This Ritual of Eating

     How important is food to you? It's very important to me. How much time do you spend thinking about food. reading recipes, shopping, preparing food, eating, drinking, and then cleaning up? A significant part of our life is spent in some aspect of our relationship to food.
     Even during a cleanse food  is immensely important. One needs to purchase the supplements, and vitamins, the fresh fruit, and vegetables one will consume during the cleanse. One needs the tools, the blender, and juicer.
Ay yai ya, couldn't it just be simpler? Then, there's the old question,does one eat to live, or live to eat? If your answer is the former, you're an Ascetic, if your answer is the later you are a Sybarite. I've always known that I'm a Sybarite. In the tenth grade in a French class that met during our lunch hour I was introduced to the pleasures of really good French bread, Brie, Boursin and hard salami. Oh baby, where had they been all my life. I was sixteen, and I recognized that I had been missing something. In after school cooking class we learned to make chocolate mousse, and French onion soup, now I was in heaven.
     Flash forward to the 1980's I spend six months working on the island of Nantucket. I have multiple jobs to pay the rent, and one of them is at a fancy gourmet store, and deli, Provisions. There I am introduced  to triple creme cheese, and a wide variety of pates. I develop a taste for cornichons. Ou la la c'est magnifique. I had yet to learn that French cheese out of France taste like plastic compared to the creamy magnificence you will encounter there, but at that time I had yet to travel to France. And that is a story left for another posting