The joy of becoming a spiritual "chef"

What’s the difference between a “cook” and a “chef”? The crucial difference is one of creativity, curiosity, experimentation and some measure of self-reliance. Note that I didn’t use the word competency. You can be an extraordinary cook, without ever having been a chef. But I’m not sure if terrible cooks can be extraordinary chefs. How can you innovate on scrambled eggs if you struggle to turn on a stove?

Becoming a chef isn’t a credential. Mind you, there are many culinary schools that offer credentials. It’s ultimately an attitude towards life. It’s less about having a specific set of skills, and it’s more about being in the world in a certain way. It’s in the relationship you have with the perceptions disclosed within the space of your mind, and therefore your reality.

Let’s be clear though. There’s nothing wrong with being a cook! Most people train long hours to become decent cooks. Not everyone has the privilege of the time and resources to grow as chefs. Attempting to be a chef is risky and error-prone. It’s often a lot easier to have someone that just tells you what to do all the time. That is, to be a cook rather than a chef.

So why bother trying to relate to the world as a chef? Most food that we consume is mass-produced. Obviously, this sits on a spectrum. It has to be packaged and distributed to conform to the requirements of the widest range of bodies. However, the range of bodies on the planet is profoundly diverse. Two bodies given the same food can exhibit radically different responses to it. If you’re starving or if all you’re eating is “junk” pre-packaged food, eating “healthy” pre-packaged food can be a big improvement. But once you reach some semblance of health and agency, it’s worth getting curious and taking a more proactive approach to your food.

At some point, it’s worth shifting from a “creator” mindset to a “consumer” mindset. In short, it’s worth growing into a “chef”.

How do you know if you’re ready to grow into a chef? Our culture uses “rational” to mean logical. But that’s not what its etymology implies. It comes from the Latin word “rationis”, which means “reckoning, calculation, reason”. That is, “rationality” actually means “ratio”-nality. To be rational is to properly ratio, or proportion, your cognitive faculties. Your time and attention are finite. Progress in the culinary world implies growing into being more rational. For example, if you’ve never sauteed vegetables, attempting to directly grow as a French chef is likely irrational.

It’s also possible that you’re a cook for some cuisines and a chef in others. Learning a new practice is often hard work. Initially, we have to devote a considerable amount of our attention to executing it correctly. Learning to tie your shoelaces can be quite taxing the first time. Over time though, it can become fully autonomous with little conscious awareness.

Finding the right teacher, or set of teachers can be invaluable. A teacher that helped you grow into a wonderful cook might be a bad fit for helping you become a chef. And vice versa. This is totally okay! We need to be prepared to engage in some trial and error, to find a good fit.

What if you’re currently learning to be a cook? It can be really helpful to tell your teacher that someday, you’d like to spread your wings and become a chef. If they think that becoming a chef is ridiculous, that’s possibly a red flag. If their response is hand-wavy, that isn’t necessarily a red flag. Perhaps the dynamic between you and your teacher precludes such a conversation from taking place. If so, exploring the dynamic itself can be quite informative.

The transition from cook to chef is more about a way of being, rather than any particular skills. It’s about a specific attitude and relationship to life. Some key markers of a chef are curiosity, creativity, experimentation and self-reliance. Although not all curious, creative, experimental and self-reliant people can be said to be chefs.

To become a chef, we might have to grow more self-reliance than we’re used to. It might necessitate an evolution between yourself and the culinary institution that you’re a part of. Institutions can be a powerful and sometimes necessary vehicle to take specific innovative experiences produced by a chef, and to attempt to systematize them for the masses. In terms of reliability, relying on “enlightened” chefs to transmit knowledge across the ages can be flaky. They might lose interest, get sick, grow old, die, etc. There’s a reason for the recurring pattern of an exceptional chef experiencing a profound insight, and for it to get systematized and conceptualized into dogma over the ages.

The average human institution is vulnerable to self-deception because the average human is vulnerable to self-deception. All teachers, if they appear and function as human, are vulnerable to functionally behaving in a self-deceptive way.

My journey definitely started out as a cook. When I was growing up, I didn’t really know many chefs. The whole enterprise was perceived as being sort of murky and risky. However, there was a clear path towards becoming an excellent cook. Each educational institution seemed to provide a clear trajectory of development to grow as a cook. But in 2019, I experienced a horrendous burnout. Until that point, I’d believed that if I merely worked hard and gained the competency to cook a checklist of the best dishes in the world, I’d be happy. More importantly, I’d be satisfied and wouldn’t want anything else. As luck would have it, I achieved my goal. I was still deeply dissatisfied. But I’d already cooked the best dishes in the world. I didn’t know what else to do. Depression was a natural progression.

Eventually, I stumbled my way into a kitchen in San Francisco that introduced me to a totally alien way of cooking my food. The meals I prepared brought me so much peace and contentment. I’d never felt anything like that before. I resolved to sprint up this spiral staircase upwards into perfection. I studied and practiced with all the right effort. I dreamed of being able to cook the “perfect” dish on demand. I wanted to be so good that someday I’d be able to reliably cook perfection independent of the ingredients, tools, etc at my disposal. I learned all kinds of complicated philosophies around cooking. I studied with lots of different masters.

I was definitely making very tangible progress towards such perfection. I could see it in the way my relationship to my food evolved. Yet it always seemed so far away. Or rather, when I was especially far away from it, having this goal was extremely useful to organize my efforts. It created a natural curriculum for my life. But it was like an asymptote. That is, something that I could increasingly get closer and closer to, but never reach.

I made lots of incredible friends, and met many inspirational people along the way. I noticed that they often had one or more of three motivations. 

Firstly, they wanted to be in community with other people. Living in a big city like NYC, it can be challenging to be in a community with well-meaning peers. 

Secondly, they wanted to work on projects together with other like-minded people. It can be really great to build something together with people that share your values. 

Finally, there were some people that just really wanted to know what food was all about. They’d often tasted something transcendental in the past and wanted more of it. In many cases, this transcendental experience totally changed their life for the better. Often, they had a deep yearning for every person on the planet to taste something so profound.

I’ve definitely had phases across all motivations, often in some combination. Over time, I came to believe that such motivations are in some sense the “wrong question to ask”. Some mysteries can never be fully illuminated. Often, the best case outcome is the opportunity to participate with the mystery and its gradual disclosure. I’ve reached a place where I just want to cook and create for the sake of creation, in a way that hopefully helps other people. I aspire to view each moment of my life via a lens of creativity and curiosity. To view each moment as an opportunity to regain balance. The last few months have been a profoundly peaceful and liberating experience. I hope all of you get a chance to taste something like it too.