Food is one of the most important things in our lives. No matter who we are, what we do, or where we live, we are united in our need as humans to eat. Remembering my life in the corporate world, living in San Francisco while commuting to Emeryville for my job in my Mini Cooper and coming home exhausted, I recall that frustration of having to figure out how to feed myself, as if it were some chore. This has got me thinking lately: why do we have to eat?

In the decades past, people claimed that, one day, a pill would be invented that we could use to replace food. I don’t know how I know this—probably from TV shows in the 90s that were set in earlier times. It never happened. Insofar, it’s been deemed impossible. Taking a class on food in US culture many years ago, the professor claimed that it’ll never happen, because people like eating. They like food, that it tastes good, and the act of eating is one we like. So why did anyone ever want a food pill? 

Like all other living creation, we have to consume, to sustain ourselves. It’s part of our design as human beings, just like all other animals—humans are considered animals, meaning, while we eat them, we are also not above them.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, weird as that may seem. The reason is that food in my life, especially since I married my husband Carlos, has become a drag and a chore, and I don’t like it, and yet, there is nothing that can be done to avoid it.

Food in my family was always functional. There are many things in retrospect that I remember about growing up with my family that I had thought were strange little nuances to my parents, that I now see as the result of a dire immigrant experience. Few people talk enough about the reality of being the only immigrants to a country from your extended family.

The result immigration is a life that is rife with the stink of unnecessary independence—to be an immigrant, alone, to a new place, is to be completely self-reliant lest you fail and fall into the depths of the society of poverty in a country that is not even your own. It’s to have to figure out how to make a way forward in a place where everything is new and unfamiliar, while hungry mouths back home clamor for assistance in the form of money that they assume you must now have so much of. 

To be an immigrant is a harsh experience that I don’t think my parents, or many others, ever allowed themselves to feel too much of, and that is why that experience transpired in silence from the perspective of words, but loudly in action.

To be the child of an immigrant is to exist loudly in the results of your parents actions, who are possibly the only adults in your life, not understanding the wordless world around you. The world, for example, where food is functional at best, made often in large quantities, using spices and tastes from far off lands and not the one you are growing up in, and more meant to be filling than anything.

“I don’t think it’s that you don’t like legumes,” Carlos told me one day. Being from very different cultures and backgrounds, food has gotten even more difficult, as it seems like there are very few ingredients and flavors Carlos and I can agree upon, which makes cooking difficult. “You were just poor,” he continued.

I dislike beans and legumes in general. These are the things that, until this day, my parents still make in large quantities, with nothing else added to them except some spices, and I still reject them as things I dislike. This makes sense. One of our primary breakfast dishes in Egypt, loved by the rich and poor alike but especially apt for the poor, is ful, a dish made of fava beans and eaten with pita bread that is heavy and meant to keep you full. Ads is a red lentil soup my parents would make growing up, which I never liked. 

“What did you eat for breakfast today?” The teacher’s innocent question that day in the 90s was meant to be one about how we are united in our American culture. I of course knew I was lying when I agreed that we had eaten cereal that morning—I knew I ate ful for breakfast, my parents believing that cereal was too expensive for how little nutritional value it provided (and they were right).

Carlos hinted that perhaps what I know is not legumes, but my own limited experience with them as the child of immigrants, in the form of taste, flavors, style of cooking, seasoning, but also my own experiences with them. And he’s probably right.

On my own, I gravitate towards Asian flavors, though they are hard to find living here in Mexico City. I prefer vegetables like greens, tomatoes, mushrooms, bell pepper—mostly things Carlos dislikes. For him, he gravitates towards potatoes, beans, corn, carrots, and zucchini like the Latin American he is I guess. While I like food that feels fresh and some that is raw, Carlos likes things that are saucy, cheesy, creamy, and at times fried. We both like meat, but him more than me.

Food gives us feelings. This is what I mean to say in the shortest way possible. While it may give us a delightful feeling, there can also be a lifetime of uncomfortable feelings associated with food, and the funny thing is, regardless of how we feel—we still have to eat! This is a point that, as you can see, is frustrating me and amusing, especially in this newer, more complex chapter in my life as someone who hasn’t been married too long.

Right here, at the crossroads of these ideas is where I have stewed for months, trying to figure out how Carlos and I can best eat, in a way that makes us enjoy food but also keeps us healthy. Because, beyond taste, the truth of food is that we get out of our bodies what we put into it. Foods can be good or bad, and while we don’t realize this much in the US, your body including your mind will perform best when you feed in with nourishing foods rather than just trying to feel full (in the form of the food pill, or potatoes, or highly processed ready-made meals).

One thing I did get from my parents, and I appreciate it, is the sole desire to cook and eat only whole foods. In the tiangus (farmer’s market) that happens in our neighborhood in Mexico City every Tuesday is where I started to understand that our food is plants. Not a bunch of little objects in a plastic bag, not a bunch of frozen objects from Costco, not objects in a plastic cup—in the tiangus, in Mexico City, where the celery sometimes still has dirt on it, is where I realized that food comes from plants. Actual plants. Wow.

I’m always amazed when I come to the US from Mexico to see what things Americans are consuming now. Last time I visited, my parents had dried blueberries from Costco. Would you look at that! This time they have a bag of oatmeal squares, also from Costco. “ORGANIC” reads the plastic box of mushrooms, as if they came from the organic factory instead of growing in the wild, organic by nature.

It blows my mind how food comes from things that are living. You can tell if you store your carrots in water like I do, how they perk up and become enlivened by the presence of water, and how they bend out of shape over time if not. The more I try to look, I realize, the more I see food for what it is—living things.

Realizing that food comes from plants, and plants are living things that exist to give, for some reason, opened the doors of understanding food not just as a chore but as a gift.

Nowadays, we assume the stores will always be rampant with food. In Mexico, I have seen that most kitchens and even apartments have very little storage space, the idea being that you’ll really only ever have as much food as you need for the immediate now. But in the past, when famine was real and your world only extended as far as your town did, people knew that to eat was not a given. When plants are there, and plants give to us, it is quite literally a gift. 

As I deepened my knowledge of the reciprocal relationship between all living things through books (Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer changed my internal landscape forever), and understood them as living things that give to us so we can give to them as well, my understanding and appreciation of food deepened and softened. Perhaps it is not supposed to be a chore if food is a gift. Perhaps to have to eat, is actually to get to eat.

Why do we have to eat? Well, because we are living things. But why is it such a burden? I asked myself this question and realized the main reason we don’t like to cook, which is a prerequisite for eating good, healthy food, is because we live in a society pressed for time, so any way you can get time back in your life, you try, because it always feels like time is running out. In a capitalistic society, there is plenty of material, and never enough time. 

“Why is that?” I thought to myself. The lack of time we feel, must be because we all have something really important to do, that’s obviously more important than feeding ourselves, even though eating is at the very core of our existence as humans. What are we in such a hurry for? What’s the rush? What’s more important than doing this thing that we know we need to literally live?

Our jobs, I realized. Especially in the US, and any other very capitalistic place, the keystone to our lives is our jobs. Streets are paved, drive-throughs are made, and food is delivered while we pay a premium not to be poisoned for pesticides, all so we can give the most of our time and energy to our jobs. And that’s sad.

This year, I have decided that I want to be a good cook, in all that that means. There’s a lot of say about this that will not fit in a single piece—my familiarization with a plantain, that happened this week, or learning to slow down enough to appreciate the process of turning tomatoes into a sauce, the contact between the knife and the cutting board, and cutting in a way that people like to eat—so I won’t go into it all. For now, just know that my desire to become a good cook mostly lays on my desire to be a good friend, a good daughter, a good partner, and one day ojala, a good mother.

You may say that I do not have to know how to cook well to be those things, and to an extent, I agree with you, but to another, I don’t. The reason is, I think I can be good at all of those things to a magnificent limit, until I learn to cook. And the reason why is that I believe friendships are forged over the plate of hot food.

For centuries, relationships have been made over broken bread and shared heart space. Shared beverages like coffee and tea have resulted in trade leading to shared friendship between people, the coffee shops of the enlightenment period resulted in shared knowledge between people, and the nights of worship for Sufis of Yemen that resulted in heightened spiritual states, shared between man and God.

To share, is to connect. To share food, is to share love. 

We’re used to meeting up with friends over coffee or dinner. In fact, try and hang out without consuming something together, and it is hard. That’s why, to me, to share food that you made, in your own home—that is how love is created and shared. To me to share food that you made is how bonds are created, families are born, friendships are cemented, and community is fostered.

This is why I want to be a good cook. Because I want to build a beautiful community. I want to be a good cook, because I love to love people.

There’s a community within the walls of my home too, even on days when no one comes over: one that is composed of me and Carlos. I want to be a good cook, to create connection and community between my husband and I. I want to be a good cook, because I love Carlos. 

Given our differences in taste and cultural background, I have found I have to forge a new way rather than lean on the internet for recipes. Carlos hates tomatoes while I love them, the same for mushrooms. There is no Trader Joe’s to get a $3.99 bottle of sauce here in Mexico City. Ingredients beyond the ones Mexicans use are generally expensive and hard to find, The result is that to become a good cook, is to access my own creativity and create food that suits me and Carlos palettes, using only ingredients available here. 

Earlier this week, I was cutting a papaya we purchased in the tiangus to freeze so we can use it for our smoothies. Lamenting wasting the papaya seeds, which have a variety of health benefits, I invented this dish that turned out so good, I wanted to share it with you.

Plantains with Pink Papaya Seed Sauce (serves 2)

Sauce (note this will make enough to last you the week):

• ¼ cup rice vinegar
• ¼ cup olive oil
• ½ red onion
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 ½ tablespoon papaya seeds
• ½ teaspoon stone ground mustard
• ½ medium avocado
• Water (amount as desired for the right texture)
• Bougainvillea bracts (optional as desired to add to pink color)

Plantains:

• 1 plantain
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 tablespoon coconut oil
• 1 cup papaya cubes small
• 1 cup sweet potato cubes small

1. Add all ingredients for sauce into blender. Note that the amount of water you add will create a looser or more thick sauce.
2. Peel the plantain and slice into discs. Cut papaya and sweet potato into small cubes. 
3. Add coconut oil to a frying pan at medium heat. Once it’s warm, add garlic using a garlic press, or cut into small cubes.
4. Once garlic starts to brown, add in the plantains and reduce to low heat, flipping them over every once in a while.
5. Add sweet potato
6. Once plantains are yellow on both sides, break to check if they are cooking through. 
7. Add papaya
8. Once the papaya seems to melt into the other ingredients, check the sweet potato and plantain by tasting to see if they are cooked through, and turn off. 
9. Plate the plantains as desired and pour the sauce on top