Food: Zen Cooking
Picture taken by me on Christmas 2007 in Okinawa
Having to use a communal kitchen among an entire dorm, one can expect a lot of confusion and stress. Many people don’t clean up after themselves, waste food, leave pots and pans filthy and encrusted with mystery substances, and scorch pans. Being slightly OCD and also a big food lover, this is like torture for me. Luckily, I found out I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
It turns out keeping a good cooking area and respecting a kitchen–especially a communal one–can relate to Zen studies. As part of a Zen studies course R is taking, he pointed out to me many ways in which one can obtain a Zen mindset even when it comes to cooking. According to Dougen, a famous Zen monk who went all the way to China and came back with these teachings, one should fully respect their cooking spaces and ingredients.
I thought these points make for an interesting read because it essentially revolves around common sense and courtesy:
- Stay focused. If people aren’t focused, their cooking area will be scattered like their minds. Don’t cook haphazardly, running back and forth for your ingredients or other tools. Get what you need ahead of time.
- Follow the Golden Rule. If you follow karma, not washing dishes/cleaning cooking area creates a bad karma cycle and will catch up with you. If one person doesn’t clean their mess, the next person won’t feel obligated to and leave it there, creating more messes until it catches up with the first person.
- Make the best of what’s given to you. This can also apply to being frugal–don’t let anything go to waste, and appreciate what you have.
- Think positive. If you start out with a negative opinion of the food, you will end up with a bad dish because you didn’t think it was worth the effort. Even if your ingredients aren’t so special, appreciate what you have to work with.
- Your food is a reflection of you. If it’s something that’s slapped together, it might say that you can’t be troubled with making something properly for yourself. In other words, you don’t take care of yourself. However, if you take the time to properly make something, it becomes almost a meditative process in which the cooking makes you stop and take your time to clear your mind.
- Take care of your tools, and your tools will take care of you. Treat your pot like your head, treat water that you wash rice with like your blood–Dougen brought back this saying from China. Put utensils down gently and take good care of them. A lot of the pans here in the dorm are scorched simply because people leave them on too high heat, which is something that can be easily prevented if they just watched over their stove tops.
- Be patient with your food. There are so many people who crank up the heat to cook their food faster, or are satisfied with things that are left cold or raw in the middle. Obviously this isn’t very Zen-like, and can be bad for your body, especially when it comes to meat or egg based dishes.
- Think your cooking through. If you know what you’re going to make ahead of time, there will be no need to rush.
I feel like many people taking cooking for granted and abuse the spaces we’ve given here. Last semester people have even resorted to stealing food (of which I’ve also become the victim of.) Why? Just because we’re in college, does it mean we’re given a license to act like 5-year olds? Even the elementary school children I teach English to know how to put back items in their proper place and clean up after their crafts. A lot of people treat cooking for themselves as an inconvenience when they could use it as an outlet to unwind during the day. Next time you find yourself cooking, see if you can’t apply any of Dougen’s observations to your kitchen and take the time to relax and enjoy the process.
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