My relationship to food started at young age. I believe it was called Pablum. From there I graduated to Gerber and from there to Pop Tarts, sugar coated cereals and doughnuts–that’s how my mom sent me off to school in first grade.
A grilled cheese sandwich and Campbell’s soup was the only thing on the menu if I came home for lunch at noon. Otherwise we could eat – and I knew by age 10 – the most disgusting array of slop from the school cafeteria for 35 cents a day. Welcome to grade school in northeastern Ohio.
I suppose I’m lucky to be alive.
By grade six I had developed survival skills and knew enough to squirrel away my lunch money so I could skip out at noon and go to the bagel and bialy place three blocks away and get a fresh bagel and a soda. I went to a Catholic school and even then could see that the Jewish folks down the road had better food.
By the time I was in high school, growing like a beanstock and playing sports, I had a ravenous appetite; mom’s cooking just didn’t cut it. She was cooking for six and had to make ends meet, but I was the oldest kid and her cheese whiz/beef casserole, macaroni and cheese, corned beef hash from a can weren’t what I needed or wanted. Being Catholic, we couldn’t eat meat on Fridays in those days, so Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks or spaghetti with tomato sauce were the only options. Pasta primavera? Apparently in Ohio, vegetables were not meant to be sautéed, mixed with a light cream sauce and served over linguini. I was forced by my father to apologize to my mom for storming out of the dining room (car keys in hand) one evening when I was sixteen, saying “I can’t eat this. I’m going to McDonalds.”
My high school actually served good food at lunchtime, so I knew that it was possible to have decent institutional grub. In college – central Ohio – food became a problem again. Meals on campus were included in our tuition plan, but they were inedible. And I wasn’t the only hungry and angry freshman. Several of us instigated a massive food fight between two dorms after our second week in school. When asked by the faculty why we did it, we simply said, have you tasted this swill?
After college I started to cook for myself. I wasn’t a good cook, but anything was better than what I was used to. It did help me relate to the struggle my mom had; I remember I didn’t know the difference between a cucumber and a zucchini.
A few years later, at 29, I moved to NYC. And although my love affair with food had always been off and on again, it was this city that made it a permanent part of my life. My wife is a great cook – an academic brat who went to high school in Italy and Germany and who’s mother was a good cook – and I have learned a lot from her. I even make my own pasta. My guacamole (cilantro is the key) is award winning. In the morning, I make scrambled eggs (organic) with spinach and tomatoes and a good bagel on the side, along with fresh juice and a bold cup of coffee as easily as falling out of bed. When people come over to our house for dinner, the food is always better than anything you can find in a restaurant. The bottom line is that good food – day to day – can be easy and inexpensive to prepare if you know how to do it. I just wish I had known how to make it happen earlier in my life. Today my relationship to food is good.