Feed Your Soul

"What's your relationship with food?" I asked my ESOL students last night. Yuwei's brows knitted together in his usual intense look of consternation. "Do you eat to live, or live to eat?"

We were preparing to discuss an article from The New Yorker that I had sent out earlier in the week, a seasoned food critic's reminiscence of his mother's detailed recipes against the backdrop of revolving food fads.

Each student, in turn, talked briefly about how being so busy during the week made it difficult to enjoy food, made a "grab-and-go" mentality a necessity. We all agreed, however, that going to a restaurant on the weekend or sitting down with family on a special occasion for a long, leisurely meal was a treat.

Jana brought up some research she had done in college about the change in family ritual from dining together to eating separately, and alone.

"This is why there is so much problem now," she said. "Dinner was where you all talked about your days and shared your problems. Now they don't have that."

I shared my own memories of compulsory family dinners with the TV turned off, as well as my experiences in France with a close-knit family who not only lingered over two- or three-hour dinners at the dining room table, but also sat down to breakfast and lunch together most days.

"Food is not just about nourishing our bodied," I said, waxing bit philosophic. "It's also about nurturing our relationships, about caring for others and sharing time. Have any of you gone to a restaurant and noticed a couple or a family who are all sitting silently, each absorbed in his own electronic device?"

A collective groan of recognition went up from the group.

"Yes, it is so sad," Luz Alba said. "I will see people who are not talking to each other at all, but just…" Here she gazed down at her thumbs and mimicked tapping on a smart phone. Then she looked up at us and spoke sternly, her index finger punctuating her point. "When I meet my friends for lunch, I have a rule: all the cell phones go away. They are not on the table. We are here to enjoy each other, to talk to each other, not to look at these things and tap messages. It is so disrespectful!"

"Who was that guy who made the Apple computers?" Jana asked. "Yeah, Steve Jobs. Even he said his own children did not have smart phones and tablets and things. He said, 'I played outside; they are going to play outside!' Is good, I think, to be away from these things sometimes. I love my phone," here she patted her own smart phone, face down on the table in front of her. "But there is a time for it, when you are alone."

Our conversation wended through electronic etiquette and back to food, then on to the article. We discussed odd vocabulary ('foolscap' is a kind of legal-sized notebook popular in Britain and Europe) and various semi-famous chefs and food critics (they'd never heard of Julia Child. This made me sad, so I required them to find a copy of Julie&Julia and watch it, asap).  

Eventually, Yuwei asked about the idiom 'what's at stake.' I love it when they ask about idiomatic phrases, rather than just vocabulary. The Internet has made it ridiculously easy to find the definition of a word, but idioms are sometimes more elusive. When the meaning of a phrase is not embedded in the meaning of the words in that phrase, as is the case with idioms, culture and history come into play, making the discussion so much more interesting and fruitful.

I used a poker metaphor to explain this phrase, but I think it only confused Yuwei further. Then we discussed how this phrase is different from 'burned at the stake.' I didn't want one being confused with the other, as their meanings are so different. Our discussion seemed to bring the two around, however, in a kind of full circle of meaning.

"Those women had a lot to lose when they were tied to stakes, didn't they?" Van asked, facetiously.

Yes, I thought; there is a connection.

After discussing various kinds of foods made from animal organ meat ('offal' is quite similar to its homonym, 'awful') and the 'pre-Vatican II' era, we decided to bring in food to share next week. I suggested we each bring a dish form our native country. Van, who has lived in the US for more than twenty years, said she knows nothing about cooking Vietnamese food.

"Green bean casserole is the easiest thing to make." she said with her usual enigmatic smile. "Maybe I just bring that."

As Thanksgiving and cold weather approach, my thoughts automatically turn to food and how we define ourselves by the food choices we make. The author of the article we read (John Lanchester, "Shut Up and Eat," November 3, 2014) hypothesized standing at the pearly gates in front of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr., and pleading your case for having lived a good life by saying, "I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal." His point was that perhaps these choices are not political enough, that food choices alone cannot take the place of real activism, of deep involvement with the world around us. That perhaps our focus has shrunk so much that we think buying organic or free-range turkeys, then ignoring our family to check-in on Facebook while that expensive bird roasts, is sufficient to label ourselves political.

I put thought into my choices at the grocery store, but I also put thought and care into the way I interact with the people in my life. I never want electronics to take precedence over human beings in my life, so I consciously separate the two. Sure, my husband and I eat dinner in front of the TV, but we often talk right over it, as if it were just another loud table in a restaurant.

Sometimes food is sustenance for the body, and sometimes it is sustenance for the soul. When a student of mine was upset about an argument with her husband, who is in Africa, and couldn't focus on her schoolwork, I listened to her and comforted her the best I could. There was not much I could say, so I mostly just listened. When her pretty face seemed permanently stuck in the clouds of sadness and worry, I broke off a piece of a chocolate bar and gave it to her. That morsel of sweet cocoa and sugar finally elicited a smile.

I eat to live, yes, but I also live to eat, to enjoy the abundance around me, and to feed others the joy of nourishment. Share a meal face-to-face with someone today, and put your phone away out of sight. Your soul will end up even more full than your belly.