Been thinking about transformational experiences. Alice Waters talks about how she had a transformational experience with food in France that set her on her life's path, and a fabulous book I read recently, Last Child in the Woods (by Richard Louv) states, more or less, that when people have transformational experiences with nature (particularly in childhood), the connection lasts a lifetime.
For me and local food, I keep going back to when I was 23, living alone in New York City and wearing little fussy corporate suits at my little, fussy corporate job at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's landmark-building headquarters on 23rd Street (back when the company was still in the tower). For those who know that location, you will immediately realize that I was mere blocks from the Union Square Greenmarket, which I visited every Wednesday during my lunch hour, rather than participate in the free lunch offered in the basement cafeteria at "Mother Met" (as the company was nicknamed). The day I saw brussel sprouts still on the stalk on which they grew was my big "aha" moment. "Wouldja' look at that! Who knew? There's a whole world of wonder out there," I thought to myself as that brussel sprout stalk became a metaphor for life's mysteries and joys waiting to be experienced. Of course I bought it, and the visual of me in that suit, going up that escalator amongst all those pale-faced corporate employees who just emerged from the basement, proudly holding my three-foot stalk of brussel sprouts, still brings a huge smile to my face all these years later.
And so, it is with great pleasure that I watch little pillows of brussel sprouts emerge on the stalk in my kitchen garden, 900 miles and a lifetime away from that corporate-suited other-me who picked through purple potatoes and fiddlehead ferns without knowing I was setting myself on a path.
And I wonder--what was it for you? What was it for you that turned your head and heart and mouth and soul in a new direction? What was your transformational experience?
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1 comments:
This was a question hard to resist - I'm surprised that you don't have any other comments.
In my experience, I took home-grown produce for granted since I grew up with it. I think that my real transformative food experience, although it took years before I actually got serious about applying it to my life, was in a hospital coffee shop. My father was dying of colon cancer upstairs, and I was mindlessly eating a sausage biscuit. My sister suddenly said, "How can you eat that?" That question has resonated with me for 21 years. It was the first time I truly connected the food that I was eating with my body.
What's strange is that I'm the conscious food consumer now, and my sister is not.
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