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Writer's pictureDoug Weiss

You Are What You Eat

I confess, I am a foodie. Now before you type me as an Instagram foodie, or a NYT recipe foodie, or an aficionado of Asian Fusion Basque culinary incantation …well you get the point. Before you decide what I mean by that expression, kindly let me explain.

I have what some might describe as a generous interest in food, almost every kind and even some foods that most folks living in our part of the world might not find appealing. I certainly did not acquire this interest from my mother who, regular readers of my posts know by now was neither a capable cook, nor someone who enjoyed different cuisines. It was my dad who introduced me to the exotic and delicious foods of other cultures.


When he left the Army and went back to work with my grandfather, my dad worked a half day on Saturdays. It was my particular joy from a very early age to join him on those days—to have little projects in the vast machine shop owned by my grandfather where my dad, his brother, Stanley, and ‘uncle’, Sal, passed the day with snarky comments directed at my grandfather, the scarcely visible old man who worked on another floor inventing yet another gizmo from which he would never earn a dime. Fortunately, he had made enough from his early inventions that he scarcely cared—as long as he could just keep doing what he liked. And among his many vanities was the belief that he was as capable a patent attorney as he was an inventor—hence the lack of royalties from his many ingenious gadgets.


When afternoon rolled around, dad and uncle Stan would pack up and we would head off to the city—always to interesting places –often dusty old shops harboring an amazing array of treasures a young boy could find endlessly fascinating. But the highlight of the day was the adventure of going to some obscure neighborhood filled with sights, smells and people very different from anyone I knew and eating something I’d never eaten before.


It might be a Lebanese café, an Armenian restaurant, an Ethiopian dive—anything but the usual. The 50’s and 60’s were not yet a time when many Americans had refined palates nor the inclination to explore other cultures. But dad and Stanley did, and they took me along for the ride. I am forever grateful.

Food builds bridges. You cannot know someone at all until you have broken bread together, shared a meal and experienced the surprise of discovering something that tastes, well like nothing else you have ever tasted. Those Saturdays with Stan and dad taught me to be accepting of every culture—to approach new cultures and their cuisines with excitement rather than apprehension and it gave me an important insight. It is said that we are what we eat—and that is generally about nutrition—both good and bad. That is not what it means to me.


Show me someone who exists on a fixed diet—who hesitates to try foods with which they are unfamiliar, or insists on eating Americanized versions of Asian, Latin or some other culture’s food and I’ll show you someone whose horizons end at their door. Food is a gateway to understanding and through my adult years, in my travels and whenever possible I relish the opportunity to try something new, but even more to use the food as a catalyst for meeting people. Sometimes we cannot even speak each other’s language, but food needs no translation whatsoever. To see the smile of someone you do not know when you first taste a dish they’ve introduced to you is a wonderful moment. To share your excitement with them is as powerful a bond of shared humanity as I have ever experienced.


And once you’ve shared that meal together, found your common ground, you have changed—taken into yourself quite literally a little bit of yeast that will keep on fermenting, opening you up to a wider understanding of the world and the endless variety and curiosity of the human experience. It is difficult to feel anything but positive about someone with whom you have shared a meal—and that is a seed that can become an antidote to fear, hatred, and alienation. If indeed you are what you eat, then I am a citizen of the world, with a passport to the universe and an unlimited visa.

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