Eating our way through an election year

By JoAnne Young 

 

This is going to be a tumultuous year. 

 

Can we calm our nerves, perhaps, with food? With cioppino or Hungarian tomato soup? Havarti dill scones or lavender shortcake? Fully loaded baked potato soup or deviled eggs? Rye bread toast and chamomile tea? Or perhaps Empower Mint ice cream? 

 

Instead of letting the angst of 2024 and its issues get to us, let’s think about a spoonful or two of comfort. 

 

I don’t mean to state the obvious, but food is a big deal. For all creatures great and small. 

 

I’ve been watching the birds gather around our feeders in the past couple of weeks, happy that we could provide them sustenance in the deep snow and below-zero temperatures. I have seen the appreciation on the faces of folks who need supplemental food, which we deliver to their homes once a week, courtesy of the Food Bank of Lincoln. 

 

I’ve read with interest, via NPR, how sushi restaurants are thriving in Ukraine, through air raid sirens and missile strikes. 

 

I’ve cringed at the idea that food and starvation have become weapons of war in Gaza, and that a decision to reject a summer food program for kids in Nebraska was made in the name of conservative politics. It’s also scary to see the cost of food go up and up and up at our local grocery stores, knowing it won’t likely come down. 

 

Food is about more than keeping us alive. It nourishes memories of pan-fried chicken served up at Sunday dinners with buttery mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas. It soothes us with  cheesy pepperoni pizza we had with coworkers on election nights that stretched into late hours, or eased us through curious birthday parties with strawberry Jello birthday cake. 

 

It triggers that great idea of feeding Mom’s not-so-tender round steak to the cocker spaniel waiting eagerly under the table. And Santa slipping a coconut into your Christmas stocking, one he no doubt picked up on landings in the Philippines earlier that night. 

 

As famed food writer M.F.K Fisher tells us: “It seems to me our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.” 

 

Though my childhood associations with food involved a family of women, and one girl making fudgy brownies on a Sunday afternoon, I am proud to say the associations I have as an adult involve men, specifically sons who season and grill delicious main courses or pasta and plant-based entrees, a son-in-law who makes the best of the best pizza from scratch and darned good pancakes and egg dishes, and a fellow journalist (I’m looking at you Andrew Ozaki) who serves a yummy smoked salmon to his wife’s book club, of which I am happy to say I’m a member. 

 

As I said, food is a big deal. 

 

Not only does it get a dedicated room in the house, it takes up whole stores. It spreads out on acres and acres of land and claims sections of shelves in libraries and bookstores, and online. On those literal and digital shelves are hundreds of cookbooks, anything you might imagine, including:   

 

-- Heroes Feast Flavors of the Multiverse with the tastes of Dungeons and Dragons, including Kender Stumblenoodles;

-- The Unofficial Bridgerton Cookbook, which instructs on how to dine like lords and ladies;

-- Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, official baking and cookbook with Dr. Finkelstein Charlotte Royale Brain Cake.

-- The Art of Eating Through the Zombie Apocalypse: A Cookbook and Culinary Survival Guide. Just because the undead's taste buds are atrophying doesn't mean yours have to, Amazon explains. 

So here’s to the tastes of home, and all you brilliant cooks and bakers out there, and the restaurants and bakeries we love that are providing a respite from the election rhetoric that only promises to get worse.

 

And salud to the interesting vegetables we can distract ourselves with next summer from 2024’s The Whole Seed Catalog.

 

Berkeley Tie-Dye Green Tomatoes, Red Dragon Arugula or Magnolia Blossom Tendril Peas anyone?  

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