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…