Why I’ve Been Trying To Write About Food

A FEW SUNDAYS ago, my partner Greg and I made a pot of chili for our community’s weekly dinner. The New York Times recipe said to add orange juice to the chili, letting it simmer and froth among the chopped onion, garlic, and butter. Then we mixed in the thick, tangy sauce from adobo chili peppers with black beans and sweet potatoes and corn, zipped with lime juice. It was rich, spicy, generous—brightened with the sun.

Lately I’ve had fun trying to write about food, playing with how I’d describe a certain taste, smell, or texture. I’ve been inspired by reading M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote essays about food starting in the late 1930s. She wrote gorgeous prose embedded with care for the human heart, for its loneliness and sadness and hope. In her 1937 essay “Borderland,” she writes about how each of us has our own private food pleasure—hers was warming sections of a tangerine on a radiator in the winter, which she describes while watching soldiers in Strasbourg march along the Rhine, the horrors of war closing in.

In the foreword to her 1943 food memoir, The Gastronomical Me, Fisher answered the question of why she writes about food: “I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens with-out my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.”

In the United States, the majority of produce at grocery stores is grown and harvested by undocumented and immigrant laborers, who are underpaid, work in exhausting conditions, and are now terrorized by ICE. Artist Narsiso Martinez, an immigrant who labored in fruit fields, draws portraits of farmworkers using produce boxes, food packaging, and labels as his canvases.

The majority of produce at grocery stores is grown and harvested by undocumented and immigrant laborers.

In “Golden Crop,” Martinez repurposed cartons of Trader Joe’s organic orange juice as a canvas for drawings of farmworkers harvesting oranges. The workers, drawn in charcoal and acrylic, pick oranges from trees and carry large bags of fruit against the fake blue sky on the juice label.

“Dignify farmworkers: That’s the goal,” Martinez said in an interview with High Country News. “Besides our contributions, farmworkers are human beings with goals, dreams, aspirations, struggles. We go through sadness, happiness, just like anybody else. I feel like it’s about time to recognize that, no?”

I practice a faith that is centered around a meal. I recently became a Eucharistic minister at my parish, and on Saturdays I go from volunteering at the neighborhood food pantry to Mass. It moves and surprises me each week how tender and life-giving it is to offer the body of Christ to every person, who is also already the body of Christ, and who is hungry. “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53).

“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk,” Fisher wrote. “And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?”