How To Be Good

Sarena Brown

Secret Ingredients Reflection

I especially appreciated Tony Bourdain’s piece, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” in our reading. While this is due in part to being familiar with his work, I also enjoy how he tells stories. I was interested from his first line: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay”. There is so much tension packed into this opening statement. So much privilege and pain. It tells me that every single ingredient has a traumatic past, yet all have the potential to be transformed into something great.

This idea brought me back to a chapter of A Cook’s Tour when Bourdain talked us through the ordeal with the pig. Remember how at first, he was squeamish and guilty, but after seeing what care was put into catching, slaughtering, and preparing the pork, he grew to respect the practice, bringing a new sense of responsibility to the kitchen. I agree with him when he noted that good food, in most cases, is inherently gruesome. A life has to end to create food as a means of sustenance, or indulgence. Any way you slice it, something has to die, and someone has to kill it. When dealing with life, death is inevitable, but both can be done with care. Even when talking about vegetarians, plant life has to be planted and harvested, a process that isn’t always done gently in respects to Mother Earth.

Moreover, I think a good life, like good eats, is inherently traumatic. Nobody gets out alive, or so it goes. And life's challenges bring forth possibilities for change and for new developments. Even if your life is relatively easy (whatever that means), there is pain in being a part of this world, just as there is pain in being born, growing up, and growing old. Andrea Gibson once said this beautifully in one of their poems: “I asked the sun about the big bang. The sun said, it hurts to become”. It all hurts. But on the other side of our pain things will be different. I won’t say better because that word is subjective, but just know it won’t stay the same.

Bourdain ends this piece with a simple sentence, “I have come home”. He describes working in a kitchen as chaos, where you have to wear many hats at once and fly by the seat of your pants. Even in these fast paced scenes, you find a deep sense of camaraderie. You’d have to, working in hot kitchens with tempers running high in close-proximity to one another. I’m happy this piece ends here, at a place of belonging. That is really all we want out of life I think, to find out where home really is.