Why We Should Play With Our Food

Hot, Gorgeous Quesadilla Mess Along Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, February 2011 (Taken By Matt Young)

Feel free to take a look, however long, of the hot, gorgeous mess of a roadside quesadilla above. This past February, I traveled out to Los Angeles (CA) to gain a better grasp of southern California and to visit a friend I hadn't seen in two years from college. I found myself enamored of what a singular locale this city is, but far beyond the backed-up lines of tourists photographing Michael Jackson's marker along Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame or even the surrealness of an amusement park lodged out on the edge of Santa Monica Pier. Rather, for my last lunch, my last meal in Los Angeles for this trip, I ordered from a roadside cart, a taqueria-turned-quesadilla dynamo run part-time by an effervescent woman, Migdalia.

"Would you like some jalapeno salsa to top it off?," Migdalia asked in her bubbly Latina voice.

Don't mind if I do, and I found myself giddy to dash on that salsa and dance on the sidewalk when I first saw the mess seen above. The jalapenos, the barely day-old tortillas, the even fresher queso de quesadilla, the juicy carne (roasted meat), sour cream, and at least two other medium tomato-based salsas created a gorgeous, serendipitous amalgamation of flavors. Not long afterwards, the inevitable question arose:

What does it mean to eat? I mean, the full definitive scope of that word eat.

As in tracking how any of those quesadilla ingredients, or how the grain for your al dente linguine, arrived on your plate, let alone the exotic paths of the olive oil drizzling between the strands of your pasta of choice;

Or how a juicy, savory cut of beef sirloin traveled from a cattle herd of sprawling megalopolises with corn-loaded feed lots (or perhaps from a maverick deep in green seas of pasturelands) to your grill;

Or how the mountain of arugula greens first sprouted on river valley lowlands, drifting down to the most urbane of plates?

After years of being an undercover foodie, I've run into too many fascinating farmers, consummate cooks, fantastic fruits, and intriguing food systems far too luscious and critical not to share. While parents or society might have told us not to play with our food, what would happen if we not just played, feeling our hands stick in the curves of rising bread dough(?) What if we also delved into actually adventuring about how our food comes to be, how we relate to that which sustains us daily, and in turn how we cultivate healthier people, healthier communities, healthier bioregions, and beyond?

Hence, while diving back into academia in a few months, focusing on Food Systems & Environmental Media at Antioch University-New England, what could be better than to explore the world that nourishes us? Hopefully, this blog can be the beginning of a long trek immersing in how people, cultures, appetites, lands, waters, and of course food interact- from the most intimate of "locavore" webs to global disseminating of food in the most unlikely of places-- tropical Colombian coffee beans grown in humid belts marketed & consumed while feet of snow piling outside a New England coffeeshop(?!)



If you should be of an adventurous, inquisitive, and especially hungry personality, feel free to join in with The Curious Omnivore.