Food, Food, Food

Lest ye think I have gone mad let me hurry to say that I just finished reading Julia Child’s “My Life in France” which has prompted me to write about food this morning. That and the fact that yesterday I had two catered affairs, a breakfast and a lunch, at work. There is always a lot of food at our place of work. We have fresh fruit brought in once a week for each kitchen (two on each floor). We used to have a bunch of snacks as well but all snacks our now up in our brand new “bistro”, the communal kitchen. As well many of our departments have standing lunch meetings where food is brought in and leftovers are always standing in the kitchens.

Yesterday I was in an all day meeting so I did not have control over what occurred with our leftover breakfast. There was a whole pan of hashbrowns which were not eaten and when I stepped into the kitchen over the lunch hour I was shocked to see they had been dumped into the garbage! What waste! Why had the hashbrowns not been taken up to the bistro so those enjoying lunch could have taken some hashbrowns on the side? I will get to the bottom of that today but meanwhile I just want to say that here in Canada we live with so much plenty that we take food for granted. Unless you were raised by parents who told stories of lack of food during WWII or, like me, read Gone With the Wind at a tender age and became forever scarred with thoughts of starvation and lack of clothes, you probably don’t think about food except to say “I feel hungry, let’s go to MacDonald’s”.

Julia’s book starts with her and her husband Paul arriving in France in 1948 to take up a position in the US embassy. Like all of Europe France was still recovering from the ravages of the war but somehow Julia and Paul managed to discover “food” and by that I mean food that tasted wonderful. Julia’s first meal was fish and she discovered that fish could have a magical taste! The way she described the fish made me want to get out of bed and start baking in the kitchen at 10:00 at night. Julia’s enthusiasm for food, and for life, leaped from the pages of her book. It was a pleasure to read and for the last two weeks I have been in France with Julia and Paul.

Needless to say when I saw the hashbrowns in the garbage not only was I outraged by my own personal sense of frugality but I was still in gourmand mode due to the book. I am sure everyone has heard “there are starving children in Africa” [and who hasn’t heard it lately with all the news coming from Somalia and elsewhere over the last couple of months?] so I was shocking to see the food there in the bin.

We should never take food for granted because this is what sustains our life. Even in it’s simplest form food is wonderful. Fresh baked bread with butter and sugar, hmmm mmm good. A fresh picked strawberry or apple, perfection. A sprig of parsley straight off the plant in the hanging basket, refreshing! Here in Canada we can go to a grocery store and see aisles and aisles of food, fresh, frozen, packaged. Imagine going into a grocery store and seeing a couple of crushed boxes of shreddies lying on the floor and nothing else? It could happen. Think about that next time you throw away perfectly fine food.