What I Ate in One Year: (and related thoughts)

by Stanley Tucci

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

Although I was raised a Catholic, I never fully acquired the assurance of belief and therefore never really believed. Though I don’t miss going to church every Sunday, I do miss the certainty of ceremony and the security of reverence. But now, in the early winter of my years, it’s through nature, art, and my children that I experience reverence, and in moments around the table that I experience ceremony. All guilt-free.

But it’s also about how food not only brings people together but makes life better.

I guess sometimes you must be made extremely weak to find a strength you never knew you had.

The slower one becomes, the faster time moves. How? Why? Is it because we finally understand time and are now able to gauge how long we’ve got left? At the age of sixty-three I probably have another twenty years, thirty if I’m very lucky. But now, as opposed to when I was younger, I know what twenty years is. I know what thirty years is. They are nothing. Just a glimpse of life. So, one panics. Or I do. Therefore, I think of death often. Very often. Too often perhaps.

This evening we ate in a restaurant that was terrible. Actually, fucking terrible. It was so bad that I can’t even remember what I didn’t eat.

Life is so short and tasting food of all kinds brings me such joy

Suddenly it seemed that the year had passed very quickly, even though during the midst of it there were times when it seemed it might never end. But it’s always that way. It’s like heading to a place you’ve never been to before. Because you don’t know where you’re going, the trip seems so long. But when you return to that place again, the same trip will seem so much shorter because now you know where you’re going. Or at least you think you do.