"Did You Eat Today?"

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Author
Otiniano, Andreo
Keyword
First Reader Nandita Raman
Senior Project
Semester Spring 2020
Readers/Advisors
Raman, Nandita
Term and Year
Spring 2020
Date Published
2020

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URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/13631
Abstract
For the majority of my life, I’ve only experienced a home that was broken. A boy living with no father and a struggling mother raising two children on her own, I was lost. Starting in elementary school, I would come home to food cooked for me by my grandma that lived right next door to me. She would take care of me while my mother was working her second job. My grandmother, Angela Dattilo, was born in the south of Italy in 1937 and began cooking for her siblings and family when she was six years old. She would walk, miles away to her relative’s farm, shoeless, to ask for ingredients. As my grandmother grows older, I try to record the recipes that she makes for our family. Why her food is so special to me is because she and the food she cooked for me was the childhood I want to remember. I grew depressed, seeing my parents fight and going through the motions of hating school and then coming home to a bowl of pasta, enough to serve two hungry adults. I finished every last bite, not realizing I wasn’t hungry but just eating my feelings. It wasn’t long until I gained weight, enough to be very apparent and my visits with my father became less frequent as I couldn’t handle the emotional and verbal abuse any longer. I ended my relationship with him in 2011. After erasing him from the family photo, his presence and words stuck with me and negatively affected me for years. I had become a person he would never recognize. As I strive to heal with the help of my mother, brother, and the rest of my family, I learn to appreciate food again, and what it means to be a family.
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