Food as Fetish, Cipher

I like eating. So do you. Everyone does it everyday. Which makes it easy to write about, easy to relate to. We may have different ideas about what's good, what's comfort, what's elegant, appropriate or healthy. But we each have associations, traditions, memories, and connotations with and of food. Food is more than nutrition, we all can agree. There's something extra, subtle, beyond the basics. A dietician may talk about building blocks and proteins, even the somewhat dated pyramid, which we all recall from placemats and lunchrooms. But we eat for pleasure rather than fuel, for better or worse. Whether you're a bedridden French writer or a zaftig blue monster, cookies make you think and feel. Memories mingle with very present happiness. You can remember things past and be here now while devouring an Oreo, especially one dunked in milk. Eating is an act of participation in the universe. I eat, therefore I am.

However, food for me is not an art. It has no aura, though it may possess soul.

I am not an expert, authority or professional. I approach my dinner as a bemused dilettante, with a little knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm. I don't claim any loftier aspirations than to eat well, whatever that means to me at the time. I am as much a pawn of zeitgeist as any woman of my age, eduation, and inclination. Farmer's market, quinoa, artisanal, local, sustainable, etc. I can't help it. I do what is pleasing and what I am told, mostly. Though there's also within me the need to rebel, to eat Kraft mac and cheese when I'm exhorted to never accept anything processed or Monsanto-made. I didn't go to culinary shool. I don't grow a garden. I only eat organic when I remember. I'm ambivalent about bacon and plan to try more brussel sprouts and kale. I am on the perpiphery of food culture. A tourist here, not pretending to know more than I do, but simply professing to know what I like, trying to improve my tastes, techniques and expand my sphere of experience as I am able.

I write about food because I am lazy. I would prefer to write about astrophysics or NGOs or medieval literature. But those subjects might require some research.