She was lamenting that she wished she could do something like I'm doing. She can. The thing that people fear is missing foods they love. Truthfully, nothing is off limits. I can have whatever I want. I just don't want some things anymore.
Oh, sure, sometimes I think about the caprese salad a friend made with ripe peaches last summer, or chocolate Haagen Das, or the artisanal chocolates made at the shop next to the nail salon, or a nice glass of organic and biodynamic wine. But I'm not really thinking about pizza or Shake Shack or even bread and cheese.
And I don't feel the emotional hook with any of these foods anymore.
So much of what we connect with the goodness of food is emotional. The way we feel at a celebration or when we get together with friends or when our mom made us a grilled cheese sandwich. Celebration. Connection. Comfort.
I will confess that over this ten week period, I have felt raw at times. Naked. Vulnerable. As I tell myself my food stories and contend with their meaning, sometimes I feel like there's nowhere to hide from the things I've been trying to mask behind food.
Like the unbearable grief I felt in the aftermath of my mother's death last summer. I made chicken paprikas to feel close to her. It's a heavy meal, akin to cold weather seasons and not something I ever would have made or eaten in the summer. After my dad's death almost 20 years ago, I'd hunt down a place that makes its own ice cream and serves it on a small sugar cone. My dad used to take me for a ride on summer evenings and we'd stop at High's for ice cream near Glen Echo Park. He'd get either pistachio or butter pecan. I'd get strawberry or peach.
There is food I connect with every important relationship in my life and with every important event. The thing I love about what I am learning, is freedom. Freedom to choose, and not to be directed by powerful memories, emotions, and biochemical forces that so often choose for us, and so often are driven by unconscious impulses.
It's not really the food choices that drive the desire to eat this way forever, but the freedom.
The Green Wilderness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.
Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.
Pictured: Shrimp over petite romaine leaves with artichoke hearts and pine nuts. Dressed with Primal Kitchen Caesar dressing
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