Friday, September 9, 2011

Dinner Via the WWW

Hungry?? Why not turn to the internet???


Say huh? She's nuts! I think her time in Digital Civilization has melted her brain! 


No! Really, I'm alright! I just found a really cool site to help me to combine two of my new favorite activites: social networking and cooking! 
From ilovemypit


NOW your interested...



First off you should know that I consider cooking to be one of those types of knowledge that falls under the category of folk knowledge. In particular the making of delicious guacamole, see this post


As much as I love all that my mother has taught me to make by example, taste and smell, I tend to want to eat more varieties of her delicious food than I wanted to try and remember. 


That is when we had a LIGHTbulb moment. (See I knew this "light" theme would come up somewhere) In order for her to share recipes with me, while I'm a time zone away and busy all the times she's not, we decided to put them on to the WWW (WorldWideWeb). But where to put them?? After some searching and review we decided to use onetsp.com.  


We liked it because of easy user interface and for simplicity. The site lets you enter your own recipes, gather them from the internet, and even create shopping lists based on the ingredients for the recipes you want to make! Most importantly it has several sharing features that allow you to meet people that like to make similar foods and share recipes. Feel free to explore the site, I recommend it so far! 


So there it is social networking and cooking together! Both types of knowledge, that I at least see as folk knowledge. I see them as folk knowledge in the sense that no one has written any book on how to cook or to connect with people on the internet. People who poses these skills will tell you they have more of a feel to them than a science. More mantic than sophic? (Click for a link to some notes on a Hugh Nibley article on Sophic vs Mantic) Certainly you can have a book or magazine of recipes but just how do you know when the broth has just begun to boil? Adam Gopnik's article in the New York Times called "What's the Recipe?" takes a closer look at this phenomenon. 


In the end I think we all come to the same conclusion that Hugh Nibley does in the above article, 
" Our notes add up to something quite unexpected. I had expected to do the inevitable and call for a proper balance between the Sophic and the Mantic, each of which has its faults as well as its virtues. But that is not the way it turns out at all!"
All I know is I feel bad for all the earl nomad husbands that slaved all day to find food, and their wives hadn't even invented cooking yet!  How many burnt meals did they eat?

7 comments:

  1. Great information! Thank you for passing it on. Also liked the quotes and I can see how this relates to the readings that we have done. A little more history about how cooking knowledge has been passed down from mother to daughter may have tied it into the class more.

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  2. After Thursday's class I was thinking more about Sophic vs Mantic than the history of folk knowledge, but thanks for the advice!

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  3. I loved how you tied in the Sophic vs Mantic. It's such a clear example and cooking really helps one grasp the concept.

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  4. I was wondering after class if it was possible to combine Sophic and Mantic; I think your example makes a great point. Do you think there are other instances where the Mantic changes to become more Sophic as it does here?

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  5. I think that part of the beauty of a more mantic point of view is that you are more open to accepting a sophic explanation for a phenomena. I actually think that many talents and skills or at least the ones that manifest themselves as a product or athletic talent require a mantic "feel" for the activity. Think of most of the great athletes you know, their isn't a science to greatness.

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  6. I'm very glad to see people trying to work through the mantic and sophic ideas, and Erin's insight here (that a mantic point of view can make you more accepting of a sophic explanation) is excellent.

    However, I don't really see the mantic / sophic coming through in Erin's main post. I did, though, within the great article in The New Yorker that she referenced. Here's a quote:
    "The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” "

    Erin - loved that you used a shared Evernote folder. Care to make using that the topic of a later post?

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  7. Gideon, I was playing with length vs depth in trying to bring out the mantic vs sophic conversation. I guess it really needed another post! Certianly I'll work up a post on Evernote I love it! For now here is a post I put up last year: http://enoughsaid11.blogspot.com/2010/09/note-taking-with-world-wide-web.html

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