and more thoughts...

Food has been on my mind a lot lately. I've realized that most of the things I have taken an interest in lately have been related in some way or another to food. Perhaps this is inevitable - it is really what most of our lives revolve around whether we want it to or not - whether it be the avoidance of food, the obsession with food, working for food, planning food, eating food, growing food, cooking food for ourselves, cooking food for a living, cooking food for pleasure...

I realize that when i think about people i know i can see something of their true selves in their relationship to food: Meg and her amazing cooking skills, her dreams of opening a restaurant named after her mama, her generousness; my dad i think of always in the kitchen, cooking something delicious at the end of the day, his love for my family coming out in this way, and my mom making the same muffins every year for our family christmas brunch. I think of Eben and his seven-hour cooking marathons, looking stressed and rather absurd as he runs in circles trying to figure out what he's doing; I think of Harmony and her meticulous and stubborn methods, her "don't-touch-that-before-dinner-hey-stop-noooooo!", and i think of potlucks with friends, with wine and good food, or at least strange food; i think of abra and her ramen and egg soup for every meal, with half-packages of mr.noodles scattered all over her cupboard; i think of noah and i making up a batch of fresh-picked blackberry jam (and his insistence on pouring in an entire package of cinnamon when my back was turned); i think of emanuel's yummy buttery pie and salty tomato sauce, and his mom's peach jam that i would always steal spoonfuls of when he wasn't home...(see? i even feel like i know his mom a bit, from her delicious jam!) I think of little jacob and i making cookies together, and his hilarious wide-eyed excitement when they come out of the oven... anyways, i could go on and on, but all i'm trying to say is that our lives are tied up in food in ways that go beyond staying alive. i love food culture, and i love the way food creates meaning and love in our lives, and i don't care if that eventually makes me a rolly-polly sentimental person...


and a favorite poem:


A Breakfast for Barbarians
Gwendolyn MacEwan

my friends, my sweet barbarians,
there is that hunger which is not for food—
but an eye at the navel turns the appetite
round
with visions of some fabulous sandwich,
the brain’s golden breakfast
eaten with beasts
with books on plates

let us make an anthology of recipes,
let us edit for breakfast
our most unspeakable appetites—
let us pool spoons, knives
and all cutlery in a cosmic cuisine,
let us answer hunger
with boiled chimera
and apocalyptic tea,
an arcane salad of spiced bibles,
tossed dictionaries—
(O my barbarians
we will consume our mysteries)

and can we, can we slake the gaping eye of our desires?
we will sit around our hewn wood table
until our hair is long and our eyes are feeble,
eating, my people, O my insatiates,
eating until we are no more able
to jack up the jaws any longer—

to no more complain of the soul’s vulgar cavities,
to gaze at each other over the rust-heap of cutlery,
drinking a coffee that takes an eternity—
till, bursting, bleary,
we laugh, barbarians, and rock the universe—
and exclaim to each other over the table
over the table of bones and scrap metal
over the gigantic junk-heaped table:

by God that was a meal