Food In Motion

So much of cooking is preparation—mise en place—and so much of preparation is cutting up large pieces of food into smaller pieces. I think if I’ve become any faster or more efficient at cooking, I owe it to learning how to efficiently cut food.

Knowing how a piece of meat or fruit should be cut up is certainly part of it, and there are very helpful procedures for everything from a chicken to a mango. But what really matters is this: keeping the blade working. There is little forward progress whenever the blade is at rest.

Handedness plays a role in efficient cutting: the food is stabilized or repositioned with one hand and the knife is used with the other. (Any time I’m tempted to use both hands to grasp a knife, I’m quietly wondering to myself about my next close call.) Using either hand for any task would be interesting, but it suggests switching hands—an interruption in the flow—and it would also require developing some skill with both hands, which takes time and repetition. Handedness leads to asymmetry; a kind of specialization on a small scale. But handedness gives us an advantage by reducing time to proficiency.

Each hand is busy with a distinctly different, but related, task. They are coordinated. The “knife hand” can keep the knife busy because the “food hand” is doing its job anticipating what the knife hand needs next. It is a process, a workflow. Food moves from one side of the cutting board to the other, not unlike the way it moves from the cupboard to the mixing bowl to the pan to the oven. Food in motion; asymmetry as an engine.