Me Love You Like Cook Food

Food seems to be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love, Muslim love,  Jewish love, or well you get the point.  Put some good food in front of folks from all walks of life, and they forget that they hate one another.  As a matter of fact, food binds us in love and admiration across cultures, spaces and times.  It is truly beyond me how we love each other's food to the point of cravings, yet we hate each other and also hate the cultures from whence these mouthwatering dishes derive.

 Food is a part of our happiness as humans.  Jamaicans have a saying: "Me Love you like cook food" which describes the joyous affection that we feel for someone.  Food really enhances our experiences by adding joy to our festivities. For example, Christmas needs a nice jug of sorrel. Easter is more meaningful with escoveitch fish or bun and cheese. We survive the week up until Saturday just for a good, hot pot of chicken foot soup.  Sunday isn't the same without carrot juice and rice and peas for Sunday dinner. Every culture has special foods that have special meaning.  As a child I hated soup on Saturdays. Soup Saturday was the most painful day of the week for me.  I also hated cold weather and the fact that the weather never stopped my mother from dragging me with her to the Korean grocery stands in Brooklyn to buy provision (Yellow Yam, Negro Yam, Dashine, Cocoa, etc.) for the God awful soup.  Now, I love chicken soup to the point of craving.  I shared a pick of my very own pot of chicken soup that I make every now and again.  My oldest daughter who is one of my mother's sidekicks, loves soup beyond measure.  I think that makes my mother happy. 

 Small as I was when I left Jamaica, I remember hearing the sound of the floor polisher, smelling floor polish, and eating Rice and Peas.  When my mother cooks something, she always has a story behind it. My mother usually shares how she used to enjoy certain foods for certain occasions or certain times of the year when she was a child.  The same for my dad. I also share stories about food and culture with my children each time I teach them to cook a particular dish or if they try something new.

Recently, since the world's  new found admiration for all things coconut, my father happened to cook some salt-fish and cabbage and donned it with some coconut oil (the real flavored kind). My Jamerican kids who love their cooked food, went nuts. They flocked granddaddy with all kinds of questions on why  the food tasted extra nice. My father always has a back story. He told stories of how island  folks came to put  away their coconut oil for so many decades. It all boiled down to some propaganda that coconut oil was bad for you, in efforts to boost the sales of corn and vegetable oil.  If we live long enough we will have a back story.  I remember news reports even saying that coconut oil was bad  for your arteries. Now, the world has gone coconut crazy. People are using coconut from head to toe, bed to bath, and even in the kitchen. I watched an episode of couples court and the wife knew the husband was cheating based on the fact that their bedroom coconut oil jar was disturbed.  Funny stuff.

What really baffles me is how our country is filled with so much diversity in food and yet people still struggle with diversity among their neighbors.  Macaroni and cheese is at almost every table during the holidays, yet we all have very different feelings about each table.  I almost never hear folks say they hate Caribbean food, but you will hear them say I hate Caribbeans.  The same goes for Mexicans or other Hispanics.  Our streets are flooded with successful Mexican and Asian restaurants and yet we struggle with people from those parts of the world.  We had concentration camps for Japanese in the 1940s and now we are building a wall to keep Mexicans out.   Ah yes, touchy subject, huh? Well, if we are raising the next generation as modern mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and grandfathers, someone had better start airing out the stench created from centuries of misconceptions.  I speak about uncomfortable subjects with my children and other young people because they are the future.  I want my future to be bright!

Food tells a story and give us a way to convey our emotions.  When I lived in Georgia, I learned to cook southern food and found a great similarity between the foods I cooked from Jamaica and the food cooked by southerners.  We are more alike than different.  Food is also a bridge to another man's heart and mind.  In the movie "Like Water For Chocolate", the power of love and food is communicated.  If you have never seen it, you should watch.  It takes place in Mexico in a well to do family with several daughters.  The family tradition is for the youngest daughter not to marry, but to take care of the parents until death.  In the movie, the youngest sister has a suitor that she has to hand over to the older sister because of this tradition.  The love that the younger sister and her suitor was so strong that even after the young man married the eldest sister, the love never died.  Since the youngest sister was the family cook, her passionate emotions transferred to every meal that she cooked.  The family members who ate the food were also affected with similar emotion.

A few years ago my mother, her siblings and I took a trip to the UK to see my grandmother who was ill.  My grandmother had immigrated from Jamaica to the UK, decades before.   Amidst the new and exciting surroundings that were pleasantly familiar in the architectural similarity to New York and most of Northeast America, was the unpleasantness of the lousy English food.  My apologies to my English Fam.  One day after we finished exploring Harrods, we were happy to find an Italian restaurant where we could get some good old fashioned carbs with some garlic and meat.  It was a breath of fresh air to have something enjoyable to eat.  The restaurant was owned by authentic Italians and at that moment, I wanted to do a praise break for immigration.  Food diversifies people.  Food comforts people.  Food welcomes people.  Food represent the joys and sorrows of people. 

Cornelia shares additional stories about her life in her book The Birthing Chair: Push Past Pain and Release Purpose

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