If you’d known me a few years ago, you wouldn’t think I would have such a good relationship with food.
I was raised in a household, like I’ve said many times before, where my mother was an incredible cook. What I haven’t mentioned are the other food-related issues in my house. I’m trying to stay away from detail, to protect the innocent, but what I will say is that my relationship with food was stressed from the time I was very young. Eating became my comfort, and binging my curse. I had younger siblings and friends who were not only thin, but had body types that made them look a way that I could never look. No matter how much I convinced myself that who I was was not who I wanted to be, I couldn’t stop finding comfort in food, so much that I barely tasted any of it.
I am a person of extremes. I am known jokingly in certain circles as “lobotomy girl” because of the extreme changes I underwent in my high school years. I arrived shy and blank, in my opinion, although my suburban-raised friends claim adamantly that I was a New Yorker through and through. My first year of high school saw me slowly moving away from my New Yorker-ness to being a “normal” high school student with a jeans and t-shirt uniform. I started heading to the Salvation army with friends to pick up t-shirts. And that’s where it started.
Indie second-hand clothes led to the also-indie idea of becoming a vegetarian. I started eating less and less in the dining hall: where I used to be able to eat anything and everything regardless of the taste, fewer and fewer things became appealing to me. I became a picky eater for the first time in my life, and I would fixate on one item at a time: piles of oranges, bowls of raw spinach, handfuls of cherry tomatoes.
That summer saw me back in New York. I met a boy who liked to wander the streets of the city at night, drinking black coffee. I adopted this habit, and the two of us would explore neighborhoods, cups of coffee sprinkled throughout the evening. Somewhere in my confused, teenage head, I decided that I needed a wardrobe to match my new life, so though the boy I had met was more like my former New York self than anything else, I chose to go in a different direction: it was black tights, red plaid and leather, even in the dead of summer, but even more so once the weather got cool and I was back in New England.
My coffee habit came with me as well, and for some reason, in my mind, my new image did not allow for much mealtime. I accompanied my friends to school, my coffee cup in tow. I ate, but unenthusiastically. I started to lose weight. I wore more black.
Winter came, then spring, and I was still traipsing around in leather and plaid and sometimes a spiky belt that I bought for two dollars at Goodwill. I drank coffee by the bucketload and mastered a permanent scowl: it’s easy to be angry in New England in the winter if that’s your goal, and it was mine.
By April, the snow had melted, but I was still bundled in my black. Then I went home for Easter break. My mother took one look at my box-dyed blonde-orange hair and essentially dragged me to a salon, where it was quickly transformed to something so dark it was nearly black, to cover my streaky homemade dye job. She forced me into some black pants and a collared shirt so that she could bring me to a party in Bedford, NY, and then promptly put me back on a plane to school.
When I arrived, back in my New York gear and snapped out of my oddly punk-grunge phase, I suddenly started getting compliments. All of a sudden, I wasn’t the fat kid anymore. How odd.
I slowly began to develop, for the first time ever, a healthy relationship with food. I made friends with a guy who grew his own tomatoes and went mushroom hunting, and suddenly, I realized that food didn’t have to be the curse I knew it to be. I fell in love with food, and fresh food especially. I was suddenly interested in different cuisines, in the way that flavors worked together. I gave up my vegetarianism when I went to France for the summer: that probably was the clincher. Being around people for whom food was such an integral part of life made me realize that my attitudes towards food had been unhealthy.
Now, I’m known as a foodie. Not only a cook, but as someone who will go out of my way to eat fresh tomatoes, who has my favorite things shipped from country to country so I can have them by my side. It took a long time to overcome my issues with food: if I’m not careful, the old feelings come back. I can eat a lot more than my 5′3 frame would let on, and sometimes I allow myself to, finding comfort once again in filling my stomach with things I cannot taste.
But then I remember the taste of a vine ripened tomato, of extra virgin olive oil on freshly toasted bread, of ripe goat cheese with a perfectly light red wine. I may not be able to kick all my old bad habits, but the new ones I have developed have brought me towards the love of food that for so many years I thought would be impossible.
