Food as love.

If you’ve ever read  The Five Languages of Love book, or done one of those flippant Facebook quizzes, you’ve probably heard of the concept that we fall into particular camps regarding how we express our love for another – romantic or otherwise. Inconveniently, we also use this filter to perceive the actions of others as loving or not. If you’re curious, feel free to do an online search for the relevant terms and discover if you do perceive the actions of others as loving, and I will use the term nurturing as well. The fun bit is seeing if you and your partner, if you have one, view things the same way. I’m betting you don’t.

One of the main ways I demonstrate my love towards someone is to cook for them. Food is and has always been a big part of my life so this isn’t exactly surprising. I recall being sixteen and cooking a dish which at the time was not only a favourite of mine but also I considered being fairly cutting edge. Please bear in mind it was the 1980’s.

There was this guy I was trying to impress and hopefully get further along the baseball diamond scenario with (first base, second base – you with me?).  I even had two versions of this winner dish. The classic version was pan fried chicken breast fillet with a bacon and avocado cream sauce. I know, told you it would be classic. My alternative version was pasta with a chicken, bacon, avocado and cream sauce. Even now as I type these words, I cringe at the thought of dry stringy chicken meat (which I’m sure it was with the fear of food poisoning looming over my head), hard cooked nubs of bacon and under-ripe soapy tasting avocado in a too sweet creamy bath.

I can’t remember his name only that my parents had gone away to their beach house for the weekend and the coast was clear. I can picture a pimply face, short dark hair and him leaning against the kitchen bench whilst I tried to win him over with my kitchen confidence. The wine was Mateus rose – that classic semi-sweet from Portugal. I won’t reveal how well my efforts were received as my mum might read this.

A really beautiful part of the school that my children attended was the rosters that were set up when the class had a new mother. Healthy meals were provided that would nourish the family of the new baby. It was a Steiner school that my children attended so many dietary variations such as vegetarian, allium/dairy/gluten-free and so on had to be respected.

Only a few years ago, one gentleman I had started dating was quite strict on only consuming free range meats and had been lamenting the dearth of smallgoods that fit with his self-imposed parameters. My local organic store stocked a wide selection so I gathered salamis, sliced cured products and sausages into a bouquet complete with tissue paper wrapping. Again, decorum will prevent me from delving into precisely how grateful he was but I’m sure you can figure it out.

What I’m saying is nourishing people with food is one significant way that I show how I care. Of course, I do like compliments and affirmations of I love you but if I cook for you, it’s because I love you. The next bit is figuring out how other people are saying it to me.

Word Con 2, graphic novels and me

First up at Word Con 2 last week, was Robyn Doreian in conversation with Simon McKeown. Writing for illustrative text has been a subject of ups and downs for me. I don’t read graphic novels or comics so I really had to work hard at finding aspects that I could relate to and work with.

Simon’s comics have a strong Victorian thread as they centre on the grand old hotels of Bendigo. The second in his projected series of ten, ‘The True History of the Whipstick Sound’, obviously features many musical references. One double page spread shows album covers of fictional bands. It is this sort of extra layer of information that I really enjoy and thanks to Simon’s prompting I went back to scour a reference book I own – “1000 Record Covers” by Michael Ochs (see links here and here).

It made me consider my own relationship with music, which I will admit is not overly deep. I do remember a second hand record store that was on Burke Road in Camberwell. Records were displayed in liberated milk crates alphabetically but not by style. Personally I thought this was a genius approach as I became exposed to things I made never have previously come across. There was a turntable with a pair of headphones controlled by the grumpy staff – just like in the movies. For a middle suburban teenage girl, it was all very exotic. I uncovered The Damned there.

And for those who are curious, below is a mock up of the front cover and one internal page of the comic I’ve been working on. 

The story centres on a woman with taste synaethesia and her journey in life. You can read the prologue here

Gretel - prologue to a graphic novel I'm working on

She couldn’t help it. It was part of her. It wasn’t something that she one day decided to do or something that she could turn on or off. All her life, people had told her to just ignore it. You couldn’t just ignore it. It was distracting. People were distracting. It wasn’t a simple thing to walk down to the shops for a newspaper. She liked to wear smudged sunglasses and an old cap low on her head to avoid any unwanted attention from people. She mostly wore drab grey loose clothing. Her eyes looked only a few steps ahead so she didn’t actively walk into someone. That would be the worst. Catching someone’s eye or having to engage in conversation was bad enough. Physical touch was too much.

She read somewhere that it had something to do with extra links in the brain. Doctors had wanted to study her brain but she had no interest in submitting herself to endless rounds of tests and scans. Letting her body go into one of those huge expensive machines wasn’t part of her plan. Not that she really had a plan. Her plans usually went as far as what work and other obligations she had that week. Family birthdays, sure, were kind of hard to get out of but she avoided appointments where possible. She hadn’t been to the dentist in five years and had started to worry if that sensitivity in her top right teeth was actually a problem. The thought of someone’s hands in her mouth was more than she could bare.

Who knows what the dentist or their assistant would taste like? Thirty year old carpet, skin that has spent too many hours in the sun all sweaty and salty or over-heated milk sickly sweet and sour. They never tasted like warm cherry pie or straight from the oven chocolate cookies. With all of the possible tastes in this world, why was it that she encountered more unpleasant than pleasant ones. Did other taste synesthetics experience the same thing? She didn’t know anyone else with her gift so couldn’t answer the question.

She’d never met another taste synesthetic. She first learned the term when she was a teenager. Wikipedia and internet chat rooms were her salvation. A doctor had declared his diagnosis one day after years of visits. Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia to be precise. As a baby, the notes on her Maternal Child record book noted that she had been ‘failing to thrive’. Her mother had always fussed over her poor eating habits as a child and hoped that things would improve when she started school. Surely her peer group would provide a positive influence. They didn’t.

 She was petit and found it easy to fade into the corners. At recess and lunch time she managed to appear occupied with packing up classroom activities, tidying her desk or taking a trip to the bathroom. Her teachers never seemed to notice that she spent more time unpacking her individually wrapped lunch items than she did consuming them.

The crackers and the carrot sticks had to be in separate containers. Cheese slices had to be a particular brand and kept cool. Cross contamination and possible food spoilage were easy excuses for food to be put in the large round file in the corner of the classroom. Other kids turfed their dry crusts and browned apple cores amongst the scrunched waxed paper and plastic scraps. Gretel became adept at hiding her mother’s homemade treats in between the foil and brown paper bags of the class’ detritus.

After school she would retire to her room and sit with her favourite blanket under the desk that her mother had kept from her own childhood. Her mother envisioned the little girl at the desk reading her beloved books saved from her own childhood, cutting and gluing artistic creations or drawing grand designs on endless supplies of paper. Instead, Gretel would sit leaning against the wooden desk, with the afternoon sun streaming through dusty net curtains onto her legs until she succumbed to snooze-land.

Her mother was grateful that Gretel didn’t come home from school and plop in front of the TV like other children she knew. She assumed that the school day exhausted her sweet little girl. Gretel lacked energy partly due to her lack of food consumption but also because she found interaction with other people so energy zapping. They were too stimulating, too distracting, too much. She couldn’t watch TV or go to the movies. All those people, all those words and sounds each with their own taste. Everything got too much. One would be lid ice-cream, another would be defrosted bread, synthetic maple syrup, damp grass, raw potato, and ear-wax or week old kitty litter.

She could understand the appeal of texture and temperature when it came to food but flavour as embodied in food was a foreign concept to Gretel. She would taste flavours thousands of times a day and so didn’t experience hunger as others did. Flavour went beyond sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. She had tried and failed to describe the taste of vinyl car upholstery after hours in the sun. Oily, sweaty and flaccid went only part way there. It was also earthy and sweet with a lingering hint of musty leaves. It was only the recurrent grumble of her stomach and weakness in her limbs that defined hunger for Gretel.

Her sixth grade teacher had tasted of vanilla ice cream. Mr Whitehall gave her a brain freeze. She found it difficult to concentrate as she held her head back, pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and covered her mouth and nose with her hands. WikiHow users voted these the most effective methods for dealing with brain freeze. She wasn’t so sure.