Balance
Notes on eating, pleasure, and food culture
1.
When I’m feeling lost, I always go back to food writing. Diana Henry waxing about chilli flakes. Nigel Slater remembering a single pickled cherry blossom on top of a cube of tofu. Caroline Eden on winter melons in Uzbekistan. Laurie Colwin gushing about the scrambled eggs, heavy with cream and butter, once made for her by ‘an Englishman’. Reading about food doesn’t just make me hungry for food. It makes me hungry for the possibility of life. I, too, could find joy in a packet of cherry tomatoes. Could make my own raspberry jam. Could eat unruly steamed dumplings at a tiny restaurant in Seoul as night thickens.
2.
Recently, I have also been reading about hormones. I’m feeling a bit out of whack, so instead of simply blaming my hormones, as I tend to do, I’ve decided I want to know more about them. During the day, thick book on my lap, I try to absorb facts about our intricate internal processes, most of which are directly linked to consumption and digestion. And at night, in bed, I myself am absorbed, into stories about food, slow and steady so I can relocate myself.
My mind is working hard to find equilibrium. The inflamed gut / the renewed fun of the microwave popcorn from my adolescence. Glucose spikes, trickier at certain times of the menstrual cycle / the joy of a buttery apple crumble at all times. How to be both sensible and sensual. Practical and pleasured. Balance doesn’t come easily to my all-or-nothing temperament.
Don’t take this one source as gospel, K says about the hormones book.
It’s all based on science, I counter.
What he is saying is: don’t believe, without evidence, that your blood sugar levels must be disastrous and insist you only want to eat low-GI foods and then wrestle with it because you love white rice, white rice is your soul food, white rice is an innate part of who you are and at the heart of all your favourite memories at the table.
3.
I wasn’t taught how to eat, the mindset and method. But the lessons probably depend on where you’re from and what you believe. In my Asian culture, the grins of my relatives and the mirror image of the people around me lets me know that I am good at eating: I eat a lot, I eat quickly, I eat to completely fill my belly but also because I love delicious things. In my white culture, a deep, pervasive idea tells me that I am bad at eating: I eat a lot, I eat quickly, I eat to completely fill my belly even though I should be worrying about the burden on my weight/hormones/mentality. My Asian culture is also conscious of these things, and there is a problematic mixed message, but at the table, I often forget. At the western table, I never seem to. Good and bad are places I don’t want to go, especially with food. But I get the sense that noise has spun me into disorientation. I can’t feel solid ground—perhaps the intrinsic link between wellbeing and food and knowing, or that wellbeing is about joy—and so I teeter back and forth across the latitudes.
4.
In Why We Cook, chef Irene Li says that she sees cooking as an experience in which you’re different at the end, changed. This is true of eating and reading for me, too. Usually, there’s an emotional wound that needs tending, and I turn to these activities for magic: a different perspective, a salve, a shift in a new direction. But there is also a neglected pleasure centre there in all of them, right in the slow braising of an aubergine / the immediate tang of kimchi against the tongue / the exact right phrase on the page. These things can nourish the part of me that I don’t always allow. Pleasure is good for us.
5.
A concerned friend asks if I’m getting enough protein as a vegan, and I reflect on my diet, realise there may be gaps. I start adding natural protein powder to my breakfast, and this feels good. I notice I feel a bit less tired overall. There’s a profound pleasure in being practical, too.
6.
Monday night. K suggests making a soffritto, so I dice the vegetables. I can’t find the best method—they all end up as tiny wedges instead of cubes—but I enjoy lining the chunks up and pressing the blade through them. Jots of primary brightness in the pot, they look like a facsimile of a summer meadow. We make up a recipe, adding two old tomatoes, cannellini beans, some orzo and a tin of chopped tomatoes. It’s more delicious than I expect it to be. I don’t think about if the meal contains a balance of food groups, even though that was the focus of the chapter I read earlier. I eat fast and full and with deep joy.
7.
Intuition, maybe.
Like, I finish reading the hormone book and although I intended to make notes, I didn’t write a thing. In my mind, I stored a few simple facts that seemed immediately useful: certain plastics mimic oestrogen, and there are several specific things to check when feeling exhausted. For the rest, I had the feeling that in a subterranean part of this body, I already know how to care for myself, even if I don’t know the habit of every hormone.
Like, there’s knowledge, even the tiniest amount, before the preparation of every meal and inside every new yelp from the body. And for the gaps, there are people who can fill those in when necessary, in a specific and focused way.
Like, when I take the book back to the library, the staff member looks at the cover and says, ‘that’s probably one to dip in and out of, rather than read in one go’. This feels like the ideal answer to my, and all, question(s) of balance.
8.
That night, in bed, I pad down to a quiet hotel dining room in Kyoto. Bowls containing whispers of rice and tofu and vegetables are laid out on a wooden tray, and there’s a ceramic thimble of green tea.
The next morning when I wake, I take three small bowls from my kitchen cupboard and place different foods inside each—peeled clementine segments; yoghurt swirled with honey, dusted with hemp powder and topped with two chubby blackberries; a sliced avocado drizzled with olive oil and chilli flakes. On a little side plate is a chunky end nub of toast, buttered. I eat at the kitchen table, satisfied with this effort, and gaze out at the garden.