Week 2/52 January 15, 2017

I want to write about food, but I realize that such a broad undertaking will require more than a single, pithy eleventh-hour essay (who am I kidding? the only deadlines here are those I have self-imposed, and yet…). So let me begin, somewhere. Anywhere, really.

For me, food is love. My relationship with food, and love, has always been somewhat anxious, not because either of them were ever less-than-abundant, but because, somewhere along the line, in my child-mind, I must have equated food and love with the notion of “deserving” and somehow, I simultaneously feared that I didn’t deserve, or that there was such a thing as scarcity, and that I must gorge myself on both. I realize as I write this that there is a pattern to be dissected, but that will be a task for another midnight writing session.

My earliest memories of food are inflected with love, the familial and familiar kind, but also with competition, a sort of a sibling rivalry. The anxiety and competition stemmed from my position, perhaps, as second child, always trailing, always furious about a perceived injustice. I would keep eating at the table just to make sure that my brother didn’t get more than I did. Later, when we were teenagers, I would run home to make sure that he didn’t eat what I had saved for myself from dinner the night before. It was a losing battle.

I think of the summer of 1982, in Madrid, on the Plaza Mayor, playing soccer and wondering why I could not play shirtless like the boys… at age 4, questioning what seemed like an asinine and unjust convention, the pleasure of running up to the ice-cream man and ordering a popsicle in bright blue aquamarine shark-shaped glory. I remember the glorious bubbles of coca-cola. I don’t remember, but I’m told, that I wholly rejected (and subsequently vomited) a fancy, hand-crafted cream of mushroom soup in the Andalusian countryside because I claimed it didn’t taste like Campbell’s, though I was sickened, it would seem, from sucking my thumb that had played in public fountains, filled with pigeon poop and the desperate hope of wishes sunken into the deep in the form of abandoned coins. I’m fairly certain that my parents were more traumatized than I, considering my abiding love of cream soups, and mushrooms, and a curiously bookendish ending to this particular episode a quarter century later, in Chiapas, in which I rejected a cream of mushroom soup because it purported to be a hand-made soup of local hongos, but was, in fact, Campbell’s. I didn’t fall ill, I just, not without certain chagrin, returned the soup to the kitchen and had an unmemorable dish instead.

I have distinct memories of my Zaydie cooking scrambled eggs and lox and singing in the kitchen in some mix of English and Yiddishy sing-songs that he would make up. Sometimes, when my grandparents would visit, he would pull out what looked like a briefcase, but was really a portable cocktail mixing set and I would watch him joyfully move about the kitchen. Food was love for him. He would buy me Planter’s cheese puff balls… colored as they were with yellow #5, I would never buy them or consume them at this stage in my life, but oh, I can still remember the buttery melt-in-your mouth joy that they would bring with each crunchy ball that I savored.  I remember my father cooking bananas flambé on Sunday mornings, the rum-orange butter flaming before being served to the clamoring masses (ie: my brother and me). And I remember my Mimi serving up stick-to-your ribs American fair, skittish to make sure that my Puggy’s meal was ready at the 5 O’clock hour. When they would visit on their tours around the country, hauling handicrafts in their truck, she would always find the time to make a double batch of merengue cookies with chocolate chips, my father-her son’s favorite, and she would leave them in a massive plastic bin in the freezer for us to consume in her absence.

Of course, it was my mother who prepared the vast majority of meals, but as history is unfair with those who perform invisible labor, so too are my memories of her in the kitchen. They mostly blur together. I do remember cooking spaghetti sauce and beef stroganoff along side her. Later, when I decided I would be a vegetarian (mostly prompted by my misguided need for control and food restriction due to deep adolescent self-loathing, but also, nominally, because, let’s be honest, when one really considers that eating meat is eating animals, it is rather nauseating… and then we forget), she insisted that I make my own meals, a wonderful lesson in self-sufficiency, in which I ate a copious amounts of broccoli and macaroni and cheese, and some variation of split pea and carrot soup, and quesadillas with salsa for quite a number of years. Like I said, misguided.

Since then, the meals I have shared and cooked with my best friends, and for my family, and lovers and loves have been some of the most salient moments of joy in a life that, though punctuated with a certain fundamental sadness, has been overwhelmingly fortunate and overflowing with if not satiety, then an abundance of curiosity and the means to scratch the itch of wanderlust that accompanied my penchant for emotional thrill-seeking.

And so we return: If food is love, then why isn’t an excess of food a warm bath of self-love, a balm for the soul? Or maybe it is? This is the point at which we consider that our pleasure centers and our physical embodiment are often-times at cross purposes, but that, too, is a topic for another day. When one euphemistically “struggles” with her or his weight for the majority of their adult life, it isn’t uncommon to hear the sage advice: in order to change yourself, you must change your relationship to food. So easily said, but, how? And what part of the relationship must we modify? And, must we stop loving food? Stop loving others through the preparation of this ultimate act of care-taking? I’ve never gotten that far, that is, I never manage to change my relationship beyond forcing a regimented rigor that is never pleasant, but usually effective.  And so it is, to this topic, I will undoubtedly return, but for now, there is a big pot of black beans (my version of Guatemalan style) that require attention, and into which I will pour sautéed onions, garlic and a dash or two of pure love.