When Cooking and Eating Become an Art, We Learn Not to Waste
By Shamsul Bahari
When you have to cook not only your own lunch and dinner but also your family's every single day, you begin to understand a great deal about what you're putting into your body and into your children’s. Cooking becomes a meditation in motion. Cutting vegetables and peeling ginger and garlic keeps your hands present and your mind calm. Eventually, you learn that nothing is truly difficult—it all simplifies with less thought and more rhythm. You know how much water to add to the rice just by the feel of it, not by any measuring cup. You clean as you go. You respect the space.
Yes, my friend, being the chef of your own kitchen is like being in the Zendo, counting your breath.
This was my responsibility: raising children in San Francisco, then Japan, and now Malaysia. Recipes change with cultures, but presence remains constant. Everyone loved my oxtail curry, a specialty I refined in the U.S. and later in Japan. Oxtail was once a cheaper cut, often overlooked by locals who didn’t know how to prepare it. But to me, it was gold.
In Sendai, Japan, food was something sacred. Even a birthday cake was sold like a rare item—gift-wrapped with care and detail, just like the fish at the morning market. There was a deep sense of reverence in the way the Japanese handled food and packaging. But I always felt uneasy about the waste. Sometimes I would rather eat three-day-old curry than throw it away—it tastes better anyway.
When cooking and eating become an art, waste becomes unnecessary.
I grew up eating out of newspaper, layered with a banana leaf—my takeaway nasi lemak or nasi kandar. Minimal and waste-free. Contrast that to the landfills in parts of Brazil—mountains of garbage that could cover the whole of this island. It’s not getting better. Humanity must awaken to the reality of our food systems and the waste we generate. But it’s never too late.
I am an environmentalist by practice. Most of my jobs over the years had to do with Health and Safety—on oil rigs, meat-packing plants, hazardous waste management facilities, and major construction sites in the U.S. and Malaysia. I developed a good sense when it comes to waste—its handling, its potential, and its dangers.
There’s a principle I used to share with anyone curious about waste and garbage. I called it the Principle of the Shit-Pot Carrier, or more politely, the Nightsoil Carrier.
He was the man who came every morning to remove the contents of your toilet—two buckets slung across a yoke on his shoulders. He walked through the village, unconcerned by those holding their noses or turning away. He had a job, a calling even. He took your waste and returned it to the soil, where it grew fat, healthy bayam and kangkung. It was a cycle—closed, complete, and sacred.
In a way, we are all nightsoil carriers—recycling our waste, our pasts, our mistakes—into nourishment for the present and future.
#ZenKitchen #MindfulLiving #CookingAsMeditation #SustainableEating #Environmentalism #NightsoilCarrier #NoFoodWaste #BananaLeafWisdom #FromSoilToSoul #SimpleLiving
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