Food is ... a sensuous pleasure. Creative expression. A conveyance of tradition. So many things.

But lately I've been appreciating food at its most basic -- as the building blocks of human flesh. And of spirit.

This spring, my 8-month-old son is transitioning from his all-liquid diet -- how can this 23-pound bouncing bundle have formed from just breast milk and formula? -- to eating solid food. He's eating everything put in front of him.

On a visit to his grandparents in Vancouver, he gobbled up his pathi's -- grandma's -- traditional South Indian baby food: parapu saadam, or smooshy lentils and rice. This made his pathi BEAM. That dish is purposefully bland, but this baby also devoured the grown-ups' curried parsnips, even a carrot-squash soup everyone but me feared was too spicy for him.

At market at the Lonsdale Quay SeaBus terminal, I fed him, like coins into a slot machine, his first bites of several fresh fruits: Plum, mango, papaya, lychee, dragon fruit. Ka-ching!

On a separate road trip to Ohio, at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, he attacked tastes from our vegetable plates: Pinto beans, turnip greens, mashed potatoes, hash brown casserole, corn.

This made me beam, but it was bittersweet. We were headed to see the grandpa who hadn't eaten any food, nor had much to drink, in weeks.

My Dad, 69, was in a nursing home, after more than a month in hospital, after the rupture of an ulcer in his duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. He could ingest nothing, not even water, while the surgically repaired hole healed, a slow process that was protracted due to complications including infections. While we visited him, with my worried siblings, he was allowed only ice chips.

He was nourished intravenously by TPN, or total parenteral nutrition, a mix of proteins, fats, carbohydrates and nutrients that looks like a plastic bag of beige glue. You can be kept alive on it for weeks, even years.

Alas, another infection sent my Dad back to the hospital and kept him from eating for two more weeks. When he finally was able to eat, he would not. It was hard to chew and swallow, and very little appealed to him.

When I drove back to see him on the second weekend of April, he was off the IV and getting food, but besides cans of chocolate Ensure, he still wasn't swallowing much. The log on his door tracking his three daily meals measured his intake in "bites." He took just a tiny one of the slice of key lime pie -- once one of his favorite treats -- I'd brought from Columbus' North Market after he told me that the one thing that tasted good was fruit: peaches, pears, cherries.

He looked so frail. This man who once hung over his belt at 170 pounds, from his beer and rum-and-Cokes and steaks and butter and late-night raids on my Mom's boxed brownies, was wasting away.

Watching him pick at dinner Saturday night and barely touch lunch on Sunday made me more depressed. I tried to will him to have an appetite.

"It doesn't matter how it tastes," I said. "You have to eat."

I talked about his grandson, and told him how he had to be around to take him fishing.

I stayed, and made my mom stay, all day Sunday so I could see him through dinner. The plastic tray seemed to arrive, even to me, too soon after lunch.

It was the baked fish that he'd ordered, but before we lifted the lid, he grumbled that it would be inedible: "It's probably carp." He yelled at Mom for opening the cellophane wrap on the single slice of white bread. She, at the end of her rope, yelled back.

But before we knew it, Dad was tucking into his triangle of fish, which he pronounced, "Pretty good." Eating several bites of it. A bite of bread, even. Plus several bites of cottage cheese and diced pears.

It didn't amount to much for a normal person, but this was the most he'd eaten in two months. I thought he looked better. He even joked with my mom about being sorry for "carping."

I drove home the next morning still tense, but was thrilled a few days later that he had been eating enough to be released back to the nursing home.

He says the food there is quite good. It amazes him in the mornings how hungry he is.

It's amazing how great that sounds, even at a time when too much of the world is hungry -- for the building blocks of flesh and spirit -- in a tragic way.

For now, I'm going to look forward to the day when my dad can take my son fishing.

I'll be hoping that they catch some fish -- and then eat them, perhaps with sweet corn and tomatoes and a homemade gooseberry pie.