Although she’s recovering from a serious fall, she still bakes. I sample a slice of moist, honey-tinged rye, and she plies me with sugar-crusted oatmeal cookies. As we talk, she peels parsnips at the kitchen sink. She says she doesn’t understand the modern obsession with doing everything fast. She thinks something is lost in the translation.

“When I was growing up,” she says, “there wasn’t much prepackaged stuff in the grocery store. Quick stuff — I don’t see any advantage to it. It’s a whole lot cheaper doing it from scratch. Four potatoes don’t cost you as much as those dehydrated ones. And I think it’s almost the same amount of time to make things from the box.” She finishes slicing the parsnips into oblong pieces, and cracks an egg into a bowl. “Fried parsnips — this was my mother’s recipe,” she says.

When Carol was growing up, farm to table was the norm. As a small child, she lived on a small farm outside Centuria, Wis. “Even during hard times we did all right. We grew our own vegetables, raised our own beef. My uncles cured bacon and ham. We made maple syrup. If someone in the family wasn’t doing so well, the rest of the family made sure they didn’t go hungry. I mean, it wasn’t free, but we worked things out.” As an adult, Carol kept a big garden. “I loved it. I grew onions, beets, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, green beans. I’d grow parsnips over the winter, and we’d dig them up in the early spring.” The aforementioned shaggy-haired grandson wanders into the kitchen and remembers summer visits to Carol’s house in Wisconsin: “There were always garden-fresh vegetables. My grandpa loved green onions and fresh sliced tomatoes with salt on them. So there would always be a plate of that. Grandpa would stop by a local farm for sweet corn. And she made the best roast — to this day, that’s my favorite food.”

Like everyone I’ve interviewed for this series, Carol’s life can be read two ways. Her father was the town postmaster, and she had three sisters. In 1953, she married a childhood friend, Merald, the son of the town banker. They raised four children. Merald worked his way from clerk to president of the Polk County Bank, an old-fashioned rural institution. Carol was a homemaker who baked cookies every Wednesday and kept her house as neat as a pin. The story is as neat and squared away as Carol’s housekeeping. On the other hand, unconventional memories bob into Carol’s narrative: “Joanne and I decided we needed a car, so we bought a car together.” Carol rolls the parsnip sticks in egg and dunks them in a bowl of cracker crumbs. She pours oil into a cast-iron pan. “But you know, girls just didn’t own cars in those days,” she says, lighting the stove. “So again, everyone probably thought ‘Well, those brazen hussies. Those two Hoyt girls.” She laughs.

Joanne and Carol would drive to the local dance hall or, for a lark, go bird hunting. When Carol was 20, the sisters and a friend drove the ’36 Ford all the way to Mexico. Border towns weren’t enough of an adventure for three girls from rural Wisconsin; they hit the gas and traveled around the country, making it as far south as Mexico City. “Joanne and I were the devils,” Carol says, laughing. “We were the two sisters who were always making trouble.”

While Carol fries the crumbed parsnips golden brown, I slide a pan of pork chops from the oven and put the finishing touches on a salad. We sit down at the kitchen table, and Carol says grace.  The parsnips are delicious — the root’s complex sweetness is grounded by the savory fried crust. “When you were eating fried parsnips with your family, what else would have been on the table?” I ask. “Pork chops, rolls, potatoes,” she says, pointing at each item on our table. She laughs a little — I had put together the rest of the dinner without consulting her, but hit upon her childhood combination anyway. “And a salad,” she finishes. “My mother always had a salad.”

Today’s effete foodie would salivate at the food that graced Carol’s childhood table: pork chops from local pigs, garden-fresh parsnips and salad greens, homemade bread and fresh butter. Her life story reminds me of an important fact: We haven’t been this way for long. Living people, indeed relatively spry living people, remember a time when the industrial food chain was not a matter of course. A time when you knew where your food came from, a time when the command to “eat local” would have seemed laughable, a time when farm to table was not a political statement but common sense.

I doubt Carol has heard of Michael Pollan, and she would be unlikely to agree with his points in the manner that he presents them. But her life reflects an attitude about food that is not so out of pace with his supposedly liberal values: She takes delight in vegetables; she sees the value of gardening; she’s not above enjoying a glass of wine with dinner; she eschews boxed food in favor of baking and cooking from scratch. When I ask her if her family ate meals together every evening, she says, “Oh yes. Of course we did.”

As a young woman in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Carol was out of step with the cultural norm in the sense that she was something of a daredevil, too independent. Today she’s out of step with mainstream America in that she believes that time spent in the garden and kitchen is not time wasted, that the essence of quality is attained through toil, not technology. When it comes to food, her habits give me hope. She reminds me that our current culture of convenience is such a new thing. Could it be that we can still correct our misstep? My question is not: How did we get to the point where a home-cooked, home-grown meal is a political statement? But rather: How do we get back to a point when it isn’t?

Note: Carol points out that the parsnips can be parboiled over the weekend to save time when cooking weeknight suppers.

Fried parsnips

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: Mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish—Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?—and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple. You don’t have to buy into all the minutiae a sushi master trades in to know that the pleasures of great sushi span from the animal to the emotional and the intellectual, which is a great trick for anything to pull off, let alone a piece of raw fish on rice.

What animates a sushi master? What drives someone to be so focused, to be a god of small things?

Jiro Ono, 85 years old and counting, is a revered sushi chef who runs a restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station, and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is easily the best, most beautiful movie about sushi you will see this year, or, let’s face it, probably any other. The film is part documentary bio-pic, part food-blogger’s wet dream. (OMG, did you see the super-macro shot of that tuna??!? NOM NOM. Etc.) It doesn’t take us into the world of technique: Jiro has mastered rice, too—his rice dealer claims that he doesn’t bother to sell his best stuff to anyone else because they wouldn’t know what to do with it—but while he describes how he does it, the film never shows us the whys and what-fors of his method. (Though, as Silvia Killingsworth reports for the New Yorker, the French-American star chef Eric Ripert describes Jiro’s rice as “tasting like a cloud.”)

Instead, the movie focuses on the life of a man who is utterly devoted to his craft. Jiro doesn’t have a secret to why his sushi is more astonishing than anyone else’s. What he says, over and over, is that great sushi—and, by extension, greatness itself— is the result of hard work, of dedication, of a commitment to excellence that, in the end, trumps everything else in life.

His search for perfection is eternal.  At 85, he hasn’t stopped working; he says he hates holidays because they are too long to spend away from the restaurant. Chefs, in particular, who have seen the film don’t hesitate to call it “inspiring.” To watch the gorgeously shot scenes of him forming pieces of sushi, jewel-like and dripping with soy sauce and life, is to wish that you might one day make so much beauty. (Indeed, a film critic friend said that her reaction to seeing this was not hunger, but to want to go home and make jewelry.)

Still, there is another side to this mastery, to this inspiring devotion. Jiro has two sons, and it’s hard to tell exactly what their relationship to each other is, or to their esteemed father. The master admits to not being at home when they were young, telling a story of how one day he slept in, and his children complained to their mother that there was a strange man in the house. The younger one seemed, at first, to be the favorite, because the father helped him open his own restaurant. The older son, Yoshikazu, is still an apprentice to the father … at 50. But Jiro tells the camera, with a laugh, that when he helped his younger son open his restaurant, he told him, “Now, you can never come home again.” As he recounts his own life, leaving his home to begin his career at 9, it’s not clear that he was kidding with his kid.

With an inflection of either humble pride or resignation, Yoshikazu says that in Japan, it’s the oldest son’s role to take over for the father. He works dutifully; he has taken over the selection and buying of fish since Jiro had a heart attack 15 years before. He, not the acclaimed master, was the one who served the inspectors who granted Jiro three Michelin stars, the highest recognition in the restaurant world. And yet, Jiro’s restlessness keeps his son forever in his shadow, unwilling to let him stand for himself.

“You must fall in love with your work,” Jiro says. He refers to himself as a shokunin, literally an “artisan,” but more accurately someone who commits the entirety of himself to his work. It’s a term with gravity; you won’t find shokunin bread in the grocery store. One of his young apprentices wells up when he tells the camera of how he finally earned the term from his master. It was after he’d worked for Jiro for 10 years. He’s signed up for a life of dignity and honor and hard work. He’s signed up for the life of Jiro’s sons, men who may or may not have their own sons to mentor and pass their restaurants down to. He’s signed up for a life given—or lost?—to the making of beautiful things.

It’s just another blow for an industry with a reputation that’s only slightly worse than Lindsay Lohan’s. Despite the continued, relentless urgings that beef is “what’s for dinner” and the shudderings of manly men like Herman Cain (remember him?) at the thought of a pizza piled with vegetables, meat consumption in America is on the decline. In fact, meat’s had an image problem ever since Oprah declared she was through with burgers after the mad cow disease outbreak of the 1990s. The problem continues with the latest controversy over “pink slime” (beef scraps treated with ammonia) being served in our children’s school lunches.

The Atkins diet was beef’s biggest friend for a moment, but over the last decade, the industry has suffered blows from searing exposes like Eric Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation.” When I looked for news of e. coli warnings about meat while writing this piece, I found a major recall that had been posted just this morning. Add the overhaul of the food pyramid, the popularity of “meatless Mondays” and a general movement toward plant-based diets, and you’ve already got a radical shift in how we feel about eating animals.

Of course, the Harvard study’s dire warnings are already being met with pushback from the kind of Internet commenters who insist, “I’m going happy, hello Ribeye!”  Behold that certain, modern insistence that whatever it is, you’ll have to pry it out of our cold, dead hands. “More BS from the food police!” They’re coming for our brisket! They’re going to force us to eat nothing but salad!

But life doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I stopped buying plastic-wrapped meat from the back of the supermarket the day I watched the documentary “Food, Inc.” I still buy meat, however, from local, trusted sources. It’s considerably more expensive than the Manager’s Specials of yore, which is why my family eats a whole lot less of it. It’s not a big deal – my older daughter has been inclined toward vegetarianism since she was a baby, picking the meat out of every meal since she could muster finger-thumb dexterity. Her younger sister, meanwhile, would rather have pasta than anything. No meat? No problem. I like the flavor and flexibility of being a sometime meat-eater, of knowing that boeuf bourguignon is still an option and that I don’t have to sweat the menu when I’m traveling or a guest at someone’s home. I also like supporting the hard-working farmers who make their living from their livestock, who aren’t part of the grotesque industrial-meat complex. And I’m really not fond of the smug, in-your-face variety of vegetarianism that  gets giddy with every new study about What Will Kill You.

Dr. An Pan, the lead author of the Harvard report, writes that the “results indicate that replacement of red meat with alternative healthy dietary components may lower the mortality risk.” We eat for a variety of reasons – not just to live but to share, to celebrate, to seduce. It doesn’t have to be a struggle against the Grim Reaper three times a day plus snacks. And health doesn’t have to be a slog of deprivation and hunger. When you cut down on meat – when you make the choice to not eat it every single day — you find other foods that are satisfying and often cheaper and easier to cook. You appreciate the beauty of a reasonable portion of a really great cut of meat. And you realize that it’s possible to live without sanctimony and fear.

Loud music may make the environment less pleasant to some people, but it can positively affect sales of alcohol. In a study conducted in two different bars, the researchers found that revelers ordered more drinks and drank their beer faster when the music playing in the background was fast and loud. When the sound track was played at a lower decibel level, drink sales were lower and the pace of drinking was slower. In other words, fast tempos beget fast-moving partiers who also, not incidentally, spend more money on drinks.

Musical tempo also has an effect on the pace at which diners eat food. So, if restaurateurs want their customers to linger longer, they should play slow music. Conversely, if their objective is to get you in, get you out, and turn over your table, playing fast music will help. Next time you’re assaulted by frenzied club music in a crowded restaurant, you’ll know you’re being given a not-so-subtle hint to eat and skedaddle.

The takeaways from these studies refer to averages, however, and it’s dangerous to assume that one or two people will respond in an average way. Julian Treasure, founder of The Sound Agency, has worked with food retailers such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer, cautions: The effect of sound will vary hugely depending on occupancy. For example, the impact of switching on loud music where there was none in an almost-empty bar is going to be very different in a busy bar with that music and a busy bar with no music. Where the customers experience the change in condition, that itself creates an effect — in the case of my friends, an adverse one.

My favorite study on how sound affects flavor perception was funded by Aurelio Montes, of Montes Wines in Chile, a man who believes so strongly in the power of music that he bathes his aging casks of premium cabernet sauvignon wine in the sound of Gregorian chant. Mr. Montes inspired a professor to test whether or not music could influence the taste of wine. The findings could be a boon to aging hair bands across the world. It turns out that listening to a heavy metal song while drinking a cabernet sauvignon — Guns N’ Roses’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” for example — can make the wine taste more robust. According to one theory, the wailing sound of Axl Rose lights up certain areas of your brain that, for example, might correspond to heavy, hearty, robust, and muscular. This stimulation then primes your brain to taste wine in the same way.

This type of research on sound has such delicious implications that chefs are already putting it into practice in the field. One such chef is Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in England, which in 2010 took the number three spot in San Pellegrino’s survey “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.”

Blumenthal has worked closely with Charles Spence, the professor who heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford. Crossmodal refers to how one of our sensory modes, such as sound, can cross sensory lines and influence another, such as taste. Together, Blumenthal and Spence crafted two experiments to illustrate how environmental sounds can influence flavor perception.

The first one used a flavor of ice cream normally not found in nature: bacon and egg. Chef Blumenthal’s ice cream is served at The Fat Duck with a piece of fried bread, which unifies the dish and adds a crispy textural component that conjures up actual bacon and eggs. In the experiment, conducted at a conference on art and the senses, participants were asked to rate the “egginess” and “bacony-ness” of the ice cream while one of two sound tracks played in the background. When the sound of bacon sizzling, popping, and crackling in a pan was played, the tasters rated the bacon flavor higher than the egg flavor. When the researchers played a sound track of barnyard chickens clucking, eaters rated the egg flavor higher than the bacon. It seems that you can pull a flavor in one direction or another with auditory bait.

The second experiment was geared toward determining if they could manipulate the pleasantness rating of a food that, in the absence of culinary accoutrements, can look horrifyingly unpleasant: a raw oyster.

The first oyster in the experiment was served on the half shell, the way most restaurants serve them. In the background a sound track of waves crashing on the beach was playing. The second oyster was served in a petri dish, making that quivering, gelatinous, slimy gray mass look like an organ being readied for transplant. In the background they played the discordant sounds of clucking chickens. Not surprisingly, the participants rated the oyster on the half shell with ocean sounds much more pleasant than the petri dish oyster with clucking sounds.

Blumenthal demonstrates the oyster test results daily at The Fat Duck, when he serves a seafood course called Sound of the Sea. Diners are presented with a large seashell inside which is an iPod. Then they’re served a glass dish of edible foam and fresh seafood perched atop a box of sand. Diners are instructed to put on the iPod earphones to hear the sounds of the sea before digging in.

Blumenthal and Spence note that the dish does three things. First, it makes diners think more about the effect that sound has on the appreciation of food, something we often take for granted.

Second, as proved in their research, the soundtrack intensifies the seafood-y flavors in the dish. The sound of the waves lapping the beach transports you to the seaside, conjuring up aromas of salt spray and ocean air, which you ascribe to the food you’re eating.

And third, the earphones make diners focus on the dish more than on companions or conversation.

Your sense of hearing is also important once you put food in your mouth. As annoying as loud eating can be, the sounds of people eating can communicate a lot of information about their food. In laboratory studies, people who simply listened to the recorded sound of someone eating celery, turnips, and crackers gave the foods the same texture ratings as those who actually ate them.

If you wanted to conduct a study on how sound influences the perception of potato chips, you’d have to standardize the stimulus: the chip. If one tester got a thick, folded chip, his experience would be very different from that of another tester who got a thin, flat chip. Scientists have come up with the perfect solution: Pringles. Because each double saddle–shaped crisp is identical, Pringles are a food researcher’s dream. One study showed that consumers rated Pringles crisper and fresher when they heard loud sounds of them being eaten. Chips with lower sounds were more likely to be rated as stale or soft. The same test was done with carbonated water. The louder the sound the bubbles made, the fizzier the water was rated.

In 2010, Frito-Lay’s SunChips brand of snacks launched what was claimed to be the world’s first 100 percent compostable snack package. Immediately Frito-Lay started to receive complaints from consumers about the sound of the bags. Here was a snack food company trying to do the right thing for the Earth, and consumers were complaining. In fact, they were more than mad. They were frustrated. No longer could the cheating dieter sneak a handful of chips in the middle of the night without rousing his spouse. Consumers created a Facebook page called SORRY BUT I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THIS SUNCHIPS BAG. The company responded that a loud compostable bag is “the sound of change.” Then they pulled them off the market.

Actually, Frito-Lay was on to something. Amanda Wong and Charles Spence of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory found that people tasting Pringles (again, to assure that each crisp was exactly the same as the next) while hearing a recording of snack bags rated the crisps crisper when they heard the bags rattling than when they heard the canister of Pringles popping. SunChips could have parlayed this learning into some kind of response to the complaints, or they could have used this knowledge in the advance marketing of the compostable bag to head off the complaints in the first place: our extra loud compostable bag will not only save the earth, it will give you more sensory stimulation.

Much of the sound that influences our food behavior is “heard” without our conscious attention, perhaps because we’re so used to constant low-level noise in the background of our daily lives that we unconsciously tune much of it out. Yet even without your knowing it, the music that a food retailer or restaurateur plays can influence what you buy.

One study showed that playing French music in a supermarket makes people buy French wine more than wine from other countries (in this study, specifically, Germany). Playing German music had the same effect, making customers buy more German wine than French. Yet fewer than 14 percent of the shoppers admitted that the type of music that was playing might have influenced their wine choice.

The tempo of the music that’s played in a store can also influence your purchase decisions. Slow music makes grocery store shoppers slow down; that means they spend more time in the store, and this translates to more revenue per customer—a pretty awesome result from simply changing the radio station. We are so sure that we’re in charge all the time, but in fact we can be manipulated like puppets.

Perhaps the most sonically challenged food venue is the grocery store. What are the signature sounds of a grocery store? The soundscape at the front of the store is the ringing and dinging of the cash registers. The center of the store hums along with the cycling of freezer cases. The produce section sounds like, well, nothing. Retailers might consider adding the sounds of nature to influence sales of their fresh produce. If a clucking chicken can make bacon-and-egg ice cream seem eggier, wouldn’t the pleasant sounds of the outdoors make produce seem fresher?

In fact, a few retailers are dabbling in this area. Safeway, a U.S. grocery store chain based in California, spritzes some of its produce displays with water. Just before the water starts, you hear the sound of gathering thunderclouds. Boom! With a crack of thunder, the “storm” hits the lettuce section. Produce grows outdoors and that’s the sound that Safeway has re-created inside. It’s an incredibly powerful reminder of where the food comes from.

Recently, I was allowed to eat food in an anechoic chamber, a special room designed to eliminate the echoic effect of sound, which bounces around and gets reflected back to us in normal situations. I emailed Professor Emeritus Ervin Hafter, who ran the Auditory Perception Lab at University of California, Berkeley, and explored aspects of hearing such as the spatial perception of sound and how noise reduction affects speech cognition.

We took my bag of food in and Hafter closed the foot-thick outer door, and then another inner one. We were closed off from all the sound in the world, it seemed. Hafter told me to scream as loud as I could. I yelled. Once. Twice. Again. The. Sound. Stopped. So. Abruptly. It. Seemed. To. Disappear. When I crunched into a celery stick, the sound was pure, clean, crisp, and beautiful. The first bite of an apple—in sound isolation from everything else in the world—punctuated the air with absolute clarity and an unmistakable imprint. If I were given the choice between eating an apple or a piece of chocolate in the chamber, I would choose the apple. Eating it was like making music.

We don’t need to eat in anechoic chambers in order to appreciate the sensory thrill of sounds like that first bite of apple. We just need to listen more carefully to what our food has to say and find a new appreciation for its audio output. If only we could learn to take sensory pleasure from the sound of food, similar to the way we revel in the aroma or appearance of a dish. We might eat more healthfully if we fully realized that an apple delivers the type of sonic performance that you could never get from a bowl of ice cream. Even if all we did was pay more attention to the sound of the food we eat, we might take one less bite and enjoy it twice as much.

It required a six-week commitment to cutting out dairy, potatoes, gluten, wheat, rye, barley, all sugars, soy, corn, caffeine and anything refined. Then when your body is cleared, you reintroduce each food one at a time and take note of your reaction. Sort of like a science experiment.

“Oooh, no bread or cheese,” I said with a wince. “My staples.”

“I know.” She nodded.

“No anything,” I added. Yikes.

Little did I know that “doing without” would be the least complicated part for me. Anyone can stop eating a certain food. But separating yourself from the masses via food choice leads to social ramifications — an outcome I should have anticipated, since I too had rolled my eyes at the recent gluten-free fad. All across America, Gen Y women, and some of their hip elders, were attaching the label to themselves as if it were a sparkly tiara. Having grown up abroad consuming unmentionables like pâté and contaminated drinking water, I did not want to associate with a righteous crew cringing at wheat products. But lean, healthy food did matter to me, enough to have devoted my young adulthood to laboring on organic farms and apple orchards.

“Let’s do it,” I blurted out to my doctor. She handed me the Do’s & Don’ts sheet and I dashed home, excited.

“What can you eat?” asked my husband.

“Vegetables, whole grains, wild game.”

He wanted to try it with me.

After three days, he backslid, salivating, to his coffee, milk, cheese and bread. I stuck it out because I had to.

Week by week, small miracles happened.

First, the brain fog lifted. Instead of plodding, I pranced from task to task. Moods evaporated. PMS gone. Cramps? Poof. I woke ready for the amazing day ahead, and if that involved being on hold for 52 minutes with my credit card company, then so be it. Life was grand. Some might have even called me perky. People would search my eyes and say, “What’s changed? Something’s changed.” I would fill them in on what felt like my own private revolution: I’ve been drugged my whole life. Did I temper my response? No. The newly indoctrinated are always high on their discoveries.

But my discovery was not yet complete. With a few weeks to go before testing, the culprit had not been tagged. I still wanted to poke my head into every home and say, “Do y’all know about this?”

And therein lies the problem.

Never, no matter what, preach.

Aware of my potential to saturate people with this exuberance, I tried to play it cool when my in-laws arrived for a visit. No one they knew would ever “do” such a diet. It must have looked ridiculous to them. I explained it minimally. But soon my special bowls of quinoa started to make me uncomfortable.

One night, my mother-in-law announced that she’d like to make a deer roast. Perfect: vegetables, whole grains, wild game.

“Now that I can eat!” I announced.

Dancing around the kitchen, I chopped carrots as relief washed over me, so pleased that I would finally be able to join the family, participate in my mother-in-law’s cooking and not linger as the outsider. She seemed relieved, too.

But when I spun around to a vision of her dusting white flour over the meat, my heart sank. I was kaput. She probably assumed that a little flour didn’t count. It wasn’t a hunk of bread after all. How could I explain — without sounding like an ingrate — that even a little bit of flour would destroy the experiment I had been so carefully developing for over a month?

Nervous and tongue tied, I waited until the last and worst moment.

“Molly, would you like some?” she asked, holding a thin slice of meat over my plate.

Let’s just say that I stumbled. I tried to make a joke. Like a fool, I apologized.

Everyone tried to change the subject.

How do you stay a decent member of society while abandoning the foods that most people eat every day? No one instructs you on this process. And charting that awkward terrain was only just beginning for me. After introducing each food individually, the culprit appeared. My gluten sensitivity manifested quickly: sleepy, bloated, irritable, headache. Dairy also turned my stomach. I had officially morphed into that chick with the hoity-toity food intolerances. Now what? No one opts out of the ancient act of communal eating. Food lubricates conversation. If you eat this and I eat this, then we are friends.

Time passed.

My siblings croaked over the phone, “Do you eat anything?”

At first, I avoided dinner parties. Then I brought my own food to them.

One afternoon, as a friend hounded down a barbeque sandwich and I sipped on water, he made this comment about a mutual friend: “She isn’t picky at all. She eats anything. I love when a person is open like that.”

Whether he meant it as a sly attack or not, the message was clear. That gung ho woman was not me. She probably flitted around carefree. I, however, was “picky.” And who wants to be that? The word even sounded bad — constrained, hair tight in a bun, so damn un-fun. Though I did not have celiac disease or a deathly peanut allergy, I had become the Queen of Intolerance herself, proud of her pantry of grains and refrigerator bursting with raw vegetables.

Here’s the thing: Food gets personal, cultural and economic. People bare teeth to defend why they eat what they eat. Even I had started to. It’s deep-in-the-gut primal. So, after his comment, I began to steer toward the middle road. When a friend’s toddler baked a cookie just for me, I ate it. My whiskey glass, despite the rye, raised itself during a celebration. At the home of a sourdough bread baker, wheat melted in my mouth.

Sometimes, we have to weave between honoring community and self.

All of which cemented my approach.

Now, six months later, I’ve figured out my how. At home, I cook up food that energizes me — which means no gluten or dairy. I no longer apologize for that choice. I am picky about what nourishes me because being deflated doesn’t serve me, or anyone around me. But it is not my dogma. Though I’m willing to be insane and buy gluten-free oats for $3/lb., I refuse to lose grace with my friends or hosts. I don’t flag the term gluten-free around. At a dinner party, I scan the scene, stick to wine and dodge appetizers. But when we sit down to great grandpa’s lasagna recipe, I ask for a small slice and partake. Isn’t sharing food one of the ultimate nourishments for the soul? Worst case: I end up bloated, excessively tired and cranky for a few days. That’s OK. That I can tolerate.