This morning I watched Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk from the Long Beach TED conference. When I watch a TED Talk, I have my notebook out, pen in hand. I take notes – all the time now.
In the first thirty seconds I was already scribbling down a quote that pulled at me.
“I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life.”
At that point I knew I was in. Food has a profound impact in my life, in many ways.
I grew up helping in the kitchen and the garden with my grandmother, or at dinner time with my parents. You either helped cooked or you did the dishes. I hated doing dishes, so I generally preferred cooking.
We didn’t eat out often, we indulged occasionally in american Chinese food or pizza, but more often it was just homespun recipes from memory or from the bank of index cards my mother keeps in a drawer near the microwave.
As a child I was a slow, picky eater. But somehow, as I grew up, I came to love food in an entirely different way. Foodie may be too strong of a word, I can’t really afford to be a real foodie, but I do love the act of preparing and enjoying quality food. Occasionally I indulge in a fine dining experience or dropping too much money on a trip to Whole Foods, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
There’s no guilt involved in my food life, I eat what tastes good and makes me feel good. That process of selection has eliminated most processed foods, high volumes of carbs and starches, refined sugars. My diet consists mostly of vegetables, fruit, nuts and animal protein (fish, meat, eggs, cheese). But I’ve trained my taste buds to appreciate fresh whole foods; the average grocery store in the U.S. is 75% wasted space to me – I ring the outer edges where the produce, meats and fruits are and ignore that blackhole of processed foods, canned goods, pasta.
Our tastebuds are trained by what we eat: those who eat bland food continue to enjoy bland food; those who eat fast food come to enjoy fast food; and so on.
I digress.
When it comes to food our upbringing, our emotions, our memories are all tied together. Much of food is tied to our sense of smell and our sense of smell connects the deepest with our memories.
In some ways that is why food makes me cry.
When I prepare a cup of tea, properly, and sit and smell it, a flood of memories of a time in Montreal comes back to me. There was a time when I couldn’t drink tea for almost a year because of those memories.
When I smell the sweet cinnamon of monkey bread the years of Thanksgiving and Christmas mornings leap back at me; sitting at a the kitchen table quartering Pillsbury biscuits and rolling them in sugar and cinnamon.
Food conjures memories, emotions and a deep connection to where we came from.
In a sense, that is why food makes me cry.
But there is yet another sense that food makes me cry. And that is when I watch or read or work with people involved in the food and food justice world.
My intensely emotional and positive engagement with food is lacking for a massive percentage of the U.S. population, not even considering the rest of the world for the moment.
When we consider the amount of time we invest in food – deciding what to eat, where to eat, when to eat, how to eat, and the act of getting or preparing food – it adds up as one of the largest activities that consumes our time. If that time is not positive, enjoyable, rooted in an enjoyment of food that gives us energy and enriches our lives it becomes a massive drain on our lives.
If we don’t have access to fresh whole foods, if we don’t know which fruits and vegetables are which, if we don’t know how to cook simple recipes from fresh foods. We are denied one of the most powerful and enriching experiences of our lives.
Food can improve our own life and well-being, but it ties so deeply into our shared experiences, that the act of gathering, preparing and sharing food if lost severs us from our families, friends and communities.
When I see the loss of food culture in this way, not in the high flying foodie way, this makes me cry.
