NOTE: Below I'm transcribing and translating segments from a TV show, and I'm probably in over my head as usual. And by translating I can't help but put my limited interpretation on things, so I've included transcriptions and video links at the end for transparency. If you spot errors, please say so in the comments, I'd be very grateful.
I was sitting at a little restaurant in the Mercado Corona and sipping an atole blanco (a very plain drink which is basically just boiled cornmeal), when I saw that behind the counter was a little old television, and it was playing a cooking show. That's an idea, I thought to myself, I like learning about food, and I need Spanish practice, I should watch a cooking show. I've found that concrete activities like cooking are good for language learning, because you can often see directly what someone is talking about instead of using a dictionary. Dictionaries are handy, but I think it's better to build a map straight from word to thing rather than from word to word to thing. Anyway I saw the title sequence and the name of the show was memorable: “En la Cocina con Gerónimo” (In the Kitchen with Gerónimo), so I remembered it. Back at the hostel, I found a bunch of episodes on YouTube and started watching a few. The show starts out with a cheesy rock-and-roll styled theme song:
If you want to cook, you want to feed yourself healthily. To cook and enjoy, we’ll try, it depends on you. We'll be cooking and having you nourish yourself better. Whatever you cook will be healthy, and you'll only learn how… in the kitchen with Gerónimo!
It is a bit catchy though, kind of a so-bad-it's-good kind of thing. Then the show starts, usually with the host Gerónimo García Villarreal dancing to the tail end of a completely different song. He addresses the audience, always calling us “familia”. You notice right off that the production values are… well some people might say bad, but I'd say informal. The audio buzzes and the cuts are a bit haphazard. You can see guys coming in from the side to clear dishes off the counter. The production crew, who he always calls “muchachos”, often says stuff in the background and Gerónimo regularly banters with them:
Gerónimo: And remember: muchachos, what's the main ingredient for cooking?
Crew: Love!
Gerónimo: Love, exactly. Love for all. With love everything can be fixed.
Actually I think this is the exchange that got me hooked me on the show. See, this thing happens to me a lot where I get fascinated by some obscure artifact of another culture or another era. It's hard to find much info about it, and as an outsider I can't interpret it like the original audience was meant to. Maybe people from that culture or era would think it was stupid, or corny, or trite, or just plain weird. I don't have the cultural context to pick up the cues and fit the thing into one box or another, and even if I did, I've got some completely different set of boxes. But the upside is that I get to make up my own interpretation, which can be a lot of fun. Maybe I just don't watch enough daytime TV, but “In the Kitchen with Gerónimo” feels like something entirely fresh to me, like it smashes together a bunch of boxes that shouldn't have been separated in the first place. I'll explain.
A little later in the same episode (February 1st 2022), Gerónimo puts some onions and dried chilis into a hot pan and reveals the secret of cooking:
The secret is always to have patience, to have a little love (so rich), and you're going to make things happen. And naturally, familia, everything is going to have the best flavor. Love and patience is one of the biggest—are some of the biggest—strengths we have to have for everything in life.
I really couldn't agree with this more! But it's not the kind of thing I've ever heard from a celebrity chef on TV. Just to pick a few: Alton Brown is too much of a geek, Dave Chang is too much of a bro, and Gordon Ramsay is, well, too fucking immature. Maybe there's some chef I haven't watched who talks like this, and please let me know in the comments if you know of one. But my point is that mainstream food programs (and most fancy restaurants) are almost entirely concerned with food that a) looks amazing on Instagram and/or b) has that kind of flashy tastiness you get from using a lot of butter and a splash of truffle oil or whatever the trendy flavor is these days. Yes I'm generalizing, but I really believe there's a missing spiritual dimension there. And on some deep and maybe subconscious level I think people in the industry know it; I seem to recall Anthony Bourdain writing, in Kitchen Confidential, that the last thing chefs want to eat in their time off is the fancy stuff they’re selling to the public, and good home cooking is where it's at. The really inspirational meals he described are made with just a few basic ingredients. But he also said that your body isn't a temple, it's an amusement park to enjoy, and I think that sums up the viewpoint pretty well. Our modern popular food culture is about pure pleasure, visual and gustatory, divorced from virtues like love, caring, and patience. From a spiritual standpoint, it looks to me like all sizzle and no steak.
Then there's the health food genre, which seems to say your body isn't a temple or an amusement park, but a machine. Food is for fuel, and we add just enough flavor to help it go down easy. You have your protein shakes for on the go, or your bodybuilder's regimen of plain chicken, broccoli, and rice, but to me the pinnacle of this paradigm arrived in my inbox recently, sent to me because of my brief experiment with Soylent back when it first came out, and describing how they make that pasty industrial beverage drinkable using “flavor technology”. Whether or not Soylent contains complete nutrition according to science, I don't think it's got much of love or patience, and it certainly isn't very tasty unless you love the flavor profile of an old-school postage stamp. And then again, if you want the message that your body is just a temple, you can go to church or tune into countless sources of spiritual media, but to me the majority of it feels so abstract. Am I really just a pure spirit dragging around this separate and ultimately worthless husk of clay? Then why is it so hard to think lofty thoughts when I'm lying in bed with a stomach flu? And why does eating food made with love make me feel like I could hug the whole world?
So depending on where I look, I'm told my body is an amusement park to enjoy or a meaty machine with certain chemical needs or a temple housing a pure soul. But Gerónimo tells me that it's all of these things and more. That health, pleasure, and spirituality aren't in opposition but are parts of a precious whole. That dancing and music help fortify our immune systems. That our happiness isn't anyone's responsibility but our own. That each one of us is a pedazo de cielo, a chunk of heaven. Familia, I wish I had time to translate all the amazing things he says in even one episode, but I'll at least give him the floor one more time:
Familia, were going to celebrate life together, loving ourselves, wanting ourselves, respecting ourselves, accepting the way we are. We won't try to judge, or change anything, just to live, but to live in love with this thing called life, and when we're really in love it's because we have an absolute love in our hearts that lights up the whole world and we can be beings of light that are content, and in this contentment, well, let's cook and give thanks for these foods that God has given us.
Amen. Let us cook.
P.S. Here are my transcriptions with links to the source videos:
Si tú quieres cocinar, te quieres alimentar sanamente. Cocinar y disfrutar fácilmente emprenderán de ti depende. Cocinaremos y tendremos como nutrirte mejor. Lo que tú cocina será saludable, y solo aprenderás… en la cocina con Gerónimo!
- Y recuerde, muchachos, cuál es el principal ingrediente para cocinar?
- Amor!
- El amor, exactamente. Amor para todo. Con amor todo se soluciona.
El secreto siempre está en tener paciencia, tener amorcito (así rico), para ir haciendo que cosas sucedan. Y lógicamente, familia, todo va teniendo la mejor sazón. Amor y paciencia es una de las grandes—son unas de las grandes—virtudes que debemos de tener para todo en la vida.
Familia, vamos a celebrar la vida juntos, amándonos, queriéndonos, respetándonos, aceptando como somos. No pretendemos juzgar, ni cambiar nada, únicamente vivir, pero vivir enamorados de esto que se llama vida, y cuando estamos verdaderamente enamorados, es porque tenemos un amor absoluto en nuestro corazón que irradiará al mundo entero, y podremos ser seres de luz que tendremos contentamiento, y en ese contentamiento, pues, vamos a cocinar y agradecer los alimentos que Dios nos regaló.
P.P.S. Maybe you're thinking ole Jesse is going a little nuts camping out in a ruin with nobody to talk to but cows and ants, and nothing to eat but refried beans and pinole. Well, you could be right, but damn it feels pretty great!