Food, Glorious Food!
I grew up in the south. I was born to a couple who by their third child had adopted the storybook round shape of “married with three kids.” They cooked regularly, my mom leading the charge for anything in the kitchen and my father taking the reins on the grill when appropriate. Nuclear and idyllic — I sprouted from the perfect loam to nourish a love for food.
And I do. I love food.
I don’t think my love for food is healthy. But I want to break it down and look at it a bit closer.
As an adult, I’ve met way more people, and food has evolved into a much bigger subject for me. I know people who hate food, who hate cooking, who eating, or some combination of those. I don’t think I could have imagined these people as a child. Food is not just a lifeblood in my mind; food is a vehicle for culture, empathy, bonding, nourishment, happiness, comfort, and so much more. I look at my own relationship to food and it feels so easy.
I absolutely adore eating. I think about eating a lot. I like the textural component of eating. I relish in the taste sensation of the food. I love feeling full, and a bit sleepy. I love eating so much that I even somewhat enjoy being hungry. The ache and groan my body elicits for the ravenous act is visceral and often overpowering.
I love food itself. Food has inherent aesthetic value, and I am very much an aesthetician with my food. In many ways, food is immediately a completely immersive sensory experience. I can see, touch, smell, taste and rarely hear the food — I’ll say the moments I can hear the food are perhaps the best because it IS a completely immersive experience. Beyond even just a single food, food is a huge wide world. I recognize this is exactly daunting and upsetting for some. Food carries such a weight of familiarity and comfort with it that the sheer diversity of food can be off-putting for some. I am not “some” here. In the past decade, I have not found a food I have not sampled, and with very few exceptions I have enjoyed every morsel. For me, food itself is a gateway to learning and understanding both the natural and the human worlds.
I *like* cooking. I want to LOVE cooking, and I really do enjoy it. But I’ve two siblings who I think really genuinely love cooking. It shows; they’re both quite spectacular in their culinary skills for “amateurs”. I like cooking — and baking — because there’s an element of experimentation and play. Beyond carbonizing my meal, there’s so little risk to making mistakes in the kitchen. While I rarely feel overwhelmingly successful, I frequently feel satisfied having ‘played’ with my food. As with food itself, cooking and baking present very wide worlds that draw me in with the siren song of warm smells and tastes.
So, for all this love of food and the food world, why does it feel unhealthy? Where could I possibly go wrong in my hedonistic glee of cooking and eating.
Well, when I suffered through one of my bigger losses, I lost my appetite.
I didn’t know what it meant to love food until I really couldn’t. Not having the driver that pushed to me eat, to cook, to love showcased that I was more than healthily dependent on food.
I began to notice that I wanted food even though I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t be hungry; my body had lost that ability to depression.
I was bored. Listless. Lonely.
In suffering through that big loss, I lost my naive glee for the world of food. I could see my behavior for what it was. I was consuming to escape myself. And at my worst, I was consuming to find oblivion.
I love feeling full because I loved being lulled to sleep.
I love sweets because I literally craved the sugar crash.
I love creamy fats because they’re so calorie rich.
My consumption was all about oblivion. It was never about nourishment. It was about comfort and escape.
I still love food. I still love eating, and I like cooking more and more every year. Now though, I know that void exists. I try to avoid eating in a petty attempt to fill it. I focus most on maintaining nutritional balance while indulging what I do genuinely love. Nowadays, food has become a task about finding myself lost in that void and pushing myself to fill it with something *slightly* less ethereal.
It can sound really dull. For now, and for the foreseeable future, food is fuel. I’m not going to stop loving it; I genuinely don’t think I can. It just can’t be my source of escape anymore.
I am not interested in that escape anymore.
And, much more importantly — any escape I’m interested in needs to be a lot more powerful than what food can offer. Food was a comfortable distraction and I’m still human, so I think it’ll keep being that for a while. So there’s a lot more to talk about food, but this isn’t the story for gritty detail. This is another human story of love and loss.
Moving forward, it becomes a story about respect and need.
Stay tuned.
Sincerely Not Hungry,
August
