..................Food...?!

When I was a child, I think things were fairly simple and if I gave it any thought at all, it didn’t mean much more than “refueling.” As I got a little older, I equated finishing my plate with not hurting my mother’s feelings. I don’t know where that came from because she never did any kind of a guilt trip thing on us. So for awhile food became a tool to communicate my happiness or displeasure with its server.

As I grew up and assumed adult responsibilities and stresses from career, marriage, and kids, sad to say I did use food for comfort. But eventually I learned that it was bad enough that a person or situation was causing me stress. I didn’t need to also give it the power to also wreck my health and appearance. So I lost 50 pounds and I am back to food being just food. You eat health food when you’re hungry, and you don’t eat it at other times or for other reasons. There are certainly days when I violate this, and important family events and holidays are automatic exceptions.

I tried very hard when I was raising my kids not to use food for anything other than nourishment. I tried not to use it as a reward or punishment. Although this was sometimes hard to do, I didn’t equate how much they liked something I cooked with how much they liked me. I wanted them to see that food was just food. They seem to have gotten the message because they’re all slender and health-conscious.

Food is one of the great universal human experiences. We all eat, every single day, several times a day.

But we all do it differently. One man's meat is another man's poison, as they say. Whole milk drinkers think skim drinkers are weird; many cultures find the drinking of another creature's milk with or without fat simply bizarre.

When I travel, food is the top of my agenda. Brillat-Savarin's cliche, "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are," is practically a mantra for me. I want to eat the way the locals eat. No matter how disgusting it is, because we're all human: if it keeps them alive it'll keep me alive.

I'll even try the McDonald's in a foreign country just to see what's different about it. The Croque MacDo in Paris became an object of morbid fascination for me.

The rest of the sights, from the Tower of London to the Black Forest to the Mayan Temples, are for me more of a way to kill time until my next meal than anything else. Sure, I'm learning a bit about the culture from the rest of their artifacts, but to me it's the food that really brings it all together for me. I'll never live in a palace or sacrifice a living body from a temple; the differences in culture are fascinating but it's hard for me to really connect with it. But they all ate, and if I can share a meal with them, I feel a lot closer to them.

I want to respect my food. I learn a lot of kitchen science because I want to know exactly what's going on with my food, and to make the best out of it. If an animal had to tie for my dinner, I consider it an act of respect to make the best possible dinner out of it and to use up every edible scrap.

My kitchen is full of cookbooks on the way people used to do that out of necessity rather than curiosity, and again, I feel connected to them. When I cook I'm joining a line of people going all the way back to the beginning of humanity, and connected to the latest advances in science as well.

So when I say that food means nearly everything to me, you can see that I'm not exaggerating.

But really it's something I share with family and friends. I think "breaking bread" with those important to you is important.

a substance that you consumer for energy?

and is it supposed to be a philosophical question??

the best thing in the world