A Stalk of Cabbage

A holiday would scarcely be a holiday without a feast. I look forward with eager anticipation to setting that large turkey with all the trimmings, the out-of-season fruits, and baked goods made with unlimited quantities of butter, premium chocolate and nuts, in front of my extended family. Preparing and serving the feast is the high point of my Christmas; eating it is almost secondary.

In my present circumstances, celebrating the holiday means buying, preparing and serving special items that I could well afford to eat more frequently throughout the year, but elect to retain for special occasions. Common prudence and a respect for my overall health dictates this: my waistline would clearly suffer were I to bake Martha’s special New York cheesecake every time I had the slightest hankering for it. I know, also, that my overall enjoyment of the eating experience, over the course of the year, will probably be higher if I voluntarily abstain from certain luxury foods outside of festive contexts.

This was not always the case. There have been times in my life when it was a financial stretch to put nutritionally adequate food on the table, and careful budgeting combined with some creative scrounging was required to create a festive board. Those meals are fond memories. Turkey and pineapple and cheesecake really seem special when you, and most of your guests, have been living off split peas and brown rice for most of the previous month. It gives you an appreciation for the place of feasting in the lives of ordinary people before the advent of modern transportation, when everyday diets, though nutritionally adequate, were lean and monotonous.

If remembering my own past is not sufficient to invoke a feeling of true gratitude for the abundance I have, without a great deal of effort, during the holiday season, I have only to recall the experience of preparing festive fare with an older Russian woman of my acquaintance, who experienced the hardships of the Second World War as a child.

She was showing me how to make a traditional cabbage pie, not what Americans would generally consider party food. Made with wild mushrooms and real butter, however, it’s certainly a delicious item, and one that doesn’t often appear on the table because it’s a good deal of trouble to prepare. After she had cut and shredded the cabbage she began chewing on the stalk, explaining that it was a tradition in her family growing up that the cook got to eat the cabbage stalk. This was a legacy of real famine conditions, when food was so short that getting the scraps from a cabbage became a privilege.

I find myself unable to even imagine that degree of privation, of hunger as a chronic condition with no prospect of improvement in the foreseeable future. I have experienced brief periods – a day or two – when due to unusual circumstances there was literally nothing to eat, and I’ve experienced much longer periods of what the press and social service agencies mean by the term hunger in America, that is, having to rely on a diet such as brown rice and lentils that was adequate in calories but otherwise nutritionally marginal. I need to remember that there are many people in the world as I write who are experiencing real privation, and to do some serious soul searching about things I may be doing to contribute to that.

When I sit down to that groaning board on Christmas day, I shall be thankful for many things:

• That I have enough to eat, and can provide for my loved ones, and that no foreseeable circumstance is likely to change that.
• That I am able to enjoy and share abundance in the context of a celebration.
• That I do not take that abundance for granted, or regard it as an entitlement.
• That I was raised in a culture of restraint, and taught to use luxury items, food and otherwise, to spice up life, not as a steady diet whose capacity to produce pleasure diminishes with time or requires escalating consumption.

Image Credit

“Dinner table set for a Thanksgiving day feast” – Microsoft Images

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• The Novel of My Mother's Past - And Mine
• Has America Lost the Cold War?
• The Grief of Downsizing
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