Aesthetics, Spirituality, Health

In class we discussed and were asked to relate our chosen activity to aesthetics, spirituality and health. 

The other day I made my flatmates their daily dinner meal, this choice was a simple fettuccine. This was my first crack at cooking fettuccine without my mother’s input. In my opinion the dish did not turn out as well as I had liked, the cheese in the sauce had gone a little lumpy. My flatmates assured me that it’s not about how it looks but about how it tastes, I was still not happy with serving them this. The ‘recipe’ I followed was from memory so this even though it was simple was very aesthetically challenging. When it comes to cooking I am a firm believer in ‘freestyle cooking’ rather than following a direct recipe. The aspect of cooking a meal and giving a gift to my flatmates and I wanted to try and fit this gift to the aesthetic preferences of my flatmates, in this aspect in my opinion I had failed. Cooking is something we need to do to survive, so from an aesthetical view point food and cooking should be completed all year round.

Cooking helps me to link to my family especially my nana and my mother. This allows me to connect with my sense of being a woman when I cook. Traditionally cooking is a very female orientated task. Most households (not all) have the wife or the mother who cooks and prepares all the meals. This is very prominent in my family my nana will cook for my grandad and my mother cooks for my brother, myself and my sister when we are home.

In order for human being’s to survive as a race we need to eat. I am a big believer in eating healthy in order to stay healthy. So when I cook for my flatmates I try to create them a meal that is healthy for them but will also give them the nutrients and energy they need to function during the day. It also allows us to be social when I am either cooking the meal or when we are sitting down and eating the meal which is great for our health. We turn the consumption of food, a biological necessity, into a carefully cultured phenomenon. We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes the means of creating community. (Visser, 1992, p. ix)

Food for thought

Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people. When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we are or wish to be. How we eat and what we eat lies at the heart of who we are as – individuals, families, communities. (Lawson, 2004).

Reference

Lawson, N. (2004). Feast. Food to Celebrate Life. Canada: Knopf.

Visser, M. (1992). The rituals of dinner. London: Viking, The Penguin Group.