Having spent most of my life in cities, hearing a rooster crow at dawn is a quaint and homey experience. If I arrive early enough at the school where I work, I can hear the neighbor’s rooster get his last crows out for the morning. Even though we’re not in the countryside, as I walk up the driveway, I look up at the blue sky and fancy myself a teacher on the prairie, moseying towards a rustic wood-frame schoolhouse. That the neighbor is actually my friend Nick, and that his backyard sprawls and shuts out signs of the city deepens my bucolic fantasy.

Behind the fence, the rooster wasn’t so idealized. He had taken to fighting the other birds in the coop, and lately had expanded his reign of terror to include the youngest humans in the household, including Nick’s three-year-old nephew Liam. A previous rooster had committed similar offenses and was soon turned into dinner. Nick’s theory was that the current rooster, heretofore docile, then sensed a vacancy atop the backyard’s alpha male throne and was driven by nature to become more aggressive. But in the process he had put himself in danger: uppity roosters do not last long around this house.

As the week went on we discussed plans for when the current rooster problem would be “solved.” It quickly turned into a social event: several friends wanted to see their meat go straight from field to table, especially since Nick reported the last rooster being the best poultry he’d ever tasted. Over drinks we excitedly planned who would come and what they could bring. I pestered Nick with several phone calls and texts to see what side dish I could contribute.

He finally set things straight and told me that the evening would actually be “a rather somber affair,” and suggested I just eat dinner at home since processing the bird would take some time. My excitement suddenly dampened, I stopped strategizing over which of my usual potluck crowd-pleasers would go best with rooster, and resigned myself to eating a salad alone.

We finally set a date and time, and I warily entered Nick’s kitchen, dreading the funereal evening to come. Yet I was greeted with the sweet, earthy scent of baking brownies permeating the air, young Liam sitting on the floor, poring over a book about trains, and other members of Nick’s family drifting in and out of the warmly lit room. A signed portrait of Julia Child hung over the stove, like a frescoed saint watching over the meals cooked within. For a moment, I almost forgot what I’d come for.

As we waited for Liam to go to bed and for the brownies to finish baking, we killed time by watching the instructional video Nick found on YouTube when he butchered the previous rooster. Even as I saw the chicken in the video get killed and processed, the glassy screen of my iPhone separated me from the reality of it. And we couldn’t help but crack serial-killer jokes when the video’s commentator, an outdoorsman named Russ, remarked that you should “save the heart, those are good eats… the heart comes in a sack called the pericardium, just like humans.” Eventually, the children went to bed, the brownies were taken out of the oven to cool, and the main event of the night approached.

We ventured out to the yard. First we preemptively dug a hole beneath a low-hanging tree branch for the inedible scraps. Then it was off to the coop. Nick stuck his head in and asked “where’s my man?” and rats scattered away from the sudden noise. He found the rooster, grabbed it, and flipped it upside down, because apparently this keeps the animal calmer. In an essay called “Killing Dinner,” about a mishandled backyard butchering of a chicken, Gabrielle Hamilton writes that as her chicken was upended, it “protested from deep inside its throat, close to the heart, a violent, vehement, full-bodied cluck.” Ours seemed far less concerned, burbling a few mild ones before spending the rest of the walk in silence.

Back at the tree, the rooster was hung by its feet. As Nick readied his knife Russ’s words rang in my head: “The more humane way to do this is to make a diagonal cut along the side of the throat… and they bleed out very quietly, very peacefully.” Maybe it was the darkness, or the dullness of the knife, but something went wrong with Nick’s first attempt. There was little peace in the bird’s thrashing around, and Nick had to double back and cut more assertively as its life drained away. He let go and it swung back and forth, into and out of the shaft of light cast by his headlamp. Finally he turned the headlamp off and knelt, and we waited for the sound of frantic fluttering to stop.

The experience wasn’t as gruesome as in Hamilton’s story — her hatchet was too blunt to chop the head clean off, so that “the first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin,” and “the second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale,” meaning she “kept coming down on the bird’s throat…stroke after miserable stroke, until [she] finally got its head off.” But it also wasn’t as cut-and-dried as Russ’s approach, the minutes of painful flapping hidden behind the editing trickery of a jump cut and his incongruous assurance that this is “the biblical way to do it.” We stood around the swaying carcass, saying nothing, until Nick asked if we wanted to get brownies while it bled to death.

On a normal day, a brownie’s suspect nutritional value is enough to cause me no small amount of guilt. But after just witnessing my first live animal killing, I needed some comfort food, so I grunted my assent and marched back to the house, where I topped my brownie with ice cream and chocolate syrup.

It took the following two hours for Nick to fully process the chicken, and in that time I regretted neither the killing of the rooster nor the eating of the brownie alone. But the combination of the two was terrible — the rich scent of the brownies still hung in the air even as the stench of the still-warm bird, plunged into boiling water to remove the feathers, joined the mix. As the two scents commingled, so did my perception of the forces that brought together these seemingly disparate eating experiences.

In an essay decrying the eating of meat, the ancient Greek writer Plutarch asks:

“For what sort of dinner is not costly for which a living creature loses its life? Do we hold a life cheap? I do not yet go so far as to say that it may well be the life of your mother or father or some friend or child… yet it does, at least, possess some perception, hearing, seeing, imagination, intelligence, which last every creature receives from Nature to enable it to acquire what is proper for it and to evade what is not.”

The dead rooster, compelled by some mysterious mix of innate urges and hyperactive hormones, ascended to become the alpha male of Nick’s backyard. Yet in trying to “acquire what is proper for it,” it signed its own death sentence. As I compulsively ate my brownie, ice cream, and chocolate syrup I couldn’t help but feel I was committing the human equivalent of this unwitting self-sabotage. Despite being endowed with greater “perception… imagination, [and] intelligence,” oftentimes we grasp for that which is most pleasing or which satiates our deepest cravings, even if we know it’s bad for us.

On a recent morning, I walked up the driveway to school and heard a familiar sound. As the newest tough-guy rooster crowed, I looked up at the blue sky and forced myself to picture imaginary scenes of pastoral schoolhouses. But the next bout of crowing broke the fantasy, and set my mind on a more somber thought: the creatures on this earth, whether intelligent or not, are bound to repeat their mistakes.

[There is] added from time to time in the pot, goose, or pork, sometimes a piece of sausage or some beans, but it is always the same cassoulet. The base remains, and this ancient and valuable base which gives the dish a quality comparable to those amber tones if especially in the flesh that characterize the works of old Venetian masters.

Cassoulet is a stew of white beans baked with a variety of meats, originating from southwestern France. Despite its origins as a humble peasant dish, today it is championed by the Universal Cassoulet Academy, an international group of chefs who are “committed to promoting cassoulet, its ingredients and its cultural heritage” (they’ve even composed a jaunty theme song for the dish). Local varieties abound along the “Cassoulet Trail,” which runs from the Mediterranean shores of Narbonne inland to Toulouse, so the Academy reassures us that there is no single recipe for cassoulet. Of course, one ingredient is always essential: time.

The recipes I found for the dish are a case in point. The Silver Palate Cookbook cautions that cassoulet “is neither quick nor inexpensive to prepare… the various cooking steps can be spread over 3 or 4 days.” Julia Child states that “you can prepare it in one day, but two or even three days of leisurely on-and-off cooking make it easier.” Child was always unapologetic about the time and energy needed to execute her meals, and her recipe for cassoulet is no exception: it “makes no attempt to cut corners, for the concoction of a good cassoulet is a fairly long process.”

As someone who learned most of my basic kitchen techniques from Mark Bittman, the champion of quick-and-healthy home cooking, preparing a dish that intentionally takes a long time was novel and quaint. In fact, Bittman himself offers a recipe for a 40-minute cassoulet. He’s far too versed in the heritage of good food to claim his version can replace the original: online he admits that “the idea of preparing [cassoulet] in 40 minutes or less is heresy,” and in How to Cook Everything he concedes that the recipe is “not ’real’ cassoulet, but glorified beans accentuated by whatever is handy.”

So here was an opportunity to compare two very different approaches to a well-known dish. On one side was Child’s traditional method, emphasizing process and technique (while paying little heed to health concerns), and on the other side was Bittman’s contemporary approach of balancing wholesomeness with convenience. To level the playing field, I bought high-quality ingredients (although I doubt French peasants spent $75 at Whole Foods and Gelson’s to make cassoulet) and used them in both recipes, so that the key variable would be time. Knowing there would be two hearty stews in need of eating and critiquing, my parents, grandparents, sister and brother-in-law were invited to help me judge.

The first day of cooking was all about bringing out the flavors of each ingredient. It was an entirely Julia-centric, meat-filled day. Once the white beans had been cooked and soaked on their own, they were re-simmered with slabs of bacon and some ground pork. In another pot, shreds of duck and mutton simmered with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and white wine. Absent the suggested cup of goose fat, I sliced fat off of duck legs, threw it in a pot on the grill, and used it to saute cracked lamb shanks. I proudly announced this exotic preparation with a status update on Facebook, but inwardly I experienced a moment of doubt, and it wasn’t just because my forearm was getting burned by gurgling spats of duck fat. I felt a mild sense of unwillingness for the richness of the food to come — call it meat fatigue. A dainty bouquet garni of herbs, fashioned with cheesecloth and kitchen string and tossed in with the soaking beans, stood meek against what seemed like scores of bones and scraps. Meanwhile, Bittman’s beans were cooked and soaked, and then left to sit overnight in the refrigerator.

On the second day I stepped back in to the kitchen, expecting the flavors from the first day to merge into a multilayered, subtle fusion. The process began with — what else? — more meat. Sausages were freshly cooked, and then layered with bacon atop a substratum of beans. Then more beans, another layer of meat (the previous day’s mutton and duck), another layer of beans, a second layer of sausage, topped with a final layer of beans and sealed with a dusting of breadcrumbs and parsley. At this point, Child’s recipe had led to massive meat overload, but it was also one trip to the oven away from being ready to serve, and it looked gorgeous. Meanwhile, the tomatoes for Bittman’s recipe had only just began to bubble. The pot looked neglected so I snuck in a spoonful of duck fat to perk it up.

As Child’s cassoulet baked away in the oven, I turned my attention to the Bittman version. As the beans cooked with stock, spices, and tomatoes, I browned yet another pound of sausage, and added it to the pot along with a kind of meat not yet encountered — chunks of pork shoulder. When the second-to-last step instructed me to “cut a crosshatch pattern into the skin side of the duck breast,” before cooking it and adding it to the beans, I snapped. Even though the meal was so close to completion, I couldn’t bear to add another portion of meat. I reasoned that a couple of missing duck breasts weren’t going to ruin this version, and with enough food to feed an army already prepared, including duck for experimentation’s sake would have been wasteful.

Had this last-minute decision just ruined the method on which the experiment rested? I told no one but my father that the duck had been scratched at the last minute. Once both cassoulets were finished and served, the family sat down to eat. Everyone put both types of cassoulet in their bowl, tasted each, and shared their impressions. We reached the consensus that Child’s recipe benefitted from the extra time in terms of texture — the beans were much softer, the rest of the ingredients broken down and then brought back together under extra hours of carefully applied heat. Bittman’s beans, while soaked for almost an entire day, were still a shade undercooked, a trace too raw and fibrous.

But in terms of flavor, the result was a tie. Child’s cassoulet was full-flavored, but not subtle. Its meaty intensity approached that of a gravy. Yet every ingredient blended harmoniously: the tomatoes, having been cooked now for several hours, had diffused to the point of being almost invisible; the breadcrumb-and-parsley crust, baked on top, was cracked so that the underlying moisture seeped throughout. In Bittman’s cassoulet each ingredient retained its particular flavor, and the result was a taste much fresher. The meats were chunkier and, not having had the time to dissolve into the stew, varied greater in texture. The lightly cooked tomatoes recalled the Mediterranean origins of the dish, and the garnish of parsley on top recalled spring, rather than the winter season for which cassoulet is intended. So was it still a cassoulet?

The table confirmed what I had privately realized in the kitchen: that while my two-day effort was valiant, Child’s recipe had surpassed a diminishing point of returns. With just a little more time spent cooking, Bittman’s recipe could easily take the cake, in terms of taste, texture, time, and cost. Yet the last-minute call to remove the duck from the Bittman version probably influenced our assessment, perhaps unfairly. Had Julia’s cassoulet not seemed so much heavier by comparison, maybe it would have been praised for its depth of flavor. In the other direction, perhaps Bittman’s would have even been improved by the addition of duck, had not the rest of the meal made that ingredient seem so excessive.

At the end of her recipe for cassoulet, Julia Child recommends finishing the meal with “fruit for dessert, followed by a brisk walk.” Don’t let the pithy tone throw you off — after eating a rich stew featuring meat cooked in the fat of other meats, you should probably get up and move before your arteries harden. But I think Julia also had the cook’s sanity in mind. After spending three days planning, purchasing, and preparing cassoulet according to her recipe, I was suffering from meat overexposure and kitchen claustrophobia. I was ready for that walk — just not along the Cassoulet Trail.

Around mid-November, my father and I agreed to work together on a Christmas Eve dinner with a twist. Inspired by an interview with Vietnamese restauranteur Diep Tran on the public radio program Good Food, we decided to make dishes that, like Tran’s Vietnamese-style turkey, reinterpreted staples of the traditional American holiday meal with an Asian emphasis. We agreed that the side dishes should involve greens, pumpkin, corn, and cranberry sauce, all surrounding the main attraction: turkey and stuffing.

We spent the next several weeks developing our plan, conferring over phone, email, Gchat, and around the woodblock island in the kitchen. Our first menu item came from a New York Times Magazine story on Indian-style kale, soaked in coconut milk and then grilled, which tastes “as if cut through with blood and fat, as if [it was] steak and fries combined” — and, as legend has it, tasty enough to convince a table of carnivorous Montanans to eat their vegetables. Indian-inspired but with a taste to please the American palette, this dish embodied all of the qualities we were aiming for.

After more research, we agreed upon the other sides. Dad would make habanero cranberry sauce, masala-spiced corn, and a rustic Italian pumpkin soup. I would handle the turkey. For the main dish, we eschewed Tran’s Vietnamese-style turkey since, at the end of the day, it would still be a giant bird roasted in the oven. We decided on turkey-and-stuffing meatballs with parsley, pine nuts, and currants, inspired by the gargantuan Italian meatballs my dad had eaten at Oakland’s Pizziola, and by the soft, savory ones with pine nuts I recall having at Seattle’s Oddfellows Cafe. We experimented with recipes and tested them on our significant others, making sure everything would be just right for the day of the meal.

But the more we planned, the more nervous I became. Without divulging specifics, we had advertised to the rest of the family that an unusual meal would be served to them on Christmas Eve. This piqued everyone’s interest, but I worried whether we were being too cavalier with the American institution that is the holiday feast. Isn’t one of this meal’s greatest traits that it is so traditional and consistent? Now with currants in the meatballs and an Italian-style soup, the ethnic influences were getting muddled – we couldn’t even fall back on the trope of “Asian flair”! More selfishly, I also fretted that since this was my first time cooking an important holiday meal for the rest of the family, I was risking my reputation as a budding cook. As Christmas Eve drew near, I became increasingly concerned that this would be a memorable meal, but for all the wrong reasons.

A second unforeseen challenge soon became apparent: my Dad and I had different visions of how to execute the meal. His goal was to have most of the dishes already made, so that we would only need to heat them in the moments before serving. As a strategy for gracefully entertaining our guests (seven adults and two children) this was a wise plan, and I agreed in principle. But when the day of the meal arrived, I found myself wishing for more spontaneity. Fancying myself more of an off-the-cuff cook, I wanted to prep and cook the meatballs as the guests enjoyed hors d’oeuvres nearby. Yet my parents asked that I rein in the show — the kitchen should be totally clean, all signs of work gone, save for a pan of meatballs ready to be broiled when the guests showed up. It suddenly felt like I was being asked to hide all the work that made my part of the meal special. I had misidentified my anxieties with concerns about excessive planning, fooling with tradition and burnishing my culinary reputation. What really mattered was being visible in the kitchen.

Preparing a meal for others is always in some way a performance. And one needn’t blow away guests with the acrobatic cutlery of a Benihana’s or the in-your-face spectacle of a tableside flambe to qualify as a performer-cook. Just think of the ritual of the traditional turkey carving, or how a barbecue grill becomes the center of gravity at a summer backyard party, or even the decision of which plates to use, and it becomes clear that in very few meals does the food just speak for itself. One can try to keep the focus on the food, to use the kitchen as the backstage is used in theater, but even then the choices of how to set the table, plate the food, and eat it in front of others all contain an element of performance.

At first I was surprised at my own insistence that the meal be assembled so publicly. If I were more cynical, I would chalk it up to the glorification of high-intensity spontaneous cooking seen on popular reality TV cooking shows. Perhaps I was influenced by the quick thinking of celebrity chefs facing challenging ingredients and a strict timeline. While there was indeed a degree of showmanship to which I aspired, it didn’t have to do with proving my cooking prowess through flashy or innovative techniques. The meal was given so much forethought, and was advertised to our family so far in advance, that it was as if I’d been preparing to perform. As the guests arrived, I was ready to be on stage.

Despite the fact that I was tasked with guiding 105 middle school students through a week of outdoor education, and despite the fact that I had just spent $400 on new bicycling and camping gear, I still showed up woefully unprepared. All I brought for the first day’s lunch were a couple mandarin oranges and a small peanut butter and jelly sandwich — gone less than a third of the way into the ride. It might not sound like that much of a problem, except that I had approached the trip with the intention of methodically doling myself calories depending on the mileage of the day’s ride. With the physical demands of cycling, the need to treat food as fuel was essential. As if I needed a reminder of my plight, a quick rummage through my saddle bag for a leftover Powerbar instead produced an old medical release form that said, in capital letters, HYPOGLYCEMIC: NEEDS TO EAT STEADILY DURING EXERTION TO MAINTAIN BLOOD SUGAR LEVEL.

Spooked by the prospect of again not having enough to eat, I spent the next two days gorging myself at every possible opportunity. Instead of focusing on eating sustainable, plant-based, well-rounded meals — which was my obsession on normal days — I worried about having enough energy to climb mountains. With each day’s meals prepared by the school’s chuck wagon, all the fuel I needed was ready for the taking. At the first night’s dinner, I wolfed down a turkey burger and two veggie burgers. The next morning, I loaded up on double servings of eggs and potatoes, plus several packets of oatmeal. That night I forced down two massive burritos stuffed with meat, beans, rice, cheese, and lettuce. Then the binge caught up with me. As I lay alone in my brand new tent, bloated and uncomfortable, I realized being outdoors was testing my relationship with food. Treating food only as an energy source showed how much I had yet to learn. Surely there were even more ways that being on the road would force me to think differently about food.

Once I accepted I wasn’t going to starve, I looked outside myself and realized how food, and the rituals and ideas surrounding food, influenced relationships between different groups. For example, food preparation acted as an equalizer between students and staff. Predetermined “families” had rotating cooking and cleaning duty, so that adults and teenagers were equally likely to be tasked with scrubbing the bottom of the soup bowl. The family system also means students serve their peers and leaders once a trip, instead of just passively receiving a warm dinner from a doting adult. I also used conversations about food as a palliative for students struggling with the challenges of day-long bicycle rides. On a particularly difficult uphill stretch, I got at least two miles’ worth of distraction out of “what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?”

Just the idea of food, and the psychological benefit it can bring, was another unexpected facet. Three days in and missing my own home cooking, I saw salvation in a farmer’s roadside stand. With crates full of organic, fresh vegetables, the stand was like a desert oasis — a temptation for me to retreat to my usual ways of eating, but which ultimately proved illusory. I bought a couple small eggplants, an heirloom tomato, an onion, and some cucumber, envisioning some sort of baked vegetable-stuffed eggplant. For the rest of the day, forging rivers and pedaling up hills, I fantasized about crafting a lovingly made meal out of beautiful ingredients. Alas, the rest of the ride took longer than expected, and once in camp I ate the school’s pasta with meat sauce for dinner, while the vegetables sat idly in the corner of my tent. For the next few days I held onto the idea that I would do the produce justice, but with all the trip’s meals pre-planned and my ravenous appetite fading, there simply wasn’t time or space to concoct an experimental baked dish. Yet the original feeling of buying excellent ingredients and planning a meal with them was so comforting that I’m not even angry they ended up in the trash. At home this would have been a shameful waste, but on the road just the idea of what the vegetables might become sustained me.

I wasn’t the only one who sought the pleasure of unexpected food surprises. Having something new and “off the menu” to eat every day also gave the rest of the staff a psychological boost. On the second night, a special teachers-only pot of pork chile verde simmered on the chuck wagon’s stove. With plenty left over, it was repurposed over the next couple of days into stir-frys and breakfast burritos. While it tasted great in each stage, its real value lay in being a bonus addition to the school’s standard trip fare. To be able to tell the other adults that a treat was waiting for them behind the serving table gave everyone a feeling that something special was awaiting them.

By making certain ingredients exclusive to staff and teachers, food was also used to foster a sense of fraternity. As darkness fell and the rest of the school gathered around the nightly campfire, it felt innocently devious to hide with other staff out behind the chuck wagon and dip a stash of teacher-only cookies into milk, with only the moon looking on. At home, I hardly ever ate sweets; here, knowing that precious storage space had been saved for a coffee cake, cinnamon roll, apple pie or chocolate almond pick-me-up, I partook, and I felt like a part of the gang.

As someone who thinks and reads a lot about food, understanding that food was a force for community and a boon for psychological wellbeing should not have felt like a revelation. But it took getting outside the usual boundaries of my grocery and my kitchen to really appreciate some of the other things that food can accomplish. I went into the trip thinking that since I couldn’t be a sustainable at-home cook for a week, dealing with food would simply become a matter of fueling up for each day’s ride. I assumed the only purpose of food would be to power our family of 130 children and adults the 130 miles our itinerary had laid out. Yet even when the need for sustenance was indeed great, these other uses of food, surprisingly flexible and universal, endured.

In the last few weeks, the Corn Refiners Association began a campaign to rebrand high fructose corn syrup — a target of much criticism — as “corn sugar.” In an act of disguising industry lobbying as consumer protection, the name change is framed as an “effort to help clarify the labeling of food products for consumers” so that they do not “make misinformed decisions about sugars in their diets.” But since the presence of HFCS generally indicates a highly processed food item, the name change would obstruct attempts to steer clear of unhealthy foods. On the other end of the spectrum is extra-virgin olive oil, which has a reputation so sterling that inferior blends have long flown under the radar by invoking the EVOO name.

Both are cases of dishonesty or sleight of hand: the quality of the ingredient is different than what it is purported to be. For corn syrup, the issue isn’t complicated. Nobody, not even the corn syrup lobby, denies that corn syrup is bad for you, so the re-branding is really just a transparent attempt to hoodwink the consumer. But for olive oil, quality is an important determinant of flavor — and price — which means there are incentives for producers to mislabel lower-quality oils as extra virgin. So enters the issue of trust.

Since regulations and standards enforcing the purity of olive oil are either voluntary or nonexistent, shoppers surrender their trust to the market or food company every time they buy a bottle. We also expect companies to act on good faith when producing and labeling things like ostensibly nitrite-free meat, substitute meat products (many of which are highly processed), and even organic food in general. In a few years, the salmon we buy might be genetically altered and not even say so on the label. Sometimes the food industry is being dishonest, and sometimes it is not, so what can we do to ensure our food is trustworthy?

Seeking greater confidence in the quality of my food, I planned a couple of meals where my trust would not be in jeopardy. I bought completely organic ingredients when possible. I did all my shopping at grocery stores to see if quality could be achieved without the reassuring aura of the farmer’s market. I made key ingredients from scratch so that preservatives, chemicals, and hidden fat, sodium, or sugar weren’t an issue. The big question in mind was: is constructing almost every component of a meal a realistic approach to making it “trustworthy”? Or, to put it more simply: how good is good enough?

For the first meal, I made fish curry. I took control of the recipe by making my own coconut milk at home, and by buying fish that was as local and sustainable as possible. At the Whole Foods seafood counter, a sticker welcomed me to ask about their “seafood sustainability rating system,” which I figured would reflect the conditions of local fisheries. The employee at the counter was surprisingly candid, telling me that the rating system was ineffective, because it understated the severity of overfishing certain species by implying that a decades-long trend could be mitigated by a rating system. His words echoed a quote in an interview with journalist Paul Greenberg:

People [buy fish based on a rating system] and say, “Check, chose the right fish, did my job for the ocean.” But they didn’t. That one person didn’t eat a fish that someone else, somewhere else, with less ethics, is going to eat. In addition to choosing the right fish, people need to communicate with retailers directly. It’s the large aggregate that needs to change.

I did the best I could and took the fish seller’s personal advice, which was to buy black rockfish, since it has a stable population and is fished locally with fairly non-invasive methods. I felt good: I was buying a high-quality product based on an expert’s first-hand advice.

Back at home, making the coconut milk ended up being extremely labor-intensive, and I don’t think I would do it again — it took over an hour to make something that could be opened from a can in just a few seconds. It was the first time I ever prepped part of a meal in the garage — it turns out a hammer is the best tool for getting inside – and twice I stabbed myself in the hand trying to scoop out the fruit’s flesh. It was interesting to learn how coconut milk is made — you shred the flesh, soak it in warm water and then squeeze the fatty, oily milk out of it — but now that I know, I’ll let a machine do the work and focus more on the rest of the recipe. Because I was using only my hands, I didn’t get much richness out of the shreds, and the coconut milk was fairly light and watery. This ended up being an asset, as it allowed the flavor of the fish to shine through. I had stumbled into one of my favorite tricks of cooking — using simple, homemade ingredients to compliment a high-quality store-bought ingredient. Like simmering fresh tomatoes and herbs to go with imported Italian pasta, or crafting a careful marinade for a steak from the farmer’s market, the pairing of light homemade coconut milk and black rockfish elevated both the store-bought ingredient and the one made at home.

Nevertheless, I had mixed feelings on what it took to make this meal “trustworthy.” Even though I appreciate what the lightness of the homemade coconut milk did for the curry, I think diluting the canned version with water would have been just as good, far more convenient, and worth the remote risk of consuming some preservatives. The Trader Joe’s brand claims to have no preservatives anyway. And it’s possible the total carbon cost of growing and shipping fresh coconuts from Mexico to California was greater than that of one mass-produced can. Buying the fish was a good learning experience and it tasted great, but it was also quite expensive — like most animal proteins, if you want to eat the guilt-free version, you’ll have to pay a large premium. Altogether the meal was both trustworthy and high-quality, but not realistic for anything but a special occasion.

Taking the experiment further, I decided to make another meal with even more parts that were homemade. The goal was to prepare zucchini pancakes (with homemade parsley pesto in the batter), topped with a fresh salsa of corn, peppers, and tomatoes, as well as homemade sriracha (inspired by this recent recipe), with a side of sliced melon (sprinkled with a homemade chili powder). In retrospect, I would have done well to live by the axiom: instead of trying to do many things pretty well, focus on doing just a few things very well.

I think I fell off track when I was harried and running behind schedule but still took 15 minutes to make pesto even though I knew its taste would end up going unnoticed in the zucchini batter. In the rush to get everything else done I did not extract enough liquid from the batter, and when it came time to fry the pancakes they would not take form. I ended up having to turn it into a moist, undercooked scramble that my family jokingly called “zucchini surprise.” The salsa wasn’t great on its own, but at least it added texture and flavor to the green mush. The best part of the meal ended up being the fresh, ripe melon rubbed with homemade chili powder. Like the fish curry, it paired a simple, elegant ingredient with something homemade that brought both elements to a new place.

In my enthusiasm to make almost every crucial part of the meal from scratch, I lost sight of the bigger picture — how would the meal taste as a whole, could I finish cooking it all in time, what was I sacrificing by obsessing over ingredients? By these measures, the meal was not a success. I maintained a high level of trust in my food as I purchased and prepared it, but I approached the latter with a righteous zeal that would be hard to replicate night after night. The financial and physical drain of my approach could turn an inexperienced person off to the idea of cooking from scratch, which was not the lesson I hoped to take away.

Yet there is a silver lining. I discovered that the finest things I prepared were also the simplest — pairings of a single high-quality item with just one judiciously chosen homemade ingredient. Whittling down a meal to just a few ingredients that you can really trust may lead to healthier eating, by fixing less food per meal, and focusing on savoring whatever is special about the dish in front of you. I would also hope this approach would make trustworthy food more accessible — if one can afford to buy just a few really solid ingredients, and learn how to use them well, then the pressure to convert to a completely organic, sustainable, local diet becomes less pressing. I found a similar sentiment in an article titled “Carrots Are the New Caviar”:

Revaluing ingredients — starting with the assumption that a potato or a carrot can taste as exciting as foie gras… can lead not only to better food, but, equally important in these difficult economic times, to a less costly way of eating… knowing how to cook means it is possible to eat both well and inexpensively.

It is unrealistic to expect that we will ever have complete trust in the food we consume — food industry lobbies, ever-changing perceptions of nutrition and dieting, and opportunistic obfuscation of food labels will see to that. Doing justice to food both as consumer and cook is the closest we can come to getting it right.

Seemingly dangerous meals like Fugu fish stew and frogs in boiling pepper oil have graced my plate and palate, but a good old American-style breakfast nearly killed me. It was at Grandma’s Kitchen, a diner in Beijing that serves typical American “comfort food” — meat and potatoes, hamburgers, cream pies, and so forth — to Western expats longing for flavors of home (and to wealthier Chinese families curious to try “real” American food). After five months of getting by on bland Chinese breakfasts, I enjoyed every bite of my egg, sausage, potato, and green pepper skillet. Sitting in a vinyl booth, listening to the theme from The Wonder Years, I was content. But as I lazed out of the restaurant into the bleary late morning haze, my chest tightened. These were not pangs of homesickness for America. The sudden, massive influx of meat, carbs, and dairy forced me to sit down on the sidewalk, clutch my chest, and ponder the distance to the nearest hospital.

As the pain receded and I gingerly stood up and ambled on, I thought about the discrepancy between what I wanted to get out of the meal and what my body had allowed. The actual, physical product of comfort food is meant to evoke feelings of familiarity, home, and nostalgia. Ideally one can eat these feelings into existence while also having a cozy, homey experience. The breakfast food at Grandma’s Kitchen was comforting, but the overall experience left me rattled. Does a meal have to deliver on both of these fronts to truly deserve the title of “comfort food”?


When I asked friends for their most comforting meals, the individual responses were personal and subjective, yet they coalesced into a collective answer that reflected a neat microcosm of some key American experiences and values. For instance, cultural hybridity: my Indian-Dominican friend adds basmati rice to her mom’s Dominican chicken soup, which itself modifies the standard combo of chicken, carrots, and celery by adding plantains, yucca, and avocado. Or America’s diversity of religion, and religion’s rules for daily life: in moments of weak physical fortitude my Jewish grandmother is rejuvenated by chicken broth, while her gentile friends always have beef broth. America’s global presence is implied when a friend teaching abroad in Honduras buys Washington-grown apples to be reminded of home. Cultural imperialism comes to mind when sampling the local adaptations to the McDonald’s menu, which is a favorite practice for a second-generation Vietnamese friend who’s lived in South Africa, China, and Hawaii.

Despite all this, the American approach to recipes for comfort food is surprisingly unimaginative. Whether you want your comfort food vegan, gluten-free, low-carb, or diabetic-friendly, cookbooks specializing in the cuisine all dutifully deliver recipes for mac ‘n cheese, biscuits and gravy, and some kind of baked casserole. Some restaurants, chefs and food lobbies dress up the old favorites with classy ingredients and experimental preparations, but they still tend to promote a uniform vision of the American comfort food canon. There’s nothing wrong with adding flair to traditional dishes, but fancy and diet-conscious comfort foods remind us that there are only so many combinations of flavors and ingredients before we come circling back to the same old tropes. Studies attempting to parse the population’s taste for comfort foods just end up looking like lists of “stuff people really like to eat”. By labeling so many kinds of dishes “comfort food,” we tend to dilute the term’s meaning and privilege ingredients over experience.

Even inmates on death row turn to comfort food for their last meals. Because of the grim fate of the diner, this clearly a case where comfort is conveyed more by the food than by the experience. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how far you believe the serving of justice should intrude upon prisoners’ lives), last meals are sometimes constrained by state laws, chefs’ skills, and availability of ingredients. Or, in the frank words of a character in Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask:

Some guy is a few hours away from the Reaper’s speedball and he chows down on a slab of imitation crabmeat in a hot dog bun… These poor slobs could order anything they want, you think, but they are just low-rent and don’t know any better. Because that’s the story they’ve told us… [actually,] they have no choice. Prisoners are allowed to order their last meal only from restaurants within a three-mile radius of the prison. What kinds of joints do you think surround death houses?… No Michelin stars in those counties.

In a literature review of sorts on last meals, we are led to ponder the other factors that influence an inmate when choosing his or her final meal; perhaps the inmate’s native culture and the region of the prison also play a part in guiding how the inmate decides. Yet most items on this list of famous last meals hew close to the meat-fat-sugar trifecta present in many discussions of comfort food. Even celebrity chefs have weighed in on their perfect last meals. These imagined meals are more refined than real inmates’ meals, yet several of them share the quality of “comforting” the eater by giving him massive quantities of rich food.

Compare this with David Lebovitz’s appreciation of Moorish noodle pudding. The recipe comes from a cookbook by Moro, a London restaurant which used to source much of its food from “their ‘allotment’; a place on the outskirts of London where 81 people tended their own gardens and foraged for foods.” Unfortunately, the site has been destroyed, “the bulldozers [having]plowed the century-old gardens under to make way for the upcoming Olympics, in order to create a pathway between two stadiums.” Leibovitz had eaten the dish for only the first time, and yet:

The meal had “a certain allure that was hard to put my finger on. For lack of a better term, perhaps it’s because this dessert is ‘comfort food’, even though it’s from an unfamiliar place. Maybe it was the page facing this recipe, showing someone pouring two cups of steaming Turkish coffee on a ruddy kitchen counter. I ate my pudding on the rooftop, over looking the city of Paris — which I sometimes like to think of as my little allotment, which I hope doesn’t get bulldozed any time in the near future”

Here, nostalgia for a bygone, unknown place was all that was needed to transform the dessert into comfort food. Leibovitz was connected by neither time, nor place, nor ethnicity, nor familiarity with the original dish, and yet its connotations resonated quite deeply within him.

Years after the scare at Grandma’s Kitchen, I am in Phoenix on a business trip. When not on the road I work from home, so I normally prepare all three meals a day; now I must dine out alone for two straight weeks. For the first few meals, things seem all right — I enjoy a lunch of goat curry at an Indian restaurant, and for dinner I find a cheap vegetarian platter at a Middle Eastern restaurant and importer. The fact that I gravitate towards these types of food in an alien environment says something about my personal taste for foods I find comforting. But I know that I will only experience true culinary comfort in preparing a meal for myself.

My hotel room doesn’t have a kitchen or a refrigerator. Even the coffee maker is automated — no hot plate or coffee pot in which to humbly heat a can of soup. A friend with business travel experience tells me how to make an improvised refrigerator for leftovers: hotel rooms should always come with two clean trash bags, so take one of the bags, put your leftovers inside, tie the bag tight, and keep it overnight in the bathroom sink (filled with ice from the machine down the hall). Just don’t forget to brush your teeth first. I get as far as the toothbrushing and sink-filling before realizing that my room comes equipped with only one trash bag, which I have already filled with a day’s debris. I hate wasting food, so I force down the rest of the leftover hummus and tabouleh, re-brush my teeth, and go to bed uncomfortably full.

On the second day, I go to the nearest Safeway and stock up on bread, peanut butter, jelly, and dried fruits and nuts. Nourishing enough, but only good for lunches on-the-go, and without any of the joy, complexity, or time on task of actually cooking. By the third day I return to the hotel to find I can now rent a small refrigerator, so my options expand. I go back to the Middle Eastern importer, and with dinner, I order extra olives, pita, and hummus to save overnight; back in the hotel room I contentedly assemble the ingredients over a styrofoam tray.

On the fourth day, I find my gastronomic oasis. Rising out of the tan homogeneity of a Phoenix shopping center I see Chinese and English characters: 利利超级市场 LEE LEE ORIENTAL SUPERMARKET beckons me in, and inside I search for ingredients I can use to build a meal within the limited means of my hotel room. I settle on making bánh mì — Vietnamese sandwiches typically filled with pickled daikon and carrot, cilantro, jalapenos, mayonnaise, pâté, and meat or tofu, all served on a French baguette.

Since heating food is not an option (I briefly consider buying a $17.99 portable gas cooker, then envision burning down the hotel and decide I’d rather keep my job), I go with tofu. I pick up some ingredients for a marinade: rice vinegar, thai chiles, ginger, and sesame seeds. I find a pre-pickled daikon and carrot mix, jalapenos, cilantro, and baguettes next to other Asian ingredients, so I figure I’m set! In the produce section I stock up on extra plastic bags. Then I spend 30 extra minutes wandering the aisles, happily looking at ingredients I know I will not buy.

Back in the hotel, I use my Leatherman tool to cut the tofu, which I plop into the marinade that’s been prepared over the bathroom sink. In lieu of tupperware, I triple-bag the ingredients, store them in the fridge for the next night, and contentedly crack open the styrofoam for the last of the Middle Eastern food.

After a summer day’s work under the blazing Phoenix sun, a cold sandwich is about the only thing I can look forward to eating. Back in my hotel bathroom, I hunch over the sink, chopping jalapenos, plucking cilantro leaves off stems, and draining vinegar from the daikon-carrot mixture. The pickled scent of the vegetables and the smell of the tofu marinade suddenly fill the room. For a moment I forget where I am, lost in the simple alchemy of sandwich making. Once the ingredients are assembled inside the bread, I sit at the desk and take my first bite.

The sandwich is awful. The marinade for the tofu is tinny and insipid; it tastes like it’s been soaked overnight in Mountain Dew. Too many seeds have been removed from the jalapenos, so there is not enough spice to draw my interest. Worst of all is the bread. It is soft and tacky, providing none of the resistant crackle that a decent baguette should have. The inner parts of the bread get mushy from being in contact with the daikon and carrots. As I finish off the sandwich in several more bland, matted mouthfuls, I think about going back to the Middle Eastern place.

To my surprise, over the next few days I make and eat the sandwich again and again. Even though I practically choke it down, even though added experimental ingredients (avocado, nori) can’t rescue it, I continue to suffer through until the package of six baguettes is finished. I just can’t pass up the chance to “cook,” even if the results are disappointing. The food itself might not be good, but every time I hunker over the fluorescent-lit bathroom counter, I am comforted, because I am making something, I am focused, and I forget I am alone.

I thought my chances would be improved by the homey, nostalgic connotations of the dish. With little kitchen skill but lofty romantic aspirations, I asked my mother for a recipe that would seem kind of fancy yet not snobby, and simple enough that I couldn’t screw it up. A bag of slivered almonds exploded across the kitchen as I assembled the side salad, and the homemade strawberry pie burned on top and didn’t cook through the center, but the chicken survived and was delicious.

This April I made the chicken for the fourth time, and besides the pleasure of finally executing the event with skill and confidence, it was satisfying to make a meal for the sake of tradition. Since that inaugural chicken dinner, I’ve lived in two states, three countries, four houses, graduated from college, and started living in a new city. “Home” is a mobile concept these days, so to have an annual dinner that all began with a modern passing down of a family recipe (instructions given over cell phone, scribbled on printer paper) is a rare thing.

So imagine my dismay at the end of this year’s meal when, as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I noticed a familiar dish on the back of the Corn Flakes box: Double-Coated Chicken with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes®. All across the country dinner was being served, and my “special” meal was the main course.

For the sake of enjoying the dinner, I had set aside my usual concerns about nutrition. We all deserve our chicken drizzled with copious amounts of butter once in a while. But I was not ready to concede that a personally meaningful meal was tied in with a Kellogg’s serving suggestion. Knowing the proven romantic value of a tarted-up piece of chicken, if one starts with a birthday dinner Brought to You by Kellogg’s, pretty soon it’ll be date-night Double Downs and McGangBangs on anniversaries. It felt like I had unwittingly played into Kellogg’s hand. Even as an educated consumer who understands the pitfalls of consuming industrially-produced, high fructose corn syrup-drenched, sodium-rich, refined carbohydrate corn products, I had established an emotional bond with a meal centering around the cereal. Echoes of Don Draper’s “It’s Toasted” speech played in my head. Happiness is a recipe on a box that screams, with reassurance: “whatever you’re eating is okay.”

The pressures of conscientious eating seriously challenged my ability to reflect on the meal without feeling guilt. Now that critiques of the modern food chain, meat and grain production and delivery systems, and nutritional guidelines have been popularized, practically any meal, if carefully considered, can make me feel like a transgressor. A commenter on a blog article about the overfishing of bluefin tuna put it best: “I’ve been trying to eat vegetarian + fish for the last six months, and tuna has been a staple that I rely on for protein. Now I feel like a jerk.”

A common solution to this dilemma is to take food production into your own hands, or at least into the hands of a trusted local farmer. But is this an option for every meal? How would Corn Flake chicken fare as an artisan, locally-sourced dish? If this video is any indication, by the time I’m done making my own Corn Flakes my only girlfriend will be the laundry press. As for the chicken, while I am comfortable relinquishing trust to the vendors at the local farmer’s market, a recent story in my city’s weekly alternative paper exposes the lax approach to organic certification by a major local dealer in (ostensibly) non-industrially-produced meats. Even the DIY-local-organic nexus of food issues can fall short of the ideal.

There may be hope in the forgiving rules of Mark Bittman’s “Sane Eating” approach, from his book Food Matters, which instructs us to, among other things, “eat far fewer refined carbohydrates [as] they are all treats, not off limits but to be eaten only occasionally (and with gusto).” Similarly, Michael Pollan’s Food Rules allow us to “treat treats as treats” — that is, we may eat red-flagged food items as long as we treat them as “special occasion foods,” so that “the sense of occasion [is] restored.”

Expanding this approach to all kinds of problematic food is alright in a nutritional sense — a little indulgence once in a while won’t kill you. But the more we learn about the issues behind food, the harder it is to eat an indulgent meal (or even a simple meal) without considering the forces that conspired to put food on your plate. So how can we navigate the distance between the intensely personal experience of eating and the highly impersonal nature of the food we eat? How can we deal when the ingredients on our plates don’t live up to the same romantic notions we concoct in the act of cooking?

We just have to make ourselves forget. For the sake of enjoying some meals, we must allow ourselves to succumb to selective amnesia. Even with all the times our eating choices adhere to the ethical, laudable, and reasonable rules espoused by the likes of Bittman and Pollan, there will inevitably be lapses. Just as the bachelor “elaborately disguises” his chicken with ingredients from a planter bed, a spice rack, or a box, so we must dress up our notions of the meaning of a meal, rerouting cold knowledge into pleasant feelings so that the food goes down easy.

Photo by mccun934.