Medusa

A man who looks a Gorgon in the eyes is said to turn to stone. Medusa is a fitting goddess for women recovering from eating disorders, I think -- she stops the wandering eye in its path, protecting herself from anyone who would criticize her or look at her harshly.

The only problem is that Gorgons can turn the same harsh gaze upon themselves. Though I prefer not to think of it, because I like Medusa too much, I can’t forget that she conquered with a mirror in the end. Perseus held one up to her and, looking at her own reflection, Medusa turned to stone, not unlike the bronze statue that I came across in the Boboli Gardens in Florence.

Even frozen, there is something of the magnificent and daring in Medusa. She is a woman who stands alone, proud and wise; her vision cuts through the quick, spotting everything, revealing every secret, every flaw. I think of her as a goddess who won’t take any crap from anyone. She is honest -- honest unto death.

Studies have shown that people with depression don’t necessarily have distorted thoughts -- it’s just that they can’t maintain the usual rose-colored glasses that most of us carry around to convince ourselves that things really aren’t that bad. We prefer these small fibs to point-blank honesty; we’d rather believe that the glass is half-full than admit that there are only a few drops clinging to the bottom. People with depression often see things just as they are -- and so much honesty can hurt, like Medusa’s gaze turned upon herself.

Still, I find her image helpful, when I’m confronted by lies and confusion around me, and can’t find the way. Those are the times when I want to be able to “say it like it is” and put a sharp wall between my own thoughts and feelings and those of the people around me. I haven’t had much need for such a stance lately, but stumbling upon this image of Medusa reminded me of all that it took for me to learn to see things with my own eyes, and honor my own visions of the world and myself. Goddess, you are great.

Final Fruit

The plums come from the tree in back of the house here. They were green when we arrived and now, on our last day, they are ripe and ready to eat. I am sorry that we won’t be here to enjoy them further; the sight of them makes me want to dig through old cookbooks in search of recipes for plum preserves, tarts, and succulent meat dishes. Rarely does such a quantity of fresh fruit fall into my hands, and these are all the more tantalizing because I cannot use them. They must be left here, perfect in their ripeness, while we leave and begin our lives again elsewhere.

There have been reports in the news for some months now of the global food crisis, and corresponding stories of individual Americans taking matters into their own hands, plantingneo-Victory gardens to cut their grocery costs, just as others trade cars for bikes as fuel costs also rise. I have never lived in a house with fruit trees before, just as I have never kept a garden and will likely never have one in New York City. So I am amazed and grateful to have watched this tree come to fruition, to feel its juice on my tongue, and to be reminded of the larger cycles that surround us.

One summer, during college, I spent weekends on a small farm near Minneapolis. My parents had bought a share of the farm’s vegetables through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, and as a requirement of membership we were asked to help out on the farm on occasion. I went back again and again after harvest day, and cajoled the small farm team to let me help them with whatever they were doing. One woman there was a chef at Lucia’s Restaurant who told me that she was working on the farm for a season in order to understand more about where food came from. This seemed like a novel idea to me at the time, and it struck my fancy that the act of eating might be linked to agriculture and land use and soil types and plant varietals, not just to fat and calories and oh-do-I-look-better-now-than-before concerns. I find it significant that I happened to visit this farm in the throes of an eating disorder, and wonder if these visits had anything to do with the new direction that food has come to have in my life since then. Looking back, I see that as my eating disorder waned, my interest in the broader aspects of food -- its origin, history, purpose, production -- increased.

I now feel that I straddle the twin worlds of the foodies and the recovered folks, equally interested in exquisite cuisine and body politics, but not quite reconciled to the fact that neither group seems to be talking to the other. Some psychologists feel that, to be recovered from an eating disorder, food should no longer play a central place in one’s life -- a stance which I disagree with, preferring to face food straight-on and thus dislodge it from its exceptional place in my imagination. On the other side, food writers rarely address the fact that millions of Americans cannot fully enjoy the food so lauded about in the food media because of their own preoccupations with weight and body image. (When I searched for the terms “eating disorder,” “anorexia” and “bulimia” on gourmet.com and bonappetit.com, for example, I found only one result -- a 2002 article in Gourmet about one woman's childhood experience in fat camp. "Obesity" turned up a few more hits, however.) But these issues are two sides of the same coin -- we can love food, but only so much; our bodies and minds will only stand so much food lust, and we must ultimately be satisfied with just enough. And, lest we forget, food has its times and places: there’s a season for plums and another for olives, a moment for birth and a death-hour. Modern grocery-store miracles aside, asparagus and fresh truffles can’t share shelf space.

For now, plums and vin santo; soft light over the patio; eggs being cracked in the kitchen; a good-bye to Italy and a hello to Spain.

Transitions

Tomorrow I leave Italy, and I am already one foot here, one foot out of this place.

I recognized my feelings of melancholy this morning for what they were -- sadness at leaving here. The sadness descended suddenly upon me, and at first I could not place it. What was there to be sad about? I have just spent five marvelous weeks in Italy, and I have more travels ahead of me. But transitions have never been easy for me; even as I look ahead to the next thing in front of me, I hate to let go. I'd like to stay here for another five weeks, then add another, until I was sure that this was my life, these happy day, and not those, then.

Then was this spring, when I juggled work and school, and the decisions of where to go next and how to keep the person I love at my side while designing my own life.

Now is central Italy, golden fields, Medieval hill towns, dusty roads, the Italian table, fiber between my fingers and potato peels at my feet.

I tell myself that I will have this again -- leaving happy places does not mean leaving happiness behind -- but for now I am sad to see it go. Which is more real -- the hardships of cold spring, or the delights of summer? How much there is to live and feel in just this one life!

Moderation

I keep thinking about hunger, and want to write more (always more! -- that's what hunger is about, isn't it?). But for today, I'll focus on moderation, which caught the attention of the ancient Greeks and the Buddha, who both spoke of the value of moderation, or the middle path, for one's health and happiness and the practice of the good life.

The Buddha also said (and I don't know about the Greeks on this point) that his students shouldn't take his word for everything, and he encouraged them to try out his teachings for themselves, to see if they were valid. And so I have, in a sense.

These last four years have been an exercise for me in moderation of appetite. A rather successful experiment, by the look of things.

If hunger makes food taste all the better, then it has been the act of allowing hunger back into my life -- of not fearing an empty belly, of contenting myself with less -- that has allowed me to become an eater. I take more pleasure in food now than I ever did when I was worried about fat and calories and my size, and it's not because I've managed to pull a fast one on my own nervous mind to convince myself that those things don't matter. They still do matter, to some extent, but they matter less and less as I find other things to take their place.

Ironically, one thing that does take the place of food worries is learning to eat well. I cannot stuff myself silly if I have just spent three hours cooking a meal for my husband and friends. Nor can I wantonly waste food if I know how hard it was to procure and prepare, having done so myself. Putting more effort into my food and more attention, instead of less, has made all the difference for me.

Though all of these efforts around food (it's just food, after all) might seem immoderate, I think it is quite natural to spend our time worrying about the next meal. After all, it is what our ancestors spent most of their time doing. I am reminded of this point here in Italy, where almost every tree in our valley has been planted for food cultivation. Down any lane you'll find grape vines, olive trees, and any number of fruiting trees, such as apricots, plums, figs, and cherries. No tree seems ornamental or accidental -- every one has a purpose, and nine times out of ten that purpose is to produce food for humans. It surprised me at first to discover that trees here weren't just oversize hedgerows, but in fact occupy an important role in the local food economy and culture. Now it seems eminently sensible: keep your food near you, and you'll never have to depend on others for your daily bread.

I am from one of the world's great food-producing regions -- the corn belt of the U.S., where the abundant loam of the prairies has been turned into rich soil for the U.S. agro-economy. Yet this notion of a "farm" is so different from the Italian azienda as for them to be almost mutually unrecognizable. In Umbria, a farm isn't something that happens "out there," where the exurbs end: instead, fields and houses intermingle, and to surprisingly good effect. For example, we can't overlook our dinner when it comes from right beyond the door, as our chard and tomatoes did last night. Nor can we forget that there's a season to all things when we learn that yesterday's cherries won't be back for another year. Where's the immoderation in that? There's no excess here, only the simple acknowledgment that real food comes with an expiration date, and obeys greater cycles than those determined by the supermarket aisle.

It has only been in the last one hundred years, in the wealthier countries of the world, that people have had the luxury to devote most of their waking hours to activities not consisting of food gathering or food preparation. But is it really such a luxury, I ask, to be able to ignore one's food? If food is one of life's greatest pleasures, then might we not deny ourselves some aspect of that pleasure by outsourcing our food preparation to others? I am thinking, again, of the sort of pleasure that can be had from the crafts of cooking, hunting, gathering, and gardening, and moreover, the satisfaction to be found in these activities beyond the products that they bring to us. This is real work, with immediate and substantial effects that we can judge for ourselves and be proud of.

I venture a guess that, in isolating ourselves from this kind of work, we make it hard for ourselves to take any satisfaction in food that is not degustatory, and thus we set ourselves up for thinking that act of eating food -- and not its provenance or its purpose -- is the only thing that matters. I strive to tip the scale in the other direction, away from the act of eating and towards the acts of finding and preparing food. Oh, how much pleasure there is to be had in knowing that an olive tree can produce oil! -- or seeing one's beans boil away contentedly on the stove, or planning next week's supper before it even occurs. For me, these are the paths towards alimentary moderation.

Hunger: The other side of the coin

Let's talk about hunger, shall we?

As a nation, Americans certainly spend enough time talking about food, about diets, about sizes. What about hunger?

I find it interesting that the "food community" -- those magazines, books, blogs and television shows devoted to producing and consuming food -- says so little about hunger, ostensibly the drive behind it all. What would a food article look like, I wonder, if we rated the experience of eating the same meal while ravenous versus only pleasantly peaked? Would a meal at Per Se when one is only mildly hungry still be rated above a scrappy meal-from-a-can consumed by one who is starving? The context of what and how we eat changes our experience of that meal -- and by this I am not referring to ambiance, or the color of the tablecloth, or the lighting, or the manners of one's waiter, or the rarity of the vintage. More than these things, hunger can determine how we experience a meal. And I'm not just talking about "big-time" hunger, the kind studied by epidemiologists, economists, and doctors: protein-energy malnutrition (PEM), though that certainly has a place in our consciousness (albeit most Americans would have to go back a few generations to understand that kind of hunger). I'm also referring to the bodily hunger that we feel in the hour before dinner, when we refrain from nibbling on leftovers because we know that food is coming, and will taste all the better when our hunger has some edge to it. This daily hunger accompanies our daily bread, or should, because without it food becomes a mere accoutrement, a sign of virtuous intentions or fashion sense. Hunger signals our bodily connection to our food, to the fact that food is, on some deep, intrinsic level, about fuel. Food = fuel = life. Our lives. What would they be without food? Without hunger to remind us to eat? Without desire and fullness and knowing when to stop?

A re-released segment that I recently heard on The Splendid Table glanced on some of these issues when Lynn Rossetto Kaspar interviewed David Plotnikoff, a reporter who hiked the Pacific Coast Trail and wrote an article about eating on the trail for Saveur in July 2007 (unfortunately, his article is not available online). The daily task of hiking 20 or so miles had inspired in him a devout appreciation for food that he had never felt before, Plotnikoff said in his radio interview. I admire Saveur's publication of this kind of article about food-for-fuel's sake, because the foodie world seems to only grudgingly, and on rare occasion, admit to our raw physical need for food -- our hunger. This reluctance to talk about hunger may be a throwback to the table manners of our grandparents, to a time when showing too much eagerness to eat was considered gauche.

Interestingly, if one cannot be bothered to put a napkin on one's lap, it might be because other concerns -- such as the act of consuming the food itself -- may take greater priority. Hunger thus becomes something shameful, a sign of poverty manifested in too great an eagerness for food. Seen in this light, just as the bourgeouis sought a pale complexion in contrast with a worker's hearty tan, so restraint at the table, and attention to proper rituals, might have been seen in earlier times as a sign of ascension in the world. To have enough food to be able to devote one's time at the table to observing social graces must surely be evidence of social superiority, ne c'est pas? And so we set up a dichotomy between the hunger of workers and the feasts of kings and burgers -- to great ironic effect.

What use has a feast without the spice of hunger? And what purpose does hunger serve, if not to remind us to eat? In this light, food and hunger seem inseperable, and yet they are so rarely addressed together, at least by the above-mentioned "food community". Conversely, I could also point to the "hunger community" of dieters and people with eating disorders, so obsessed by the impossibility of ending their own hunger that they cannot take any joy in food or its creation. It seems that these two groups might have much to say to each other, but I know of few places where such dialogues are taking place.

I want this blog to be such a place, where I can jump-start some conversations about food and hunger -- and, most importantly, to consider the hours that we spend when we're not thinking about food or hoping to quell our hunger. Those are the times that, ultimately, we need to live for, the moments that give meaning to our lives beyond our bellies and our waistlines.