Food and love seemed to be connected so much in our house growing up.
My mother was an excellent cook and it was the one thing that we were privy to that put a smile on our Dad's face.
He was the king and he ruled his little fiefdom with a stern look and silent direction most of the time; other times he was like mount Vesuvius and he spoke in tongues.
So when I look back and see him smile or laugh, he is either being fed by my mother, me, aunt, friend, or eating out in a restaurant. So food definitely is tied up with happy memories.
Cleaning your plate was a big deal and being grateful and thankful for our bounty. Everything was celebrated with food and drink, marriage, birth, and death...death being the big one as it went on and on drowning sorrows in food and drink.
All of the above was controlled by and dictated to us from adults and it was I believe how they showed love in those days, we just did what we were told.
My brother was a secret eater, he ate everything that was being kept for special occasions. Never occurred to him that if he ate it, the rest of us did without. One Christmas he managed to open all the boxes of biscuits with a blade, eat the bottom layers and reseal the boxes, of course we discovered when they were opened what he had done. We thought how daring and clever he was, my mother thought different.
His Easter trick one year was the best...we must of had about thirty Chocolate Easter Eggs on display that each of us had received as presents or bought ourselves and being the tradition we had to wait for Easter Sunday before we could touch them.
What a surprise when the day finally came and we discovered that our brother had secretly with a blade again got into the back of each Easter Egg and removed it's back along with the contents and resealed the boxes with the front turned outward so no one ever noticed until the day! Yep, that was a real master stroke!
Why eat in secret? why smoke, why drink, why do drug, why have sex....????
Is it not about entering the world of the adult and testing boundaries, experimenting, making mistake, risk-taking and taking conrol...becoming stuck and not moving on.
I have yet to meet a perfect human being.