Taste Your Life : Bread, Wine, Chocolate

Maybe I just needed the words close to me.Bread. Wine. Chocolate. Slow. Loss. Food. Love.All words that speak to my heart. Words that I dance and sometimes wrestle with in my own writing and life-ing. Words that make me pay attention.When I saw a Facebook post early in the fall about Simran Sethi’s book, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love, I knew I had to meet it. Maybe, on a deeper level, I knew I needed it. That bringing her words closer to me would feed me, could heal me.As with good food, good books feel like medicine to me. Curative. This book certainly felt like that.I should clarify. It felt like medicine, not in the sense of terrible cherry cough syrup or a sedative to knock me out. It felt like medicine like homemade chicken stock with rosemary and ginger and garlic, or thick hot chocolate with chili pepper, or lying on grass or sand and listening to wind and water, or a long hug from an old friend on a bad day. That kind of medicine.When I started this column in October of 2013, I deliberately called it “For Here, Please,” with the tag line, “Sustenance you can’t pack up in a Styrofoam cup, meant to be enjoyed in the here and now.” Mostly as a reminder to myself of how I wanted to live my life, how I still do. Yet for the last three months I haven’t found time to do something that gives me great joy, which is write this column. Clearly, columns can’t be entirely responsible for me feeling well and whole. Neither can books.But I’ll tell you what. Sometimes they do a bang-up job and give me a serious, steady, IV drip of salvation.In the pages of Bread, Wine, Chocolate, Sethi writes of awareness, savoring, and wholeness, and I so desperately want to feel whole. I don’t think I’m the only one. When I tune in to the world around me, I can feel the craving among us. For a different way of being in the world. For a wake up from a groggy slog through our days. To not feel so alone. To not feel so heart-hungry.Yes, Sethi is writing about biodiversity, about traveling to six different continents to investigate foods and drinks we drool over and even devote websites to (like this one), about the practicalities and particulars, the tragedies and triumphs of how we eat and how we might eat, but she’s also writing about a deeper, broader hunger.I read this book over two of the busiest weeks of my life this fall, working long days into fatigue and spending time each evening before bed, treating myself to a small serving of pages. I often gobble books, but not this one. I found myself craving those nighttime moments when I knew I’d have a trusted guide into mindfulness, moments when I’d ask Mike, again and again, “Hey, can I read you a part? It’s so good.”Reading it was like going on a retreat, attending a class with a favorite professor, a deep breath and a reminder that I belonged to life all at once. Reading it made me slow down. It made those sacred evening moments expand. It invited me to savor. It fed my hunger.In case you can’t tell, I really loved this book, the way you love a treasure of a person who is so dear, so wise, so wonderful, that you both want everyone to meet her and also want to save her all for yourself. Maybe most of all, I loved the integrity of this book, how true it was, on all levels, to itself, which is what I want to be. I loved the way Sethi creates for the reader an experience that feels much like a tasting of wine, or beer, or chocolate, or bread, all of which she offers guides for throughout the book.

“Taste is something we all do and have. It doesn’t just belong to foodies or sophisticates. Each of us owns and shapes this construct. What we feel about tasting and eating—what we savor—shouldn’t be discriminatory or hierarchical. Because if we operate from the premise that only certain people own taste, then there is no point in exploring. We should all just frequent the places that have collected the most promising Yelp reviews or greatest number of Michelin stars.I refuse to do that. I refuse to let someone else define what delicious is for me. To whatever extent I can, I want to define and redefine what tastes good. I want to define what is good—for me. And I want you to do the same for you, because taste is both universal and personal. What each and every one of us cherishes matters.”If you, too, are hungry in body and heart and mind, go get this beautiful, important book, and let it lead you peacefully through these last weeks of December. Savor the stories, the tasting guides, the information, and the deliciousness. Even if everything and everyone else is bustling and hustling around you, be the one who slows down enough to truly taste and experience what you’re eating—from the gingerbread to the company of family or friends, to your own precious companionship. Ask questions. Give thanks. Remember connection.“Taste it all,” Simran Sethi encourages. I know I will.