I still greet my loved ones the way I was taught: have you eaten?
If the answer is no, we eat. There are no ifs or buts about that. Everything else can wait until food —hot, nourishing— has been consumed, and hunger has been satiated. I’ve spent a few years thinking on this, the whys behind it. An ex joked it was because I had a feeding kink. (That ex is an ex for a reason.) But no, I realized recently that it’s because food is holy to me. More than any notion of god, more than the fox gleaming at my throat, food —and shelter— is numinous, a small miracle in a cold universe.
Food to me says, ‘I might not be able to do much but I can keep you alive, I can keep you warm.’ Food says, ‘I want you in this world of mine. I want you alive. Eat, please. I can’t fix anything else, but I can do this. I love you. Eat.’
My family wasn’t good at expressing love. As a kid, my mother told me that words were meaningless. You showed your love through action, through sacrifice. She worked relentlessly to demonstrate this, pulling impossible hours at the business she’d co-founded with my father while the latter lolled about in an opiate haze. (Every year, I think about burning him offerings so he’d have a way to feast in the afterlife. Every year, I put the hell money away.) Regardless of everything else, she kept us fed. My mother could not cook (sorry, mom, it’s true) to save her life, but there was always food.
“Eat,” she’d tell me. “This will help you grow strong.”
I have a dimming memory of being five or so, and wandering through a forest of legs. It is Chinese New Year. The air smells of spice, and sizzling meat, and rain, and a drift of cigar smoke as my paternal grandfather puffs away in the backyard. There is conversation. Laughter. My aunts are cooking something but I am too short to see what. Every now and then, they lean down, offer me a spoonful of something unutterably alien to child-me.
“Eat,” they tell me, chuckling warmly. “You’ll not regret this.”
I didn’t. It was delicious every time.
When I first moved to Montreal, I did not sleep or eat —not really, almost not at all— for about three weeks. I was very distinctively going a little mad from deprivation, but was too stressed to do anything but wobble through each day, becoming progressively more exhausted. Friends took me out one day to Korean BBQ, and surrounded by the warmth of their conversation and the comfort of their presence, I relaxed enough to be hungry for the first time in weeks. I don’t think I stopped eating for hours. I think I barely spoke, and I’m pretty certain people quietly fed me shares that weren’t mine.
As the days grow chillier, I’ve been thinking a lot about stews and soups, rich curries to simmer on the stove for hours. Mulled wine. Hot chocolate, but from scratch as a a chocolatier taught me to do. Hotpot and my friends around a table, talking and laughing. Bourguignon as a beloved’s mother taught him to make it, as his child-self remembers it tasting. There’s a reason we pass down recipes like commandments, like prophecies. The gods may very well not exist but food is still holy, as is love, as is hours of labor, and ground-up spices, and braising meat, and the steam rising from a cauldron of food, and someone saying, ‘come in from the cold. Please eat.’
Please live, they’re telling you, as they ladle a second helping into your bowl. I love you too much to let the dark take you yet.
***
As always, a cat photo. I hope you’re staying warm.
This resonates with me. In my family, food is important. Meals together, shared even in times of strife, have weight. Some holiday get together dates are sacrosanct due to the food and company, in good moments and bad. Food is love and life. We cook for those we care about, or pay for their meals when out. We have recipes that date back generations (we typed out my great grandmother's handwritten recipes and turned it into a PDF to share with the family. Those recipes were passed down to her from generations before as well. It is a tasty part of family history).
My retired mother lives alone and when by herself she barely cooks, but when we would visit, or when she was taking care of my ill sister, she would cook a delicious feast. Sometimes simple, sometimes over the top, but always full of love and attention.
My mother is not good at showing affection. She is still learning. But through food? That is a love language she understands and can give.
This is quite powerful-and lovely.