Conscious Spooning

If you attended one of our Wendell Berry tribute dinners last year, I owe you a hand-carved spoon, which was part of the dinner. They are finally done! (Yes, a year late.) I am not a welcher, but I am a bad judge of the space-time continuum and how much it can be stretched. Such as thinking I can make thirty wood spoons in under a month during a very chaotic period in the history of restaurants. I’m sending them to those of you who attended the dinners last year. Which, btw, were magical, and I want to do again (but maybe without the spoons).

However, I loved making them. And they got me thinking—about imagination, making, friction, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, and the beauty and strugg of being human.

Spooning started, for me, during the pandemic, when my restaurant babies, that I had spent so much of my life making, were shut down. Their future looked bleak. It was creepy to sit in empty dining rooms and lifeless kitchens and feel the momentum and hustle that is the lifeblood of our industry dissipate, then vanish, like smoke up a venthood.

Like many, I turned to vintage crafting projects to fill the time and the having-of-no-effing-clue about the future. Since my boo, Jeff, is an architect, but also a woodworker and furniture maker, I had been bugging him to make small things for Modern General, our store in Santa Fe, for a while. Somehow, he understood that I was the one who actually needed to be making things (or maybe he just wanted me to leave him alone). He bought me my first tool—a hook knife—which looks like it sounds:

I found a piece of apricot wood in a pile of orchard prunings. Jeff split it like a melon with the ban saw in our garage. With a pencil I traced the shape of what I imagined on the flat part, considering the lines of grain and whorls of knots, the darker patches of heart wood. Then he showed me how to use the ban saw to cut a “blank”—a crudely shaped proto-spoon. I scribbled my design again on the rough-hewn chunk.

And then I began scraping one curling peel of wood after another.

I worked tentatively at first, then faster and more insistently as I got comfortable with the knife.

 It was slow-going but also satisfying, because something that had planted itself foggily in my imagination began to get clearer with every humdrum pass. It felt like a chase, like peeling away what wasn’t, until I arrived at what was. It kept becoming—more real, more beautiful.

For days I walked around in a trance, whittling my spoon. There was a telling trail of wood shavings in almost every room in our house, like breadcrumbs.

And there was a point that required faith. To get the spoon how I really wanted it, sometimes I had to give up on the close-but-not -there-yet shape. It disappeared entirely and looked awkward and ugly for a while. But then it came back—better, closer.

I made mistakes. But sometimes they revealed a possibility, another idea—something I could not have predicted from the pure abstraction of a plan, something that could only be discovered in the process. I realized the part where I usually held the spoon as I carved was fatter than the rest—a flaw I needed to fix. But then I decided I wanted it that way. I wanted it to be wider where I held it as I was carving rather than perfectly straight—a plumper, softer holding place for the person who used it, too. And so I left a swollen section along the length of the handle. Somehow that joined us together, maker and user.

One evening, while sipping a glass of rose, I picked up my spoon to attack again the bowl, the hardest part of any spoon, but also what makes a spoon a spoon—its concavity, its negative space. My knife lost its purchase on the wood and the whisper-sharp bevel plunged into the fleshy part of my palm, leaving a curved crimson gash. I held my hand high, wrapped in a kitchen rag, while Jeff drove me to Walgreen’s for butterfly bandages. This resulted in a new rule: no wine while spooning.

The next day I saw that a pool of my blood had absorbed into the bowl of the spoon, leaving behind a red black stain. It disappeared as I carved away those blood-dark layers, but I still have the crescent-moon scar on my left palm. The spoon marked me, and I marked the spoon.

When I was done carving, I sanded. First with the rough and chunky 80 grit, working my way all the way to 400. Then I soaked the spoon in mineral oil and polished again with the fine paper until the surface was as smooth as bone. I gave this first spoon to my bud and general manager Avery, as a going away present. He was leaving the industry after ten years of working at Vinaigrette in Santa Fe and Austin, and years in other restaurants in other places.

Since carving that first spoon with a single hook knife, my process has gotten a little more technical. I have a few more tools and tricks now—I carve the bowl on a vice, with a set of chisels, I have knives of different shapes and sizes and an electric sander called a Gwenevere I sometimes use to smooth out the bowl. But the weird excitement of the process is the same—every one is a chase, a hunt, a reveal. And every piece suggests a different design, has its own idea buried in the wood itself. It’s my job to find it.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was craving and chasing in miniature—in those ridiculously laborious spoons—something I was afraid I had lost. What making restaurant-places had always been like, and meant, to me. I didn’t know if they would matter anymore, and I was mad as hell about it, but also powerless. And so I found in microcosm what I had always loved about creating restaurants. Restaurants—at least for me—are crafted, made things, where imagination meets up with friction.

When you build a restaurant, you start with an idea or a feeling. Maybe that feeling begins as a a menu, a name, some words, or a wormy squirmy feeling in your belly you want to share. How that idea finds expression in the world, though, is informed by the particular place, like the spoon is informed by the wood. The neighborhood, the flora and fauna, the people who live there, its history and culture. And then the process reveals possibilities—you respond and react and find solutions as you go, in friction, in work, in collaboration with others and their ideas, and in response to the slowly becoming thing. And, even, to mistakes, or challenges, or setbacks—things you could never see coming. Every project is its own challenge—and the process of making them is a kind of discovery, an unfurling.

This is very different from how much of the world we live in is designed, and made, nowadays. We want to predict it all, and be done with it, before we even begin. We want to make a perfect plan, and 3D print it. We think that the less our bodies and feelings and even now our minds (AI can do it!) are involved in the unfolding process, the better. And so much of the built world, and the places we spend time in, have a factory made, cookie cutter quality to them, as we map one-size-fits-all solutions upon every place.

I don’t make places like this, and I don’t like spending time in places like this. They are not made for humans. For human bodies, and souls. Or even by us, as much.

The thrust of the economy is towards replacing our physical work, our human involvement, in just about everything. Wendell Berry was worried about this decades ago, when he wrote Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, and continued writing his manuscripts in longhand then typing them on a typewriter. For him, the frictionless ease of a word processor, was the problem, not the solution. It further separated the work of the mind from the work of the body.

...we are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has as a sterile, untouched, factory made look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the bod yin this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.

Over the last decade, a few powerful companies on a mission to eliminate friction, as well as human bodies and brains and mistakes, from our work and interactions, have gained unprecedented power and influence over our daily lives. All businesses have buried in their DNA an idea about the meaning of life because all businesses are built to solve some problem. The framing of a problem, and its solution, comes from the founders' perspective on what is good, even what life is about. The real trouble with their hegemony, then, is that Google, Amazon and Meta’s ideas about the nature of humanity, culture, work, and consciousness—which are actually pretty extreme—have permeated culture almost as much as their technologies. This idolizing of computation and automation, and belief in the necessity of eliminating our bodies and friction from all our work, has crept even into how we think of our communities and what it means to be human—the very nature of consciousness.

Some believe that eventually AI can achieve consciousness, because of its ability to consume data and “learn.” When Michael Pollan was asked about this in a recent interview for the Times, he pointed out some simple reasons why he didn't think so.

“I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human. Despite how it may seem, the internet is not actually the whole of the world. But to a computer, it’s all you got.”

To sum up. 1) The world is not a computer, or the internet, and so anything that AI becomes—because it is trained exclusively on and by those things—will be a distortion. If it seems complete, it will be so because we have been slowly conditioned to believe that those parts of the world that can't be digitized don't matter, and so they will come to matter to us less and less. 2) Feelings are an essential, perhaps primary, part of consciousness. Computers don’t have emotions, though they have become shockingly good at appearing to emote and empathize with us. And 3) Friction with one another and our surroundings is how consciousness becomes and evolves.

This is also why food culture, restaurants and cafes, and I would argue Culture Culture, depend upon friction and in a sense are friction embodied. Culture is the sticky accretion of knowledge and ideas and art that happens when we rise above mere survivalism. It is what we make, sing, write, paint, carve, say, cook, eat and do when we have a little bit of time to reflect, and a little bit of control over our time. Culture is created when we have a gap between the moment and our understanding of it—when there is the possibility of reflection, digestion, expression. Culture is consumed, and simplified, when there is no gap between right now and our regurgitation of it, no time for real reflection.

Paradoxically, our technologies have sped up life and intensified remote communication to an almost pre-modern state of desperate right-nowness. We are isolating, more, but we are constantly talking. There is no space for the perspective that is the ground of culture. And there is less and less friction, which makes culture stay put, and deepen, like top soil.

Check this space next week for our plans to foster friction in all our new and old projects. #bringfrictionback