I am Christine Berardi and I love to go to groceries, supermarkets, farmer’s markets, street markets, wet markets, fish markets, cheese shops, wine shops, bakeries, butchers, co-ops, spice merchants, coffee shops, and breweries anywhere in the world. I’m voraciously curious about what people are cooking and eating indoors and outdoors, at home and at restaurants, BBQ joints, taco stands, chestnut braziers, chippys, noodle shops, watermelon trucks, creameries, u-pick farms, charcuteries, oyster bars, and frites stalls. I like food eaten off a stick, cooked over sticks, with chopsticks, or on popsicle sticks.
I want to know the story that food tells about a culture, the stories people around the world tell at the table, or remember when they eat. I want to know the memories that a particular taste or texture conjure up, the legends and lore of the how and why. I want to know how we are all the same and yet completely different when we break bread together.
Southern- rooted, I lived in the San Francisco area for 10 years and have just moved to the NYC area. Here at Cognitive Leeks, you’ll find my stories of the forks in the road, bites taken, life tasted.
Contact me at cognitiveleeks(at)gmail(dot)com
Old Vietnamese custom says it’s wrong to fight with or hurt someone while they’re eating. “My mother said that hitting a person when he is eating was the cruelest, most uncivilized thing anyone could do. And that if you caused a person to cry into his rice – souping rice with tears – you would be cursed with the bitterness he swallowed.” – Andrew X. Pham.
I like this mentality.