Wandering around a cute little town in Napa, starving, my yelp app navigated me to what looked like the perfect lunch spot, a restaurant called Ad Hoc. I walked up the front steps  to peek out the menu and I saw a huge sign above the door that read, ” Ad Hoc — for the temporary relief of hunger”.

After lunch, once my hunger was temporarily relieved, I started thinking more about that sign…here I was in a fancy foodie town,  feasting on fancy foodie food and its so easy to forget exactly what food is actually for: the temporary relief of hunger. And yet, in my delusion, I often think it is so much more…

When I sashay down the aisles at Whole Foods, I feel like I belong in its foodie paradise. When others mispronounce food names –gyro, acai, poke — I silently pat myself on the back for being ‘in the know’. When Eric cooks a gourmet meal for a crowd, I beam with pride to have such a gourmond husband. For me, food is about feeding my identity as much as it is about feeding my body.

The problem is, can food actually make me a thing? When I tried my hardest to eat healthy my blood work kept coming back with high blood sugar –food didn’t make me healthy. When I was a vegetarian I made my whole family slaves to my dietary ‘needs’ — food didn’t make me compassionate. When I ate all the fancy restaurants in town did it make me fancy? How can a physical object I use for a brief moment in time imbue me with an abstract quality, an identity? After all, when I look under the burger bun, under the lettuce, tomato, meat paddy, I just don’t see ‘foodie identity’ lurking in any particular ingredient.