I never took meals very seriously.

unwind

A person’s relationship with food – and food being a broad category that includes what we eat to sate our appetites, what we eat because we have to, what we eat to be full, what we eat even when we don’t really want to, and what we eat to feel certain things; memories and emotions mixed up with particular smells, textures, the way that something turns in your mouth, slides down your throat, and settles in the pit of your stomach changing suddenly into an experience, the way a spatula feels in the palm of your hand, how the skin of an onion yields just like that when you settle your wrist into the handle of a good, solid knife; how drops of soy sauce fall into a hot pan, sizzling and turning into the air, folding into the flat of the walls; that meal your father made for you every time you came home from college, a place in time -

and the way that a person chooses to make sense of those experiences contextualized tells us a tremendous amount about her.

That is because a person’s relationship to food must also be her relationship to nourishment, the earth, and – I dare say this with a straight face – other creatures that live and breathe and feel. It is her relationship to pleasure; it is the most primitive form of intimacy.

I say this because eating is an activity that for most of my life was fraught with risk, inextricably bound with guilt, disgust, and no small amount of desire. It was not until very recently that I started to rethink how I organize my own relationship to these experiences and the terms by which I make decisions about what I put into my body – what decisions about what to have for dinner really mean, socially, politically or otherwise.

What does this all have to do with you, you ask? What are you getting out of this situation?

I’m going to lay all my cards out on the table, here. I can’t guarantee that I’ll have the best or most innovative recipes because I’m not a expert chef and I won’t mislead you into thinking that I am.

In fact, I won’t mislead you at all if I can help it. I will try to be as honest as I can. Mostly, I just want to create a space in my life where I can take food seriously, to think about meals as more than what you do while you wait for other things to happen. To think about meals as the event, themselves.

Well, here goes nothing.

bon appetite.