"I DON'T THINK WE'RE IN KANSAS ANYMORE, TOTO"

The last time I publically mused on food without a comic bent, I celebrated the life and death of a chicken and described my attempts to eat in balance with my surroundings. At the time, I was living off my savings (which had amassed to an amount that allowed me to live comfortably in Latin America), I had no business plan other than to take on an occasional translation and to spend my days writing or experiencing life, and I had a single mission to invite the greatest number of friends to my apartment regularly to eat whatever I happened to invent. In short, I constructed this writing venue, ‘Taking Tea In the Scullery,’ during the glory days of my relationship with food.

Lately, I am far from such, and everything I do reflects this fall.

Here is my present diet: Breakfast – toasted white bread roll (often 2) and butter; a cup of coffee with milk; sometimes a few cookies or a banana; sometimes orange juice. Lunch – white bread roll and melted yellow, processed cheese and a little fried doughball with chicken bits (coxinha, for those who live in Brazil) or white rice, red beans, grilled chicken and a bit of tomato; sometimes a little bit of chocolate afterwards. Snack – more coffee with milk; sometimes yet another piece of bread and butter or bread and cheese. Dinner – stewed, steamed or cooked vegetables or a vegetable soup; a simple salad comprised of two lugubrious vegetables; sometimes pasta and sometimes pizza (more bread and cheese); sometimes beer, usually when the neighbors pick up the tab (which they sometimes do in tandem with yet more pizza).

I have tried the following justifications for this diet that runs so contrary to what I enjoy, to what I spiritually and emotionally crave, to what I preach, to what I initially intended with this blog, and (here is the real kicker) to what I am trying so desperately to build into my new business (www.fabricario.com). Naturally (no pun intended), I do not for one minute believe my own sad plea for anti-gastronomic exoneration. Nevertheless, here is my dubious attempt:

1) I am very busy. I have no time to invest in cooking and little time to organize going to the weekly food fair or overwhelming grocery store.
2) My budget is pathetic. I would rather keep the food costs to a minimum and stick to what is easy to obtain.
3) My weight has been relatively the same for the last six years, so I am not concerned. I will worry later.
4) My diet in college was roughly the same. I got over it, so I know this is just a phase.
5) Organics Shmorganics. They are for people with money to piss away (or for producers who have recognized a capitalist goldmine).
6) I am unhappy, depressed and too emotionally weak to give a darn about something so futile as fancy cooking.

All of these explanations are very dubious and rather easy for me to refute on a point-by-point basis, but I will not do so just now. The truest way to refute everything I just wrote in one swoop is to admit the following: this diet, this whole darn eating plan (or lack thereof), this attitude, and certainly the apologia – they all just plain stink (this, short of describing how my stomach reacts to melted, processed cheese day in and day out). My truthful admittance: my whole body and soul are crying out in pain.

For the majority of my readers who are not organic-oriented or happy foodies (shout out to Josefine and my fellow kitchen bloggers!), you may be wondering why the melodrama. You may be thinking I am making it out worse than it is; you may be of the opinion that limp, little veggies just at night are better than what most people consume; you may be convinced that tomatoes at lunch really do constitute a whole salad; you may be thinking that I am whimpering over something that is such a non-issue or, conceding that this diet actually could be a concern for me, that I am whimpering over something that is so simple to change (if I really want to).
Therefore, I offer an anecdote to persuade you of the honesty in my affirmation that my body and soul are crying from my horrid diet. Credit my parents. My mom is not a cook by nature. This is not to say she is not a good cook (actually, she cooks quite well), just to say that her nature is not inclined towards the kitchen. Once my sister and I moved out of the house, she effectively moved out of the kitchen. Recently, my dad and she decided to bring back breakfast in the house. I don’t know what made them do this. I imagine it grew costly to eat out, or the same daily breakfast offerings seemed so dull, or running into the same people every morning became tedious, or it was one relatively easy action to take to be more zealous in dealing with my mom’s diabetes, or perhaps there was some yearning to bring things back to the home. Whatever the reason, the decision was made. Last I spoke with my parents, they seemed incredibly pleased with this new lifestyle change… something so simple that seemed to fill them with a sense of breakfast pride. My mom made a point of telling me about the change, which, in addition to demonstrating her reaching out and speaking my foodie language, was so expressive as to indicate a real effect on my parents’ souls; paraphrasing and interpreting permitted, I creatively allowed myself to hear the following: “our food ritual is making us feel good, so good in fact we feel the need to share it.” To boot, the topic of conversation immediately following the breakfast news made my jaw drop: my parents started a weekly yoga class. (This is jaw-dropping news because I had the impression that my parents breezed through the sixties and hippie seventies with only a brief pause to see the musical Hair and to plan the quickest route to Canada to avoid the draft), and also because the idea of my parents doing ‘downward dog for the sun salutation’ makes me smile). While I would love to attribute happy soul-fulfilling breakfasts as the sole decision to try yoga, I will not do so (I am sure I would lose a bit of credibility by attempting such). However, there is much to analyze in the fact that the conversation went directly from an improved breakfast ritual to a new attempt to honor the body (and soul). End of anecdote. So, when I attempt to evidence that my body and soul are truly crying from my diet, I point directly to my parents’ expression of newfound happiness from their new breakfast ritual. And as my parents are hardly as obsessed with all things epicurean that I am, I would venture to say, giving them due credit for their food-body-soul sensitivities, that I am even more visibly affected by food-related actions than they.

So, why, if I know I hate it, if I know it hurts me, if I know it weighs me and my soul down, am I subjecting myself to this white-bread-and-processed-cheese-and-coffee diet? Because I presently eat the way I eat for the same reason most people do things they know are no good: humdrum; habit; depression; frustration; sadness; anger; a sense of darkness in the middle of a sunny day; throwing up one’s hands and crying. I spelled it out in my six apologies above: I have buried myself below a rut of self-pitying justifications for my self-mutilating (or stomach-mutilating) actions.

And I am having a hell of a time breaking the cycle. Or I was… until today. Today, amidst everything on my list of things to do, I just stopped. I stopped and began to write. This is not to say I am having a Dorothy moment, where I wake up from my scary dream and the Wicked Grilled Cheese Witch miraculously stops tormenting me. This is to say that I am using writing to document my crawling out this dark, unhappy food place (which, clearly, is a dark, unhappy everything place). I have two blogs in English: this resuscitated food blog and ‘The Nude Maja’ (www.maiandros.wordpress.com), which documents my book from beginning to end. They both serve a similar purpose – writing as a tool to harmonize with my surroundings. I may very well take on all my sad justifications of my unhappy diet over the next few posts, analyzing why or how I fall back on these tricks of my mind. I may not. I just thought most of you who recognize that a) I have been absent for a very, very long time and that b) my state of ingestion is a faithful reflection of the state of my heart, would be relieved to know that I am now outwardly expressing both my food and my feelings in the way I do best – with words.

As I finish writing (in my kitchen, which is the only place I can pick up a very weak wireless signal from some unsuspecting neighbor), I am determined to take a small break before posting this article and to use it as the launch pad for my new-and-improved version of ‘Taking Tea in the Scullery.’ First, some puttering around the kitchen to challenge my Wicked Grilled Cheese Witch. Then, a triumphant posting.