Portion control

Reflections on fate and food

On my way to work last year, a careless driver took a sudden left turn into a gas station, forever committing our life-paths to an unavoidable collision course.

The phrase “came out of nowhere” meant nothing to me until that exact moment, when I saw the side of the truck materialize in an instant, as if from thin air. Before I could even hit the brakes, my car was stopped in its tracks, and the airbags jumped out against my body.

Waiting for the tow truck, I got into a conversation with the other driver, a businessman of Nigerian origin. When he told me that he was a native speaker of Swahili, I asked him to teach me a word from that language.

The word I chose that day was ‘luck’, that having been the driving force behind our encounter, and he translated it as bahati. Later I would learn that this word was originally a Persian one, which was itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European root behg, meaning ‘to divide or distribute’.

This shift in meaning is an intuitive one. The products of fate, the random happenings of the world, are conceived to be allotted to each person, who receives from this cosmic storehouse their own share. In English, this same metaphor gives use the expression: a person’s ‘lot in life’.