A Hermeneutics of Food

Food should be delicious.
Food should feed at least two of your three hungers (mouth, belly, heart).
Food should avoid being precious.
Food should avoid trying to be something it isn't: vegan hotdogs, for example, just should not.

Food should be made to eat quickly, standing up over the sink.
Food should be made to eat while driving, or riding on public transit, or pushing a stroller.
Food should be made to eat while sitting at a restaurant while four teenagers or college students hover nearby with water carafes and table brushes.
Food should be made to eat at dusk, after the sun sets into the water, and the grill is hot and everyone is just a little drunk.
Food should be made to eat at a desk, which you hate.
Food should be made to eat at a table for two on a vacation that has been in the works for over a year.

Food should be made to seduce, to impress.

Food should be made by women, but men-chefs get all the attention.
Food should be made by cooking school instructors who themselves were taught by old men, so that everyone who is anyone is still learning mother sauces as if anyone wants them.
Food should be made by your mother, so pay attention when she's in the kitchen, because her food will form the spine of your memories and when she's gone you will grieve her by grieving her potato salad.
Food should be made by your father, who will try to put pickled banana peppers on dishes they have no business being.
Food should be made by apprentice chefs who work long, long hours and who live in small, empty-fridge apartments.
Food should be made by people who do not give one single fuck about what they're cooking, but need to pay their rent.
Food should be made by eccentrics who live on Patagonian islands and cook like angels for groups of four.
Food should be made by immigrants who came here to have a better life and who know what the hell they're doing so just show them once and leave them alone, Martin. 

Food should allow you to recall other fine moments in your life.
Food should allow itself to be forgotten.
Food should be simple.

Food should be consumed on a melamine table off a paper plate while sipping from a plastic straw.
Food should be eaten languorously, like a cat who is playing peekaboo with a can of tuna.
Food should be scarfed down without ever looking at it, never taking your eyes off a smart phone. 

Food should loosen your chest and allow you to breath easier.
Food should quicken your pulse.
Food should make your shoulders stronger, from kneading and pushing and stirring and whisking.
Food should make your belly softer.
Food should cut across your tongue with a lash of acid, followed by a blurt of fat, each balancing the other out.

Food should not be too hot. It can sometimes be too cold.
Food should not be a challenge to those eating it. (I see you, lobsters.)
Food should not make the eater feel bad or stupid, in the case of "not getting it" when it comes to chefs with Opinions About How Food Is Done.
Food should be a mix of all foods, from all places.
Food should be sacred and separate, according to passport and time zone.
Food should be prepared according to the eater's religious deferences.
Food should tell you when it contains insects.

Food should be taken home from a farmer's market and cooked that same day.
Food should be packed up in boxes when you move houses.
Food should be forgotten in the fridge until it liquifies and is awful.
Food should be purchased in a hurry from a chain grocery store while you try to head off a tantrum from your toddler.
Food should be eaten only with good wine or filtered water.
Food should be eaten only after at least one beer.
Food should never be eaten with a beverage.
Food should always be eaten with a beverage.

Food should avoid making you feel silly when you eat it.
Food should not be fancy just for the sake of being fancy.
Food should not be low-brow just to prove a point about fanciness.
Food should not avoid its own truth.
Food should try to be plain, unless it is very fancy, in which case it should just go ahead and be fancy.

Food should be delicious. It should be simple, unless it's impossible to make simply, in which case it should be extravagant. It should be seasonal and fresh. It should make your body feel good; if not your body, then your heart, or your mind. It should be familiar, unless it is truly the first time the dish has been prepared in human history, in which case it should be sublime. It should be a real part of your day, but feel free to ignore it in favour of more pressing matters. It should be delicious, though. Don't eat it if it's not delicious.

Sagittarius at Gunpoint

I have this theory about memories and moving. It goes like this: when you stay in one place as a kid, you're connected to your past in a way that people who moved around a lot aren't. You can walk past a park and say, "That's where we went sledding every winter," or "That's where Dan's brother knocked his own teeth out with a bottle rocket." You grow up with the same group of people: elementary school, middle school, high school, bachelor parties, first communions, whatever. Your parents are friends with the same people they went to school with. There's a web. When you're a kid, it's invisible. When you're a teenager, it's stifling. But when you're an adult, it's reassuring to know that you can, kind of, go back to the same old haunts. I know, I know: change is the only constant. But even when they rip out the bank where you opened your first account and replace it with an A&W, you can still remember the bank.

I moved five times before I turned thirteen. My dad worked for IBM, so we would relocate, stay in a place for a few years—three, three and a half—and then he would get promoted so we would pick up and move somewhere else. It was never just down the road: we moved from Toyko to Calgary, from Ottawa to Victoria. I went to five different schools before I started high school.

On paper, this is glamorous. "Oh, you lived in Japan. You were a child model. You rode elephants in Thailand and spent Christmas in Hawai'i. Must have been amazing." And I'm sure it was! I have mementos of those experiences, like a little Thai outfit that I will one day stuff my own child into, or a tee shirt from 1985 with a whole travel itinerary applied in iron-on felt letters down the back: Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia. But I don't actually remember much about that time in my life. I was too young, and everything was too transient. Nothing is truly foreign to a young kid, because everything is happening for the first time—there's no context that says, "whoa, this is unusual!" because every damn thing is out of context. Childhood is literally creating context. (Exhibit A: we took an infant to see the Chihuly exhibit at the ROM and I was blown away and he was like, "Oh, more colourful shapes, like the rest of the world.")

I don't remember the bedroom I had when I was ten. I don't remember my teacher. I don't remember what our dining room looked like, or if we had a basement, or what the bathrooms were like. I remember snippets: getting a rug in the shape of a teddy bear and setting up camp, lamp and all, in my closet in Calgary, only to be told it was a fire risk; leaving a Japanese lesson having learned the word for octopus (tako), and thinking, "I'm never going to need to know that one" (never thinking that one day I'd greedily eat takoyaki on ramen dates in my thirties); taking the bus to my first date in Victoria (I saw the Fran Drescher vehicle The Beautician and the Beast, with Little Frank); my sister's second birthday party at my grandparent's cottage; ice skating at the Calgary Olympic Stadium; sitting in the car and eating McDonald's pancakes before skating on the Rideau Canal, my newborn brother's bellybutton stump and how gross it was. I barely remember any friends; I remember a handful of moments, with vague sketches of buildings or people in the background. Without that constant reiteration of this-is-where-that-happened, memories don't stay. I sometimes think about what it would be like to show up at our house in Tokyo and ask to take a look around. Would I remember things then?

I don't know that my parents ever thought of any one place as their "forever home." They had both come from small southwestern Ontario towns; as a family, we never discussed going back to either of them as any kind of "homeland." My mother's parents had been living near the Bruce Peninsula for a few generations, but my father's parents had escaped post-war Poland with zero fucks given. We've never visited, never been in touch with family over there. That side vanished into the forward-thinking ether. Our nuclear family was our whole world, for most of my life: aunts and uncles and grandparents lived a flight or a ten-hour drive away. Every few years, friends and teachers and neighbours would be in the rearview mirror. Aside from my family, I don't know anyone who's known me since I was a kid. Even as the world was big, our web was small.

If you're up at all on your star signs, you might be familiar with the idea that Sagittarians are natural travelers. We yearn for the road, wanting to see the world, never feeling settled in one place, never wanting to. But what if that's forced upon you? Would it be as fun? As urgent? Frankly, I'm a terrible Sagittarius: I'm rarely optimistic, change bums me out, and extroversion makes me sweaty. But the travel thing has always made me curious. If I chose it, would I love it?

The driving force of my adulthood has been finding home. It propelled me into relationships, and made my biological clock deafening. It has been seeking the place where I feel most myself, most human, and finding that most everywhere comes up short. (As I write these words, it occurs to me that the geographical cure for whatever is wrong with me was never going to work, because feeling outside is an issue with my insides; but, certainly, a sense of being from somewhere in particular might have helped define some edges.) Being nomadic in my childhood, keen on escape in my teen years, and evicted in my thirties, has given some broad strokes of why this particular concept might have eluded me. And honestly, I don't know that I'll ever be "from somewhere;" Stratford is the closest, and it feels good to be back; I'm still keenly aware of the history people have with each other here, stretching back to pre-K and sometimes earlier.

My main memories of childhood are of airports and flights. I remember a sunrise over the cloud cover during a red-eye back from somewhere far. I remember TVs suspended above seats, every screen playing the same movie, cheap headphones given out by stewardesses. I remember the different music channels we would tune into, and how the children's channel would loop every 90 minutes; on a fifteen-hour flight between Chicago and Narita, you could hear Peter and the Wolf ten times. I remember the in-flight meals, delivered on greige plates, the excitement of getting a whole can of ginger ale to myself, the little fake salads and gravies that were not the right colour. I remember how loud the toilets were when they flushed, and how thrilling the moving sidewalks were. I get knocked sideways by sense memories, like the particular smell of a jetway, or of a hotel with a pool.

And it's not like I feel robbed of anything, because I'm sure the experiences I had were valuable and formative, if not exactly seared into my conscious understanding of myself. But I also wish that I knew where capital-H home is for me, truly. Is it Stratford, where I went to high school? I've moved back, and it feels a bit like I'm pretending at rootedness. Is it Sauble Beach, our seasonal home since forever, but only during the summer months? Is it any of the other places, or somewhere further back? Would my Polish great-aunties welcome me? (Doubtful, if their surly New World counterparts are any indication.) I feel most alive when I'm on the edge of a great wind, usually next to a large body of water, with all the ions in the air. I've never lived there, but I've felt that wind, and it feels like it unlocks part of me I didn't know existed. Can I live in a gust of wind? Can I bring my toddler and husband?

Once, during a move, a hotel clerk tried some small talk and asked me where I was from. I didn't understand the question—we were moving towns, so technically, we were homeless, but the idea of being "from somewhere" was also just not something I had internalized. "Toronto," I answered, even thought I hadn't been there in years, and didn't know anything about it; I had been born there, so I was from there, right? She peppered me with questions about what I liked to do in the city, and I stared at her, blank-faced, because I wasn't really from there at all. I wasn't from anywhere, in that moment. And that is something I remember.

Anthony Bourdain Taught Me How To Eat

 Anthony Bourdain taught me how to eat. He taught a lot of people how to cook, how to travel, what to order in a restaurant, what to pay attention to—the feeling of barbecue sauce dripping down your chin, the sound of peanut shells cracking open under your fingers, the smells of meats (all kinds of meats) roasting or braising or grilling or steaming, the sound of a thousand people screaming in a city street or a thousand mosquitoes buzzing in a forest grove, the taste of damn near everything—but he taught me how to eat.

When I was eighteen, I worked in a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop manned by twenty-something year old cooks and chefs: half-papered cooking academy drop-outs who thought they knew better than their teachers, and who decided to open a little nineteen-seat joint to prove it. It was half Tampopo and half Kids: sociopaths saucing noodles at 6 PM and drinking shots at 9:30. It was 2002, and Bourdain had recently published Kitchen Confidential (the cover photo showing him and two unnamed associates posing with kitchen knives the size and attitude of machetes) and A Cook's Tour (the cover image of him, in some unnamed Asian country, camo tank and half-smirk on display). Everyone in the restaurant had read them, and most had taken the Gospel of Anthony to heart, which was: eat good food, see the world, and be as macho as you can. Bourdain knew he was putting on a persona—he says in the introduction of A Cook's Tour that he wants to see the world, and hopes it looks like the movies—but for precocious chefs in small towns, Bourdain was an avatar of all they might be one day: smoky, smart, gnawing on roasted duck on the floor of a Vietnamese fishing hut.

Perhaps most of all, Bourdain represented a certain kind of authentic man. He certainly curated his experiences to be tough, what with the drinking and the drugs and the travel. He wanted to get in there, see things not from the window of a tour bus, but from the back of a sampan. Cooking, which is often fussy and perfectionist, wasn't really his calling. He wanted to be a war correspondent, with the front lines on the edges of the kitchen. He offered a path into the world that was informed by adventure and great food, not necessarily in that order. I still remember a daily special that our cook created: mango and lightly grilled octopus served wrapped in udon noodles and nori, a bastard's version of sushi, and easily one of the top three things I've eaten in my life. That dish would never had been made if the cook hadn't said, "Fuck it, I've been reading about Bourdain in Japan."

One of my favourite things about Bourdain was that he ain't no snob. He insisted that international street food be taken seriously as a culinary tradition, which, for a guy who came up in relatively posh rooms, bucked the norm. He opposed the insistence that only French food could be serious, and, with his books and television shows, showed viewers at home the plethora of unfamiliar, weird, confusing, and downright unpalatable eating there was to be had. Some of it was stunt food, for sure, but a lot of it was just saying, "Hey, chuckleheads, get a load of this pho." I really believe that reading Bourdain in 2002, before moving to Toronto and before getting my feet wet with David Chang or Munchies, opened me up to what was out there. It taught me that you can eat basically anything, anywhere, and have it be meaningful.

Because Bourdain was passionate and erudite and raw and sexy, because he was well-traveled and a halfheartedly reformed drug addict and an accomplished cook, because he could write 3000 words on, basically, "I went for dinner at this place," he was a hero to a lot of us young food-minded folks. His space was unabashedly male—there were not a lot of women in his books, like, at all—but it was also about all the damage that he had inflicted on his body and his psyche, and that he had lived to tell about. He was a survivor, saying, "Hey, follow me. I made it. You might too."

In later years, I stayed away from his media presence, because I was worried that he was like an album I had listened to too much freshman year: would it hold up if I went back and spun it again? But I always loved encountering him in the wild. I read his articles in Lucky Peach. When his partner came out against Harvey Weinstein, Bourdain was there by her side. His support for her complicated his macho persona: it was her fight, and he was in her corner. It felt grown-up, to be there but not in the centre of the frame.

And then, of course, he died this morning. I wonder if those young punks who staffed that hole-in-the-wall had a bad time hearing about it. They followed a lot of his same path: drugs, disappearing into other jobs, running out of money or good luck before their thirtieth birthday. He was what winning looked like, what getting out alive could be. Suicide is a haunting thing—questions about what went wrong, and how, and why—and it's scary, because maybe you or me hold the seeds of it in our own imperfect little hearts. It seems like something we're powerless against, because we don't see the dark heart of it, creeping up and around and inside; we see the outside, where people fake feeling okay for one more day, until they don't.

I am so, so grateful to Anthony Bourdain for teaching me what it is to eat. Taking my time, considering my options. Treating highbrow like lowbrow and vice versa. To have a brotherhood of cooks, a community of people who look to food to answer questions: how am I creative? How do I express myself? What do I bring to this millennia-long conversation about how we nourish ourselves? To go in search of deliciousness in unexpected places, of adventure, of hope. Because that's what eating great food is, really: it's the hope that somewhere in the meal, you'll taste something you've truly never tasted before.