Food is never just about food.
- my Lit Hum professor
A a self-proclaimed foodie with a slightly above abysmal palate, I’ve always approached food for its own sake. The texture, the smells, the heat of a well cooked meal.
But what he said rang so true. My family always made a big deal out of eating dinner together. I always tried to get out of it by staying out late with friends, but my mom would always call me incessantly to get me to come back. (I somehow know that one day, I will always regret not spending enough time with my mother.) Big D and I always found ourselves eating; take-out from food courts, menu fixe in France, horse meat at his place…
I eat the majority of my meals here alone… not in a pathetic kind of way (well, maybe), but in the way that I enjoy my own company more. Or is it because I enjoy reading or watching TV while I eat? On Saturday, I headed out to Jean Georges, a rather frou-frou place for a lunch prix fixe with Shopping-loving M, Innocent P and Russian S. It was rather odd, because we were an unlikely bunch. M and P had just come down from Montreal for a weekend, S and I just recently met when we realized that we had nearly every class together this semester.
The meal itself was good, not spectacular… but our reasons for being there were interesting, I guess. It was a status symbol, in a strange way, despite the fact that we were poor students. Conversation around the table was mainly centered around how the food was and … I don’t remember.
Relationships are made and broken over meals, friendships are either strengthened or weakened. In my pseudo-snobby way, I realized that S had rather crude table manners… and that M was very dainty in her bites. And in a truly haughty way, it made me like M better. I was annoyed at the fact that S, at my table, was probably making us look bad… although I may have been doing just that too, with my poor posture and Asian eating manners.
Maybe what the food really showed me was how much I wanted in on a higher society. I often boast about the advantages of being from a low-income family, how I do have so much more gritty life experience than those trust fund kids… but from afar, maybe I just want to be one of them.
