Food is Love

My first memories of food and all the complex emotions that surround it started around the age of seven. We used to go to my big Nanny's house, yes we called her big nanny. My mom's mom was big, and I was told she used to be a chef at the old Elizabeth Hotel in Halifax. Her kitchen always smelled like tea biscuits, homemade bread, and roast beef. She wore a dress, orthopedic shoes, support hose for her varicose veins and a big dress apron. I never saw her in any other clothes. She would hug me into her big wonderful bosom and hold me on her lap. She was my first memory of demonstrative love. Me and my two sisters and parents would go to big nannies house every Sunday afternoon for a visit and supper, all this topped off with Hymn Sing and The Wonderful World of Disney. We would gather around the big dining room table with my mother's siblings and my cousins and eat what I now understand was her wonderful magical food. I know as a seven year old I didn't care that much about the actual food then (except her strawberry shortcake) but I sure cared about the love and the feeling and the fun around that table. 

My big nanny died when I was nine and my mom carried on the tradition of suppers at her house when I had my babies. I then took up the cause in due time. All in all love and family and food are inextricably linked for me. When my children were older my husband was the Sunday chef, everyone gathered at his big dining room table on Sunday and I talked often of my big nanny and how important making these memories for others is. I lost my cooking skills (the little I had) and so I felt the weight laying heavy to carry on the tradition again after Terry died. A few of the kids moved away and I stopped regular Sunday suppers after a brief year of trying.  All that said my point is I know how much food and love are linked. I know how important the effort is to gather my kids and grand babies at my table. I feel joy when I do it and have them there, and I remember again big nanny in her kitchen.  Love and food.

My favorite movies are those about food, (check out Like Water for Chocolate, Babette's Feast, The Lunchbox), some of my favorite shows are those about food. I want to know the history of food, I drool in Lydia's kitchen. A scene in a movie where a family sits outside in a Italian garden around the table drinking wine and eating and carrying the plot along awwww gets me every time. My most favorite date memories with Terry revolve around a fancy or not so fancy restaurant with great food and all those innuendo's and heightened senses of taste and smell, like in the movie Nine and a Half Week. Better than a dozen roses, just talk food.   Sex and food

When our son died friends and family showed up first thing in the morning with food (I was young and didn't get it then, I do now). I've made a special cake every year for the last 17 years, the same one my best friend brought me that morning, the only thing I could eat for a week. Years later when I was in a clinical depression I could not eat for months on end. After my husband died I could not stop eating and stuffing myself, I could not stop buying food to fill the house, only to throw it out rotten.
Grief and food.

I get food. I get the connection, that visceral hook it has in me and in us all. I see how it can become an addiction, how it can make or break a person, their body, their mental health. I understand the need to strictly control what goes in the mouth in order to not feel that which is there. The deprivation, the victory of denial that can take the place of the real issue, it takes a lot of hard work and focus to starve and this distracts from the trauma. I get the cycle of stuff deplete, stuff deplete  repeat. I can see how it can change a person from a 100 lbs to 400lbs over a troubled life.  Mental illness and food.

So life goes on, I still have to eat. So I go wherever and whenever I am invited to dinner, I eat out with friends when I can. I invite people over so I can use my fantastic kitchen and make a nice meal for them. But I despise cooking for one, in fact I rarely and I mean rarely do it. And by "cooking" I am talking put a pot on the stove for Kraft dinner- and even that is too much effort if I am the only one eating it.  I have yet to go to a restaurant alone for my supper. So I have resorted to boxed dinners and or cheese and crackers and potato chips or ice cream for supper. My new single girl's supper. It's telling of where I am at. But more importantly- it is not where I want to be. I see a future where I come home and cut up some fresh veggies, cook something healthy just for me, experiment with recipes, set the table, anticipate and enjoy the meal I made just for myself. Or perhaps a evening in that restaurant I always wanted to try.  Just me, a table for one please. I see it. It is coming. It will be like another baby step on the road back to healing from this grief, to filling in this crater that sits in the middle of my life.   Healing and food.