Cooking

Cooking with our own hands is far more than “preparing a meal”: it is a gesture that reweaves the ties between body, matter, and world. In Sardinia this remains visible to the naked eye: in the homes of Ogliastra and Barbagia bread is not only bought, it is kneaded; cheese is curdled; olive oil is pressed; gardens are tended. Every ingredient carries a story of season, patience, touch, and care. Here food is never an anonymous commodity—it is relationship.

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The study by Wolfson & Bleich (2015) showed that those who cook frequently at home end up with healthier diets: fewer calories, less sugar and fat, more fresh ingredients. But the crucial point is this: these effects occur regardless of whether people intend to lose weight. The benefit lies not only in what is eaten but in how food is reached. Cooking itself is a practice that steers the body toward healthier choices, even without an explicit dietary goal.

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On the biological level, the act of “getting your hands in the dough” prepares the body for digestion. Smell, touch, and sight—assessing ripeness, color, texture—activate the cephalic phase of digestion, triggering saliva, gastric juices, and enzymes that ease absorption. The body thus tunes itself to matter before nourishment: it restores contact with the material world, readying itself to take in what will become part of it.

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Cooking trains the senses and brings them into harmony: the bitterness of herbs balancing sweetness, acidity lifting fat, crunch supporting softness. Over time this practice refines awareness of taste and satiety: meals are slower, bodily signals are better heard, overeating decreases without effort. Stress also finds a release: the rhythm of preparation, its repetitions, the cooperation around the stove lower tension and open spaces for well-being. Around the table, food becomes a social bond: people teach, learn, and transmit—and health ceases to be an individual affair, becoming instead a shared practice.

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This is where Tim Ingold’s vision sheds light: for Ingold, making (2013) is never about imposing a shape on inert matter but about walking alongside materials, listening to their possibilities, following their lines. To bake bread is not to impose a model but to dialogue with flour and water, to sense temperature, to listen to yeast as it lives. In making, meaning is not added afterwards: it emerges in the gesture itself, in the time of waiting, in the care of transformation. Cooking, then, is a creation of meaning: an act where consciousness becomes presence, where attention anchors itself in the here-and-now, where identity is woven into ties with things, places, and people.

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Sardinian longevity is not a secret formula: it is an ecology of living. It springs from the smallest everyday acts—cultivating, gathering, transforming, cooking, sharing—that build coherence between biology and culture, body and landscape. Food that is made offers more than a nutritional profile: it is education of the senses, training in presence, embodied memory. Within this weave, the body is not a mechanism to optimize but a place of relation: with the land, with others, with one’s own history.

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This is why, if we want to live long, chasing the latest technological promise will not be enough. To be long-lived we must return to the basics and reclaim life itself: putting our hands back in the dough, reopening the garden, rekindling the fire of the kitchen, reclaiming time for ourselves and for others. Only then do we restore contact with matter, prepare the body for digestion, develop the senses and the harmony of taste—and above all, cultivate a broader consciousness of who we are and how we dwell in the world.

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In the end, the recipe is not a list of ingredients: it is a way of making. And in the gesture—patient, sensitive, shared—Sardinia offers us its simplest and deepest lesson: longevity is a form of attention.