The Longest Time

Well, this isn't food, not exactly—and if you'd been present in the "editing room" while I made this, you'd know how unimportant food can be sometimes—but even if this isn't exactly food, I do still think that it bears some relationship to human appetite.  The motivation behind art and cooking are sometimes the same thing: we want something more than the world currently offers us.  We look in our pantry and it seems scant.  We mill around the house, hungry.  There is something we want, but we don't know what, so we take another look in the pantry out of sheer boredom.  Would you look at that, we say.  There are some provisions in our pantry after all.  It was only that we could not see them.  If this seems too poetic for you, let me return to the ground.  Sometimes you merely feed yourself because you are hungry; but other times you spend some time making yourself a meal that does more than fill your belly.  This, I think, is the bridge between art and food.  Food and cooking lend themselves so easily to all our human metaphors.  How often have you heard someone say, "This pie is made with love"?  "This cube steak is made with love." "These mashed potatoes, hon, are made with love."  Of course, they're made with fire, spatulas, and rolling pins, but we cannot help ourselves.  If eating were only calories, we could all go happily onto liquid diets.  But there is something more to eating.  I spent the whole afternoon eating marker caps, eating my vinyl record as it turned around and around.  Bon appetite.