Flat Cookery

Flat cookery is John Cochran's demand for a culinary practice that acknowledges nonhuman participants without reducing them to instruments. Chefs and philosophers alike bring tacit ontological commitments to their practices; received cookery caricatures ingredients and utensils according to intended human use, while an object-oriented approach recognises powers that exceed any particular interaction (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, p. 11).

The editorial places AO&'s practice close to this demand. Their meals expand preparation to include sourcing, tools, sites and producer networks, making the pot's boundary a practical question rather than a given. Meticulous control is not opposed to openness here: a constrained experiment can disclose nonhuman contingencies more effectively than aleatory expression (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 10–12). Flatness concerns the distribution of powers, not the absence of technique.

Cochran argues that Molecular Gastronomy and Slow Food do not achieve this redistribution. The former analyses chemical composition in service of professionalised sensory effects; the latter restores social and cultural meaning only to circulate food inside a global economy. Both preserve a chef–consumer system and displace amateur experiment (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 11–12). A more experimental gastrology would instead map zones of interference among chemical, physiological, hedonic and institutional objects (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 19–20).

CONTRADICTION Eugene Thacker explicitly resists expanding cooking into anonymous universal transformation and proposes desolate cookery with an abject-oriented ontology, while Cochran's flat cookery opens practice to a continuum of objectal powers (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 11–12, 23–24). The editorial preserves both orientations and does not decide whether abjection corrects or abandons flatness.

The source offers only this programmatic synopsis of Cochran's contribution. A fuller genealogy connecting flat cookery to object-oriented ontology beyond Collapse VII is unverified (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 11–12, 19–20).