What Has Age to do with Food?

While the process of aging is hardly surprising, the changes in priorities and leisure preferences that accompany aging are what interest me of late. The particular preference under consideration today is food, or rather the greater emphasis I place on eating it. Now I am not one of those people who never valued the taste and cultural role of food, but eating as an activity simply had a lower priority than meeting attractive women, hanging out with friends, doing athletic activities like mountain biking, or going to a bar/dance club. In the years since leaving my birthplace food has grown in importance to me. Before progressing, I want to note that while enjoying what I ate might not have held the greatest importance to me, I was often a hungry young man. Moreover, even though I was slight of build I prided myself on the quantities of food I could consume. What could have been an educational time in my life, namely learning how to cook and appreciate food during my adolescence, was not to be. My stepmother was not a particularly impressive cook. Despite this, my father had a standing rule that his children (stepchildren were exempt) had to eat everything on their plates. So I learned to eat quickly and without tasting much. This was a necessity, as I had to eat quite a lot in order to balance out the calories my body consumed while swimming or playing water polo.

The habit that changed my orientation toward eating was the weekly trip my freshman dorm floor would take to various restaurants. Embarrassed as I am to say this, none of our choices were particularly refined. Frequented establishments included the Olive Garden and a chain sushi restaurant called Todai. Even though the food we ate was only of middling quality, I began to relish the pleasures of a decently prepared meal and the sharing of this activity with others. What really pushed me toward the appreciation of food culture was studying in Italy. There, surrounded by restaurateurs who took great pride and pains for their dishes, I learned that a good meal could be memorable and even transcendent (of language, of expectation, and even sensation).

After college I became more invested in certain foods, sushi primary amongst them. My exploration of sushi grew so that not only was I eating copious amounts of the stuff (we are talking whole serving trays for one person here) but I was eating the more adventurous varieties: ankimo, sea urchin, barracuda. I also began to frequent other restaurants that specialized in nouveau California cuisine, country French cuisine, and local produce.

At this point I am still no expert, but the importance of food continues to grow; just this morning I was reading about a biking tour in Quebec focused on La Route des Saveurs. This is the sort of change to which I have been inferring; instead of placing physical activity first, eating has become the primary activity with the physical activity serving as a means of transport and exercise. I make no claims to this post offering enlightenment about the human condition. What I will say is that by changing my orientation toward food I believe I have altered my frenetic pace, learned to consider culture from the palette as well as the eye & ear, and have turned what used to be a mundane action into a necessary yet potentially transformative activity.