Delicious Knowledge
Delicious Knowledge
Allison Huang
On Cooking Tomato Egg-Drop Soup & Carrying on Tradition
Seldom do I wonder whether I am wasting my life when I stand over a pot of pork belly. I often prefer to be cooking in the kitchen rather than reading in a library. Yet sometimes I reminisce on my days as a historian-in-training at Princeton and I ask myself: Should I press myself into the more difficult work of parsing words rather than paring vegetables?
Struck by the fear that I was devoting my better years to this lesser undertaking, I surfaced the topic with my friend Ruby. A Princeton graduate who obtained a BPhil at Oxford and who was an intellectual in her own right, Ruby was recently married. She shared how marriage reoriented her schedule around homemaking activities like cooking. As we hunched over Poke Bowls in a whimsical chain for quick eats, she assured me that cooking was not a “worse” form of knowledge, but a different one.
I owe it to my schooling why I even considered cooking to be a “worse” form of knowledge. The Western intellectual tradition, albeit for a few twists and turns, has privileged knowledge gained from workings of the mind (such as ingesting and producing pure “metaphysical” artifacts) over that gained from the senses or working with the hands. It was because my love of cooking descended from a non-Western tradition—my Chinese heritage—that I was sensitive to Ruby’s claim. But my Christian faith gave me an authoritative basis on which to verify that her claim was true, affirming my convictions that other kinds of knowledge, not only “head” knowledge, were worth pursuing.
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On a Wednesday night, my roommate was in charge of a pantry-friendly, cheat version of tomato-egg soup, a popular Chinese comfort dish, made from whole Cento tomatoes out of a can. “What were you thinking to flavor it?” I asked. “Just some salt,” she replied. “Do you feel strongly about that?” I prodded, my own vision of the soup looming large. Because the tomatoes were canned, we needed to add umami flavor with soy sauce and scallions. I always boiled it twice: First to emulsify the canned tomatoes with the water; the second time to stir in the egg. Even though the ingredients were simple, the creation of the fluffy and substantial egg drop strands was no simple matter. The eggs had to be beaten, but only for a few seconds, lest they become homogenous and “listless” in the soup. The water had to be gently swirling in one direction while the eggs were poured in—in a stream not too thin—in multiple takes, so as to not lower the temperature of the soup and hinder its ability to solidify the egg. All this I found myself telling my roommate without her prompting. Embarrassed, I exclaimed that I probably thought too much about it. She confirmed that I certainly thought about it more than she had.
Most nights, I happily putter about in the kitchen preparing dinner. With the luxury of a work-from-home setup, I am able to start elements in the middle of the workday, such as “purging the darkness” from cubes of eggplant by submerging them in salty water or soaking leeks to loosen the silt that clings to them. It was my mother who taught me that good food takes time, more than what is allotted in the hour and a half between the end of the workday and dinner—and she, too, was a working woman. Other children of immigrants, like my Muslim Senegalese friend, similarly saw their mothers spend all day making the traditional food of their culture. In my household, dinner regularly comprised three unique dishes and on weekends I would eat homemade filled buns, pancakes, cured meats, and other delicacies. Each time I feasted, my mother would beckon me. “来看我怎么做的”—“Want to see how I made it?” She taught me not only procedures, but techniques and tips, later aiding me to avoid many of the pitfalls first time home cooks stumble over.
It would be disingenuous to say that my mother was my only teacher. As a loyal viewer of YouTube cooking and baking channels, I banked up knowledge of Western cooking since I was thirteen. But I nonetheless inherited my interest in cooking and love of food from my family as we preserved the ritual of enjoying meals together at the dinner table each night. My mother funneled time and energy into preserving this ritual and creating the food that enlivened it.
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Embodied describes my love and knowledge of cooking, gained from a give-and-take between my senses and the world, rooted in my family heritage. Even as I perfect a recipe like tomato-egg soup, I rely on the measure of “what tastes good” that my mother inculcated in me.
This verbiage of “embodied” (its antithesis being “disembodied”) is contemporary, whereupon I first heard about it through the campus minister and podcast host Brandi Miller. However, in the Western intellectual tradition, the split between knowledge of the “mind” versus knowledge derived from the world has been prominent since ancient times, and the former was always regarded as higher than the latter.2 Aristotle’s Metaphysics argues that true knowledge is a byproduct of metaphysical contemplation rather than observation of the world. Fast forward to the early modern period, natural philosophers (later scientists) often looked down on the work of mechanists and craftsmen (later engineers) because they believed themselves to be pursuing a purer form of knowledge—called “contemplative” knowledge—whereas mechanists and craftsmen discovered only “instrumental” knowledge. Phenomenological writing in the early 20th century (geniuses writing about themselves) suggested that genius was the product of upper class leisure, men with time on their hands to write and think. Thomas Edison was praised for never working with his hands and doing all his experimenting in his head. Princeton University—boasting a preeminent liberal arts education—is reputed as being too “theoretical” by engineering and science students who reported learning little useful for jobs in industry.
I was a pupil of this intellectual tradition. Hence my discomfort when I was cooking dinner at my fiance’s apartment, his roommate walked in the door, and I vacillated over whether to invite him to eat with us. I had once offered this roommate a simple stir fry dish. He commented it needed more “acid,” quoting directly from a book he pulled off the shelf and unfurled. “Salt. Fat. Acid. Heat,” bold letters declared on the front. What if this is how my family has always made it? I protested silently. But what came from a book—compiled and edited, reputed by “professional chefs,” and full of scientific principles—had to be more true than what I learned carrying forth my heritage and family tradition. Now I see such a claim to ascendant knowledge is bogus. But how I realized this is important.
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On the way to visit my fiance’s family in Vermont, I happened to be given a block of tofu and half a package of Korean rice cakes. I happily found myself stirring tofu and rice cakes into a simple broth a few days later. My fiance’s curious mother helped herself to some of the broth. She then popped the question, “Why do you eat tofu? For protein?” I had never been asked the question. “It tastes good, I guess,” I fumbled. The moment was too fleeting for me to introspect that I ate tofu because my mother cooked it for me.
The question revealed that we had different frameworks for how we thought about food. She assumed that I chose what I ate out of deliberate calculation in my head—following the dietary craze of maximizing protein intake—whereas in reality I simply ate what my people ate in times past. Proceeding from a kind of “head knowledge,” the diet approach characterizes most of the “healthy eating” fads that have captivated Americans in the last 70 years: control the body using the mind. The popular dieting technique of calorie counting presents a case study. Scientific findings on how the body uses energy and stores fat are used to drum up a caloric intake program to help people “get in shape.” As dieters go into semi-starvation, they must try to suppress their body’s hunger cues with techniques like drinking water before meals to “trick” their stomachs into feeling full. The stomach isn’t counting calories, the mind is. Calorie counting does not prompt people to examine what they learned to eat from their family, nor does it regard that people inherit different metabolic rates from their parents, all of which are aspects of being embodied beings.
It should be no surprise that “health-conscious” Americans willingly, even if unwittingly, control and rationalize our own bodies in such a disembodied way. Centuries of condoning or effecting the disembodying acts of history, such as imperialism and slavery, has warped us to treat disembodiment as if it were normal and good. Imperial powers left in their wake peoples cut off from their ancestral homes as imperial cartographers drew maps with no mention of them; generations of youth unable to read the text of their own people because they were only educated in Romanized languages; children of farmers forced to cultivate export foods like coffee beans and palm oil at such rates that they were unable to cultivate other native foods for their families.6 People have been ripped from their lands, their cultures, their inherited ways of being. These same tendencies permeate how we organize labor today—author Emily Guendelsberger writes about how a factory worker in an Amazon shipping facility is timed to the second during his bathroom breaks to maximize production efficiency7—and extend to our everyday lives.
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In recent years, young women who have suffered from diets like calorie counting have undertaken a movement to reclaim an embodied way of eating, called “All In.” This method, like intuitive eating, encourages people to enjoy food and eat until they are full, allowing their bodies to guide their eating habits rather than their minds. Because the people who try “All In” have been in a state of semi-starvation due to dieting, they gain more weight. But they are told to persist in eating according to bodily cues. Over the course of years, people report their bodies returning to a lower weight and their metabolism and hunger correcting itself. I mention “All In” because it aligns much closer with the Chinese intellectual tradition regarding the body, advocating that given the right conditions, the body can slowly direct its own healing. Acupuncture, for instance, consists of stimulating pressure points on the body to spur the body to self-correct certain ailments. Rather than controlling the body with the mind, this technique prods the body to care for itself.
The Chinese approach to the body is a world apart from Western tradition. For instance, all edible materials—from medicine to grains to food—are held to be conceptually similar. Dried green beans can serve as both “food” and “medicine” (to use Western categories); they both fuel the body and regulate its “qi.”8 It struck me that this understanding of the body, centuries in the making, could be as legitimate as a Western one; that the embodied approach integral to Chinese medicine could be as effective as the disembodied approach common to the Western tradition.
As my sister and I brought home Western ideas like 30-day juice cleanses and 90-day exercise challenges that advocated extreme measures based on Western science, my parents rebutted and cautioned us to take “everything in moderation,” according to Chinese tradition. It was not doctors who gatekept this knowledge claiming a greater truth and objectivity in the name of science, but my own parents inheriting the knowledge from prior generations. Coming from a culture that emphasizes collective, communal knowledge and parental authority, I grew wary of the disembodiment inherent in the claim that truth came from a disinterested field of knowledge “experts.”
However, “All In” is tricky because it assumes that the body knows what we should eat. If we are to entertain the possibility that embodied knowledge matters (presumably because we are embodied creatures), then it necessarily follows that we can also inherit evil. The American “tradition” of eating—from the rural Idahoan adding brown sugar to her casserole, or the young Detroitan man eating two bags of chips for lunch—can benefit from course correction informed by Western scientific understanding about what is good for the body. It is not that Western intellectual tradition does not bear useful fruit. After all, I would not have even recognized the distinction between kinds of knowledge had I not received schooling in the Western tradition. It is that, like all human traditions, it can skew towards certain ways of thinking. The Western intellectual tradition may tempt us to act as if we are brains floating in vats. But we are living bodies with families, contexts, experiences and heritage.
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How can we be assured that the knowledge gained by interaction with the world is different from and not worse than knowledge formulated in the mind? The fact that we are not simply brains floating in vats suggests that embodied knowledge is pertinent to our flourishing. But this observation can only be prescriptive if I am certain that the world was made purposefully. I do believe that there is a God who, with great intention, made us to be embodied creatures. He formed the first humans from dust able to perpetuate a family line. These two, endowed with moral agency, erred eating the fruit of a tree that would give them knowledge of right and wrong—the irony. (The opposite of goodness cannot possibly be ignorance.) Owing to their lineal descent from the first man Adam, humanity was plagued by the corruption of sin.9 God always indicted his people, the Israelites, for failing him on both a collective and individual level. God treats us as embodied creatures because he made us to be so.
Christian saints throughout time have reminded us that what is good is not just a matter of what we know but how we live it out. John Calvin, in A Little Book on the Christian Life, cautions that “knowledge” of Jesus Christ is not demonstrated by how “eloquently” one can talk about the gospel. “For true doctrine is not a matter of the tongue, but of life; neither is Christian doctrine grasped only by the intellect and memory, as truth is grasped in other fields of study. Rather, doctrine is rightly received when it takes possession of the entire soul and finds a dwelling place and shelter in the most intimate affections of the heart.”10 Continuing in this tradition five hundred years later, James K. A. Smith argues in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power that we overemphasize “intellectual” knowledge when what defines a person is what and how they love. Habits and rituals reflect and cement what we worship; what we worship determines the purpose of our lives. Time and again, Christians have affirmed that head knowledge alone does not lead us on paths of goodness.
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Upon entering college, I discovered that not everyone grew up eating regular, full meals at the dining table. I came to appreciate my mother’s dedication to feeding me after meeting others for whom not being fed was symptomatic of their mothers not having time for them at all. My closest friend testifies that her mother was too busy being a doctor to cook. Throughout college, she grazed on sweet foods instead of eating enough vegetables, protein and calories to fuel her body. The lack of fuel impacted her mood and energy levels. More than her knowledge of what is “healthy,” my friend’s ritual of snacking shaped her life.
When I visit home, my mother begs me not to cook. Cooking is a waste of time, she says, you could be studying instead. Mulling over her words, I explain that I simply do as she did. Isn’t it wonderful that I love to cook because that is how you loved me? She responds: If I had the opportunities you did being born in America, I wouldn’t have spent so much time homemaking or caring for my kids. Such a seemingly cold-hearted claim is softened by the reality that my mother lived out a different life than the one she claims she would have chosen. Yet one thing is for certain. The vision of herself that she tries to live vicariously through me manifests an individualism that characterizes how most Americans think. The self comes before family or community.
American individualism is a disembodied way of being. One lives as if they have no ties and thus no obligation to others. But when everyone seeks only their own good, the most vulnerable in society suffer. The crisis of broken families today is attributed to the “me-first” mentality of the boomer generation coming of age in the 70s and 80s. Mothers captivated by New Wave Feminism prioritized their careers over their families and their children grew up without parents. It is not that women alone bear the responsibility of tending the home (certainly not!), but that they safeguard many good things in doing so.
I choose to labor over pork belly not only to care for my own body, but because it evokes a labor of love and prepares me for my own potential destiny as a wife and mother stewarding a family. I want to live as the embodied creature God made me to be.
Allison Huang
Poet & Historian
Allison is a member of Stone Hill Church of Princeton. A poet at heart but a historian by trade, Allison seeks to understand the relationship between beauty and truth. Her writing has been commended by institutions like the Poetry Society of the U.K., Rider University, Princeton University, and the Davidson Institute for the Gifted. In the last year, Allison started producing music under the artist name 'Inherited' (Instagram: @inherited.music). Her music can be found on Spotify, iTunes and YouTube, among other platforms.
Photography by Zhenyu Luo
