The Culinary Argument Against Dualism

Okay, so I just started reading one of the most witty and brilliant books I have laid eyes on in quite a while... and it's a cookbook! Rather than explain how this is such a great book, let me quote Robert Farrar Capon at length from the preface:

"There is a habit that plagues many so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm. To me, that is a crashing mistake--and it is, above all, a theological mistake. Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding "Good!" over each of his concoctions. And it is God's unrelenting love of all the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment. So, if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist."

Later he writes:

"Food these days is often identified as the enemy. Butter, salt, sugar, eggs are all out to get you. And yet at our best we know better. Butter is... well, butter: it glorifies almost everything it touches. Salt is the sovereign perfector of all flavors. Eggs are, pure and simple, one of the wonders of the world. And if you put them all together, you get not sudden death, but Hollandaise--which in its own way is not one bit less a marvel than the Gothic arch, the computer chip, or a Bach fugue. Food, like all other triumphs of human nature, is evidence of civilization--of that priestly gift by which we lift the whole world into the exchanges of the Ultimate City which even God himself longs to see it become."

Good stuff.

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