The Nevada Sagebrush

Emily Katseanes

Halloween has officially opened the holiday season. Now Christmas decorations are in stores, Jon Stewart will be reminding Americans Hanukkah exists and Thanksgiving is approaching with its reputation of gluttony, turkey legs and tryptophan-induced napping. But for all the pants-unbuttoning and diet-undoing that comes with the holidays, Thanksgiving dinner actually does an important thing for Americans: It reconnects us to our food.

When I studied in Italy, the other American students and I would buy thick slices of square-shaped pizza from a vendor and eat them as we walked to school. Italians would turn their heads in shock as we went by — eating while walking? Why weren’t we sitting down with a quartino of vino and making an hour of it? What was wrong with us?

The United States is a place where people not only routinely eat while walking, but eat while driving.

In Italy (and elsewhere), eating food is an important daily event that lets you rest your mind and focus on something deeply pleasurable. The famous Spanish siesta takes place in Italy, too, under the name pausa pranzo. Everything closes for two hours and Italians go home to eat a homemade lunch with their family.

In the U.S., that kind of enjoyment of eating is generally considered sinful or gluttonous — except on Thanksgiving.

This kind of daily disconnect from food is a fundamental problem. We have to eat, but when we get disconnected from the process of eating, we forget that food is supposed to nourish us emotionally and physically and not just stop hunger pangs.

By taking the time to cook things for ourselves from recipes or scratch instead of from boxes or freezers, we reconnect to that process of nourishment. We can feel the goodness of both vitamins and the time spent cooking drip into our systems and, when we scrape mashed potatoes off a fancy plate instead of a paper container, eating has somehow become an event. We can appreciate the oven-roasted turkey in a deeper, longer-lasting way than the hamburger eaten in a car.

And that appreciation is important. It combats poor nutrition, overeating and shocking discoveries, such as the existence of starvation in the world, or that chicken on a plate comes from live chickens in yards.

Realistically, it’s too time-consuming and expensive for most people to make a Thanksgiving-style spread every day or even every week. But we can still eat every day like it’s Thanksgiving, maybe not in volume, but certainly in the style of celebration and awareness.

Cooking for ourselves is one way of doing that. Throwing ingredients onto a pre-made pizza crust takes about as much time as heating up a frozen one and is much more satisfying. And yeah, I still love fast food and greasy pizza as much as the next person, but if I eat it sitting down with a friend, it’s no longer a rushed, face-stuffing mess. It’s a meal.

Meals don’t even have to be fancy. Even when I don’t have time to run home for a homemade lunch, you can find me in the Knowledge Center, blissfully unaware of homework for a few minutes while I eat the peanut-butter and jelly sandwich I slaved over that morning. Crusts on, cut in half diagonally.

Emily Katseanes’ favorite food is burritos with wolf blood. Reach her at ekatseanes@nevadasagebrush.com.

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