What I talk about when I talk about food

When most people talk about passion, the thing that comes to mind is the swooning, romantic type. The: I love you, I love you, I love you – wait – I didn’t read Romeo and Juliet, but I think this is what it was about. Things of that ilk.

I do not discount this as a real thing. I have had the odd Shakespearean tragedy in my life. Odd being the operative word.

But passion is so much more than a natural feeling between humans taken to a bit of an extreme. Forget not, we were all 16 once.

Passion is often what makes someone elevate their work to the level of not mere greatness, but art. At the very least, passion might make you think you’re competitive in your field.

I had an acquaintance who said she could sleep for Trinidad. In the manner of an Olympic event. That may yet be the saddest not-actually-bad thing I’ve ever heard.

Me, I eat. I eat with a passion. (I do not eat with a vengeance, as some think.) I eat passionately. I have a passion for food. When it is not there, I miss food.

And I’ve never hidden it. I’ve been open about my feelings since the early 2000s, when I started to write about food for Caribbean Beat magazine. I only did it for about five years, but there was a magic to it that made it feel like forever. Not in the dreaded oh-God-will-this-ever-end kind of way. Fifteen years after I stopped, people still introduce me as “the girl who writes about food.”

It was easily one of the happiest times of my life. I loved writing about food because it was, finally, the place in which I could use the language I most clearly understood. I do not only love food itself, I love the discourse of flavours and textures; the arguments about pairings and balances.

In the essence of those conversations, I found the words to talk about how to care and how to show you care. Love and its absence. Bad mind. Indifference. How to create communities of two, two million or two billion.

Don’t get me started on utensils. If you do not care about how a cultural group eat what they cook, do not pretend you care about their history or belonging.

Food, tragically, has become fashionable. It is always a dark day when something is trendy. Food is the last thing that should be trendy, because it is sort of like air being in fashion. I feel like it’s important for me not to explain that.

Food should be cherished and savoured. I do not mash up a food, nor do I kill a meal. I exact no violence upon anything I eat. I want someone to forward a reasonable argument as to why this is the language so many people associate with eating.

Of food I think only of pleasure. Many years ago, a friend and I were talking about the tedium of cooking for one. How easy it is to forget the celebration of cooking when it’s just for you.

I admitted that I too had fallen into the terrible trap of the too-simple meal. He said, “Yes, but you probably mean you make only one lamb chop, and then do some interesting with a bowl of rice. The rest of us eat tuna from a tin.”

I looked at my feet. He was right. Down to the kind of rice, he was right.

Naturally, I blame my family. When I was offered that first food-writing job, I asked what made them think of me.

“Because it’s all you think about,” is what I was told.

And it is-was-is true. In my family, we start talking about what we’re having for dinner while we’re having lunch.

These days I miss writing about food because, as I said earlier, that was a language I really understood. There are nuances of our lived experiences, feelings, appetites (pun noted but mostly unavoidable), vulnerabilities and pain, that I think I know how to talk about through stories about food.

I am not alone in this. I come from a long spirit line of people who have written histories and biographies through food and cooking stories. There is a catharsis in cooking.

I’m sure people who do things like interpretive dance, pottery and wood turning all feel something similar. There’s something about doing something withing hands or body, and working with the things of the natural world, like clay, wood or potatoes.

It’s healing. There is so much scope for healing.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.