steam curls from the pot
knife scratches a wooden board
memory seasons
My favorite foods are the ones that remind me I’m alive. Not alive in the biological sense — anyone can breathe and keep going — but alive in the way a meal opens the senses, connects you to a place, and ties you to someone else’s hands.
I don’t crave luxury. I crave stories.
I once ate cheese in Slovenia that had been aged in a cave. The farmer led me down a damp stone passage, the air cool and musty, the smell of earth pressing against my lungs. He lifted a wheel from a wooden shelf, brushed off a thin film of mold, and cut into it with a knife that looked older than both of us.
The taste was sharp, alive, with a tang that carried the darkness of the cave itself. When I ate it, I felt the time, the patience, the waiting. That cheese was not a product; it was a story told through months of silence underground.
Bread has a similar power. In a small village near Palermo, I once bought bread from a woman who baked in a clay oven behind her house. The loaves were uneven, some darker at the edges, some split in the middle. She wrapped mine in paper with a smile that carried generations of practice. When I tore it open, the crust cracked loudly, releasing steam into the morning air.
It wasn’t perfect bread. But it was true bread. And I realized then that I would take imperfect bread with a story over flawless bread from a factory any day.
Fruit can be even more fleeting. In Japan, on a July afternoon, I bought a handful of tiny plums from an old man selling them on the roadside. He told me they only appeared for a week each summer. The skin was tight, the flesh sour-sweet, the juice staining my fingers. By the time I finished eating, I already knew I might never taste them again.
That’s the kind of food I love most. The kind that insists on presence. The kind that says: you are here, now, alive, because this flavor will not return in the same way twice.
I don’t chase luxury because luxury often hides the hands that made the food. It polishes away the fingerprints, sterilizes the imperfections, erases the story.
I prefer to know where the meal came from. To see the oven, the knife, the dirt on the hands that picked the fruit. Food is at its best when it reveals its origins, not when it hides them.
In Bern, I sometimes buy vegetables from a farmer’s market near the station. The carrots still carry clumps of soil. The apples are lopsided, speckled. Once I asked the farmer if the apples were organic. He shrugged and said, “They are just apples.” That answer was better than any certification. When I ate one later, biting into the uneven skin, it tasted of rain and sun more than polish.
One of the strangest meals I ever had was in Lisbon. I walked into a tiny restaurant with no sign, only a door left half-open. Inside, the owner’s grandmother was cooking fish in a pan blackened from decades of use. There was no menu. She served what she had: sardines, bread, olives. The fish tasted smoky, salty, alive with the sea.
When I finished, she poured me a small glass of homemade wine without asking, as if she had already decided what I needed. I sat there long after the food was gone, listening to her hum as she cleaned the pan. That meal didn’t feel like dining. It felt like entering someone’s memory.
Sometimes I think food is the most honest way of traveling. The sights can be curated, the monuments preserved, the history retold through polished plaques. But food resists curation. You taste the weather of that year, the soil, the hand that stirred the pot. A strawberry in Switzerland is not the same as a strawberry in Japan, even if they look identical. Each one carries its place. Each one is alive in its own geography.
At home, I cook simply. Rice, vegetables, soup, bread. Nothing complicated, nothing ornate. I don’t measure much. I let the ingredients decide their own rhythm. When the soup simmers and the room fills with steam, I sometimes think of all the places I’ve eaten, all the hands I’ve watched preparing food. Each spoonful is a reminder that survival can be more than mechanical. It can be art.
The best meal I ever had was not in a restaurant at all. It was on a mountain in Slovenia. I had packed bread, cheese, and an apple in my bag. After hours of climbing, I sat on a rock overlooking a valley. The air was cold, the wind sharp. I tore the bread with my hands, ate the cheese in rough slices, bit into the apple.
It was the same bread and cheese I could have eaten at home. But there, on the mountain, after the climb, it tasted alive. Because I was alive. Because the effort of reaching that spot flavored the food in a way no seasoning could.
I like food that insists on being present. A cheese aged in a cave. Bread baked in someone’s backyard oven. Fruit that only appears for a week in summer. These are not luxuries. They are reminders.
A meal tastes best when you can see the hands that made it.
Because in those moments — sitting on a mountain, in a backstreet kitchen, by a river, at a market — food is no longer just food. It is proof that you are here, that you are part of the chain that connects earth to hand to mouth to memory.
Food, at its best, is not sustenance. It is presence. It is story. It is life.
life 
Leave a comment