By Jennifer Dempsey
I have always had a complicated relationship with food. I’ve feared it, desired it, hoarded it, denied it, resented it, obsessed over it.
So I’ve always felt a little envious and intimidated by folks who enjoy a pure, uninhibited love affair with food. But after interviewing several food lovers for this article, I feel embraced by these enthusiastic epicures, and am beginning to understand why George Bernard Shaw believed “there is no love sincerer than the love of food …”
“Life is my passion and food is life,” said Michael Martichelli, head chef of Martichelli’s in Crested Butte. “I started cooking at age eleven. Cooking is what I love, not what I’m cooking. When you cook for people you love, you are giving part of yourself, so yes, food is love.”
“Food that is cooked with great love and care will always taste different to that which is cooked without feelings and therefore soulless. An invisible energy is transferred to the food we prepare and the people who eat it.”– Rosa Mayland from Cooking with Love
“A chef who really does his or her job well takes their eater out of the physical realm into a more heightened place through their food,” said Shelley Long, culinary specialist at the Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center in Salida and member of the U.S. Personal Chef Association. “It’s kind of a nurturing thing, a healing thing. I didn’t have kids of my own, so that’s where my nurturing instincts went. I’m feeding and loving the world. Food is a way to immediately share your love with others.”
“Happy and successful cooking doesn’t rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life.” – Georges Blanc from Ma Cuisine des Saisons.
“You actually have to use your whole body to cook, lean your shoulders in, throw in some finesse and get some love in there,” said Michael Busse, head chef at Garlic Mike’s Restaurant in Gunnison and Montrose. “You have to feel it or you’re not even cooking, you’re just going through steps. You gotta get the smells into your head. You have to have some kind of knack for it. Cooking is something that can be learned, but you can’t teach passion.”
Busse, who creates “the finest Italian cuisine this side of New Jersey,” was named Best Chef by the Gunnison’s People Choice Awards.
“I absolutely, truly love what I do,” he said. “There’s nothing more satisfying than when I can see the body language of a customer that says ‘Oh my God, I’m loving this!’ Food is the best way I can bring joy to people. In 25 years I can’t think of anything else I’d want to do. When I started I was 165 pounds and now I’m about about 235 pounds of pure love. And that’s a lot of love.”
“So what is the love that everyone talks about in cooking? It comes from the senses provided by the nose and tongue. I ask my nose to choose my ingredients for a dish. It’s not a big nose, but it’s a discerning nose.” – Joanne Saltzman from Intuitive Cooking.
“I got Grandma’s nose,” said Dan Jones, a foodie from Howard who loves to cook for family and friends. “She smelled everything and could pick and single out everything. Aromatics is another way of tasting. I know what things taste like without tasting. For me, it’s all about the herbs and spices and textures, knowing what spices blend. I don’t always use recipes. It’s kind of like music, putting the instruments together to make harmony or chaos that works.”
“Painters learn to add a small amount of gray to a bright green apple to emphasize the shadowed areas. Cooks learn to add a ‘pinch’ of a favorite spice to enhance flavor.” from Food Is Art.
“I used to draw and paint, but then I found food and that has become my form of artistic expression,” said Kathie Stucko of FreshZoes catering in Salida. “Food is the passion, art and creativity of my life, most of all in the presentation. I love to make food look beautiful as well as taste amazing. I love to make people happy by creating culinary works of art that elicit comments like, “It is too beautiful to eat,” but never stops them because it tastes as great as it looks. There is no greater pleasure for me than to make someone’s day through the food I’ve created for them.”
“It was in the kitchen that as a child I would stand on top of a little chair to be eye level with nanny and my mother watching them prepare a meal. We would sing a silly Italian children’s song, making me laugh as I was fully encouraged to touch, smell and taste everything. Oh, they let me stir something or grate the cheese or in some way include me. It was on the little chair where it all began for me, the loving environment and culture that the kitchen creates …” – Raymond Victorio, from Chefs Essentials.
“Cuisine develops as a part of material culture through the effort and love of real people who must provide food for their families.” – from A History of Food.
“Food is the common denominator for every living being,” said Michelle Gapp, founder of Kalamatapit Katering in Salida. “Besides water, it’s what we all need to live. Eating and cooking is something we can all do together. Not so much in the U.S., but for instance in Mexico it’s part of their culture, religion, family gatherings, weddings, funerals. It brings people together, and that in and of itself starts to create an artistic thing. Right now, food in the U.S. is so compartmentalized, but in other parts of the world it is part of the culture, like history and music and family.”
For Gapp, a graduate of the California Culinary Academy, the Slow Food movement, which promotes awareness of food sources and local farming, could be a start to repair this disconnect.
“We can all get pretty automatic about eating,” Gapp said. “I can definitely be like that. But the great thing about the Slow Food movement is that it’s all about connecting back with the food source, not wasting it or taking it for granted … appreciating it and thinking, ‘Wow! this came out of the earth!’”
After 32 years in the restaurant business, working sometimes “100 hour weeks,” Gapp finally decided to open her own catering company three years ago.
“My menus are made up by the clients,” she said. “I love it when I come across something I haven’t heard of and I have to research it. That’s awesome. I like the creative side of it: doing a traditional dish and throwing something funky in it. You might get a basic eater who says, ‘I don’t like sweet potato’ but you sneak it in there and they do like it. That’s fun.”
“I think it’s about time that we realize that eating is one of the pleasures of life. The nerve endings and cells in our tongue are similar to our erogenous zones. So that’s really where food and pleasures are connected.” – Lois Ferguson on Food and Sensuality
So perhaps a complicated relationship with food stems from a complicated relationship with culture or family or love itself; perhaps it stems from the inability to allow oneself to be nurtured. Whatever the reason, after writing this article I am determined to develop a loving relationship with food. I think I’ll start with friend-requesting the Leadville Gourmet on Facebook. This enthusiastic epicure is “dedicated to those foodies who feel separated from their palates because of their struggle to live semi-separated from civilization. My mission is to help people reconnect with our forgotten palates and search out accessible foodgasms.” Bon appetit to that!
Jennifer Dempsey is a freelance writer, director of the Salida Circus and tentatively starting to cook. www.thesalidacircus.com