What Food Means to Me

What Food Means to Me

I never realized I have been dealing with the topic of food from so many angles until Alya Honasan of Philippine Daily Inquirer popped the question in an online interview, "What does food mean to you?"

Reading the question on email, I suddenly felt pity for beauty pageant contestants. You know, being asked a profound question while in skimpy wear on live telecast. (We might recall here Venus Raj's response when asked about the biggest mistake she had made in her life and how she had made it right, and how her answer was roundly criticized for its, of all things, un-American syntax.)

In other words, I was stumped at the question, and I think I even blanked out -- but not because I couldn't answer, but because I had so many answers that I didn't know where to begin. I had to literally sleep over the question to sort my thoughts out.

When you have been writing about food from the perspective of a freelance writer, travel and tourism magazine editor, and now public information officer for so long, you know that food is not just food. It is about so many other things. You find yourself at the intersection of so many fields you never expected to converge in your mind, and I believe this is what happens whenever I touch the subject without being conscious about it. Why? Because food is indeed a lot of different things all at the same time.

1. At its most basic form, food is sustenance, so the topic easily turns to proper nutrition and health, Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), essential vitamins and minerals, and the diseases you end up getting when you lack a basic nutrient.

1.1. At the extreme end of the spectrum, in the wellness circle, food may even be seen outright as medicine. As an old sage said, "Let food be your medicine," as in preventive maintenance medicine -- because there are food that double as medicine.

2. Food often means cooking, and what is cooking but basically chemistry, and I am not exactly referring yet to fads like molecular gastronomy and methods like sous vide, and the like, but that's a part of it, too.

3. It doesn't take long before you see that food means the edible flora and fauna (biogeography or terroir) of a given place, and these can be endemic, exotic (imported), nativized/naturalized, cultivated, etc.

4. Food is also all about economics and agriculture: the modes of production involved (starting from backyard gardening), the workers behind it, its place in the market, the pricing, and how it is distributed and marketed through a supply chain.

5. If you dig deeper, discussing food means discussing it anthropologically because it is also associated with some significant rules or practices (culinary arts) and the underlying belief system. So this means that food is all about the culture in general, associated traditions and history, about being human, something that Doreen Gamboa Fernandez was so good at. There's even a subset of 'foodways' called ritual food, a very interesting topic that is hardy being written about.

6. And because many food items and dishes are unique to a given place, food also becomes a source of ethnic pride and cultural identity. As they say, "You are what you eat," not just in terms of health but also in terms of your own sense of identity.

6.1. Food inevitably then becomes tourist attraction as tourism inescapably includes food-related interest points.

7. Of course, from the perspective of sybarites and epicures (current term: foodies), eating may be discussed purely by its gustatory aspects, flavor profiles (from sweet to umami), and this may be extended to how it is presented (plating).

8. Then there's the matter of food as preferences (likes, dislikes), in particular, which are a matter of family background, a matter of nostalgia, giving food a significant psychological dimension. Food suddenly becomes a mental health issue (food addiction, bulimia, anorexia).

9. I could be missing some other things. (Political? Legal? We can talk about the Milk Code and Europe's legislation on food origin to protect authenticity and intellectual property.)

So for me, considering all of the above, eating food is not just a physical and physiological act, but also a social, economic, cultural-historical, psychological, and aesthetic act.

This may sound strange, but the very act of eating is, for me, a spiritual act as well. And that is why I routinely say my prayer before meals. (Some people even say a prayer after meals.) I am not just thankful to God for the provision, I guess; in the very desire to eat, I am expressing my continuous desire to live, my continuous appreciation for life. If we study the Bible closely, we can notice a hidden theology behind eating and eating together.

When I was struck with covid sometime in 2021, I experienced a most alarming loss of appetite for the first time, and I forced myself to take at least three mouthfuls every meal because I guess I still wanted to live despite the fact that I was very weak and depressed, so food to me at the time literally meant my very survival.

So going back to the question, I eventually answered all of the above complex web of points and concluded: "Food, for me, means life."

What does food mean to you?

(random food photo: Andrew Casipit)