As Carrie Bradshaw said, the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. So where better to start my food and relationships newsletter than with my own relationship to food (as if that could be contained in a 500-word 900-word essay). Anyway.
My love of food began in earnest around the time my mom bought me this book:
I sat down and dog-eared the page of every recipe I wanted to make. I became an expert at toad-in-a-hole (“framed eggs”, according to the cookbook), English muffin pizzas and choco banana loaf. I already enjoyed eating – now, I was discovering the pleasure of crafting it. The active aspect of food. I was a participant.
I memorized a few of the recipes, occasionally pulled it off the shelf when I felt like baking. But mostly, the book lived in the microwave stand, its blue plastic spine jammed between Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals and Eat, Shrink and Be Merry.
Part of my desire to write about food and cooking is to find a way back to the period when I didn’t know enough to limit my ambitions in the kitchen, when cooking wasn’t mediated by social media and a drive for perfection. As a kid, I was willing to try everything – which sometimes resulted in my brother telling me my food was disgusting, which always resulted in me crying. But I tried. I made new things, got so good at some that I didn’t even need to look at the cookbook.
I’ve gone through periods of believing I couldn’t cook, or didn’t enjoy it. Sometimes, all I ate was instant noodles and instant coffee. University is not an ideal time to be into cooking – broke, sharing crowded kitchens and trying to keep in class makes subsisting on greasy styrofoam containers of Thai food more appealing than cooking. My friends and I were frequent posters in a Facebook group called Is it considered a meal by a college student? A typical post might read: cold chunk of tofu and half a cigarette. Or just, toast with no butter. Things like that.
After graduating, with way too much free time on my hands, I found my way to cooking again. One needs to eat, and I had few other ways to amuse myself. Minimum wage forced me to get creative, and my schedule gave me entire days to mess around in the kitchen. Cooking was more creative than ever for me. I read recipes and then deviated wildly, inventing and substituting and reinventing, stealing small amounts of ingredients from my roommate’s shelves in the pantry (I was a horrible roommate) to pull something edible together.
I never snapped photos of the things I cooked then. Food was much more ephemeral. I’d throw together a meal, take a second to appreciate its beauty, and then gobble it down.
Now, I feel the impulse many women my age feel – camera eats first – when I’m sitting down to eat. I usually don’t even post the photo. I just feel an urge to document, to catalogue, to show off my work. Apparently, this can decrease your enjoyment. I know this, and yet I keep snapping the photos.
Obviously, I never took a photo of my English muffin pizzas when I was a kid. One, there’s no way they were pretty. Two, taking a photo cost something, and I had to save my disposable camera for more important things, like my friends and I giving each other bunny ears at summer camp. Food used to exist to be consumed and then disappear. I never used to care about its aesthetics.
And how much more pleasure did I get from cooking then? How much pride did I take in my meagre creations? How did the meaning of food – food that I had made – change so quickly once Instagram came along?
I care deeply about how dishes look, because the visual is part of the sensory experience of food. It makes you hungry, builds desire. If you’re a true food lover, the time between seeing a gorgeously plated dish and digging your fork can be the source of an erotic tension, a sensuous thrill. The visual experience is not the thief of joy – it’s the phone coming between you and your food, disrupting that joy.
We endlessly collect our own data and archives like librarians of our own narcissism. I do it too. I’m not going to stop taking photos of every martini I drink, or resist the lure of a beautiful tablescape I can post in the middle of a photo dump. But I hope that by cataloguing my food-love through deep reflection rather than a compulsion to pull out my iPhone, I can sink my teeth more deeply into what food means, rather than just what it telegraphs on an Instagram story. Like when I was younger, I hope I can place a dish on the table with pride, and not grip my phone so tightly in the other hand.
A couple weeks ago, I cooked what I promise was a very attractive dinner – New York Times Cooking’s Salmon With Garlic Butter and Tomato Pasta. Mine didn’t look quite as sexy as theirs, but the blistered tomatoes, flaky salmon and fresh cracked pepper were so appealing next to my four olive martini that I didn’t even reach for my phone.