have you ever had a pizza from naples?
i have never had pizza from naples in italy. tomorrow, i could take the first flight out to naples, italy and eat the most authentic pizza from the best place in naples. maybe i’d enjoy the pizza from naples or maybe i wouldn’t, but all it’d ever be to me, is a good, ‘authentic’ slice of pizza. i would be eating some good pizza but it might as well have been from some gentrified restaurant in nyc and i’d have been happy.
you know, good tasting food is something i can appreciate. the thrill of having something sensorily satisfying through the sheer effort put into it and the novelty of it is a beautiful feeling. but it does not compare to the experience of eating indian food at home for me. the food at a nice restaurant may be of a higher objective quality and of fresher ingredients but the meal i eat at home with my family completes me as a human being. it is an experience that makes me understand my tiny, little place in the universe. this food is nourished with a lifetime of memories and feelings and when i eat it, i feel all those things and i feel nourished in my heart and it’s more than a sensory feeling. there are no words to describe that sense of vague familiarity and identity.
i imagine, in their own way, this is how people from naples feel like when they eat their pizza. maybe all i am really saying, is that we can only ever be ourselves in this world. in a city, we sell experiences like authentic thai food or authentic african food and in eating food from different places or really from life, maybe we are just looking for something beyond the amusement of our palates. i cannot help but feel i’d never be able to understand what it means to have authentic food other than the food that is authentic to me because that is the only experience that i can really know anything about. it is quite cheap and almost vulgar to expect that i will ever feel a sliver of what a person from naples feels when they eat their pizza and likewise, that they’d feel anything like what i feel eating indian food.
we experience things the way we are and i experience things the way i am - how i taste a piece of food has a lot to do with who i am as a person and that has more to do with the nature of being human and experiencing things than it has to do with food.