Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Soul Food


So when you wake up in the morning do you feel like your soul is being fed by what you do?

The soul is a forgotten ingredient when making or preparing food for others.  Sure most of us are just happy if we can get something in and out of the oven in time for maybe half the family to the table to eat.  The idea that you could inject some type of love or soulfulness to the food is almost unheard of really.  America just moves at a pace that never really allows itself to slow down enough to even acknowledge any type of soul in food if it did exist.


As a very low totem pole cook in a sea of masters I see a lot of chefs showing off what they know but with no purpose of reaching someone's soul. They get lost in that ego waterfall that is seen on TV.  Ego is the complete opposite of soul, before you can find your soul in cooking you have to lose the ego.  The sad part of that suggestion is that most new tattooed chefs rolling out of culinary school correlate ego with money and celebrity chef status.  Most of those money hungry clones will had already sold their soul to the devil somewhere between their third and four year at culinary school. 

Once in your life you should experience food made with passion and soul.  This doesn't mean you search out for the most expensive restaurant in town.  Actually to the contrary, most places that will sell food with passion and soul is the guy with a ten seat restaurant in a neighborhood you would never go to after dark.  Or the guy off the side of a country road selling barbecue out of a trailer.  Be aware and look for these folks and look into their eyes and discover that passion and soulfulness isn't bred from ego and pretentiousness, but with a heart that refuses to ever stop making food perfect.