The Tasteless Chef

I mean…I can taste again, and I’m not really a chef, but I digress. Let me try to explain. Early on I pursued the culinary arts, misguided but gifted. I could taste the nuance as if it was only implied. Little notes of flavor hidden behind something bold or tart, I could almost always pick it out and identify. Drawn by this, my curiosity took over. Untrained, untaught but learning. I entered kitchens briefly, sponging up technique and talent. I found the spaces, toxic, designed for extraction. It fails to hold attention for long. Similar to graffiti in an art museum; for sure, it deserves a pedestal, but that doesn’t make it better, and if anything, it neuters it by taking it out of context. But, we give restaurants carte blanche to define the meaning of food. I could feel it, I understood it, but I didn’t know. I did find footing in my own business; it felt like I could do more with a purpose. We did; it was different and meaningful, but toxic environments are, well, toxic, and I couldn’t escape becoming sick. I left, I built, and lived, and recovered.

When people ask me why I got cancer (oh yeah, squamous cell carcinoma on the right side of my tongue), I tell them it’s ‘cause I talked too much shit and smoked too much grass. If only, right?! I mean, it’s a stupid question and better answered by a priest or mythician. I just know it opened a world of understanding to me, the loss. I mean, I bite my tongue a lot, actually like biting, cutting, bleeding – not holding back my words. I hardly do that, so you’d think that would have informed me of the landscape of my mouth more, and not to wallow in digression but look in your mouth, close your eyes, poke around and look. You don’t know that space with your eyes, hardly even with your fingers, but the tongue. It owns that landscape! In the dark, all alone, the most intimate part of our body, I’d say. So they cut out a 1 cm chunk and sewed that shit back up. Huge cut down my neck removed lots of glands, none of them were cancerous. And I woke up. Groggy, emotional. It took forever to be able to move my tongue freely. Weeks. Then I couldn’t feel that entire side; I’d be eating something and it would disappear from space and flavor. Disconcerting. I healed; my mouth felt again. Taste buds regrew, and I knew myself again — or like the feeling of going back to my high school 20 years later and it still feeling familiar. Wow, this is running on like a sentence. Oh, I remember. My cancer came back! March 2020, what a great year; surgery again but this time followed by platinum-lined chemo and radiation. And boy, does a little radiation change a landscape. Hold on; we’re just getting to the good part.

The thing about learning is it just takes so long. I started on another one of my 40-day journeys (just another way I’m like Christ), and it wasn’t till like day thirty that it got dramatic. I mean, my beard fell out in the shower one day and never grew back, but I mean taste-wise. One day I couldn’t taste sour. I think I must not have noticed when bitterness left, then salty and finally sweet left. That process was very informative, like seeing the layers of flavor in their whole and then watching them be washed away. Those are interesting but more of an amusement when compared with what happened when I lost the thing I thought gave me value and made me special. I learned I was wrong. Being a good taster only makes you good at eating. It was my curiosity and my compassion and my desire to comfort and create space that made me a good cook. I had no taste left, yet I was no less valid, and in that realization, I recognized my arrogance and my tendency to be an asshole. This landscape is littered with swollen egos that need to share their flavors with the guest in exchange for idolization that falsely inflates the ego. What I mean to say is, in the pursuit of creating art, the food is trimmed and blanched and emulsified and even under vacuum, and it is ‘elevated’ to a gastronomic experience of the senses, blah blah blah, yeah, you can pursue that, and I nod my head, I can get there, but I can’t maintain. In this economy you can’t feed a family on that. I don’t have the belief in its value and here’s the part where I tell you what they are missing.

Ego death as a job requirement, (are you even in therapy?)

I see this so-called “elevation of food to art” as a distraction from the potential of food. First off, it’s already pretty magnificent, providing nutrition, becoming a tradition of discovery that is thousands of years old, and a practice of cookery that has been a routine part of living for like forever. You needed to make that better, cool. Alright, I feel like my tone is at the level where I usually make enemies of my friends so let me try this instead. Let’s talk about what is possible. Like all good efforts, it’s not a given; it comes with practice and is discovered by chance. This little moment that we can create. The caring of a tradition that is unique to our species, feeding each other. The pinnacle of cooking is found in the careful and thoughtful creation of space, space for more than the food on the table but what happens over it and because of it. The conversations and the connections of your loved ones. We can make that happen, and when it’s perfect, we use the flavors, smells, the pleasure, the presentation, we use them to remember. They make a moment and a conversation and become a key to a place in our minds that each of us gets to keep for the rest of our lives. A memory that can last for as long as someone from that table is still alive, or longer.

My biggest shame in being a chef is being in someone else’s kitchen and my presence to make them feel lacking. A place where people tend and care for each other to their liking and to their tastes is a valid and beautiful place. I think as a group we should look very closely at ourselves and ask why we bring embarrassment and feelings of unworth into the heart of the home. The celebration of our toxicity hounds us, assholes sell and we’ve sold out. It doesn’t have to end like this. As chefs, if we choose to nurture the young cooks that work under us, choose not to perpetuate problems because we were taught that way. If we go to therapy and work out some of that shit there, imagine the atmosphere we could create in the kitchen, and then give this team of professionals amazing ingredients, find the best, most innovative, and challenging. Find something new and give the next generation a challenge and a safe space to discover and create. The restaurant is dying. We can decide what we replace it with.

My work was centered around connecting with a farmer who lived up in the mountains in rural Utah - he planned to source, harvest and process a heritage breed sheep. My project had to do with film photography with the other artists, and I also went up into the mountains for this harvest. It was my job to stir the blood and I remember how vivid that red was - we tanned the hide and processed the meat, and returned to our camp. Another artist used some of the blood in his screen printing and we shared the meal with everyone.