Editorial Letter

When is it time for a new recipe? I ask this question neither out of a spirit of culinary creativity, nor out of gustatory boredom and a desire for new experiences. Much more pragmatically, I am curious about the moments when our recipes fail and demand revision or even complete reformulation. When are recipes no longer sustainable as transmitters of culinary knowledge?We are all familiar with the typical ways that recipes fail. This can occur when the dish does not turn out as expected due to an error or an oversight, or when the would-be cook lacks the requisite ingredients or techniques it demands. Here the failure resides not in the recipe itself but in its performance and application.A recipe can also fail due to poor authorship. In this case, the list of ingredients might be incomplete or erroneous, the measurements might be inaccurate or out of balance, or the instructions might present the steps out of order (or even omit them). A recipe could even fail simply by missing the mark—that is, a perfectly functional recipe might simply produce a lousy version of a well-known dish (can a recipe, like a syllogism, be valid and yet unsound?).If the failure pertains to familiar dishes—particularly when the author of the recipe is not present to clarify the instructions—we can appeal to our culinary experience, to lingering taste memories and the fleeting whispers of bygone dishes. But if there is a problem with the authorship of a new or unfamiliar dish, the absence resonates dramatically: it points to an unfulfilled need or desire, especially when there is yet no established taste referent or criterion for evaluation. To conjecture about the possibility of a poorly authored recipe requires that one simultaneously inhabit the mindsets of both author and reader, that one envision and enact the very thing which has not yet been experienced. Applying a recipe in this case becomes its own peculiar form of authorship: it reminds us how cooking, thinking, and being are inextricably tied to the creative powers of culinary imagination that sustain the life of our biological and social communities. While some of the essays collected in this issue illustrate this connection quite literally, what they all share is an awareness that the pursuit of our physiological sustenance nourishes and challenges our thoughts, values, and aspirations.Noha Fikry Ismail begins this issue with a recipe for sustaining life in the complex networks that erase the distinction between our cultural communities and their sustaining biological networks. “Living Food, Killer Species”—a reflection borne out of the author’s dissertation research in Egypt (Fikry 2022)—traces “the cycle of feed and food through which humans and nonhumans eat” by reflecting on the practices of tarbiyya and mish-making. The former practice refers literally to raising children, but also to the way that animals are raised domestically for food—a recipe that demands the food for such animals be “alive.” This quality requires care, time, and circumspection so that the leftovers saved for the animals are not rotten or dead but alive and repurposed for the sustenance of new life: a cycle of life-life that supports and prolongs the cycle of life-death. The latter practice of mish-making also sustains life by providing nutrients to the tiny organisms that digest, ferment, and fortify our food in the process of feeding themselves. Here rotting is not a sign of food’s death, but of its emerging life-sustaining qualities. In both cases, the author asks, “what makes food alive?” Her answer points to life’s diversity and the many different ways that we recognize and cultivate it to nourish our individual and social bodies. And while these “recipes” differ, they nonetheless both depend on the idea that living food does more than simply provide sustenance.This tension between living food and sustenance inhabits Caitlin Bradley Morgan’s study of Essex Farm with a much more ponderous urgency. The author’s fieldwork explores the continued sustainability—environmental, social, and economic—of Essex Farm’s full-diet CSA now more than twenty years after Kristin and Mark Kimball first established the farm. Morgan evaluates the recipe for the CSA’s success across the three pillars of sustainability, probing its flaws of authorship and application to reveal just how ambiguous such diagnoses can be. While the mission of a community gives life to its members and motivates their work, such ideals might not even offer the sustenance required to perpetuate the life of the community itself. The author’s conclusions suggest that the recipe for thriving agricultural communities requires not only a list of the proper ingredients, but also a consideration of the economic and social environments that foster communities and mitigate the ravages of time.Is a good recipe enough to undo—or at least decelerate—time’s unrelenting march forward? Koby Song-Nichols’s “A Hope for Historical Cooking: Bao and Being Present” suggests that a thoughtful hermeneutics of the recipe construes the past not simply as time gone by, but also as an alternative present demanding both rigor and care. Reading and cooking with recipes from the past is therefore not a process of replication or even resuscitation but one of dialogue, negotiation, and improvisation in which the recipe is not simply another (historical) possibility but instead the laying-bare of recipes as records of culinary possibilities in the present. Here this translates into the author’s encounter with bao-making on technical, historical, and personal levels to reinscribe the very question of authorship in recipes: What is the proper attitude for approaching historical recipes and how do we prepare ourselves for co-authorship every time we re-present the past? Song-Nichols’s response attenuates the tension between author and application, thus providing a thoughtful recipe for sustaining historical food scholarship in the future.M. Paulina Hartono offers a more literal translation of history that aims to introduce the authors of a culinary past to wider audiences in the present. As part of Gastronomica’s “Translating the Foods of the World” series,1 Hartono’s work explores the historical context in which one of Indonesia’s national cookbooks—the Mustikarasa—emerged in the 1960s to crystallize its national identity and its spirit of self-reliance in the face of increasing globalization. Hartono introduces Anglophone readers to this previously untranslated cookbook via the text’s modern introduction by JJ Rizal (2016) and eight of its recipes. But we are also introduced to a version of authorship through the figure of Indonesia’s charismatic first president Sukarno, who commissioned the Mustikarasa at a time when Indonesia was struggling to grow enough rice to feed its own population. Here authorship involves a collective effort to compile the nation’s local dishes and in so doing trade economic dependence for a new national identity rich in cultural and gastronomical diversity. The Mustikarasa is not the only national cookbook of Indonesia, but its collective authorship and application distinguish its particular ability to nourish an emerging national identity.This issue’s final section showcases another one of Gastronomica’s recent calls for papers: a special section dedicated to short philosophical essays on food—a format that challenges the familiar recipe for philosophical scholarship and reflection. Andrea Borghini and I provide a more thorough introduction to that special section later in the issue; here, I will simply note that the authors and essays featured in this section build upon a now rich and diverse body of philosophical work on food by philosophers and theorists over the past four decades. One of the first and most important contributions to the philosophy of food is Lisa Heldke’s (1988) essay “Recipes for Theory Making,” which explores how philosophical theorizing can benefit from the practice of cooking and applying recipes. In particular, her account of recipe failure focuses on the cook’s application of the recipe and how “thoughtful practice” places the cook into conversation with the recipe’s author and allows the application of theory to also be its re-authoring in a new situation or context.While not the specific focus of her investigation, one might infer from Heldke’s considerations that the recipe failure dilemma introduced above (is it application or authorship?) is a false one: what the author and cook share is a relation to the recipe and its primary role as a transmitter of knowledge. With this relationship in mind, we might reconsider the question, “when is it time for a new recipe?” Recipes are sustainable when author and reader share in a set of conditions (environmental, social, technical)—however tenuous or distant—that allows not only for the successful performance of a dish, but most importantly for the very existence of failure, whether it be of authorship or application. Recipes are no longer sustainable when the relation between author and reader is broken and no common basis for understanding remains: troubleshooting the recipe fails and any appeal to history, authority, or ingenuity falls flat. Without hyperbole, I would argue that to reach such a point would be to reach the very end of human existence as we know (and celebrate) it. We cannot separate our shared human existence from the grip of recipes. They sustain us, and more importantly, they remind us that knowledge is never simply transmitted but actively cooked and transformed through its authorship and application.