Food and Fiddle

March 14, 2012

Connections. That almost sounds calculating, kind of like “networking,” using people for what they can give you. What I mean by it is a sense of connectedness to a place or to other people or to one’s own past, or to a present and future. It is a feeling that one has a place within this vast universe and, in some way, matters because of that.

Connectedness has always been important to me, I think because I grew up feeling slightly on the outside of every culture and group I was in. I now know that we are all “on the outside”, so to speak.

Food in a strange way offered me connections. I didn’t like to cook--I grew up surrounded by brothers and was offended when I was told I had to work in the kitchen while they could play outside. Naturally, I rebelled. But I loved to eat. I loved the tastes of food; the way food seemed to bring the whole world to a halt to concentrate it in those acts of chewing and swallowing.

That may have been because both my mother and her mother were wonderful cooks. Both were grounded in the southern traditions of frying and making pan gravy, biscuits, green beans flavored with fatback (my mother later left out the fatback and steamed vegetables), sauces, and wonderful desserts. In my early years, we went to my grandparents’ house in Kannapolis on Sundays for Sunday dinner (the big family meal after church—both of which were southern institutions). I remember my grandmother cooking and serving wonderful dinners. I would eat and eat, usually to the point of a stomachache from eating too much! My brothers and I would turn eating into a competition, but I oftentimes overate out of the sheer joy of the food.

To this day, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, biscuits, cold slaw, fried corn, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and pecan pie take me back to my grandmother’s table. That’s also the quintessential southern meal, but for me it’s special and very personal. I’m named after my grandmother--her name was Lucille—and my mother was adamant that I inherit her violin, which I now play as a fiddle for old-time music and in a band, the Root Cellar String Band. Memories of those meals, then, definitely connect me to my past and my family, but they also connect me to my own present, a present that combines that past with all the new potentials for connectedness.

Beginning the connection

Nourishing connections—To Food, Through Food

March 9, 2012

A birthday seems like an appropriate time to start a project like this food blog. It offers a way to measure life every year, not so much in terms of progress towards a goal, but more as a time to evaluate how life is being lived.

I focus on food here, but I’m not the standard foodie. I’ve always loved to eat and to explore new foods and socialize around food. But I always also did a lot of thinking through food. That might be because I became aware very young that there were differences in the ways in which different people and cultures ate and that food and eating could mean different things to different people. The differences don’t sound like much—Appalachian North Carolina (my father’s side) and piedmont North Carolina (my mother’s)—I felt them and frequently felt on the outside. Then we moved to northern Virginia when I was about 7 and I learned that I had an accent and ate weird food like grits. Then we moved to Korea (my father was with the State Department), and that introduced me to real cultural differences—and also the fact that people were still people regardless of the language they spoke, the color of their skin, or the strange food they ate. From there it was a logical step to studying folklore, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and philosophy in school, and then applying all of that to food. 

So, I’m now a food studies scholar, but this blog isn’t about that. It’s about how food gives me a sense of connection to my own past, to other people, to places, and to the possibilities in the present. I learn about things through food and think through things with food. I also like to give to people by cooking for them or by creating meal opportunities (parties). Those are the things I’ll be writing about here. I hope my musings are useful—and enjoyable—for other people as well, and that they nourish the imagination and soul, if not the stomach…