Food, or Eating Your Beans and Cornbread Thankfully Like An Adult

For the sake of not talking politics for a moment, let us indulge ourselves of this social media food outrage du jour.

Brown beans and cornbread as served Up Yonder, the author’s ancestral home and gathering place

I must be careful sometimes to not just give in to the baser human nature, hunch myself up, and growl at folks in my best impression of Anton Ego’s Peter O’Toole-fueled growl “I don’t like food, I looooooove it.”

Food has long been a happy place for me. I like eating it, I like cooking it, I like talking about it, I like sharing it, I like watching programs about it, I like reading recipes about it, I like the history of it, I like the creativity of making something new.

I love food.

Thing about food is, like many things in life, there are tiers to it, and societal sorting that lends to there being a snobbery at the top of culinary endeavors and a shocking lack of basic humanity at the bottom. Leave it to humans to take the most basic of needs and make a caste system out of it. Like anything else, food and culinary can fall anywhere on the spectrum from daily chore, to hobby, to scientific endeavor, to religion, to obsession.

Consider, if you will, Allium Sativum, the sulfur-containing compounds allicin, ajoene, diallyl polysulfides…