Coming Back to Food

One of the most immortal truths ever written about food is M.F.K. Fisher’s musings on hunger in The Art of Eating (1954) and the myriad of life-giving essentials that are bound up with it: “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”

In food studies circles, food is lauded ad nauseam for the way it marries the material and intangible, or the biological and cultural. Really, it’s a special substance, though I chafed at its deification throughout my studies of it. I crave the marriage of the sensuous and the intellectual, one reason I shamelessly fangirl over Nietzsche and his unbridled enthusiasm for the body and the philosophical insights gleaned from it. And the reason I can’t give up food, either, as a topic of musing and writing.

Food can be as personal as you want it to be or as grand as you want it to be. The scale of things that we can use food to study is magnificent, from the intimate habits, emotions, and memories of day-to-day life to Neanderthals and the nature of time. I think that’s incredible.

Once you start tugging at the thread, the stories food tells never stop unraveling. It’s a medium through which we can learn about vastly different things, refracting all of the most important bits in life, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, the lavish to the necessary, and the meta to the micro. The joy and frustration of food is that there is never a tidy answer to whatever question one happens to be pursuing. Long ago, in my vulnerable youth, Rainer Maria Rilke advised me to “live the questions” in his Letters to a Young Poet (1929). Entangled in existential questions of religion and faith at the time, I still use this dictum today to think about food.

After graduating with a degree in Gastronomy, I bristled at the veneration of anything gastronomic. Can’t we talk about anything else? Immigration, climate, power, family, trauma, dictators, literature, trade routes, time, poetry, capitalism, war, technology, nature, labor, film?

Yes, but it’s a whole lot more interesting when we use food to do so.