Julia Child Saved My Life

I was living a shadow of an existence for many years. I grew-up in a war zone as a young soldier and subsequently lived the life of a survivor: you do what you should or what you have to, nothing more. This proverbial sleepwalk kept me bound to the past, ravenous to feel alive again.

War can do that, the contrast between your impending death and each breath intensifies every experience. I longed for that desert, I didn't realize that what I really wanted was to feel something again.

I began to wake, brushing the dirt off the coffin of my soul, completing the sentence: "I want..." yet I still could not accept the idea of doing anything that did not have an inherent purpose.

My passion began to re-emerge and over the years I discovered the creative release I had been craving in the kitchen. I am not a painter or a musician, but I have an eye for beauty, an ear for harmony and a palate capable of tasting every element. I found my canvas and my opus on a plate.

I continued to have a desperate frustration with my life, anxiety wracked me as I tried to find my way. I picked-up Julia Child's "My Life in France" and found within its pages a a blueprint for a life of joy, adventure, love and deep richness.The key was openhearted passion. I knew my passion was food and people, though it somehow didn't seem enough to build a life around. It was too frivolous for a practical girl like me. Julia is not unique in her guidance; MKF Fisher, James Beard, Ernest Hemingway and countless others have whispered these truths to me since then, but Julia was my first.

Realizing I was too unhappy to go on, I struck out to craft the life I had been missing with passion as my only guide. Through my journey I found that there is a particular breed of human who truly appreciates culinary pleasure. I collected a menagerie of these individuals and with food as the only common denominator a community of passionate, vibrant people was born.

I began formulating a theory in which people who know how to enjoy gastronomical pleasures also know how to live well.Perhaps there is more to eating and cooking than hedonistic pleasure or survival. Based on this one little element of life, people from all ethnicity's, all economic and social backgrounds were united.

Eating is the most basic joy and comfort for the human race. Sharing a meal and sharing your bed can be equally intimate acts, cultures are defined in part by their cuisine and it is something everyone must do.

It is interesting that this is the one element of life in which utility and art are united. Perhaps that is why it is only through this lens I have been able to make sense of it all.