cooking in thought

I just finished reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and it sure made me think. The San Francisco Chronicle writes: “On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.”

Although this book is sad, I like any book that makes me think of things I haven’t before. I certainly did not consider my own mother’s feelings and thoughts when I was nine years old and the heaviness of Roses’ mother’s truth is hard to imagine. If we are what we eat, what about the emotions that went into it?