Food as a love language
"I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything."
I’m back…momentarily to bring some tenderness into your lives <3 enjoy and as usual, send me your faves!
One day, I offered a number of children a basket filled with tangerines. The basket was passed around, and each child took one tangerine and put it in his or her palm. We each looked at our tangerine, and the children were invited to meditate on its origins. They saw not only their tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree. With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. They saw petals falling down and the tiny fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. Now someone has picked it, and the tangerine is here. After seeing this, each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and the fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or her mouth and have a mindful bite, in full awareness of the texture and taste of the fruit and the juice coming out. We ate slowly like that.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, from Tangerine Meditation
Brown is warm and homely. Simple and unrefined. Brown sugar, brown bread and brown eggs, which tasted so good that children fought for them […] Hot crusty bread. Tea and toast, and yellow butter. Biscuits. Chocolate biscuits. Brown gravy and tart HP sauce. Chutney, and preserves cooking on the stove. There is nostalgia in brown. The touch of my mother’s soft beaver lamb coat in which we buried our tears. Brown simplified life.
— Derek Jarman, from Chroma
My grandfather let me eat apple pie for breakfast. Once we asked him could we have ice cream before breakfast, and he said if we could find any, we were welcome to it. We went to the outside freezer and found two boxes of Cornettos. He let us eat them all. . .He was kind when he saw us, but he did not see us often, and when he died, I had not seen him in a long time. . . .[He was] a person whose death left no hole in my present, but whose dying made a clear breach with the past: someone I missed not for me, but for who I used to be. How do you grieve for someone you no longer know? Me, I grieved with bread. Bread is the staff (stuff?) of grief because it is the staff of life. Tiny microscopic life forms, breathing and bubbling and growing under your hands: It lives.
—Ella Risbridger, from “How to Grieve With Challah Bread,” Midnight Chicken
One of the primary ways we connect ourselves, one to another, is by eating together. Some of the connecting happens simply by being in the same place at the same time, sharing the same food, but we also connect through specific actions such as serving food to one another or making toasts: "May I offer you some potatoes?" "Here's to your health and happiness." Much of our fundamental well-being comes from the basic reassurance that there is a place for us at the table. We belong here. Here we are served and we serve others. Here we give and receive sustenance. No small matter.
— Edward Espe Brown, from “Nurturing the Heart,” Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings
And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.
— Andre Dubus, from “On Charon’s Wharf,” Broken Vessels: Essays