Who I am

I'm just a girl who loves food.

My name is Jane. I live in Newton, Massachusetts. Leonard Nimoy is from there. John Krasinski & B.J. Novak are from there, too, which will mean more to you if you're closer in age to my 14-year-old twins than to 45-year-old me. I grew up in Wolcott, Connecticut. Nobody is from there. I came to the Boston area when I was 18 to go to Wellesley College. Hillary Clinton is an alum from there. Susan Sontag gave the commencement address my first year there. I didn't know who she was then. I know who she is now but I don't feel like that quite redeems me.

The point is that I'm kind of a country hick from working-class roots transplanted into uber upper middle class suburbia by way of an uber upper middle class education. I'm now raising my middle-of-the-middle class kids who will hopefully be a lot more comfortable in their singular class bracket than I am in either of mine.

When I was a kid, I never had a bagel or hummus or even a good pizza because Wolcott is nowhere near New Haven. I grew up on food like American chop suey and fried baloney and Frosted Flakes. Lots and lots of Frosted Flakes, which I used to sprinkle sugar on top of when I had it as part of my balanced breakfast. I was raised Polish Catholic in the kind of way that means those two words are inseparable. We celebrated Wigilia (Christmas Eve) every year at my grandmother's house with a quasi-traditional menu that was the epitome of ethnic assimilation, a little bit of this-and-that so the kids would eat, too. My grandmother spent weeks preparing the sledzie. I had to look up how to spell that. It's pickled herring. I think every culture in every square inch of the planet has a recipe for the controlled rotting of fish in order to render it marginally edible. Like sausage, you don't really want to know how it's made. My grandmother made it in the bathtub, or so I was told.

When I was in college, my horizons expanded a bit. Exploded is more accurate. I discovered coffee - real coffee - and cheese - real cheese - and French bread and English cigarettes. I also discovered girls but that's a different story. As the years went by I became more-and-more enamored of the fine foods and drinks that one finds in a place dominated by wealthy liberals. I learned words like macrobiotic and organic and locavore and slow food.

I knew these words already. Sure, I consumed every mass produced soulless packaged food that the 1970's threw at me, but that's not the whole story. My parents also had a large back yard garden and apple trees and blueberry and raspberry bushes. There was a family down the street that raised a couple of cows and my dad got buckets of manure each year to fertilize that garden. We grew corn and and tomatoes and squash and we had green bean plants that were always infested with the grossest looking wormy-type slug things. Ew. In addition to weeding and de-sluggifying and harvesting, my job was to tend the strawberry patch. From all of this I learned that you had corn and tomatoes and strawberries once each year and every other time it might have looked like an ear of corn or a tomato or a strawberry but it wasn't really.

These were the seeds that were sown in me: To love and respect the land and the food that generously comes from it; to enjoy a meal not just as a meal but as a communal experience; to define myself at least in part by what I choose to eat and to not eat and the reasons why I make those choices.