A Line Cook's Rant About... Cooking

Plucking pheasants, "teledildonic" accoutrements, and the other problem with UPFs.

“One day the day will come when the day won’t come”

Paul Virilio, Open Sky

“Something is happening here but you don't know what it is…”

Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

Much to my ongoing culinary shame, I’ve never plucked a bird. Not a pheasant, grouse, chicken, not even a measly quail. And the reason I’ve never done so is largely due to one unpleasant bicycle ride in 2016.

I was in the final months of culinary school, well past the point we’d started the “advanced” part of the course. This basically meant that instead of making shortcrust pastry tarts week after week, we’d started obsessing about puff pastry, consommé, and the intricacies of a rabbit’s anatomy.

One advanced term morning, I was coming to the end of my cycle to school, the same one I’d been taking for 8 months without bother. This morning, however, having extended my arm to indicate off a main road, I lost my balance entirely. I don’t know if I’d hit a rock or a pothole, but my front wheel began thrashing left to right. Before I knew it, the top of my head had hit the tarmac and my bike was on top of me.

My right hand was covered in blood by the time I got back to my feet. A chunk of my index finger, going far deeper than looked healthy, had been torn right off. And I remain certain the fact I had a helmet on means I’m here to tell you about it. Luckily, all I had to suffer was a heavily bandaged hand, and absence from the school kitchen for the week.

The week the rest of my class would spend learning how to pluck game birds.

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There’s a book that decorates the kitchens of most Finnish families called Kotiruoka. “Kotiruoka” means “home food” in Finnish, and the book is a bible for the Finnish home cook full of recipes, nutrition advice, and techniques. It was first published in 1908 and is updated every few years to reflect modern trends and tastes. The slightly dated edition on my bookshelf, for example, includes a few pages on that most exciting of modern conveniences: the microwave. I’d wager the most recent edition has a few things to add about air fryers.

My mother-in-law, however, has much older editions. In her yellowing, dog-eared copies stained with drops of melted butter and splashes of tomato sauce, you’re more likely to find guidance on skinning rabbits than how to make sense of that bread maker you never use. My wife is even certain she can recall an edition that offers advice on trapping and killing wood pigeons.

Reading these old books leaves me feeling that what passes for “knowing how to cook” has changed increasingly decade after decade. I wonder, up against a Finnish home cook in 1908 who could skin rabbits and fashion traps for game birds let alone pluck them, do I really “know how to cook”? At the very least, what passes for what we call cooking today is increasingly distanced not just from traditional skills, but, in being so, distanced from nature itself.

Kotiruoka… Home cooking

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My wife’s family name is Koivumäki. Like many Finnish surnames it refers to something from the natural world. Koivu means birch, mäki means hill. But there’s another level to the name’s meaning for our family. Koivumäki is also a place. It isn’t somewhere you’d find on a map. In fact, it’s nothing more than a small plot of land on which, as you’d guess, a small mound and a birch tree can be found. And a few years ago, not long after we moved to Finland, my father-in-law drove us to this place, to Koivumäki.

There is a small cottage at Koivumäki. A cottage my father-in-law lived in when he was a little boy. A cottage one of his own ancestors built. At one point my father-in-law, a quiet man whose emotions are not easily read, turned to me and walked me to a tree beside the cottage. He pointed out some dull metal pellets lodged in the bark. They were bullets from a rifle shot by his uncle probably 60 years ago. He turned at that point and, in his soft but clear English, spoke of the good memories he had of the place.

As an immigrant far from home, and someone who moved from house to house a great deal as a boy, I found this connection to place deeply moving. And, as I walked my son, just 2 at the time, around the hill and tree that the family generations ago decided to take for their name, I felt grateful that he, the youngest of the Koivumäkis, had seen this place as well. That he had become part of its story also.

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I’m not someone who easily relaxes. Most days I’ll have something gnawing away at the back of my head trying to convince me I am supposed to feel worried about it. I hate it, but I’m also a victim of the modern compulsion for real-time updates and scrolling and, yes, the checking of newsletter statistics.

But I had a blissful moment at midsummer the other week, laying in a hammock, the sound of my kids playing and wind through the birch leaves the only thing I could hear. We were at our family summer cottage, phones barely getting signal. It felt as though we could have been at the end of the earth. And I felt entirely at ease.

It is at this cottage that I get the chance to be closest to nature. We catch pike and perch using old wire fishing boxes, the biggest, most mature, of which we gut and fillet and cook for dinner. We forage for mushrooms in the forest. We cook over open flames under the fire-orange sun of long Finnish summer evenings. In doing so, we contend with the mosquitoes, the ticks, even the squirrels forever trying to take all the wild strawberries for themselves. This opportunity to get closer to nature is really a chance to get away from modern life. Away from news, notifications, and apps that are less tools to me now than extensions of my own being. Away from convenience as well. Though disempowered at these times, I realise how little that kind of empowerment really means to me. And how deeply happy I am to find moments away from it.

Finnish people are said to enjoy a close relationship with nature. It is one of the reasons the country has been named happiest in the world in recent years. Personally, this closeness to nature is a reminder I am far more one with that damn, strawberry-stealing squirrel than separate from it. A reminder that, for all my modern anxieties and fears of change, my story is linked to a natural world that goes back infinitely and unchanged into the past. Being close to nature, understanding I am part of it, makes me feel protected. Protected by being a part of this old and ongoing story. And when I must return to modern life, cooking is what takes me back to it. I think this is why I love to cook so much, and why it is so good for me. Not just the nutritional element, not just being able to cook fresh vegetables and so on, but the reminder I am part of nature. The act of taking a fish from the water or mushroom from the ground different only in degree, not kind, to brining that fish or frying that mushroom. I no longer need to build my own shelter as the first of the Koivumäki family did. I don’t need to fashion my own clothing. I don’t even need to skin a rabbit or pluck a pheasant. I can rely on so much technology to satisfy my basic animal needs, to the point I feel closer to my phone than than the natural world most of the time. But I can cook every day. And, in as much, I can connect to what makes me a part of nature, a part of the land, every day as well.

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One of the lamentably few things I can remember from my MA studies are the opening words of a small book of cultural theory called Open Sky by the writer Paul Virilio. Though written in 1997, a good decade before the internet started to really impact our lives on a persistently existential level, Virilio argues that modern technology has begun fundamentally changing our relationship with time, space, and even our own identities. He suggests, rather bleakly, that instant communication technologies and the increased speed of transport have divorced us from both physical reality and a true appreciation of the present.

Virilio’s text includes some pretty out-there technology concerns. One example is the loss of in-person sex in place of some manner of tele-sex he describes using suits equipped with “biocybernetic (teledildonic) accoutrements”.

“Teledildonic”, dear reader. Your new word for the day.

A new “ecology” emerges from his critique. An ecology that doesn’t just protect the environment, but protects us as well through scrutiny of new technologies and the impact they might have on us before being implemented.

It is because of this element of Open Sky, I mean the stuff about our ability to connect with “the real” as opposed to the internet dildo stuff, that I thought of the book recently.

The most affecting and eye-opening book I’ve read on the impact of ultra-processed foods and a food system that encourages us to cook as little as possible is The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson. One of the most remarkable things I took from Wilson’s book was the suggestion that, though we know UPFs are having a negative impact on our health, we aren’t entirely sure how this is so¹. The way UPFs have become an increasingly difficult source of “nutrition” to avoid, reminded me of how technology, much to Virilio’s concern, had been forcibly made a part of our lives despite its, in his view at least, damaging effects.

And why wouldn’t it be similar? Food technology is far more important to us than whatever new capital-generator Meta, Google or Chat GPT inflict on us. But, just as Virilio’s new ecology wasn’t focussed just on the environment, nor do I think the problem with UPFs is entirely nutritional. It is something intangible as well. I’m not sure what the word is to describe that intangible thing. Maybe the word is spiritual. Maybe, though I imply no religious element, I mean divine. Maybe it is just psychological. Whatever the word is, I mean to suggest that the prevalence of UPFs, the drive by a modern food system that pushes us further from cooking for ourselves, pushes us further from one of our few truly natural (and animal) daily acts. An act that ties us to a product of the earth. A product that lived, and grew, and will help us grow in turn.

Cooking, be it as animalistic as the skinning of a rabbit, or as refined as the brunoise-ing of an onion with a Damascus steel knife, is an act that ties us to nature. I think to lose that tie, be it personally for those who are physically able to cook, or broadly within our communities by sharing the act with those who cannot, is as damaging as the effects any UPF might have on our delicate animal bodies.

Maybe we’re too far gone. Maybe the productivity bros are right and time cooking is better spent on that side hustle they keep telling me to pursue. Maybe, 100 years hence, armed with our drone deliveries, and Soylent Huel, and bipedal Thermomixes that do the dishes and are considered legitimate objects of romance within a particularly disagreeable section of society, we’ll think of chopping onions and simmering our own sauce as ludicrous an endeavour as skinning a rabbit and catching wood pigeons.

Inevitable as it may be, something profound will have been lost when that day comes.

Koivumäki

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1. Wilson, Bee, The Way We Eat Now, p110