man of the land

Zack and I just had our 7-year anniversary. I happen to really love the number seven, and am filled, besides, with deep gratitude and appreciation for this inimitable friend and partner. As the past few posts relate, I've been thinking a lot about animals, and food, and animals as food. So Zack and I were talking the other day about our childhoods, and I was so fascinated to hear him retell the things that I knew about his past, but all in the light of food. He grew up in the country, fishing, raising chickens, foraging for berries and mushrooms and persimmons, working in his parents' and grandparents' prodigious gardens. Watching his grandpa skin a rabbit, carve a turtle. Splitting a side of beef with another family. In the light of these earthy connections to food, both vegetal and meaty, his extraordinary sense of beauty and intuition with food makes even more sense. I can't tell you how many times love has been given to me in the form of food that Zack makes. In an essay I was reading recently, a writer talked about the lovely forms and colors and textures that pass through your hands when you cook from scratch. And someone who really notices those things (like Z does) is also able to capitalize on each item's peculiar character and shape. He's taught me that the way something is sliced affects your experience of it, even if the same amount is used. He's taught me about timing and tasting and looking and feeling. About how to follow certain parts of a recipe closely, and where there's room for experimentation. This love language was already part of my family's history, but it's been (pardon the figures of speech) seasoned and honed from the first weeks of knowing Zack. (Years ago, I tasted his black bean hummus at a vegetarian potluck before I ever met him formally. It was really good.)