A very long rant about food

Eating is such an opportunity to take a necessity and turn it into a gorgeous, luscious experience. Food is nourishment (hopefully, depending on what's chosen), and also so many other things -- a cultural experience, an artistic expression, a means of bringing friends together, a reminder of childhood and family, a connection to the constant reality of needing to sustain our own lives, a venue for all our idiosyncracies, quirks and creativity -- and we get to indulge several times a day. I have enough idiosyncracies about food to supply a small country, dozens of personal rules and I break all of them regularly. I adore food and everything about it -- shopping for it, growing it, preparing it, eating it, sharing it, looking at it, smelling it, arranging it nicely on a plate. Sometimes at a restaurant the food isn't arranged as nicely as I'd like and by the time I've finished reorganizing my plate and making it look more to my liking, everyone else has finished eating. At the same time though, I can easily go to the store and get my lunch directly from the produce bins and eat without even having a plate. I don't like heavy, diner kind of food unless I'm driving cross country and then I'll stop in absolutely the worst diners, the ones that serve things like chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and I'll eat whatever the special is and look at the people and make up stories about their lives. In anyone else's culture I'll eat just about whatever, and I love those experiences.  In spite of being obsessed with how beautiful food is, at least once a day I have a blended salad kind of thing, greens and either fruit or veggies whizzed up in the blender as a smoothie, because the added nutrition that results from breaking down the otherwise undigestible bits is worth not making it pretty on a plate, plus it tastes spectacular. The one consistent quirk I have is a dislike of large quantities of food on my plate - the gigantic portions that a lot of restaurants serve up nearly make me ill and sometimes I have to pack up half of my plate to go before I can bring myself to start eating. I nearly never eat at those buffet places, partly because food sitting out on a steam table is never very good, but also partly because I'm so uncomfortable eating around those big heaping plates of stuff, the cult of quantity over quality, and it just makes me feel sad to be there. I like to see a big border of plate around the food, because I really like to see the food.

And then, the other aspect of food that I'm obsessed with is the fact that our bodies are built out of the foods we eat. This seems obvious -- but apparently not to everyone. I work with people who have all kinds of challenges, I've had friends and coworkers over the years who have physical, emotional and mental health issues, and rarely have any of those folks changed their food first, and for the most part not even second or last. I'm amazed when people go to doctors, take meds, accept a poor quality of life and never once think, maybe all this garbage kind of food isn't good fuel.  People who believe that the chemicals in the pills they take have power in their life for some reason don't believe the chemicals in their food might also. It seems crazy to me.  And it isn't even truly about convenience - the people who say they eat microwave garbage or fast food things because they're so terribly busy probably spend more time on their food than I do. It doesn't take any time to "prepare" a piece of fruit, and I can put together an amazing salad in less time than it would take them to drive to a fast food place and get through the drive through. (And if I throw the veggies in the blender I can be done before they would get their car started.) I don't own a microwave and I don't think this slows me down. I think terrible food is an acquired taste and raising children on frozen convenience foods and drive-thru's is a kind of child abuse.

Food is more than "just" nutrition, but it shouldn't be less. The way we choose to fuel our lives says so much about the quality of that life. And the way we approach the things we do every single day matters so much more than the big one time gestures people get so excited about. We're built out of the nourishment we choose and our lives are nourished by the little everyday choices we make and food deserves to be beautiful, delicious and healthy for human consumption. Otherwise, why bother?