Everyday I find myself astonished and humbled by the infinite recipes for eating and living. My experience in architecture, philosophy, yoga and food has blended into a strange kaleidoscopic lens adjusting awareness, responsibility and joy in every interaction. I see cooking as transformative, as an event that helps me to take the other in, to consume, to enjoy and to cherish. My revised recipe for living now involves three considerations borrowing from yoga mindfulness and object oriented philosophy.

 (X)  Everything is a location in existence.

You, as a thing, are a dynamic location. You are a unique point in the stippled picture of the universe, never isolated, always responding. As is, everything else.

I borrow this from the practice of yoga that warns us against the misguided and egocentric belief that we are proudly autonomous or sadly disconnected.

X+  Everything is more than it appears.

You, as a thing, are more than your actions, emotions, body, race, religion, thought, features, likes, dislikes, you and everything you think you know is more than your assessment. You are hidden. As is, everything else.

Object oriented thinking and Graham Harman taught me to celebrate the darkness and depth of things. There is a philosophical generosity in accepting the unknown and resisting the drive for full disclosure.

 X + ( –X)  Everything is conditioned on what it is not.

Food is the visceral example of this. What is not you, sustains you. You are weird. As is, everything else.

Timothy Morton, the author of the Poetics of Spice (2006), Dark Ecology  (2016) and much more in between, talks about the “weird,” turning, twisting, looping non-linear causality and coexistence of things.

You, as a thing, are as a location in existence, more than what you seem and are conditioned by everything that is not you, and everything you encounter does the same.

Everything is a Point. Hidden. Weird.  Including, you. And, me.

Thing: {(X), X+, [X+(-X)]}

Keep reading. This is the master recipe I’ll be using in all food stories to come and to help me care about things I don’t understand. Let me tell you how to eat bittermelons and brownies, and a few things in between.