Woodstock Writers Festival: Paula Butturini -- Healing through Food

"If you don't stop walking like Frankenstein, I'm going to punch you," Paula Butturini recalled screaming at her husband toward the end of his recuperation from a bullet wound. They were in Rome. Butturini added that nobody noticed, at which the audience laughed, at her slightly veiled comment about the volume at which Italians speak.

Her husband, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, was reporting from Romania at the time that the country was in the process of overthrowing its communist regime, when a bullet almost cost him his life. At the time when she made her angry statement, he was still walking with a brace, but his progress in healing had seemed to come to a halt and he had become immersed in depression. "The accident was a defining moment and things start to turn after that," Butturini recalled, adding, "Sometimes anger can be a virtue."

Butturini's new book, Keeping the Feast has just come out. In fact just an hour ago from this time as I sit here composing this posting, the mailman handed me a copy of it. I heard Butturini speak on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival. I was a little tempted to delay writing about her until I read the book. But at 260 pages it looks like a quick dash and interesting -- read. I'll post again after I finished it.

Butturini's book is subtitled, "One couple's story of love food and healing in Italy." She and Tagliabue met in Rome in 1985, married four years later, just a month before he was shot. Subsequently he suffered post traumatic stress and fell into a severe depression. Butturini was no stranger to this latter phenomenon; her mother had suffered from it when the author was a child and she was not going to tolerate her husband putting her through the experienced a second time.

Butturini did more than just demand that her husband not give into depression. As part of his therapy, while living in Rome she established some simple rituals of daily life, shopping for foods in Rome's outdoor market and preparing delicious meals which unlike so many couples and families they sat down and shared. Too many people use food as consolation -- and pay for it on the scales. Butturini used food for healing. It worked.