Break/fast

Is breakfast a difficult meal for you?

Is it the one that you rarely think about, the one that you linger over the least? I was never one to skip breakfast, but I still find it a hard meal to wrap my head around. I rarely get to lavish the attention on breakfast that I pay to lunch and dinner: hunger, and the morning rush, conspire to make my breakfast as simple as possible. But "simple," I find, is often pre-made and repetitive: store-bought yogurt and granola; toast with peanut butter and banana slices; fruit and cottage cheese. Those are my staples, the ingredients that I always have on hand to make my morning meal in a pinch. I rarely give them a second thought. So what's wrong with that?

Part of the problem with these kinds of foods is that they are sugary and flighty, often leaving me hungry later in the day. And they get boring, day after day, the same combination of dairy and grain and sweetness. There is only so much granola and yogurt that I can take before going batty. Yet I have never been one to yearn for bacon and eggs in the morning -- so what to do?

I have found part of the solution to what-to-eat-for-breakfast in the insight afforded by Asian cuisine which, it should be pointed out, does not draw clear distinctions between "breakfast food" and all the rest. Breakfast, at least in China, may be sweet, or it may be savory; it may have fruits, or eggs, or soup, or rice, or all of these things. Breakfast is like lunch or dinner, only smaller. Just think of all the things you can have for breakfast if you follow this approach! Not just eggs -- pork! Beef stew! Tofu! Vegetables! Are you someone who can't stand another day of bagels with cream cheese and frozen orange juice? Don't you agree that breakfast is the most wasted culinary opportunity of the day?

I'm trying my best to change things around here, and I am taking my cues from Asian cuisine. My breakfast may be a bowl of rice with coconut milk and fruit, as in my first photo, or a sticky rice bao filled with sweet pork, shitake mushrooms, peanuts, and dried shrimp (picked up in Chinatown); black imperial rice with coconut and bananas; mung bean porridge with tangerines; or any other strange and wonderful concoction I happen to dream up or stumble upon. This is what I am eating, more often than not. And I can't think of a better way to start my day with a breakfast that is just a little beyond the ordinary -- even if all porridges look the same.

Hot pot! (火鍋)

Tonight we went to Chinatown in lower Manhattan to eat huo guo (火鍋)-- Sichuan hotpot -- with some of my husband's classmates. Hotpot is something like fondue, except that instead of oil or cheese, you get a large pot of spicy, steaming broth (and small gas burner) to cook your ingredients right there on the table. Hotpot is one of my favorite Chinese foods; we ate it often in Beijing in late-night dinners that we shared with friends, and Chuan and I even traveled to Sichuan during our time there, before the devastating earthquake. I love the variety of ingredients, the two different ma and la flavors (one makes your lips tingle; the other clears your sinuses), and the communal feel of huo guo.

The one problem with hotpot, for me, is that there are no portions, no courses, and no end to the meal. Even now, when I eat hotpot in New York, I have to remind myself to take my time. And even then I keep telling myself to slow down, to look around, to engage in conversation, to focus on the company, all throughout the course of the meal. Tonight was difficult in that respect, because I didn't know my company very well, and I felt more like a wifely appendage than a dinner companion in her own right. But focus I did, and I got through the meal, occupied more by reminiscences of China than by the conversation.

Coincidentally, the weather today in New York City reminded me of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, which is known for its humid, foggy weather, its beautiful women, and its spicy foods. Lower Manhattan was covered in fog and mist this evening; we could have been eating hotpot in any Chengdu eatery, and no one would have known the difference by stepping outside onto the city streets.

All of Sichuan, in my memory, appears wet and flowing, its rivers and fragrant broths confounded. In Chinese, "sì chuān" means "four rivers," and the province is indeed criss-crossed by waterways. Sichuan, even inland, is a land of water. (My husband's name, Chuan, comes from the same word: 川 in Chinese.)

We ate wonderful mushroom hotpot in Chengdu's restaurants, and visited poetic shrines and ancient battlegrounds, but we both agreed that the most interesting part of Sichuan was further north, closer to the border with Tibet, where yak's milk replaces tea as the most common drink.

These photos are from Jiu Zai Gou ("Nine Villages"), a scenic area in the mountains of Sichuan. Most of the people who live there speak a language that is closer to Tibetan than to Mandarin, and many are practicing Buddhists. We visited in autumn, right before the trees changed colors, and spent several days living with one of these families in the foothills of the Himalayas. I remember waking up early in the morning, seeing my breath hover above the comforter, and hearing the faint sounds of gongs -- monks in prayer.

In China, we visited Buddhist shrines and paid our respects to the ancestors (Chuan's ancestors) wherever we went. I remember standing side by side with the man who would become my husband, burning incense and lighting candles as offerings. I knew that it was right that we were there together, a man born in China showing a woman from Minnesota how to approach the shrine. And then I told him something, about what the Buddhist images meant -- the wheel, the lotus, the knot-- and how Tibet and China fit together (or didn't) in Buddhist history.

These things were going through my head tonight as I watched the last pieces of mutton go into the hotpot; as I debated whether to eat more or to stop; and as I paid polite attention to the conversation around me. All of these things made up my meal, in Buddhist fashion, the past coming to greet the present, the present looking towards the future. And if that isn't a good meal, a pleasant communion, I don't know what else is.

-- 艾鹭 (Aì Lù)

Finding food

(This is in response to a few comments on my last entry.)

Food and emotions. Do you have a hard time separating the two?

I used to. I still do, sometimes. But I'm learning to tell the difference, which is actually a pretty cool skill to have. I know plenty of non-eating disorder folks who haven't gotten the memo on it yet, either.

There is a big difference, I think, between using food to stand for your emotions and having emotions about food. The first can be problematic, but I think that the latter -- recognizing and expanding our emotions towards food -- is part of healing itself.

I know this is not clear yet, so let me give you a few examples, starting with all of the meanings that food have (an anthropological perspective). Food may mean fuel to you, or warmth, or love, nourishment, pleasure, guilt, reward, sin, happiness, delight, punishment, satiety, sensuality, taboo, connection, home, embodiment, blessing, or burden.

Any more? Please do share.

I think that part of what happens with eating disorders is that the meanings that food can have are severely reduced, just as the actual food consumed may be restricted or limited in variety (hell, we always binge on the same old things -- don't we?). For example, to someone with an eating disorder, food rarely means pleasure or nourishment. In fact, food is more often a burden or a sin to them. But even people who don't have eating disorders may have difficulty connecting with the delights and blessings of food, so trapped are we in a culture that equates denial with virtue.

One reason that I have turned to food magazines and other food media is that they have helped me to expand (diversify!) my attitudes towards food. Food is not uni-dimensional: quite the contrary. Food has so many meanings, not only here in the United States, where I write, but in the thousands of cultures that exist across the world. Food should be diverse, as anyone who has ever consulted a nutritionist knows. We are made to eat many things, at many times, in many moods. It is not bad to have emotions about food. What can be harmful is when food replaces emotions, or when we have too few emotions about food.

People who are in recovery from eating disorders are often told "Don't focus on the food!" I was, and I have had plenty of time to think it over. In conclusion, I don't quite buy it. I think that part of recovery is learning to cultivate a new relationship with food, not to exclude it from one's thoughts altogether, nor to eat like an automaton. When we are having a problem with someone we love, we usually don't solve the problem by exiling that person from our lives; and yet, recovery from an eating disorder is often painted as a sort of exile from food, or from food-as-emotion, without realizing that there are so many different emotions that can surround food, and not all of them are harmful.

This is what I have learned to do in recovery, and here is my challenge to you: find a new meaning for food in your life. Add it to the ones you already have. Right now. Pick one that I listed above, or add a new one of your own. Maybe you lean the other way: you already enjoy food, but you don't think of it as physical fuel or nourishment, or you are disconnected from the sources of your food. In any case, look at food from a new angle. Visit epicurious or culinate or the slow food blog. Pick a recipe or an ingredient, a cuisine or a cause, a farm or a feedlot. Learn something new that you didn't know about food. And then think about where you are, and how that knowledge is changing how you feel about the food that you eat every day.

And let me know how things are going, OK?

~Ai Lu

P.S. GRM, Tiptoe, Emily Jolie: I had so much to say to your comments these last few days! Thank you for giving me so much to think about.

What work is there but this?

These days I have been thinking a lot about recovery, as I receive comments and emails from readers of this blog, encouraging me in my unabashed rediscovery of good food.

When I sat down to write my personal bio on this blog, I struggled with setting a date to my recovery. It was important for me to indicate to you, my readers, that I was writing from a place beyond the disorder, I wanted to offer some of what I have learned in the process to other women who are going through what I went through four or five years ago. I felt that there are simply not enough models for life after recovery, and I wanted to be one.

So that was the confident side of me, the one who thought she knew everything about recovery and how to pass it on.

It surprised me a bit to realize, over the course of the months that I have been writing, that my recovery is not a staged event, but an ongoing revelation. Since I began to write and participate in the ED blog community, I have changed. The ways that I look at food have changed. I am eating wheat again. I have fewer digestive problems. I am weighing myself less. I am less anxious about getting "enough" exercise. I look at women who are heavier than I am and don't feel sorry for them; and when I look at women who are thinner, that doesn't seem so appealing anymore, either. I am learning to rest with myself.

Perhaps writing is healing, in this case: through writing, I bring the past closer and find some way to integrate these disparate parts, these disparate countries, all of this whole and this emptiness that contain me. I am learning to be humble in this renaissance, to accept that this is not the end of the path, after all.

And if this is not the end, then it bedazzles me to think of how deep we can go. Life is an interminable onion, layer after layer after layer.

And yet -- what work is there but this?

Second ode to bread

I haven't left my apartment all day -- oh, what a marvelous Sunday! In between bouts of neuroscience studying, I made Chinese sweet buns (bao zi):

Now that I am eating wheat again, I can return to baking. My husband used to joke that the fact that we used our oven exclusively for storage meant that we were just like the typical Asian immigrant household. Most Asian food is cooked exclusively over the stovetop, so many Asian immigrants in the U.S., like my mother-in-law, devise other uses for the oven space. For a long time, when I was staying away from wheat, I didn't use my oven, either.

Dough rising

All of this lead up to say that I wish that I had baked something wonderful in our oven today, but the buns that I made were steamed -- a perfect example of how ovens are completely expendable in Chinese cuisine. Nevertheless, they gave me the satisfaction, at least, of letting me pretend that I was baking, as I kneaded and coddled the dough for a couple of hours before filling and steaming the buns.

Steaming the buns

I made two sweet pastes to fill the buns: red azuki bean paste and black sesame seed paste. This recipe, from The Essentials of Asian Cooking, provided me with the excuse to use the red azuki beans that we got in Flushing last weekend and to try the freshly-milled flours from Wild Hive Farm, courtesy of the Union Square Farmer's Market on Friday. And I can never pass up an opportunity to eat sesame:

Filling the buns

I haven't kneaded bread since I was a high school exchange student in Chile and a friend's father taught me to make pan amasado. Chile has been on my mind a lot recently. September 18 is the Chilean Independence Day, a time when Chileans get together with friends and family to fly kites and eat barbecue; I was reminded again of this on Friday, when we had a Chilean couple over to wine and cheese. I spoke Spanish the whole night long. It is always a great joy and relief to me to be able to return to Spanish and find it as much unchanged as when I last left off. And Chilean Spanish I may understand best of all, for it was in Chile that I learned to speak Spanish, and I still sometimes betray a bit of their accent despite all of my time in Argentina later on.

I also found out, just yesterday, that my Chilean host father is terminally ill, so he was on my mind, too, as I went about my tasks today. As I kneaded the bread I thought of my host family, and their lives, and my family, and our lives, and all that has happened since I came back to the U.S. for the first time, seven years ago.

I wanted to write more here about China, and Chinese breads, and what I did for lunch (which you can see above), but it seems better to leave off now with a few verses from the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and call it a night:

Ode to Bread

Bread,
you rise
from flour,
water
and fire.
Dense or light,
flattened or round,
you duplicate
the mother's
rounded womb,
and earth's
twice-yearly
swelling.
How simple
you are, bread,
and how profound!
You line up
on the baker's
powdered trays
like silverware or plates
or pieces of paper
and suddenly
life washes
over you,
there's the joining of seed
and fire,
and you're growing, growing
all at once
like
hips, mouths, breasts,
mounds of earth,
or people's lives.
The temperature rises, you're overwhelmed
by fullness, the roar
of fertility,
and suddenly
your golden color is fixed.
And when your little wombs
were seeded,
a brown scar
laid its burn the length
of your two halves'
toasted
juncture.
Now,
whole,
you are
mankind's energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.