FRESH YARN presents: How The Food Network Saved My Life... by Megan Fulwiler

FRESH YARN presents:

How The Food Network Saved My Life
By Megan Fulwiler

It's hard to be a Buddhist in the middle of a panic attack. I found that out a month into an intensive seven-month chemotherapy regimen when I woke up one night with a racing heart. Drenched in sweat, I couldn't catch my breath and my mind was spinning with gruesome images of mangled limbs. The chemotherapy was killing off cancer cells, but it was also killing other cells that kept me alive. Since I was already learning what it felt like to lose control of my body, I wasn't prepared to lose my mind as well. I struggled to notice my in-breath and visualize my out-breath. I tried to follow Thich Nhat Hahn's advice and practice nonattachment. I scrambled frantically to find my inner place of peace, but I couldn't even remember where it was. Instead I was doing everything you're not supposed to do: clutching, holding, freaking out.

Then I remembered the South Hampton picnic I'd seen that afternoon on the Food Network's Barefoot Contessa: shrimp salad, tomatoes sprinkled with feta cheese, pesto pasta, and lemon pound cake. Host Ina Garten packed everything in small Chinese take-out containers and tied each slice of lemon cake in parchment paper and raffia. The segment ended with her friends gathered together on a windy beach, sipping cold beer and wielding chopsticks as they dined on Ina's delicacies. I replayed this scene over and over in my mind, running through images of firm pink shrimp, bow-tie pasta speckled with pesto, and yellow striped tomatoes. I was soothed by the comforting whir of her Kitchen-Aid mix master beating sugar and butter until it formed a yellow ribbon. I imagined myself on that beach, my skin tight from a day in the sun, my hair coarse and curly from ocean salt. I focused on the shoreline, felt the rough parchment paper in my palm, and tasted lemon icing on my tongue. My breath evened out, my pulse slowed, and my body relaxed. In my hour of need, the Barefoot Contessa sailed in on her silver Viking stove and rescued me with the sturdy shine of her All-Clad cookware.

Barefoot Contessa is a regular program on the Food Network featuring Ina Garten and her sprawling shingled home in the Hamptons. Each show revolves around the gourmet meals she prepares for her husband, Jeffrey, as a homecoming on Friday evenings. She regularly hops in her convertible Mercedes to pick up a quart of local raspberries or a bottle of Pinot Grigio. She's stout and warm, like a fresh baked brioche. Her face is freckled and open and her dark brown hair falls in her eyes as she cooks. She's generous, pleasant, and kind of messy, dropping eggs shells in her bowls and getting avocado all over her hands. She's a fan of heavy cream, liqueurs, and lots of lemon zest. When she makes dessert she smiles conspiratorially into the camera, asking, "How bad can that be?"

For weeks now I'd been watching the Food Network from the depths of my parents' old red sofa. At 35, I'd moved back home to Vermont to undergo chemotherapy for acute leukemia. I'd already lost ten pounds, my hair, and my taste buds. My jeans were too loose, my bowels too tight, and everything tasted like licking tin. A week after my diagnosis, I took a leave of absence from the college in Albany, New York where I was an English professor. Colleagues took over my classes, a neighbor took in my plants, and I packed a suitcase. Instead of living alone in an old brownstone and joining friends for drinks on Thursdays, my mother was tucking me in at night and my father bringing me clean pails for puking.

The worst side effect of chemotherapy, however, was that I couldn't read. A stack of novels sat next to my bed, but I found the language baroque and the plots knotted. So I turned to more straightforward nonfiction books like Lance Armstrong's It's Not About the Bike and Jerri Nielson's Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole. Even in the realm of real people and real lives, I was just skimming words, skipping pages, and drifting away. I had spent a lifetime reading. In fact, I'd made a career of it. But now stories didn't work; they seemed frivolous and beside the point. That's when I discovered the Food Network and found narrative winnowed to its essence, words reduced to their white-hot core of truth. I found relief in the concrete language of food.

On the days I felt empty, limp, and flattened from chemo, watching the Food Network gave me structure and purpose. When my parents came home from work and started cooking dinner, I retreated to the TV room and the rituals of food preparation I couldn't smell. In my real life, everything made me nauseous and I could only eat white food: egg noodles, rice, vanilla yogurt. But my Food Network life was filled with smoky pancetta, curried chicken, and chocolate mousse spiked with hot pepper. In my real life I was learning about white blood cells and prescription painkillers. In my Food Network life I was learning to smash garlic cloves with the flat of a knife, assemble Panini, and make black olive tapanade. In my real life, I made regular trips to the hospital for blood transfusions and lab work. But in my Food Network life I hung out in East Hampton grilling Tequila chicken with the Contessa, or joined Giada de Laurentis from Everyday Italian on trips to specialty shops wearing a pashmina. For thirty minutes at a time, I could leave my body and the world of biopsies. I could live near the ocean and my biggest concern could be how to make fresh gnocchi or where to buy Callebaut chocolate.

My friends called often to see how I was feeling, but after awhile I stopped answering the phone. My new network took up all of my time. When people asked if I was writing about my experience, I assured them I was. But the truth is I was too busy TIVO-ing Paula Deen's Home-Style Cooking. Against the backdrop of a Gulf Coast bayou, Paula dredged thin filets of Tilapia through piles of corn meal, popped them in smoking oil, and lobbed huge pillows of Crisco into her biscuit dough. I became addicted to Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals and her hoarse-voiced culinary enthusiasm. I developed a serious crush on Tyler Florence and followed him to the far corners of Sicily on his quest for the ultimate meatball. When the oncologist talked about my bone marrow, after awhile all I could see was Alton Brown's Good Eats Beef Map: Brisket and Shank, Rib, Short Loin, rump roast.

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.