Be another 1/5. For this Japanese author of delicious books, eating is a great excuse to open up to the world, to exchange, to go from the intimate to the universal.
He is an author as powerful as he is gentle, listening to the world, people, animals and plants. He advances in literature after experience, travels a lot and, no doubt, having grown up with a mother who runs a cooking school, he never loses his childhood passion for cooking. For this Tokyo-born Japanese woman who arrived in Paris at the age of 27, everything we eat speaks through us. He explains this in particular in two wonderful worksEarth is a cauldron And The Call of Smells.
On the grill
In Japanese, when a person is rude, obstinate, in short, unpleasant, they say that they are “inedible, whether grilled or even steamed.” In French, to grill someone is to question them or even pester them for answers. Dig into it. But what does cooking have to do with human privacy?
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For Ryoko Sekiguchi, eating food is “bringing it home to our bodies. This has to do with assimilation. We chew vegetables, shellfish, with the same gesture we chew the history of these shellfish. He claims: “We believe that eating is a one-way act. no! If I eat a delicious dish, at that very moment I tell myself that if a bear eats me, my meat will be delicious. What we put in our mouths is alive. That’s why in relation to food, it seems to me that we are in a constant dialogue. »
In the pot
High school student Ryoko Sekiguchi loved to perform in class. In a pot on a kerosene stove, he was putting a whole bunch of food. “School was my first taste laboratory. This cauldron contained many different things coexisting. When we cook, we are constantly creating free, rich exchanges that we share with the bodies of others. “Turning the classroom into a kitchen full of smells was a transformation that brought us all immense joy,” she says.
Eating is a series of small daily metamorphoses that ultimately transform us profoundly.
Ryoko Sekiguchi
Words about food
“It’s strange, you can’t eat something that doesn’t have a name. But have you ever described the taste of zucchini, chocolate cake, or given a name to a dish you invented? However, words pass through our five senses, it is through them and through them that we can remember what we ate, what the dish says. No dish remains silent. It is important to note it, to know it, to notice it. Eating is a series of small daily metamorphoses that ultimately transform us profoundly. Deep down, I think cooking is a great excuse to taste the world, to talk about it, to travel to a country that is different and that is also you, with your senses and your words.
From Ryoko Sekiguchi’s The Earth is a Cauldron, Editions Bayard (2020) and The Call of Odors, Editions POL (February 2024).
Source: Le Figaro
