If you have been following my recent posts, you might have noticed a shift. The content hasn't been strictly about food, ingredients, or cooking techniques. If you came looking for a simple recipe and found yourself reading about the harder edges of life, you might be wondering where the culinary content went. But there is a reason for this pivot, and it strikes at the very foundation of why this website exists.
To understand the shift, you have to understand the name. SmartPigKitchen is an aesthetic theory and philosophy based on first principles in fragments. It intends to show that culinary is an ARTform and Art and aesthetics themselves are moderate preventive medicine. The whole site is designed to warn about the dangers of technology, gossip, and passive aggressive disabling and is a pun on the "starving artist" trope. If you think someone is doing something wrong, at least have the kindness to tell him or her the truth so he or she can reform. Or the they/them as the case may be.
I'm being disabled by wealthy people who genuinely believe they're more religious and more kind than I am! In psychiatry they lack direct honest IRL communication with patients yet this behaviour is hypocritical when you consider that therapy teaches the exact opposite! As far as I can tell I'm being negatively judged by people I've never met IRL and also people I've tried to help! I wrote a paper called Madness Theory: The Essential Other in order to help psychiatry! Psychiatrists say I'm not a doctor: I agree! I'm an unpaid philosopher. Where do psychiatrists think the roots of practice come from? Philosophy!
I am not cooking for the aesthetic, and I am not writing from a place of culinary luxury. I am writing from the trenches of subsistence living.
The reality is that my life has been derailed by something insidious: the gossip of psychiatry. It is a unique kind of social paralyzation when clinical labels and neighborhood whispers intertwine. The stigma and the rumors have acted as a profound invisible barrier, effectively disabling my life and making it incredibly difficult to secure employment in my own community. When society decides it knows your story based on whispers, the local doors lock. You are left on the outside, forced to scrape by, stretch every dollar, and make do with whatever is left. You become the starving artist in the smart pig kitchen, just trying to figure out how to survive on the scraps.
But being pushed to the absolute margins of society offers a crystal-clear, unvarnished view of how the world actually works—and how deeply flawed our ideas of "justice" and "rehabilitation" truly are.
We live in a culture obsessed with the philosophy of discipline and punish. The prevailing narrative is that if someone is struggling, making mistakes, or turning to crime, they need to be broken down. We are taught that harsh consequences, isolation, and punitive measures are the only ways to force a person to reform. But the exact opposite is true. If you study criminal reform you'll find that punishment doesn't heal desperation; it only breeds more of it. If you look closely at the people who actually turn their lives around, who step away from crime or pull themselves out of the darkest parts of their lives, it is almost never because they were punished into submission. It is because someone helped them.
People get better because something genuinely good happened to them. They get better because they caught a lucky break, because someone looked at them with humanity instead of suspicion, or because someone simply handed them a plate of food when they were hungry.
When you are starving—whether for calories, opportunity, or basic dignity—a hot meal is not just sustenance. It is an interruption of the punishment. It is physical proof that someone believes you are worth keeping alive. That is the catalyst for change. Compassion and tangible support rehabilitate people. The heavy hand of secretly, covertly disabling people from reaching their potential to help people only crushes them further.
So, yes, my recent posts have strayed from traditional food writing. But they are entirely about the kitchen. Because before we can talk about what we are cooking, we have to talk about who is allowed to eat, who is left out in the cold, and why a single act of nourishment will always do more to save a human life than a lifetime of punishment evercould.
