A kitchen without a fire

In Greek mythology, fire belonged to the gods. For mankind to be able to learn how to bring fire in its lives and how to use it, took ages. With the first specks of fire, which were lit by flint stones or by rubbing 2 sticks together, man has divided himself from nature, became its user and not just a silent follower of her.

In the flames of this new element, a new food culture emerged. The animal corpses became less of a risk for us to eat and the easier to chew processes tissue expanded the available calories, with which the human brain got more energy to physically grow and evolve. So what drives us, in these modern days, to eat and carve raw meat or vegetables? This present dilemma is not only academicals nature. I can’t forget the recent workshop in spring with Dario Cortes, where we hiked on the riversides of the Slovenian river Savinja and searched for edible flowers and herbs. Those few raw stems and flowers clinched a kind of never-ending thirst in my soul, a thirst that normal food could not extinguish. Fire enables, on one side, a much easier digestion of the eaten substances, on the other side it also takes some of these as well. If we are open enough for culinary experiments, we can quickly find out, that the subject of raw and unprocessed food is a very interesting part of our diet, which complements itself with processed foods, like a piece of raw fish with cooked rice in a bite of a sushi. It’s interesting that especially our channels for raw foods tend to open themselves much more in the winter time. These dark days in the winter are usually much better lived, if you eat a bowl of sour chicory, in which we cut some pieces of cooked potatoes or beans, sauerkraut is also better eaten when raw, but much rather prepared with garlic and pumpkin oil, like a real gourmand delicacy. If we dig a bit in our cultural culinary heritage, we also find “pršut” (prosciutto) , softly smoked and dried “klobasa” (sausages) and salted anchovies by the seaside, all in all from meat to even fish, which can also be broadly classified as raw unprocessed food. This summer, when we camped by the sea with the family, we prepared very special seafood dishes. One of the dishes was also raw - anchovies, marinated in vinegar. Oh, how the children ate those! The loudest kid of the bunch told me that of all the dishes we made that summer, the best one was the raw fish. Raw food has therefore a special place in our hearts, be it child or grownup, you just have to find it within you. The taste is most direct, primal and wild, luring you in like a juicy and ripe apple of temptation, which also Adam and Eve couldn’t resist. If we generalize, the raw, thermally unprocessed food carries a certain animalistic energy, which we as a thought-out, rationally organized and technologically progressive culture miss in our daily lives. Manipulated and designed tastes cannot supplement the primal raw taste of food for good, because it is hidden deep within us all but tends to rarely swim to the surface. Sometimes our own bodies shove us in its direction, other times curiosity or just a lucky occasion. Maybe it is the raw food that can remind us that we as users of fire and the discoverers of the genome are nothing more than enculturated savages, which need the reassuring feeling that we are still a part of Mother Nature and not its owner.