From the craigardan diaries
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
There’s something about food that brings people together. Music and stories around fires have done this as well, for as long as language has existed, but long before we discovered communication through sounds and syllables, there has been food to do that for us as a race. New experiences are something I have always been averse to, or I should say, the old me used to be. And yet, that is what I have learned to seek: to grow, to breathe, to live. I am someone who has an affinity for corners and nooks and known comfort zones where I blend into the background, because I like operating in the familiar, but ever since I undertook this journey twelve years ago to discover who I was beyond the roles and responsibilities of someone only in relation to another, I have sought out the unfamiliar whenever I can to break out of self-imposed structures.
This year, my explorative side brings me to Craigardan, a beautiful multidisciplinary artist residency in the Adirondacks, in the thick of nature like it is known to thrive sans human intervention. Back in India, we live as close as we can in harmony with nature, but space is always at a premium. The middle class back home operates with minimum gadgetry and conveniences, and life is more functional than it is convenient. Like I know someone who invested in a Roomba only to realize the movement of dust and the settling of hair in room corners is not really a Roomba-conducive cleaning job, so back to broom and mop and pan they went. We buy gadgets, and go back to the analog life because… space. Or the lack thereof.
When I was scouting for a sieve in the kitchen yesterday, I realized how language has to be this precision instrument when communicating, because there are various mesh sizes that work for the straining of different sizes and textures of food. And so, the conversation went from “is there a sieve here, you know, a strainer to strain all this chopped parsley from the batch of salted lassi I just made, oh, there is just a colander for pasta, hmm, maybe it can do the trick, oh well, I couldn’t strain all of the parsley out, but at least, you don’t have to chew on them when you’re drinking the lassi” kind of conversation. From fine-mesh expectations to oh-well-we-will-make-do with colanders.
Food doesn’t need to be precise, however. You can commune with food, and you can communicate through food. It’s mostly hit, very seldom miss when ingredients come together to make a dish that sings on the tongue and the song registers in your soul and carries to the people you are eating with and you feel inter-synaptic connections being made. In my Craigardan cohort, one of us is a communications consultant, one a writing teacher and writer of fiction and non-fiction, one of us is doing research on amoeba fecal matter, one of us is an end-of-life doula, and then there is moi. Foodie, word lover, wallflower, not gifted with the gift of the gab, prone to say the oddest thing in human company, expert communicator in one-way or solipsistic communication. But congregation around the dinner table for a shared meal brought us out of our corners to sit in community with one another, me particularly. And naturally, the conversation turned to food. World cuisine, personal preferences, food adventure stories, and your palate knowing when the food speaks to you. You know what they say: you can lie to the mirror, but you cannot lie to your tongue.
The welcome dinner when we arrived here on Monday was made for us by Craigardan founder and host, Michele Drozd: a beet and pear salad, lemony braised greens, and lentil soup. And divine lemon bars with a drizzle of ricotta cheese. I regret to say I did not take pictures of the meal. We were then gently guided by team Craigardan to consider signing up to make dinner for the cohort and sign up on a sheet for which night we would want to do so. Breakfast and lunch are simple enough: a pantry of staples, spices, and ingredients to cook with, and a fridge loaded with produce from the farm and yogurt and milk and eggs and bread, but dinner can be a communal, come-together experience, we were told. One of us signed up to cook Tuesday night, one of us baked sourdough bread in the morning, and I chopped heirloom tomatoes for the salad: the hardest work I’ve had to do in a kitchen ever.
We sat down for a lovely, lazy dinner of bread and butter and pesto and a tomato-basil salad with basil that grows right outside the kitchen (we have a name for the plant and I will be the custodian and plant waterer and whisperer for the rest of my stay here) and a hearty black bean stew. We broke bread… and that broke the ice. We talked, we joked, we laughed, and pretty soon, each of us knew what we would make for dinner on our chosen nights to cook dinner for the cohort: hamburgers and eggplant burgers, cabbage salad, mango lassi, spinach and vegetable pulao, and cucumber raita and Indian restaurant-style yogurt-mint dip, by demand, to bathe in.
If you, like me, find yourself in the midst of strangers, and you don’t know what to say to break the ice, talk about food. You cannot go wrong. Two hours went by effortlessly, plates and bowls were licked clean, the gelid harvest moon rose in the cloudy sky, we heard songbirds twitter and chipmunks chitter and coyotes howl in the hills, we joked about bats and beavers in the Adirondacks, we made plans to trade recipes, we did the dishes and dried them and stowed them away in their places, we bid each other good night, and we walked back to our cabins, bellies and hearts full.
None of us are the same, but the converse is also true: none of us are so different that we need to stick to our corners. We just need to find common ground. And there is no greater ground, more mutual ground, more hallowed ground than food.
Bon appetit, everyone… and happy Gardaning.
