The Art of Eating

One of the sacrifices that most any graduate student must make is the luxury of eating well. This is most tragically true of any American trying to pursue a professional career, with little but fast-food and cardboard vegetables to fill those precious 20 minute lunch breaks and the exhausted hour and a half between work and bed. For many Americans, food is little more than necessary. It is mundane. It is something to be fit in.

Coming to Rome two years ago, with a full schedule and little money to spend, I discovered quickly that the way in which food works intrinsically within the culture of Italy not only makes it easy to find meals that are both healthy and delicious, but that the culinary culture of Italy plays an integral role in human relationships and in improving the overall quality of one’s life. In the street markets, for instance, one finds the culture of a small farming town (even in the middle of the city), where vegetables are hand-selected personally for you, and where customer loyalty means something. Up the road from my house one finds a bar where the same old men can be found nearly every day at any hour. The three old butchers in my neighborhood are always in a bad mood, but after two years seem to have grown quietly fond of the pretty American students who, in stumbling Italian, try to explain that they would in fact very much like for the butcher to decapitate the chicken for them.

The gift of Rome (in culinary terms, at least) is that, with little time and money, it is possible to eat meals that are fresh, healthy, and splendid. But more than this, it is an opportunity to enter into the culture at its roots, to discover how the culture has developed over countless generations through the culinary arts. And here lies the task of this American student in Rome: to rediscover the art of living through the art of eating.