The Art of Eating

Food has often been my enemy.

I hate to admit this, but it has. Food was the thing that kept me from some elusive imaginary state of physical perfection -- the point which I'd realize when my mother's voice didn't hold that hesitation while looking at me look at myself in the mirror as she pulled flat a puckered seam -- my perennial question to my mother 'do I look fat?' because, of course, to her, I did -- for years I wasn't good enough. I was a 'fat slob.' I was 'a little pig.' I was also a part of her that she loved so fiercely she couldn't forgive herself for the things she'd said and so promptly washed them from her memory forever. 'You would be so beautiful if...' It is how I remember it. I also remember the numbing qualities of food and how it could blank my mind like nothing else -- how afterwards plates and pans and forks would slide beneath my bed -- as if I were, what? hiding them? It's not that I feel shame about it now, but it's as if I wonder at how I made my way back from there...how did I come to this place where sustenance is good and to feed my body essential.

I remember the year I learned to bake bread. It was 1992 and I was living on Aurora street in Boulder, in the fourplex where Trevor and I lived with our long-haired gray cat - colvin. It was a two-room apartment with a kitchen along one wall. We covered our awful velour, earth toned flowered sofa with a purple Indian-print bedspread. My friend Matt was knitting a sweater for a girl he'd fallen in love with and he and I decided, for some reason, to bake bread. It was, I remember, simply agony. The flour and the yeast, and the foaming and the stirring -- oh god the stirring. My arm was getting tired. The sticking and the ... what now? It was summer in Colorado and we didn't have air conditioning and we lived on a busy street. Our carpet was pine green and CD's were lined all along the living room wall. My idea of dinner in those days was cubed chicken thighs sauteed with cheddar broccoli campbell's soup -- and baked somehow...awful. Awful.

I, in fact, truly shudder now to think of it. I had yet to discover farmer's markets or organic produce. I had only briefly glanced at my mother's Gourmet Magazine. My partner at the time, from rural Maine, it was his suggestion for the casserole above.

The evolution of my cooking I have to largely give credit to my best friend Tamara -- an artist who owned all The Moosewood Cookbooks. She made things from scratch, invited me over for her freshly baked bread. Soups. Mollie Katzen's books would serve me well for ten years -- and more...still I have them, ruffled pages with drips and bindings falling apart.

I came to learn more about what food meant to the body -- and to the mind -- to the mood -- to feed yourself well was to nourish yourself -- to truly care for yourself...to respect yourself.

I bake bread rarely now -- but when I do it's an easy affair -- though G. still complains its too dense and worthy as a doorstop -- the rising dough draped with a damp cloth, the punching down, the kneading -- the consistency...the feel of it -- 'like an earlobe' someone once said to me -- a strange comparison -- but true.

I think of how I went to visit my mother's friend Randi who lived in a small mountain town -- the kind of town that gets dark early when the sun dips behind the peaks -- and her herb garden, her compost, the hand-grinder for coffee --- it resonated for me, somehow -- it was about connection, and I was a person always seeking connection.

So now, if I feel off-kilter, or unsteady -- I find myself at the co-op. I pull out the produce and hum through the aisles. I fill tiny plastic bags of herbs and dried fruits -- which drives G. crazy -- all the little bags with numbers cluttering up the cupboards. I plan the meals and what to feed our bodies and our souls -- and it makes me feel connected.

This summer I have plans for a garden, and a compost. Maybe a fruit tree or two if I can convince G. whose childhood memories of mowing around apples and swarms of wasps have kept him from agreeing so far.