The L train line, from the Rockaway Parkway Yards to the last stop on the west end of 14th Street in Manhattan, is about 10 miles. But for a kid growing up in the immigrant neighborhood of Canarsie, it might have just as easily been a universe away. I grew up in the subway cars of Brooklyn, and graffiti was the wallpaper of my childhood. I would often trace the fluid lines of a black tag with my fingertips, feeling the wild stroke of a derelict hand that had dared to leave its mark on the world.

These were the markings of a small, underground world written in code, performed in darkness and proudly criminal. What most citizens deemed vandalism, I saw as art. I didn’t visit museums. The only galleries I knew were the streets and subways of New York City where young kids sought immortality in an otherwise bleak world of food stamps and white bread.

Graffiti as we know it today evolved from a specific time and place: N.Y.C. in the 1970s and ’80s. There are rival origin stories in Philadelphia, and cities like Chicago and Los Angeles had their own scenes, but I grew up here, the golden age of vandalism, and nothing else came close to that cultural electricity, which still resonates today.

Everything started in subway cars, because everyone who was poor converged in those spaces and found each other, unrehearsed and unfiltered. Graffiti was the backdrop to an early hip-hop culture that was rising from the streets: breakdancing, bomber jackets, Adidas shell-toes with fat laces, Krylon cans and boomboxes. I heard kids spitting out rap lyrics on the train faster than I could think. I saw moves that defied gravity, with nothing more than a human beatbox for rhythm and piece of cardboard for a dance floor.

I knew kids who couldn’t read but who could throw down masterpieces in sketchbooks with a handful of Sharpies. Pioneers like Taki 183 gave rise to a generation of bomb artists like Dondi, Seen, Lee, Revolt, Phase 2, Sane, Smith, Lady Pink and countless others. They paved the way for artists like Cost, Revs, Shepard Fairey and Banksy, who are known and beloved the world over.

But this was the city before Koch, before gentrification. Before graffiti moved into galleries. When crime here was climbing to all-time highs. There is no way to romanticize the era. Poor people committed crimes against other poor people. Drug dealers seemed omnipresent. The hopelessness lived in crumbling brick buildings and rat-infested subway platforms. Art was solace. I remember my friends swarming over every blank wall in the city with black markers and Krylons hoping their tags would stay up just long enough to become more than a blemish to be painted over. That maybe, it would last long enough to become Art.

There is an undying paradox in graffiti that makes it the most tragic form of art — it is the act of being anonymous while simultaneously aspiring to fame. You are known for your tag, not your real name. Your identity is hidden, but your tag is everywhere. It is both profane and sacred. At its core, it is nihilistic. And that is why I love it.

Because pretty food is the same. I am a chef and there is a connection between the permanence (or lack thereof) of food and street art. When the culture of graffiti I grew up with died out at end of the ’80s, I longed for something as sublime and as useless as spraying art on a wall. I found it on a porcelain plate in a French kitchen. I found a tribe of derelicts who were unhinged and passionate and nocturnal. There is an insanity to the number of hours spent over a stove to create a plate of food that will disappear in mere minutes. It’s not logical. But we do it anyway. We live for the few people out there who will truly get it. It means the world to us. To the rest of society, we are as anonymous as that fool who scrawled an illegible word on the back of a subway car.

Edward Lee, the author of “Buttermilk Graffiti” and “Smoke & Pickles,” is the chef and owner of 610 Magnolia, MilkWood and Whiskey Dry in Louisville, Kentucky, and the culinary director of Succotash in National Harbor, Maryland, and Penn Quarter in Washington, D.C. He earned an Emmy nomination for his role in the series “The Mind of a Chef” and, most recently, he wrote and hosted the feature documentary “Fermented.” He is on Instagram and Twitter @chefedwardlee

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