The Lost Sublimity of Food (1)

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Today, our food is mediated and changed as it travels the line of production, from field to table, or even seed to table, as seeds themselves are mediated and changed by genetic engineering. The more developed our society is, the more separate we are from the natural world, cut off from the source of our nourishment, the earth herself. From the perspective of the early 21st century, it is hard not to conclude that we have lost something important in our alienation from both nature and natural food. As we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with the nature within us. We forget who we really are and what we really need. Having never dug a line of new potatoes from the ground, nor plucked a cob of corn, fresh from the field, we do not know the sensuous delight of such food. Years of eating processed meals, mass-produced vegetables and insipid fruit, have bored and dulled our tastebuds to indifference. We don’t care much anymore for apples, or cucumbers, or tomatoes, because they all taste of nothing.


Blessings on your table!

The Good Food Angel

A Mother and Three Angels....

In all our lives as Little People, it is the Big People, our parents, who are the authors of our experience, shaping the mould that makes us who we are. When our parents fall short in making our experience a good one, others sometimes offset the damage, so that it is not critical, and we can at least go limping into adulthood, where we try and figure out the missing bits of the jigsaw, learn how to be parents to our wounded child-selves and perhaps, if we are lucky, heal ourselves. Some people's experiences as children are so damaging that they have lifelong 'issues' with food. For some, food ultimately kills them. A sort of suicide by food, or lack of it.

Others are lucky to have been brought up in homes ringing with the sound feet answering Mom's cry of Dinner's ready! Of voices resounding from the dining table. Where family meals are cooked and eaten every evening and Sunday roasts are extravagant and ritualistic. Homes where mothers bake proverbial, delicious, nurturing apple pies. In my experience, these are the most rooted, secure people I come across in life, most likely to build constructive lives and develop healthy relationships.

My experience is somewhere in the middle, not all good, not all bad. The four people who shaped my food experience were a mother and three angels…….

E.----
My mother. Before Dad's death, we were almost the apple-pie family. Home was my mother's life and her ambition. Home-making was the destiny her whole life had prepared her for. After Dad's death it all fell apart. She was forced to be an earner, in an era when only husbands earned and women cooked. When she began to earn, the cooking became scare. Our home had no centre because it had no hearth, no kitchen where someone cooked food for us to eat together. Thus, what I ultimately learned from her about food, I learned through absence-----how important it is to be nourished properly as a child, how children long for routine and reliability at home, how I lacked something important that other children had, something anchoring and sheltering. She was the catalyst to my determination to do things differently for my own child and her short-comings fuelled my wish to speak, clearly and unequivocally about the many children in our society today, who are not being nourished, or nurtured as they need to be.

K.----
My grandmother, who rescued me from the deprivations of my mother's house many times and gave me a taste for honest, homecooked food and her kitchen, with the Aga fires always lit, was a place of warmth and refuge for me. She taught me how good it is to know there will always be dinner on the table and how nice a hot meal can be on a winter's day.

A.-----
The dark-haired Demeter of Slievenamon. In the wonderland of her farm-garden, she taught me the pagan pleasures of digging food from the earth and plucking it from the vines, the trees and the bushes. There I grew to know the seasons of the earth, to love the land and to delight in the Neolithic power of cultivating all that you need.

E.----
A gracious and generous host, representative of an old world that has now passed. She taught me the sociability and life-affirming possibilities of food shared with our fellow-travellers on the rocky road of life, the ritual nature of feasting and how meals are somehow connected to Time and Mortality.


Who are the people who shaped your experience of food and how did it affect your life? I'd love to know. Drop me a line if you wish....


Blessings on your table!

The Good Food Angel



www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Zen and the Art of Eating

If you are hungry,
Eat now!
Because further down the road
There is no food.
-------Songs of Kabir

I love that quote from Kabir, because even though its true meaning is metaphorical and refers to the spiritual journey of life, it also reminds me that eating is one of life's sensual pleasures, to be enjoyed only during the short time we are alive---that little window 'twixt womb and tomb', where we have a chance to be radiant and awake to all the wonders of this extraordinary world. The dead cannot eat. And, as we are physical beings, existing in time and space, the richness of life comes to us in all sorts of ways, including the physical realm, including through fresh, natural food and the ceremonies of food---now what could be more wondrous than a peach, sun-ripened and plucked from the tree. Perhaps this is the zen of food.

Blessings on your table!

The Good Food Angel.


www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Food Is Not Just About Food....

In recent years, as an eater with a life-long preference for fresh, natural food, as an environmentalist, as a writer, as a feminist, as a full-time mother and later as a working mother, attempting to juggle career and family responsibilities, I found myself, in the mundane act of trying to put dinner on the table every day, at the centrifugal point of all the forces----economic, environmental, societal and cultural-----that were coming to bear on the food I ate.

But, in the public discourse around food, of which there has been much in recent years, there has been a failure to place food in this wider context. I hope that my blog will make some contribution towards a wider and deeper public debate about food, and that others will join me in this debate.......let the journey begin!

Blessings on your table!

The Good Food Angel

Food Matters

Food is elemental to all living creatures. Eat, is the first thing we seek to do after we take our first breath of earthly air. And eat we shall do, on all the days of our lives thereafter. To eat, is to have a relationship with our planet, the source of our food. It is also to have a relationship with each other, when we cook for each other and eat together.

The food we eat and how we eat it, is a manifestation of both these relationships---good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, caring or destructive. When we change what and how we eat, we alter the template of our lives. We rewrite our relationships with each other and our relationship with the earth we live on, at a fundamental level.

This is exactly what is underway right now----serious, insidious changes to our food and the way we eat it, with far-reaching, wide-ranging implications for the environment, for our society and for ourselves.

Blessings on your table!

The Good Food Angel