| Abstract: | The dictionary meaning of 'cooking' is heating food, but cooks do much more. Socially, the essential activity is distributing food. Kitchen knives are central. The historical success of kitchen knives has led to their being overlooked; for the division of food at meals goes hand in hand with the division of associated tasks, and specialist helpers, typically men, have aggrandised their trades and tools – soldiers their swords, farmers their ploughs and priests their sacrificial blades. Tragically, those most social of instruments, knives, have cut off the 'cooking animal' from its world and each other. |
