I know Peter Elbow has covered the similarities between cooking and writing, but I'm compelled to recite my personal experience.
I love looking at the recipes in the NY Times but when it comes to transforming recipes into food, I see the ingredient list and realize all my shortcomings: my lack of ingredients and tools and my lack of motivation to spend three hours prepping, cooking, and plating elaborate dishes. These recipes require some serious economic resources and some real dedication to becoming a foodie. As a cook, I've come to revel in simplicity and develop an appreciation for good weekly planning.
Likewise, I've come to value clear writing over the opaque rhetoric often used by contemporary theorists. As much as I enjoy reading Zizek, Deleuze, and Butler, their complex, unclear writing cannot make complex issues more interesting. They are NY Times recipes, accessible to readers with the resources and know-how to decipher and use their opaque writing. And reading their books, I can't help but get discouraged: I simply don't have the ingredients and motivation to write like postmodern theorists.
Instead, I draw from Maya Angelou's memoir cookbook, The Welcome Table, which provides relatively simple recipes that connect to taste, culture, and tradition in complex ways. The recipes are simple but the resulting taste is complex, drawing from Angelou's heritage and personal experience. Her prose also expresses clarity without sacrificing complexity. The key to her clear writing, I think, is her capacity to create images, which are made from basic ingredients--good, though not necessarily standard, syntax and grammar. She plays with images at many levels, ranging from a cohesive picture of her whole book to individual metaphor used by her grandmother. Writing and cooking weave together, the clarity and simplicity of each practice producing complex images and tastes.
I may observe complex spectacles, but my sustenance starts with simplicity.
