Several recent posts have focused on motivation. Kitchen Frenzy is yet another motivation-zapper that can sabotage Meal Making Transformation.
I recently had the privilege of going to a week-long retreat. And yes, in case you’re wondering, the experience led to my full enlightenment : )
On a more practical note, however, I want to share an insight that came via the kitchen at the retreat, surprisingly enough.
Each day, retreatants had to spend an hour chopping vegetables, cleaning toilets, mopping floors, etc. It’s called “karma yoga,” i.e., learning to maintain inner balance even when dealing with the stuff of daily life.
Flipping the Switch Of course I joined the kitchen crew, responsible for chopping the mounds of vegetables required to feed a group of 27. We chopped from 1:00 to 2:00 each afternoon, and as soon as soon as the clock struck one, it was like somebody flipped the “kitchen frenzy” switch. The whole crew began to hurry, hurry, hurry and push, push, push.
I’ve noticed this phenomenon in our healthy meal making classes, too. As soon as we get to the cooking portion of class, the frenzy sets in. Almost automatically, participants start rushing to chop onions, smash garlic, mix spices and combine ingredients as if there were only seconds until the Great Kitchen Apocalypse.
Who Likes Stress?! Stress is a serious healthy meal making deterrent, a problem I hear about frequently. And there I was, getting sucked right down the stress vortex, at a meditation retreat no less! Observing my descent, I couldn’t help but ponder why we get so easily swept into the kitchen frenzy vortex.
Two things came to mind.
Practical Time Constraints On a practical level, we do face time constraints in our busy modern lives. Meal making must compete with work, kids, errands, house cleaning, exercise, sleep, meetings, socializing, social media and on and on.
So we do need to be efficient when it comes to meal making, and there are plenty of good ways to do so, e.g., improving knife skills, organizing the kitchen for smooth cooking, having a good guiding meal plan and so on. (See my book, Take Control of Your Kitchen for every strategy needed for efficient meal making.)
However, the need to economize on time doesn’t require frenetic hurrying. In fact, I’ve found that rushing and pushing usually backfires. It leads to stress and stress leads to sub-optimal brain function, which leads to inefficient wheel spinning. And there was a lot of inefficient wheel spinning in that retreat kitchen that wasn’t saving any time!
Unhelpful Thinking So if stressful rushing really doesn’t help us be more efficient, why do we still keep resorting to it? This question led to a second reason we seem to automatically flip into kitchen frenzy mode at cooking time: our cultural thinking.
You know that creating a new and more supportive kitchen and eating culture is a big part of my mission. (In case you missed it, learn more about this New Eating and Kitchen Culture here)
Sadly, our current convenience eating culture has degraded and denigrated the act of eating and with it the act of making what we eat. How else to explain why we can be satisfied with an industrially-prepared, not-food meal that we eat on the run? Or snacking on processed chips, crackers and cookies instead of eating a meal? Or ordering nutritionally bankrupt takeout in an attempt to comfort the soul?
Because we’ve been convinced that food can be anything that tastes addictively good and fills a hunger hole, it follows that we shouldn’t want to and/or shouldn’t have to put out any effort to make food. Naturally, then, if we do venture into the kitchen to make food, we want to get the chore done and get out as quickly as possible.
Couple this kitchen thinking with our culture’s general obsession with our lack of time, and you have a perfect recipe for kitchen frenzy.
An Antidote These reflections gave me space to see that I was knee-deep in our hurry-up-and-be-done-with-it kitchen culture. As I relaxed from the grip of that knee-jerk thinking, a sweetly pleasant thing happened. I got into an easy chopping rhythm–and sliced and chopped a crazy amount of leeks and onions quite readily and free of stress.
Good Things Take Time This was not the first time I had experienced how small miracles happen by simply giving things the time they require, and not begrudging them that time. Surprisingly, things get done with ease and in the exact amount of time needed. Hard to believe in our time-stressed culture, but it’s worth giving it a try, even if just out of curiosity.
Who knows, maybe we’ll all attain kitchen enlightenment–or at least a little less motivation-zapping stress!