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taspencer

My Personal Food History Begins with a Cliche

Updated: Feb 17, 2022

The obligatory "about me" post.

Girl at table holding a bowl of carrot soup.

I have always loved food. I grew up chopping cabbage and onions for stirfry with my father and rolling out pie dough with my grandmother. These childhood moments taught me to love working with food and to feel at completely at home in a kitchen.


By the time I was in middle school, I had started collecting food magazines, and copying recipes out of library cookbooks. I planned and executed multi-course meals and events for my friends and I, including a Valentine’s Day Mystery Meal and a real British tea party complete with open-faced cucumber sandwiches, cream puffs, and lemon mousse. Cooking, baking, entertaining—I loved it all.


When I was sixteen, I became anorexic.

The details are unimportant, but please understand: during the next seven years, I loathed food because of what it could do to my body. Obsessed with becoming thin, I believed that most food was a waste of calories and not worth consuming. Food disgusted me but, in the twisted way that applies to many of us with eating disorders, it also became a fascination. I hated and loved it all at the same time.


During those years, I perfected the art of labeling food as “okay or “absolutely not.” I stopped eating red meat and confined myself to cooked carrots and lentil curries. I counted out paper-thin turkey slices and arranged them on 90-calorie-a-slice bread spread with exactly one teaspoon of flaxseed oil—one of the most disgusting fats I have ever tasted to this day. When my sweet tooth whined, I appeased it with jello dotted with fat-free cool whip. These foods were safe. I could fit them into neat calorie-labeled boxes and check them off throughout my day.


As I entered college and my disorder morphed, I abandoned the calorie check-box method and traveled through multiple phases, including binging (though I never dared to throw up, thank goodness!) and days of severe restriction in which I forced myself to wait 16 hours to eat (I counted) between dinner and lunch the next day. By the end of college, I was very thin and very miserable.


And then I began dating my now-husband, a diabetic who loves food. After living with him for several months, I began to gain back some of my childhood passion for food. As an adult, my childish love for reading recipes became an obsession with learning exactly how everything—from profiteroles to rack of lamb—is made. I wanted to know the proper way to sear a duck breast. I wanted to learn the formula for a classic madeira cake. Slowly, without realizing it, my disgust for food was replaced with a crazy curiosity.***


Today, I am a passionate lover of food in all its forms, and I seek to create a harmonious balance with it in my life.


Girl standing in yard holding a live lobster.

I am curious, always interested in trying new techniques and tasting new flavors, even if the dishes don’t “turn out” or I don’t care for a particular food after all. I refuse to label any ingredient as good or bad—they are what they are, to be enjoyed to the fullest at their own time and place. Much of my personal enjoyment comes from working with the ingredients to create a finished dish.


Most importantly, I understand that everyone has their own personal food perspective, and I affirm them for seeking it out for themselves and living into it. There is no magical diet that works for everyone; our bodies are different and require unique blends of nutrients. It's important that we all seek to build harmony between our bodies and the food that we eat, and approach our meals joyfully, eager to savor and appreciate.


My cookbook seeks to reflect all these things: a passion for a variety of ingredients, techniques, and cuisines, a respect for a diversity of palates and meal compositions, and a never-ending search for balance and harmony between food and the lives of us who enjoy it.


That being said, enjoy!


***Please note: there is no easy path to recovering from an eating disorder. It is a cancerous mental illness, which does not go away easily. Even when it is in remission, there’s always a chance it will come back. There were many contributing factors that helped me to beat it—for now—but I will not include them here.


Originally posted May 24, 2019.

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