This is my previous cutting board. It’s cracked and it’s warped. It hasn’t been taken care of. It was typically stored in the wrong place, such as next to the sink where it might be overexposed to water and thus crack. In the last ten months or so, I let it go that way. I stopped paying attention to it. I ignored its well-being and care because of who and what it represented for me. Our lives are often shaped and informed by symbols, and I have let this cutting board become a symbol for a certain part of my life. Its cracked and warped status reflects the 13 years of marriage that ended last year. My ex-wife gave this cutting board to me sometime, long ago, I don’t remember exactly when. For that reason, the board no longer needs to be cared for. It came from a place where I felt uncared for most of those 13 years, and I don’t want memory of that period anymore. I have let it transform from a material, utilitarian kitchen tool to a metaphor. In addition to cutting boards, we also need metaphors in our lives. Metaphors are symbols. They shape experience. They stand in for what we cannot physically put in a specific or imaginary place. When something cannot be in its exact place, a metaphor serves us.
Most of the time we construct metaphors in order to navigate difficult issues or time periods, to make sense of the world, to create happiness, or to perform some other emotion or need. Among his many examples of metaphor, George Lakoff noted how food shapes everyday experiences. Some of these examples, like my association of warped or cracked with my cutting board, are negative. “He left a bad taste in my mouth.” “Those ideas are half-baked.” “I just can’t swallow that claim.” Food, my source of pleasure and escape, too often serves as a negative metaphoric experience when life’s promises fail or disillusionment settles in. Like a cutting board, the kitchen, too, can be a space for metaphoric interaction — in marriage, in a relationship, when trying to impress someone, when simply getting nourishment to others. My kitchen is not big enough for me and my kids to congregate, but it is big enough to provide an intimate space for cooking with someone else. Each of these scenarios could be metaphoric. Plato called rhetoric cookery — basically a lie. The kitchen, or food, can stand for the lies often told in marriages. Around food. Around the oven. Around the cutting board. These lies, of course, eventually crack, just like this board and what it represents cracked. The lies crack open and a marriage falls deep within, never to return to its surface or board.
This is my previous cutting board. This is also a metaphor. A cutting board is a space for preparation. Food, or what becomes mise-en-place, is prepared on a plastic or wooden object before being transformed into a meal. Food prep involves mise-en-place. Everything in its place. This is the mantra of cooking. Everything must have a place before it becomes transformed and transitions into something completely different such as a meal. It’s an incredible assumption that everything could, indeed, be in its place whether cooking a meal or “cooking” a relationship. Who among us believes that everything could have a place and, at some precise moment, be in it? Most things feel out of place. Most things feel unmatched, out of place, wrongly situated. Warped, bent, stuck in the wrong fit. 2020 is another metaphor for such a thought. 2020 is a year, just like a cutting board is a place for food preparation, but it is also metaphoric for nothing being in its supposed place: health, racial justice, presidential competency, climate. 2020 has transformed from a year into a metaphor for a lack of stability or preparation. Preparation assumes something completely different than everything in its place. Preparation is the moment prior to mise-en-place. Most of our lives, it seems, we are preparing for something because we are not yet in the right place we want to be in: we prepare for a test, college, a job, marriage, parenting, etc. To do so, we buy books, take advice, study, prepare. This year has left many of us feeling underprepared. Our government was underprepared to deal with a virus. Our universities have been underprepared to deal with health concerns. Most of us have been unprepared for quarantines, limited access, face masks, getting sick, fear of getting sick, children learning from home. Still, in this culture lacking preparation, I prepare food. I still eat. I raise two children. I run my house like a restaurant. Making meals. Planning meals. I am the waiter, the sous-chef, the chef, and the dishwasher to two individuals who expect me to always be prepared to serve them anything they want three times a day. Thus, I use a cutting board every day, three times a day. I slice tomatoes, bread, cheeses, vegetables, hot dogs, chicken, bagels, whatever must be prepped for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I roll out pizzas and breads. I drain tofu. I put everything in its place. I have my own mise-en-place. I feel prepared when I cook. I feel, that is, prepared. I don’t know if I am of if I am not. I can only act on feelings. If I feel prepared when I cook, I wonder how I feel elsewhere in life these days? Am I as prepared?
This board is cracked. Warped. It’s now useless, like so many other things from my past. Think of our metaphors for cracks and warps. If you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. One is cracked up. Get cracking. A warped mind, as in mentally unstable. Cracks in the system. To fall through the cracks. How can this board, with so many metaphors embedded in its actually existing, physical cracks, be useful anymore? What can be prepared on so many cracks? Nothing anymore, it seems. The surface breakages resist anything being in place. Everything, on this real and metaphoric surface, is out of place forever.
Mise-en-place is, as well, a metaphor. “What exactly is this mystical mise-en-place,” Anthony Bourdain asks in Kitchen Confidential. Preparation is mystical. Mysterious. How does a raw onion sliced up on a wooden board either transition into symmetrically prepared pieces for usage or become transformed into brown, sweet goodness when shoved from the board into a pan? How do those raw, hard potatoes, inedible on the board when chopped into rustic, uneven pieces, become crispy and golden when pushed from the board into a pan and then moved to the oven? Mystery. Transition is mysterious. How do we know when or if we are fully prepared? Mystical belief. We have to believe in our ability to be prepared. One 2014 NPR story cites celebrity chef Wylie Dufresne drawing a parallel between food preparation and life; he focuses on preparation.
“What I used to do is, let’s say I had 23 items of mise-en-place I had to do every day. So I’d take a pad and I’d write them all down on the way home. And then I would crumple the list up and throw it out,” he says. “On my way to work I’d write the list again. And you become one with your list. You and the list are the same, because the list is scorched into your head.”
Dan Charmas calls mise-en-place “a philosophy.” Dorie Greenspan claims that having your own mise-en-place “will make you feel like you are starring in your own Food Network show,” as if preparation is about identity transformation. Alice Waters called mise-en-place a “source of aesthetic pleasure.” Bon Appetite magazine once took a picture of Thomas Keller’s mise-en-place. Everything, indeed, looks in its place. His cutting board is also not cracked or warped.
Almost a year ago, shortly before we would divorce, I was preparing food for my ex’s relatives — people I barely knew but was trying to please while they stayed in our home — when she began to eat the mise-en-place I had placed aside. Pieces of cheese. Sliced tomatoes. Some roasted garlic. She took handfuls of food off of the then not yet warped and cracked cutting board. “Can you not eat it all?” I asked. “I want there to be enough for everyone.” To me, this was a simple request: I am preparing food for your relatives. I want them to be happy from the food. I’d rather you not eat it all just yet. Later that evening, I was accused of “dressing” her down and a month later we were getting a divorce. I was not prepared for such a reaction. But I often was not prepared for many of the reactions I encountered. They were reactions creeping out of long existing cracks.
For some reason, I remember a hand crafted wood butcher block cutting board my uncle once made for my father. It had a dark and tan checkerboard pattern. For two people who seemed to never talk or connect, the gift felt, to me back then, odd and out of place. I remember it as a beautiful board out of place in a tense and often conflicted relationship. I don’t know if that board ever cracked, though their brotherly relationship often seemed to be cracked and warped. The worst metaphor of family relations often involves the cracks, the falling apart. Some historians trace the cutting board’s invention to 1887 when a Sycamore tree was used by Conrad Boos to create a work space. His son John supposedly turned that idea into a kitchen item and eventually a major business that provides cutting boards to people across the world. I do not know if the cutting board father and son got along. The cracked cutting board I own is a Boos. This connection can be read as superficial and accidental (many people own Boos cutting boards, for instance, not just me) or as accidently insightful (the tracing of beginning — invention — to end — its relevance to me). What did people prepare food on before the late 19th century? Was anyone more prepared then than now? I doubt it.
I went on Amazon today and ordered a new cutting board. I should have done so a long time ago. As with most things that I own physically or emotionally, I have remained with what is long broken, warped, and no longer of any use. This is, I have noted previously, why I write in this particular online space. Writing is transition. Movement. Filling in the cracks. There are many choices to consider when buying a new cutting board. There many qualities to look over and wonder about: how will this work with my life? Is this the right choice for me? Will it eventually warp and crack, too? I did not choose a Boos. Instead, I bought a Sonder. Replacing one brand of cutting board with another brand of cutting board could be metaphoric of transition. The movement onward. Out with the old and in with the new. Starting over. We are all thinking about transition these days — how we might eventually transition from our current pandemic to normalcy again. The transition from our homes to a habitable public sphere. And yet, we have no idea if that transition will ever occur or if it will occur the way we imagine it might. Cooking offers a similar problem (how will this taste in the end). Relationships as well. Transition, though, arrives differently than home shopping allows for, and it seldom occurs through the purchase of material objects, even if we want it to. Mise-en-place is having everything one needs. That, too, is a dangerous proposition. There is always an illusion inherent in need. Shopping won’t solve need. Lying won’t solve need. Cooking won’t solve need. Neither, though, will keeping the warps and cracks in my life.
