what it means to be me-- a wee ramble

I think about food all the time. I dream about it, too. Mostly those are professional dreams-- big vats of this and that, in need of tending, perforated pans of crab cake mixture in need of shaping, sauces that need thickening. But the thinking about food, it's what I do, horizontal on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, staring out the window at the rain and the yellow blossoms. I think about what's in the house, and what I can do with it. I weigh my options, think about what I've already eaten today, feel what my body wants/needs, what the weather is dictating, and then I (r)evolve into a decision.

There are times when a trip to the grocery store is excruciating and so rife with conflict that I feel like I could run screaming from the building, pushing an empty cart ahead of me. Sometimes what I want to make and what I need to make are at odds with each other. Sometimes my culinary training is the antithesis of how I wish to eat. Sure, I'm versatile, I can do no fat, low-fat, vegan, wheat-free, gluten-free, or carnivore's delight. The issue is that sometimes there are things that I want to do/make (in Spanish that would be the verb hacer) that I have no business eating. The desire to hacerlos has to do with my sense of experimentation, expanding my repertoire, mixing things up a bit. The no business eating has to do with maintaining my sense of balance, striving to be healthy, staying on the straight and narrow for fear that anything else is a slippery slope indeed.

So those times when I think I'm gonna have a meltdown in the grocery store, they usually involve an overwhelming sense of possibilities (plural) and/or desire to engage the parts of me that delight in fat, sweetness, salt, umami and the kind of crunchy that is often formed in either a large factory or a small vat of 375'F oil. When I have these moments-- these itchy blooded boilings in the bulk aisle or the cheese section or the place near where the rice cakes live-- I just have to keep on keeping on. I work through it. I find a compromise, or I lead myself off in a different direction, entirely. In retrospect, this makes me thankful for the very versatility that is at the root of the torture-- there are a lot of things I can cook-- for every dangerous trap, there's an escape route of some other, lighter culinary variety.

If I stop thinking about food, I could be in a rough spot. I might lose those appealing escapes and be at the mercy of cravings that are not entirely free of an emotionally motivated element. In fact, the few times that I've been the most distant from food thoughts just happen to be the times I've been closest to death. I'm not shitting you.

I've always found it a bit funky that WW pushes folks to find ways to celebrate/reward without food-- I mean, I look at every culture around me and food is the center of celebration. I think that shifting how those celebrations go down would be a valuable practice. Enough is as good as a feast can be a guiding principle, celebrating with a sense of balance (yin and yang, alkaline and acid, crunch and cream-- you name it) leads to satisfaction. So I wanna be satisfied, and I don't want to deny that I'm in love with food, because it makes me happy (despite my struggles), it brings delight, it reminds me of how I, we, the seasons, the planet-- are alive and in motion. To be one with food, to work in service to food-- it's a gift.

Take and give.