As undergraduate art students are taught, it is necessary to limit the scope of the work they are doing in order to be able to accomplish a reasonably well finished piece of art.  To start out with the idea of making a painting is too overwhelming.  A painter needs to start out at least with an idea of the type of painting he or she wants to make, in order to limit the number of choices to be made during the painting.  Is the painting to be representational, or abstract?  Should it be of a small detail, or of a grand view?  From life, or from the artist’s imagination?  The number of options can be daunting.  Thus it is helpful for an artist to limit his or her scope before beginning so as to be able to explore a theme, such as abstraction or life drawings, more fully.

So, too, with cooking.  The minimalist food writer Mark Bittman, author of “How to Cook Everything,” has published a new cookbook entitled “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.”  When asked how whether or not it was too limiting for him to cook only with vegetables, he replied by quoting a vegan Japanese chef with whom he knew.  “It’s like pen and ink; You limit things so that you can explore the universe of them more completely,” he explained were words that inspired him and described his vegetarian cooking experiences.  Once he limited himself to cooking vegetables, Bittman said that he was surprised at the range of things he could make, and the new ways he found for eating certain foods.  “What really freaked me out was how many things I could do with whole grains,” he said.

To cook only vegetarian food can be a limitation, especially if one is used to cooking meat.  The majority of cook books on the market include meat.  However, according to Bittman, we can find a new universe of food and eating if we take the step of limiting ourselves to vegetables and grains.  So, it is helpful to look at vegetarian cooking as an interesting experiment, and one that is better for us and for our environment.

It is also, when compared with meat cooking, something like an art.  For many people, meat makes everything taste good.  It is more of a challenge to cook without meat because of this.  However, sometimes in cooking, as in art, limitations can actually expand our ability to do work and be creative.  With all ingredients on the table, to come up with something creative is harder when the variety of ingredients is greater.  Some of the most innovative and delicious recipes are also the simplest.  By getting rid of meat, we open ourselves up to the possibility of creating some truly delicious dishes, rather than meals that simply satisfy our basic desires for fat and protein.  We also have good reason to take on this kind of limitation, as Bittman points out, because when we actually pay attention the industrial method of raising meat is so disgusting when.

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If even plants are not vegetarian, then how can people refuse to eat meat?  The question really isn’t how, but why.  Actually, the problem extends much beyond carnivorous plants.  Many animals eat each other.  Cats and dogs are fuzzy and cute, but make no mistake that they are killers.  Their ancestors, anyway, actually hunted, killed, and ate other animals to feed themselves.  Most of our ancestors, for that matter, killed animals for food.  So why do so many people make the choice to give up something that so many other animals do instinctively?

Given these facts, and given the fact that we seem naturally inclined to like animal flesh, there would seem to be no reason in nature for giving up the eating of other animals.  However, most people recoil in horror at the idea of eating other people, when in reality, other people are no fundamentally, physically different from other animals.  Humans are made of the same organic compounds, the same proteins, minerals, and molecules as are the bodies of other animals.  And it strikes many people as perfectly normal to eat a cow’s or a pig’s flesh even though that flesh side by side with human flesh is nearly identical.

If cows or pigs looked like humans, it seems doubtful whether people would still feel so inclined to eat them.  So, why do people continue to consume animals when they really are so similar to us?

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Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

© Mary Oliver.

This poem is about how one can feel less lonely as an individual on the planet.  Mary Oliver is writing about ego and about the fact that it is not as hard as we think to let go of our egos.  All one has to do is “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

The philosopher Socrates, as transcribed by Plato, claimed not to be a thinker, or one who produces thoughts.  He stated that he was merely a midwife of ideas, bringing them into this world.  To him, the thoughts that he had – and his were quite refined – were not even really his.  He was not even the mother of the ideas, but just the one who helped the mother, whoever she may be, let the ideas out.

One could interpret this to mean that he saw himself as the midwife to other people’s thoughts, because, in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates was the devil’s advocate, interlocutor, and instigator of other people’s thoughts.  However, it is also possible to interpret this utterance as referring to Socrates’ own thoughts as well.  He, the thinker of his thoughts, was not even the mother of his own ideas.

By calling himself the midwife, Socrates put himself to the side of the thinking process, and the end of this maneuver was not humility before other people.  He was not hiding or denigrating his brilliance from other people.  His purpose was to illuminate a new way of looking at our thoughts; to introduce a detachment from the thinking process in order to free us from the constraints of our egos.

The effect of Socrates’ analogy today is to remind us that we are not alone with our thoughts in a world of others who cannot or will not share our ideas.  We are part of a process that is larger than the individual, which goes beyond ourselves.  Like the great philosopher Socrates, we let our minds bring forth ideas like a midwife assists the birthing of children, and like the subject of Mary Oliver’s poem, Geese, our bodies love what they do apart from our direction, like animals acting on mysterious motives.

With this conception of our bodies – of desire, fear, hunger, and even love – we can have compassion for ourselves, for our emotions, as we would for a soft, wayward animal.  When we think of ourselves as midwives of ideas, we can separate from the fear of being wrong, and from the need to convince others that we are right.  Reminding ourselves that our bodies, our emotions, are animals, soft and vulnerable, helps us to have compassion for our hurt feelings, our lonely feelings, and the feelings that we cannot control.  It reminds us to give ourselves and our feelings the protection that we need.

When we detach in this way, we can not only learn to care for ourselves, and to think freely and without fear; we are reminded that we are both less critically important and greater than we had ever thought.  We are not alone, but, “in a family of things.”  Yet our thoughts and our feelings come from something other than our own will, the thing we think of as “I,” our egos.  They happen to us, or through us, as the birthing of a child; as does love.   These things that we had always thought of as the qualities that define us, that make us who we are as solitary individuals in the world, are just as much parts of that world as they are of us.  Every time we think or feel, we are performing an act that connects us with the totality of existence.  Our thoughts and feelings give us a place in “the family of things,” just as a fox has a place in a food chain, and a plant is dependent on weather, other plants, and invisible microbes for its existence.

When we remember to think of ourselves as animals, we can learn to feel safer in our places in the world, and to have compassion for ourselves, which are just as much ours as they are like soft animals, which do not come from us, and do not answer to us.

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I have been a vegetarian off and on for years and I have often struggled to find ways to prepare food that is healthy, vegetarian, and delicious.  It is not easy to find cooking methods that accomplish all of the above.  Most European cooking uses meat to some degree, even if it is just little bits for flavor, or if it forms the basis of a stock or broth.  I have tried to duplicate a lot of European dishes without using the meat, with varying results.  Pasta can be made quite tasty without meat, although I don’t want to eat too much pasta because I don’t think it’s that healthy.  I know people who have developed type II diabetes, and pasta is one of the foods that they need to avoid, since it is so rich in carbohydrates.  I try to add lots of vegetables to the sauce, so that I’m not eating so much pasta.  Then again, I can only eat so much pasta before I get tired of it!

Soup and stew are good options to incorporate other grains and beans.  Traditionally these things are made with meat, or with stock made from bones, which add richness and flavor.  Cooking vegetables for a long time, and adding fresh herbs at the end of cooking can increase the flavor of vegetarian dishes.  I usually don’t think that these preparations stand up to traditional meat stews and soups.  Besides, in the middle of summer I don’t want to spend that much time cooking a soup, and I don’t even really want to eat soup when the weather is hot.

I have experimented with many different types of cooking, from Chinese to Mexican, and a lot of the non-European cuisines have something to offer in terms of flavor.  However, none comes close to the variety and depth of flavor that Indian cooking achieves.  Indians have been blessed with a long history of agriculture and trade, and by the fact that the Indian sub-continent seems to have produced an astounding array of edible plants, including a barrage of spices and flavorings.  What’s more, Indians have a long tradition of vegetarianism, and so have developed a number of techniques for developing flavor without meat.

The sheer variety of spices alone accounts for a wide range of possible flavors using only vegetables, grains, and beans.  Among the techniques used by Indian cooks regarding spices are frying, roasting, using whole spices, and adding raw spices at the end of cooking.  If spices, such as cumin and black mustard seeds, are fried before other ingredients are added to the oil, their flavor increases dramatically.  They also develop nutty, caramelized flavors, similar to flavors that come from searing meat in European cooking.  Spices can also be dry roasted by swirling or stirring them in a small pot or pan over medium to medium-low heat until they have darkened and release their aromas.  This is the technique used to make spice mixes like garam masala.  It is for this reason that I have found that the garam masala I make at home has a much better flavor than store-bought, packaged garam masala.  Usually, commercially produced spice mixes are not roasted.  Once roasted, spices can be added to foods at the end of cooking, and their flavor will still be intense.  Another method that Indian cooking uses to create strong flavors from spices is by mixing ground spices with water, adding this paste to hot oil, and cooking the spices.  This way, the spices do not get as hot, so the flavors are not as intense.  On the other hand, it is easier to keep the spices from burning.

There are many other ingredients used in Indian cooking that make it unique and delicious.  Without the base of spices Indian cooking would not be nearly what it is.  One thing that is helpful with regard to Indian cooking is that, since the flavors are strong and there are so many ingredients, it is possible to incorporate many different types of vegetables and grains into Indian recipes.  Indian cuisine is very acquisitive.  After all, some of the most common ingredients of Indian cooking, such as tomatoes, potatoes, and chili peppers, are not native to Asia at all, but only arrived through exploration of the Americas.  It is apparent that Indian cuisine and recipes are open to new additions and to experimentation, making it ideal for people who like to cook vegetarian, but don’t want to simply subtract the meat from traditional meat recipes.

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