Love & Trust -OR- Ugh! How Can You *Eat* That???!!!
I'm going to present two recipes here. One is for a traditional
Jewish recipe for a dish called kishke, which is stuffed cow's
intestine. The second is for haggis, a traditional Scottish dish
that is also made from stuffed innards.
When I see the recipe for kishke I get the warm fuzzies thinking
about Nana and Mama and wonderful childhood memories come back of
dishes I loved being prepared and little me waiting impatiently for
them to be done while the house filled with smells of my favorites. I
also remember the happiness on their faces upon serving me the fruits
of their labors and their satisfaction in watching me enjoy their
cooking immensely.
When I see the recipe for haggis I want to puke.
What's funny about this is that haggis is so very similar in
composition to my beloved kishke. That got me to thinking (as so many
phenomena having to do with food are wont to do). Why if I love
kishke, do I turn green when I think of haggis.
Let's look at the recipes and we'll perhaps get an idea about why:
Recipe for KISHKE: http://tinyurl.com/2ozjj
Recipe for HAGGIS: http://tinyurl.com/32gm7
The similarity between the two dishes is very obvious. So why should
the former make me swoon, while the latter makes me gag?
I think it has to do with love and trust. Both of those recipes are
made from innards – the most inward part of the animal and the parts
one has to be most careful to clean thoroughly before preparation.
The hands that do that cleaning and preparation have to belong to
someone we trust implicitly to both know how to do the work and to
belong to a person who loves us very, very much and wants only our
welfare. They are the ultimate "Trust Me" foods.
Now I loved trusted enough Nana and Mama to allow them to serve me
kishke, the taste of which I found delicious. There is no one is
Scotland I presently love or trust enough to prepare haggis for me,
although I am sure that haggis is delicious too. So, when my
consciousness is focused only on the ingredients, per se, they make
me nauseous.
I think that we can pick up cues of a long-standing tradition of love and trust when we are served a food we have not yet eaten by people
we love and trust and become sentimental about new to us foods too.
Perhaps one of the reasons that people become addicted to mass
produced food is that while we like the taste, we keep looking for
the love in it, love that can't possibly be there. No one slinging a
zillion hamburgers a day or producing bread on a conveyer belt can
possibly love you personally. The taste is there, perhaps, but the
deep satisfaction of feeling loved when eating prepared food is not.
If we are not getting our need to be loved fed from the sources we
really want it from we are likely to get hung up on the sensual
aspect of food and the sensual aspects alone. It is then that we
become addicted to food - addiction to food being the irrational
demand that food which has not been prepared and received in love
will satisfy us profoundly. Not desisting from demanding that food
not prepared and received in love will satisfy our deepest needs for
love and trust is the insanity of the addiction to food.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan
posted by Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat @ 1:48 PM
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