Feeding the Inner Man

I enjoyed Alexandra DeSanctis’s review of Stanley Tucci’s book Taste (“A Bite of Italy,” April 18). As a partial Italian American who is married to an Italian American, I agree that cuisine is much of the Italian culture. I believe, however, that the “food is love” ethic is a major contributing factor to the country’s obesity epidemic. A recalibration to moderation is needed. Life and love should be more than thoughts about the current meal and the next meal.

Frank Poggio Via email

Alexandra DeSanctis responds: Mr. Poggio is right to suggest that love for food can easily become disordered, as can most of our passions. It’s difficult to avoid, on one hand, the specter of gluttony and, on the other, the unfortunate reality of eating disorders and other forms of unhealthy eating. But I took Tucci to be making a far simpler point: Food is love in the sense that cooking a meal for someone — or even for yourself — and enjoying it is an act of great care. There are few ways to make a person feel more valued and valuable than preparing a home-cooked meal and serving it to them at a decorated table.

Food is love neither in the sense that eating will provide our greatest fulfillment nor in the sense that we should eat however much we’d like and expect no negative consequences. But food can be a medium for love, serving as perhaps the most common way to say “I love you” without speaking the words. If you cook a full meal for yourself even when you’ll be sitting down to eat alone, it is an act of care for yourself. It says something about how you see your own worth. When we cook a beautiful meal for a loved one, we communicate that we want them to be well nourished and to enjoy what they eat, that we care for them enough to spend the time and energy it takes to craft something special.

There’s a reason we celebrate life’s milestones by visiting excellent restaurants, letting a skillful chef help us mark the importance of a particularly exciting occasion; there’s a reason many of us long for nothing more than our favorite childhood dinner, just the way our mother prepared it. When Tucci says food is love, he seems to mean that food is a way of giving and receiving love — that through the act of cooking and enjoying what we eat, we can connect with others, whether those who grew or raised the food, those who taught us to prepare it, or those who are around the table with us.