LISINSKI: Ratatouille: A Guide to Life

“This meal is life-changing.”

We’ve all said something like this before. Ours is a vernacular of hyperbole, and anything remotely above average skyrockets to a transcendent experience. I know I’m guilty of this too.

But can a meal deeply affect the life of your average college student?

Last weekend, I enjoyed a dinner and a lunch out at some of Paris’s more highly touted restaurants. Both meals were a substantial improvement on my previous record spending, which was a 17-euro prix fixe where I learned firsthand that “saucisson” is not a flavorful French country sausage but instead a boiled hot dog.

Could I realistically fit two upscale dining experiences into my strictly calculated budget? Perhaps Hemingway’s Paris classic “The Sun Also Rises” captures the truth best: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Strange as it may sound to those who crave something different from their travels, I genuinely believe two excellent and distinctly French meals helped steer my abroad mindset back on track.

Some trace their family roots back through business, through the wrinkles in leather their ancestors produced for decades; some families find lineage in military insignias shared by fathers and sons alike. My family, as far back as I’m familiar, connects through food.

My sister studied French cuisine. Her husband knows the ins and outs of the Parisian restaurant scene. Head southeast a couple hundred kilometers, and you can find any of a number of pasta dishes my mostly Italian mother and grandmother and aunts replicate regularly.

The cuisine of this area is one to which I have a deep personal and familial connection, so experiencing it at the source — however traditional or revised the interpretation might be once I got there — was genuinely a main objective of mine.

“Good” food was something I deified, and “authenticity” was its highest ideal. And let me tell you: foie gras with the texture of butter, crispy suckling pig over a bed of lentils, beef entrecôte with béchamel sauce, Grand Marnier crêpes and more wine than I’m comfortable discussing in print were well beyond “good” and “authentic.”

So now, I’m deeply satisfied to have finally fulfilled one of my expectations for my time abroad. And while I may have a personal attachment to the joys of eating, I do not view it as pure hedonistic indulgence.

Like all great topics, Disney can explain it best. One of my favorite bits in the Pixar repertoire is a short scene from Ratatouille in which Remy, our heroic Parisian rat with Michelin-star-crossed aspirations, describes the process of discovering new flavors.

As he alternates between what I can only assume to be cheese and fruit — hey, it’s an animated movie, so I can’t be sure — swirls of colors dance across the screen to different classical scores before erupting into fireworks.

It’s an adorable setup, and I think it does a surprisingly good job of portraying the sense of taste in the language of sight and sound (I believe a kind of “synesthesia,” for any of my former English teachers reading this).

Food has that kind of power for me as something beyond sustenance: it is a creative outlet, just as is writing. Distinct elements already exist, and as Remy excitedly exclaims later in the film, there are an infinite number of possibilities for their combinations and uses.

Now, food has given me a kick-start.

As you might remember from previous columns, I was feeling out of place and unconnected to Paris, an unwelcome graft that just wouldn’t take. Indulging in excellent French meals — the kinds that Parisians themselves dream about and write about and talk about — made me feel reconnected to that creative energy bubbling just beneath the surface of the city, and it did so in a way that literature and visual art and music have failed to do so in past weeks.

So for those of you in Boston, get out there and eat. We all must crawl from the sheltering primordial soup of our dining halls one day.

Find a restaurant distinctly Bostonian. Go have an oyster or a piece of fried fish almost anywhere down by the water. Or, find a restaurant that taps into that humming energy and does something special with it (my unsolicited advice: Lone Star Taco Bar deep into Allston).

Your wallets may regret it, but your hearts will not, and your stomachs certainly will not.