The Gut and Integrated Gastronomy

Life is taken care of via a taken-care-of stomach.

I’ve, in many places, written extensively about the matrix of a domain I call integrated gastronomy. Let me tell you something I’ve come to find about the gut, at least my own gut.

What the snow globe is to the globe, the gut is to the cosmos. Put differently, the gut is the universalizer. Food made from across the world becomes local the instant it enters my gut, my personal microcosm. Distance dissolves in the grand scheme and everything is linked.

Going further, I feel that the gut is a kind of cosmic transformer. Everything it encounters becomes here and now. Vietnamese lychee. Spanish olive. Canadian oats. These things lose their foreignness and become one, with their distances erased.

We massively overestimate the meaning of distance because we do not fully understand space itself. I’m starting to feel at home with flavors from anywhere because once tasted, those flavors functionally become home. The new pantry is global and we are transcending cuisine, what I call Post Cuisine.

Taste reveals this directly. The gut takes a mango grown under full tropical sun, a cacao bean raised under filtered shade, or a maple syrup born of winter sap pressure, and transforms them into one unified mold. This is why certain foods from far away feel strangely familiar. My gut handles them well, like it were an integrated system.

The body wants food that’s alive.

An ingredient can be a pure expression of taste, aroma, texture, and vitality. And the gut can squeeze every ounce of juice out of this expression; it collapses distance the way nature collapses boundaries in a permaculture garden.