Busayo Oderinde: The Passion Factor in Food

Food is spiritual and emotional. Don’t roll your eyes; I am not just a crazed foodie. If you truly enjoy and understand food, you will agree with me. The boo had a meal of pounded yam recently somewhere in Lokoja and he called to tell me it was an emotional experience. Also the comments that you amazing people posted on the Street food Chronicles article confirms this notion that food is emotional and passionate. {Click here if you missed it}

Now that we agree that food is both emotional and spiritual, it just follows the logic that it is a medium of communication. So food can communicate happiness, memories, sadness, anger, tiredness, joy and well love.

The love factor is something my sister said one time years ago and it stuck. We were eating a meal we were really enjoying, I remember it was a simple meal, I think it was fried yam and tomato sauce, it was prepared by another sister  and we were giving her (the cook) compliments on her cooking and my sister said ‘it’s love that is making the food sweet.’

As I have grown and eaten all sorts of meals in all sorts of places, I have found the truth in that statement. Sometimes, the key to a truly satisfactory meal is the love or passion the meal was cooked with. If the chef at a restaurant loves his job and it is his very passion, the food will communicate it. If it’s the opposite scenario, the food will also be bleh.

Food is a way of showing love, care, gratitude or even passing a message. We send people food to say ‘hey’, ‘get well soon’,’ thank you’ or even ‘hello bae, am checking you out’( in Falz tha bad guy’s voice).  It just follows that food when eaten can give a message and love/passion is a message. I once proposed that love was the sixth taste of food to someone. We have sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami (a new taste bud recently discovered, we shall discuss later) and of course the love/passion taste.

In this part of the world, we show love through food – I even think it’s a general worldwide concept. My mum, like most Nigerian mothers I know, shows her love through cooking. She can stay in the kitchen for hours and cook for a ton of people, she doesn’t mind – a habit she has ingrained into her daughters. You dare not enter my mother’s house and refuse to eat, I repeat you dare not. It’s the way she’s wired, it’s what she knows.

A food cooked with tension tells it. Let’s say a wife is angry with her husband and she cooks the meal just because she has to, and not because she wants while hating on her man, I bet you, nine out of ten times, he will not enjoy that meal. Have you ever heard the statement:’ it just didn’t go down well’ or ‘there was something missing but I could not pin point what it was’. And it’s not for a lack of seasoning or ample ingredients; the food is simply communicating the Cook’s intention or heart.

A home full of love will most times produce satisfactory meals, while a house full of tension and unhappiness will have unsatisfactory mealtimes. I know of homes where the cook is happy to do it and people flock in to visit and have a meal. I also know of well to do homes where people avoid visiting talk less of eating there.  I have also seen cases of very bad or mediocre cooks who still have people enjoy their meals and what I saw was the enthusiasm of the cook which made people feel comfortable enough to enjoy the meal.

The thing is when you have a meal that was cooked with tension or was just lacklustre, it can ruin that meal for you. I don’t like beans, and when I tried to figure out why, I traced it to a time in my childhood home when there was a lot of tension in my home, and the very yucky beans we were served in boarding house in Secondary School. Till date, I won’t go out of my way to eat it.

I also see it in my cooking; if I don’t feel like it, I don’t bother, because one way or the other, I will commit a blunder of some sorts like adding too much salt or under or overcooking. And cooking makes me happy; it is stress relief for me. Some like to shop, I like to cook.

Ever seen the movie ‘Chef’? An indie Hollywood movie about a gifted chef who had a journey of self-discovery and redemption. He had to impress an important food critic and he couldn’t because he couldn’t control his kitchen which he knew was stuck in a creative rut. Of course the food critic gave a scathing review which hurt the chef, the critic told his followers it was perhaps the lack of heart he tasted in the chef’s food. So it wasn’t the lack of the skills or ingredients that made the food lacklustre, it was because the Chef was stuck in a rut and not cooking as passionately as he wanted to. You can taste the passion in the food.

So there you have it, you can taste the love/passion factor in food. Do you agree?

Let’s talk. Love and chocolates.

Photo Credit: Dreamstime |  Jason Stitt