The long expected truth...

As I was sitting here today, taking in information and feeling. Crying, thinking, hoping, wanting and suddenly hungry, it occured to me that the stories we make for our selves not only guide us in how we live our lives but also how we eat and what we eat. Our foods create our bodies and these vessels become the way through which we interact our souls with the material world. But if our stories guide our food which make our bodies, then who we seem to be to the world will only literally be a figment of the imagination. After all, that is all a story is right? So I thought to myself, what is my story with food and how does it shape me today?

To start, I grew up in an Italian-American family in the restaurant business. For me food WAS life. Together with my mother's large Polish-Italo-American family and my father's carefully knit immigrant family, food was always the convergence point. Food was the place where we all came together and met, it bonded us, it gave us tradition, it filled us beyond any physical capactiy. Indeed we always cooked enough to feed an army and in a way, in our breaking bread, we were an army together. Our dinner parties and gatherings brought us such strength that nothing could stop us, or break us, and yet, many things did.

Aside from pulling my life together, food had an uncanny way of pulling us apart. The resaurant business is so much more than food, it is food taken out and made vulnerable because in serving it, you invite others to take part in actualizing their own food stories in one space. In a way, when you eat in public you make your self vulnerable, you share a very personal, intimate experience with total strangers in plain site and by making this the means by which you make a living, this vulnerability can lead to many possible outcomes. In the case of my parents, this lead to a disconnect in their relationship, communication and marriage. Somewhere between the salad and dessert, the water and wine, other people's stories became entangled in their own and the personal, protected, promised unit of two began to break down.

So for me food is a source of bringing together and pulling apart. To me, the act of cooking and eating is almost a magical play of power and control, of bringing together people who may otherwise never talk or of isolating myself from others I feel I would not have a voice or be heard with. But then again, this is just a story, based on a story. The actual stories, the happenings of our lives will never change, CAN never change. They happened, they are real, they are valid, they are past. But the myths and fiction we make up about them are the continuous act of creation and imagination. It is the mind making itself up at every moment. But we are not mind creatures, we are not only a head, and food is not meant for thought.

To truly nourish our bodies and understand our bodies, I think we need to look first at the facts and fictions that surround our power struggles with our world and our diet and our lifestyle choices. If it is true that the oracle of Delphi quoted to Socrates that the one ultimate virtue was to "Know Thyself" and if also it is true that we are what we eat, then to truly get a grip on what we are, thyself, we must look at what we eat as part of that. And if our food choices are guided simply by ideas we create about our selves and the world based on little stories, than we are nothing more than a figment of our own imagination. What then will it take to wake up, show up, be present and powerful in the real world. Where are we most of the time? I do know it certainly is not at the bottom of a sea salt and vinegar chip bag! In the end, isn't that why we peer down an empty bag of chips or look in the can of coke when we know we've finished it, or open the refridgerator for no good reason at all. What we really needed and wanted wasn't ever there, but somehow we got tricked into the process of looking anyway... Every time.