A Mysterious Relationship

What is your relationship to food?

I suspect some of you might have difficulty answering that question if you are at all like me. For me, food is primarily about sustenance, i.e. I eat when hungry (exception: free samples) and usually stop when full. For the first 30 years of my life the words relationship and food never struck me as belonging together.

But early on in our partnership, and long before our daughter was born, my wife began educating me about how the simplicity of my relationship to food was not universal. For every book I read about music or movie ephemera, she read two about the link between food and love, food and stress, food and family. By osmosis, I learned how complicated this relationship can be. And when our daughter was still young, I fully recognized the importance of teaching her about the relationship.

Although this is a topic ripe for judgments, that is not my intent. Instead, I'd like to hear about your journey, what you've uncovered about this mysterious relationship, and if you're a parent, what you've tried to impart to your children.