My Love Affair with Food

Hey Steph,

I kind of have a thing for food. It goes back to my whole obsession with minutiae. It’s the tiny things in life that fill me with joy. I’m entering a new season: the era of full-time work. It is the first venture I’ve undertaken that has no foreseeable end. No graduation, no year-long internship. I have the daily grind, the 9-to-5 hustle, and working for retirement in my sights. I’ll admit. I’m not too excited about it. It’s not that I’m afraid of work; I’ve been working hard for the last 21 years of academia. But the monotony of a neverending job seems overbearing, and I haven’t even begun yet. That’s where the power of food comes in.

         Historically, our ancestors literally worked to live. It was their hands driving the plows. It was long hot days of working the fields and feeding the livestock. It was monotony. It was mentally-simple tasks repeated over and over.
        The pay-off: harvest.

Sometimes harvest occurs deep in the middle of the woods, "huckleberrying" with your awesome grandpa and cute little "Bug."

        We modern Americans have lost the emotional meaning of this word. Oranges, potatoes, carrots, bananas, lettuce, apples, and many other fruits and vegetables can be bought at your neighborhood grocery store all year round without breaking the bank. There they sit, your produce, in industrial-made plastic stands far removed from the good earth they came from.

        But for our ancestors, harvest was the joy-inspiring prize at the end of the months and months of work. Harvest was literally the fruit of their labors. Harvest was peace after days filled with worrisome prayers for rain. Harvest comes only with right number of frost hours and a kind, steady spring to welcome in the blossoms.

        We just don’t and can’t understand the emotional release that comes with a good harvest. But maybe we can take back a little more pleasure in food. In the past couple of years, I’ve read two books—In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I highly recommend both. They have given me a thoughtfulness with food that I didn’t have before. It is not an unusual experience for me to be holding back squeals of delight when I sit down to a good meal. For me, a good meal looks a lot like what those harvest-earning ancestors ate: it’s fresh vegetables and fruit. It’s homemade bread. It’s delicious meat.

         Though whatever career I undertake will be far from the fields and orchards and grasslands where my food comes from, a bit of reflection at eating can help to remove the “middle man” of my sterile office space and put me back kneeling on the soil with dirty hands and sweaty brow, holding the fruits of my labors; those hours of staring down the computer screen were the tilling of the soil that brought me this heirloom tomato or that juicy peach. In a small way, through thoughtfully eating, I can mentally step back into the shoes of my ancestors and reclaim the gift of the harvest. And that makes work a little more palatable.

Wishing you good eats,

Amanda