Like any true love story, we’ll start at the beginning. My grandparents lived in a small little town in Southern Italy when I was younger, just a small walk from the beach. Naturally, my mother took us to spend the summers there, walking to the beach everyday, speaking rudimentary Italian, getting constant history and culture lessons. I fell in love. Yes, with the beach and the people and the culture, but it was not those that drew me into a lifelong love affair.

It was the pasta, bathed in sauces and cheese; it was the pizza that our landlords hand-baked in the house’s brick oven; it was the gelato, smooth and creamy scooped over the counter at small little cafes found all over town; it was the fresh fruit found in the markets. It was really the fresh everything. I also happened to have Nutella for the first time while I was in Italy, as well as the lovely creamy Kinder candies that my mother would hand out when we were good. I think it was then that I fell in love with food.

The love continued at home, where my mom made a point out of feeding us homemade dinners, where we had pizza Fridays and burger Saturdays and my dad was never shy about grilling steak tips. It wasn’t always healthy, but it was always effortful, homemade and tasty. Always. I can’t really remember ever having a bad meal at home. There were always things I didn’t like as much, like breadcrumb chicken, but it was never bad.

It’s strange to leave home and be responsible for your own food when you’ve never had a bad home-cooked meal. I learned quickly that it’s easy to get some bad food or a good meal. I came to believe that not many things are worth eating unless they have some sort of nutritional value or unless they taste as good or better than something I could get at home. It didn’t take me a long time living away from home to become a picky eater.

Being a picky eater doesn’t mean that I don’t like food, it means the opposite. It just means that I appreciate something good when I eat it. It was a love affair that has been continuing on for years. It began on the coast of Southern Italy and I don’t see it ending anytime soon. Like any love, it is a blessing and a curse, but it means that I pay a lot of attention to what I and that most of what I eat is worth it and tastes great.

As a result of my deep appreciation and general pickiness about food, it means that I spend a lot of my day thinking about what I’m going to have for my next meal. It means that when I daze off during class, I’m thinking about what I can make for lunch or what I can whip up in Kimball. It means that I spend a good deal of my paycheck on grocery shopping, it means that I can’t usually leave campus without buying some sort of food, and it means that grocery shopping is my favorite sort of shopping. It means that I’ve been looking forward to living somewhere with a kitchen like a little kid waiting to open presents on Christmas morning.