeed, cows do occasionally “protest” the horrendous conditions of contemporary slaughterhouses by attempting a “break-out.”2 But what of ingredients lacking a brain and central nervous system? No doubt they too encourage or discourage their own consumption—by humans among others—through the variety of flavors, colors, and other sensory impressions they offer. When these are wedded to human agencies and intentionalities we have powerful possibilities for either the “enchantment” of well-executed “culinary traps” (Adapon 2008, 38ff.) or “surprise acts of betrayal” (Janeja 2010, 164). All of this makes cooking not simply a burden or a creative act, but deeply “hazardous collaborative work” (Janeja 2010, 164). This is true, as I’ve shown, not just regarding special dishes or the kind of “dense objects” (Weiner 1994) that act as inalienable possessions of families and groups—such as the Kalymnian outdoor ovens—but also regarding the more mundane dishes and ordinary tools, anonymous knives, rolling pins, can openers, and the like, that we find participating in the daily struggles of Kalymnians as they work both to reproduce and sometimes to alter familiar flavors.
The point, for me, of these reflections is not to reach an ultimate solution to the question of the ontological status of nonhuman animals and other edibles (much less the so-called inanimate objects that go into making kitchen tools of various kinds). Rather, it is to suggest that for Kalymnians, and no doubt for many others, it makes no sense to think of these as part of a fundamentally different type of story from the anthropological one we have been telling, and thus these things should be a central part of our analyses. In other words, as Bruno Latour nicely puts it, “Toddlers are much more reasonable than humanists: although they recognize the many differences between billiard balls and people, this does not preclude them to follow how their actions are woven into the same stories” (2007, 76 n. 88; emphasis in original). If we treat food, taste, and cooking tools, then, not as some rhetorical flourish to liven up ethnographic writing, but as equally central to understanding the ways that people are living, reproducing, and transforming their everyday lives, we will, I think, see a whole new analytical terrain open before us.
FIGURE 15. Katerina Miha making coffee for her mother and father. While not a fan of Greek coffee herself, Katerina often makes it for her parents, who describe her as an “expert” in the art (2014). Photo by author.
Katerina (no longer referred to as Little Katerina by the family) was clearly more confident than ever in her cooking abilities by 2012. Her brother Vasilis had declared her pastitsio superior to their mother’s.3 And Katina talked of her daughter’s abilities to make “new” dishes like sautéed vegetables and ham or sausage with rice and curry, and was clearly impressed. In the short video “Little Katerina Describing a New Dish” (see video example 11) you can see her talking about how she puts together the ingredients.
She recognizes the possibility of using prepared frozen vegetables from the supermarket, but insists that she doesn’t do this, she cuts everything by hand. She also recognizes other possible procedures, such as cooking the rice and vegetables separately and then combining them afterward. As we saw with Nina and Polykseni, each cooking decision is taken against a background of other possible practices. Also notice that when describing stirring and other procedures, she makes the hand gestures that she imagines doing when actually preparing the dish, once again making the recipe transmission process a multisensory experience. I was curious about the origins of this dish, which didn’t sound like anything I had seen on Kalymnos before. I thought, when her mother had first mentioned it, that it was perhaps something she had learned on television. In fact, she told me that she had learned it from her brother’s wife. And where had her brother’s wife learned it? From her mother. And where had her mother learned it? She thought it was from one of her sons who works as a chef in a hotel restaurant on Kos. Horizontal knowledge increasingly makes inroads into the more “traditional” base of Kalymnian recipes.
Since I had by this time put up some of my videos on YouTube, I showed a few to Katerina.4 As soon as she started watching the video of herself making a salad from four and a half years earlier, she said, “I remember this. I said that the salt should go directly on the tomatoes, but my dad said it didn’t matter. But I was right, I heard someone saying the same thing on TV recently. Even though I was little, I figured it out!” The fact that she remembered this—before it came up on the video—was certainly impressive in itself.5 She was clearly pleased that she had come up with this technique (she claimed, in retrospect, to have thought of it by herself) and had later been vindicated by the authority of a television chef. More important, perhaps, this incident suggests that Katerina has learned that it is such small techniques or “tricks” that are seen to make up a significant part of the domain of cooking knowledge on Kalymnos.6
I asked Katerina what would happen if she had a job when she got married—would her husband cook? She said, “No! If I can’t cook in the morning, I’ll cook when I get home or the night before.” She also responded in the negative to my question about whether cooking was men’s work. After thinking about it for a bit, however, she added, “If he wants to and knows how, well, I don’t have a problem with that.”
Katerina planned to cook one of her new dishes for the camera. But because I was on Kalymnos only for a short time it was difficult to fit a regular meal into the family schedule (Katerina cooked only when her mother was unavailable to do so). So instead, Katina decided that Katerina could make the sweet that she had been planning to make. The sweet in question was a variation on the dish kadaifi, a concoction made with shredded phyllo dough (store-bought) soaked in sugar syrup and topped with several layers of custardlike cream, frosting, and a final layer of nuts.7 Even though a number of the key ingredients were preprocessed, including the phyllo dough and the custard and frosting (which were made from mixes), this was still a complicated recipe requiring timing and a number of discrete procedures, as Katerina soon found out. As Katerina began the dish, she asked for instruction from Katina since she had never made it (nor many sweets of any kind) before. Soon Katina took over a number of the procedures, leaving small parts for Katerina to do. Once again, it seemed hard for a mother to give up control in the kitchen, even if in this case it was justified by the daughter’s lack of skill and knowledge. The dynamics at play here were mostly in a joking frame. At one point Katina used the phrase, “Who will marry you if you can’t make sweets?” though it was said with a clear humorous inflection. At other moments Katina mitigated any criticism of Katerina by saying that it is through mistakes that you learn, and that in any bakery the helper is always watching and learning from the baker.
Indeed, much of Katina’s instruction focused on how to solve problems, such as how to thicken the custard once Katerina had added the milk all at once instead of slowly while stirring, or how to scrape off the top of the phyllo dough, which had gotten slightly burned in the oven. Katerina herself commented at several points, “Cooking is my specialty, not baking,” and she promised to cook for my camera before I left Kalymnos (unfortunately, we weren’t able to arrange this). Katina also was teaching Katerina about the imprecision of measurement, as Katerina’s questions about how much of one ingredient or another to add were always met with the phrase “eyeball it” (me to mati). Katina’s more serious criticisms of Katerina came invariably in terms of attention: that Katerina was not focused enough on the process at various moments and was instead occupied with music or other frivolities. This once again is a reminder of the key idea that learning skill is an education of attention, as I will emphasize in the next section.
One other interesting lesson that came out of this cooking session was the idea that it was better to cook things at home than to buy them ready-made. Katerina raised this issue after asking her mother how much they had spent on the ingredients for the kadaifi. They made a rough calculation of 7 euros, leading Katerina to compare it to the 2 euros she had paid for a small sweet at the local bakery. Katina added that the bakery sweets were often stale or made from unhealthy, cheap ingredients. But Katerina interrupted, saying that wasn’t the point, that if a whole family wanted to get sweets it would cost you 10 euros and some. This showed the ongoing importance of cooking in the home, as opposed to eating out, and its relation to proper household management, which is tied to Kalymnian female gender identity.8 Indeed, Katina picked up and expanded her daughter’s comment as she was washing the dishes they had used for making the kadaifi. She said that this was one easy way they could save during difficult times.9 Buying sweets from bakeries or fast food was something they would do only for some urgent need so as not to be deprived (yia na mi sterithoume). She expanded on this to suggest that the “younger generation” had been ruined by too much time in coffee shops and that fast food had replaced the ability to make what was needed in the home. She claimed that divorces happened because of this—girls who hadn’t learned housekeeping and “were only for going out—coffee shops and sex. We’re not like Athens with equality, men and women both cooking. It’s expected for the woman to know how.”
This last comment is a good jumping-off point for summarizing some of the main points I have been making about cooking and gender in previous chapters. Kalymnians care deeply about cooking; of all the values expressed in relation to cooking, the most important is the overriding sense that cooking matters, and should be taken seriously. It is perhaps precisely because cooking matters that rumors of its demise tend to be greatly exaggerated: fear of the loss of cooking knowledge seems to go to the heart of Kalymnian concerns about living in the contemporary world while maintaining a respect for tradition. Because cooking is a shared value on Kalymnos, not a demeaning chore as it is seen to be in some cultural contexts,10 it interlinks power—in the sense of influence and prestige—and aesthetic pleasure for those who control it. On Kalymnos nobody—male or female—would dismiss a discussion of cooking, the flavors of food, the sources of ingredients, or the myriad “tricks” that make up the shared or secretly held knowledge of the skilled cook as unimportant or trivial. But cooking may also be a burden in its everyday demands on time and concern. And it is a burden that falls disproportionately on women as part of hegemonic views of gender identity enforced by both women and men in Kalymnian society.11
Katina’s contrast of Kalymnos and Athens is a recognition of this hegemony: women and men, on Kalymnos, are not seen as “equal,” by which she means the same, as she imagines them to be in Athens.12 Thus, if girls do not learn how to cook, they are in some sense at fault in a way that boys are not. Katina’s statement represents the conservative end of an ongoing discourse on gender on Kalymnos and elsewhere in Greece. It is a discourse that, perhaps influenced by the mass media, seems to ignore some of the complexities of the Kalymnian gender system in imagining a “past” male dominance giving way to increasing “equality.” It ignores Kalymnian kinship structures in focusing on the nuclear family rather than the matrilocal couple, which is still common on Kalymnos. It poses the issue of cooking for a new couple purely in terms of whether it is done by the wife or the husband, ignoring the equally likely possibility—as we have seen throughout this book—that cooking will be undertaken by the wife’s mother or even the husband’s mother, regardless of whether the wife is employed outside the home.13 Furthermore, there is irony in claims about the heedlessness of the “younger generation,” considering that, as I have shown, the desire of mothers to teach their daughters (or sons, for that matter) is often fraught with ambivalence and power struggles.
Finally, I have argued throughout this book that cooking is a practice that combines both explicit, conversationally based learning and implicit, embodied skills and training of the senses. While Katerina might not embrace all of the conservatism implied in her mother’s discourse, she has certainly learned many of the unspoken lessons of Kalymnian society, as reflected in her taste for home-cooked food, her desire to make food for her brother and father, and her embodied assumptions about the proper deployment of tools and techniques such as cutting in the hand.
One interesting moment in the making of the kadaifi came when Katerina had left the kitchen and Katina was looking for something to use to crush the nuts for sprinkling on top. Not finding a food processor to hand, she wrapped the nuts in a cloth towel, put them on the counter, and started whacking them with an old pot, saying, “I’ll do it like old times” (san ta palia). When Katerina came back in and saw her mother doing this she started laughing hysterically and went to tell her grandmother what her mother was doing. I interpret this moment as the inverse of the can-opener incident described in chapter 2. Just as Katerina’s grandmother had used an old technique to define herself as “traditional,” the laughter here stemmed from the disjunction between most of the tools they had used in preparing the kadaifi (the handheld electric blender, which Katerina clearly deployed more comfortably than her mother) and this low-tech, “old-fashioned” way of getting things done. Keeping in mind that Katina had always been a supporter of replacing old tools, such as aluminum pots, with new ones, the image of her smashing the nuts with an old pot was particularly incongruous to her daughter. Certain things change, but the idea of women drawing a crucial part of their identity from their kitchen practices has been passed down from grandmother to mother to granddaughter. And Little Katerina has internalized the view that places prime importance on developing cooking skills as part of what is expected of a Kalymnian young woman.14
What, then, makes Kalymnians competent cooks? If my ethnographic approach is valid it is because cooking skills and knowledge are not abstractable and quantifiable but rather embedded in a particular social and technical environment (the kitchen). Cooking skills are exercised, reproduced, and changed in a context in which Kalymnians observe their own and others’ practices, share and hide secrets, praise and criticize procedures and results, and carefully taste, compare, and remember what Kalymnian food should taste like. Thus, as Tim Ingold has argued, a skilled cook, like a skilled practitioner of any sort, “is continually and fluently responsive to perturbations of the perceived environment. . . . This is possible because the practitioner’s bodily movement is, at one and the same time, a movement of attention; because he watches, listens, and feels even as he works. It is this responsiveness that underpins the qualities of care, judgment, and dexterity that are the hallmarks of skilled workmanship” (2001, 135). We have seen the multisensory engagement that is prevalent in Kalymnian kitchens as béchamel is stirred, phyllo dough is rolled, and octopus is seasoned. Kalymnian women, and some men, are skilled cooks to the extent that they have undergone an education of attention that allows them to apply dexterously embedded techniques like cutting in the hand, recognizing that no two potatoes or onions are ever exactly the same. And when some Kalymnian women complain about the younger generation not knowing how to cook, they are expressing concerns specifically about how the younger generation’s attention may have not been educated, but rather distracted by the availability of fast food and the time devoted to Facebook and other activities that lack any clear connection to traditional Kalymnian gender-coded abilities. Discussions of the fate of cooking always take place in the context of some of the key values that I have detailed in this book: following tradition; cooking lighter, healthy food; knowing the origins and provenience of one’s ingredients; exercising proper exchange and sharing relationships.
Interestingly, Ingold argues that his approach to knowledge stands in opposition to those who see knowledge in the form of recipes for action that are essentially separate from action. He criticizes the approach of cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber, who uses the idea of a recipe for Mornay sauce that is transmitted from one brain to another as an instance of the circulation of cultural knowledge, seen as a set of shared representations. Such a view consigns the practice of cooking itself to “the mechanical execution of a predetermined plan” (2001, 135). I’ll return to this phrase in a moment. Between representation and execution, Ingold suggests, lies a yawning gap that can only be filled with the careful, contextual understanding that ethnography provides, and that I have tried to suggest in word and video as Kalymnians navigate their kitchen environment, with full sensory engagement and with an ever-developing set of “tricks” and other embodied (conscious or unconscious) skills.
One other key ingredient in the definition of Kalymnian cooking that I have suggested at different points in this book is the notion that cooking is risky business. Thus, when Katerina (the grandmother) points to the risk of cutting your hand on a can opened with an “old-fashioned” can opener, she is suggesting one tip of what I believe to be a larger concern with a person’s willingness to engage life in a certain manner. The significance of risk as an existential aspect of Greek culture has been explored mostly for men in Michael Herzfeld’s work on sheep theft (1985), Thomas Malaby’s on gambling (2003), and my own on Kalymnian dynamite throwing (1998). The notion that cooking might share some of the same aspects of risk on a more mundane level may seem strange. But in the same way that Kalymnian women slice bread holding it against their chest or that Katerina embraced her dangerous can opener, it is argued that many Greek men attempt to engage, rather than minimize, risk as part of making life meaningful—that in dealing with the “pervasive indeterminacies of experience . . . risk . . . rather than tamed and quantified, is engaged and performed” (Malaby 2003, 21). In other words, there is a “poetics of risk taking” (23) that is very much tied up with Greek notions of personhood, as in Katerina’s meditations on how the “traditional can opener” made her a “traditional person.” And risk need not involve physical danger and the potential risk to life and limb, as in Kalymnian dynamite throwing, to be seen as meaningful. Risk is part of the significant business of Kalymnian cooking whenever someone adds a new ingredient or tries a new technique in order to face the constant challenges posed by the cooking environment, with the risk of failure—a bad meal and attendant comments by family and neighbors—ever-present.15 Indeed, cooking in this sense is like other performances such as magicians’ rituals, in which risk is required “as a precondition for satisfactory performance” (Jones 2011).
In the time that I have been doing research on Kalymnos, a major change has been that risk is not simply attendant on tools, ingredients, or other social challenges (how to feed ten people who show up unexpectedly, for example), but on one’s openness to change and alteration. Katina, for example, told me how she first saw Greek eggplant salad (melitzanosalata, what in the United States is called baba ghanoush) at a restaurant where she went for a wedding celebration. She thought at the time that it looked like vomit. But after seeing it more often, and observing a friend preparing it when she was staying on Rhodes, she started to make it for her family, noting, “We took the risk.” Risk here is seen as a willingness to expand food horizons, to continue learning new ways of preparing the familiar or variations on traditional recipes. But it is also simply an extension of the notion that the skilled cook is always adjusting to circumstances: the availability of ingredients, the desires of different people, the small variations in cooking processes and even changing times, which now include the growth of new sources of knowledge such as the TV cooking shows discussed in chapter 5.
It is the ability to face these different kinds of materio-social variations with dexterity that defines a good Kalymnian cook. In 2012, Katina was telling me about a small alteration she had made to her moussaka that she had been very pleased with. Instead of leaving the béchamel sauce as a layer on top of the rest of the ingredients, she stirred it in so that it pervaded all the layers. She said she had discovered this trick on one occasion when she had made too much béchamel and was afraid it was going to spill out of the pan, so she stirred it to allow some to sink down in the pan. In describing this to me and to her neighbor, she illustrated the stirring motion by grabbing what was nearest to hand, a paintbrush and a roll of tape, and mimicking how she would do it with a real moussaka, reminding me once again of the crucial importance of the visual and kinesthetic elements of learning. The advantage, she said, of this technique was that it allowed the flavor of the béchamel to pervade the entire dish, instead of having the béchamel sit like a “brick” on top of the rest. When I asked if she thought other Kalymnians would adopt her trick, she said, perhaps, “but some people have their own ways of cooking that they stick to out of self-regard (eghoismo), they are not interested in taking a risk to improve their cooking.”
Regardless of whether these Kalymnians exist, Katina’s comment points to the expectation that cooking skill and knowledge will not stand still. As Harris puts it in the epigraph to this chapter, “Nor does she stop in order to know: she continues.” Kalymnian cooking is encapsulated in David Pye’s notion of the “workmanship of risk,” a type of approach to craft that once again stresses the idea that “the quality of the result is not predetermined. but depends on the judgment, dexterity and care that the maker exercises as he works” (1968, 4). Pye usefully contrasts this to what he calls the “workmanship of certainty,” in which the end result is largely predetermined before the process of making begins. It is this contrast, I believe, that goes to the heart of Kalymnian concerns about the replacement of cooking with preprocessed and fast food, a type of preparation that promises exactly the same, standardized product each time. Despite its lack of deep inroads on Kalymnos thus far, the threat of fast food is the threat of replacing the risk that makes skill and embodied knowledge valuable with the certainty of industrial products that are simply the execution of a preset plan.
Certain aspects of high-tech “modernist” cooking that I discussed in the introduction tend in this direction as well, and are equally antithetical to the notion of skill developed here. Sous-vide cooking is an example in which “you have none of the normal sensory cues that a meal is cooking: the smell of garlic sizzling in oil, the blip-blip of risotto in a pot. . . . You set the water bath to the required temperature, vacuum seal the food in the bag, submerge the bags, set the timer, and wait for the bleep. No stirring, no basting, no prodding or tasting. No human input at all” (Wilson 2012, 253–54).16
This is similar to the approach identified with the magazine Cooks Illustrated, which focuses on rigorous testing in lablike conditions and controlling variables to produce recipes such as “the best soft-boiled egg.” Here the point seems to be absolute control of variables so that perfection is guaranteed, as long as you follow the recipe to the letter.17 A profile of Cooks Illustrated founder Chris Kimball in the New York Times Magazine (Halberstadt 2012) was titled with his quotation: “Cooking isn’t creative, and it isn’t easy.” Kimball’s promise to his readers seems to be that he and his staff will do all the trial-and-error work in “America’s test kitchen,” and will provide you with the error-free result. As it is described in his profile, “What the magazine essentially offers its readers is a bargain: if they agree to follow the recipes as written, their cooking will succeed and they will be recognized by family and friends as competent or even expert in the kitchen” (Halberstadt 2012, 68). There is something gendered male about the attempt to define abstract and context-free cooking knowledge that such approaches represent, even if they have circulated as part of U.S. female cooking culture in the form of the food industry’s claims to create “foolproof” mixes for all kinds of culinary staples, recipes that taste the same every time.18
The most theatrical version of this approach is labeled molecular gastronomy, the ultimate in futuristic cooking. Is molecular gastronomy simply a sideshow, designed to appeal to devotees of food television programming or the wealthy patrons of restaurants like elBulli and The Fat Duck, featuring wonders like mustard ice cream? I suggest that the answer is no, that this movement is part of a larger tendency toward abstraction in many areas of contemporary life, from education to Wall Street trading. There is an ongoing struggle between context-situated knowledge and the creation of recipes or algorithms of practice that allow for the reduction of the “risk” that is part of human engagement with the world—or, as James Carrier puts it, “a general desire to replace individual skill, experience, and knowledge of context in decision-making with procedures that are seen as impersonal and objective, the ‘best practice’ of modern management-speak” (2012).19 This is also what culture critic Evgeny Morozov dubs “technological solutionism, or “recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized” (2013, 5). We see these trends in education, for example, in the growth of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which tend once again to project knowledge as product rather than process, and abstract learning even further from the face-to-face contexts in which they have occurred through most of history. I would note that one of the classes that Harvard University plans to offer online is titled “Science and Cooking” (Heller 2013, 13). As one practitioner describes the model for MOOCs (at least so far): “‘to the extent that learning requires some degree of interactivity, that interactivity is channelled into formats that require automated or right-and-wrong answers’” (quoted in Heller 2013, 91). Morozov also discusses a food-related example that he sees as prototypical of technological solutionism: designs for “smart” kitchens that will observe cooks’ movements and inform them “whenever they have deviated from their chosen recipe” (2013, 11). In the name of efficiency, the very joys of cooking represented by a sense of mastery are sacrificed for the presumed improvement in taste.20 On Kalymnos, “right and wrong” is always embedded in a sensory and social context.
But this raises another point: what applies to processes of cooking also applies to “taste” itself. At a time when taste is seemingly becoming ever more rarefied, with the molecular gastronomy or “note-by-note” movement at the forefront of literally separating taste from food and molecularizing it into an object for infinite play and manipulation,21 I have argued throughout this book for an approach to taste that understands it as an experience deeply shaped by culture, history, and memory. As a sensory experience, taste cannot be separated from the panoply of other senses. I would reject the view that taste can be manipulated in the laboratory to produce anything more than the kind of addictive fast food that is the financial silent partner of molecular gastronomy.22 Studying taste on Kalymnos, I am struck by the extent to which it is deeply shaped by not only culture, history, and memory but also locality and a long, tacit practice of enculturation. Instead of seeing taste as an abstract chemical process, I have suggested that it is a central part of Kalymnian social life, as mothers and daughters negotiate whether nutmeg is part of the Kalymnian tastescape, and Kalymnian cooks make decisions about cutting or grating tomatoes, always with the implied input (and watchful judgment) of the larger community. I am thus sympathetic to the view presented by épicier Lev Sercarz, as described in Halberstadt (2013), noting that “when he designed blends for clients, he learned as much as he could about their backgrounds and how they lived. ‘Sometimes I feel like an investigator,’ he said. The things we eat as children haunt us as adults ‘whether we like it or not,’ he added. ‘Some people embrace where they come from, some rebel, but in the end it really doesn’t matter.’” This “haunting” suggests that our senses are deeply tied not only to tacit knowledge but to memories, that memory itself might be seen as a sense.23 But it also reaffirms a key point in my research: that if we want to understand the significance of everyday cooking, we must see it in relation to everyday eating, and the significance placed on the flavor of food. This significance was ever-present for me in my research on Kalymnos.
While binary contrasts are notoriously slippery in contemporary anthropology, it is hard not to see these objectifying trends as representing the opposite of Kalymnian cooking, which, to quote Nomiki Tsaggari, “requires hands” (and all the senses). Most Kalymnians would be on the side of many of the New York Times readers who wrote in to disagree with Cooks Illustrated founder Kimball about what constitutes the essence of cooking. As one reader put it: “I am certain though that any meeting about getting into print the problems of boiling an egg to perfection so misses the point of making that egg. By its very nature cooking is an imperfect pursuit. That we cannot make a dinner for our families and friends without standing under clouds of doomed imperfection says as much about what we actually think we are doing when we cook.”24 Kalymnians, perhaps, would be more at home with Alice Waters’s plea to let local ingredients shine than they would be with any of these high-tech transformations of nature.25 Indeed, when I asked Evdokia Passa, whose restaurant was discussed in chapter 1, whether she saw cooking as essentially art or science, she responded, “Neither: cooking is soul” (to mayeirema einai psihi).26
While I was writing this, I noticed a Facebook post from Evdokia’s husband, Dimitris Roditis, about the exorbitant price of the common sweet-shop cookies kourambiedes (a concoction of butter, flour, and powdered sugar similar to Mexican wedding cookies), something that in the past people would often bring as a gift when visiting, or for someone’s name day. What started out as a comment on the economy, however, soon became a discussion of the essence of kourambiedes in the comment stream that followed. As Dimitris wrote, in response to a friend’s post about his favorite version of the cookie: “Kourambiedes are ONLY my friend Katerina’s version! Anything else is simply the execution of a recipe.” Here the execution of a recipe is seen as essentially antithetical to cooking, lacking all personal touch, emotion, “love,” or embodied skill. When I asked Dimitris about Katerina’s kourambiedes, he wrote back, “Kourambiedes are usually drowned in baking soda and rose water and then topped with fine sugar, so much of it, it looks like Scarface’s wet dream! Katerina makes them small, irregular in size, with butter as the major taste that’s blinking at the cloves and tip-dancing almonds!” I’m still ruminating over this last metaphor, which once again seems to capture the agency of food to influence humans and their social relations.27
I decided to ask Dimitris about an article I had read about Japanese robots, known as mombots, that have been designed to make dishes including sushi, ramen, and omelets (see Daly 2010). I knew that most of my Kalymnian cooks would dismiss such an idea out of hand, just as they are skeptical of the kind of prissy nouvelle cuisine they see on TV, which doesn’t satisfy the tongue or the stomach. I was curious, however, about Dimitris’s reaction because he considers himself a technophile. He had basically single-handedly introduced computers to Kalymnos in the early 1990s, and is a fan of science fiction and cyberpunk in particular. He often complains about the unwillingness of the older generation of Kalymnians to comprehend the significance of the computer revolution, as well as the irrationality of the political system and those who hew too strictly to “tradition.” On the other hand, Dimitris is involved in the running of his wife Evdokia’s restaurant Harry’s Paradise, taking pride in telling me about the careful sourcing of their ingredients such as buying from the small-scale cheese makers on Kalymnos and neighboring islands, seeking out beans grown by an organic cooperative in northern Greece, and using vegetables raised on goat-dung fertilizer by their neighbor. Would mombots represent the wave of the future for Dimitris? I showed him a video of the mombots in action.28 Somewhat to my surprise, Dimitris was horrified by the prospect of eating the product of a mombot. He told me that he found the idea of robot cooks deeply disturbing, at first commenting that a dish is simply not supposed to be the same each time. After reflecting, he added, “Cooking is too much part of our humanity. A robot can’t produce that.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.