A sad goodbye to The Minimalist.

I woke up this morning to a flurry of links on my food blogroll pointing to the final post of Mark Bittman's Minimalist column in the New York Times. It was not a pleasant way to wake up. Even I am surprised by how sentimental I'm getting, as I think back to the effect that this single column has had on my cooking history.

The Minimalist was originally called Bitten, and this I started reading when I first started cooking in Australia. They plopped me in the country, gave me a kitchen, and for guidance, I had two resources: the internet and my mother, and my mother was far away. Before I even knew who Mark Bittman was, even before I could cook much of anything at all, I learned from him how to make things like kielbasa and cabbage, cumin-spiced lentils, and roasted eggplant. His recipes were less like recipes and more like outlines, full of opportunities for variation and personal flair. His videos were witty and unpretentious, and stressed the simplicity of the process. The first thing that I ever learned about cooking was that all you need for a good meal are just a few good ingredients, a basic knowledge of what heat does to those ingredients, and a grasp on how tastes and textures blend together. (And above all else, use garlic liberally.)

No exaggeration, it was this blog alone that taught me, crucially, how to cook, not what to cook. A person can follow a million recipes with success, but still fail to understand why, for example, you drizzle sesame oil last or why you shouldn't crowd the pan when browning or why you do one particular step before another.

Sure, I eventually accumulated a dozen more food blogs that I continue to skim every day, but over the years, Bitten (and then The Minimalist) remained the only blog whose every post I would read faithfully and carefully, and that is because of the way it encouraged me to think about food and cooking in holistic and not just functional ways.

I know it's sappy, but I'm going to miss reading the column like I'd miss a friend. Anxiously awaiting something new from Mr. Bittman.

Lessons.

The year, actually the year-and-a-half, was a formative one for me.

I don’t have a philosophy on life, because having a philosophy on life means that you’ve answered life’s important questions, or that you are satisfied with the answers you have.

My ache to travel is because I want to keep asking and keep looking and keep reformulating. What began as a trip about me, about understanding me myself and I – turned into a lesson that there is nothing you can learn about yourself that is not in the context of someone else.

I learned very quickly that the world is not a scary place. It is filled with people who have all the same fundamental human needs, desires, dreams. The most meaningful friendships I made were from people I knew for a day, a week, an hour. There are big things to be learned from the smallest encounters, and each one began with a simple ‘hello’. Distances between people are easily breached. The unfamiliar becomes the familiar.

In the end, most of the attributes that you pride yourself over – no one cares. No one, except you to an obsessive degree, really cares about how funny you are, or how good your grades, or how pretty, or how athletic. The greatest lesson has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with other people, and how you exist alongside them.

The best decision I made was not just to travel, but to travel alone. It let me fully see that I never once felt alone.

The crucial realization is that I didn't need to travel more than a block to understand this. People relate to each other the same way whether in Cornfield, Indiana or Bhaktapur, Nepal.

I deeply miss my time abroad, but I’m comforted by these lessons that I kept. The new year may not have any more adventures like those of the past year, but I’m going into it with a few more answers.

The Midwest.

See the picture of the truck from my last post? I named him Mater, after the beat-down pickup truck character in the Pixar movie Cars. He's parked right on the edge of a farm up on Salisbury Street, a road that extends north out of West Lafayette into stretches of corn fields and windmill farms. A "$1200 obo" sign is taped to his window. I often ride my bike up Salisbury for the scenery, and am just fixated with Mater every time.

When I finally took my camera out to take photos of the truck, the farmer came out and asked me if I wanted to buy him. I had to explain that I have a fascination with old things, antique machinery, used pieces, to which the farmer invited me to the plowing of his field the next day. There'd be thirty tractors doing the plow, he said, a lot of them antique. There'd be a potluck for lunch, and oh, my name is Tim, nice to meet you. How could I refuse?

The next day, my friend and I arrived and immediately were shepherded to Tim's brother's garage, full of a dozen old mid-century vehicles. I was smitten. This green one dates back to the 1920's and used to be a school bus, can you imagine? The seats inside were wooden, and the inside wasn't tall enough for me to stand up straight.

In Indiana, corn is king, and I figured that these farmers could tell me everything I wanted to know about how it's grown, where it goes, how much they produce, what the profits are like, what subsidies they get, where it's stored. The whole time they were telling me these things, I kept thinking back to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book I read a few years back that sealed my fascination with agriculture and the food system.

It is so easy on principle to put down corn farmers for producing way too much of this one thing at a detriment to the health of the country's people and the environment. But actually interacting with these farmers made me realize, crucially, that like any other people working to produce, the short-term economics will prevail over the philosophy and the long-term consequences. The seed these farmers used are Monsanto-patented, and the reason they do this is solely because it is profitable. To change the flow of this system, it is not enough to indoctrinate people on what is sustainable or healthy. All big changes start with economic incentives, not moral ones.

I should stop myself before digressing further. This is a long, long, long discussion for another day.

They told me I could wallow in this huge repository of corn, but I politely refused, as good of a photo-op as that would have been.

Afterwards, we were graciously invited to their pot-luck lunch, and despite fearing that I was overstaying my welcome, they insisted, and I helped myself to delicious chili and cobbler. The plowing was a community event; all the neighbors were there, and most of Tim's extended family.

One unintended result of moving to Indiana is that I can stop just reading about agriculture. Here, I have people to talk to. As I start to think about these things more and more, I'm sure I'll come up with plenty of questions to ask.