Food for Thought

cake, pizza shells, English muffins, bread

I was having an email conversation (yup, I'm that old-fashioned) with some friends about food, and diets, and food culture, and ways to think about food, and this morning, this is what spilled off my keyboard. Seeing as it was pretty much a completed blog post right there, I figured I might as well use it. So, if you'll pardon my dropping you into the middle of a conversation, here goes:

The thing is, you'll find it quite difficult to ditch the "food as a virtue/vice" thinking, because it is all-pervasive in North American society. You've grown up steeped in that mode of thinking; you won't even notice it's there because it's "normal" to you - part of the North American discourse. The fish can't tell the colour of the water it swims in.

I notice it more because I didn't grow up with it, not to the same extent, anyway - none of the women in my environment, mother, grandmother, older sister, aunts etc., ever "dieted", it's not even part of their vocabulary; in fact, there isn't a verb for "to diet" in German, the only word they have is the equivalent of "losing weight" ("abnehmen", lit. "to take off"). "Diät essen" (eating according to a diet) means being on a special medical diet such as a diabetic one, and it's quite rare.

It would be unthinkable to Germans for families to eat separate meals, to have one person cook something different for themselves than for the rest of the family. And that starts right when kids are little. "Was auf den Tisch kommt, wird gegessen!" - "What's put on the table gets eaten!" is the standard stern admonishment to picky eaters; there none of that "I don't like the vegetables!" "Okay, darling, you can have a peanut butter sandwich." You eat what's there, and if you don't, you go hungry, tough luck to you. I've seen that going around the internet as child-rearing advice recently, usually under the heading of "Why French Kids Eat Their Vegetables" or something like that - I grew up with it. Meals are at a set table during set times, with a beginning and an end (in our family, both those involved prayers, "saying grace" - one to start, the other to end), and you show up at the table for the beginning and don't leave until the end. And that was for three meals a day - breakfast, dinner, supper. Breakfast and supper are just bread (with jam or cheese and meat) and tea/coffee/cocoa, but still, the table is set, you have a real meal. It annoyed me as a teen to always have to show up for each meal, even if I was in the middle of something, which is why we don't do it around here except for dinner - but the attitudes that go with it are in my blood.

That's what I mean by "food culture" - it's as much about how you eat as about what, and it's always, by definition, shared (you can't run a culture on your own, as I found out the hard way). Going on a "diet" of whatever description, voluntarily or not, separates you from shared food culture, and as far as I'm concerned, that's not a thing to be undertaken lightly.

If you want to dig into that whole mode of thinking, check out Mireille Guiliano (French Women Don't Get Fat), Will Clower (The French Don't Diet), maybe even Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love - the "Eat" portion of it), and any number of "joyful food" movies or books (Julie and Julia, Ratatouille, Kim Severson's Spoon Fed, Elizabeth Bard's Lunch in Paris etc, and any of the TV chefs, my favourites being Jamie Oliver, Julia Child and The Two Fat Ladies). You might find yourself quite surprised at how they think of food.

Think of it this way: what if our culture declared that sex was only good for reproduction, and enjoying sex was somewhat disreputable? (Umm, puritanism? We've been there before... But never mind that for the moment.) And then we declared that the physical problems we have are because of how we do sex, so this week's sex du jour is the missionary position, all others are declared "unhealthy". If you still have sex other ways, and you've got a backache, well, hey, you've been warned. You've gone down the list, and you've got all the symptoms of wrong-sex-position intolerance; if you still persist in your perverse behaviour, you can hardly blame anyone else for your problems.

Sounds ludicrous, I know, but it's really not all that different. Because even in this, there's a kernel of truth to it: of course some people have back problems because of their conjugal calisthenics; of course some people have sick sex behaviour and need to change it; of course some people can do some things and not others. But it's not because some sex behaviour is inherently bad. For most people, the whole gamut of it is good, and right, and healthy, and a pleasure, and it's meant to be.

And so is food.

And thus endeth today's sermon. LOL.
A.

So there you have it: Life, the Universe, and Food for Thought. May it be a tasty morsel.

edible art, aka a fruit salad

Joyful Eating

I'm reading Julie and Julia, which is surely required reading for any new-baked hopeful blogger (book contract, here I come? Uh... never mind).


Apart from the fact that Julie Powell is a whole lot more foul-mouthed, albeit also funnier, in her writing than Amy Adams portrays her in the movie, what strikes me about the book is the sheer pleasure Julie gets from her cooking. She cooks not from a vague sense of "shoulds", from a desire to follow the latest tenet in the religion of "thou shalt/shalt not eat this-n-that", but because it's sheer, unadulterated pleasure. Well, the eating is, anyway; the cooking, not always so much (the story of her first extraction of marrow from a beef bone is rather entertaining. Even if she didn't find it so at the moment).

Here, listen to this:

"Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It's not what I thought it was. ... It's joy. [...] I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child's book] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility." (page 356 in the paperback edition).

She's talking about a cookbook here, people.

In fact, that last quote reminds me of nothing so much as my favourite un-diet book, French Women Don't Get Fat (Mireille Guiliano). It's all about that: eat delicious food, in portions small enough so you can enjoy it, because it's just so dang good. Because it's all about life. Not about calories, not about "thou shalt". The joy of eating, eating for joy.

Life, the universe, and a grilled steak with greek salad, pita bread and hummus. Oh yeah.