In our society, we’re taught to view food as either strictly fuel or – simply and sadly – as a villain. We’re taught to be suspicious of fat grams, carbs and sugar.

We’re taught that boneless, skinless chicken with steamed veggies makes a fine meal – every day. We’re taught that pasta is dangerous.

So I was excited when I came across the memoir Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food and Healing by seasoned journalist Paula Butturini. (I received a copy courtesy of the publisher.)

In Keeping the Feast, Paula celebrates food and its curative powers. She talks about food’s connection to companionship and meaningful conversation. She describes beautifully the art of preparing and sharing food with loved ones.

Food was a big deal in Paula’s Italian family. Every day, they ate together, surrounded by home-cooked wholesome foods.

In the memoir, Paula focuses on several tragic events and how food played a role in helping her family heal.

She recounts her husband’s nearly fatal shooting in Romania (he’s a journalist and was there on assignment to cover the uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu), his severe depression and her mother’s battles with the disorder.

After his body begins healing, John is stricken with severe depression. In hopes of helping to lift his depression, John and Paula return to Italy, where they’d initially fallen in love.

Paula uses the daily ritual of buying, preparing and eating meals together as a way to bring normalcy into their lives – one step, or meal, at a time.

Below, Paula talks about why she wanted to tell her story, what food means to her and how it contributed to their healing.

You can learn more about Paula on her website.

Q: Why did you want to tell your story?

A: When I first started contemplating telling our story, back in late 1995, I thought I wanted to write a detailed chronological description of what happened to my husband, John, principally so that his two older children, Peter and Anna, who were 14 and 8 at the time he was shot, would understand everything he had gone through.

Originally I was thinking of contributing a full chapter on the shooting and its aftermath to the Tagliabue family history, which John has always loved researching. It was I who decided to write it and not John because John himself was unconscious for much of the beginning of the story, and, like the children, needed to be told what he’d gone through too.

It was very painful to revisit the subject though, even though I started writing six years after he was shot. So after learning I was pregnant at age 45 for the first time in my life, I decided I’d put the project off and simply enjoy my pregnancy and the first year or so of the baby’s life.

I didn’t actually restart the project until our daughter, Julia, was about 10, and by that point John and I both wanted to make sure that the three children understood what all of us had gone through — not just the physical wounds from the bullet that hit him, but also the psychological ones, not simply what clinical depression did to their father, and to my mother, but to all of us.

By then, I wanted to try giving the children a basic road map through and out of depression should this illness ever hit them, to help them navigate their own lives and those of their children. I found I didn’t want them to suffer along in silence and ignorance as I had done when I was a child and my mother was suffering through four bouts of post-partum psychosis.

I hoped that our experience might help other families going through similar trials, and with US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, there’s a lot of potential for similar trials. Although John wasn’t in the military, he was shot during an armed conflict, and post-traumatic stress wreaks the same sort of havoc whether you’re wearing a military uniform or not.

Q: You’ve said that food is more than fuel, and that food is a metaphor to you. What does food mean to you?

A: Food means just about everything to me: at its most basic, of course, it means fuel, but it’s also a personal shorthand for an endless list of human responses: love, hunger, cravings, desire, health, illness, nourishment, medicine, tonics, secrets, survival, comfort, family, friends, grace, celebration — I could go on and on.

At its most fundamental, I think of food as the difference between survival or starvation, poverty or plenty, life or death. It can translate into love or hate, joy or sorrow, solitude or companionship, success or failure.

Food can be a tie that binds or a tie that chafes, or a tie that has the power to do both, depending on whom you’re eating with.

For me, at a particularly difficult time in my life, it represented love, hope, and sanity, a way to keep me from being terrorized by fears of the future, a way to keep myself and my husband going along, one step at a time, rather than panicking over where the future might bring us.

Eating, three meals a day, three meals together, around the same little table, helped keep us centered, together, going in the same direction, rather than in different ones.

Food also means memories to me too — largely happy memories of childhood, sitting around the same family tables, in the same family kitchens, eating the same family recipes — and if I eat a meal today prepared as my grandmother or mother did, the food helps keep all my family, even if dead, alive in my mind.

Q: How did food help you deal with difficult times, such as your husband’s shooting and severe depression?

A: When John was shot, and later, in the years when he was in the grip of post-traumatic stress and clinical depression, food helped in endless ways. As the doctors were trying to heal the 15-inch long gaping trench wound across his back — as deep and wide as my forearm, a wound that tunneled under his spine, from his right side clear across to his left side — food was at its most elemental: a provider of nutrients that would help his body regenerate new flesh.

It was also a real medicine, for in addition to all the high tech drugs he was getting to fight off the infection that was raging throughout his body, the doctors in Munich were trying to help foster healing by bathing him twice a day in a giant stainless-steel bathtub of warm water and chamomile syrup, and packing his wound with pounds of sterilized, refined white sugar. The sugar crystals would work by osmosis, drawing the liquid out of the bacteria lurking throughout his wound. Once the liquid was drawn out, the bacteria would die, eventually killing the infection which had been so close to killing him.

For my part, when John was hospitalized in Romania and later in Germany, directly after the shooting, it was food — lots of it — I needed to replace the calories I was burning off while worrying whether he’d make it.

Later, when his back was healed but he began suffering from clinical depression, food — the buying, preparing, cooking and eating of it three times a day — was the thing that kept me sane while he was so ill. It all kept me focused on the present, and away from terrifying thoughts of the future.

And the normality of eating together each day, was a way of reminding John and me of normal, happy childhood meals that we each ate with our respective families when we were young.

Sometimes, when nothing in life is going along in a ‘normal’ fashion, any reminder of normality, like eating a good meal together, is medicine in and of itself.

Q: How did food help your husband in lifting his depression (in addition to his therapy and medication)?

A: I don’t know that I’d say that food in and of itself helped lift John’s depression. But I would definitely say that food helped him get through a series of seemingly endless days and weeks and months of depression by keeping him engaged in something with at least a memory of pleasure while he was so desperately ill.

A very wise doctor in New York once told us that depression often came and went on some sort of cycle of its own, that it could be likened to a fever, and that when the fever peaked — those months when John was dangerously ill, suffering anxiety attacks, night terrors, and found himself generally in a state of psychic pain and darkness — the important thing was to just hang on, until that fever finally subsided.

When a person and the family he belongs to is in that situation, it’s absolutely critical to not worry about the future but to just get through the very difficult present.

Cooking did that for me, and on bad days, I didn’t think about a day at a time, but a meal at a time.

Once we’d finished breakfast, I would begin to prepare whatever we would eat for lunch. After lunch I’d begin to prepare what we’d have for dinner. And once we’d finished dinner, I could check one more day off the calendar, knowing that we’d gotten through another day, which was no mean feat in itself.

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Thanks so much, Paula, for your thoughtful responses! Stay tuned for part two tomorrow.

By the way, I also recently wrote about food’s healing powers. You can read it here.

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    Last reviewed: 15 Feb 2011