Chopping, Working, Thinking

If I could teach the world one thing, it would be how to chop onions. Or, ideally, three things: the three most reliable and versatile methods of chopping onions, which are likely to satisfy the needs of any home cook – of anyone, that is, who does not already know how to chop onions. These are, by the way, rough chunks, fine dice, and plain old slicing, but I won’t go into detail here as this is one of those occasions where a few pictures – or one short video – could quite literally do the work of a thousand words.

Not usually so inclined, my drive towards the didactic is born of two related but frictive life experiences. Over the course of my career up to this point, I have chopped rather a lot of onions and become rather good at it. So good that I know that when done methodically, using those three techniques mentioned, chopping onions can be rather easy and even, if not quite fun, rewarding and somehow pleasurable.

The corollary of this ability, however, is that I am acutely attuned to the various ways in which onions are not chopped well – and boy howdy, are onions often not chopped well. All throughout my adult life, in house-shares and hostels, at home, at work and at dinner parties, I have seen friends and family, lovers and enemies struggle to slice onions in all kinds of unlikely and inventive ways: blunt knives, wobbling boards, cuts that go neither with nor against the grain, but haphazardly through it at angles odd and askew. I try to keep my advice to myself as dining table cooking is about as welcome – i.e. entirely unwelcome – as backseat driving, but I cannot help but notice.

Hyper-sensitive to the slicing and mis-slicing of onions as I may be, I am not really a chef. True, I spend my working days procuring, preparing and serving food, and otherwise managing a small commercial kitchen. But many in the industry would deny – have, quite explicitly, denied – me the title of chef, as I neither attended culinary school nor paid my dues slowly climbing the ranks of the kitchen hierarchy. Bored and broke after university, I lied my way into my first kitchen job then leapfrogged to the top by taking over a small kitchen in a library. Because of this, to some I am now, and can only ever be, a cook. I’ve never particularly cared to argue the point, and will readily admit that I lack the encyclopaedic knowledge that many chefs labour for years to acquire; but I would like to discuss some notable differences between the two roles.

Since the advent of food television in the mid-20th century and the premiership of Marco Pierre White in the 1990s, the chef has been raised up from the dank basements of hotels and restaurants and carried out into the glaring limelight of celebrity. Often, now, the biggest cheese at a restaurant is not the richest customer or the wheel of parmesan in the cellar, but the chef themselves. The cook, meanwhile – the canteen staff, the catering department, the dinner lady (and these workers are so often female) – remains hidden away out of sight, chained to those lower rungs of the employment ladder labelled ‘menial’.

Of course, as Marx spells out, all wage labour involves selling yourself, auctioning off your limited time on this planet to the highest bidder.[1] But contemporary wisdom tells us that there are rankings within this system, that it is better to sell one’s mind than one’s body; better to be a lawyer than a labourer, a professor than a prostitute. As do career advisors and the education system, although they are not usually as explicit as that. Career advice, to my memory, most often comes in the form of existential questions like ‘what do you want to be?’ I do not remember ever being asked the much more practical question, ‘what can you bear to do for eight hours a day, five days a week, for forty years?’ Or, equally pertinent, ‘what can your bear to think about for eight hours a day, five days a week, for forty years?’

Selling one’s mind means selling one’s thoughts. If you are contractually obliged to think about employment law between the hours of nine AM and five PM, you are not free to think about, say, orca consciousness. Some lucky people get to think about whatever they want as part of their living – writers, artists, old school academics, for example – but even many of these spend much more of their time doing administrative paperwork or facilitating the work of others. One very elusive species, known as the essayist, sells their free thoughts for cash, but the industry is notoriously difficult to infiltrate. Unless you are already a bestselling novelist like Zadie Smith; an accomplished academic like Susan Sontag; or shagging the editor like Adrian Chiles, getting paid to think about whatever you want is more likely than not a fanciful but unlucrative daydream.[2]

Unless, that is, you are a ‘menial labourer’. There is a certain level of physical work which not only allows the free wandering of thought but is highly conducive to it. As many writers and philosophers have realised before me, sitting down with a notebook is often not the best way to go about the task of writing. The blank page is not a great stimulus. It is much better to do something, some lightly exerting, mildly stimulating kind of activity. The most popular option throughout history – at least among those who have managed to publish their musings on the matter – has been long, leisurely, walks through beautiful and dramatic landscapes. Friedrich Nietzsche chose the Swiss Alps. Daniel Kahneman chose the manicured grounds of various elite universities. Robert Macfarlane continues to choose any number of remarkable areas of the British countryside, accompanied by an eccentric cast of artists, writers, academics and experts.

For my part, dull quotidian requirements like paying bills prohibit me from wandering off at all hours of the day to think about stuff. But those same requirements do entail a lot of onion chopping, and to the experienced onion chopper like me, chopping onions can serve much the same purpose as walking. Just like footsteps along a mountain path, the regular, rhythmic rocking of the wrist which constitutes onion chopping occupies just enough of the reptilian hardware of the brain to free up the higher, brainier parts to really do their stuff. I believe this state of mind is called transient hyper-frontality, but as an onion chopper I don’t really have the credentials to explain it. Daniel Kahneman puts it in layman’s terms: ‘I did the best thinking of my life,’ he writes, ‘on leisurely walks’.[3] While I do not mean to place my thoughts on par with those of a Nobel laureate, some of my best thinking has been done while chopping onions.

Indeed, chopping onions has one very significant advantage over walking. As every nature writer will know, it is very difficult to make notes while walking. The inspirational rhythm of footsteps also bumps pen strokes far beyond the realms of legibility. As every friend or spouse of a nature writer will know, to stop every time a thought appears is not really to walk at all. Making substantial notes while walking can quickly become that same old struggle with the blank page; only outside, in the wind and the rain, without a desk, in some beautiful locale that one is now too distracted to enjoy. Notes made while chopping, in contrast, are really very convenient. Just set your knife aside for a moment, jot your little note down, and chop on. Just as Nietzsche’s famous pithy style was actually a necessity born from his debilitating ill health – short aphorisms were often all he could squeeze out between debilitating migraines – one can, word by word, sentence by sentence, write entire essays while chopping onions. This sentence, this essay was first written while chopping onions.

But not everybody would approve. In his 1977 book The Miracle of Mindfulness, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh recommends a state of mind which ironically – although perhaps not, for a Zen master – might also be described as mind-emptiness: an absence of thought. ‘When washing the dishes’, he writes, ‘one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing dishes.’[4]

From his choice of example, I infer that Thich Nhat Hanh has never washed dishes for a living. Thich Nhat Hanh, I submit, has never been four hours in to a ten hour slog in a KP pit, surrounded by towering stacks of industrial catering trays caked in BBQ rib marinade: sugar, vinegar, and molasses slow cooked into a solvent of unholy strength, which chews up sponges at an alarming rate and is topped off with a knuckle deep layer of pale, slimy pork fat.

Throughout history, though, many others have been in just that situation. The potwash is no capitalist mishap, no ugly but avoidable product of a world which could be otherwise. Since antiquity and beyond, the difficult and time-consuming task of food preparation has, quite sensibly, been outsourced to professionals: those who can cook more efficiently by cooking in larger quantities. But more cooking inevitably means more pots, so for perhaps as long as there has been civilization there have been those who must spend large parts of their days scrubbing dish after dish after dish after dish after dish.

Why would a sympathetic person demand that these individuals live only in that moment, concern themselves only with the mundane properties of the soggy baked bean? Why would we not permit them to ponder life and death, meaning and value, to think fondly of an absent loved one, anticipate an upcoming meal, or compose a poem?

One could argue that to do such things is still to be in the present moment, as thoughts are no less temporally located than are sensations. But I’d go further, and ask what’s so good about the present moment, anyway? The ‘Ultimate Truth’, ‘the Way’ ‘Mind at Large’ – the unknowable, unspeakable eternal reality of the world, whatever you want to call it – is, to be frank, boring. There is nothing – or perhaps everything – to it. It is, and that’s all there is to say about it. What’s really interesting, what there is plenty to say about, is music, narrative, emotion, flavour and thinking. We have, almost literally, all the time in the world to be in thoughtless union with the universe – two infinities, one behind us and another ahead. In comparison, the time we have to think is a graphene-thin sliver of a sliver, shorter even than the brief life of our biological bodies. That time, and that ability, is a privilege. The three pound chunk of grey-pink flesh inside your skull is, to the best of our knowledge, the greatest thinking machine in the universe. You’d be mad not to use it.

Speaking of madness, I am here, once again, reminded of the patron saint of over-educated, under-employed white boys: Friedrich Nietzsche. Beginning in Beyond Good and Evil and continuing through to his unfinished Will to Power, Nietzsche rejects the Buddhist rejection of desire on the grounds that it risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater: that desire ,when trained on the right target, can be a motivating life force.[5] I suppose I am saying something similar about thinking. Failing to experience the present moment because one is lost in remembering past glories or imagining future successes is, to be sure, a bad thing. But to think well, in a creative and considered, methodical and spontaneous way, is a privilege and a joy.

I learned to think well only when I learned to chop well. The two developed not only simultaneously, but symbiotically. It was not in the dank, musty environment of the philosophy seminar room that I really took to the task of thought. It was in the gleaming, sterile atmosphere of the professional kitchen, among the shining stainless-steel work surfaces and colour-coded chopping boards, looking down on the sublime geometry found inside an onion.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847), available here, p. 8

[2] Sontag and Smith are undeniably a successful academic and bestselling novelist, respectively; Adrian Chiles is married to Kath Viner, editor-in-chief at the Guardian, for which newspaper Chiles writes a twice-weekly, all-encompassing opinion column.

[3] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Penguin, London (2013), p. 40

[4] Thicht Naht Hahn, The Miracle of Mindfulness, as quoted by Arthur C. Brooks in ‘The Satisfaction Trap’ in the March 2022 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, p. 30

[5] For a long time while this essay sat as a draft on my laptop, it contained what I thought to be a Nietzsche quote but which I had, it seems, entirely fabricated. The more general point described here can be found can be found throughout the works mentioned.