Cooking has the power to transform more than plants and animals: It transforms us, too Michael Pollan
Cooking is a form of transformational alchemy. It is to engage with the laws of science and our cultural histories to put on a plate our profound relationships with nature and our fellow human beings.
To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from corporations and a capitalist industrial complex seeking to compete with the wisdom of cooking for ourselves, developed over centuries, for their profit, often at the expense of human and environmental health.
When you cook with local ingredients from the local market, you don't just feed your families. You also feed the families of the local market traders, farmers and neighbourhood kedai runcits /sundry shop traders. In doing so we protect our food sovereignty and preserve our local food systems.
Food Sovereignty is: the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through socially just, ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their collective right to define their own policies, strategies and systems for food production, distribution and consumption.
When you cook heritage recipes from your local culture you don't only nourish yourself, you nourish the survival of generations of nutritional wisdom embedded in those dishes. Science now knows and confirms the wisdom we’ve held for generations in choosing ingredients that grow easily in our landscape using family recipes passed down for generations: turmeric fried with chicken nourishes your liver, the collagen in bone soups nourishes your skin and bones, chillies your heart health and coconut's medium chain triglycerides provide an efficent resource for energy for your work.
“At the table, we learn moderation, conversation, tolerance, generosity, and conviviality; these are civic virtues, The pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities – to one another, to the animals we eat, to the land, and to the people who work it.” Alice Waters
Cooking gives us not just the meal but also the occasion, the pleasures of the table: conversation, tolerance, generosity and conviviality. The pleasures of the table also remind us of our responsibilities – to one another, to the animals we eat, to the land and to the people who work it. When you invite your friends and family to the table you celebrate the civic virtues of moderation, conversation, tolerance, generosity and conviviality.
Cooking with local ingredients, family recipes and friends and family at the table - is a model of sustainability and the foundation of democracy.