November 6th - 7th

I am coming to appreciate the long, slow style of eating, as well as how spread out the meals are. Something that is really different about the meals here is the timing. Breakfast is at 8:30, while lunch is at 1pm and dinner not until 7:30. I have felt like I need a snack in between meals, but there is only fruit available. In the beginning of the week I had a hard time waiting until lunch and I hoarded away an apple from breakfast. It sat on my dresser the rest of the week. It made me think about the psychological and emotional aspect to hunger. I grew up not with an actual scarcity of food, but surrounded by others who had felt it. I think it got passed down genetically. One of those tiny genes of trauma they are discovering get turned off and on. My father was at one time an illegal immigrant in Canada who often ate out of trashcans as a necessity. His father in turn lived through the depression, one of seven in a poor mining family. He continued this practice throughout my childhood, even when dumpstered bagels were not a necessity. It then became a case of responsibility. We eat the food out of the dumpster because it is just as good as any other food and we are not wasteful! We are not blatant consumerists, we care about the world. This translates to eating habits – it is hard to leave a plate uncleaned, even when I am full. Because it is there and it should be eaten, because we are lucky to have it.


I think about this and hunger. When I am hungry, I feel a bit panicked. Is there food? Will it be enough? Combined with being a person in love with food, the taste, the history and sensuality of it, I rarely actually make it to being hungry – I am always happy to plan out the next possible opportunity to eat. The description in Counihan’s piece of how Florentine women spend the days talking about food, planning food (27) struck very close to home. It is a way of ordering your day.


This whole ritual has been taken out of my hands at Spannocchia. And to be honest I have found the experience somewhat anxiety producing. On a deep level, my anxiety about being hungry was a kind of distrust that somebody is really going to feed me. However, by the end of the week, I had built up a kind of faith, a relationship of trust in the kitchen. Part of this was just the practice – every day we did indeed have food, and had more than enough.


Another was the fact that the meals were in courses. This allayed some of my fear that I would eat too slowly and others would everything up – fostering that stuffing your mouth kind of dining. And third was the inherently social aspect to the meal. When we ate, perhaps the first bites were rushed, but then we fell into a conversation. And then after we digested the first course a little, the second course would come. We wouldn’t be so desperate, but we would be able to fully enjoy it.

I also saw what was referred to in our reading as the constant presence of bread. Since we were eating what would probably be considered a very fine meal by traditional Tuscan standards – every day – there were other constants which rounded out the meal. The constants of oil, salad, tea, bread and fruit. These were our condiments, as well as the markers of the beginning and end of a meal. Amazingly, I never once this week walked away from the table feeling uncomfortably stuffed. Though I enjoyed every single dish. After a certain amount of mindful, utter enjoyment, I was able to step away and know I had experienced that dish to it’s fullest – and I did not need to physically prove it to myself.


With this emotional aspect to hunger, eating and food, I’ve been thinking about the word gola which Counihan explains as “a desire or longing for food”. Trying to explain it in English seems rather fraught. While it seems to directly translate to the word “gluttony” it does not have the same moral judgment. In the context that the word gola is used, it does not seem to mean something inherently shameful, though it is sensual and indulgent. It as though we should not be overindulgent in order to continuously have the enjoyment of food. Enjoy just enough so you can enjoy more later. I have observed in our own group of Americans that food does not seem to be thought of as an enjoyable daily ritual. Clearly, we all think about food. We think about the political meaning, the history, the ingredients and where they come from. We talk about whether it will make us fat. We talk about the social aspect, in an anthropological sense. But we don’t talk much about personal joy. We don’t address it as a bodily experience. Of course, if we talked too much about the body, we might start thinking about sex, or emotions which are irrational; we might attempt to break down the barrier between mind and body.