Scott Samuelson  0:00  
So part of what I want to do is kind of reconnect all this stuff to say, hunger is tapped into ways of life, cooking is tapped into ways of life, the good life, our virtues, who we are as people overall, is tapped into food. That these things are interlinked, and when we separate them out and put them into self-contained boxes, we've we've I think, done an injustice to the whole picture.

PJ Wehry  0:28  
Hello, and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Wery, and I'm here today with Dr. Scott Samuelson, professor of practice at Iowa State University and former sous chef at a French restaurant. And we're here to talk about his book, *To Taste* on cooking and the good life. Dr. Samuelson, wonderful to have you on today. Hey, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

PJ Wehry  0:50  
So, Dr. Samuelson, I mean, obviously you have this background in philosophy and and in practice, and also a background in cooking. So, I there's some immediate origins here, but why this book?

Scott Samuelson  1:06  
Yeah, well, in a way, it's been something on my mind for a very long time. I I it brings together several things for me, but I might go back at least as far as when I was in graduate school, my mentor was Dr. Donald Philip Vereen, and he was a scholar of Vico and Hegel. And but and I wrote my dissertation under him. He and I almost never talked about Vico or Hegel or anything else. We almost always talked about Italian cooking, essentially, he was a very gifted Italian cook, and he knew that I liked to cook a lot. And then, so we talk about food, we talk about ingredients, we talk about preparation, and you know, there was something at first. I thought we were kind of playing civilized hooky, you know, not talking about philosophy and talking about the fine foods and and the good life in that sense, but but the I kind of realized over time that there was something philosophical even in our conversations about food. And I when I shortly after I got my first full time job teaching, I started moonlighting at a French restaurant, as this kind of sous chef, really interesting French restaurant out in the country, a kind of farm to table place, a really really lovely spot, Simone's Plain and Simple, it was called. Anyway, you know, I I was doing that and teaching philosophy at the same time, and I had grown really interested in philosophy, particularly as it related to people's lives, and I was particularly interested in the pursuit of the good life, which philosophers have have been exploring for a long time. But has kind of had a boom lately. Again, thinking of philosophy as a way of life and a way of pursuing the good life, and it kind of dawned on me, like, wow, wow, these two things really are the same thing at some level. That I'm cooking, I'm pursuing the good life of philosophy, and I I saw those two things as being deeply intertwined. Certainly in my own life, but I think really in everyone's life, food is is central at some level. But I also found myself a little bit, I would say, unhappy with the way in which a lot of contemporary philosophers were treating the subject of food. It didn't feel quite right to me. It felt oftentimes as if they were just abstracting moral principles and trying to apply it to things or whatever. Whereas I was just interested in the things that we actually like about food and that are important about food, and how we can talk about those things in a way that actually kind of evokes what's important and reminds us of their importance. So you know that's that was I think what kind of led to the book overall. Ian,

PJ Wehry  4:00  
can I ask you because you you mentioned food a couple times there, but in the title, and I think this might, maybe this will fall flat if it does. Just ignore the question. That's fine. But you you don't say food. You say on cooking and the good life.

Speaker 1  4:13  
Yeah.

PJ Wehry  4:14  
And I feel like a lot of people who talk about food and philosophy talk about food and not cooking. Yeah. Why cooking instead of food?

Speaker 1  4:22  
Yeah, great question. The that I guess it was in a way my general thought of I would like us to approach any number of questions more as engaged makers, so to speak, rather than merely as passive consumers of things, and I feel like cooking is how we transform food, and so you know I I was interested in thinking about cooking as a kind of paradigm for leading a good life. And and actually, kind of, I I would say it goes both ways. I was thinking about what does it mean to lead a good life, and how does that influence how I think about cooking, and and what have I learned in cooking that has helped me to think about what it means to lead a good life. So obviously, food and sharing food is fundamental to that. But but to me, cooking was a better way in, so to speak, to thinking about these questions that were both, so to speak, cooking up a life as well as cooking up a meal.

PJ Wehry  5:29  
Part of that comes from you mentioning Vico and Hegel, and and I just want to make sure I'm tracking with you. But it seems that there's this focus on the process over the product.

Speaker 1  5:42  
Yep, is

PJ Wehry  5:42  
that a

Speaker 1  5:43  
yeah? No, that's exactly right. And and I I I try to make that point throughout that that the process is very important. I mean, obviously, a cook sort of knows that, but we can we can easily forget that. I think in a lot of a lot of different walks of life, like for instance, one subject that I kind of try to deal with in the book a bit is education. So, both what does it mean to learn how to be a cook, but just what does it mean to learn anything? And to me, you know, education itself should be thought of as a kind of process. So, so in thinking about cooking, you're thinking about what comes first, what comes next. You know, how does it all fit together? And I think taking something of that approach to think of other subjects is is is useful. And and actually, it's it's kind of common sense almost. But somehow we've it's it's that common sense has become quite uncommon.

PJ Wehry  6:40  
Interesting, and not to get too much into a digression here, but this idea, I think, in education at a practical level, and I think that's where, as you're talking about philosophy as a way of life, answering more of these questions, that people think of education in terms of terminal or just useful degrees,

Speaker 1  7:00  
right?

PJ Wehry  7:00  
And more and more, the the the program reflects the the need for the degree rather than what education's supposed to do. And this has been a a formative thing in my life because it came from my dad. But the way that he finished his his college degree, and then he didn't read a book for two years, and then finally he read Tom Clancy, and he enjoyed it. But now he reads one or two books a week, right? And so, which is better to have a four-year college degree or to be reading one or two books a week? I mean, he's reading mostly nonfiction now, but that came from the the joy of of discovery and just the the joy of reading again,

Speaker 1  7:44  
yeah, exactly. The I yeah the the philosopher of process that I draw and actually in thinking about education is Alfred North Whitehead, and he has a wonderful book called The Aims of Education, and you know his one of his fundamental insights is is that there's a kind of rhythm of education if it if it happens properly and the rhythm begins with romance he calls it that you sort of you you come under the spell of something so like if I'm thinking about being a cook like you know that's how it starts for most people. It's like you eat something that you just really love, and you're like, "Wow, I would love to make something like that, or "I want to be able to cook such a thing. So you begin with that, and then you have to enter into at some level a process of, I think he calls it discipline or grammar, where you have to kind of master the the subject. This is a stage where you it requires discipline on your part to learn those things, you know. And so this is as a cook, you're learning techniques and you're you're you're figuring out how to you know make any number of different kinds of dishes and work with ingredients. And then the last stage is one of synthesis, where you kind of put it all together and and you you start to develop your own kind of style overall, and that and he says that the end of education Whitehead does that the end of education is style, and and to me that's something that I again I feel like we've forgotten a bit that that really what you want is to have a style to to have internalized something and kind of made it your own, such that you know you you can offer it. And to me, that's what a good cook has: is is a kind of style. You're not just following the recipe or putting food on the table, but you are you've you've kind of figured out how you you you do all these things. But it's true of any, you know, it's true in sports. You have a kind of, you know, I was just watching Lionel Messi play. You know, he's got a style of playing, or, but but it's even true of of you know a mathematician. They they they have a kind of style of being able to do things. But anyway, that that I think of that. As a process that you go through, and and it's it's a beautiful process. It has its bumps sometimes, but to go through that process and to to have achieved that, that's one of the great things in life. And I sometimes worry that we try to short circuit it. And in fact, cooking is a good way of talking about it. Like we just want to find the right recipe, follow the recipe, pump out the the product and be done, and and that's to lose that all that wonderful development that goes on that transforms a person and and kind of gives them a practice that that is one of the most meaningful things in in a person's life.

PJ Wehry  10:38  
So one of the things that really shapes a cook too is their particular circumstances, and there's that meeting. I've been doing a little bit of work, not a lot, but a little bit of work in Vico, so I'm thinking about that that generative influence of culture, where the style comes from your surroundings and your surrounding culture, and as I think about, so for instance, following a recipe, part of the problem with a recipe, and I think about this for someone who was working at a farm-to-table restaurant, is that the produce is different, and that it's actually a very artificial thing to just be like, you know, put one onion in, and it's like, like, yeah, it's like what size onion, what kind of onion, what time of year? Like it really does. These are all different things,

Speaker 1  11:27  
right? And that's the I, you know, to use Vickian language, Vico has this phrase he calls what he calls the barbarism of reflection, where when we become too abstracted from things, we kind of barbarize ourselves, and and yeah, and I worry that, like I said, when we think of food in this highly abstract way, we we sort of lose track of the things that matter most in our lives. You know, we have a tendency to to really abstract food into thinking about like nutrition or or flavor or you know I don't know calories you know all of this kind of stuff which you know there's a grain of truth in all of it but it it's sort of the further we get from it the more we lose what it's really all about, but yeah, I mean, back to your original question, I guess about culture there being a a context for this. I think that's exactly right, but it's also it's even there. It's really interesting. I think at least for I mean, I mean, I'm an American, and so I think we Americans have all like inherited a kind of permanent identity crisis. Like, what does it mean to be an American? Like, you know, I have part Lebanese blood, part Swedish blood, part you know whatever. And I've I like Italian cooking and and all this stuff. But but but there is something that's true that that I think to to learn how to be a good cook, and I think this applies to all walks of life. You do need to tap into a kind of tradition, a tradition of making things, and and that that's like I said, it's a really beautiful thing when you find that tradition, and it doesn't necessarily have to be the one that you grew up with. But I do tend to think that over time, as you develop, you sort of return back to the things that you did first encounter as a young person. So even if even if you you know go far afield and learn some some very different form of cooking than what you grew up with, you tend at the end to go back to seeing your the way your mom made soup as as something very important to who you are as a human being.

PJ Wehry  13:52  
To go to your point about nutrition and all those things, it's continually breaking food instead of seeing it as this continuous thing. It's continually breaking food into these disparate pieces, and then what happens is everyone's recovering this new piece. It's like, well, there's nutrition, and then, but it's not really nutrition doesn't cover all the complexity. So then it's like, well, you got to get out your gut biome, so you need your prebiotics, your probiotic, and it gets very complex very fast. And it's not a great approach to actually learning and teaching. And it's good to start with a recipe. It's good to start with a tradition, and to move from the recipes to the techniques and those sorts of things.

Speaker 1  14:30  
Well, yeah, and also to to me, it's it's that it's it's important that it's that it really is complex. This is one of the things that I've I'm a little dissatisfied with about a lot of the way in which food is talked about by contemporary philosophers, and even for that matter, by a lot in the whole tradition of Western philosophy, but there's a kind of sense of always wanting to reduce it somehow to something. So you know, even with hunger, it's like, well, hunger is just for whatever nutrition or. Something and then once we check that box, then we can move on to like whatever self actualization or something like that. And I these things I like I said I find they have maybe grains of truth in them to think about it as like well we need nutrition we need this we need you know to satisfy our hunger so we can do other things all of that is, like I said, has a grain of truth, but it really doesn't understand that these things are much more complex than that. That they, that that hunger itself is not just for feeding the belly, but it is about human connection at some level. That we want to eat a certain kind of food with other people, and to reduce it to that, to just wanting to stuff my gullet with nutrition or whatever, or good flavors, is to have, like I said, to do an injustice to things that I think has real cultural has bad cultural ramifications overall. So part of what I want to do is kind of reconnect all this stuff to say, hunger is tapped into ways of life, cooking is tapped into ways of life, the good life, our virtues, who we are as people overall, is tapped into food. That these things are interlinked, and when we separate them out and put them into self-contained boxes, we've we've I think, done an injustice to the whole picture.

PJ Wehry  16:24  
And this is more just an observation, and I don't even know where to take it from here. But I do think it's really interesting that in philosophy, when you reduce something, you create, you make a thinner account. But when you reduce something in cooking, you thicken and make it more flavorful. Yeah.

Speaker 1  16:39  
Right. Yeah. No, I like that. Yeah, that's true, and that's exactly right. But but here is where like that when you when you reduce something in cooking, what you're trying to do is to evoke its flavor most powerfully. You know, so you're not reducing it by like taking out, but by concentrating. You know, into into what it really is, and yeah, so that's that that's yeah, that's that's that's the yeah. It was just I was like, you said

PJ Wehry  17:11  
reduce, and I was like, I'm thinking food. I was like, that's really interesting. That it seems so like even like it's thin versus thick. Anyways, I don't even. I was just like, that's that's

Speaker 1  17:20  
a. But what I'm talking about the reductionism that I don't like the non-cooking form of reductionism is something we see all around us where we we we think in like so we we abstract something and then we think in terms of that abstraction and then what is often happening around us is that then that abstraction is weaponized at some level against us, so like you know, a flavor, for instance, can be abstracted and then weaponized. You know, you get junk food basically. Nutrition can be abstracted and then kind of weaponized, and you get this kind of obsession with you know fulfilling all your your you know daily requirements, or or you become a kind of health fanatic or something, or you want to, or we get into all these kinds of forms of maxing. It's called now where you like yo max, you know these things, so that you've you've you've optimized at some level, and and all of that kind of stuff. I feel like, is hostile to living a good life. I I don't feel as if it the product of it is is is is a more connected, more fulfilling life overall. So yeah, it's

PJ Wehry  18:33  
if I understand you correctly, you'd say like it's not. There's two things going on here. One is that cooking is a great example of this happening, but that cooking is a big part of the good life because we're thinking about food. I in there is no account and there's no real consideration. Even I mean, you mentioned a recipe because you're talking about cooking, but a lot of people talk about food. A lot of philosophers couldn't differentiate between cooking the food yourself and ordering

Speaker 1  19:05  
it,

PJ Wehry  19:06  
right? Right, and like, and and for you, if I'm understanding you correctly, as as someone who cooks a lot, I do most of the cooking for my family. There's there's some goods that happen just from the cooking process.

Speaker 1  19:17  
Oh yeah, I mean that's to me. I mean this is my my kind of basic intuition. Just personally, is if you ask me what a good day is, it means I've spent some time in the kitchen cooking, and and that itself is you know fulfilling for me. Now I get not everyone is a cook like that. I'm not saying everyone should be doing that, but but there's something very fundamental about that that that is is something I think everyone should be thinking about. What am I doing? I want to cook. A, I love to cook. It's part of a tradition I've learned, and it I I like to do it and to get better at it and to do it well. But then B, I'm doing. Why am I doing it? Well, I want to have people over tonight. And have you know have food for them, or I want to just eat with my family, and and and share that food with them, and have a nice conversation, or or whatever. And to me, that's like like I said, that's being human one on one. We we we do something that that we find fulfilling, but that that also brings us together, and and and and opens up the possibility of some of the most important things in life, things like festivity, conversation, intimacy. You know, and so in that sense, I do think of you know what what's a good life, what's a good day. Do something, make something for other people that brings them together, and that you share these things together, and what better or what more fundamental than food itself, which is is an absolute necessity.

PJ Wehry  20:50  
When you talk about what a good day looks like, I immediately-I mean, I'm hit with smells and like. So there's two recipes I think of, and they're both irreducible, right? Like it's one is, and my kids keep asking for them, and they're and we've been really busy, and I just haven't gotten around to making them. But I'll make bolognese from scratch, and I open up a bottle of wine, and there's a glass for me, and then there's like something goes in the, and I just sit there, and you just smell it for an hour as it's it's you know, and then let it sit for a couple hours, just cooking, and the whole house smells like it. And it's similar process with with gumbo, right? Like it's like

PJ Wehry  21:27  
you, there's beer that goes in, and there's a beer for me, and I'm sitting there and I'm smelling it, and it's just it's a good time. Like if you talk about what's a good day, it's probably going to include one of those two two recipes.

Speaker 1  21:39  
Exactly. I I have to say I love those kinds of recipes, and I love braising meats in part because of that leisurely, you know, quality to it, and it's kind of bubbling away and fragrant, and and and you know, and then you can you know reduce it in ways that like really bring out these deep flavors that are deeply satisfying to us. So yeah, I love all that stuff. I mean, you know, it's like it's it's. I have you read anything by this guy Atul Gawande? He he wrote a book that was called called Being Mortal several years ago. It was a bestseller. He's a doctor, and and really brilliant guy, and and really humane person as well. But he found as a doctor that it actually, particularly dealing with people in kind of end of life situations, terminal cases, etc. He found it that it became important for him to get out of the mindset of just like how do I extend their life, and to start thinking about the quality of their life. and And he would and he got to asking them just like, well, what's a good day look like for you, rather than just be like, how do I manage your pain or something. You're just like, well, what's a good day look like for you, and and then once he had a sense of what a good day looked like for them, you know, he would he could adjust the medications or whatever to help make that happen, rather than just adjust the medications to keep them, you know, just going as long as possible. But anyway, the reason why I bring it up is that

PJ Wehry  23:18  
that's good

Speaker 1  23:19  
that that he he and actually cure just as a little side note, when when he started asking people what a good day was and focusing on that rather than extending their life as a side effect, most of them lived longer on average than the people who didn't do that. It's a that's 100% Yeah, sorry, paradox. But but anyway, my point is is that when he asked people what a good day was, it you know a lot of times what did they say they said they wanted to share food with people that they loved you know or to to do something where they were contributing in in a way like one moving story told was like an older lady who she had taught piano for most of her life and she just wanted to teach piano again you know, and but but those are the that's you know when I say what's a good day, I think that's a really important question for all of us to be asking, not just waiting until we're terminal patients to be thinking about that. And while it takes different forms, what a good day is for people, I think it's it's a pretty common thing that you want to have a nice meal with people you care about as as being at the center of that, and you want to make some kind of contribution as as much as you can. It doesn't have to be cooking the meal. It might be, like I said, teaching someone piano or or whatever. But you want to be doing something that is kind of extending the goods of humanity throughout the entire, you know, throughout everyone, and and so you know, to me, that like the idea of just spending time listening to music, having a glass of wine, making you know a leisurely pasta sauce, you know, that's and then then share. It with people like that's that's that's a pretty good way to spend a day, pretty good way to spend your life. I love that because everything you just said makes so much sense with the immediately with the good life, right? Like a lot of times philosophers start talking about the good life. I'm like, I don't know if I'm. You're like right. I I can't I can't see myself inhabiting this space? Like it doesn't sound great. It doesn't sound good. You know what I mean? It's like it's very. And I, of course, I think that's the main thrust of your book.

PJ Wehry  25:30  
If you don't mind, and I just want to make sure that, in the spirit of of what you're asking, that we stay grounded here. You talked about Alfred North Whitehead's kind of romance, discipline, synthesis, and style. You started cooking. What was the romance moment for you with food?

Speaker 1  25:53  
Well, the you know I I start the book by this isn't quite the romance moment yet, but I start by saying you know my first entrance into cooking, I was given a piece of what I consider philosophical advice. I was about 14 years old. I had gotten my first job as a short order cook in a roadside ice cream parlor, and the the guy who owned the place said he was showing me this like big freezer of all this battered food stuff, and he was like, and he was trying to say, you know, you do this with this, you do that with this, you do this with this, and I was, you know, it's a lot to take in. And he goes, he he looked at me, he goes, when in doubt, deep fat fry. That was his. That's certainly an approach. So that you know, I, I, you know, had that kind of experience of cooking at a very young age. But honestly, it didn't. All that stuff I didn't care that much about. I mean, I enjoyed food like everyone else, you know, and I was happy to have the deep fat fried products of of the dairy mart. But but that wasn't what really did it for me. It was actually when I was in college and I was getting sick of cafeteria food, which wasn't that great. And I I was like, well, what is it that I want? And I thought back to my mom's pot roast. She made this really delicious beef chuck roast, and I was-it was just-I was like, "I want something that has that like deep, you know, satisfying flavor, not these kind of flimsy flavors that I've been getting. And my mom's a very good cook. She also would make Lebanese food. She or her her great grandmother was from Lebanon, and and and so she'd make all these delicious Lebanese dishes too, and and and I started thinking about those too, you know, and how much I just love them. I was like, I want to make something like that. I want to be able to you know eat that and make it. So that was kind of my romance, and then I really got into just cooking generally. I used to watch Julia Child and you know work on you know French techniques. And I mentioned you know being in graduate school, and my my mentor was a great Italian cook, and so you know all of that stuff I just loved, and it was like so I was in that romance period of just absorbing all of these different things and trying stuff out in the kitchen and having a bunch of beginner's luck and and you know just really enjoying it and and so as you know as I was going through that I realized wow I need to learn you know a lot more than I know I need to really get a sense of what it means to make different ingredients and and I need to master a lot more techniques, and that's when when I got this job at the this French restaurant. You know, I was lucky to work with this this really wonderful French cook who who could kind of give me some of that discipline, but but also just give me a sense of like I don't know what I don't know, just like just of a standard. I guess that's the word that you know. I would make something and be pretty good, and and then she would be like, you know, and you'd be like, oh, okay, this could be better, you know, and and and then eventually it was up to standard, and I was like, oh, so now I have this sense of a standard in my mind of what it really can be, you know, not just like oh that's pretty good, but like no, this is now getting to be really good. So that was really important, and then just you know, then just the practice of of making food on a daily basis for for you know my family and loved ones.

PJ Wehry  29:43  
And as if you don't mind me sharing, we had way too many chickpeas, and I think this kind of and this goes to what you said about the recipe. And I normally I'd been following techniques and doing. And trying to cook inside traditions, doing a lot of like Italian kind of Mediterranean cooking, and then so one thing that happened is we went from two to five kids because we had a baby, and then we started fostering two, and that happened in three months. So my cooking had to radically change. So big pots of things, lots of braising, lots of beans, like, and we had way too many chickpeas. And I kept seeing things on TikTok about how easy, you know, like, or it wasn't TikTok because YouTube Shorts, you know, was the same kind of vertical. And you know, it's a 32nd video, and it's like boom, boom, boom. You're done in 1520, minutes. It tastes so good, and I was like, "That would be really nice. Like I'm cooking, and it's I'm like to cook for nine people. Yeah, it's like it's like an hour, you know. Yeah, and then it has to sit for a couple hours, and so I tried two different recipes, and they were aimed at kids, and the kids hated them. Now, part of this is probably there is used to the other stuff, and I said, "Forget it. I'm just going to cook with what I know. And so, what I I was like, "What what really works? I'm like, "I'm just going to call this peasant stew. And I took I made a bunch of I took a bunch of mirpois and a bunch of white wine in good stock, and then I just added chickpeas to it with a lot of lot of rosemary, and finished it with like some vinegar or whatever. But and anchovies, you know that kind of it's Italian peasant, you know, got the anchovies in there, not the it's olive oil sofrito, not mirepoix. Excuse me. Same diff as you say. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to get in trouble. Yeah, there that that northern Italian to French crossover is jealously guarded, but it's so so clear. Anyways, and that became the kids' that's one of their favorite meals, right? And it's just so, and and by pulling on these resources, and some of it was technique, and some of it is just like I know these flavors work, and they've worked for centuries, and I'm like I'm just going to put them in, see what happens, and lo and behold, it's way better than you know, chef boyardie, but with chickpeas or macaroni cheese, but with chickpeas, and I don't know why I thought that would work. You know what I mean? And that-that to me is so illustrative. And it's by putting the extra effort into cooking. Not only is like you know a lot of people talk about fighting with their kids about food at the table. Not only am I not fighting with my kids, I'm actually generating good things in them is that I, anyways, that was something that as I was well, yeah, listening to you. So

Speaker 1  32:47  
yeah, I love the example that and and the like. So on the one hand, we have this important piece of like said knowing processes and traditions, you know, that you could draw on, but the other piece that I we haven't really talked about that I think is important, and that your story illustrates to me, you know, the title of my book is called "To Taste, and you know, the the it's part of it's just you know the the infinitive to taste, but it's but it's also like you know the the mysterious last line of many recipes is seasoned to taste, you know. Yes, but but the but that like what taste is is a very complex thing. Again, it's not we we have this tendency to think of taste as just something like oh it's my taste it's just whatever I like or happen happen to like. But it's way more complicated that particularly for the cook, you know. So here, here you are. You're drawing on these traditions, making this stuff, but you're also tasting. I mean, not literally putting it in your mouth, but also just smelling, looking, you know, kind of getting a sense of what it's supposed to be. But and and so you're thinking like, oh, could use a little more salt, or you know, maybe a splash of vinegar at the end, or whatever. But you're also thinking about your not just like yourself. You're also thinking about your kids and and you know what they like and like how are they going to you know respond to this and and and to me that's now we're getting at what taste really is. It's something that's not just subjective in a sense, though it it certainly is deeply personal at some levels, nor is it merely objective. Though there are plenty of objective things about taste, I think, like like we all dislike rotten apples, for instance, and prefer ripe ones. But but but but but fundamentally, there's a profound intersubjective quality to it that we're it's it's a something that we share, and that like I said, it gets passed down through those those techniques and those traditions that you adopt. That that's already a lot of wisdom about taste that's embedded in that stuff, and now you're like actively participating in that, adding you know your own taste and and your kids. Taste and trying to to negotiate that, and and yeah, so that's a that's what cooking is, or that's what good cooking is fundamentally. But again, I also want to say it's kind of what a good life is, both in the the sense of you know having a nice meal with your kids, but but in this other sense too of like thinking about your life in a kind of tasting sense, like you know, you you've inherited these ways of doing things and thinking about things, and then you're like, is this working for me? Like, how does this actually, so to speak, impact me and the people around me? You know, and how do I balance that to make you know a good life? So to me, that that concept of taste is crucial to you know to to to this whole process, and it connects us to others, but also connects us even to the ingredients and and to the the entire world. I mean, you know, you start caring about your chickpeas.

PJ Wehry  35:58  
Yeah, I well, and that's actually one of the questions I really wanted to ask you because you you're at a farm to table restaurant. We've kind of hinted at this before. When you look at the the cooking process, how does that play into the larger? I don't want to say economy. I'd rather say ecosystem, but maybe economy in the old sense,

Speaker 1  36:20  
right?

PJ Wehry  36:21  
How does that play into the way we think about the production of our food?

Speaker 1  36:27  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's. I think it's. It's again. I. I like starting with cooking. I think it's a natural place for many people to start. But like I said, you start to just want to make a nice meal as a cook, but but it's hard to start to separate that out from like oh I want fresh ingredients I want good ingredients you know and now I'm like okay where do I get them well you know now I I start to move into what you're calling that larger ecosystem or that larger economy of of seeking out stuff that that you know seems also part of a good process, and you know, like I I started very late in life, but I've recently started you know growing a garden, and I kind of regret that I didn't do that earlier because there's something so nice about just walking out, picking your herbs, you know, and then now you have them. They're fresh, they taste really good. You you you feel confident in them in some ways. So you know you start to get you start to care about that stuff, and and you want to to I think mend it as much As possible, you know. I in the chapter I'm talking about working with Simone at that French restaurant. Like we would sometimes slaughter animals, you know, to prepare them, and and and all of a sudden now you're part of the slaughtering of animal process, and you start to realize, like, oh man, like that's a serious thing to take a life, even the life of a rabbit, you know that's that's that's no small thing to do, and and I don't want it to be, you know, I I'm I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not going to stop eating meat, but at the same time, I'm like, yeah, there's something, there's there's a right way of doing this, and there are worse ways of doing this kind of thing, and and you care about that. To me, I like this approach, and Simone was a real model of this for me. I mean, she she like had her own gardens and and kind of a small farm where she you know had raised some animals and like said slaughtered them. But she also worked with local farmers, and she kind of knew where the produce was from, and and did that as much as possible. But also, at the end of the day, if she needed an ingredient and she didn't have it available, she would just go to the supermarket and buy it on sale, you know, as cheaply as she could. In other words, she didn't have what I think of as like a moralistic approach to this, which I worry that that we can easily fall into. We start with a good impulse of wanting, you know, nicely sourced ingredients, but then we just get obsessed with like, well, you got to buy organic or or whatever, and and and and you can, you know, then then ethics just becomes a game of trying to be pure, you know, like I've somehow managed to get the the good the organic stuff and avoid the non-organic stuff or whatever. I don't know that that really is mending the world that much. Like I, I, to me, I want it to be connected to. Like I said, fundamentally, I want a nice meal with people, and then that that reaches out to these other things. And yes, I would like to mend that process as as best as I can, and I think, like I said, there are you know terrible practices in certain kinds of slaughterhouses, the way certain animals are are raised and treated, and and I think that there's you know crappy things that people do with agriculture. I mean, I live in Iowa, and there's just tons of bad agricultural practices. The.

Speaker 1  39:59  
You know, so I would like to to change that, but but my point is is that I don't necessarily think that I should start with just I figured it all out, I've got all the right lines I've drawn, and now I'll just color within those as best as I can. No, it's it's I I need to be actively engaged in this as much as possible, and you know I I can only do so much, but but that's the stuff that that matters to me. So I don't know if I'm answering your question well. No, but

PJ Wehry  40:25  
I and I want to make sure I'm tracking with you. But one of the things I catch from you talking about the when you slaughtered an animal, it created a sense of responsibility, and that's and and letting that be generative for your practices rather than trying to extend past your responsibility, like you're like, well, this is what we should be doing in Iowa, and it's like, well, I know you're a philosopher, you know, but you're no farmer, Doctor Sam, you know, Doctor Samuelson. It's like,

Speaker 1  40:55  
right,

PJ Wehry  40:56  
and I, it turns into a form of street preaching rather than allowing the sense of responsibility, it's like moving more towards gratitude, a nose to tail philosophy, enjoying all parts of the animal.

Speaker 1  41:11  
Right?

PJ Wehry  41:12  
Is that is that kind of tracking with what you're saying?

Speaker 1  41:15  
Yes. Yeah. Definitely. The way I I I kind of the frame it in in the book is one way of doing ethics. I call dodgeball of evil, where basically you you've just identified some evil and you just think your whole life is managing to dodge it as best as you can. And of course, when you're playing dodge,

PJ Wehry  41:37  
so good. Of course, when you're playing

Speaker 1  41:40  
dodgeball of evil. You also have to throw a few balls too. You know, you know, try to hit a few people and say they're out of the game. And I don't know that dodgeball of evil is is the best way of of approaching ethics. And the flip side, I I call it you know the garden of the good, like where you actually try to grow the good around you. You start with good and you try to make it grow. And I think that most people like people like that a lot more than the dodgeball of evil people. But I also think that the the garden of the good tends to be actually making the world a slightly Better place, you know. Yeah, like I said, Simone didn't care about the organic label one iota, you know, and and she didn't go around thinking about it. She didn't judge people about what kind of. She just tried as best as she could to find honestly grown ingredients to honestly slaughtered, you know, animals. You said she could only do so much of that. She tried to, you know, make make that, you know, a paradigm for her, and put on great meals for people. And I was like, wow, this is this is really nice. Like, as opposed to the kind of moral scold who, you know, just has, you know, whatever their like I said their their dodgeball of evil game that they've managed to master,

PJ Wehry  43:06  
and I think there's something here too that even gets into farming, and I think it's the same instinct. I think we're talking about parallel structures here. When you talk about, by the way, I forgive me, but I'm just going to wholesale steal the dodgeball of evil-that's amazing. Like that is such a very precise metaphor for exactly how it feels. It's like, oh no, I'm out. Exactly. What happens? But sometimes, you know, it depends on the rules of the game. If you catch it, the other person's out. Like, what does it mean to catch evil? Anyways, but that's. But when we talk about the garden of the good, and I and I love that because we're focusing on what we want rather than like we got to avoid, is that in farming we have this real issue with monocultural farms because we're abstracted from it because we feel like we have to have food out of season, you know. I think I hear like the the importance of rhythm and time, and so we have a garden out back, and we did a lot of companion planting, and I told the kids to take care of it, and they didn't do a great job. There was a there were they did water it for a while, so yeah, and but we chose we chose stuff that was native, like very much native, and we chose stuff that was that worked well together, and so for what they probably watered it 10 times, they did no weeding, and we are probably going to get 30 to 50 pounds of food out of a suburban backyard, and my oldest daughter said, "Is this gardening? Because it doesn't feel like it, right? And and some of it is is thoughtful. It's not. It's not that. It's just diversity for its own sake, but thoughtful. Diversity, the and and recognizing like the rhythms and the way things work together, versus kind of like this very reductionist, like you know what I want, I want corn, and and so we're okay that some things have gotten eaten by bugs, but if you companion plant, that becomes less of a problem because of the diversity, right? Versus like if you grow corn or just tomatoes, then you are going to be having to spray that and work on it all the time. Does that? And yeah, never mind what that's going to do to your cooking because you're like, oh no, now I have 100 pounds of tomatoes,

Speaker 1  45:40  
right?

PJ Wehry  45:40  
And nothing else, and

Speaker 1  45:41  
and this is this is sort of the kind of metaphoric or paradigmatic shift that that I think we we need to do desperately right now, which is like one way of conceiving of farming is a kind of industrial model, which you just want. This is I'm using that word maxing because it seems to be a popular word now to put on everything. But like the idea is you just want to max. You know, like you want to like if you're going to plant corn, you're going to max your production and max your profits, and you know, and and and and that's not really how things grow. Like things don't max. Yeah, like they they grow, but they don't max. Like I said, what you described is is the way things grow. That there, you need some diversity. You know, you help things along, and when you do that, yeah, you do get nice produce. And if you wanted to be a farmer, you could sell it and make some money, but but your goal isn't just max your money and max the the the the profits and max the produce. It's it's that you you want to yeah you want you just want to grow it in a healthy way and then hopefully pass down that land in at least as good a shape as you found it, you know, maybe to your kids or to the next owner of the house or whatever. And and like I said, I feel like this is why I think cooking as a as a kind of better and eating are much better metaphors for thinking about what it means to satisfy us. If we if we just think about ourselves on this in this maxing way, we see ourselves as machines that need to be optimized. I think we do damage to all sorts of things, but but to our souls fundamentally. And whereas when we see ourselves as biological beings in an ecosystem that are part of that, and trying to live well within that, then I think that's a much more useful way of approaching any number of things. I mean, we we talked about education before, but that's to me, it's like one one metaphor for education is is is this kind of industrial metaphor that you're just going to like have all these learning objectives, and they're going to be met at higher and higher levels. But another metaphor that actually is the common metaphor in the ancient, the medieval world was to see education in terms of digestion-that you you take in something and it becomes part of you, and then you transform it into kind of energetic activity. But digestion is something you can't overload. You know, you need to find the right amount that allows you to digest it, so that you can then use it well, as opposed to just stuffing it or optimizing it or whatever, which tends not to produce good education. But anyway, my point is just no, it's good to me. I feel like that is a shift that is important for us to be making in a lot of different walks of life, how we relate to the land, how we relate to education, how we relate to culture, how we relate to ourselves. To me, cooking and eating are provide a much better kind of paradigm approach than this industrial model approach, which seems to be, I don't know, starting to come back to haunt us a bit.

PJ Wehry  49:06  
I'm starting to understand why you're listed as a professor of practice and not of philosophy. That's it's a beautiful answer. I want to be respectful of your time, but if I could ask you one Final question. Besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone should pre-order, and unfortunately I don't have a picture of the of the cover, but besides buying and reading your excellent book, which is coming out in November, pre-order it helps with the sales. What would you recommend to someone who has listened to our conversation, that they do or meditate on over the next week in response.

Scott Samuelson  49:49  
Well, I, I really, I to me, it's the way I open my book is actually the first chapter is about. A good friend of mine who was had terminal cancer and was going to die, and I, you know, wanted to make food for him, which is a common thing to do for people in that situation, and and you know, and I thought about like, what do I really want to make for him, you know, in this time we have together, and and to me that's just a to me that's a like philosophers have often said that we should you know remember our mortality as as people to live well to remember that our time is limited and precious and so like I mentioned before that that question that Atul Gawande asks his patients, like, well, what is a good day? And I I think that that's that's a powerful thing to say, you know, and meditate on just what is a good day for me, and and how does that relate to to eating? How does it relate to to the people around me? You know, how does it relate to what I'm doing and and how I'm spending my time, and and and to me that once when when I center myself in that question, other things sort of fall into place more easily overall. So I guess that's what I'd ask people to meditate on is just that question: What is a good day?

PJ Wehry  51:20  
Just like the rest of the conversation, I love the the focus on the concrete and the practical. It's a great answer, Dr. Samuelson. Wonderful having you on today. Thank you.

Speaker 1  51:29  
Hey, thanks for having me. This was a great conversation. I loved

Unknown Speaker  51:32  
it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai