Food is Not For Everyone
Throughout my life, I’ve had a complicated relationship with food and eating. I’ve had a myriad of stomach problems that I’ve dealt with that have made eating challenging, so there were times in my life where eating was more of a chore than anything enjoyable. I would often be in search of the most bland, innocuous meal I could find in order to not upset my stomach, so the process of preparing a meal wasn’t enjoyable either. I’ve been honestly sort of dreading writing a piece about taste because of this. I definitely don’t hate food, and my various stomach ailments have since improved, but some of my attitudes have remained over the time. The process of eating and preparing food is still unfortunately more of a chore than it is enjoyable, but it is definitely less so. I do find the prospect of cooking really fun and interesting, and I’m hoping that my perspective can change in the future and I can have more of a healthy and enjoyable relationship with food.
The experiences of sharing food and the process of preparing meals are incredibly interesting to me too. I’ve certainly had positive experiences with family dinners in my life and even recently developing “traditions” of going out to eat with my friends weekly have come close to helping me experience the connectedness that should be inherent to this, but because of a lot of my negative experiences with food they feel slightly overshadowed. This is unfortunately antithetical to some of the profound experiences of sharing in the preparing, serving, and eating that accompany the traditions that Elizabeth Perez writes of in her book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. Reading about the Lucumí and other Afro-Cuban traditions really opened me up to new conceptualizations of what food can mean.
I hope you do find joy in cooking in the future. It helps if you are making something that you personally like to eat and if you get to eat it with friends and/or family.
ReplyDeleteThis class in particular, compared to other times I've taught it, made me acutely aware that sensory experiences are not necessarily inclusive. Even though everybody senses, we feel and experience what we sense, or what we cannot sense, in quite different, sometime even divisive ways. Thanks for sharing your experience.
ReplyDeleteThis blog post really speaks a lot to the importance of "appetite" with taste. People often associate an appetite with a desire to eat, when it can even refer to how little you eat, and your appetite and be disrupted when faced with a food that you either have not enjoyed before or have had an unpleasant experience with in the past. I can see how, if you have had an unpleasant experience with eating in general, how that could disturb your enjoyment of taste altogether. It's nice to hear you're coming around to taste through pleasant experiences! Hopefully you can come around to cooking as well. It can be so rewarding to cook for friends or family members, like spending all day making a homemade gift :)
ReplyDeleteI can sympathize with your experiences of having trouble eating, and you are not alone! Opposite to you, growing up I never had stomach problems, but recently I have been experiencing them and I have no idea why. I love food, and when the ability to enjoy it is taken away, you realize how much you take taste for granted. It is more than a necessity to eat, it is a way to bond, to relax, to enjoy life and the products of nature. It is hard to enjoy food when you are afraid that it will come back up. When my stomach issues subside, I am always overjoyed with the experience of eating. It is clearly more important to us emotionally than we give it credit.
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