"And then we'll eat it!"

My parents used to welcome winter with a night-time demonstration with an orange and a candle in the backyard. The candle was the sun, the orange the planet Earth, and my dad would hold and rotate the objects in his hands to show us with the relative reaches of the candle's flame the reason for winter's encroaching dark. I remember one solstice when my little brother was very young. My mom explained to him that we had to put on coats and boots because we were going outside for a little ceremony. My brother said confidently, "Oh, yes, and then we'll eat it!" Maybe he meant the orange. But I think it's possible that even as a pre-schooler he associated ceremony with food and knew that eating food (for him, preferably cake or cookies) is one way that we sanctify and celebrate.

Food and food rituals can be as mundane as they are sublime, and Giard describes this interesting paradox: while time in the kitchen can be "slow and interminable" and "feature distinct limits and pressures" for women, cooking is also a creative act that connects her with her own sensory past and the legacies of the women who have worked invisibly before her. In a similar moment of homage and loss, Benjamin writes in "Cafe Creme," "And what don't you have along with your coffee! The entire morning, the morning of this day, and sometimes also the missed mornings of life" (359). Given these two perspectives on food preparation and consumption as acts that elucidate memory and self, I'm interested in Berlant's commentary on food and eating as "interruption." She writes, "To eat can be an interruption of the desire to build toward the good life" (779). To eat can be a break, a relief or respite from "personality," a "small vacation from the will itself, which is so often spent from the pressures of coordinating one's pacing with the pace of the working day" (779). So, as much as food can be a display of taste or a manifestation of intent or creativity or consciousness or memory, it can also be a way to zone out. Food epitomizes the dualities of the everyday.

- Esme