An Ode to Eating

A thoughtful meal is a wordless way of saying grace.

I tend to get a little meditative when I prepare a major meal, especially as I tend to start early in the morning, after I’ve eaten a little home made yogurt mixed with jam from a good friend who is more obsessed with fermenting than me.  I’ll put down my tea and start on the things that take longer to set before the actual cooking even begins.  I’ll pour the last of the milk, from a different neighbor, into a pan and turn on the heat, remembering with the rising smell of the thick, fatty milk how I drove out to her farm and it was raining a little, and as we walked out to the storage tank in the barn we were followed by a herd of barn cats, all hoping for leftovers, and how we dipped out the milk in the overwhelming heat of the dairy ripe with the rich scent of milk, real milk, not pasteurized cleaned store milk, but milk that smells like fat and cow and grass, and then walked back out so I could see a calf that had just been born and struggled to stand, still a little damp from its passage down its mother’s birth canal, and how, driving home with a gallon of milk on the passenger seat in a reused Acme water jug, I burst into tears of astonished gratefulness, for a neighbor who barely knew me but unquestioningly let me into her home, sent me home with a gallon of milk because I’d called her up, haltingly explaining how I wanted to try making yogurt, and for a cow who produced this amazing, nutrient rich substance that smelled so vigorously of life I could barely breathe.

And then, coming back to reality, I add a little lemon juice to the now near boiling milk and stir until I feel the thick gobs of curd hit against my spoon, then I cover the pan and let it sit until, several minutes later, after I’ve started kneading bread in a bowl on top of the still warm stove top, I can check the pan and see a translucent yellow layer of whey, and, gently lifting the spoon, find rich, white curds of cheese, which I then transfer to cheesecloth, squeeze to remove the whey, and hang with twine over my kitchen sink.

While the cheese sets, I finish the bread and leave it to rise, and start in on the vegetables, washing, boiling and peeling tomatoes, chopping eggplant and peppers and garlic and onion and setting them aside, all the while falling deeper into a trance, thinking of picking the eggplant on a sun drenched summer day in the field up the road, surrounded by birds and insects and more often than not distracted by the farm dog, who would nose up unexpectedly between the rows of plants, invisible beneath the broad leaves of the nearby squash except for a wagging tail, to knock me over from my crouch and lick the exposed skin of my arm, which smelled of sunblock and dirt, until I would throw her ball down the rows of vegetables for her to retrieve and come running back, but not before she would stop to smell a deer track imprinted in the soft ground the night before.

Squeezing tomato juice into a bowl, my fingers slipping over the skins as they peeled away from the soft, tender flesh beneath, I think of eating cherry tomatoes off the vine, each bursting like a little flash of sunlight when my teeth broke the skin, each one a different color, a slightly different flavor, all mixed together in a carton like a bowl of multi colored candy, each fat and full of water and reflecting the sun.  I remembered teaching my cousin, who had one day picked tomatoes with me, running up and down the rows, singing and laughing and throwing tomatoes at one another, how to make pasta sauce from scratch, explaining how to remove the skin and squeeze the juice without squirting it half way across the counter, and watching as he drank the juice straight out of the bowl like it was nectar from the gods, which maybe it was.  The farm gods, the field gods, the kitchen gods: the little gods that grant us blessings in the smell of fresh milk, the taste of a sun-filled tomato, the sight of your first ever cheese sitting solid and real on your kitchen counter; the intoxicating odor of rising bread, so much like beer, the unbelievably rich purple black skin of an eggplant, the impossible way the inside of a bell pepper curves into thousands of translucent veins, so much like stained glass.

Finally, everyone sits down to eat, sprawling on the floor, on odd pieces of furniture, glasses of wine catching the dying sunlight from the window, using torn pieces of bread to scoop up curry coated eggplant and pepper, laughing in surprise at the unexpected bite of a piece of hot pepper, at the mysterious even brown of a piece of fried cheese.  Voices melt and join and blend together, woven together with the rain damp field of cows, the roasting heat of the field, the mellow warmth of my kitchen, with the windows wide open and letting in the sounds of insects and the kids playing in the yard next door.  Eating is a way to give thanks for life, for the joy of waking up every morning and finding yourself, still, remarkably, breathing, an astonishing collection of flesh formed out of the things you put into your stomach, broken down and reassembled into your lungs, your legs, and your heart.

What, I ask you, can be more defiant of a system that demands isolation, obedience, uniformity, than living a life so full of richness, possibility, and community it can’t help but sweep up others in its path, and carry us together on the promise of a future when every day can be filled with so much life we can barely stand it?

Hell if I know.