The Obsession with Food

Growing up in Beijing, I don’t think I ever had an obsession with food. The reason was definitely not an over-abundance of the varieties, as my mom was not into cooking until I left home to attend college, and we hardly went to any restaurant. As a little kid, I did not like candies, cookies or cakes. My mom was raising me and my sister with her teacher’s salary, and I recall that we lived on mostly a vegetarian’s diet, not by choice, but rather by necessity. There were indeed a few indulgences in my childhood that I still remember vividly though. My mom took me to this little dingy restaurant that specialized in spicy noodles in Sichuan style (i.e. Dan Dan noodles) when I was at most 9 or 10 years old. It was so spicy but somehow I found it irresistible. Since then, I have been able to eat very spicy food. My first experience eating in a restaurant that served “western cuisine” was when my mom took me and my sister to the Tao Ran Ting Park one Sunday. We were really tired and hungry at the end of the day, and my mom decided to treat us to a meal at the “western cuisine” restaurant in the park. I was shocked at the price of a tiny bowl of chicken noodle soup, and I tried to eat it very slowly to savor the taste. Now that I have a son myself, I can imagine how my mom felt when she saw me eating the soup in such ecstasy.

It was not until I had to go to the military academy for a whole year of training after high-school that I had developed craving for food. Of course, I was not alone. The food there was so bland and so devoid of protein and fat that we all ended up gobbling down a ton of carbohydrate all the time, and still felt hungry immediately afterwards. As a result, all of us skinny girls in high school ballooned. I remember wanting to eat all the time. Looking back, the insatiable appetite perhaps was not only due to the poor diet but also due to boredom and frustration. I remember loving all the food with protein and fat.

Of course, once I returned to civilization at the end of the year, I lost all that weight immediately, as who wanted to eat so much carbohydrate when there was something else to eat? I found the food served in dining halls at Peking University “heavenly”, but somehow did not feel the urge to overeat at all. I was quite skinny again when I arrived in Boston as a transfer student at Harvard. As I was never a picky eater, I was quite amazed at the “all-you-can-eat” dining halls of Harvard dorms. Maybe human beings are naturally rather dim when it comes to deciding whether they should stop or keep eating, if there is always food in front of them. When so many varieties of food were laid out in huge quantities, somehow I ended up overeating again. I did not get as plump as I was in the military academy, but I surely got chubbier, partly due to the high calorie content of the American cuisine, and partly because I did always sample more varieties than necessary during meals. Or maybe it was the sense of anxiety and loneliness that I felt, as a foreign student in a totally foreign environment, struggling to understand what’s going on around her?

At both Peking University and Harvard, I heard others complaining about the dining hall food being really bad. Since I spent two years at each place during college, I actually found both places to be really great when it comes to food, both in accessibility and in taste. I terribly missed having access to such dining halls when I was in graduate school at MIT – an austere institution with austerity stamped on everything. I suddenly found myself having to “find” food, since I usually had no time to buy groceries and cook, and had no money to afford eating out at decent places. As a result, like other graduate students, I loved free food, not only because of the fact that it’s free, but also because it was right there, completely accessible, just like back in the college days at Harvard. This habit of loving free food would stay with me for years, as it does with most former graduate students. It’s a condition that we don’t shake off for a long time. Naturally, due to the scarcity of free food, and the fact that it takes extra energy to either cook or buy food, I lost not only the extra pounds gained at Harvard, but even some more. I was extremely skinny, and would remain so for many years.

Not until I became pregnant with Winston did I start gaining weight again, as well as a strong appetite after the first trimester was over. I did not have any real cravings, except that for a few weeks I ate a lot of bread and ice-cream. Clearly I ate more than before, and I gained almost 50 pounds during my pregnancy – i.e. an increase of over 50% in weight! I noticed that when I was having morning sickness during pregnancy, I only wanted to eat food that I ate when I was growing up (vegetables and grains) – as opposed to food that I came to like in my adulthood. Strange, isn’t it?

The other day, I rented the movie “Julie and Julia”, which has two parallel plots. The one on Julie Powell was kind of boring – it’s about a frustrated office worker writing a blog on her conquering all recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in one year. The other is on how Julia Child became a famous cook and author, which was very entertaining, with the phenomenal Meryl Streep playing Julia Child pitch-perfect. It was a feel-good movie. I could not help thinking that while love is a theme that writers never tire of writing, food is a topic that movie-makers never tire of filming. There have been so many movies featuring food from different countries in the world – “Like Water for Chocolate” from Mexico, “Babette’s Feast” from Denmark, “Mostly Martha” from Germany, “Eat Drink Man Woman” from Taiwan, “Tampopo” from Japan, “The Scent of Green Papaya” from Vietnam, and of course many American movies such as “Big Night”, “Chocolat”, “Fried Green Tomatoes”, and of course now “Julie and Julia”. I am sure that there will be more to come in the future.

The obsession with food is like the fascination with love. Both will live on in the imaginations of writers, film makers and artists, as both reflect the fundamental needs of human beings. Even those of us who claim to have no obsession with food not only cannot live without food, but we all find the topic comforting and reassuring. On a dark rainy day or after a period of stress, what else can be more relaxing than watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child cooking a delicious-looking dish with such gusto in the kitchen? It makes me feel that life could be, just could be, as great as a feast – well, if not all the time, at least once in a while.