The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat by Caroline Grant & Lisa Catherine Harper

Author:Caroline Grant & Lisa Catherine Harper
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Food & Wine, Cookbooks, Cookery, Writing
Publisher: Roost Books
Published: 2013-03-12T07:00:00+00:00

Part Three

learning to eat

Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage-12-17-12.indd 165

12/18/12 10:31 AM

Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage-12-17-12.indd 166

12/18/12 10:31 AM

a white Food disorder

DANI KLEIN MODISETT

Before I divulge the not-very-deep-dark secrets of my children’s rela-

tionship with food, I feel the need to confess something about myself.

There is never a time I don’t want to be eating. Even right now, I’m typ-

ing, but what I’m thinking is,

When is lunch? What is lunch? How about some egg salad with dill?

Nah, too mushy. Hand-cut turkey on a crusty baguette with red leaf

lettuce, sliced Roma tomatoes, and grainy mustard? Nice, but a little

Martha Stewart-esque and labor intensive. How about what you really

want? A soup-bowl-sized latte with a softball-sized blueberry-oat

muffin top? Just the top, the top won’t kill me. OK, write one more

page, paragraph, no two, two more paragraphs, or how about finish

a thought? Better yet, start a cohesive thought, a thesis, the point,

write the point of this piece and then you can eat . . . I promise.

Eating is one of the driving forces of my life. When I was fifteen I read the

autobiography of esteemed playwright and director Moss Hart, Act One,

with his extensive descriptions of the food he either ate or planned to eat

while he was writing and I knew I’d found my soul mate. Hart was laugh-

out-loud funny, George S. Kaufman’s collaborator and co-creator of such

classics as You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, but

like me all he really wanted to do was eat. He was the first man, other than

167

Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage-12-17-12.indd 167

12/18/12 10:31 AM

my father, I loved. If only he hadn’t died of heart attack two years before

I was born.

Sometimes when I am trapped in a dull conversation my mind wan-

ders and I think about designing a T-shirt or a belt buckle that says, “I’d

Rather Be Eating.” Although partial to sugary, creamy treats, I’ve also

been known to absentmindedly plow through a sixteen-ounce container

of imported shaved Parmesan cheese even if it’s not imported. I can eat a

pound of Costco Parmesan in under an hour.

Given my appetite, I should be a very large woman. But I am also very

vain. I come by it organically having been raised by a former model and a

man who, once diagnosed with cancer, refused any kind of chemo treat-

ment that would make his hair fall out. These are my people. To state that

I have an internal, relentless, draining, sometimes paralyzing struggle

between feeling like life is not worth living without excess food while si-

multaneously believing that I am only a valuable woman if I am the size

of a movie star’s leg is like saying there’s some fighting in Israel that may

never end.

Did I just compare my disordered eating to the problems in the Middle

East? Yes, I did. But only to the extent that I am certain both are conflicts

that will not see resolution in my lifetime. Does my preoccupation with

food and my body size—what I believe to be a decidedly female preoccu-

pation, at that—render me shallow, callow, and self-involved? Yes, dear

readers, some days it does.

So imagine my joy when I found out my first child was going to be a boy

and then the second one, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.