The Food of Love
Family meals, from a young age, unlike those outside the home, are opportunities for learning good manners. This is why many think that during meals one should avoid unpleasant conversations.
But harmony can easily be threatened when particular diets come into play.
Sometimes food can be used to argue, albeit on good part, about the different tastes of individual family members. The “table” is also the last chance left for mothers in-law to reign with their recipes!
When separated parents are together for a meal with their children, it often becomes the pretext for a blast of conflicts and contradictions between the first and the second marriage. Feeding and food preparation are among the most relevant topics discussed in marital therapies.
Though children can see breakfast with family as an occasion for parents to get back together, it can be a complete failure: a delay to get ready might be enough to trigger a fight!
Divorce consequences can be felt both in sexuality and feeding. For Jacqueline Burgoyne, half of those separated experience a change in weight, losing it mostly, and that happens more to men who rely on women in cooking and for most of them skipping meals is the most destructive effect of their single lives.
A meal can be an opportunity to express our own dislikes so Christmas and other holidays are particularly bad for this, but looking at it with a more positive point of view, we must not forget that the great theoreticians of gastronomy have always accompanied their recipes with reflections on the reciprocal pleasures of throat and eroticism. Curnonsky points out that we don’t use our mouths just to eat but also to delight and he suggests to keep ice-creams, fruit and cakes close to the bed in order to help love!
He also claims that liquor is for flirts and champagne to quench thirst for tired lovers.
When we barely know someone we generally avoid going for a meal at the beginning, preferring instead a coffee or a beer, and that’s pretty much what happens when we go for a date with someone for the first time especially because eating is wonderfully natural as well as intimate and full of several meanings.
Written by Alessandra D’Alessandro
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