Mat och tänkande

Gelin d.y tipsar om en artikel av Adam Gopnik i The New Yorker om mat i litteraturen. Gopnik lagar rätter från litterära verk: "Eating Günter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy." och funderar apropå en fisksoppa från Ian McEwans “Lördag” på matlagning och tänkande. Går dessa två, ja i alla fall i mitt liv absolut centrala sysselsättningar att kombinera?

"While you are doing all this (pysslar med fisksoppan alltså, min kommentar), I was reminded as I did it, you are thinking about the bouillabaisse, not about life in our time. Or, rather, you are not thinking about the bouillabaisse, or about anything: you are making the bouillabaisse. And here, I suspect, lies the difficulty with using cooking as the stock for the stream-of-consciousness stew. It is that the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness—the nearest thing that the non-spiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought."

Bortsett från den intressanta reflektionen är jag förstås mest avundsjuk på själva artikelupplägget. Om någon redaktör som vill köpa en text där jag lagar rätter ur världslitteraturen är det bara att höra av sig!