Food, Fathers and Lessons in Love

Posted 05/24/2011 by Most Jewish Team

By Jean Meltzer-Maskuli

Growing up changes things. When I was a teenager, it seemed that my father and I were constantly at war. He was not an emotional man. And for all of his stoicism and silence, I was the exact opposite—passionate and expressive. Maybe I thought I could pry through the silence with noise. When I couldn't, I ate.

"Once, in Fat Camp..."

People love to hear Fat Camp stories. As someone who has been on both sides of the Fat Camp fence, both as a counselor and a camper, I have plenty of epic tales to tell. There was that time when we broke a flume at the water park. There was that time when the locals littered our running track with donuts. There were those epic two-mile walks to the local drugstore, where campers were allowed to purchase such tremendous luxuries as water and sugarless gum.

Only at Fat Camp will you pay $20 for a bag of M&Ms.

I loved Fat Camp. Even though my most visceral memory of Fat Camp is being hungry all the time, I also remember the incredible alliance of friendship I felt among my fatty peers. At Fat Camp, all the pigeonholes and labels about weight disappeared, and for three to eight short weeks, you could be more than just a fat kid. You could be popular, accepted and loved.

Which was something I needed...

It wasn't until I started dating that I began to understand my father. Like many searching for a future mate, I had a clear list of what I was looking for. But for all my mental notes and files, the success of a first date always boiled down to one thing: Would he share his food with me? And I realized something that changed my entire relationship with my father.

My father had been telling me he loved me my whole life.

At restaurants, my father always changed dishes with us if he thought we would like his food better. He scooped mountains of fish and potatoes onto our plates if we even hinted we liked them. At home, my father always stocked the house with our favorites; mine were Entenmanns cake and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. My father always spent Friday night with me, watching 20-20, while we devoured a bag of chips together.

What my father couldn't say with words, he said with food.

To say that food is nothing more than pleasant sensation is to deny the incredible weight (pardon the pun) that food carries within it. Food has the power to transmit memories: good and bad, joyful and painful, humorous and tragic. Food can say the things that we cannot, express the silent desire that we cannot. And sometimes, food can heal what we cannot.

When I think back on growing up fat, I don't remember the painful parts of that experience. Often I feel grateful for the journey, because I have learned the most important lesson about food, fathers and fat: People, like our size, aren’t always what we want them to be.

I'm grateful to my father for teaching me the meaning of love.

Jean Meltzer-Maskuli is a first-year rabbinical student at RRC.