Glasgow has a strong Italian community. I’ve travelled, spent time in Italy, and I still believe that some of the best Italian food I’ve had, is in Glasgow (and I don’t believe it’s purely down to having an “unsophisticated palette”). Italian food is direct and extremely simple, like Krav Maga. I introduce this idea at an early stage, in the hope that you bear with me on analogies and comparisons etc., and the idea that we can look at a seemingly “unrelated” area and learn something from taking a different perspective etc. I’m becoming increasingly aware in my own life that breadth, rather than depth, leads to a greater understanding of an area. When you persist in going down a rabbit hole, you end up understanding less about what you were studying. Once you have an “understanding” of a subject, viewing it from different angles and directions often increases your knowledge more than just simply increasing your study in one discipline etc., and whilst it may seem frivolous to look at self-defense from a cooking perspective, I think/believe there may be value in doing so.

                Most of us don’t understand food, and I’m not trying to present myself as an expert in this area. In my youth I had the fortune to date/go out with an Italian girl whose parents owned a pretty prominent Italian restaurant in Glasgow. She worked there, and I used to go and see her there, before they opened, and before I started my shifts working door security. As she had genuine work to do, I’d often end up left in the kitchen talking, and spending time with the chefs and the cooks. Many of the older ones, had been prisoners of war, and as young men decided to stay in Scotland rather than to go home to a war-torn Europe. My Dad used to say that before the war you couldn’t get a decent haircut, or a decent ice cream in Glasgow until the Italians decided to stay. I was eager to learn from the chefs how you made great tasting food; not because I wanted to make great tasting food (which I know illustrates an inherent stupidity I possess), but because I simply wanted to know how to do it.

                The chefs at the restaurant, like many “experts” in a field, couldn’t believe the level of ignorance – particularly mine – about things such as flavor. I was fortunate to learn, at a relatively young age, that flavor has to be “built” i.e., it doesn’t just happen at the end. You don’t just throw all of the ingredients into a pot, and “hope” that the outcome is a good one. I learnt that a large part of creating flavor was about reducing the water content of vegetables, in order to bring out the “taste” of them.  Mushrooms contain a lot of water - you need to spend a lot of time reducing this; the same with onions, and carrots (which form the sofrito, upon which many dishes are based). How much of your Krav Maga curriculum is water? The unnecessary, that has no productive base. That doesn’t increase or enhance the flavor of what you are teaching. Has everything been “boiled down” so that all that exists is the flavor? This is what I came to understand from talking to Italian chefs thirty years ago; you get rid of the water in order to taste the flavor of the vegetable, and this can take time. The simple thing that you strive towards in Krav Maga: the great block, the perfect punch etc., needs you to lose something, and to take time etc. A carrot only becomes “sweet” after a certain amount of time, and the same process is needed to develop a punch or any other technique. Creating the base for a “good” bolognese, involves removing water, rather than adding more herbs, and this I believe presents a great analogy for training. Are you tightening the basic flavors up, or are you simply looking to explore more flavors?

                When I talked with the chefs at the restaurant, they were all about the basics and what you build on them. If the “base” flavor was off, then there wasn’t a chance to “rescue” it later on in the cooking process; you can only build. Italian cuisine, from my understanding, is based on doing a few things consistently well, at the beginning, rather than trying to “rescue” everything at the end. If you don’t create flavor at the beginning, why would you believe that a sprinkling of something would somehow transform it later on? And if you understand that such an approach wouldn’t work with food, why would you believe it would work in other areas of life, including self-defense i.e., you should not start off and continue with something that is fundamentally flawed, believing you can change the outcome later on. If there was something I took away from Italian cuisine, was that you start with something basic and enhance it, and that to me is what Krav Maga is all about.