In our family, we say love with food. We also say anger with food. We say sadness with food. We say everything with food. "The job interview didn't go well? Here, have some cake." "You're getting married!? Tabouli for everybody!"

We take food wherever we go. I've carried barbecue with me on visits home. More than once, my mother has arrived at my house with a leg of lamb in her suitcase.

Mom is incapable of traveling without taking with her your average farm stand's worth of various foodstuffs. She and my uncle, her brother, had arrived at the family gathering in Niagara Falls, New York, from their homes in Michigan, a roughly five-hour drive, with enough provisions to feed the Lewis and Clark expedition. They came with, let's see, a huge bag of pistachios, some peaches, several bags of pizza-like bread seasoned with pungent zataar (a thyme, ground sesame, and sumac mixture), a goodly amount of Bing cherries, a few small cucumbers, mixed nuts, leftovers from a restaurant they stopped at along the way (yes, they stopped to eat), a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting, and the raspberries.

For me to say no to the proffered raspberries wasn't simply to decline a nice offer. It was to reject a gift.

Even though they were in plastic containers, I had a sinking feeling that things might not go well with these raspberries. I was too rushed to tape them shut to make sure that they wouldn't spill en route back home. I was also concerned that every second I wasn't zooming toward the airport was a second that jeopardized my catching the flight.