One consequence of launching into a life that features weight reduction (and hopefully eventually weight maintenance) is that food and the human relationship to it, and specifically my relationship to it is rarely far from consciousness. (By the bye after hitting a weight loss of forty-one pounds I’ve taken off on this excursion to the Pacific-Northwest-With-Particular-Reference-to-British-Columbia pretty anxious about it all. It is my near term goal just to not gain a whole heck of a lot of my weight loss back. So far I’ve been pretty good with what I eat, but portion control has been something of a disaster…)
Anyway last eve after we arrived in Seattle and had a lovely Moroccan dinner (not that I’m obsessing about such stuff…) and I was settled into bed and reading my current murder mystery (Uniform Justice, the twelfth Venetian-placed Commissario Brunetti mystery by Donna Leon – a great series, by the bye. I highly recommend it. The link to Amazon contains some very good reviews, if you’re interested.) I read this passage. Said a lot about some people’s relationship with food, and hinted at all of us one way or another. Or so it seemed to me:
He remembered then one of the few stories his father ever told about the war, though he recalled it in a garbled fashion, for it had never been told the same way twice. At some point, marching across Lower Saxony in the days just after the end of the war, his father and two companions had been befriended by a stray dog that emerged from under a bombed house to follow them. The next day, they ate the dog.
Over the course of decades, this story had taken on talismanic powers for Brunetti, and he found himself unable to keep his mind from it whenever anyone talked about food in a way he thought too precious, as though it were a fashion accessory rather than a basic need.
All he had to do was hear one of Paola’s friends go on about her delicate digestion and how she couldn’t even bear to buy vegetables that had been displayed next to garlic, and the story came to mind. He remembered, years ago, sitting across the table from a man who told the other guests how impossible it was for him to eat any meat that had not come from his own butcher, that he could taste the difference in quality instantly. When the man finished the story, and after he had received the required accolade for his delicacy of palate, Brunetti had told the story of the dog.
Food for thought, perhaps…
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