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.