Food is memory. For years, I have been riveted by the relationships we carry on with the food we put in our bodies. At five, I remember first hearing my grandmother refer to herself as “fat”. I suppose she was; early photos of her as the alto in a traveling singing family showed a slender, sweet-faced slip of a girl, large, long-lashed eyes all but swallowing the timid smile she gave as she glanced up from her sheet music to notice the photographer. She was married at 17, pregnant by 18, and by 24 she had had four babies and a miscarriage. In the course of six years, she changed from innocent songstress to farm wife and mother, perpetually breastfeeding, perpetually fighting her relationship with food while also creating elaborate meals for her hard working crew of husband and growing farm boys. Eleven years after her fourth child, she had one more, and only six years after that, her first grandchild (moi) was born. I have almost no memories of her outside her kitchen. She was only 38 years older than me. She could have been my mother, not my grandmother. By the time I came to know her, she was wide. Her hands were broad and square, with large, bony knuckles. Her wrists were thick and muscular. She was a wall of brightly flowered cotton fabric, short but large. She was comfort and sunshine and warmth and music, the scent of fresh bread and cinnamon, the embodiment of family connection, her kitchen the eye of the daily hurricane of a farm full of dirty, exhausted, hot, hungry people. She never let on she needed help, so my grandpa claimed my strong back and willingness to learn new things as his own, proclaimed me his right-hand-man, and put me in the un-air conditioned cab of a belching tractor the week I turned thirteen. My puny arms weren’t long enough to work the gearshift, so I used one foot to hold down the clutch while using the other one to kick the lever to shift gears, all my attention on making ever straighter rows, until I looked up a few hours later, and there was my grandma, standing at the end of the field in a cloud of dust, holding a foil-covered plate, a jar filled with ice water, and a wet rag to clean my face and hands. My birthday is in late June, which is almost always the middle of wheat harvest on the High Plains. Nearly every birthday cake of my teenage years was eaten on the filthy, diesel- and dust-caked tailgate of a pickup truck parked in a wheat field, surrounded by my grandparents, parents, and uncles, all eating more quickly than was healthy because wasted time was wasted money as we raced the threat of summer hailstorms to get the wheat harvested before nature mowed it down for us.
At five, I heard my grandmother call herself fat, and the defeat in her tone prompted me to crawl into her lap that afternoon, when the lunch dishes were done and she finally indulged my begging for her to read me a story, lay my head on her ample breast through with I could hear her heartbeat, and sigh contentedly, “I’m so glad you’re fat. You have the most comfortable lap of anyone I know.”
She shrieked with laughter, her belly jiggling. She repeated the story over dinner, to the amusement of my uncles, gathered around her table after a long day of inoculating cattle, and slipped me an extra cinnamon roll, cooled just enough for frosting, to make sure I’d had enough to eat. I am sure my noticing her letting herself have one, as well, is just wishful thinking disguised as memory.
And now tears try to work their way through my tough-girl exterior, because the memory of that warm cinnamon roll is the memory of everything that was right, before trauma and tragedy. And even that is tangled in my mind with the knowledge that everything about that story is also complicated, and hints at why that world is no longer one that exists for my family. My children will not know their young, vibrant great-grandparents. We’ll never know if a lifetime of pesticide application, living downstream and downwind from an enormous beef feedlot, living on a diet of red meat and fried potatoes, contributed to my grandfather’s stage 4 stomach cancer diagnosis the same year he planned to retire and finally take my grandma out of the kitchen to show her the world. We can almost certainly know that her high blood pressure, obesity, and the enormous stress of losing her hero and north star over two years of helplessly watching his agony and starvation contributed to the fatal stroke she experienced just four weeks after she stood, surrounded by her remaining children, and wept over his grave. My regret over not calling her those last weeks of her life because I was twenty years old, stupid, and didn’t know what to say lingers in the flavor of date pinwheels. She traveled with my parents to Colorado, to the ski resort where I was working over the winter, the week after his funeral, to take her mind off of the terminal loneliness of a silent house once filled with food and family, and she brought more food with her than we could possibly eat. Her date pinwheels, she brought in a chilled roll, to be able to bake and serve fresh. They flopped. She had forgotten she would be baking them at a higher altitude than the one in which she prepared them. In the lack of atmospheric pressure at 10,000 feet, they spread out and ran together. I still ate more than enough to induce guilt, because they were my favorite holiday treat, and she knew it, and they tasted perfect, aside from a few burned edges. A few weeks later, her terminally silent house stood dark and completely empty, a family member stopping by occasionally to rummage in her freezer for a jar of strawberry jam or some homemade sandwich buns. Her last pan of cinnamon rolls, left in the freezer for six months, were dry and unremarkable. We ate them anyway.
Unlike her only daughter, my mother, who is tall and strong-featured, I inherited her short stature and wide hips, square fingers and curled eyelashes, and my eyes are the exact shade of hers, hazel ringed in dark gray. I inherited her personality, to some extent- her creativity expressed in music and cooking, mine in writing and painting, neither of us taking ourselves as seriously as those around us think we aught. I didn’t inherit her susceptibility to weight gain, but then, I didn’t plunge quite so hard and fast into motherhood at such a young age. I have had the luxury of seeing my body change at its own pace, and often wonder how hers would have, had she had been afforded the same luxuries as I have.
Food is memory. In my memory, the experiences that shaped me, food is love and warmth is food and love is family and family is food. It is all inextricably tangled together. To describe the flavors of ones life is to describe ones life. Turmeric, coriander, basil, lime, garlic, oregano, rosemary. Name each flavor to a hundred different people, and hear a hundred different stories the flavor or scent conjures; memories that paint a picture of a life. Portraits in flavor. Reconstructions built from the memories of taste.
Food production, or at least some part of the process, defined my childhood. The flavors of the food grown in the same soil I scrubbed from my face every night formed the very cells of my body. The experiences of coaxing food from the soil, of raising animals for food, formed my passions and convictions as an adult. The most beautiful memories of my childhood are of the times love and flavor burst around me, the darkest memories are of trying to eat because I must, flavors turning to cardboard, salted by tears. My ideology was informed by my parents’ and their friends’ avant-garde idea, at the time, to create a market for local farmers who wished to grow organic crops, but had no way to sell them. They helped build a mill from scratch, my father welding together sifters and slicing through slabs of granite with cable and water to create millstones, my mother formulating concise control recipes to determine the finished baking properties of each batch of grain, spending days in a small lab testing protein, moisture, and gluten content, and predicting how each would translate into a finished product- which lot was best suited for breads, or pastry, or pasta. If you’ve bought U.S.-grown organic oat or wheat products at a health food chain store, you’ve probably eaten some of their product. My first real job, a second job when the farm could spare me, was performing those bake tests, using specialized equipment to knead bread dough at a consistent rate until the gluten was perfectly developed, then baking small loaves of bread from it, and documenting each loaf’s properties. The scent of fresh bread always brings back to me a sixteen year old’s ambition and self-doubt.
Always, the edges of these memories blacken and curl from the licking flames of the knowledge that to unabashedly love food is not allowed in our society, and for good reason. Food has given and taken away, both directly and indirectly. The same food that brought my family together tore away our nucleus with high blood pressure, obesity, and possibly cancer. My first experience with death was brought about by the simple fact of living among crops of growing food- the verdant leaves of tall corn obscuring a blind intersection, my uncle’s bloodied body lying under a flaming sunset, two crumpled pickup trucks, as his wife set the dinner table for him a few miles away. For the first time in the weeks and months that followed, our table was silent, and the food others brought to us unappetizing. The entire community came together to harvest his corn and sunflowers, his last crop sold to support his family. Other long-past experiences of pain come back with the memory of scent and flavor. Food’s cousin, drink, is so easily taken in excess. The scent of bourbon is both comforting to me because it was the scent of a loved one, and revolting to me because it was the scent of waking up to my head hitting the car window. When I drink as an adult, which is rare, the alcohol warms its way to my stomach, reminding me as it traces a pleasant path through my veins of the complicated ways it, too, can comfort and hurt.
My mother battled breast cancer in her forties, and in her fifties, suffers through menopause brought on by treatment, and weight gain she never had to worry about before. “Gaining just an extra ten pounds over your pre-cancer weight raises your risk of relapse significantly”, her oncologist told her. “From now on, a few extra pounds could kill you.” At a time in her life when she most needs to manage her stress, she is instead feeling more stress than ever over needing to battle her cravings. As her friends happily expand, throwing up their hands in despair over a losing battle with age, then eating the cake, she eats dry greens and oatmeal and simultaneously prepares food for her husband who still feels, in spite of his own better knowledge and desire for health, that decadence equals love. She denies herself indulgences, or judges herself over giving in.
Food is feeling. So many times, as I have lain in despair, I have half-remembered the rush of endorphins that is my body receiving nourishment. I scarcely realize what I am doing as I walk a well-worn path to the kitchen, knowing food won’t solve my problem, but desperate for a change of perspective and a temporary relief from sadness. If depression would allow me to make a clear-headed decision, then spare me the energy to act on it, I would know in those moments to take a walk outside instead. But food is there, and food is every good feeling, and even a few seconds of food-fueled oblivion is worth the poor choice, until it is done and overindulgence has left me feeling more low than before.
Food is poison, and food is medicine. This is perhaps the cruelest combination as we embrace flavor and fight indulgence. It is a drug. It is addictive. It is pleasure. It is necessary for life. Choosing to consistently eat the wrong things will kill us; making the right choices can heal us. It is sacrifice, as a less fortunate parent knows, agonizing over stretching their budget to cover vegetables, only to have their children proclaim them yucky and demand more affordable, less healthy foods. Our physical appearances, which so often relate to our diets, open and close doors for us as we navigate jobs, friendships, and relationships; food is privilege and opportunity, as much as it is the story of our lives.
Food is complicated. As I was transitioning into motherhood, I wanted to remake myself as a wellness expert. I started my journey with a six month certification as a health coach through a so-called holistic wellness course, and in the end, I realized I had paid a lot of money and knew no more than I did when I started, which was that easy answers sell. Beautiful people with simple insights and straightforward equations, these are our experts. Balding scientists citing boring correlations are neither engaging nor authoritative. We all long, on such a deep level, to find meaningful answers in the things we can attain, and we can all attain a simple change in the things we eat. It is so hauntingly attractive to think that if we can simply switch the poison to medicine, we will be well, that we can prevent the things we fear, that suffering and death will wait a little longer to court us.
Food is guilt. When someone unhealthy dies, we feel a bit of relief over thinking, “That doesn’t have to be me; I’ll do better than they did.” When it is cancer, we think, “Nothing but fresh produce and anti-inflammatory foods for me; I won’t ever give cancer a chance.” Type II diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure are all so easy for a healthy person to dismiss as poor choices on the part of the victim. And yes, it may have been poor choices that led to their outcome. But we never ask what led to the poor choices. So eager to not have to face uncomfortable truths, we assume everyone had the same choices we do, and simply chose to make the less healthy ones. We crave simple answers harder than salted chocolate. We crave simple, secret knowledge. We long to hear that food can work miracles.
Food is powerful. There is no denying the power of diet to work toward creating the type of body we choose to live in. Plants are essential to sustain life. Many pharmaceuticals were isolated as active ingredients in healing foods before becoming pills. My own toddler was healed from cancer, in large part, because of a plant used for its medicinal properties by our ancestors, the active compound of a bright pink flower now isolated, prescribed by his oncologist, and billed heavily to his insurance.
Redefining one's relationship with food is essential to creating lasting change. When food is love, or poison, or comfort, or memory, or simply the brief ability to feel, there are few things powerful enough to take the place of those reactions. It can be comfort, but must not not be the only source. It must be enjoyed for what it is, and nothing more asked of it. It must be taken with other joys, as a side, not an entree. Life is bigger than a plate of sustenance, but it would be doing our entwined senses of taste and smell a disservice to limit it to being only sustenance.
Food is life. Food is identity. Food is story.
What is yours?