About Food

Or, more to the point, about food and me.

It was the wonderful English food writer Elizabeth David who said "Good food is always a trouble and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love".

I'm often reminded of that when I'm cooking the shabbos meal, or making a spur-of-the-moment dinner for friends. I've prepared special meals for loved ones' birthdays, or to mark a special event. I've spent countless hours, too, just cooking for the hell of it, just because the act of cooking was more important than the end result although the end results are usually worth the effort.

 
Food has nearly always been, for me, about exploration. Food has been my entry to exploring different cultures and understanding communities. If you know what people are eating, and can understand the reasons behind why they're eating it, you'll learn a lot about their lives, their values, their circumstances.

Food is very much bound up in our identities. The homesick crave the dishes they grew up with, or have come to associate with perhaps better times in their lives. Others will refuse to touch a particular dish because it reminds them too much of a terrible time in the past, or a person they'd rather forget.

 
We eat a particular dish -- red beans and rice, seal oil, hummus, kimchi, pickled herring -- because it's what our people eat and doing so tells others that we are part of this particular group. In a sense, food is the road map which gets us home.

But, despite those associations, food -- at its core -- simply sustains us. Without it, we whither away and perish.

Even if we're fortunate enough to have plenty to eat, we must still make sure we're eating food that truly nourishes us. Food is complicated that way: too much of some of the things we really love to eat could give us heart disease or spike our insulin levels. Not understanding how our bodies take in those nutrients means we may be shortchanging our health; tragic when there's so much good information available about how to make the most of what we eat. Tragic, too, because there are plenty of hucksters who are ready to take advantage of people's ignorance about nutrition, trapping people in cycles of poor eating and poor health, to say nothing about losing money. 

"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not," observed Mark Twain. 

By learning about eating well, by learning to cook what's best for us, by exploring, we learn to appreciate better food. We learn to want what is better for us, and our lives are richer for it. That has been my own lifelong journey with food and cooking. I'm still learning, I'm still breaking bad habits and adopting new better ones.

Enjoy the buttery desserts, just don't make a meal of them. Indulge in that hamburger with fries, just don't make a diet of it. Cook and eat what gives you pleasure, especially if you take into account the longer term results of those choices and the pleasures that good choices open up for us.  

As a cook, I'm enjoying the journey there, one meal at a time.