Today, my 51st birthday, happens to fall about 5 days after the two week mark since my last posting to this blog. Although I’m late, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that my topic today is a passion of mine, food writing.
I’m sitting in a small vegan place that just recently opened in east Nashville, Tennessee, called Khan’s Desserts Bakery and Café, drinking an herbal tea blend called Lavender Love, made by local tea maker called High Garden True Herbal Teas. I also have a vegan chocolate mint brownie on my table, with green frosting and a sprinkling of chocolate chips on top.
A little while ago, I indulged in a vegie burger and a side of fried okra at Pied Piper Eatery, just a short drive down Porter Road from here. The burger itself was red inside, because of the beets, kidney beans and secret spices used to make it. I ordered it with avocado, pickle, lettuce and barbecue sauce, and bottles of ketchup and mustard were already on the table.
The okra was nicely crunchy with a clearly homemade batter, and pieces of it had been cut with subtle variations in shapes and sizes, so I could tell it hadn’t come from a bag of pre-made frozen fried okra.
Even though I’m nowhere near hungry enough to break into the brownie, the tea and the thought of the sweet dessert make me feel satisfied. Food can be such an immediate sensual experience, that I sense how writing about it lets me express something very concrete and close.
Writing teachers often instruct students to write about what they know. What can you know better than the food you ingest daily? Using nouns and verbs, the details of a meal can rival the most daring of adventures as an exciting topic for a writer, including the climbing of Mount Everest and the search for the Titanic or flight M370.
Additionally, this nourishment not only provides experiences, it also keeps you alive, and can heal you from the stresses of the humdrum, mundane, so called “normal” life. You can write about your food whether you’re a gourmet or not, no matter what walk of life you come from.
It helps to keep a perspective on how you treat yourself and how your emotions come into play as part of how you work and relate to others. When striving to lose or gain weight, or achieve any other health goal, it will help to keep a journal of exactly what you have eaten every day and how much.
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