Tastes Like God: The Spiritual Life of Food

By Carrie Triffet

THIS IS NOT ABOUT A MIRACLE DIET. IT’S ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS ON A DIET OF MIRACLES.

Part deliciously funny spiritual memoir, part serious metaphysical “science experiment,” TASTES LIKE GOD illuminates the big questions of existence, through the lens of Carrie’s own tangled relationship with food. Her spiritual exploration of food’s true meaning takes the reader on an unforgettable, real-time journey of transformation. Topics include:

• Overcoming food addiction
• Dieting, exercise and attractiveness
• Guilt and the food chain
• Inner peace and deepest self-acceptance

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780983842163

Book preview

Triffet

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Sometimes a single question can change your life.

A couple of summers ago, I spent the day with a very wise young friend. Standing in her sunlit English kitchen, I watched as she fished a couple of red and white decorative mugs out of the cupboard and set about making us tea. LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED, their rims proclaimed, with that bossy certainty that mugs everywhere seem to possess.

She asked how I’d been. I felt it inappropriate to lie.

As the kettle boiled I told her, in moderately indelicate detail, of my ongoing struggle with digestive issues. My stomach and southerly regions have always been slightly unruly, but in recent years the behavior had, at times, seemed downright ornery. Nothing I did seemed to have any effect. I listed for her the physical remedies I had already tried and the ones I was still considering.

She listened intently with slightly furrowed brow until I finished speaking, then passed me a steaming LOVE mug. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two.

Perhaps you might ask yourself this question, she offered at last. What have I swallowed that is indigestible?

• • •

I knew she was speaking metaphorically. What information had I fed myself that promoted distress and blocked Truth?

That’s Truth with a capital ‘T,’ by the way. And the capital ‘T’ Truth was this: Truth is Love, Love is God, God is everything—including me and you—and if God-Love-Truth included me and you, then oh boy, was I ever suffering from one serious case of mistaken identity.

I earnestly asked myself this indigestibility question in meditation over the following days and weeks. Each time I got only silent fear in response. Some deep down part of me didn’t like that line of inquiry one bit. Although my intellectual thinking mind had long accepted that I was made out of God (in Truth!), the rest of me wasn’t buying it.

So I dropped the question, shelving it for some other day. Over the intervening two years it arose time and again in different forms, usually in connection with food itself. Because although my friend’s question may have been intended metaphorically, it proved to be equally useful when taken literally. Food, as it turned out, was a remarkably good lens through which to view the human condition—my own human condition as well as everybody else’s.

What did I swallow that was indigestible? The same thing as you. We’ve all swallowed concepts that can’t help but cause us internal distress of one kind or another. Yet the deeper I looked, the more I realized food seemed to play a pivotal role in this peculiar digestive process, at least for some of us.

What follows, then, is the story of my own tumultuous relationship with food, unfolding even as I simultaneously arm-wrestled the bigger questions of existence. To my great astonishment, these parallel journeys turned out to be one and the same.

FEED THE NEED

ICE CREAM DREAMS

I was starving and nobody knew it.

Food was plentiful in my childhood home, and I shoveled it into my mouth three times a day like everybody else. I just wasn’t swallowing any of it. I couldn’t. Something was in the way.

Liquids slipped down my throat with a little effort. As for actual foodstuffs, I discovered if I worked at it long enough, diligent massage with juicy spit would eventually turn small bits of bread or mashed potato into something kind of resembling liquid, which could then make its reluctant way down the gullet. Firmer foods never stood a chance of getting past the mystery barrier.

Obediently I chewed forkfuls of meat until long after the table was cleared. I chewed until each mouthful was sucked clean of its savory juices, leaving only flavorless gray wads of matted fiber, which I saved up in my pockets and deposited discreetly in the backyard. This had been my suppertime ritual for as long as I could remember. I was seven years old.

In the peculiar habit of children, I saw nothing unusual in this situation. I merely accepted that other people, normal people, could swallow what they chewed. It never would have occurred to me to mention it to my parents.

One day while dancing gleefully naked in front of the bedroom mirror (as you do), I noticed I could count every-single-one-of-my-ribs! I was a whiz in school, and had mastered addition and subtraction with ease. All these perfectly delineated front and back ribs gave me the chance to show off just how great I was at counting sums. I went running for my mother, hoping she would share my joy at this impressive display of mastery.

She did not share my joy.

The next day I was bundled off to the hospital, where my mutant, overgrown tonsils came out and lots of vanilla ice cream went in. Everyone joked how lucky I was, to have an excuse to eat vanilla ice cream all day. I wasn’t impressed. My throat was on fire and despite all assurances that the cold would help, it didn’t. Besides, I didn’t particularly like ice cream.

I never understood the big deal about ice cream. In my family, there were only two kinds, and I found both equally lacking. Large, anemic supermarket blocks of ice cream came in three artificial colors: Off-white, brown or pink. (Or sometimes we got a box of Neapolitan, just to change it up a bit—a stripey version containing side-by-side slabs of off-white, brown and pink.)

Or there was the sweet and swirly soft serve kind from Dairy Queen. Concentric flowing rings of inoffensive blandness rising tall off the cone, crowned by a delicate curlicue on top.

Meh.

It wasn’t until I tasted my first double chocolate Häagen Dazs in the late 1970s that I kind of got what the ice cream fuss was all about. Even so, it’s never been my go-to dessert. Cakes and pies are more my thing.

• • •

My dad’s relationship with ice cream was an entirely different matter. A product of harsher times and different social attitudes toward children, my father spent his formative years in an orphanage. He was not an orphan.

His mother, a divorcée, found herself utterly overwhelmed with trying to run a corner grocery while tending to an infant son on her own. Pushed to extremes, she gave her baby away and returned to collect him fourteen years later, after securing a second husband to support the family.

(I got into many a heated childhood argument over the impossibility of having six grandparents. I cried with frustration as other kids—and their parents—called me a liar. Divorce and remarriage, obviously, were still highly uncommon occurrences in my neck of the woods at that time. Yet not nearly as uncommon as they would have been back in my father’s day.)

Anyway. Ice cream. To my father, ice cream was more than a dessert, more than a cooling summertime treat. It was a magical, outsized totem of love and specialness: It singled him out for attention and affection. It proved he existed, proved he had the same right to happiness as anybody else. In the orphanage, he got ice cream once a year on his birthday. It was his favorite food.

As an adult he vowed his children would be showered with ice cream opportunities. He himself was by this time diabetic, unable to share in the sweet treats. Yet he would see to it that no matter what, in lean times or plenty, my sister and I would always know the abundant joy of ice cream love.

I would barely touch my dish of Neapolitan, and I met those offers of after-dinner trips to Dairy Queen with disinterested yawns. It crushed him when I declined, but hey. Ice cream just wasn’t my thing, you know?

Around age fourteen I began to realize what ice cream actually signified for my father. By declining all those treats, I had repeatedly negated his attempts to teach my sister and me of our inherent specialness, through the only symbol he knew. By refusing to appreciate ice cream as a yardstick for worth, I’d inadvertently managed to trample my father’s definition of happiness.

By some convoluted leap of logic, I became convinced my refusal to eat his gifts of ice cream made me personally responsible for his impoverished Depression-era childhood. It was my fault he had grown up unloved and alone, institutionalized like an underage cast member from Annie. It was I who had caused his hard knock life. How could I have been so cold?

• • •

My older sister was a hearty young thing, sound of mind and physically fit. I, on the other hand, had gotten a rocky start in life, nearly killing both my mother and myself during childbirth. After that, I exhibited a host of strange maladies and unnamable terrors pretty much right from the start. On top of it all, I was a picky eater.

I don’t know when or how the decision was made, but my mother often cooked me entirely separate meals without comment or complaint. I was routinely given food fit for royalty while the rest of my family scraped by on peasant rations. I didn’t like bean and cabbage soup (what child would?) so I got lamb chops.

Meat or fish was an event in our household, and it tended to come on specific days of the week. Wednesday always meant fish. On Friday, inevitably, we ate chicken. There was no such thing as lamb chop night.

And yet I never questioned my plate of choice cuts, while everybody else made do with vegetable soup. No one ever said a word about it, any more than we spoke of the pre-chewed lumps of unswallowed gray matter that I quietly deposited in the garden for the neighborhood dogs.

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:

IT’S COMPLICATED

Shortly after I mastered swallowing what I ate, I fell hard for food’s allure. The gray tones of childhood burst into brilliant Technicolor whenever good food entered the picture. The mere presence of something delicious to eat seemed to make the skies bluer, the birdsong sweeter.

When friends came over, I’d gamely endure a morning of playing house, or a few rounds of Hide and Seek. A board game if we must. But the toy of my dreams was the Easy-Bake Oven. What could be better than play and food? Anytime I could convince a friend to help me cook and eat, that was a very good day indeed. The same sensibility applied to special events. When my birthday rolled around, the gifts were nice enough, the games were okay. But I was really just in it for the cake.

Mind you, this was no ordinary birthday cake. My mother’s family owned a wildly popular local bakery that gained its devoted following the old-fashioned way: They used lavish amounts of real, honest, top quality ingredients in every one of their baked goods.

Other shops might rely on food coloring to tint their pastries a slightly lurid shade of yellow. At our family bakery, those delicacies got their golden glow from a sea of bright orange egg yolks, and plenty of sweet butter. And oh, could you ever taste the difference.

My birthday cakes were rich, densely multi-storied beauties, blanketed in buttercream and lovingly hand decorated with my name spelled out amid all the pretty roses on top. I dreamt of those cakes year round. When I turned twelve I took cake decorating lessons at the bakery, just so I’d have an excuse to hang out near those magnificent layer cakes more often.

Had you tasted the birthday cakes of my youth, you’d understand why the party itself was just something to be lived through in order to get to the cake. But really, I felt the same way about most extracurricular activities and the foods that brought them to life.

I’ve never understood why anybody would bother to plan an outing if food was not to be part of it. What point was there in hiking, I wondered, if no picnic awaited me on a grassy bluff at the end of it? Any sort of get-together only made sense to me if it was going to be brightened by snacks. C’mon, at least tea and cookies. Give me something to look forward to.

• • •

My mother was a pretty good cook, with a repertoire of ten or twelve dependable home-style recipes in rotation at any given time. But by the time I was in my teens she had grown too ill to set foot in the kitchen, so my grandmother moved in with us and took over, whipping up a steady storm of delicious Middle-European treats in her wake. Between the two of them I never bothered learning how to prepare my own meals, beyond the occasional bowl of oatmeal or scrambled eggs on toast.

When I left home at seventeen the sudden dearth of deliciousness came as a shock. So I taught myself to cook, not by following recipes but through patient experimentation, mixing random ingredients in every possible combination. No longer a picky eater by this time, my investigations drew upon a broad palette of flavors. I wanted to find out: What made a dish delicious? What made it inedible?

Some experiments paid off the first time: Twice-baked potatoes with grated lemon, capers and sour cream. That one was a keeper. Ditto for peanut butter-and-cinnamon redhot-baked French toast. (Better than it sounds.)

Yet for every success, I cooked up at least one dismal failure. Whiskey-marinated sweet potatoes showed some promise, flavor-wise—or at least they did until I accidentally ignited the alcohol, scaring the crap out of myself while nearly setting the kitchen on fire. (Did you know unbreakable Melamine plates do, in fact, break when superheated just before clattering to the floor, trailing a stream of swearwords? Neither did I.)

I kept at it with dogged determination, and over time my experiments paid off. I developed a sort of sixth sense for deliciousness. Food seemed to speak to me. I could tell just by holding ingredients side by side within my mind, which ones would combine to spark tickles of joy on the tongue. And when I cooked, the food would seem to whisper as I stirred and tasted, telling me just what seasonings to add next. I loved good food, and to my everlasting delight I discovered eventually, through much trial and error, that good food loved me back.

• • •

So we’re muy simpatico, the edibles and I. At least we used to be. Our attraction started out innocently enough, yet the nature of that relationship began to subtly shift at some point in adulthood. Our bond grew darker. Needier. I couldn’t seem to pinpoint when my