Slow Love

A short recipe for building love.

Start with good ingredients. Cheap thrills can come in all shapes and sizes but taking the time to understand the full lifecycle of a product yields significantly better results. That’s why it’s so often best to do more of the work yourself. Not just because of the freshness or the labour of love, but because you can understand a product so much more fully when you see it’s transformation from plant, animal or fungi into food. 

Every so often take the time to make ingredients, not just food. Buying green coffee beans and roasting simply in a pan is one of my favourites. 

Find the connections. Building relationships between ingredients and humans requires openness. Without a willingness to share we can’t hope to receive. On this aspect of relationships the media is full of advice. Since we tend to focus on the beginning of love, there are plenty of artistic examples of putting one’s self out there and either being rewarded or learning from the experience. But there’s no love without risk.

For most people this means being honest first with yourself and second with others. For plants, animals and fungi it means having an understanding of how they came from the ground and ended up in your hands. It also means constantly tasting and smelling, since often this is the best way to learn about a product off the page. 

It’s become a cliche but my favourite technique I’ve learned is naturally leavened bread. It’s nearly magical to see flour transformed into bread, even more so if you actually see the grain being milled. Even if you can’t, it pays to know what the process would look like. It not only gives you a greater appreciation for whole grain flours, which will be more rewarding and healthy to bake with, but an understanding of why you want to be cooking with real food, as unprocessed as possible. 

Take care in preparation. Fast food, meal kits and assembly meals ask us to put things together quickly and consume just as fast. As much as possible, try not to do this. You and the people you love will thank you for it. Moving quickly can be exciting so certainly move and be decisive but truly falling in love is like turning on the heat before you’ve even prepped the ingredients. Exciting but risky for everyone involved. 

Think about what you’re doing, with all your senses. Every eating occasion, like every relationship, is both a risk and an opportunity. Once you’ve occupied someone’s life you have a responsibility to act in a way which is fair. Failing that, you need at least to minimize harm. So don’t be casual with either your diet or your friends and family.

As you cook, taste the various plants and fungi you’re adding to the whole. While it’s often less safe to do this with uncooked animal products, any opportunity you have to understand the flavours of the individual ingredients in something in something like ratatouille will lend that much more understanding and appreciation of the final product. It also highlights how much pleasure can be had along the way. 

Enjoy the process. So often we think in a goal oriented way. The sense of eating is satiety. The sense of love is procreation and pleasure. But just because we need to do something doesn’t mean it should be mechanical. I argue just the opposite. These most basic human desires should be celebrated and savoured as what makes us, us. Good food and healthy relationships demand both respect and joy. So whether in cooking or in relationships, pour yourself a drink and stay a while. Taking your time will also allow you to enjoy what you do have instead of wishing for things to be a different way. 

Give thanks. Not everyone will live like this, which is a shame in my opinion. But when you find people who reciprocate your emotions and ingredients of genuine quality remember to appreciate them. This is the stuff which makes life worth living, after all. 

And now for everything which happens after the credits. After I do and the music swells, the rest of us are all still here. Cleaning up after a meal is just as necessary as having it. We could call this Relationship Maintenance but even that phrasing admits a kind of boredom. We’re meant to tell stories about the exciting moments of our character’s lives and leave the average days unrecorded. 

This is the illusion of art. No epic poetry, literature, history, film, tv or even podcast is written for the middle years of marriage. I suspect this is often why the personal lives of artists are so dramatic. It can be heartbreaking to be so keenly aware of one’s emotions, so deeply in love and quite suddenly without love and just left to clean the dishes. After all, if our emotional response to love or food is what makes life worth living, how do we go on after the meal?

Since I’m only in the middle of my marriage I can only guess. But I suspect the answer again is biomimetic. Our socio-cultural understanding of our needs should mirror our biology. After all, if we continue to feast after we’re full we’d become sick. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. 

I believe our capacity to love isn’t limited by biology. Our often overactive empathy exemplifies how humans can love infinitely, even to a fault. But we can’t sustain infinite relationships. We have limits because of the effort required to love (and eat) equitably. 

So what’s a conscious consumer to do? As with so much in our consumer-driven, neoliberal lives the normal solution is to start over. Why repair when you can replace? Who wouldn’t want to be forever in the lustful beginning of a new relationship? But my argument is that this too is making us sick. 

I am not in lust with my wife. We have a toddler and another on the way at the time of writing and between our dogs, renovations, work and social lives we’re often too tired to be lustful. 

I am in love. Within it. In the middle of it. As with any relationship or recipe each moment is a new opportunity and (sometimes) a challenge. But this what I’m arguing for: to be in love. Call it slow love, if you like. 

Neither of us is perfect. Sometimes I think the lust part allowed us to build a bridge, allowing time to believe the other is perfect before discovering all our flaws. Or finding all new ones within and without of ourselves. As with any new experience, the infatuation comes first. But she’s the one I chose and I want to live with that, within it, and build a life without wondering how things might have been in some way more exceptional. 

I want to learn to celebrate an uneventful marriage just as a weeknight meal. A life about nothing. It probably won’t make it into the history books but that’s another place where history confuses us. Just as love isn’t a series of infatuations, humanity’s story isn’t a line of exceptional individuals surrounded by plebs. We tell stories about the exceptional because they weren’t normal, but they stood on the shoulders of an awful lot of average people. For every great chef, there are quite a few dishwashers.