Cooking Club

At the risk of seeming like an Anthony Bourdain fan site, I'll start this post with an excerpt from his essay Name Dropping Down Under, from the collection The Nasty Bits. The piece explores possible reasons for the sudden rise in popularity of celebrity chefs in countries like Australia and the US:

As you sit in your lonely apartment, you feel a yearning, a longing for a sense of family, or belonging. Disconnected as you are from roots you still feel ambivalent about, those big family meals in movies are looking strangely good. A vestigial "nesting" impulse takes hold and you find yourself watching Rick or Nigella, thinking "Gee, I wish he were my older brother, or dad, and he was cooking for me." Or "I wish Nigella were my sister, or mom, cooking me that slow-roasted ham..."

This quote resonates with me for several reasons:
1) I am sitting in my lonely apartment.
2) I do feel a longing for a sense of family, or belonging.
3) After my trip to India, I finally started living in my apartment, although I had been sleeping there for over four months. With my parents' help (they accompanied me on my epiphany-inducing journey), I rearranged the furniture, so that a rack of drying laundry no longer blocks the incredible ocean view and a place to sit is available in front of the widescreen TV. I also gave the kitchen a thorough cleaning, so that the stove no longer serves as an appetite suppressant.

The point of this post isn't to whine about sitting alone in my apartment. Instead, I want to announce my goal of starting some type of cooking club on the island. I am not a foodie in the purely hedonistic sense, but rather since I see food as a window into other cultures. In America, I observed how food was often driven by a desire by corporations to maximize profits and a public obsession with minimizing the time, effort, and money required to prepare a meal. In India, I saw the entire cycle of a meal as I rode past farms on the train, accompanied my uncle to the local market, and watched my aunt prepare six-course meals, starting with grinding whole spices into pastes for the curries. In Singapore, I've obtained numerous glimpses into other cultures, such as:
+ eating a home-cooked Chinese meal from one of my coworkers and his apartment-mates (every single Chinese grad student complains about the Singaporean version of their cuisine)
+ going on an "organic tour" of Singapore to visit local farms and eco-friendly eateries (in Mandarin, unfortunately for me)
+ conversing with food bloggers about the local cuisine (which helped inspire me to start this blog)
+ enjoying an exquisite Japanese meal with the head waiter at the nearby Shin Kushiya.
During my last summer at Stanford, a group of six friends and I would cook dinner together every weeknight and I would love to do what I can to start to revive that tradition here in Singapore.

Comments

[john]

brilliant idea on the cooking club. one of the best parts of our summer culinary gang (besides good food and catching up on each others' days) was experiencing the food that each person grew up with, as the majority of the recipes were family ones.

food as culture; the theme continues...