As a 26 year-old woman with an almost MA in Museology (museum studies), working in her chosen field, obviously I am due for a quarter-life crisis. As I bus to my museum in the morning – usually an hour and a half – my brain is bombarded with questions like, “Is this really what I am supposed to be doing?” or “Am I ever going to feel like I’m making a difference?” or “When can I stop commuting like this? How can I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile, but do it from home or when traveling?”
It doesn’t help that work is not really working for me. Sure, I’ve been in the job only 7 months, but it feels like longer. I’ve already worked in the museum field for 8 years, in all kinds of positions, but this one was supposed to be the one where I got the recognition for my hard work, where I got to work on great projects, where I got to be the X factor for museological success. It’s been 7 months, and I am painfully aware that I have heaps of responsibility, but no recognition, no accountability, and no foreseeable chance for major advancement. Sure, they love my ambition and drive, but that love doesn’t translate into a larger paycheck or in some cases, even being allowed into the meetings I’ve arranged and organized.
It has taken some time to find a solution to this soulless droning day in and day out for an art medium I don’t even really like. The solution lies in the tenet that the average American completely changes careers every 7 years. I am apparently overdue. I will stay in this job for a while, though, since I’ve been working towards something like this my entire young adult life. But it doesn’t mean that I cannot start preparing for what comes next. And what comes next should mean more to me than what is currently eating my career-based optimism. I should get excited NOW, do what I want NOW, and build a foundation for what I want to do next NOW, so when I finally get fed up with it, I’ll have something to do instead of floundering like I did when I got sick and couldn’t work for six months last year.
So…..what do I want to do? I want to play with my food.
I’ve always loved food. That’s not a rare thing in humanity, but it is a bit rarer to be a child prodigy with food. Ever since I was small, I was fascinated by the sheer variety of foods that could be found in my neighborhood supermarket. I would beg my mother to take me there so I could look at the produce or count the different kinds of Campbell’s soups (influenced actually by an Andy Warhol art book I saw in second grade). My mother would give me a bowl of water and a baby whisk when I would sit in my high chair in the kitchen and watch her beat eggs, so I could practice and do what she did. She wasn’t the greatest cook in the world, but she tried. Dinners weren’t great, but she baked well, and still does. She cared to make things from scratch, to show me how to home-can fruit and jams, and to bake pies from berries we picked that day. She influenced my love for cookbooks – her kitchen shelves still sag under their heft, though she rarely uses them. My fascination grew when I started watching the PBS Great Chefs series in the morning, before catching the bus to go to grade school. I’d watch and absorb, then run out the door when they started the dessert section, then I’d flip through back issues of the Williams-Sonoma catalog while on the bus, daydreaming about a huge kitchen full of sharp knives and wide, clutter-free counter-tops. Yes, I was a strange, precocious child.
I won’t say that I wasn’t a picky eater, but all children are. Especially when they have Scandinavian parents who grew up in the 60s….bland is the only word I can use when thinking about the food I ate as a child. I’d always try to spice it up a bit though. I remember discovering spicy barbecue sauce and going through a bbq chicken sandwich phase in grade school. It was messy, but I’d hit upon a discovery: food could actually taste interesting! Now, I was a child of the 80s, when boxed mac & cheese and “fruit” roll-ups were the height of kid gourmet. My mother’s favorite dinners to cook were baked skinless chicken with mashed potatoes or baked white fish with minute rice (overcooked, with margarine on top). Invariably, we’d have mushy overcooked green beans (usually home-canned) or frozen peas or corn, cooked in the microwave. Finding a food that tasted like something was a major discovery.
I’d been able to experiment with foreign flavors in cooking starting in middle school. We had a home-economics/world cultures class that assigned us cooking exercises with ingredients like lemongrass, chickpeas and turmeric, making recipes from Niger, Indonesia, and Lebanon. Opening my eyes (and nose, and mouth) to non-Western food, I searched for more. I never really found my palate until high school, when a globe-trotting friend took me to eat at an Indian restaurant for the first time. Eating over at friends’ houses also helped, and my friend Dan’s mom, Cindy R., showed me how easy it was to cook spectacular things over a camp stove, or in a dutch oven.
My food obsession blossomed as soon as I went away to college and could choose food for myself. I spent time in Cuba and Mexico and enjoyed comparing and contrasting the flavors I found in their cuisines. At Pitzer College in Claremont, California, I majored in anthropology and art, with a minor in art history thrown in for good measure. It seemed as though my path led toward a life spent in a museum basement. The one passion of my life that I set aside was food. Since then, I have been going around, secretly jealous of friends who ditched their state universities or private liberal arts colleges to attend culinary school.
Now I think, “Why waste time and energy being jealous?” I want to learn about food anthropology (something barely touched on in college anthro) and commodity histories. I want to write about great restaurants I find and what fabulous recipe I made for dinner. I want to support organic, fair trade, sustainable food production. I want to finally go to a culinary school. I want this to be my legacy.
So….. Yesterday I joined the Slow Food movement. I am now a member of the Seattle convivium of Slow Food USA. I’m not sure how this is going to help me get where I want to be, but it feels like a solid first step toward my passion and a possible new career.
This is my documentation of my new journey, a place to practice my writing, and a place to share my love for a good meal.
Thanks for joining me.
