Horrible Cooking

My bad...

I cooked the worst dinner last night.

I know you’re waiting for a punchline, but there isn’t one. The dinner was plain gross.

I was trying a new recipe. It was a tofu soup with a soy-sauce broth, pan-fried tofu, soba noodles, bok choy, and cremini mushrooms.

My wife took the first bite, after a long day at work, and even though she was being polite, I could tell she didn’t love it. The kids tried it next, and they tried to be kind, too. I took the final bite, and I understood their quiet. It wasn’t inedible, but it wasn’t edible either.

The grocery story had run out of bok choy, the soba noodles somehow stuck to the pot they were boiled in, the broth tasted like water, and the tofu was still soft and wet. To be fair, the mushrooms were just fine, but they couldn’t salvage the dinner, and neither could adding an array of sauces to the broth.

I announced that the dinner was a fail and laughed about how gross it was. They laughed, and understanding I wouldn’t be offended, each person, one by one, agreed with me.

We moved to a backup plan, which was a failure too. We laughed again and moved to our backup of our backup: peanut butter, bananas, and sourdough bread. The kids thought it was hilarious, and I did too. We’d never had a failed meal before, not to mention two.

But then, as we ate, my wife and I began talking. How lucky were we that this was a new experience? How many people have access to a first meal, let alone a second, or a third? Isn’t it an embarrassment of riches that we can just dispose of food we don’t like?

This is not a new insight by any means. How many times have we heard that we should feel fortunate with the food we have, especially in comparison to others, elsewhere, who don’t have food of their own? I’ve always thought of it from a comparative perspective, that we should feel lucky because we have what others don’t.

But yesterday, as we discussed it at dinner, I began to think of it a little differently. Gratitude does not need to be about what others don’t have, nor does it have to be about what we have that others don’t. We can also feel gratitude for what we have sufficiently.

I’ve been hungry before, but I’ve never gone hungry. I know hunger as a momentary state, a small problem with an easy solution. I can always go downstairs and grab a snack, or swing by the store and pick something up. Sure, I can be appreciative that I don’t suffer from hunger the way millions of people around the world do. But also, can’t I also be appreciative that I don’t suffer from hunger at all?

There’s a philosophical question here, one that I was discussing with my friend recently in a different way. Is it necessary for humans to suffer in order to appreciate the good in our lives? Their argument was yes, that it’s hard to know what light is when we don’t know darkness. I hear that and see the truth in it.

But I also wonder now if that’s only the first step in gratitude. It feels easier and more natural to feel thankful for our blessings in relation to others. It feels harder—and also more sustaining—to be thankful for what we have without comparing our life situations.

For me, this insight shone through last night as we discussed the horrible, terrible, no-good very bad dinner I had cooked. That’s a pretty low-stakes way to draw out this lesson. I hope it feels as helpful to you as it does to me.