Soup Opera

July 24, 2003

When I was young, I learned through my parents that most food comes in one of two forms — in a bag from the drive-thru window of a fast food joint or wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam from the grocery. As I got older, I learned important variations: cheese in a jar that could be microwaved (Cheese Whiz), noodles made by boiling a freeze-dried, crinkly, rectangular mass with a healthy dose of MSG (Sapporo Ichiban ramen), hardened jelly stuck to a piece of plastic and rolled up (Fruit Roll-ups), and so on.

People I meet in my adult life think that because I grew up in Ohio, I was once a hick girl running through fields of corn or, when they mix up Ohio with Idaho, potatoes. No, in my family, corn came frozen in a Jolly Green Giant box and was microwaved, and the word “potato” never crossed our lips without the word “chips” right behind.

When I first went to college in California, I was astounded to see, just in front of the school post office, oranges growing from trees. All my friends were from Oregon, Colorado and California, and they had probably seen oranges growing from trees before, so they found my obsession with those oranges weird. I asked my friend if she thought they were okay to eat. She gave me a strange look. “Of course,” she said. I still didn’t dare to.

A few years later, I was taking a long bus ride somewhere in Indonesia. The bus driver got off the main road, drove through bumpy, dusty residential streets and pulled up at a house. He and some boys ran back to a tree and began shaking it. One boy held out a basket and caught clementines. They then handed the basket around the bus, and for the first time in my life, I ate fruit directly from a tree. I wrote about it in my journal, excitedly, but it never occurred to me that I could have this experience in the U.S. I thought it was possible only in the tropics.

I knew in some vague way I wanted to eat healthily, but when I came back to the U.S. and had to cook for myself, I didn’t know how to do it. The health food store scared me, so I stuck to healthy restaurants and made myself salad with iceberg lettuce when I ate at home.

Then I signed up for a six-month program with a holistic health counselor who taught me how to make whole foods. I never really knew how to cook before, since everything I had made was either packaged or uncooked, i.e. salad.

I, who learned at age 20 how to cook pasta from my college roommate, was suddenly cooking whole grains like quinoa, millet, spelt and kasha. I, who at the age of 25 had to call my 16-year-old sister to ask her how long to boil an egg, was now carting around grocery lists full of words that once had seemed too sophisticated for me: kale, Swiss chard, broccoli rabe, squash, beets.

What I liked about this kind of eating was that I always knew my food had come from a trustworthy place: the earth. M.F.K. Fisher wrote in With Bold Knife and Fork, “I have leaned more and more on my own well-being’s dependence upon things that grow from the soil. I look better, at least in my own eyes, and I think and feel better, if I eat a lot of them.”

And I was feeling better. Better enough that I felt like trying something bold — making ginger-carrot soup. I had never made anything so refined. I, the kitchen idiot, didn’t cook with real ginger, and I certainly didn’t puree things. The most I had ever used a blender for was smoothies, but making food out of frozen things had always been second nature to me.

My holistic health counselor gave me the recipe. Cooking the soup was hard, because I didn’t have a peeler, so I had to use my knife to peel the carrots. I also didn’t know about bullion cubes, so I bought cartons of organic vegetable stock and lugged them from the health food store in SoHo to my apartment in Harlem on the subway. I struggled with de-skinning the ginger, again for lack for a peeler.

Cooking the soup took me two hours. (Now it takes me one.) My friends and family had always made fun of my kitchen foibles, so I nearly died when my roommate, the amazing “I never use a recipe” cook, loved it. I then had a friend visit, and she also raved about it. I ate up their praise, and then stashed the soup. My family was coming to visit that weekend, and I wanted them to try it.

They all came in on a Sunday morning. Not even five minutes had passed before I said, “Are you hungry? I want you to try my ginger-carrot soup.”

My father complained he didn’t like ginger.

My sister and my mother giggled at the idea of eating something I had cooked.

But I served it to all of them.

Then I waited.

Finally one of them said that they liked the soup. I don’t remember who, and I don’t remember their exact words. Inside my head, the fans had gone wild, and in my mental pandemonium, all I knew was that I had cooked — from scratch — something delicious.

I wish I could end this essay by saying that from then on, everything I cooked turned to ambrosia, but honestly, the list of things I am really good at is shorter than the food menu at Starbucks. If I ran a restaurant, the menu wouldn’t be well-rounded. Having gotten over my fear of the blender/food processor, I could confidently make pesto, hummus and my own special walnut-lentil spread for the masses, and my French lentils and yellow lentils sometimes turn out okay. But the grains and veggies that are my staples are never anything startling.

Then again, I want to be an eater of fresh foods, not a cook. So I recently did something new: I went to a farm and picked my own apples, pears and Asian pears. And I was right. As long as I depend on the earth, I don’t need to be a gourmet cook. The earth can feed me right any time.

I wrote this for a personal essay class I took. It's sort of sad how I used to eat — no offense to those of you who do eat a lot of fast and processed food. If you want the ginger-carrot soup recipe, let me know!

Soup Opera

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