KNEWSING 1: Fighting Food

I have decided that everyday I will respond to an article I read in the newspaper. Sometimes these articles will be front pagers; sometimes they will be paragraphs found right in the underbelly of the nytimes.com. I will read a different newspaper from a different city everyday, choosing something that stands out. It will be a combination of knowing the news and musing – I’ll call it knewsing. Why not? It’s also a way of opening up a discussion, so I welcome comments here, anytime, from anywhere.

Today’s article is from The New York Times. It’s called: Parenting and Food: Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever. By Frank Bruni
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30bruni.html

The article is about how to deal with your children and food – how to keep your sixteen year old from imitating the bulimic/anorexic model in the fashion magazines that sit at the check out aisle in the grocery store; how to keep your son from becoming the next case of childhood obesity.

Food strikes a personal chord for me. My father died of obesity, at 50 – a life cut short by too much eating. I myself went through a different disorder and almost cut my own life short by lack of eating. Food is something that I have hated for a very long time; fought with, Tyson-fisted. I have never been able to receive pleasure from food -- not the kind that soothes and eases, like the way the French eat, at Cafes, slowly. Or the Spanish and their Serrano, happily loving the fruits of the earth. I’m sorry for that, for that loss of happiness.

It's a happiness I channel by watching the food network and writing restaurant reviews -- talk about paradoxes and irony. I love doing both of those things. I love watching garlic sizzle on the pan on Iron Chef; the carots on the chopping block; I love writing about the way a succulent piece of broccoli tastes dipped in butter and coconut curry.

But it really is about so much more than food. My father’s appetite and eating was so much more than gluttony. Bruni’s article ends with a statement about the “mysteries of appetite.” And it’s telling, I think. This animalistic drive within us, like a pregnant woman who eats dirt, seeking minerals. The other day I saw a woman on the airplane, she took up two seats, and was so bloated I had the sudden violent urge to yell at her, while at the same time feeling like I should hug and ask her what she was really hungry for. What was it, in her, driving her to fill herself up to the extent that she got to the point where she had to buy two plane tickets just to take a vacation and fly back home to Tennessee. How is it that we have allowed food to stop nurturing us and start nullifying us? Why has food become something we fight instead of flavor?