the language of food

If you need to see your grandmother's face again, to hear her voice, to see your father, long dead now. If you need to remember what it was like to run through the park, to bike to grade school, to swim naked at the beach and be two feet tall. If you can not remember. If there is something you left behind, a kind of happiness, a kind of sorrow. If there were words that someone gave you, words you carry with you as you push yourself to finish graduate school. Words that you carry with you each time you know you are not good enough, not smart enough, not interesting enough. If you can not remember who you are. If you need to know you are worth something. Eat yourself into your past. To eat the cinnamon, clove, ginger, molasses christmas cookies of your youth is to return the body to the yellow kitchen in rural Virginia. If you were to fly back to this home, rent a car, you would circle the area again and again. The forest and swamp and yard and sky erased by a parking lot and a suburban strip mall. The air is thick with humid exhaust.
We are the language we use, the thoughts we have, and the practices we do. You do not become a ham sandwich, apple, two cookies after lunch.
If you want to bring your body back, if there are ways of being, ways of feeling you can not remember, the language of food is the language of memory. It is not what you eat, but the construction of flavor and smell that link you breath and posture to the past. There is a memory in the body, memory that does not have thoughts or sentiment. Muscle memory of other times other ways of being that might now be foreign. The way you eat is the language, the way you prepare food, that you never prepare food for yourself, that you never sit down. These are all language. These are a discussion, a dialogue, a shouting match with your limbs and reflexes.