Good Food is a Gestalt

It isn't what we eat, but how we eat that makes it part of us. 

A woman lives in a warm cottage at the foothills of the Swiss Alps.  She stands on a stool over a pot of boiling water.  On tiptoe, she carefully places pierogi into the water.  Each one was wrapped with care earlier that afternoon.  Each one stuffed lovingly with garden potatoes, wild mushrooms and the cheese she made fresh from the cow's milk.  It is her neighbor's cow and the milk was offered in exchange for her famous tomatoes.  She whispers to the boiling water - a soft song she doesn't know she is singing.  The dumplings, clearly a staple in her diet given the form she has taken over the years, bubble on her alpine stove.  Meanwhile, she continues her preparations musically, placing bread on the table, stirring the butter and parsley, pulling pressed kraut from its dark corner.  It is late summer - too early for apples, so she takes the remaining apple butter from last autumn and puts it into a bowl.  The dumplings are ready.  On tiptoe again, reaching with her ladle into the pot, she pulls them steaming from the water and places them with the same care into a large bowl.  From here she lets them sizzle momentarily in the herbed butter.  On to the plate they go, bouncing one by one, a dance that, after decades of similar ritual, still gives her childish pleasure.  She makes the sound they ought to make with their rubbery skin and pudgy insides.  When she is satisfied with their arrangement, she goes to the basement and pulls out her grandfather's wine.  It's a sweet and tart wine - her favorite, made from the juice of summer mulberries.  She wraps the bottle in a piece of cream-colored lace she crotcheted ages ago, the delicate beginning of a tiny dress.  As luck would have it, she bore only sons, so now it serves as decoration for special occasions.  She eyes her table, once a heavy tree in the nearby forest, then pauses, realizing the absence of onions.  How could she forget the very thing that made her back ache so with their harvest, that made her kitchen smell so delicious?  They are perfectly caramelized, waiting on the stove for their vessel.  She sets them in their place and calls to her guests.

We are ripened through the seasonal experience of growing and cooking and enjoying.  The loving exploration of feelings we register as uncomfortable, infuses life with gratitude and youth.  When we embrace a curious and affectionate relationship with our bodies, the question that plagues our young and privileged culture - what to eat - goes from being a distressing mystery to a playful opportunity. 

Good food cannot be quantified by measured units.  Good food is a gestalt.