The Inspector: “[Y]ou’ve misunderstood me; you're under arrest, certainly, but that's not meant to keep you from carrying on your profession. Nor are you to be hindered in the course of your ordinary life.”
— The Trial, Kafka
Last night, two people were in bed about to sleep somewhere in Madrid in a quarter that loosely translated ‘Wash your Feet’, and were whispering to each other about the possibility of their body parts being cooked once they die, or being given away to the other creatures of this earth as feast. There was no fear. There was the presence of an unprecedented intention. Only new horizons of possibilities that never were part of an old overused logic, a logic that always tried to eschew the shade of death. For a long time, death meant pain, unrealised dreams, tragedy, loss, terror. For one who was always gently terrorised for years by a long litany of unfortunate deaths that were innocently called History, the temptation is always to play safe. As long as one follows the rules, submit the papers on time, one can remain alive. Or remain valid.
A long cooking process preceded this pillow talk. A series of serendipities or fortunate accidents. A succession of rituals. Like opening a fridge and cooking leftovers. Encounters. Re-encounters. New taste emerging in each cooking. A field of casualities. Open partitures. Pakikipagsapalaran. Acts that with sustained repetition turn into an ethnography of the past. Patterns of those that could not be exacted (by our current ways of measure). By cooking, I could revise my past. In our dominant logic, this too was demonised as Historical Revisionism. And it has something to do with scale and intent. An excessive scale and a malicious intent.
Now, food is somehow the new art. The new science. The new age. The new commodity. And many heralds are busily projecting the solution to the new mission called sustainability. Waste-free. No waste. Another choreography of avoidance. Another ‘Do not’. How limited is our notion of power. It’s just a matter of time, like how the ‘Bio’ ink is now stamped in 12 brands of the same product of a bio supermarket (!) that ‘Waste-free’ will be the new seal of approval. More ink to be produced to mark the brands so that they are correctly labeled. An obsession to proclaim that we are doing the right thing. To correct the wrong thing. And the vicious cycle goes. People have thought of this, that they were doing the right thing, for thousands of years. And we are merely leftovers of a series of consequences of this excess towards the right thing. Somebody thought that inventing a monotheistic god could make people survive the dark plagues, until it became excessive. Somebody thought that creating nations would save people from the excesses of religion, until it too became excessive. Somebody thought that a code for a social media could connect everyone, until it became a main highway of misunderstanding, because the code had an excessive byproduct: artificial intelligence. This is not a critique of our capitalist system, because a dominant logic has always been there. If not the religion of saints, the religion of money. It's a wake up call to our agency. To re-search: where did it go?
I don't believe in waste-free cooking as a new mantra. Because even if people profess to do so, they still peel all the skin of the potato and the carrots. And this is 30 percent wasted of the substance itself (and we dont want to get started with talk on pesticides). Many consumers do not eat the leaves of leeks, or the leaves of kohl rabi or carrots. I hope I do not inspire you to create another food trend by cooking these leaves and making it the new superfood. Food trend is making turmeric / curcuma, my favourite spice that my grandmother has used for ages, as very expensive. They are proclaiming it as the new superfood. Who? I’m sure we spent thousand of euros and dollars to create the ad campaign for this. I’m sure we used a lot of post-its. Post-its is also a commodity. But it’s a kind of the norm for brainstorming. To use post-its. It validates the colourful visibility of the idea that we are making something happen. The right thing?
Maybe this is our excess. For doing the right thing, and being convinced that your right things is also good for the others. The excessive work and thought process of creating a better place for everyone. But not for our own. That is considered selfish. But anyone who has fallen in love can agree that one needs to be in a state of self-love and acceptance first before love can actually fall. Planets need to have its own gravitational core so it can dance, and not collide, with others. To save the life of others in a falling plane, one must put its own oxygen mask first. Waste is not inherent in these emergent processes.Yet we live in wasteful bubbles.
If you haven't solved the riddle, what I’m trying to get at is that waste is a product of a binary logic. A logic that is produced in languages where words are given genders (about 3/4 of the world's language do not gender their words). The presupposition itself in our proto-capitalistic society that leftover is waste, and the consensus fetish that imbue meaning to leftover as waste goes back to our lack of 'neutral' logic or a holistic attitude of equanimity. We try to go to yoga class and feel equanimous for an hour and a half and once we are back home or in the office, we are back to the binary logic: work / home. We need to do this, we need to do that. We have no time.
I go back to the fridge. I call it the garbage bin of our subconscious. The thing that escapes our rational thinking. Somehow we gave it the license to store things that we know we could forget later. And I’m sure some of you will be thinking now, I do not waste anything in my fridge. Or, I have nothing in my fridge. But we all have histories. And the practice of cooking leftovers is not to point out who is the best student in fridge maintenance, but to identify what we have in common: a possibility that something so common and ubiquitous like a fridge could be a laboratory to deal with something so deathly as the past. As a point of re-search. As Work. The work of searching your true profession. Not from scratch (another illusion in our society). To search again for the things we might have forgotten when our everyday life is enclosed to a wasteful binary logic wrapped in the fear of the unknown (or the ungendered). To use what is already there as a place for work / living. Nowhere Kitchen was never about waste-free cooking. It’s more about cleaning the fridge as a pretext to consciously ritualize, not routinize. And making time to clean as part of life, not as a service you can pay. Nomads and displaced refugees have no fridges. Perhaps they do not have a binary logic. You are reading this precisely because the woman who organised this event decided to clean up her fridge as a pretext to invite 50 of her friends and celebrate her 50th birthday. I received more money from her because we saved from unnecessary shopping, and she did not have to pay a regular catering, which would usually cost more. It was a win-win situation.
Cooking with leftovers, means cooking with what is there. Improvisation. Another thing, that, in our highly bureaucratised society has been reduced to a practice you do in theatre or dance. Or privately. Not everyone need to improvise. Because we live in an official system that can be premeditated. If you want to improvise, you can do it safely inside a studio.
Back to death. This new paradigm of thinking that makes it even possible to make feast of one’s dead body (and not reduce it as cannibalism) is inspired by serendipities that were consequences of leftover cooking. When I and some co-cooks went to Indonesia to work and play, I had a surprise encounter with a Spanish woman whom I met previously in Asturias in a performance festival where I also cooked and performed (with 40 milking cows!). It so happened that she was celebrating her firstborn’s 40th day anniversary, and in Bali, this is done by ceremoniously cutting the finger nails of the baby for the first time. We ended up cooking food for the guests. Our improvisation got attached to a thousand year old tradition. The father of the baby cut the nails and then kept it alongside the placenta that has been preserved with salt. They keep both ‘dead body parts’ as leftovers that will be part of the baby’s future ceremonies. The baby gets to have memories and witnesses. Six months later, I was in Zurich cooking in an exhibition of a woman, who asked me if I could cook her placenta which she kept until now. Memories of my first placenta encounter in Bali that looked like dried fish made me assimilate quickly the idea of placenta as food. And said, ‘Yes’. She changed her mind, and said will decide what to do it with it later. Instead, she gave me half a bottle of her mother’s milk. At this time, I already started doing a series of tasting of mother’s milk inspired by my lactating friends in Berlin. That night in Zurich, after Mother’s Milk #03, it dawned on me, we never have this memory: the memory of our first taste. And yet we store in our brains so many other information. Last week, a conversation revealed to me that mother’s milk is not a leftover, it is something that is only produced when necessary. And there it was.
In my mother's mother tongue, leftover is translated as 'tada'. It's a verb. An action word. It means to leave something behind for the other. It never meant waste. This is my point with mother's milk. It was never about 'not wasting' because this presupposes a pre-wasting. (and here there is a thin line of difference, so please dont reduce it to binaries again). It was about the understanding of the organic design of limit. We somehow lack or lost this motor skill, the capacity to put a limit to what we produce. Yet the mother's body demonstrates that we actually can. The problem is that our body that has been equipped with ancient members of intuition, empathy and creativity has the tendency to be preempted by our mind, where we harvest fear, control and the desire for excess (have you realised that sometimes your mind works without you noticing it). Lactation is a proof that our body is capable of creating limits that is enough for the humans to survive. Or of producing if the body wills it. Survival. Emergency. The displaced and misunderstood intelligences of living. Waste-free is not a new trend. It was the innate power we forgot. It was power at our 'disposal'. And we are only beginning to understand what it can really do. I discovered this 'territory of knowledge' out of inhabiting mess, out of improvising, out of a critical habitation and colonisation of my everyday life, out of my own pleasure points, out of accepting the consequences of my pain, out of encountering my shadows, so I don't have to colonise the shadows of others, so I have no one to blame. I never wanted to do the right thing for you. Only what feels right for me. And that gives everyone a fair share of responsibility: the major work of resistance of finding out what one really wants. To take care of your given framework / leftovers: your body, its history and its limited shelf life. To write your own history, so you don't have to depend on others. So you can write it however you want. So we don't have to invent -isms and spend too much energy to apologetically correct what others wrote about us. Or blame others. To die knowing that we have cooked our own leftovers. So we can be leftlovers too. Cooked in love and death. La roja y la blanca. And the circle goes. Tada.
Madrid, Lavapies, 19 December 2016,
Before Lunch
Ykwim.
Notes:
*This text was inspired by different interwoven conversations. The thing in between that occurs when bodies engaged are of mutual agreement that they see things differently, and yet they can observe the thing in between. And by Kafka, whose leftover happened to be near.
*This text was read in front of an audience, for an event called 'Ecologies of Practice' in Studio 13, Uferstudios, Berlin. 19 December 2016: