Friday 18 December 2009

Bon Appetite!


Tonight I watched Julie & Julia, a movie about two women who find themselves through cooking. Throughout the movie, I craved practically every dish they made. I felt like just getting up and cooking.

As I watched them carefully prepare their dishes, from poultry to fish to sauces or desserts, I reflected back upon the two boxes of Goldfish my friends and I consumed late last night sitting in a dorm room at RIT. I thought about the Pop Tart I had for breakfast, the mini bagel pizzas the boys microwaved at 4 a.m. I realized how much we waste calories.

I'm not talking about nutrition here, at all; in fact, butter played a somewhat significant role in this movie, and in real life, Julie gained weight from her cooking endeavors. What I mean is, we breeze through food, taking no time or effort to prepare it, other than to hastily tear apart the plastic wrapper or the cardboard box that contains our sugary, processed, mass-produced meal. We put no thought into our food other than what we feel like, what is accessible, and what is economical.

I've heard it said that Americans eat differently than the rest of the world, in that we are too sanitary with our food. We do not like contact with it; we don't like to know exactly what's in it, where it came from, who made it, or how it came to be on our plate. Rather than being something that will soon become part of our very bodies, it's something distant and separate, that at some point, will disappear into our mouths, never to be seen again and quickly forgotten.


So while I'm home from college for 30 days, perhaps I'll try to get more involved in this ever familiar process of eating: less unwrapping and more cooking. My hope is that I'll stop missing out on the quality of food and the creative process behind creating it; that it'll be one more thing in my life a little bit more authentic, unique, and real, rather than processed, ordinary, and fake.