Food

A glorious, juicy hamburger, cradled in an airy bun delicately sprinkled with sesame seeds, approaches you by way of that angel of sustenance: your waiter. You whip out your phone, ready to capture a picture of it for your online friends to envy. 

But take a step back, for a moment. 

What is this hamburger, really? Minerals. Zinc. Iron. Vitamin B12. Omega 3 fatty acids. Calories to keep your body moving, minerals in individual cells, ions working with neurotransmitters, at a microscopic level, impossible to perceive. At its base level, this is all that food should be. 
When you look at that hamburger, however, you don’t think,

 “Mmm, look at all that vitamin B12! My nerves will be happy all day!”

No.

However little food should mean to us, it transcended that boundary of black-and-white need long ago. When our species was still taking its tentative baby steps into this world, our existence was devoted entirely to the pursuit of food. We have fought wars over food. Died over food. 

And now we post it on our Instagram.

This is just another piece of our obsession. Food means much more to us than a series of nutrients, solely for the continuance of our existence. It is so engrained into our collective psyche that it has become entwined, irrevocably, with emotion.
Food is friends, laughing around a plate of hot wings. 
Food is romance; affection won over plates of pasta and twin glasses of wine.
 When we are happy, we eat. We go out to celebrate an anniversary, a success, a birthday. 
When we are sad, we eat: picture a heartbroken lover, scraping the bottom of a pint of ice cream. Or tired hands, cradling a beer after a hard day. 

More bashfully, food has permeated our expressions:
 “I could just eat you up!”
“She’s so sweet.”
“They seemed a little bitter over the whole thing.”
“He looked disgusting.”

Food is nostalgia. 
(Candy corn, for example, exists purely for its nostalgic value. Nobody actually likes candy corn.)
Food embodies the holidays. Some of our most poignant memories revolve around food:
Cinnamon rolls and homemade hot cocoa on Christmas morning. Making chocolate chip cookies with your mother, her letting you lick the mixing spoon clean, and giving the bowl to your sister. Popsicles in the summer, sucking the plastic tube dry like a mosquito on a sugar high. A watermelon seed spitting contest. The taste of success; Gatorade after a dusty softball game. Or the guilt of succumbing to a third triple-chocolate brownie. 

All of this, the color, the culture, memories, emotions, all associated with food, cannot be captured in the black and white concept of what food should be. Food is colorful. Food is culture. We want to taste the curry in India, the hot dogs in Chicago. We trade recipes, an ancient tradition, passed from wrinkled hand to new as naturally as breathing; little bites of history. 

From a step away, food should be simple. It is the continuance of life, the device by which we gain energy. Eat. Reproduce. From a step away, that’s all that we are.
But we can see so much more clearly from up close: the simple pleasure of breaking bread, of a spoonful of soup, of a warm belly. We can look back centuries with each loaf of sourdough bread, at traditions of making, as old as stone. We feel the satisfaction of being full, the simple happiness that food brings us. 

So look at that hamburger more closely. See the meat your ancestors chased on foot, the recipe of bread as old as flour, ground from wheat with mortar and pestle, once upon a genealogical time. 

And then post it on Instagram.