How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pasta

Life lessons from an Italian kitchen

One afternoon, seven months after moving to Northern Italy, I opened my refrigerator and noticed that it contained nine different types of cheese. My prior-year self would have been alarmed. I just laughed. My partner agreed that it seemed like a lot, but argued I shouldn’t count the parmigiano or the mozzarella, because in Italy those are essentials. Like salt and pepper.

I was the one who, the previous year, had suggested fleeing California for my partner’s hometown near Venice. For a number of reasons, it seemed like the right move. Still, I had understandable concerns about uprooting our lives and shifting them to a different continent. Abandoning my friends, family, and a stable career in law were the most prominent worries.

But surprisingly high on my list was the fear that I would get fat.

When I lived in California, I avoided pasta at all costs. The only pasta-like substance that I permitted myself to buy was penne made from chickpea flour, which had to be drowned in sauce in order to have any flavor and would dissolve into a gooey mush if I waited too long after cooking to eat it. Cheese was, likewise, considered an enemy. Occasionally I would indulge myself in a thin layer of chèvre spread atop gluten-free toast, but that was it.

Were I allergic to gluten or dairy, these restrictions would have been eminently reasonable. But I am neither of those things. My body tolerates all foods, when I let it. Yet instead of eating what I liked, I ate the things that I thought I was supposed to eat. It wasn’t about ideals; I don’t have the moral fortitude to be vegan. It was all about fear.

I initially lost my trust in food for legitimate reasons. Growing up in America in the nineties, I lived on Gushers, Capri Sun, packaged ramen and horrifyingly plasticine public school lunches. In high school I routinely ate nothing until after school when my friends and I would hit the Taco Bell drive-through and gorge ourselves on 99 cent tacos. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and got a part-time job at a grocery store (recession wooo!) that I finally started paying attention to things like ingredients and nutrition facts. I discovered, to my horror, that the foods I had grown up eating — processed, artificial, and mass-produced — were also the most likely to kill me. I had been naive. Nutrition required vigilance.

This realization corresponded with time when my life was tightening up in a lot of ways. I decided to apply to law school, a decision which catapulted me into a highly restrictive world where I felt I was constantly under evaluation. I learned to stop thinking about what I liked and focus instead on the subjective goal of getting ahead. Regimens for eating, fitness, socializing and other “life things” were created to fit around the larger goal of advancing my career.

Then in my second year of law school, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She waited months to tell me because she didn’t want to upset me before my finals. That was how much my success meant to her. She assured me not to worry, and not to let her health distract me from my work.

I kept my grades up. I graduated, passed the bar exam, and began working at a prestigious law firm. As my mother’s condition worsened, I reinforced the barriers that I used to compartmentalize my feelings. I ate plain quinoa and went to the gym every morning.

After her death, I wrote a eulogy. I entertained my guests at her memorial service. I sorted through her belongings. I continued working at the law firm, uninterrupted. I planned trips. I planned meals. I started working with a personal trainer.

Structure had to be maintained at all costs. I became fixated on doing everything just right. It was the only way to avoid falling into the enormous internal void had been created by the death of the most important person in my life.

I ate the same salad nearly every day for a year.

When Americans think of Italian food, our minds immediately go to pizza, pasta, and gelato. We assume that these are main staples of the Italian diet. And we are absolutely correct.

When my partner and I first moved to Italy, I was in language classes five days a week, so he did most of the cooking. (He still does.) He started making pasta all’amatriciana — spaghetti with a simple sauce consisting of shallot, tomato, copious amounts of olive oil and a massive hunk of pancetta — the fattiest part of the pig. It terrified me. But it was delicious. I ate everything that was put in front of me. What else could I do?

We soon discovered a restaurant down the street from us that made some of the best pizza I’d ever had. Italians do not share pizza: a fact I had learned on my first dinner date with my partner. So there I sat, staring down an entire frisbee-sized margherita pie with crust like a cloud, covered in sweet, light fior di latte that was perfectly balanced with fresh tomato sauce and basil.

What was I to do?

Even salads offered no sanctuary. In Italy, a salad is dressed in three steps. First, a generous soaking of olive oil, followed with salt and pepper. Then you mix everything. Only at the very end can you add a dash of balsamic if you so choose, but this is optional and often frowned upon. At a restaurant I once watched a man at an adjacent table hold a bottle of oil upside down over his salad for a solid five seconds before he decided it was thoroughly coated. My partner and I would spar constantly over how much oil to use when dressing salads at home. He eventually prevailed because, once again, he had deliciousness on his side.

And when four o’clock on Saturday rolled around, I lined up at a local gelateria and ordered myself a cone with two flavors, like everyone else.

Friends, I ate it all. Internally I cringed — waiting for the carbs, fat and dairy to catch up with me and inflate my body to twice its previous size.

As it turns out, cheese is not my enemy. Neither is pasta nor olive oil. I have embraced all the Italian staples that used to scare me, and eschewed my pointless self-imposed restrictions. Instead I happily employ an eat-when-hungry, stop-when-not approach. Eating is once again a joy rather than a regimen.

Food is not the only thing I’ve had to loosen up about. Being plopped into a new country where I had little idea what was going on, and couldn’t communicate with anyone beyond ciao and grazie, forced me to let go of many things. I can no longer do everything right. I must, instead, do many things wrong, and appreciate the grace and patience of those around me when I do. It is a humbling experience that has reminded me of the importance of kindness. Every time I mess up and someone is nice to me anyway, I think of my mother. With her in mind, I have started to be more kind to myself.

And I did not get fat. But, more importantly, I no longer care if I do.

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