Gastrohumanism did not begin because one day I sat down and decided to invent a new concept.
It happened the other way round.
For years, I simply did what I do. Only later did I begin to wonder what to call it.
The real catalyst was a letter.
My students gave it to me on their graduation night. In just a few paragraphs, they managed to dissect me with almost surgical precision. How they saw me. What they had noticed. What had bothered them. What they remembered. And, perhaps most importantly, what, after several years together, had remained with them.
I read it and, at some point, found myself asking:
What is it that I actually do?
The easiest answer is obvious.
I teach culinary arts.
I educate young people who may one day become chefs and professionals in gastronomy.
Fine.
But what am I actually doing during all those years while I am teaching them to cook?
I am not dealing only with ingredients, recipes, temperatures, techniques and the organisation of work. We do not spend four years arguing solely about whether something is properly cooked, how long a stock should simmer, or in what order a particular culinary process should be carried out.
I am also dealing with them.
Young people who are only beginning to form their relationship with work, knowledge, responsibility, authority, failure, other people and themselves.
A future chef is not the only person who walks into the training kitchen.
A young human being does too.
With their upbringing, family, ambitions, fears, problems, talents, the stupid things we all do at that age, and a view of the world that is still taking shape.
And then you realise that the lesson has long since ceased to be merely a cooking lesson.
That is the space in which gastronomy and humanism came together in the service of individual development.
When I speak of humanism here, I do not mean that I am trying to construct or interpret some new philosophy.
For me, the point is much simpler.
A human being is not an appendage to a profession, a curriculum or an institution.
The individual is the reason any of them exist.
They have the right to ask questions, to think for themselves, to disagree, to make mistakes, to change their mind and to grow.
Knowledge, education and professional training should help them do that, not merely turn them into competent executors of instructions.
Gastronomy Is the Starting Point
Gastronomy is where I begin.
It is my profession. It is where I have spent my working life, and it is where I feel at home.
But gastronomy has never been just about cooking.
Take a single ingredient and, before long, you find yourself outside the kitchen.
An ingredient leads us into biology, chemistry, agronomy, ecology and health. A culinary technique leads to physics, technology and an understanding of processes. A dish opens questions of history, culture, identity and tradition. A restaurant takes us into economics, the organisation of work, markets and human relationships. And all of this is shaped by the society in which we live.
From there, the circle only widens.
I have always been interested in many things. Probably too many to fit neatly into a single box.
Cooking. Education. History. Economics. Science. Technology. Culture. Art. Society. People.
One thing leads me to another.
I can start with coffee and end up in botany, genetics, chemistry, water and sensory analysis. I can start with the making of a stock and end up asking what kind of chefs we are educating, and what happens when, in pursuit of speed, we strip a craft of its foundations. I can begin with a film, a cruise ship in a bay, a classroom lesson or an ordinary conversation, and suddenly find myself facing an entirely different question.
That feels natural to me.
That is why gastrohumanism has become a platform on which I can bring together what I do professionally with what interests me personally.
In one place there may be culinary terminology, specialist lectures, ingredients, techniques and food science. Somewhere else, education. Somewhere else again, something I have seen, read or experienced that made me stop and think.
Not everything has to appear, at first glance, to belong to the same field.
It belongs to me.
And that is enough for me to start digging.
Gastronomy is the starting point. It is not the boundary.
So What Is Gastrohumanism?
For me, gastrohumanism is simply the name I have given to what I do and the framework that describes it best.
I do not present it as a new philosophy, ideology, scientific discipline or complete theoretical system.
It is a personal framework for my work and writing.
It gives me the freedom to take a subject that interests me, approach it from the standpoint of my professional and personal experience, and try to understand it.
Sometimes I will do that better.
Sometimes I probably will not.
But the method should remain the same.
Ask a question.
Establish what we actually know.
Look for the data.
Check the source.
Try to separate fact from opinion, evidence from assumption, and what we know from what we merely think we know.
And then try to explain it all in plain language.
Without making it sound more sophisticated than it really is.
If I do not know something, I do not know it.
If there is not enough evidence, there is not enough evidence.
If I was wrong, then I was wrong.
Making a mistake is not the problem. The problem begins when the facts show that we were wrong and we start defending the mistake simply because it is ours.
That is something else entirely.
The Individual
In the end, I still return to where all of this began.
To the human being.
In my case, most often to the young person standing in front of me in the training kitchen.
What, after all, is the goal?
For them to spend four years perfectly reproducing what I have shown them?
I hope not.
If all I have taught them is how to carry out familiar procedures while I am standing beside them, then I have done half the job.
Perhaps less.
Life will not always hand them problems they have already seen.
Sooner or later, they will face a problem for which there is no recipe.
They will find themselves in a situation where the teacher is no longer standing beside them.
That is when we see what we have really achieved.
That is why, for me, the goal of education is not simply for a young person to memorise a procedure, but to reach the point where they can carry on without us.
To know how to ask a question.
To find information.
To look at the source and ask why it should be trusted.
To verify it.
To find another source.
To recognise when they do not know something.
To make a decision.
And to take responsibility for it.
Of course they will make mistakes.
They should.
There is no serious experience without error. Without acknowledging an error, there can be no correction. And without correction, there can be no progress.
Perhaps that is why I have always disliked the idea of a “stupid question”.
What exactly is a stupid question?
A question asked by someone who does not know something?
That is precisely why they are asking.
The same applies to subjects we declare off-limits before the conversation has even begun.
As far as I am concerned, we can talk about anything.
Absolutely anything.
That does not mean we will agree. Nor should we have to.
It also does not mean that every opinion automatically carries the same weight.
It does not.
Its weight comes from the arguments behind it, the facts that support it and its ability to withstand scrutiny.
But we can hear an argument out. We can ask what it rests on. We can check the facts. We can try to understand why someone thinks differently.
And we can leave open the possibility that perhaps we are the ones who have missed something.
To me, that matters far more than winning an argument.
That is why, however broad its range of subjects may be, gastrohumanism ultimately always comes back to the individual.
To their ability to think.
To learn.
To doubt when there is reason to doubt.
To question not only others, but sometimes themselves.
To make mistakes.
To correct themselves.
And to keep going.
That is about all there is to it.
Gastronomy is the starting point.
The human being is the subject.
Individual development is the goal.