Carla

name: Carla

collection #: ML14

collection location: The Chicken Coop, Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA

age: mid thirties

occupation: artist

Relationship to food: strained

At the time that I interviewed Carla, her relationship to food was strained. Generally, it was in her disposition to take great pleasure in eating- pairing food with wine or going out to dinner and languishing in the length of time spent there. However, as she was in her second and final year of grad school, food had become more about survival than pleasure. She had lost her desire to cook and was functioning from the mindset of “what’s the quickest way I can keep my body moving”.

She grew into early adulthood with a very romantic notion of food. As an artist she enjoys process and always thought she’d have a particular relationship with food preparation, one where she spends hours in the kitchen doing something such as making pasta from scratch. I suffer from this same notion. I revel in the idea of mixing the perfect dough, rolling it out over and over in the pasta maker. Carla has, however, never really done this and as she gets older, she is growing comfortable with the idea that she just may not be one of those people who makes pasta from scratch. She credits this with the fact that she eats alone. She believes it has killed her desire for the process of food preparation as it lacks a community and ritualistic atmosphere.

Her greatest food memory is of coffee. Her parents brought the ritual with them from Columbia. They have a pot together as a family to start the day. They always have a pot of coffee with dinner and they finish their day with it too. When she moved to NY several years ago, she lived alone for the first time. On her first day in her new apartment, she bought a coffee pot and a bread machine, both equipped with a timer. She set them to go off the next morning at the same time and still remembers the amazing scent of both as they baked and brewed. To her it felt like the ultimate in spoiling herself. She still feels the same way when she rewards herself with a really good cup of coffee.

But my favorite of food memory of Carla’s is one told of green olives (the kind stuffed with pimentos) and her sister. When she was young, Carla wanted to be just like her sister: wearing clothes like her, changing clothes when she changed clothes, ordering the same things when they went out…and this drove her sister crazy. One day at a salad buffet, her sister dared her to eat 100 olives in a row. She remembers being really little and fighting through it but eating them all. The thing she finds funny about this story is that she still loves olives. She finds it amazing every time she eats olives that she still loves them because when she does she always thinks of her sister and that moment. It makes her question the food that we love and the foods we hate and why we love or hate them, because that was one of those moments that could have changed her relationship with green olives forever. But it didn’t. Not in the slightest.