• Home
• About CanCan
• Contact
• PR Submissions

Food is Good

I never have considered myself a gourmand. Sure, I can appreciate the finer things, but I “came of age” as a cook once I was in a place without a Western kitchen.

Over three months spent in Central America, I went into the Belizean rain forest with Mayan women to scavenge for jippy-joppa and dig wild ginger root.

I labored for hours to make gingerbread (which they pronounced gin-gur, with the hard “g” sound like in the word “again”) with them, in an outdoor kitchen. The bread was baked on top of a piece of zinc roofing with hot coals underneath it, then a bucket on top piled with more hot coals. It smoked like crazy, stung the eyes, and it was impossible to breathe or talk without a coughing fit.

I baked a Coca-cola cake for someone’s birthday in a converted school bus RV.

During my year in China I couldn’t read packaging or find familiar ingredients.

I had a toaster oven that was just large enough to hold one of those pans for baking 6 muffins.

I had two gas burners. There I became the queen of substitutions and making something out of nothing.

I learned how to make a passable Indian curry from a co-worker, and a Thai curry via a cooking class.

My cooking journey has always been DIY (slash) survival.

As such, I was bewildered when I met “true gourmand” food aficionados.

Bewildered because, for them, it wasn’t only about enjoying food, but about finding fault in food that wasn’t all they thought it should be.

And having lived for roughly a decade in third world countries, where to most people eating is a matter of survival rather than a luxury of a million choices, I was shocked to have a conversations like this:

Me: I made a quiche. Do you want some?

Food Snob: What kind?

Me: Spinach.

Food Snob: No, what kind of cheese?

Me: Oh, um, Monterey Jack and Swiss.

Food Snob: Hmm. What brand?

Me: Kraft? (I was on WIC at the time. You get lots of cheese.)

Food Snob: Oh my gosh. No thanks.

*end scene*

And I also found it offensive that being a gourmand also meant rejecting  food at family gatherings (and tangentially, rejecting the person who made it).

Does being a gourmand make food the Highest Good?

I can’t “stomach” a world where Food is God.

In cross cultural situations, I have put dozens of unappealing delicacies in my mouth in the name of honoring my host.

I often try to conceal the fact that I have been a vegetarian for 16 years so that I won’t have to see the disappointed look in my dinner host’s eyes.

What we eat is a strangely emotional realm. During the first week of school, as I served lunch to 17 four-year-olds each day, many of them cried and called for their mothers.

Why is the act of eating an emotional trigger? It is so complex and fascinating to me.

All of this has been on my mind because I spent the weekend cooking.

Some things were to freeze, and some were to enjoy in the moment. I made it all with the goal of nourishing and blessing those who would eat of it.

This weekend I made beans and rice, bean burgers, tofu burgers, nut burgers, bean balls, whoopie pies, and this Rosemary and Olive Oil Crackers recipe.

Making crackers has been on my Kitchen Bucket List.

This was my first time.

I won’t tell you the minor ways I had to tweak the recipe to use what was available to me.

But the end result: I can make crackers!

I hope if you were here you would have some, and not ask what brand oil I used.

Submit Article: Digg | Google Bookmarks | Add to Technorati Favorites | kirtsy | Stumble It! | Del.icio.us

Comments