Do you know much about food? I have such little understanding of so many things (especially considering I’m an advocate of self-reliance). I’m pleased to say I have some great culinary councilors on my bookshelves, but I haven’t got all the best kitchen tools to honor their advice (I don’t even have the essentials: a pre-seasoned cast iron skillet, an aluminum stockpot, welding gloves [as AB says 'mitts are for pitchers and potholders are for sissies']). I need to get more involved with my relationship with food — from growing more on my own to using farmers markets to, you know, actually cooking stuff. What kind of relationship do you have with your food? — an excerpt from an email I received
Food is an interesting subject for me lately! … I am reading through both In Defense of Food by M Pollan (sp?), and The End of Overeating (which is about American food behaviors and trained eating behavior…more sociological and pop social psychology than anything else). As with nearly all women, any relationship with food becomes inextricably linked with discussions about weight. Throughout my life, I’ve vacillated constantly on eating habits, relationship with food, etcetera. I’ve never been a tiny girl, and have always taken great pleasure in good food and drink: I’ve also always been an athlete, and until this year have had the great fortune of consuming foods and drinks indiscriminately and in mass quantity without gaining weight. Graduate school’s first semester has not been kind to me: I put on some fifteen pounds between lots of social drinking, a newly invigorated social life, and little time for exercise.
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Through college, I cooked my own meals — they usually consisted of microwave (whatever): lean cuisine, pizza, anything easy, simple, and relatively inexpensive. However, since moving out here, it’s been an up and down. When I am stretched between classes and work, I tend to opt for very simple meals: pasta with some sort of sauce, bratwurst and boiled potatoes, occasionally simmer curried chicken. I can make great pad thai and vegetarian curry, and oftentimes cook for friends. Living alone presents its own unique set of cooking circumstances. When left to my own devices, I tend to lapse into eating one meal a day, usually in the mid or late afternoon, of something typically unhealthy and pre-cooked: delivery, pickup, whatever. However, I find that as my devotion and dedication to fitness and strength training increases, my diet becomes remarkably ‘better’ … though admittedly boring and dull, too. A lot of boneless, skinless chicken, salads, ground turkey, nuts … I make it a policy to avoid processed and refined carbohydrates as much as possible, but they do creep into the daily diet more than I’d like to admit.
My kitchen is boring, too: I have a blender, french press, coffee grinder, tea pot [...]; a large pot, a small pot, a small frying pain, a large frying pan, and a soup ladle. And assorted plates, bowls, forks, knives, etc. I got a second microwave, which is pretty anemic: it takes two or three minutes to warm up a slice of pizza. That’s it for me. At some point, I would like to get real cooking materials: I do love to cook, but have made do with the few sundries I have.
Bloomington has a fantastic assortment of independent grocers, farmers markets, &c. which allow an unprecedented amount of fresh, organic produce. I’ve tried to move slowwwwwllllyyyy but surely towards eating ‘whole’ foods. I want very much to grow my own food, but have no space … I’d imagine there’s a community garden here in Bloomington someplace, I’ve just not sniffed it out. I think being in touch with food and what we consume is a very, very good thing for people: I want to learn to hunt for precisely this reason. I think it would be good to go out and shoot my own meat, skin it, and then cook it …. gruesome, maybe, but being in touch with what we use, eat, consume, destroy, ruin, &c. is very important and something contemporary society terribly lacks.
The food industry, as a collective entity, terrifies the shit out of me: a lot of it is rooted in my viewpoint that American policy has been so pervasively emasculated by business that there’s no such thing as corporate responsibility towards the constituency. The health problems associated with Western diet are atrocious, and the economic divide (eating healthily is painfully expensive, while eating tons of food fortified with high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, etc) plays, I think, a serious role in the encroachment of serious illness on younger ages and great numbers of people.
Food as a sociological tool is unparalleled. I love very much to cook for people. It’s a primative, base appeal: to feed someone is to provide them sustenance, and to eat with another person is to share in a most basic, intimate human activity that exists outside of the realm of sexuality. It’s the same reason why drinking and say, smoking pot, is such a social activity: it’s usually not the actual experience of getting drunk or high, but the social sharing of an experience, the collective unity, that drives people towards it.
Isn’t it all about transcending isolation, anyway?
