My father recently had heart surgery, and while we were waiting to hear whether he would survive, my family talked nonstop about food.
My sister changed her eating habits and her life in the half-dozen years since she moved away from home. She lost more than 100 pounds over three years and developed an exercise routine that keeps her healthy.
But that afternoon, reunited in a suburban hospital, she was obsessed with getting an egg roll from what used to be her favorite Chinese restaurant. I was determined to eat a confection I could only find in Chicago: a thick, gooey, open-faced apple pancake that is like eating a sweet cloud.
My stepmother was mentally reviewing her collection of Gourmet magazines, cookbooks, and newspaper clippings, trying to uncover the secret to the apple pancake I coveted.
If she had unearthed it, she would no doubt have had the ingredients on hand. She keeps her freezer so well stocked that she literally has to tape it shut for fear the frozen foods will fall on an unsuspecting ice cream seeker.
It was not just my sister, stepmother, and I that were interested in our next meal. My stepbrother -- a professional chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America -- was worrying aloud about when his kitchen gear would arrive from Mexico, where he had opened and then left a restaurant. He had been living without his pots and pans for months and was finding it unbearable.
I don't think food was on the conversational menu because it is a neutral topic, unlikely to elicit the intense emotions we were already anxiously feeling for my father. The fact is, my family could make a living debating whether the best pizza is deep dish or thin crust and where to find the ultimate hot dog.
And I don't think it was just that food was something we all had in common, in spite of our various political and social views.
I believe food is essential not just as sustenance for our survival as a species, but that it is central to American family life.
My family's love affair with food was in some ways typical. My mother, father and sister have been overweight off and on over the years. They have, but almost never at the same time, found success with diets and then rebounded back to their round shapes. I apparently inherited the metabolism of someone farther up the family tree who is, in spite of what she eats, effortlessly thin, the root of some serious sibling rivalry.
My father worked long hours, my mother socialized endlessly, and my sister and I were eight years apart, so the bunch of us rarely shared a meal around the same table, but we did come to love some of the same foods, many of them ethnic -- a brunch of bagels, cream cheese, lox and smoked whitefish -- some specific to our family, like my dad's barbequed chicken, cooked and consumed poolside.
Special occasions provided the palate with extra incentive to reunite with far-flung cousins and other kin. My aunt's sweet potato casserole and turkey were unlike any I've had since, making Thanksgiving my favorite holiday.
And in spite of the numerous ways I've distinguished myself from her over the years, I cannot watch a movie without extra butter on my popcorn, just like my mom.
But moving away from home presented culinary challenges. There were so many foods I loved but never learned to cook, and so many hometown haunts that did not have franchises in the places I have lived since.
Over time, I learned to love new foods (shrimp and grits, catfish, my mother-in-law's fried chicken), and to be more experimental. But nothing will ever replace the comfort I feel eating creamy mashed potatoes.
My father survived to eat breakfast the next morning and to prove Shakespeare got it backwards. It is food that is the music of life. Play on.
This LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.
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