With this blog, I had hoped to be able to cook with my classmates, and in the process, learn about their relationships with food--some posts you see are like this. Unfortunately, time restraints (read: poor management of my fourth year time) made me shift my method for interviewing my classmates to an email questionnaires, only a handful of which were answered (again, maybe related to fourth year). Despite these drawbacks (which HSIQ, in its infinite wisdom, has taught me to now expect in my future projects), I have observed some things from my observations of my classmates' relationships with food that I gathered into larger themes below:
Evolution: Many of my classmates' journeys in food talked about how their diets or attitudes towards food have changed over the years. The motivations have been varied: going to college and experiencing food from different cultures, books changing their attitudes towards sustainable food procurement, wanting to eat healthier because of their experience in healthcare, a significant other entering to life with different food or cooking habits. I want to say that everyone who responded to my interviews have noted some sort of change in their relationships or attitudes towards food. I really liked hearing that, as one of my recent philosophies (likely influenced by my exposure to CBT during my psychiatry rotations) is that "the only thing constant in life is change." I like this mantra, as it turns a discomfort into a comfort, and it really highlights the significance of human beings' ability to adapt, integrate, and be flexible. It was cool to see the kinds of growth my classmates have been on through this journey of food alone, and I wonder where they and I have grown in many other significant aspects of life.
Catharsis: A few of the people who cooked with me or answered my questionnaires commented on how the experience was quite relaxing or cathartic for them. In either setting, my conclusion is that guided reflection of this sort can help take people out of the hustle and bustle of the here and now to provide some contemplation time for thinking how they became who they are, how they have changed, and a chance to provide intention for what they are now. Additionally, I think for many people food and nourishment really does have an automatic "joy sparking" element in it. I'm hoping to use this takeaway in my practice as a psychiatrist, on the wards and in therapeutic outpatient management. On the other side of things, as I will be working with patients with eating disorders at some point in my career, I can imagine that the same positive emotionality and story-telling associated with food can likely be flipped to the negative, so I suppose that I will just understand that there's often a natural pathos associated with food and its preparation.
Connection: This one is a little bit more personal, but as I was writing each of these blog posts up, I realized that a lot of the ways that I knew my classmates prior to these interviews was through their social media presence. As I typed about my knowledge of my classmates through their Facebook posts, Instagram stories, or Yelp reviews, I wondered what my relationships with these classmates would be like without these mediums--would I be better connected with them or worse? I also wondered about the performative and inherently artistic nature of our social media identities: The performance/art (read: Insta story/FB photo post with caption) we put out, how that output is interpreted by outside acquaintances (a like, a comment, a screenshot that gets sent around), and how that forms our external identities. In that same vein, how am I characterized and perceived by my outside acquaintances and does that mean anything about my own "performance" on social media? More importantly than all of this though, is the question of how to know someone beyond the two-dimensional interpretation of that output. I felt that these questionnaires did teach me more about my classmates beyond the dimensions that I'm familiar with; I learned how they grew up, how they've changed, who they are now, and who they hope to be--and I think that to find more avenues and opportunities to do this, with my future patients, and equally significantly, with those who I see day to day, I'd probably experience the world with more compassion and curiosity.
In my first post, my mission statement for this blogging project was as follows:
In medicine, the most meaningful part for me has been the privilege of getting to know people's stories. My goal with this blog is to use this channel of food to understand my classmates' stories, while simultaneously grabbing recipes for my own and practicing my interview skills for my future residency in psychiatry.
While this project didn't pan out to become the aspirational cooking/touchy-feely blog I had hoped it to be, I think my general intention was still executed and I was able to do good learning along the lines that I wanted to.
