Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE José Andrés has spent three decades cooking Spain for the world from kitchens in Washington, D.C., yet the country itself — its markets at dawn, its village grandmothers, its centuries-old techniques for salt cod and olive oil — remained the compass by which he oriented everything. Spain My Way is his account of going back: traveling region by region through a country he left as a young man, eating and cooking and remembering, tracing the line between the food on the plate and the land, the history, and the people that made it possible. The book is for anyone who has ever wondered whether a dish can carry a whole world inside it — and for the cook who wants to understand not just what to make but why a particular place makes particular things possible. Andrés writes as a guide who has earned the right to explain, and the result is a book that reads as both travelogue and culinary argument: that to cook Spain well, you must first learn to see it. SECTION TWO - **Created — unity of body and soul**: Andrés treats tasting, smelling, and handling ingredients not as sensory entertainment but as genuine acts of knowing. The cogitative sense — the body's trained capacity to perceive particular goods — is exercised on every page. The kitchen, in his account, is a place where the whole person learns, not just the mind. - **Created — imago Dei expressed through craft**: The book's attention to the specific artisan — the woman who makes a particular cheese in Asturias, the fisherman who knows exactly when the anchovy is ready — affirms that creative work ordered toward the good of others is a participation in something larger than individual ambition. Each named craftsperson is a small argument for the dignity of making things well. - **Fallen — the risk of rootlessness**: The book's structure of return implies a prior displacement. Andrés left Spain young, built a career in a different country, and the book records what was nearly lost in that departure. The Fallen condition here is not moral failure but the fragmentation that comes when a person is severed from the particular community and place that first formed them — a disorder Aquinas would locate in the disruption of the natural bonds through which practical wisdom is transmitted. - **Redeemed — memory as restoration**: The book's repeated movement back to childhood dishes, to teachers, to regional traditions that survived industrialization, functions as a form of restoration. What was fragmented is reconstituted not through nostalgia but through active, embodied re-engagement — travel, cooking, tasting. This is prudence-memory operating at the level of cultural inheritance: the past is recovered not as sentiment but as usable wisdom. - **Justice (gratitude)**: The book names its debts with precision. Andrés credits specific mentors, specific villages, specific recipes by provenance. This is not politeness; it is the justice-gratitude virtue exercised structurally, as an argument that no cook is self-made and that the right response to having received something good is to say so clearly and specifically.
✓ Strengths
- ✓Food as embodied knowledge: Andrés treats the kitchen as a site of genuine learning, where the hand, the palate, and the eye work together — a concrete illustration of the unity of body and soul in the acquisition of practical wisdom.
- ✓Memory as moral formation: The book is structured around return — to places, to people, to dishes learned in childhood — and this repeated act of remembering embeds the integral virtue of memory (prudence-memory) in the reader's imagination.
- ✓Gratitude toward teachers and tradition: Andrés credits named mentors, regional cooks, and forgotten recipes by name, which is a specific enactment of the justice-gratitude virtue rather than a generic nod to heritage.
- ✓Place as participatory good: Spain is not backdrop but agent in the book; the particular geography, climate, and social ecology of each region shape what is possible in the kitchen, suggesting that the person is always already embedded in a common good larger than the self.
- ✓The book models docility — the willingness to be taught by what is other than oneself — as a condition for any genuine mastery, which Aquinas identifies as the first part of prudence (docilitas).
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's anthropology is implicitly naturalistic: human flourishing is located in sensory experience, communal eating, and cultural continuity, without any account of how these goods are ordered to an end beyond themselves. The Fallen condition — the way disordered desire can corrupt even the pleasure of food — receives no sustained attention.
- ⚠The self-help categorization sits awkwardly with the book's actual content; readers seeking a therapeutic or formational framework will not find one, and the framing risks positioning gastronomic pleasure as a self-sufficient path to the good life.