A life-changing meal, and the limitations + affordances of writing about life-changing meals
I’ve been thinking a lot about one meal that really shifted things, fundamentally, for me.
In some ways, I think the “I had a meal that changed my life, let me tell you about it!” trope feels, well, like a trope. Overdone, often surface-level, often with little to say that hasn’t been said before.
Typically the changes in question are not a fundamental redirection of one’s life course, they’re revelatory in smaller (though still personally significant) ways: opening the expanse of sensory possibility, deepening a connection. They increase our capacity for what’s possible to experience, or clarify what experiences we enjoy. But ‘life changing meals’ discourse rarely goes much deeper or wider than that.
But popular things are often popular for a reason, and this particular writing theme resonates specifically because it’s something we’ve all experienced. We’re hungry to read that particular story and see if some facet of it resonates with our own significant meals, and our own experiences.
I’ve been reflecting on the different ways “important meals,” as concept, can be differentiated in my world and there are a few broad-strokes classifications I’d offer (do you agree? Any you would add or change?)
Important memories: Especially good dishes, restaurants, experiences, something that felt really itself in a particular way, or made me feel particularly myself in that moment: Having tea on a river next to an archaeological site, eating oysters on my 40th birthday.
Strong connections: A meal where I felt not just impacted by the food, but where the main elements of the experience were in the interactions or deepened connections with other people (or in a few cases, the decided lack of connection that felt palpable and that expanded over the course of the evening).
Shifting trajectories: Meals that, by virtue of one or both of the above (or something else) actually served as a turning point in large or small ways, creating an impact on me and my life for years to come.
I see the first two as more surface level, or at least potentially so: They leave good memories and perhaps stronger relationships, but the fabric of one’s life remains largely unchanged, the weft and weave still largely in the same pattern as before.
The latter allows us to see as the experience of “I had a good meal!” at a deeper level: A place where we’re asked to critically engage rather than simply retell, to analyze rather than just acknowledge. It taps into our feeling, our connection, and the actual functional experience of eating and offers the potential for a shifted understanding of the world and ourselves.
I do still enjoy reading about your favorite dinner with your mom, the time you burned a pan of meatballs, or the time you showed up to a dinner party empty-handed.
But what I really enjoy reading is stories that get me to reflect and ask why, and to seek resonance not just in the meal or in shared experiences (who hasn’t shown up to a party without the right offerings to give?) but in shared understanding, or the possibility thereof. I want to be expanded by your food stories, opened up. Allowed to see the world in a new way.
I’ve been thinking of what this kind of story looks like in my own life, and the first that came to mind was a frankly not-very-good pizza and a slow food dinner in high school.
I can’t assume that resonance exists for others, but I’m really curious how/if it resonates with you: Not because this is an especially complex or unique story but perhaps because it’s not either of those things, and it’s a reminder that large shifts in our trajectory sometimes come from unexpected places and small daily practices.
Transformation through the making of moderately OK pizzas
In my high school, we had a thing called May Term. May Term was a 1 week intensive class, which we devoted the entire week to (sometimes traveling elsewhere for it, sometimes just devoting full days in town to whatever we were studying). All other classes were set aside for the week, and we all eagerly dove into anything from wildlife tracking to Judo to yoga to astronomy.
We chose our May Term subjects a couple months before, if memory serves, and there was a definite race to sign up for the popular subjects (like astronomy, taught by Paulette Gerardy, forever one of my favorite teachers). Each teacher chose a subject to teach for May Term that connected to their interests, whether or not it was what they taught every day in school.
One year, my May Term pick was yoga and meditation. Growing up in Boulder, I had ready access to classes on both, but had never dove in to either in any sort of formalized way. Portia Hinshaw, normally a math and English teacher, taught the class, and took us to a mountain ashram, on walking meditations, to sunrise Hatha yoga, and to the homes and studios of various practitioners so we could learn from them.
When Portia died last year, I thought again about that May Term, and how it exposed to me modalities of healing and practice that I continue to use today, over 20 years later.
But she also exposed me to Slow Food: Both the Slow Food Movement, but also to what eating slow actually meant.
I had had ‘slow cooking’ in the sense that food was made from scratch and local many, many times, but this was the first time it was conceptualized as such. The first time that cooking slowly and intention was seen as a choice that could be personally fulfilling, rather than an obligation or something you did for others. It was the first time cooking (not just eating) was framed as an act of joyfulness and pleasure for me. And clearly that stuck with me (see: The last 20 odd years of my hobbies and career).
Seeing slow eating as an intentional way of eating allowed me to see this practice as a possible way of existing that I could connect with regularly. It allowed me to view food as part of a larger practice of mindfulness, and as part of a way of moving through the world that I coveted: One rooted in excitement, in small pleasures, in intention over rush.
On our final day of May Term, we prepared and ate a slow dinner. The focus of our ministrations during our class’ slow dinner was pizza, and from what I recall, we ate it close to 10 PM because the dough took a lot longer to rise than we anticipated. We also weren’t experts in rolling out dough, which meant my pizza was THICK. Just, a block of dense, whole wheat covered in cheese that mostly dripped off the sides because, since I couldn’t roll dough very well, I also couldn’t roll that dough in a way that kept anything on it.
I can remember the exact flavor of that pizza: With a whole wheat crust, made from scratch, with a little bit of honey (I think we were trying to emulate Beau Jo’s pizza crust, which I at least tremendously failed to do). The fresh herbs, the haphazardly cut toppings chopped by people who had very little experience doing any sort of dicing at all. And, the important lesson that mozzarella packed in whey actually isn’t the best choice for this application unless you make sure you aren’t dripping whey all over the pizza.
The laughable cheese to sauce ratio, too: An act of teenage rebellion against my mom, who always ordered extra sauce on our pizzas (which I hated), I spread barely any sauce on mine, instead coating it with layers and layers of soggy, fresh mozzarella cheese which slipped around like layering silk on silk. I learned many lessons from this pizza, but one was balance: Too much sauce wasn’t great, but it turns out there could actually also be too much cheese, which was a shocking revelation.
It was, frankly, not a very good pizza.
But I can still remember the flavor of it decades later and, more importantly, I still remember how that not terribly great pizza also opened up a doorway for me to learn something new.
It resonates in every class I teach and every book I write now: That perfection isn’t the purpose of this work, but rather to learn, to experiment, and to connect to something in a new-to-you way simply for the act of trying.
Keep reading for your subscriber discount code for 40% off all my classes (I’ve got a new suite of writing and culinary classes coming up this fall).
You can also use the same code to book private 1:1 sessions with me for 40% off.
Subscribe to continue reading
Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.