About

Author

My name is Cameron and I’ve been traveling since as long as I can remember. I’m currently an exchange student at a university in Tokyo, Japan, where I sometimes study, but mostly eat and travel around the Yamanote line. While trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, I figured a good way would be to start doing something with my life, so I created this blog.

Why the Tao of Cooking?

The Tao is an ancient Chinese philosophical construct. It is usually translated as “the path” or “the way”, but according to Taoist texts the true Tao can not be named. To create an unorthodox, unofficial summary of the idea, the Tao is essentially that thing that keeps the world spinning, gravity pulling, and life flowing. It is why we get up every morning, it is how we find meaning in our lives.

Before I get ahead of my self, I must say that first and foremost I am a philosopher. It is the search for my own personal philosophy, a pocket version of the Tao, that drives me to travel. It is travel that perpetuates my love for food and the diversity of flavors that we are blessed with on this planet. It is my love for this diversity that allows me to hear the stories told by hundreds of years of cooking traditions, and it is hearing these stories that allows me to add to my ‘philosophy’. It all comes back around.

The title of this blog may at first be misleading, because it is not exactly a blog about how to cook. It is more about how to feel, how to connect with the world around you through the medium of food and travel. If ‘cooking’ is the act of preparing food, then the ‘tao of cooking’ is not just the act of cooking itself, but all of the stories and meaning behind the act. I’m a follower of food-is-communicationivism, and I believe that to eat is one of the main reasons we travel, and travelling is one of the best means by which to know ourselves.

I hope you enjoy my journeys with me, and are able to learn something through the ideas that I share. I leave here a quote by Lao Tzu, who is credited as the founder of Taoist philosophy:

A good traveller has no fixed plans / and is not intent on arriving.