pheloniusfriar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pheloniusfriar) wrote2015-07-08 12:48 am
pheloniusfriar) wrote2015-07-08 12:48 am
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Into the deep friar
I am starting in on a very, very interesting looking (and free) course from Harvard on the edX platform: "Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science". It is a 10 week course that examines cooking from a scientific perspective: why things do the things they do when we cook. The supposition is that by understanding what the processes are and how they work (individually and together), that we will be able to be more creative, expressive, and successful in the kitchen. Well, as anyone who knows me knows, I love to cook (and eat, let's not forget that) so this sounded right up my alley. The course is given by an applied mathematician, a chemist, and a physicist and features a dozen or so of the most innovative and experienced chefs of our generation. What's not to love? Oh... it has already started (it's three weeks in) and I hadn't had time to even look at it until today, so I watched the introductory video set and went over the syllabus and stuff just now, and none of the assignments or laboratory experiments are due until the end of September, so there's plenty of time to catch up (otherwise I was probably just going to cut my losses and drop it)! What's not to love? Aaaand... when they say experiments, they really mean heading into the kitchen to cook. Week one: make cola; week two: sous vide eggs; week three: make ice cream; week four: hot vanilla flan; week five: ... well, you get the idea. What's not to love, right?
In the introductory video by the chef José Andrés, at the end he is standing in front of a chalkboard with the following quote on it by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
If you want to build a ship, don't gather people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
I had never seen it before, but for whatever reason it really captures something important about the way I approach life and everything I do. A natural critique of the quote is that it's poetic, but won't actually build you a ship (in fact, the critique was made to me when I presented someone with the quote). It's hard to express how I feel exactly, but I made an attempt with the following:
The former makes building a ship a terrible chore and concentrates the creative and technical processes involved to a small handful of people who must use coercion (at least through wages) to make it happen. Perhaps it will have a good chance of resulting in a ship, but to me it is a philosophy of paucity and simply another method of creating power-based relationships. The latter makes the building of a ship an unbridled collective passion and will always bring people together to find a way amongst themselves to accomplish the task. This is predicated on a philosophy of unbounded wealth (not unbounded resources, but it requires a broader definition of wealth than what is generally permitted) where richness comes from experience and the process, rather than material goods and the end product. To be clear, it has been my personal experience in industry and in the arts that this is not all hand waving, naval gazing (pun intended), and good intentions: you will get a ship this way too.
In the introductory video by the chef José Andrés, at the end he is standing in front of a chalkboard with the following quote on it by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
If you want to build a ship, don't gather people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
I had never seen it before, but for whatever reason it really captures something important about the way I approach life and everything I do. A natural critique of the quote is that it's poetic, but won't actually build you a ship (in fact, the critique was made to me when I presented someone with the quote). It's hard to express how I feel exactly, but I made an attempt with the following:
The former makes building a ship a terrible chore and concentrates the creative and technical processes involved to a small handful of people who must use coercion (at least through wages) to make it happen. Perhaps it will have a good chance of resulting in a ship, but to me it is a philosophy of paucity and simply another method of creating power-based relationships. The latter makes the building of a ship an unbridled collective passion and will always bring people together to find a way amongst themselves to accomplish the task. This is predicated on a philosophy of unbounded wealth (not unbounded resources, but it requires a broader definition of wealth than what is generally permitted) where richness comes from experience and the process, rather than material goods and the end product. To be clear, it has been my personal experience in industry and in the arts that this is not all hand waving, naval gazing (pun intended), and good intentions: you will get a ship this way too.