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This I Believe: Emma Hempstead
Emma is currently a sociology student, with an interest in food, farming and social activism. media type="file" key="EMH Spoon Recording TIB.mp3" width="240" height="20" Full Text: I believe in licking the spoon. It started in earliest memory, with furtive licks of cake batter when I thought my older sister Sarah wasn't looking. At seven years old, she threw me out of the kitchen for eating cookie dough. But I believed. Licking the spoon made me want to cook by myself at an early age, just so that no one would be watching as I munched on mouthfuls of batter. I perfected a honey bread by myself when I was nine, because of the joys of licking the spoon unhindered. I continued to lick the spoon as I got older, and the bowl, and the eggbeaters. I relished the flavors of all food at all stages of doneness. Cookies would be tasted when they were just butter and sugar mixed together, and again when the egg and vanilla was added. My heart leapt at the thought of making the gravy, as I knew no greater joy than chicken drippings with cream straight from the saucepan. To this day, the best chicken is picked with fingers off the bone from the freshly carved carcass while hovering over the hot oven. Preferably while you pretend to get the salt and pepper as everyone sits at the table unawares. I believe in licking the spoon because of the illicit pleasure and the sheer enjoyment of taste, when food is at its absolute freshest. Licking the spoon is experiencing the food when all is possible- you can make it sweeter, spicier, creamier or saltier. Happily, these little adjustments require further tasting in your labor of love to find the perfect balance. Juggling a hot piece of spaghetti as it slips out of your hand for the tenth time is an exercise in dedication; to bite into it is to know the true meaning of texture. Licking the spoon is experiencing your food, it is knowing and appreciating intimately the details of what you eat. The more you lick your spoon, the more familiar you get with what's on it, the richer your understanding of the nuances of flavor, and the more at ease you feel with what you eat. In my case, this familiarity with the food once it had reached my kitchen drove me to want to understand where it had come from before that. Once I knew exactly what was going on in my saucepan it seemed shallow to leave it at that. I drew strength from all my licks from all my spoons, and dove into exploring food at the social level, discovering farms and people that shared a love of experiencing food like I did- the spoon-lickers of the world. People who cared a great deal about the little elements of food and saw the way their spoons were connected to the world around them. Today, through Slow Food and the local food community, I am figuring out my own place among these spoon-lickers, and initiating as many people to that club as possible. The wonderful thing is that once you unleash the power of licking the spoon, it opens you up to choices you never knew you were making and has inevitably led me to make healthier, happier choices every day. I believe that our food landscape is still in the licking the spoon phase- anything is possible. We can make it bigger or smaller, make food itself more adapted to processing plants, or more adapted to eager mouths, remain unconscious or wake up. If we scale back and allow people to make decisions based on their own gut-level intuition, let them unleash the consumer power of their spoons, I believe we will be making a change for the better.