You may find this month’s blog a little different than my usual life coaching tips, but it’s as important to one’s growth as any that came before.

We often think of love when we think of February, I mean, it has Valentine’s Day in it, never mind that it’s history is not all candy hearts and love notes. I will talk about love in these written words, but it is the love of embracing one’s history through food.

I recently read a book titled, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, and in it she quotes another book titled, Cool for You by Eileen Myles. The reference, in my opinion, relates to how we have foods that are embedded deep within us, and when people try to conform us or control us they take this food and replace it with commodities. Instead of wild Rice cultivated with love we have minute rice, bland and without nutrients. Instead of peaches ripe from the tree, we have canned and diced and processed fruit cocktail. Instead of Kimchi, we have canned mixed vegetables. Instead of chili peppers rich in medicinal purpose we have ketchup and mustard. We are given commodities in schools, in prisons, in internment camps, and on reservations. We are expected to receive these foodstuffs with gratitude as if it only existed to eliminate the pain of hunger. We reject these foods at first because we remember the taste of the legacy of our ancestors, but then we forget who we are and consume them readily. Our heritages are slowly taken away by can openers

Food is often used to reference experiences. We “meet for coffee”, have “lunch dates”, and order boxes of readymade “treats from around the world.” Recently, a writer friend of mine shared a piece about her favorite Christmas gift being a box of homemade foods from her family. I remember a time when my meat and potatoes mom embraced my vegetarianism, even including some of my recipes in her church cookbook. I also remember receiving food from the ladies circle after the birth of my second child that I could not eat because of my dietary needs, and the words chiding me for ungratefulness that were delivered along with the meal.

My children, husband, and I have lived and traveled all over the United States. Our girls grew up receiving foods from all over the world via our neighbors and friends with a “try this, I just made it”, or with a door thrown open and a greeting of, “I heard you coming, have dinner with us.” Sharing food from ones another’s culture, asking about dietary needs, and listening to ancestral stories is love in it’s purest form.

It is my hope that we all show love by embracing our neighbor’s authentic self for…

“Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wigs or fins or roots That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.” 

– Winona Laduke