Childhood hunger haunts people. It haunts people badly, and like a lot of other childhood traumas, it shapes the person’s whole life. In my limited experience, people who grow up hungry have one of two reactions in life:
1. They do live off of pizza, take-out and convenience foods, because their relationship with food and how they get it is so irreparably broken. They eat what they can get when they can get it, and there’s a desperate element to that consumption, because they cannot get past the ingrained thought that they do not know when they will next have access to food.
2. They distance themselves from their childhood hunger by tightly controlling what they eat and drink, by developing an appreciation for food beyond what they learned growing up. Their lives still, in many ways, fixate on food, but in a different way from the first group.
Clint, for me, has a lot of control issues. A lot of what he does boils down to control, what he maintains and what he’s able to give up. It’s the control he did not have as a child, that he struggled to acquire, that puts him in the second group for me. I do write him as being the survivor of childhood physical and emotional abuse. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s body autonomy, it’s control over what he eats that scrapes against an eating disorder on occasion. The only way to have (close to) complete control over what you eat is to cook it yourself.
So it’s a couple of things:
-I do think that Clint had a good mother, who did the best she could to feed her children, as best she could with what limited funds she had. What food he had was probably as good as she could manage, but there wasn’t much of it, and it wasn’t reliable. But Clint does know what solid, home cooking was like, and he does equate it with what safety he had as a child.
-Cooking is a marketable skill, both in the job market and in personal life. Someone who can cook has something to offer a group of people. Food attracts people. You have worth if you can feed people. It’s necessary, but more than that, sharing a meal is something that connects people.
-Cooking is a skill that rewards simple stubborn practice. Sure, you can read a recipe, and follow it, and get something good. But cooking works pretty well if you learn a few basics and then just do what you like. You don’t have to have a lot of reference material. You don’t need a formal education. You can learn, little by little, here and there. It’s an oral tradition in so many communities. It’s done by eye and by taste, there’s no exact measurements, and no punishment is handed down if you add peppers instead of carrots or skip the caraway seeds if you don’t like them. It might not taste as good. Or it might taste better. Or it might lead you to something else entirely. Cooking rewards the brave, and the stubborn, and it can be made YOURS so easily. A handful of secret ingredients and it’s now YOUR special recipe for spaghetti sauce.
I like to make a lot of jokes about Clint living off of junk food, and the Avengers having bad eating habits, and I think, they do on some level. But you don’t maintain that kind of musculature and that kind of strength and physical ability by living off of fast food. So I write Clint as someone who likes to cook, and more than that, who likes to cook for these people. It’s his place, in this weird little family dynamic. It’s what he can offer them, now that he doesn’t have to worry about money, about hunger, about being forced out.
I’ve also written Clint as having this kind of relationship with food. To date, the one fic I really focussed on it in is Lucky Pennies, and it’s something Coulson observes in the way Clint eats, but also, later, you’ve got Clint trying to feed Coulson, as this kind of apology/nurturing thing where he knows that Coulson’s mad at him and that him being there is probably making the situation worse, but his need to feed Coulson overrides it, and Coulson recognises that and lets Clint do it. I’ve also got a pretty intense thing to do with food between Clint and Bruce in my marvel bang fic, which will be getting published later this year, where Bruce and Clint talk to each other about how spending time in abusive households and care has affected their relationship with food.
knitting in the dark 