content analysis

I’m a reader. I always have been. It’s very hard for me to sit still without something to read. It doesn’t even have to be a great novel. I always read the entire “History of our Restaurant” on menus. Give me a crappy local newsletter, a brochure, or the back of a bottle of shampoo and I’ll read every word. I love reading and I love books; it’s that simple. As Nick Hornby writes in The Polysyllabic Spree, “Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time” (pg. 58).

At the same time, I’m a piss poor cook. I’m the only person I know capable of messing up the simplest of foods like rice and beans, mac and cheese, or toast. I can’t even work a grill properly. And let’s not even talk about the T-bone in a Frying Pan Disaster of 2002. While I fully accept this condition (and resign myself to life of dinner via dialing), I never considered its possible connection to my love of the written word until this past weekend.

I’m currently reading the captivating, gossipy, and intellectually curious book, Heat by Bill Buford. In the book, Buford writes about rotund celebrity chef Mario Batali and becomes a kitchen slave and, later, line cook in his kitchen. Throughout the book, Buford describes the physiological features of cooking. One knows a food is done, not through timing, but by smelling, touching, looking. In real kitchens, precise proportions are non-existent (one highly sexist cook suggests that the serving size for a food be “a B cup”). A cook learns to make a food by watching.

At one point, Buford is discussing one of the chefs Batali previously worked under, a mercurial entrepreneur named Marco Pierre White. He notes that White has always suffered from severe dyslexia and struggles to read a single page of the newspaper. Yet, his inability to read led to a greatly enhanced ability to learn by watching. He has “photographic memory for food,” writes Buford. After noting how White’s extraordinary gifts of visual retention had made him a superb chef, Buford writes a truly remarkable passage (pg. 104 in hardcover), presented in complete here:

Marco’s genius might be nothing more than an exaggerated variation of Mario’s “kitchen awareness,” but it made me realize how this visual facility was not one I had developed, probably because I’m a word guy — most of us are — and for most of my life the learning I’ve done has been through language. Most metropolitan professions are language-driven — urban, deductive, dominated by thought, reading, abstraction, from the moment you wake and wonder how you should dress for the day and read a weather report to find out. Until now, everything I had known about cooking was from books. A different process was at work when I found myself in a kitchen for twelve hours. I wasn’t reading; to an extent, I wasn’t thinking. I watched and imitated. The process seems more typical of how a child’s brain works than an adult’s. It was learning to throw a ball. For instance, how to bone a leg of lamb. Now I have a picture of Memo’s working down the thigh bone with his knife. Or how to tie a piece of meat: there’s a brain image.

Elsewhere, he describes how Italian pasta-makers are often women who learned as children by watching their grandmothers, truly an example of non-linguistic, physiological learning. Reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder if my mind has been so wholly shaped to learn linguistically that my abilities to learn experientially have atrophied. It is true that on the occasions when I cook, I cling desperately to the recipe, handling the ingredients like a chemist from the 1880s might have handled noxious, flammable chemicals.

Of course, we know that abilities in something like reading are affected by both intrinsic differences as well as learned, cultivated ones. But is the ability to learn non-linguistically likewise a mixture of nature and nurture? Marco learned to cook and Michael Jordan learned to play basketball through social processes. But did MJ have a preternatural ability to watch a move and reproduce it like Marco did with food? If so, is the gene (or whatever it might be) that makes one good at learning to cook the same as the one that makes one good at sports or carpentry or dozens of other visually learned practices.

Maybe a reader will come along and say, “of course, you dummy.” Maybe only a professional raised in a professional family could be surprised and intrigued by these questions. But I found that passage deeply enlightening. What do you think?