FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

How The Food Network Saved My Life
By Megan Fulwiler

PAGE TWO:
Cooking programs have a clear beginning, middle, and end. There is no waiting or suspense on a cooking show. As they put one pie in the oven, they are already pulling out a finished one to show you. The hosts deal out culinary tips like a Black Jack dealer snaps down playing cards: which cuts of beef are best for roasting, how to make chicken stock from scratch, the superior flavor of English hothouse cucumbers. In the fading light of Vermont winter afternoons, I collected these tips carefully, stacking them up in my mind as evidence that I still lived in the realm of knowledge and facts.

After discovering the Food Network, I turned to reading recipes. In hospital waiting rooms, I scanned coffee tables for magazines like Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, or Food & Wine. Walking down the carpeted hallway to the chemo clinic, I clutched back-issues of the glossy magazines tightly to my body. I sat in the tan pleather lounger waiting for the infusion and searched for recipes. As the nurse swabbed my chest, pricked me with Lidocane, and inserted the IV needle, I was already engrossed in reading a list of ingredients: one minced onion, two cloves of garlic, ¼ teaspoon kosher salt. When the pharmacist dropped off the bags of chemo, I was busy visualizing the necessary steps: first roast the pumpkin, then puree with sage, then roll the dough for the raviolis. As the cool chemicals flooded my body and muffled my brain, I surreptitiously ripped out the pages I wanted and stuffed them in my bag. Back at my parents' house, creased recipes for Fava Bean Spread on Toast Points and Grilled Salmon on a Bed of Edamame Foam piled up on my dresser collecting dust.

At one point in my treatment, I was hospitalized for ten days in a sterile room with a closed door and a Hepa filter. The first thing I did was click through the TV channels in search of the Food Network, but to no avail. As a substitute, my mother brought me a copy of Martha Stewart's Entertaining to read in bed and I spent hours planning the dinner parties of my future. High on morphine and bald as Kojak, I stared at the tiny black dots on the particle board ceiling, thinking about the delicate skin of shrimp shumai and the crisp crust of agadashi tofu in dark dipping sauce. I called my boyfriend at odd hours with requests for Egg McMuffins or Thai dumplings. He dutifully went to local restaurants and read me the menus over the phone. I savored the sounds of the appetizers and lingered over all my choices. He brought me anything I asked for, but by the time he got to my room it wasn't what I wanted and I couldn't taste anything anyway.

No one comes away from a cancer diagnosis unchanged. Lance Armstrong became an activist for cancer research and won the Tour de France seven times. Melissa Etheridge wrote the song "I Run For Life" that has become the new breast cancer anthem. But when I looked in the mirror and saw the dark circles ringing my eyes, my pale skin, and bald skull, I had no idea what I should be learning. In my Food Network life, however, I had learned how to make a soffrito -- the base of all Italian stews and sauces. The recipe is an unchanging combination of onions, garlic, celery, and carrots. If there were a Jeopardy category labeled "True Things," this belonged in it. Unlike cancer, a food recipe has a predictable outcome. It's a story written by a professional chef wearing a stiff white apron in a sterile test kitchen. The language of food is direct, no-nonsense, slap-your-hands-together-and-get-started. The range of error in a recipe is limited. You could forget to adjust for baking in high altitude, someone could slam the door on your soufflé, you could whip instead of fold. You could ruin your dinner but that's about all. Recipes present life controlled by reliable variables. Before you begin you know what is going to happen. I needed stories that were stable, predictable, and free of risk. Recipes satisfied this hunger. In its presentation of recipes, the Food Network provided a spectacle of certainty available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I'm now in remission, my hair is growing again, and I've moved back to my apartment in Albany. My basic cable package doesn't include the Food Network, but I have a new subscription to Cooking Light. While I still love to read recipes, I don't feel the same craving and they don't fill the same purpose. I welcome quality time in my galley kitchen, even if it's just me, my Murphy stove, and a paring knife. I feel fearless, free to experiment and try new things. I make dishes with coconut milk, buy prosciutto thin as tissue paper, and stock my pantry with jars of sun-dried tomatoes. I'm cooking at the edge, but I never feel alone. I know my network is there in the wings, whispering words of encouragement. The other night I picked up a book on Buddhism for the first time in a year and opened to this passage: "What unites us all as human beings is an urge for happiness, which at heart is a yearning for union, for overcoming our feelings of separateness." It was then that I realized that I'd found my own way back to the Buddha after all. The path I'd taken, however, had not been a traditional one of mantras or focused breath work. My path had led me through shiny kitchens and glossy close-ups of food preparation, into the waiting bosom of the Barefoot Contessa.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that we all live in two worlds. The first she calls the "kingdom of the well" and the second is the "kingdom of the sick." But I believe in a third kingdom called the Food Network, a world of familiar characters, garlic presses, and meat cleavers. I don't think of the Food Network as the world I lived in when I was sick. Instead I have another home that welcomes me back for a visit anytime. It's a place where the Contessa still cooks for Jeffrey, where Rachael whips up a fajita party, and where Giada is always simmering a spicy homemade marinara sauce.

PAGE 1 2

-friendly version for easy reading

©All material is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without permission