Axes to Grind

Actually, knives to sharpen. The topic has nothing to do with axes, so if you were hoping to see me give an impassioned and reasoned take on how to dismember a corpse using an axe, or the virtues of axe-murdering people versus chain-saws, you'll have to wait until I come up with some impassioned and reasoned views on those subjects, because right now, I don't have any. I spell "axe" with an 'e,' and that's pretty much all I have to say on the subject.

But knives inspired my narrative, if so it can be called. I saw a program on television, which I watch too much of, which talked, in part, about the Luddite virtue of purchasing your knife from a Japanese knife-maker. For the price of a handmade Japanese knife, a chef could feed a homeless family in Africa for a decade (well, probably not that long, but I don't have an exact figure on knife-price-to-homeless-family-in-Africa-welfare-by-date). Of course, because they are handmade, they are supposed to be better. Maybe they are, a little. But who is to say that a knife which is slightly lower in quality will cause any food I cook to become substandard.

I am all for using the right tools for the job, and I suppose I don't begrudge people who have the money to purchase high-quality Japanese knives, but I do resent the implication that anything handmade is automatically better. In many cases, this simply isn't true.

And yet at the same time, I too yearn to give up my life, go apprentice myself to a Japanese knife-sharpener, and learn the ancient craft. The realistic portion of my brain also tells me that people have been using and sharpening knives for thousands of years longer than Japan has existed, and they can't possibly be the only people who can do it well. Someone has to sharpen knives that aren't made in Japan, and someone has to keep knives sharp that aren't located in Japan. Ergo, there must be a knife-sharpener outside Japan.

I don't know where this is going, which is a good sign, because my views usually don't arrive at their destination. I would like to learn how to sharpen knives, but I resent the fact that we in America seem to feel that things from other places are automatically better, that things made by hand automatically are worth more than things produced by machines. I think people in the US are too eager to look elsewhere for their culture, to feel that it's bourgeois to like things from the US. French cooking is, for the most part, boring and small. Japanese knives are, for the most part, overpriced and will not make your food any better. Chinese pottery is, for the most part, in Wal-Marts around the country.

Give us a chance, world. If we would stop chasing after the culture that other people have and start recognizing the culture that we have, maybe our culture wouldn't stink so much, for the most part. Judge something by its quality, not where it comes from.

In that spirit, I would like to say that those Japanese knives on that program looked very sharp, and I wouldn't mind owning one. I doubt if it will enable me to make a soufflé. And Blogger's spell-check doesn't believe that "soufflé" is spelled that way. We've all got problems.