This is a longish rumination on food--my relationship to it, my attitudes about it, and how these came about in my life. For a poem on food, see the "Poems" page.

This essay is © Kris D'Arcy.  

Consider the significance we attach to food, aside from its obvious necessity: myth, story, and religious ritual often center on food or include it as an important element. In Celtic tradition, the cauldron was sacred to the goddess Kerridwen; the cauldron of the Otherworld contained an inexhaustible supply of food. Pomegranate seeds given to her by Hades kept Persephone from returning permanently from the underworld. For many of the Native American nations, cornmeal was sacred and was used in religious ceremony. In the Old Testament, God sent manna that kept the Children of Israel alive during their forty years of wandering. The Seder, the Passover feast, commemorates the flight of the Jews from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. The New Testament gives us the miracle of the loaves and fishes and, of course, the Christian Last Supper, the basis of the Eucharist. In religious ritual, food is a symbol of divine generosity and love, and as such it represents the spiritual as well as the material. Food is also a metaphor for that which satisfies hunger that is spiritual, not physical. It is an intersection of the spiritual and the material worlds.

But I’m not religious, in the conventional sense. Indeed, I am passionately attached to this world. For me, food is a precious and important link to the material world. Paradoxically, it is my sensual delight in the physical world that makes me believe there is something that transcends it, for surely we have been given a gift. There is, then, a spirituality that surrounds food, if you care to recognize and respect it. It comes from sharing meals with people you love, from knowing that the food you eat comes from the earth we all share, from the warm memories of home that the taste or aroma of food can evoke, from acknowledging the gifts we’ve been given: our senses and what they perceive.

We are animals first, and we must eat to live, but in food preparation, humans have combined necessity with artistic and spiritual impulse. The history of food preparation, endlessly ingenious, creative, and aesthetically pleasing, is a testament to the human drive to create. Creativity and spirituality are, to my mind, very closely linked.

My attitude toward food has developed over time, initially taking shape under the influence of my family and our circumstances, modified later by my reading and general perspective. My grandparents had a farm, and my parents owned a grocery store, so food was in the foreground of our lives. But my love of, and respect for, cooking and shared meals developed in opposition to my upbringing as much as in tune with it. And as an adult, I began to understand the political, as well as the spiritual, context in which food is embedded.

As a child, I was ambivalent toward food and mealtimes.

From the ages of seven to nine, I suffered from stomach ulcers; I can still remember the burning, terrific pain in my stomach and the nausea that often kept me awake at night. I never knew when something I ate would trigger those symptoms. I had to take special meals to school, which featured half-and-half in a thermos and jars of strained baby food—quite humiliating. I couldn’t eat what the other kids ate, and how I wanted to! I wanted the Wonder Bread that my mother wouldn’t bring home, the "minute steaks" that other kids’ harried moms prepared, the poor-quality hot dogs (my brother-in-law calls them "Snouts ‘n’ Ears Brand") that passed as a meal in some households. It wasn’t until later, when I was away from home and very homesick, that I began to appreciate the quality of the food and the cooking I’d enjoyed as a child.

Other children thought I lived in a veritable paradise. My parents owned a grocery store, and I had easy access to all the candy and ice cream I could eat, all the cola I could drink, all the goodies that stocked the shelves—at least in theory, and often in practice (perhaps that’s why today I don’t much care for sweets and never make desserts, entrusting my sister with that chore). I took for granted the top-quality meats and poultry that my parents sold and also brought home for our own meals. But it was no paradise for my two sisters and me, thanks to my father.

My father sometimes made food a vehicle for punishing or humiliating us. Where a rational parent might simply tell a child when her behavior was a problem, my father would, without the slightest warning, stage a scene designed to demean and shame us. And merely sending us to bed without dinner wasn’t imaginative enough. On one occasion, when without warning he decided that we were eating too many sweets, he brought home bag after bag stuffed full of candy, cookies, cakes, more candy. He informed us that since we liked sweets so much, we were now forbidden to eat anything but what he’d just poured out on the table. 

I dreaded the evening meal. Almost every night, my mother cooked a balanced meal for us. The exceptions were those times that she’d been working long hours at the store and had no time or energy. Then we might have scrambled eggs with crumbled bacon, or salmon right from the can, garnished with vinegar and onions. There were no fast-food franchises or pizza places nearby; in fact, there were few fast-food chains at that time. But usually, we had meat, potatoes, a vegetable or two, and almost always, a salad. It wasn’t her cooking that made me dread dinner time. No, it was my father.

We’d assemble at the table, we three girls hoping against hope that he wouldn’t ruin yet another meal, my mother nervous and tense. If he came to the table in an apparently good mood, we waited for a chance remark to set him off. If he came to the table in a bad mood, we could hardly eat, waiting for the axe to fall. It was at meal time that my father would criticize our behavior or appearance, always with caustic, punishing sarcasm. Sometimes he’d begin in such a way that we were fooled into relaxing a bit, only to realize we’d been led into a trap. Many meals ended abruptly, with one, two, or all three of us leaving the table in tears.

Sometimes, too, my father would decide suddenly that we needed religion.

Technically, we belonged to a church, and both my sisters attended a Lutheran elementary school. But the store was open on Sundays, so Dad rarely went to church, and the rest of us were lax about it. Still, more than once we had to endure several evenings of taking our turn reading passages from the Bible. He was going to start with the beginning and go all the way through it. Even the "begats." Things didn’t go well. Not only did I, for one, feel like a complete phony, but all three of us were made uncomfortable by some of the Old Testament stories that featured nakedness and incest. My father would give up on this eventually, to our relief. But until he did, we dutifully took turns reading passages we either didn’t understand or that embarrassed us.

Yet when we had guests for dinner, my father was a genial host. Some of my favorite memories are from Sunday dinners when my grandparents ate with us. We sat at the table long after we finished eating, listening to my grandparents’ stories: the time during their courtship when Grandma got tired of waiting for Grandpa to come and took off with a young man on a motorcycle, or the time Grandpa, left in charge of the kitchen when Grandma was taken ill, mistakenly put an entire cup of salt in the cake batter. "Even the pigs wouldn’t eat it!" he always finished. Those times were warm and filled with a sense of abundance.

In later years, after Jim and I married, we often went to my parents’ for barbecues in the summer, sometimes as part of a big group of relatives and friends. Jim learned to grill at those barbecues. No matter how expensive the cut of meat—Dad was fond of putting prime rib on a covered grill—when the time came to barbecue, he’d say, "Let Chef Pierre do it!" And Chef Pierre, aka Jim, had to sink or swim. My father pointed out the niceties of grilling, such as how to tell when the fire is hot enough, where to place the meat, how long to cook it, whether or when to cover the grill, and so on.

This is the side of my father that gave me my own love of feeding people, of gathering people I care for and sharing a meal with them. The best meals are created only when the cook loves what she is doing and the people she’s doing it for. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Dr. Urbino tastes his food at one point and says, "This food was cooked without love!" In Like Water for Chocolate, the protagonist’s emotions find their way into the food she prepares and act upon the diners. It’s true: food should never be prepared by someone who feels angry and resentful. It is probably just as well that during a recent depression, I was unable to cook for two weeks. The food would have had a poisonous effect, no doubt.

Not only the meals I remember affect the way I think of food now.

The fact that my parents had a grocery store meant that I knew where food came from. I saw the halves of cattle that hung in my father’s walk-in cooler, awaiting his butcher and boning knives; I had seen hogs’ heads, smelled the awful odor that goes with rendering lard, watched my father grind hamburger and make cube steak. As a very small child, I would go with my father to the produce wholesaler and see crates and crates of fruits and vegetables. Sometimes, too, he’d bring us something we regarded as exotic—a pineapple, a coconut, a mango. When it came to produce, he stocked only the staples, but most of the people who shopped there would have had no use for anything but potatoes, onions, celery, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, oranges, apples, and bananas.

But I had also seen fruits and vegetables growing, the magic of their sprouting, growth, and ripening. My grandparents grew vegetables like leaf lettuce, green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and cabbage. They also grew strawberries, and I remember picking them with my grandmother, asking her constantly, "Is this one ripe enough? Is this one?" My grandfather also had a couple of pear trees, a plum tree, and an apple orchard where he grew red and golden Delicious apples, Jonathans, and MacIntoshes, as well as several varieties of what are now known as "antique" apples: Wolf River, Winesap, Fireside. Apple-picking was a day we all looked forward to; we ate apple after apple, right off the tree, and still had room for Grandma’s chicken soup afterwards.

My grandfather took the windfall apples—those that had fallen from the tree and gotten bruised—to the cider mill to be pressed. He also grew sweet purple Concord grapes and made his own wine, of which a few luscious ounces are still left after all this time (he died in 1990). I was often present when the grapes were pressed, and I can still recall the heady aroma of the crushed grapes.

And there was a smokehouse behind the house. On the days my grandparents made sausage, my parents would help. The meat had to be spiced and mixed just so, then placed in the sausage stuffer. One person would hold the casing while another turned a crank that forced the meat mixture into the casing. Then the sausages would be tied off and hung in the smokehouse until they were cured. Although I’m a vegetarian now, the memory of that sausage, speckled with the yellow of mustard seed and the black of peppercorns, spiced and tangy in a way that I’ve never tasted elsewhere, still makes me salivate.

My grandfather went ice-fishing in the winters and brought back buckets of perch. He’d give my mother a mound of them, which she’d put in the sink and on the kitchen counter. Some of the fish, still alive, occasionally flopped off the counter and onto the floor, which made my sisters and me squeal with horrified delight. My mother would batter and fry the perch for one of our favorite meals.

My grandmother earned a little extra money by plucking and singeing the wild ducks that hunters brought her. In her younger days, she catered weddings. She loved to tell the story of being asked to cook a whole salmon, stuffed. She had no idea how to do it, but she invented a method on the spot and won praise for her efforts. Grandma canned the vegetables she grew and the applesauce she’d made from their own apples. She made jam and froze strawberries. And after my grandparents had helped a friend or relative butcher a hog, Grandma would fry up sidepork for us—terrible stuff in terms of nutrition, but we loved it—and make blood sausage, a substance I can’t believe I ever ate. She made it in loaf pans, and I recall only that it had raisins in it. My mother would slice the loaf and fry up the slices. Grandma used to pickle pig’s feet, too, something I would never even taste, probably because of the gelatin, which I thought was downright icky—slimy and transparent.

But if I took from my childhood and adolescence the desire to gather people together and give them dinner, and a joy in the sensuous aspects of food, my sister Linn’s response was very different.

She’s gone through periods of being unable to eat, of having to force herself to eat. She dislikes cooking and relies heavily on fast food and carry-outs. When her children were small, she often asked me to host their birthday parties. With her history of mental illness, the food issue has manifested itself more than once as a fear that, if she cooks for people, she will unwittingly poison them. Those troubled mealtimes during our growing-up years continue to haunt her, even as she maintains that she has no bad memories of her childhood, nor of my father.

There is yet another aspect, however, to her relationship with food. Many years ago, Linn stopped wearing her glasses except in cases of dire necessity. Why? Because, she says, she doesn’t want to see the ugliness in the world. I’ve pointed out to her that she can’t see the beauty, either, but this argument doesn’t sway her. She’s always been interested in what she calls the esoteric, the world of astral projection, of psychic powers, of astrology—the world of the unseen. The material world hasn’t held many charms for her. For those who know her history, this may seem an odd thing to say, as she certainly has behaved like a sensualist in her day; but she little appreciates the natural world, the landscape, the garden, the forest. She much prefers to brood on the other world.

For me, on the other hand, food is part of my passionate attachment to the material world. The aroma of sizzling Indian spices, the sharp, clear bite of a strong onion, shining mounds of peppers and eggplants at the outdoor market—I can’t believe that we are not meant to take note of these things and to savor them. My attachment to this world arises in part from the belief that the visible world is a manifestation of an ongoing process of creation and of whatever mysterious force endlessly spins out that creation. Unlike my sister, I want to take in the world with all my senses. It seems a sacrilege not to do so.

Where Linn turned away from food, leaving behind the traditional family dinner, refusing or fearing to cook, my experience with those terrible dinner times made me vow that things would be different in my family. I swore that if I ever had a family, I would see to it that meal times were special, and that under no circumstances would they be a time to find fault.

When Jim and I started our married life in a two-room apartment in Peru, Indiana, I didn’t know how to cook. I had to learn, first trying out the usual groundbeef casseroles and tuna casseroles, as well as spaghetti, chili, and fried chicken, all using a stove so old that we had to light the oven and each burner with a match. We may have had to eat a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese (ten cents a box at the commissary), but at least we didn’t have that stomach-churning turmoil at our little chrome-and-formica table. Our kitchen was tiny and badly painted, and there wasn’t enough room to store everything, but I would not have traded that kitchen for my mother’s well-equipped one.

I learned a lot about cooking in those years. At home we’d eaten only what my parents’ store or my grandparents’ fields provided, so I grew up not having tasted fresh mushrooms or fresh vegetables like broccoli. I had no idea how to cook them. My mother rarely used rice, so I had to learn about rice. Because Jim was in the Air Force, and the commissary had to supply food for people of a number of nationalities, regions, and backgrounds, I was exposed to kinds of food that I’d never tried before. I delighted in experimenting, though never with anything too exotic. I learned about lentils and pinto beans, about brown rice, cabbage soup, and vegetable stew. And one more thing: I learned that, on a regular basis, and even on an airman’s salary, mealtime could be a joy.

There are two things from this period that stand out most clearly for me: the duck we stuffed and roasted for a Thanksgiving when we had to stay in Peru, a duck that was succulent, as was the orange-studded stuffing; and the now legendary disaster of the oatmeal soup, which came from my macrobiotic period.

When our children came along, we continued to make the evening meal a happy event. We usually all ate together at the table. As soon as the kids were old enough, they sat at the table with us, at first in a high chair, later in a booster seat. We taught them early how to conduct themselves at meals. And we revived the art of conversation at our dinner tables. They learned to eat a wide variety of foods and became accustomed to exotic spices. They learned to love good food and good company, and my daughter now confides that she hopes to be able to reproduce these experiences with her own children some day.

In Peru began my keen interest in cooking and in different ethnic foods. My horizons and my repertoire had broadened beyond the meat-and-potatoes diet I’d been raised on. When Jim and I returned to Michigan and became college students, necessity brought me to a greater understanding of the political aspects of food and hunger.

We had very little money, especially after our daughter was born, so I learned about combining foods in order to get complete protein without meat. I was good at stretching the food dollar, but it wasn’t enough; we had to cut some meat out of our diet. It was then that I read Diet for a Small Planet, a book whose message I was never to forget, one that eventually led me to vegetarianism.

I slowly began to learn about the politics of food, the power structure that assures some of us more protein than we can possibly use and others barely enough to live on—sometimes not even that. I discovered that in some areas of the world, women do not eat until the males of the family have been fed. Even if they are pregnant or nursing, they must wait, and in times when food is scarce, this may mean poor nutrition and a lack of protein.

The economic forces at work in the production and distribution of food are enormous and corrupt, keeping food from the starving in famine-struck areas like Somalia, driving out small family farms in the U. S., encouraging the genetic engineering of plant foods.

Books have been written on these topics, of course. The point I want to make here is that knowledge of these conditions and forces has made me more aware of how all of us living beings are interrelated, how the connection is there, even when we aren’t aware of it. We live in a world that is complex in its interweaving. The ramifications of what each of us does ripple out and affect people everywhere, as well as other living things. This has been said over and over again, but the knowledge is more urgently real to me because it came to me through the very basic animal need for food. When I read my spice catalog, I can find a discussion of the political situation in Kashmir and how it’s affecting the price of saffron. I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and realize how real and wearying is the search for enough calories, enough protein in some parts of Africa. These things make me understand how precious is the sharing of food under such circumstances, how precarious are the lives of so many of the earth’s inhabitants.

They make me understand why cornmeal is featured in the rituals of the Navajo, why bread symbolizes the body of the god, why food is at the center of religious and secular observances.

So the personal, the political, the spiritual intersect for me in food. For me, food is associated with generosity, warmth, and sharing. It represents human creativity in the vast number of ways in which it is prepared and served, and it represents too the dark side of humanity, its greed and excessive appetites. If I’ve written little about that side, it is because the scents and tastes and colors of the food I prepare speak to me more of joy than of despair. Yet it’s important to me not to forget that other side and those whose food is meager and unsatisfying.

When I have a vegetable garden once again, I will learn how to can tomatoes, green beans, applesauce, just as my grandmother did, so I can take those tastes of summer from my shelves in winter and warm myself with them. I’ll watch the seasons unfold and then drop away as my plants follow the cycles of their growth and death. When I dig in my garden, I’ll remember that the Native Americans think of rock and stone as the bones of Mother Earth. I will feel myself to be a small part, but not an insignificant one, of this vast universe, this creation unfinished.

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