It is easy to think of all the ways you’ve been loved in flavors.

To me, love tastes like a kind of mango you can’t get in stores around here, hand delivered by a friend. It tastes like a stem of asparagus plucked straight and fresh from the earth. Like something foraged and placed into the palm of your hand to try, which always has an aftertaste of trust.

Love has an aroma. I think it’s unearthed dill plants that Candace sent home with me from her sidewalk garden, overflowing my kitchen counter. It’s my coat smelling like yesterday’s dinner of curried vegetables—homemade by someone making a new home. It’s the wet soil around the fig sapling, which Tony tenderly propagated to share. It’s pretty much any cup of tea.

Feeding someone is love in action. I sit on my porch and hear a chorus of baby finches in their nest every time a parent returns with their next meal. I can’t see them, but their sporadic agitation draws my attention to how dependent they are on someone delivering their next meal. Would we be here, any of us, without having been fed by someone at some point? I think of church potlucks for every occasion and freezer bags full of cookies my great-grandmother sent with me to college. I can’t fathom every hour my mother spent preparing family dinners, because she never complained, never kept tally—she only shared in love.

Pause for a moment. Dig into your most gourmet memories of caring and being cared for. What seasoning does that nostalgia give you? Which stories do you savor?

There are plenty of days when I am immersed in what’s wrong in our world. I cannot access hope when I focus on how we are divided, distanced, commercialized, and downtrodden. But when my friend Hope brings me a box of scones, everything changes. Tang of feta, hints of herbs—crumbling, evanescent bread reawakens my senses. But it’s the thoughtfulness baked into the gift that proves to me something different about the world. A gift of food or a shared meal reminds me that we all need to be fed, and that this is how we love one another. It’s how the earth loves us.

When Everything Is Transactional, How Do We Make It Relational?

We have become so distanced from this earth-love. When we talk about our food systems, we tend to start thinking about the big picture, about supply chains. We look at the number of people to feed, changing weather predictions, and climbing costs, and we worry. We too easily slip into discussing prices, weights, or destinations without attention to faces, stories, or roots.

The problems we face feel too large and too nebulous to begin to address. And how could we, when we can’t even call any members of this ecosystem by name? We don’t know the farmer or grower, the land, the chef, or even the delivery driver who drops food on our doorstep before hustling off to the next gig.

There is so much we lose when we do not know how our food grows, who prepares it, or the rituals behind it. We lose our sense of meaning, of being grounded to this point in history, of connection to the earth. Yet, although we have lost so many of our ancient practices, we have not lost one another.

We tend to not know where our food comes from unless it is handed to us by a friend. When I buy zucchini at the store, it is a commodity. When my coworker brings me some from her garden, it is a treasure. How many stories behind the squash at the store am I missing out on? It stands to reason, then, that our connections—friends, families, neighbors—are where we begin repairing the food and earth relationships that we have lost.

What happens when we honor food and its stories as the centerpieces of our relationships, rather than treating food as caloric input to keep our bodies, machines, and economy running? Take yourself back to a meal when you were fully present, immersed in the experience. Now compare that to a mindless meal, where you were rushing through and multitasking. Which one of those memories was then, and is now, more nourishing?

Growing Attention, Nurturing Relation

I cannot pretend to have answers to all our worldly problems. I alone cannot rebuild the networks that feed me greenwashed groceries. But right now, I can smile at my neighbors. I can pour this love I have for the world into each encounter. I can rebuild the ways we see and interact moment by moment by lost moment.

I can handwrite a recipe to share or be grateful when someone teaches me about their favorite mulberry trees. I can invite my neighbors together to share a pitcher of lemonade on the porch and, in the space of an icy glassful, shift our feelings from hopeless to whole. You can, too.

I am not special; I work in an office, and I write on the side. But I have been shown an abundance of love and joy indescribable from simple offerings—fruit, flowers, bread, toil. We are all capable of this intentional care of, and toward, one another. We always have been. Glassman and Fields, in their Instructions to the Cook (2013), which is based on the writings of the thirteenth-century Zen master Dōgen, write, “When we cook—and live—with this kind of attention, the most ordinary acts and the humblest ingredients are revealed as they truly are.”

I want to bring our attention back to these familiar things. This preparing, sharing, tasting, and enjoying. These are organic moments. They cannot be commodified or advertised or fundraised for. We cannot just teach this as a skill to targeted demographics. We can’t public-service-announcement it. We can only choose and choose again to live this way: with these nourishing moments as the most important thing we can live for. In fact, they are.

Love has a flavor and an aroma, and hope does too. To me, hope tastes like the seasonal traditions that bring us together year after year: fruit pies and chili cook-offs. It smells like soil refreshed by rain. It feels like the realization that we’ve had the tools to build the world we want to live in all along.

Touch, smell, taste the earth. Share what you have with all who are here.

Digestion Invitations

Imagine a cozy kitchen setting full of warmth and flavor. Who is there to take care of you? Who is there whom you will feed in turn?

Draw on your memories of the places you grew up. What sensory memories of food do you carry with you? How do they knead and mold you?

What do you have to share with others?

Featured Image: Photo taken by the author.

Citation:
Glassman, Bernie, and Rick Fields. Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters. Shambhala, 2013.