Getting Off To A Good Start

I'm really, really focused on breakfast lately. This wasn't always the case. Until recently I never woke up hungry but after learning that I had low thyroid function and starting medication for the condition I almost always want to eat first thing in the morning. This is a wonderful thing. I have discovered the joys of granola, fruit salad and yogurt with mint, waffles, and of course eggs.

Eggs were my nemesis growing up. The yolks were "gross" if they were cooked too hard and "disgusting" if they were runny. I watched my Grammy eat soft poached eggs and grapefruit whenever she was on a diet and internally shuddered. I made an uneasy truce with the egg in college when I realized that my dining hall made a perfect hard boiled egg. Their eggs never had that green ring around the yolk and the whites were tender. Best of all, because the eggs weren't over-cooked they didn't smell like sulfur when you cracked them open later in the day during a study break at the library.

After moving out of the dorms I learned to appreciate the brunch frittata and the late-night egg sandwich. I just couldn't muster an egg breakfast. As the years passed I made peace with the soft scramble and the runny yolk and I find myself enjoying what a friend calls "nature's gravy" more and more. I've perfected the faux-poached egg as well as the sunny side up, both seen above, and I am happier and better equipped to face the day for it. Viva Los Huevos!

It has been a year since my last post. Shameful! I'll just say this. I was underemployed for quite a few months last year and then last June I finally got a call to work... and I worked and worked and worked. Thank goodness. My cupboards would've been bare.

Food as The Personal
My job often relates to food in some way. I recently did a six month stint on a show about obese teens and their struggle to lose weight before college. I was shocked and saddened to see hours and hours of footage where these not-quite-adults obsessed about the sugar they couldn't eat on their new diets and continued to sneak "junk food", privately tamping down their feelings with chips, cookies and in one instance canned cake frosting. It made me appreciate the personal relationship I get to have with my work. I am only good at my job if I can marry my own experiences and feelings with every frame that makes it to the screen. My love of food made me empathize with these kids. While I don't relate to their disordered eating and their families' disfunction surrounding food and a "healthy lifestyle" I can relate to the power food has to make us as individuals feel good, to feel in control and to manipulate others within our personal spheres.

Food as The Community
I am currently working on a show about whaling. I was raised to understand that whaling is Wrong. I relate to the point of view of the show's protagonists that whaling is abhorrent. While I am not vegan like many people featured on the show, my perspective is that there are other sources of animal protein that we can eat that won't throw off the balance in major eco systems and drive species to the brink of extinction. That being said, I understand that the Wrongness of whaling is a Western cultural construct. I still wrestle with the idea of dictating to a community that their traditional way of life is Wrong. It makes my job interesting to talk with co-workers who have traveled to places like Japan to have whale sushi and whale terriyaki just to see what the fuss is about. I won't fault them for trying it. In essence they are playing with their cultural boundaries and investigating the cognitive dissonance that is always a part of food and community. Do we know what our food is? Where it came from? What it took to harvest it? Probably. Do we want to acknowledge it? Probably not.