Transmitting love through food hides a secret

"Food is love. People keep saying it, I hear it more and more often, and I know it's true. But for me it also meant that love was eating." With these words begins one of the most peculiar books of the season, Bread and milkThe author, Karolina Ramqvist (Gothenburg, 1976), is a Swedish writer whose books address themes such as female identity, motherhood, and family relationships. It was obvious, then, that at some point she would have to address the topic of home cooking.

If we are to believe him, it all begins "with the milk that is so thick and sweet that it satisfies and soothes the newborn child and eases its pain. It is possible," he continues, "that we want to return there, to the point of being able to lie in someone's arms and drink from their body."

We will never taste this maternal and primordial milk, the source and principle of all the pleasures of this world, again, but it is possible that by eating it—something we do so many times a day and in so many ways—we hope to recover what we consumed immediately after colostrum, when absolute unconsciousness provided total happiness.

For Ramqvist, this happiness isn't associated with anything related to his mother, at least not as directly as the heartbreaking memory of his grandmother's rice pudding. As is often the case with children, he didn't want to try it at first. However, one day he decided to give it a try, and the result was instantaneous. "It was the best thing I'd ever tasted in my entire life." And even more: "I just felt so happy and surprised that it was possible, that something I'd always thought was bad could be so good."

From that moment on, Grandma's rice flan became a shrine to memory. So much so that she strives to get her own daughter to try it, secretly hoping that, through the flan, the child will recover her mother's childhood experiences. But the daughter, like herself, "examined it with an indifferent expression, almost with disgust." The chain of love suddenly comes to a screeching halt. The author consoles herself with the thought that, as some dieticians used to say, you have to expose a little girl to a new dish forty-two times before they decide to try it...

Food heals, but it can make us sick

We have to remember that Karolina Ramqvist persisted in her attempt and perhaps ultimately triumphed. What we didn't suspect is that this parable of the transmission of love through food concealed another secret, this one not so easy to swallow: the bouts of anorexia (and its infernal companion, bulimia) that the author suffered while the famous rice flan was coming out of the oven. Because food "tied" the author "to the world," our relationship with food isn't always so simple. Food heals, but it can also make us sick, and we can spend half our lives in this systole and diastole.

The lesson of this magnificent book is that the impossibility of recapturing the taste of the first few times we ate something is also the impossibility of recapturing our childhood. Everything we experienced there, which shaped our personality, which made us who we are, must necessarily remain in the night and the fog. We eat to live and love and be loved, but will we ever know enough?