I have a lot of thoughts about camp, some of them relating to myself in some fashion and some of them relating to other people whose experiences I observed and heard about. Having spent the last few days in a remote location where I basically was cut off from all knowledge of how the world is doing (more on that later, perhaps), I thought it would be worthwhile to begin a possible series of posts about preteen camp with a post about what is perhaps an often-neglected subject when one is dealing with such experiences, and that is the food.

There are a lot of attitudes when it comes to dealing with children and food. This particular camp offered foods that may have been outside of the comfort zone of some of the campers, but I have always found the possibility of discovery to be something worthwhile, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that I am such a creature of habit. An appreciation of novelty is a good way to keep one’s familiar habits from becoming too stale. An appreciation of something new helps to balance out the appreciation for the familiar. For me, I must admit that one of the foods provided at camp was outside of my own comfort zone but I decided to try it and see if I enjoyed it, and to my pleasure, I did.

That food happened to be the tomato bisque that came along with dinner yesterday. What made the bisque enjoyable was that it tasted like marinara sauce, which I happen to enjoy, with a hint of cheese, and because it was warm. I have had previous tomato soups, like gazpacho, but they were cold and sour instead of warm and rich, and it is a pleasure to like a new thing, like a new flavor of soup, that one is not familiar with otherwise. The joy is that one has one more source of pleasure and enjoyment in this world. And that is something worth celebrating, whether that pleasure is a big one or a small one. If there were plenty of young people at the camp who explored new foods in the hope of finding new ones to like, here is hoping that they were rewarded as I was.