AlexSaysAThing

We bought a bag of potatoes, a bag of onions, some margarine, eggs, a couple cans of Campbells Tomato Soup, a loaf of Wonder Bread, and we made fucking do.  Sometimes, yeah, we bought garlic, if we lived near a store that sold garlic.

We went to the library to check out Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, and we watched Julia Child on PBS.  We got ideas.  We used our imaginations.  We learned to cook since we were old enough to stand on a chair at the stove.  Because we all had to.  Sometimes an adult wasn’t around, so if we wanted to eat, we took an egg and slice of bread and tomato soup and got creative.

When I was younger, we lived very frugally. My family is part Italian, so we knew how to cook with garlic. We still did not fucking make garlic confit, because that simply wasn't something any of us did. Because confit is French.

It's not even as simple as just "cooking garlic". Confit is a French technique, of cooking something low and slow in fat. Most people wouldn't think to do that with garlic. Most people just use it as an ingredient or seasoning, rather than think to cook it on its own. Even if someone unfamiliar with confit wanted to simply "cook garlic", it would take a lot of trial and error to come up with the same technique on their own, as there are literally hundreds of ways one could decide to cook garlic, so even in that case, having someone explain it to you is still helpful.

“It is the story of their becoming human together.”

This is it. This is the oldest written literary work that we know of, and it’s a story of becoming human together.

This is a story about love, and it’s a story about death, and we told this story thousands of years ago, THOUSANDS of years. We have always, always, always been wrestling with this profoundly beautiful existence and with knowing one another, while knowing that we all will die and be forgotten.

We become human by loving, but we also become human by knowing death.