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Why write about food? by Gina Rae La Cerva
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Why Write About Food?
I love to write about food because when we write about food we are really writing about everything else. Food cannot be isolated from the whole system. When we write about food, we are actually writing about our past, our present, and our future.
For most of human history, food was our most primal connection to nature. Today, it remains a daily need, an experience of joy, and sometimes even an obligation.
Writing about food allows us to explore all of the many facets of what it means to be human. From hunger and desire, to sustenance and deliciousness, food taps into our deepest emotions.
Yet food is also practical. How did you eat growing up? How has that changed as you became an adult and could make your own food choices? How have you decided to nourish yourself and those you love? Food ties us to our health and to each other.
And food is political. Every meal is a reflection of the environment and labor. When you sit down to a plate of food, it exists because of a vast web of relations between humans and non-human creatures.
Food is consumption, predatory, the circle of life.
Food is poetry, sensuality, and pleasure.
Writing about food is a delicious way to access our inner worlds and transform our relationship with the external tapestry in which we exist.
Gina Rae La Cerva is an award-winning writer and environmental anthropologist originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has researched tsunamis in Indonesia, crossed the Pacific Ocean on a sailboat, and traced the wild meat trade from the forests of the Congo Basin to the streets of Paris. Her first book, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food, was recommended by the The New York Times and named an Amazon Best Book of the Year for 2020. Her personal essays have appeared in Emergence Magazine, THE Magazine, Sage Magazine, and various compilations. Gina Rae holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Vassar College. She loves to cook and eat!
Gina Rae will be teaching a Live Virtual Food Memoir Retreat, Thursday evenings April 8 - May 6, 2021. You can read more and register by following this link https://www.wildriceretreat.com/retreatsearch/gina-rae-lacerva-food-memoir-2021 or you can catch up with Gina Rae on Instagram at @feastingwild.