Food Is Love

I became a vegetarian this year. Mostly out of rejection for a fast-food culture and a desire to heal my husband's Crohn's disease and my own migraine headaches via the stuff we eat, and also because I am disgusted with Americans' relationships to food. Unfortunately, this has put a deep chink in the relationship I have with my parents.

My mother thinks that in some sense I am rejecting her. I get it. To my mother, food is love.

When I told my mother I was a vegetarian, she became anxious, and immediately began suggesting meat for me to eat.

“Venison is low in fat.”

“Mom, I’m not doing this to lose weight. I’m doing this to be healthier, and because I
don’t want to eat things that suffered for me to eat them.”

“What about chicken? Chicken isn’t meat!” Sometimes my mother doesn’t pay attention in her panic.

“No chicken, mom. I took two cans of chicken over to the food pantry today.”
“But you’ll still eat fish, right?”

“I’ll make it simple. If it can be categorized as ‘dead,’ or if it had to be killed in order for me to eat it, then no – I won’t be eating it anymore. This includes things like fish, meat, poultry, and shellfish. So no shrimp.”

Silence.

My mom doesn’t realize that her panic has less to do with my physical health and more to do with our emotional bond. Jonathan Safran Foer points out that eating is as much of the fabric of culture as anything else – but I’m pretty certain it goes farther than that.

In my family, the only thing that will pull us together is a holiday meal, and sometimes that isn’t even enough. My grandmother’s children fight like pitbulls on PCP, and mostly it is my sister and I who now plan holiday meals and send invitations and attempt to make a cease-fire. I am the preparer of the turkey – although I should now say that I was. My sister and I shoulder(ed) the burden for every holiday meal that was served at my grandmother’s house. My mom may be thinking that I won’t be preparing these feasts anymore – but I simply won’t be preparing the turkey. Let’s face it, it was all I could do to prepare the damn bird anyway – I nearly threw up in the cavity every time I had to stick my arm inside it. Nothing grosses me out more than a giant turkey carcass with its white birdy flesh. I never actually ate much of the stupid turkey, anyway – I was too tired and too disgusted by the time the whole ordeal was over. I had to wait a day or two before I could stand to look at the meat.
Enough on the carcass, back to the family – showing up at the meal means that you accept the love. Because food means love. Provisions are given for those who live far away, but for those within driving distance, it is a denial of emotional bounds, a severing of ties, a denial of love.

I think the idea of food as love in this family originated with my German great-grandmother. She came from pre-Nazi Germany, and while not a Jew, I am certain still suffered from poverty. I’m not trying to minimize, but simply to point out that Germany before the rise of the Third Reich was a bad place for everyone. To leave that kind of extreme situation and come to the bounty of America must have been overwhelming. I get the sense that she spent a long time trying to compensate for the hunger she suffered.

My mother says that she served frosted cinnamon rolls. With butter. In point of fact, she served everything that could be buttered with butter, and some things (like the frosted cinnamon rolls) that you wouldn’t really serve with butter. Butter lived on her table. One of my uncles butters the bread he uses to make tuna salad sandwiches. My mother butters turkey sandwiches she then puts mayonnaise on.

Why all the butter?

It’s a long answer. Let’s put the butter aside for a moment, and talk about emotional eating.

If you think you’re not an emotional eater, I bet you are. If you have a favorite food or foods, or if I can get you to hop in the car with me right now by promising to take you to your favorite restaurant no matter where it is in the contiguous 48 and pay the bill no matter how high it goes, there is, somewhere in you, an emotional tie to food. Chocoholic? Emotional. Coffee addict? Emotional/physical. Ever been “on a diet?” Oh, boy. Denying or restricting in any way is emotional right there.

Now my mom’s family – emotional eaters. They deny it. Two uncles who are obese (one dead, complications from diabetes) one anorexic, one obese mother (heading into morbidity). I’m sure that this seems like a complicated landscape – but we have skipped the generation that will put this picture in focus. The missing fork, as it were.

The lost generation here is my grandparents. My grandmother hates to cook. She doesn’t much care about food, though she does have her preferences, which are mostly convenience foods and Cheetos. She is suspicious of those who do like to cook. I suspect this is a class difference for her – having been raised as a very wealthy young lady and educated, cooking was not something she did but something that was done for her. When she, as a rebellious teenager, eloped with my working-class grandfather, (he of the German mother with the affinity for butter) she found herself attached to a man who expected her to get in the kitchen and make something. Every day. Three times a day. And did not applaud her efforts as superhuman, but instead considered them mundane. This is not a judgment against my grandfather, but rather a statement of fact. I get the sense that his philosophy was that he worked, so he thought she should, as well.

It should go without saying that my sister and I consider(ed) my grandmother a horrible cook. Food was frequently served cold at her house, either oversalted or bland. On one notable occasion, I mistook homemade mashed potatoes for powdered instant potatoes and therefore gagged on the lump I found, which in fact was a large lump of unmashed boiled potato, and not a large lump of congealed flakes, as I originally thought. Since food = love, you can probably understand from this metaphor that my grandmother was not a demonstrably affectionate woman. As her children were looking for affection and warmth, they of course went to the maternal arms of their grandmother, who fed them emotionally and physically. Often at the same time.

Now, I’m not faulting my grandmother here – I would have resented my kitchen as well; much the same way that I resented my cell phone when I had a boss who rang it incessantly. In point of fact, she often jokes that she only has a kitchen “because it comes with the house.”

To this day, my grandmother’s children are food-reward trained. They feel justified in giving themselves ice cream for good deeds, behavior – even a good workout. They’ve passed it on to their children, who use a particularly strenuous workout as an excuse to go out for pizza. But with this comes a particular self-loathing, along with a certain cognitive dissonance and blindness – all of which comes down to one simple equation: If food is love, this love will kill you.