This week, Sara Pepitone (any relation to Joe Pepitone, the one-time New York Yankee?) writes about a restaurant she and a friend-turned-boyfriend found and enjoyed together.  They break up and the place remains a melancholy reminder of their love and friendship.  But it’s more.  She seems to be saying that eating out together was among the most important things they shared.  Of course, it’s a short piece (very nicely written) and she is focusing on a particular angle of a relationship that must have had more going for it.  But it is odd, in a way, that the food is so important.  An earlier boyfriend, she reports, once said to her:

"You only love me when we’re eating…"

    She denies it, but the story makes it seem true.  Does she really love only when she’s eating?

    There are two ways to go here: Taoist or Confucian.  I think I will take the former, because the latter is a bit too obvious (and we have been doing a lot of Confucian love advice lately…)

    But before we get to that, I can’t help saying how depressing the New York dating scene appears.  When she breaks up with the main boyfriend of this story, Pepitone writes:

I knew we couldn’t really satisfy each other and that, as he said,
something just wasn’t right, though those words, him saying that, made
me crazy for weeks, months. I didn’t understand how long the hysteria
attached to that data would linger.

    All the effort to find common interests, things to talk about, fashion affinities, and, in the end, some vague sense of lack of satisfaction or "something just wasn’t right" ends the whole relationship, which in this case had been a long-term friendship as well.  It’s impossible.  There is always "something" that is not right.   How can they expect that "everything" will ever be right?  If that is the standard, then every dating run is doomed to failure.

     But back to the Taoism: there is a way that the Tao Te Ching can understand why food is linked to love.  Of course, the modesty, even asceticism, of philosophical Taoism (not to be confused with the more sensual religious Taoism), would suggest that fancy food, or gluttony, or food snobbery takes us away from Way, diverts us from what is important in life.

The five colors blind eyes.
The five tones deafen ears.
The five tastes blur tongues.
Fast horses and breathtaking hunts make minds
  wild and crazy.
Things rare and expensive make people lose their way.

That’s why the sage tends to the belly, not the eye,
always ignores that and chooses this. (12)      

     This passage clearly states that over-indulgence is bad (i.e. avoid the affectation of the "five tastes").  But it also gives us the idea that there is something fundamental, elemental, about food.  The ephemeral and less meaningful things, in the last couplet, are those associated with "the eye."  It is simply surface appearance: unimportant.  The other, more substantial, side of life is related to "the belly."  We have to eat, and we derive a certain satisfaction from eating, and if we can find contentment with simple food, we are better off.

    This idea pops up elsewhere in the text. In passage 80, a description of a utopia of sorts, it tells us:

Let people knot ropes for notation again,
and never need anything more,

let them find pleasure in their food
and beauty in their clothes,
peace in their homes
and joy in their ancestral ways.

    Food is a central part to that simple, easier, more humane way of life.

    So, it is easy to see how sharing a meal with someone – especially if the moment also includes an open exchange of feelings, a free-flowing intermingling of selves – can be a memorable part of a loving relationship. Maybe she did not love him "only" when they were eating, but when they were eating it was easier to feel and see that love they shared.