What I Learned from My Dad

The Value of Complementary Thinking, Perseverance and Cooking

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

DAD SAID: “Everything is both a science and an art: the science is the WHAT of a thing, the art is the HOW.” He said no more than that. His huge brown eyes watched my face as I puzzled over the words. It was probably fifty years ago.

I had asked him which was more important. Dad’s answer lodged in my brain as a question mark. By now, the question is my heart as well. Dad passed away in 2002. I like to think he recognized his gift as he was giving it.

Thinking about Science + Art together inspired me to stay curious, with the conviction that every problem has a precise answer, even if not in my lifetime.

Science + Art thinking has applied to human experience from the moment the first human walked upright, and maybe threw a dead animal into a fire. Dead, unburied animals bring hyenas, vermin, and maggots. Buried animals decay underground and feed the bacteria that worms eat. Roasted animals feed hungry men, women and children. Cooking concentrated nourishment even for cave dwellers and prairie wanderers.

The world’s first primordial, complex invention was cooking. Some prefer to call cooking a cultural practice. Yet, no one is born by falling off an encyclopedia truck with a cookbook or a spatula in hand. Every separate “thing” is invented, even the words for things that humans find, and things they point at for one reason or many. Every invention solves a particular problem with Necessity as its mother, Thinking as its midwife, and Self-Reliance as the prime agent of this race of self-made people who learn.

Cooking gives humans efficient, flavorful, even delicious nutrition for health, growth and hunger satisfaction. Eating cooked food has enabled humans to become smart, confident and productive.

Cooking is life enhancing, possibly the primary factor in human flourishing, because cooking concentrates food energy into small, tastier and easier to digest portions than uncooked food. The benefits of being the “cooking” animal is a key to life and leisure as a human being. Well-feed leisure is the key component of being able to think of ourselves as the rational animal, drive cars, enjoy air conditioning, build ocean liners, and threaten to blow each other to bits.

Cooking is the first separation, the original fountainhead of man’s dominion over the animals and the planet. The second separation might have been the ideas of What and How. The What is actually my place holder for five distinct words in modern thinking: who, what, where, when and why. How seems to stand alone, like the thumb on a hand, but actually the How is the concept of method. All actions that men have done, are doing and will do as long as there are humans answer the question how. These six question words reverberate with possibility, repeated here for emphasis: who, what where, when, why and how.

You could prefer to emphasize the irony of the combination of science and art — you could keep dog paddling in place, going in circles with the circle of life until you are exhausted. However, since no other creature is capable of sustaining a rational processes of thought, you could add both the WHAT and the HOW to your thinking as complements, the one always answering or completing the other. Then you will find yourself forever curious, eager to learn, and psychologically young.

By any standard, the human race is young. As individuals, our own outlook effects both our lives and those we care about most. As Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, “To hold an unchanging youth, is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started.”

Ilene on one of the five bridges over the Corinth Canal (2024).
Construction of the canal between the Ionian and Aegean seas began: 67 AD (first attempt); 1881 (final attempt).

PS: Adam ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Did God throw the couple out of Eden because Eve didn’t have the presence of mind to serve Adam an apple cobbler or hot applesauce?