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Love is Not Low-Fat June 30th, 2006 Kissing someone who doesn't love you is like slathering margarine on your grandmother's homemade biscuits. First, there is the issue of margarine versus pure, sweet butter. Then, there are the biscuits themselves. There is the matter of your grandmother all by herself, not to mention the man or woman pressing their lips to yours. I'd like to start with Olera's buttermilk biscuits. She did not make them from a can that you bang on the countertop to open. Forget about a boxed mix. My grandmother made them from scratch, and she did not skimp on the fat. Olera Virginia refined her biscuit making when she was a young mother living on a dairy farm, getting up at 4am to make breakfast for my grandfather and the farmhands. Even when she was elderly and lived alone, she made biscuits or cornbread most days. She would cook dinner for at least four almost every day because she knew someone would drop by and be hungry - one of her grandchildren, her brother, or various kinfolk in transit. And she was certain they'd want hot bread with butter. What she probably knew in her secret self was that we came to be around her as much as for her lovingly prepared food. Olera's biscuits had a crusty bottom because she cooked them in a cast iron skillet. When your knife cut one open, a little puff of steam greeted you because she only served biscuits fresh from the oven. She unselfishly saved the cold leftovers for herself, crumbling them into her buttermilk when she was alone. And the only thing you could put on her pillowy biscuits was sweet butter. No margarine made it past the front door and not because she was loyal to the dairy industry or was worried about anyone's arteries. Never mind that margarine is cheaper or that Julia Child was on her side during the dark, low-fat years of the 1980's and 1990's. She loved the rich taste of butter and wanted us to know that anything else was counterfeit. What does any of this have to do with kissing? A lot of fake products and ideas came to the fore in the 1960's. Margarine had been around for decades but really began to fly off of supermarket shelves during that up-side-down decade. Today, we consume about three times as much of the oily, yellow stuff as we do butter. Not only have adulterated foods pushed aside pure foods, we have come to want our food fast. And these days, no one is in the kitchen very much. So who is getting their “hunger fed as much with understanding and affection as with bread?” Who knows that old Kitchen Madonna prayer anymore or sees it on a plaque hanging over a stove or sink? In the 1960's the sexual revolution took off, overfed by Alfred Kinsey's fake statistics and a socio-biological subversion of the nuptial meaning of the body. Just more counterfeit and forget about purity. Most are familiar with the fruits of the unraveling of a traditional understanding of dating, courtship, and marriage. The statistics on abortion, pre-marital sex, unwed mothers, acceptance of homosexuality as a valid lifestyle, STD's and AIDS are all the direct result of the instant gratification approach to God's plan for love and the body. Now back to kissing and fast love and anything fake. Kissing someone who can not possibly know that they really love you - and that you reciprocate and love them too- is like slathering fake oily margarine on your grandmother's homemade pita bread, Parkerhouse rolls, cornbread, biscuits, sourdough bread or whatever kind of bread your grandmother or anyone else dear to you could have made. We all could learn a thing or two from my grandmother who took her time to do everything from scratch, from the beginning, one step at a time, whether in the kitchen or not. True love can't be hurried. Kisses belong only to my beloved. Don't walk into my kitchen, kiss me, and then ask for a biscuit. It takes time for two people to grow in knowledge of each other and to discern if they should become one. And kissing is the first step to becoming one. As John Paul II has said, attraction is not love's finished form. Love is not something ready-made. It is a task given to a man and to a woman. What do you want? A canned biscuit with margarine or a homemade buttermilk biscuit with pure sweet butter that would please your grandmother? Love takes time. You have to get out your iron skillet first. Make sure it is clean. Get out all of the ingredients and don't forget the butter. Give the oven time to get really hot. Make those biscuits just like your grandmother told you. While you wait on them to cook, start reading Pope John Paul II's Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body. Although that is a lot of biscuits to make, just remember, then comes the lips and the sweetness! © 2006 The Kitchen Madonna |
