Food

When I was 12 years old, I was treated for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. My weeks spent in a hospital bed were fully consumed by watching shows on The Food Network. I would watch it all day until my lust for food overtook the nausea from chemotherapy. I would wake up in the morning without a shred of an appetite and by the end of the day I would be begging my parents to pick up takeout from the seemingly endless cuisines available in Philadelphia. It’s safe to say, my parents were suckers, and I ate like a king.

Food is weird. We eat it and our bodies convert it to energy that can be used by the cells. Like gas in a car, food, at its core, is nothing more than fuel. But while a chemical conversion occurs, food is also converted into memories. Like the grilled cheese cut into strips that my mother would make for me on every snow day during primary school. Or the grapefruit that I would watch my father eat for breakfast every single morning without fail. The eight-dollar Chinese dinner combo that literally got me through college (Thank you Capital Corner — I owe you so much). Or the grocery store sushi that is always a bit of a gamble but my girlfriend and I eat constantly.

I really can’t say that I began this project with any sort of sentimentality, but the more I shot, the more I realized how complex these relationships are. I started to think about my personal relationship with the foods that I eat and the memories associated with them. To this day I still have aversions to some of the foods I ate during that traumatic time that I can thankfully say was now over nine years ago and every single time I eat a grilled cheese I still think of sledding and snowball fights.