Cooking as Dharma practice

This is not what I intended to post this week, But after reading the answers I just spent two hours writing to a newspaper reporter's questions about me and my new alter ego Nana Chef in relation to her new program and Kickstarter campaign, I realized talking about Nana and cooking was talking about Dharma in my life. And I couldn't do it any better as just a post. So here's the Q and A:

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background in cooking, etc? 

I really started cooking big time when I moved to Maine in 1973 because there were no restaurants or quality food stores. I'd traveled widely and learned in many kitchens. My kitchen became a kind of salon. From there I was asked to cook for other people having parties and that led to the catering business first in Georgetown as Captains Cook and then in Brunswick as the very popular Tastewrights. Part of Tastewrights was the first upscale bakery in Brunswick. That came after a season selling my baked goods at the Brunswick Farmers' Market where I introduced baguettes. 

Sadly, a massive orthopedic crisis forced me to immediately halt the physical effort of cooking, so I went down to Radcliffe and into the first ever Food History seminar. To help promote the farmers' market, with four area farmers, in 1990 I wrote the first ever farmers' market guide based on all the questions I heard people asking over and over while I worked in one.  How to Fix a Leek...and Other Food from Your Maine Farmers' Market turned out to be popular and so beloved I did an updated edition in 2011 aimed at farmers' markets everywhere. I believe you can still buy it on Kindle and at the Brunswick Farmers' Market from Keogh Family Farm. Last summer (2015) I worked with Bath Housing Authority to hands on help residents  cook and preserve the harvest from their organic gardens.

Even though after 1988, I became too handicapped to keep cooking, people would call and ask me to do a small event or just please bake them a batch of the special cookie I had developed at Tastewrights. Well, baking those batches led to an explosion of demand and suddenly I was back in the baking business as Cakesphere. Orders were flying in especially from California where I was a huge hit but it was only me and my orthopedic system broke down again and I was in so much pain, I had to stop instantly. My Dr. said: "If you do this again, I won't help you." Sadly I did go to the state's so called Business Development Center to see if I could get support to hire people and grow without my having to do all the physical labor and the response was pathetic--like it was for Roxanne Quimby at Burts' Bees. The guy said: "Yes I know your cookies. I see them all the time at Bow Street Market but I wouldn't spend $1 for one so as far as I'm concerned, your business won't get our support."  

By then I was deeply committed to Buddhism and became the go to cook for gurus visiting Maine and Boston and Baltimore. Then it became Vancouver and San Francisco. I was in Nepal a lot and after I spent a whole day cooking 3 meals for 300 kids in a kitchen with no water, no floor, no electricity and a stove that was a burning tree shoved into some bricks, I started a cooking and better nutrition program for impoverished kids at my teacher's boarding school: it's still going after 15 years! Then monks and nuns asked for my help so I started a small charity, Veggiyana, registered in Maine, to provide food, cooking lessons and food gardens to Buddhist practitioners. www.veggiyana.org  From all this Wisdom Publications in Somerville MA asked me to write a cookbook so in 2011 they published Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking: essays on food history with 108 deliciously simple vegetarian recipes I'd gathered from my travels and cooking all over the world. In 2012 I was invited to Ulan Baator, Mongolia to teach cooking and revitalize a Buddhist owned vegetarian cafe, which I apparently did in my six nonstop weeks there because I was told it became a huge success that year. The income funded free Dharma classes.

In 2014 I was invited by the Bath Freightshed Alliance to cook their June Farm-to-Table fundraising dinner using all local ingredients i helped to scavenge and I believe that dinner raised the most money of any in the three-year series. By then I was also starting to make jam and cookies with my friends' granddaughters who came to visit. In 2014 and 15 I volunteered as a chef for San Francisco Cooking Matters elementary school classes so I could test out this idea of being Nana and it was the kids at the worst low income school in the system who named me Nana Chef. That's when I decided to help all kids get skills, confidence and something to bring to the table. I volunteered for Brunswick but nobody even bothered to answer me. 

2. Can you tell me more about the Nana Chef program? 

First I want people to know RSU5 (Freeport, Durham, Pownal) is offering a Nana Chef summer camp to all cookees for a week at the end of June and I think it's going to be great fun to give these cookees joyous memories to nourish a lifetime by making strawberry jam and peach tarts, fancy tuna fish baguette sandwiches and pesto sauce with Nana.

Nana offers her cookees basic training: safety, skill, sensing. Kids smell spices and decide which ones they want to add or not. They learn the magical medicinal properties of herbs and the differences in salt. They learn simple baking, artful display, fast foods like smoothies and peanut butter and pesto sauces. The essence of the program is to bring back the universal tradition of elders passing wisdom down to the young by gently letting kids get familiar with kitchen art and craft and its importance to their own survival.

Right now on her website, www.Nana-chef.com, cookees can learn to make applesauce, dilly beans, and banana bread. They can watch a video to learn kitchen words like mince and cream. They can learn a little about herbs and spices and above all get some safety tips for being in the kitchen.

3. What was the drive behind it?  

Nana is coming back into the kitchen to nourish kids with a lifetime of the joyful memories of smells, tastes and delicious love many of us elders have when we remember growing up with an older woman spoiling us in the kitchen. Now too many mothers and grandmothers have to work and too much food is industrially processed to be nothing but fast, so kids won't have those sublime memories to magnetize them into the kitchen as adults. That could totally destroy cooking--humanity's greatest accomplishment, and we can't let our lives be decimated like that. We're already suffering massive health and environmental crises because that's underway.

Nana wants to show today's Harry Potter struck kids how magical cooking is: the poof! of a popover, the smoosh of heated berries into jam, the mystery of milk turning into yogurt, the cucumber into a pickle. Cooking should not be cutthroat competition it has become or some AP pursuit for a resume. It should wonder-full fun. Cooking is really all about survival, sharing and love. Nana wants cookees to know preparing food is not a dumb dull chore. It's where science meets art and sharing is everything.  It's giving life and showing love. Nana is real because there is no app for that!

4. What do you hope students will learn?

First, that they really can do something very very important for themselves and the people they love. This means they are important. Secondly they learn actual skills, survival skills, that give them confidence they can take care of themselves and survive. And thirdly, that everybody brings something to the table; everybody in the world cooks and eats so they are not alone in the kitchen but part of something huge and important that binds them to every other human on Earth as an equal.

5. Tell me more about your YouTube channel and why you are starting that up.

It's very hard for one person to break through all the noise, clutter and firewalls to reach the world. The easiest way nowadays seems to be via video and indeed some young mothers familiar with Nana Chef suggested I introduce her on a You Tube channel. The idea is similar to the old Mr. Rogers' shows: Nana talks directly and gently while imparting wisdom and love. She can't do that in print, only in life and the only way to bring it to life for kids so scattered is via a video. So to get this idea of Nana into public consciousness, I'm trying to put together a video channel.

6. What has the community response been like to your efforts? 

Whenever even the most sophisticated or most technological people hear the phrase Nana in the kitchen they instantly fill with rapture, glow and smile as they remember some smell or taste and show of pure, non judgmental love. Nana turns out to be a powerful concept I am trying to restore, at least to cooking. 

7. Why is cooking your passion? 

I started as a political scientist in international relations and when I got out into the world, the first thing that hit me was how politics divided people and killed people but food, food always brought people together and nobody got hurt. I can go anywhere in the world and immediately relate by asking someone what they eat or how they cook a particular ingredient. It never fails. Everybody on this planet brings something to the table; we are all equals in the kitchen. So cooking became my politics. 

Equally important, when I started to cook a lot I discovered cooking is the cross of science with art, nature and nurture. It's endlessly fascinating. And magical. And it's traditional every which way, so it binds you to the whole of humanity past and present. But most of all it's about love--love of life itself and love for others, and about sharing that love. It's a very spiritually satisfying activity.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved