Food, foreplay and the creative process

Food is sustenance for our body and soul - it’s ritual, ancestral, and also symptomatic of a sick society. My heart aches when I pass McDonald’s in Kapaa and the line is so long it’s clogging the parking lot, and yet I am certain there have been long ago days I was in that line.

Food belongs in all our stories - the kitchen table where we grew up, the gardens we planted and ate from, and the blackberry bushes that tore up our hands and stained our summer clothes - and the animals killed for our sustenance.

Food is the cow in the pasture outside my bedroom window with a mournful all night cry when they take her baby away, and the eggs we steal from underneath the chicken.

Food is a language between lovers and food preparation can be a sultry foreplay in a delicious relationship. My friends almost always gain weight when they enter a new relationship because food is part of the love ritual - the joining, the coming together, the opening of heart and hearth.

Food feeds our body and our soul, and therefore, it also feeds our creative process. If you show me the contents of your refrigerator or tell me where you buy food and how you prepare it - if you spend too much or too little, show me who you invite to sit down and eat with you, or who invites you to eat with them.…if you tell me what your grandmother's hands smelled like when she cooked, you’ll be telling me who you are.

Being on Kauai and being able to purchase food from the hands of the farmers who made the food is a luxury so many do not have the privilege to experience, something I never take for granted.  Some days I still eat standing over the stove, right out of the pot, soup from a can.

Waiting for the local avocados to ripen and planning a meal around an avocado is something I never did until I moved to Kauai. I long to volunteer at a farm, or take a month off and work the land, but writing consumes me - hence the occasional can of Amy’s soup, hovered over the stove.

Food is also how we grieve, how we carry love forward when dear friends and family have departed. Food is love and soul language, and this week, our writing community wrote to food - we practiced including it in our stories until we remembered that sometimes food is our story.

Author Thomas Moore reminds us that all eating is communion.

Living in southern California for over twenty years, I became obsessed with the farm workers - the Mexican immigrants who came up to work the fields and ensure food was put onto our tables. Years ago I purchased art from the then 92 year old painter Billy Woolway (who started painting at 82). Billy was also obsessed with the farm workers, and painted them on concrete in mixed media. While he was painting, he made soup with local ingredients from the farms he was painting, and sipped that soup while he decided if the painting was finished.

There was often a dog in the painting, or a woman in the doorway in a red dress.

Billy’s paintings hang on my wall where I can see them when I'm cooking - to remind me to connect with the land and the hands that feed us.

My grandmother’s hands always smelled of onions or peppermint, and her pasta vazhule from the old country fed our souls, though the recipe was lost after her stroke…ham hock, lentils, onion, garlic, love and laughter were ingredients. I often buried my face into her crisp apron.

My mother was a horrible cook and thought adding canned peas to canned Dinty Moore stew was a gourmet gesture. She despised being in the kitchen. I never once saw her chop a carrot or buy anything from the produce section. Once when my father’s boss came for dinner, she inadvertently cooked the pot holder in the cake and had trouble cutting it for the final course- a story she told over and over through the years.

This week students made lists, and one exercise was to list what was in their refrigerator right now. Then we wrote about what the contents in our refrigerator had to say about our life.

Here is what I wrote:

I am a woman on the verge of ending a relationship so my refrigerator is empty, where foods my boyfriend loves – cilantro and onions and fresh ahi and avocado with homemade tortillas were once waiting for an invitation to cook together, to play music, to move through the kitchen like the lovers we rarely were, in a constant state of foreplay but never moving beyond the flirtation, so that now the shelves are wiped clean, and only the freezer is stocked for tomorrow. Today the jars and condiments that once flavored our hungry tongues are past their expiration date, and so are we.

Whatever the details of its origins, eating meals together is linked to better health and emotional well being, increasing endorphin output by a factor of two according to a recent UK study.

Every day of the week, writers in our community write together live, in timed, themed writing exercises. Though I have never done a study, just an observation spanning eighteen years of teaching, I am certain writing together and reading back our stories has the same endorphin effect as sharing a meal.

What's in your refrigerator? What’s your favorite story that happened over a meal? How does someone who has died show up in a meal or in your kitchen? Who taught you how to cook? What family dinner table was so different from your own and fed both your body and your soul?

Read Elizabeth Becker’s story about about grief and baking and love, then write your own story.

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Join Writing at Red Lights free Substack to write your own food story. This week, read Elizabeth Becker’s story about apple cake and her dead father, followed by prompts for you to write your own story. Every Friday come write with us over the weekend, and share your stories in our Writing at Red Lights Facebook group.

Laura Lentz is the founder of Literati Academy, and the author of Freeing the Turkeys and STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey.