The Experience of Eating After Your Jaw Has Been Wired Shut
A BLT takes on epic meaning
Like many kids, I was a picky eater. I ate only the raisins in my bowl of Raisin Bran and enjoyed plain turkey sandwiches on white bread. I ate pasta with butter nearly every night for a decade.
But when I was 12, I took a children’s cooking class―it was the first time I tried new things regularly, each week offering new recipes and unfamiliar cuisines. At 15, I took my first job in a restaurant. I worked for five years at a short-order burger place, cooking greasy fare for tourists trying to catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, then I started working as a line cook at a waterfront restaurant. I learned to bake bread, grill a steak, break down a lobster and debone a duck; how to make ice cream, sear a sea scallop, and ferment kimchi. I learned to taste in a different way. It was there that I realized the power of great food to bring people together―not just around the table, but throughout the growing, harvesting, fishing, catching, and cooking.
I write all this only with the clarity of hindsight, because I never saw this thread in my life until I had my jaw wired shut.
In my second semester of college, I did what virtually no one wants to do as an adult: I got braces. Not the clear plastic kind, but full-blown metal…
