Wortcunner is a vegetalista.
When I was twenty two years old I faced a systemic infection poised to enter my bones. Had it gone into my bones, it could’ve been life-threatening–and I knew it…Listening to my query about ways to treat it without resorting to antibiotics, a doctor dropped out of the mechanical-chemical lens for a moment. She whispered to me that a relaxation practice and black tea leaves would cure me. That began the curing of me–a curiosity that pulled me stumbling over an ongoing, long distance journey of knowing plants and foods as medicine–thus the wort-cunning, knowing of western (and local and exotic worts) and herbs and the ills– and into seeing through other frames of knowing, other cunnings–the medicine of perception.
Cooking is a way of bringing balance.
People ask me how I learned to cook. I learned to cook cooking, for me. To my tongue. To my satisfaction. I cook to sustain, maintain, entrain, to regain health. The vitality of my food became vital for my survival. I learned to cook to my weakness, then to my wife, then to the community.
As our ecological matrix, mirror and maker of our internal and external environment, and primary conduit of chi energy, food and the cooking of food for me is to dance in rhythmic time with the material and the intangible substances of life.
–Jared