With so many photos, recipes and stories to make you lick your lips, it’s always a joy putting together this issue that focuses on food! Food has always been a passion for me. I’ll have you know I earned my Brownie “Hostess” badge, making dinner for friends, when I was about eight! I was always baking cakes, cooking crumbles, helping with jam and marmalade making. The pleasure was in the creating, as much as the eating.
However, there’s another side to my food story. Since the age of about 14, I have been on every kind of diet you can imagine. So many years of worrying about every bite. Feeling afraid of fat (or carbohydrate, or sugar). Always in a struggle between how I felt about my body, and how I feel about cooking.
How many people do you know who have a healthy relationship with food? I try not to diet anymore, or let myself slip into that diet mindset where every mouthful becomes a mental battle. But we’re surrounded by messages about what we should and shouldn’t eat. Sitting waiting for an appointment recently, this message was up on the wall: “You are what you eat so don’t be fast, cheap, easy or fake.” Oof! That’s a real kick in the guts! And confirms what I always feared most: that as well as hating myself for being weak and eating the things I shouldn’t, it seems everyone else is thinking I’m easy and cheap too.
It’s sad to me that food – a basic necessity of life – has become such a topic for judgement. As Sue says in her “First Word,” so many memories are connected to food; it’s the way we celebrate and come together. So share an ice cream cone with your grandchild or a hot dog at the fairground; you can even eat candy floss, I certainly won’t judge you!
**Editor’s note: in the August 2019 issue the story “Panorama Recreation: An Invitation to Opportunity” was mistakenly attributed to Jesse Holth. It was in fact written by Jo Barnes.
