comfort was once survival
Of all my creative processes, cooking is one of the most fulfilling.
My training as a cook was unusual. Beyond the theory, I was the guy walking into kitchens just to ask what things were and how they were made. Some chefs welcomed the curiosity. Others kicked me out. But I needed to know what was really happening behind that door.
Of everything I cook, I am drawn to what demands time. Slow cooking. Fire. Wood. Marinades. Embers and waiting. Something important happens in that silence.
Recipes are often just suggestions. I prefer instinct. It starts in the body—the physical certainty that a marinade has finally settled, or the gut feeling that something unexpected is missing, and that adding it will make the dish better.
Some preparations take days to emerge. Brining. Aging. Letting aromas and flavors merge and develop. Sometimes my fridge is occupied for four or five days by kilos of meat, doing absolutely nothing except waiting for the right moment to touch the fire.
And when that moment comes—usually at twilight—I sit alone in front of the embers for eight or nine hours, watching over the process.
It is there, in that long, dark wait, that a thought inevitably surfaces. One that makes the act feel almost sacred:
How much life had to be spent so that I can possess this knowledge today?
I don’t just mean the animal on the grill. I mean the human cost of curiosity. Someone had to be the first to pull a root from the ground and ask: “Can this sustain us, or will it kill us?”
Someone had to test the limits. Someone had to find out—likely with their life—which mushrooms open the mind, which ones nourish the body, and which ones stop the heart in seconds. Someone had to understand that fire was not just destruction, but transformation.
We tend to think of cooking as comfort, but we forget the origin. What is comfort today, was once survival and curiosity.
The wood dies to become heat. The animal dies to become sustenance. And thousands of ancestors died so that we could understand the alchemy of food.
What we call “culinary culture” is the result of thousands of years of unforgiving trial and error. It is the legacy of those who dared to taste the unknown.
Our bodies carry that history. We know what nourishes us physically and emotionally because others paid the price of finding out. What makes us feel at home wasn’t designed for convenience—it emerged through a raw experimentation that destroyed empires and built gods.
That is why I insist on the craft. On cooking from scratch and respecting long timelines. This isn’t romantic nostalgia. It is respect for the cost of discovery.
While the world asks for faster outcomes, I choose the long wait as a rebellion against amnesia.
Civilization wasn’t built by signing decrees. It was built around a fire, by people willing to risk everything to turn the raw into the extraordinary. And the certainty I operate with today is a debt I owe to those who took that risk before me.
