On Volume 62 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, Corby Kummer discusses his book The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes and the movement that encourages the preservation of local varieties of foods and the crafts used for preparing them. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Steven Shapin reviews a book written by a man who spent time learning some of those arts. In “When Men Started Doing It,” Shapin describes how the book, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford, is different from other recent books about chefs and cooking. He also accounts for the wanderlust that drove Buford to quit his job at The New Yorker in order to become an apprentice to various chefs and ‘food artisans’ in Manhattan and Italy.
Shapin writes: “Buford is a romantic, and what’s gone wrong with the modern world — as he sees it — is the commodification of food and the loss of skill in making and preparing it: not knowing what’s at the end of your fork but especially not knowing how to make it, not knowing how to use your hands and your senses. Having spent his working life making intellectual artistic judgments, Buford wanted to be able to make sensory artisanal judgments: how much pressure to apply to the point of a very sharp knife when separating the muscles of a cow’s thigh, and to the ends of a matterello when rolling out pasta for ravioli, how to gauge the proper resilience of dough, how to touch grilled meat to tell its degree of doneness, how to hear when the risotto needs more broth, how to smell when the fish is cooked, how to tell by sight alone whether the meat is good, how to taste on the roof of your mouth the difference between grass-fed and grain-finished beef, how the polenta looks when it’s ready and how to judge when it doesn’t need stirring. . . . What he wanted was to be a very good cook, a cook who was the steward of vanishing artisanal traditions: ‘I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human’ — where more human is understood to mean less modern.”
Related reading and listening
- Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
- A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
- Honoring the pigness of pigs — FROM VOL. 137 Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
- Making peace with the land — Fred Bahnson challenges us to consider how we might honor our created and redeemed relationship with the earth as God’s stewards. (48 minutes)
- Living in a meshwork world — Theologian Norma Wirzba believes that Creation is the “material manifestation of God’s love” and that this fundamental teaching affects everything, especially our understanding of the meaning of modern environmental crises and climate change. (17 minutes)
- Beer brewing and monasticism — Fr. Andrew Bushell talks about why and how he became a brewer and about the intertwined history of brewing and monasticism. (28 minutes)
- Carelessly invoking “science” in the pandemic — Historian of science Steven Shapin talks about about how the authority of “science” has been invoked by many political authorities during the pandemic, yet how scientific pursuits are deeply human endeavors. (18 minutes)
- Confronting modernity through farming — Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)
- Rediscovering the Organism: Science and Its Contexts — Philosophers, theologians, historians, and research scientists are interviewed in an effort to describe the interaction of science with other disciplines and with the settings in which science is practiced and exerts its influence. (107 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 113 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven Shapin, Arthur Boers, Christine Pohl, Norman Wirzba, Craig Bartholomew, and David I. Smith
- Bread and the Hungry Soul — Dr. Leon Kass talks about how the activity of eating provides clues for understanding human nature. And Br. Peter Reinhart discusses the art of breadmaking as a metaphor for spiritual life. (72 minutes)
