Does inefficiency show care?

My 17th birthday lunch! Including white rice, 5 types of fried veggies, egg curry, mutton curry, chili shrimp, lentils, papaya chutney, and the classic Bengali rice pudding (payesh)

I would like to think I make a really good goat curry. But if you watched me make it and you cared about efficiency at all, you'd think I was insane.

It's called kosha mangsho. It's a Bengali mutton curry, and the whole point of it is that you have to simmer the spices and meat for a really long time. You can't rush it. You stand over the stove stirring and scraping the bottom so nothing burns, for hours. Some inevitables include: The kitchen getting unbearably hot, sweating, and an arm cramp.

If food were just about keeping your body running, nobody would ever make this. But we don't. We do the hard thing. Why?

This is where food anthropology gets interesting. It asks why humans put this much effort into something that's technically just fuel.

Cooking is one of the only things that actually makes us human. No other animal does it. Anthropologist Levi-Strauss (not the jeans guy) said the difference between raw and cooked is basically the difference between nature and culture.

When I stand there stirring goat meat for two hours, it isn’t about the dinner. It’s about relaying what my parents once did, what their parents did before them. I'm taking raw ingredients and turning them into something that means home.

There's also the chemistry, which I love. The heat breaks down collagen in the meat and turns it into gelatin, which thickens the sauce. The Maillard reaction browns the onions and creates that deep savory flavor.

But the science is just the how. Anthropology is the why.

The why is that food is a language. When I make that stew for someone, I'm saying I care about you enough to stand here and sweat over this pot for three hours.

What’s the other answer to this question? The question of why we put so much effort into something that’s “just fuel”?

To make it taste good.