Food, Life, and the Big Picture

When my mother-in-law died a few years ago, my two sister-in-laws and I spoke at her memorial service. We hadn’t talked about what we would be saying prior to the service yet it was funny in a sweet kind of way that the three of us talked about a lot of the same things.

One of the things that all of us talked about was how food was love…Sue loved to cook, and her family had many traditions around her food. When she died, so many people brought food.

So much of life (and death) is food.

I met today with nutritionist Meredith Terranova to talk about my allergy-related food issues, which as I’ve come to see over the last couple of weeks really aren’t that big of a deal. Meredith put my specific food issues into the bigger picture, and we had a bit of a “come to Jesus” meeting.

It’s funny: the person I want to be physically is at odds with the person I physically am.  Sometimes, I feel so stuck. I know the physical person is tied up with the mental person and I’ve spent the last couple of years struggling with unhappiness over various personal issues. This conversation hit a lot of buttons with me, some things I could see coming and others that seemed to just pop up and whack me in the gut. I’m still a bit of an emotional wreck. How surprising that a simple conversation about nutrition affected me so greatly.

But, as Meredith said, food is LIFE.

We were talking about how I live my life, and it’s really not so suprising that this topic could become emotional.

Well, it’s just time for me to step up, suck it up, and be brave enough to face the challenges of getting what I really want out of my life.