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The best is yet to be
If you thought my first column of 2023 was going to be about New Year’s Resolutions, think again. I’m no longer interested in imposing outrageous goals upon myself, only to wake up every Monday morning to start afresh. Nope, I’m not doing that anymore. I no longer want to hop on that bus. But in December I had a festive lunch date with The Sistas. As usual, we talked about food. We always talk about food. If you’re a friend of mine you’re a foodie, in some way, shape or form. We each (more or less) decided it was time to be more conscientious about what we eat, but we didn’t mention the dreaded, and much misunderstood word, “diet”. Believe me, we’ve all been on a diet of some kind. We’ve been to Counterweight, Weight Watchers, tried Keto, tried Intermittent Fasting, boiled up a batch of Cabbage Soup and drank our fill of Metrical. Deep down we all know what we have to do to feel better, be happier and become our best selves. If anything, during that lunch we decided to enjoy ourselves more and stop being afraid of food.
I’m sure some of all y’all don’t know what it’s like to be afraid of food. I know, for a fact, most of you do live with some kind of food anxiety. If you happen to be an adult, you’ve got food issues. If you are an adult with food issues, you’ve already shared your food angst with people in your life. Yes, you do and yes you have. I was raised by an Italian mother who had food issues. My mom’s biggest fear was to be “fat” and was most fearful of having “fat” children. It might be hard to believe, but pasta wasn’t something we were served very often. We knew from the moment we were old enough to get the food from the plate into our gobs, “pasta is fattening”. I don’t remember my mom ever using the word “fattening” but we knew. All one hundred pounds of her, Mom knew how to get a point across. She made sure we understood that certain foods made you fat. The End. Don’t get me wrong, we ate a lot of Italian food, but for every piece of lightly breaded pork or veal or beef on our plate, we were faced with at least two kinds of vegetables (one green, one yellow) and some kind of potatoes, no pasta. The potatoes were a nod to Dad and his Irish/Scottish background. “If you’ve got potatoes, you don’t need pasta.” On those special occasions when we did get pasta there wouldn’t have been another kind of starch on the plate of spaghetti or macaroni. There certainly wasn’t bread on the table if there happened to be pasta. It wasn’t just the pasta, or the potatoes. Mom had a way of looking at you when she figured you’d had enough. Any meal at our house was accompanied by the phrase, “The best exercise you can do is push yourself away from the table.” Everyone in our house had food issues. We ate healthy, wholesome, homemade food—all of it served with a huge scoop fear of becoming plump. Over my seventy-plus years I have listened to Mom’s voice in my head, especially as a mother when I served a meal to my family.
So, here I am in the second week of 2023 and I’m not making any New Year’s Resolutions. I won’t resolve to lose twenty pounds or to walk a thousand kilometres or spend one thousand hours outside while walking those one thousand kilometres. But, I do have some ideas. When I woke up on the first day of 2023 I acknowledged I am still a work-in-progress and likely will be for the rest of my days. I will be working on my outlook on life, and my life includes interesting food. I will definitely eat delicious food because I love food. I want to enjoy food without feeling guilt or remorse. If anything, I will stop settling for food that isn’t delicious and soul-soothing and exciting. I want to stop feeling bad about feeling good. Here’s to the baking, the broiling, the sautéing, the roasting and the frying. Here’s to the fresh, the preserved and the aged.I’ll raise my fork and my glass to the yumminess of 2023.
“May the best of the “repast” be the worst of the future”.
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