Musings on the Meaningfulness of Life and Food—or ode to tater tots
Sunday, Jan. 16, 2022
I just returned from the airport and dropping my daughter off to fly back to her real, adult life after spending the holidays here and seeing friends and family for the first time in 2 years (due to Covid). NPR had Krista Tippett’s On-Being program (https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/ ) featuring Oliver Burkeman who writes about happiness and time management. I was in a reflective mood anyway, but the discussion brought up some good points about the purpose of life and how to live meaningfully. I was reminded, too, that when I was developing my Center for Food and Culture, the business consultants/web designers I worked with told me about Tippett and said that my discussions of food reminded them of her. They suggested I start a podcast series modeled after her, something along the lines of “on eating.” This was in 2011, though, and the western world was just waking up to the idea of food as something meaningful beyond nutrition, celebrity chefs, or trendy food adventures. Ours is not always a reflective culture, and even in the humanities in academia, I found myself having to defend my research and thinking on food.
Times have definitely changed and people are more open to what I consider humanities approaches to life—looking at how different people over time and place have searched and occasionally found meaning in their lives. I still see the humanities as central and necessary, although I have found it useful to think about how those ideas can then be applied to changing food systems and larger cultural and political structures.
In my daily life, the meaningfulness of food is nowhere more evident than when the “children” are home. Now adults, the 2 younger ones are not as interested in food or cooking as my oldest was. He and I connected over sharing recipes and cooking tips, as well as philosophical discussions around his ethical commitment to veganism. He died from colon cancer, rather ironically since he was otherwise the picture of good health, in 2017, but he is very much with us, especially during the holidays. I still make his favorite dishes for those days, and we actively remember him in that way, but the activities around those preparations are not something that the others find as meaningful. That’s ok. We each have our own ways to express ourselves, and different things speak to different individuals. I enjoy the processes and tastes anyway, and we’re discovering new rituals that are becoming traditions for us—life goes on, but it always encompasses the past.
So, instead of including a recipe here, I’m reminiscing about some of the foods we ate and the meals we had this holiday season: lentil salad, apple waldorf salad, kale salad (with “massaged” kale, a descriptor that seems perfect for a certain attitude towards the green), pumpkin pie (from homegrown pumpkin), tofukey and a host of variants both homemade and store bought, corn pudding from a jiffy mix, frozen samosas and pierogi, and, always a favorite, tater tots. These foods were not particularly distinctive nor unique, but each was meaningful in its own way, embodying tastes, values, identities, and memories. A lot of the foods used short-cuts, but that was just fine—giving me more time and energy to spend with the kids, and to be with them in the fullest experiential sense. And ultimately, that’s why the food was meaningful. It brought us together, with hunger an excuse to stop what we were doing, to take pleasure in the moment and in each other, and tater tots did that just as well as long hours over the stove. That might be what I would serve Krista Tippett, too, if she ever came to visit. It would give us more time to talk. I wouldn’t turn her down if she offered to help and prepare other dishes, but that wouldn’t be necessary for the meal to be meaningful—just as the meals with my children.
