The Experience of Food: What Does Food Mean to You?
By admin • December 9, 2025
Food is more than fuel. Sure, a burger settles a growling stomach and a cup of coffee revives a sluggish afternoon, yet there is a deeper kind of nourishment most of us seldom pause to recognize.
Consider a dish tied to a memory. Mine is my Yugoslavian grandmother's crab cioppino. Whenever I see it on a seafood menu, I order it hoping to recapture her version. It is usually good and it quiets my hunger, yet it rarely truly satisfies the craving. What I am really chasing is the memory: the warm, buttery tomato-and-crab aroma drifting through every room, the joy spilling out of her kitchen while she worked in her blue homemade apron, planning Crab Cioppino with Hot White Rice and Apricot Cobbler with Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream. I can still picture myself glued to my favorite big chair after the long eight-hour drive from Southern California to Northern California, surrounded by that mood, waiting for her to notice I had stayed inside while my five siblings played outdoors. She would spot me in the living room and finally call me into the kitchen to taste the cioppino and share my thoughts. What a treat. I can still feel what it was like to spend the whole afternoon watching her and waiting for dinner.
How often do we, or our children, experience food that way? Only around the holidays, or perhaps not even then? There seems to be a modern epidemic of treating food as a supplement, something to keep us running like a pill popped for this or that. At the same time, a growing community of food lovers is turning back toward the joy of cooking and eating as an answer to our addiction to fast this and fast that.
In French, you would never say you are "feeding" your children. In French, only animals are fed; children are nourished. That distinction is worth sitting with. So I offer a challenge to our habit of rushing here and there while squeezing in a bite: consider what that pace may be doing over time to our nervous systems, our adrenals, and our digestion. What would life look like if, at least once a day, we left the table in love with life again because every cell in our bodies had just had an experience, an experience called dinner?
A side note: if any of these ideas feel out of reach, watch the films Like Water for Chocolate and Babette's Feast. The more recent The Hundred-Foot Journey is a fine choice as well.
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Food can be a quick fix or a lasting memory — the choice is often ours. Slowing down to cook and eat with attention turns an ordinary meal into something that nourishes body and spirit alike. Whether it is a family recipe or a simple weeknight dinner, the experience is worth savoring.