Food is bliss. No, I correct myself — eating is bliss. I love to eat. Spanish tapas, dim sum, pad thai, chow mein, pastries, and the best of all, Southern Italian pasta.

If you’ve ever had fresh pasta, you know what I mean. The kind that has been kneaded, rolled out, cut, and cooked a split second before it’s tossed into freshly cut tomatoes, not the ones that have been sitting in a box for the past year in your cupboard.

A friend of mine recently articulated the exact emotion I was trying to express: “We don’t eat because it’s necessary; we eat to enjoy it.”

Okay, yes, we eat because we require nourishment — pasta contains carbohydrates which are converted to energy to fuel the body, but the question is rarely “Are we going to eat dinner?” It’s “What should we have for dinner?”

We eat for the passion, for the sake of loving it. The purpose of eating is not just to eat, but to taste each experience fully and with passion. And now that is how I see life.

Life should not just be lived for the sake of necessity. It’s a cliché, I know, but it should be lived for enjoyment. Life should be lived for the utterly spectacular feat of living. Ignoring that brilliant, blinding world of possibility that the universe grants us ought to be criminal. Life without satisfaction is a life not worth living.

With that being said, I am no culinary master. I can’t sautée to save my life. Cookie dough is best served in Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream for me, and I could build a castle of takeout menus.  I can give you the names of the quickest and the best Chinese takeout within a five mile radius of my home, can name the “slight citrus undertones” in a chicken salad, and can arrange my meal artfully for Instagram. But food plays an integral part of my life. Not just as nourishment or for the experience, but food has always activated a part of my brain I too soon forget. Nostalgia.

The smell of freshly cooked macarons harkens memories of a Parisian café, and chow mein brings me back to late nights spent with a friend, desperately trying to finish a project. Chocolate chip cookies bring me to Christmas nights, the only time my dad bakes those gooey bites of deliciousness.

We forget those memories too quickly, and it’s amazing how one bite or even a wafting smell can transport us back to a place we wouldn’t have remembered if not for a single taste.

I guess you could say that you should live your life the way you eat. Live for the passion, the taste, and don’t forget to stop and remember the happy memories you’ve made.