The Hungry Child

Meals are a child’s security and when they are not provided, or when there is doubt as to whether they will be provided from day to day, a child’s sense of safety and of being cared for, are badly shaken. It must be an in-built evolutionary trait that we are so in need of being fed regularly by our parents. I knew, at a very early age, how important regular home-cooked meals were, because I missed them when my busy mother didn’t provide them. I felt the difference when I went to stay with my grandmother and had the wholesome pleasure of her beautiful home-cooking and the certainty that meals would always be provided every day, around the same time. Once, I was so miserable back at home, on a diet of fish fingers, Angel Delight, Jaffa Cakes and packet oxtail soup, that I begged my mother to let me live with my grandmother permanently. When asked why, I said ‘because she cooks proper meals every day!’ There were plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t have wanted to live with my grandmother. She was very loving, but was stricter than my mother and I was terrified of my grandfather, who hated children, only ever addressed me as ‘child’ and was quite a tyrant, yelling out like Father Jack if I didn’t tip-toe around, as he sat in his special chair, moodily smoking his pipe. But the yearning for the certainty of ‘proper food’ three times a day, overwhelmed all my other misgivings, even my terrifying grandfather. My mother dismissed my request as being just another silly whim, continued with her haphazard culinary provision and a couple of years later packed me off to boarding school, where I spent six even hungrier years. It was a private, exclusive boarding school where we received the best academic education. But, being privileged in other ways never makes up for the primal deprivations of being cold or hungry as a child. I have spoken to many people since, who like me, were sent to boarding schools in the days when the food was universally awful, and they all feel as I do. Many ex-pupils of boarding schools belong to the most powerful and influential cohort of society today. They are successful in politics, business and the professions. They have had every privilege in life, but if you enquire about their schooldays, they will always talk about the dreadful food and the interminable longing for home-cooking. That yearning never leaves them and none of the other privileges of class, education, or money, ever compensate for not getting good, home-cooked food when they were young.

Those of us hungry at boarding school, the well-to-do hungry, were unusual when I was growing up. Mostly, children ate quite well and only the truly poor, who could not afford enough food, suffered nutritionally. It was an era when much food was locally produced and genuinely farm-fresh, from bread, to milk, to fruit and vegetables. The weekly 'big shop' hadn't yet become an institution and people bought food more frequently in the small shops of their towns and villages. Even in urban estates, fresh foods were delivered daily, or a couple of times a week, by local bakers, green-grocers and milkmen. It was the era of stay-at-home mothers, when there was time for home-cooking and most people took it for granted.

Roll on to the present day, however and my childhood experience is being mirrored right across society. Most children today, from all backgrounds, are experiencing the ever-present ache of neglect that comes with a yearning for ‘proper food’. What was unusual in my day, is now the norm. And when children today are not actually hungry, many of them are eating a diet of consistently unhealthy, high-fat, highly-processed foods.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The Politics of Home-Cooking(!)

Across the Western world, in the post-Reagan/Thatcher era, public infrastructure has been deliberately run down, as neo-liberal economics insinuated itself into governance. Health services, schools, water supplies, roads have all deteriorated, failed, cracked or collapsed as a result. From the dead victims of Hurricane Katrina, to the dead victims of a scandalous Irish health service, populations across the Western world are suffering the consequences of pervasive public squalor.

Sooner or later, when you run down an infrastructure, it cracks. You can get a way with it for a while, perhaps even a generation, but then something happens and everything falls apart. The centre cannot hold. This is the public squalor which we have allowed to creep up on us, on our watch. We don't yet realise it and we haven't yet coined the phrases to describe this phenomenon, but we are now at the beginning phase of the running down of our social and familial infrastructure in the very same way that our public infrastructure was run down in recent years. The end result of running down infrastructure is squalor, in this case, social and familial squalor. If we think there will not be repercussions from what I call domestic squalor, as far-reaching in their own sphere, as the catastrophes of public squalor, we are either very foolish, or very blinded by the short-term lure of our little grab for private opulence, regardless of the consequences.

If we are interested in what those consequences might be, we can find some clues in the World Health Organisation study (see previous posts). Not surprisingly, it found that the effect of hunger on the children was deep and far-reaching. Those children who were not being properly fed, reported psychological and emotional, as well as physical problems. When they did get to eat they were, in the main, eating processed food, with little nutritional value and were unlikely to eat fresh fruit and vegetables on a regular basis. One of the saddest findings of the study was the large proportion of the children in food poverty, who said they wished they had a different life and did not feel happy.


Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Affluenza

Once, hungry children suffered the poverty of there not being enough money for food---the poverty of (literal) poverty. Now, they suffer the poverty of affluence, that new 21st century disease which Oliver James pithily termed 'Affluenza'. The affluence of this century seems to be a more toxic evolution of the last century's affluence, castigated by economist John Kenneth Galbraith as 'private opulence and public squalor'---- his thesis being that the more private wealth people accumulated, the more public services and infrastructure were run down. Now, as well as private opulence and public squalor, which we most certainly have, right across the developed world, we also have domestic squalor. During this present phase, everything that falls within the realm of domesticity seems to be under attack----personal relationships, the family, caring for children and community. These aspects of society are all currently suffering the same fate as public services and infrastructure have already suffered. Now, while we continue to accumulate private opulence through our consumer lifestyle, it is at the cost of our familial, cultural and societal infrastructure. This paradoxical bind we find ourselves in begs the obvious question---- what is the purpose of affluence if we must sacrifice our most basic needs to chase it? The one bright hope is that as our economies contract and our consumer profligacy is curbed, we perhaps might lessen our propensity for domestic squalor.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Food Poverty Amongst the Affluent Classes

In the World Health Organisation study referred to in my last post, 'food poverty' was defined as existing where children ‘sometimes, always, or often’ went to bed, or to school, hungry because there was not enough food at home. Either there was no food in the house, or it wasn’t edible because nobody in the house had used it to cook a meal. Parents were letting their children go hungry because they did not have the time, nor the energy, nor the will, nor the organisational know-how, to provide proper regular meals for their family.

It was found that children from both private and state schools suffered food poverty. Far from being a phenomenon of the disadvantaged, or uneducated classes, in some cases, the rate actually rose slightly amongst the wealthier classes. Following hot on the heels of the WHO study, a British study carried out by the reputable Institute of Child Health backed up the findings, showing that the children of middle class families, where both parents worked long hours outside the home, were most likely to suffer obesity and diabetes. They found a direct correlation between the hours worked by mothers and the risk of their children being obese.



Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

Crisis in the Making

I recently came across a shocking study that should give us pause for thought on our attitudes to food. The reputable and comprehensive study was carried out by the World Health Organisation Collaborative Research program and published in 2007. It took place in 35 countries across Europe, the USA and Canada. It is sadly ironic, that in this area of the globe which we call the ‘first world’, the study found that food poverty amongst children is widespread and is not linked to financial poverty. Here are some of the countries who scored shocking results:

In Britain, one of the world's oldest and richest economies, with its consolidated inter-generational wealth, going right back to the days of empire, the rate of food poverty among children in the year 2007 was 15%.

Ireland, while ranked the second richest country in the world, bloated on the fast, brash, arriviste wealth of its Tiger-economy-years, had 16% of children in food poverty.

The USA was even worse----despite the conspicuous wealth and bravado of its national narrative, for almost a quarter of its children, the American dream is a hollow one----an alarming 22% were hungry.

There is something quite askew in our culture when our richest nations cannot organise their societies in a manner in which their children are not hungry. In the coming weeks, I shall be exploring the reasons behind these remarkable findings.


Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Winter Solstice

Photo: Courtesy Office Public Works Ireland.


At this time of year, like many people, perhaps because of some evolutionary memory that we all have, I love to spend time cooking and baking and doing all the special things that people of all religions and none still partake in, at the darkest time of year---tending to home and hearth and, in the spirit of Hera, keeping the home fires burning. Feasting together, from pagan times onwards, has been how we humans have warded off cold, uncertainty, feelings of lack, and the precariousness of our existence in the great cosmos.

Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and the longest night, when our pagan ancestors celebrated the turning towards spring and lengthening of days that begins tomorrow. It is the day when our earth, hanging amidst the infinite lonely galaxies, swings upon its axis and turns towards light and hope, and our sun smiles back and graces us once more, for another cosmic cycle.

Five thousand years ago, the solstice sun's sacred climb to the sky was watched from Newgrange in Ireland (an ancient architectural wonder, which predates the pyramids and is still standing and functional) by humans who did not have our distractions and separations from the fundamentals of existence. On this day of days, deep in the inner chamber at Newgrange, golden dawnlight floods through the roofbox, built by our precision-astronomer ancestors for this very occasion when their window and the first rays of the rising sun are in perfect alignment---for one day every year, suddenly, all's aglow with golden sunshine, illuminating the megalithic iconography on the walls and enchanting the expectant faces of the 21st century pilgrims within....and all seems possible again.

If the builders of this mysterious place could speak to us through the millenia, they might quip, you cannot eat nintendo Wiis, or iPods! Don't forget, it is the sun that brings forth your food from the cold dark womb of winter and allows you look forward to another season of life!

Van Gogh's beautiful painting The Sower, captures the same pagan spirit that acknowledges the wonders of creation---a humbler humanity bowing to the divine order of things, which does not take creation for granted and recognises that constant miracle that is the food we eat. The painting, even its title, has an archetypal quality unusual in Van Gogh, evoking a similar affect in the viewer as the beautiful tarot paintings of Pamela Coleman Smyth. There seems to be something in it that we know to be true, that we have always known. Van Gogh gives the sun glorious centre-stage and the eponymous sower is depicted as a servant of the great forces of nature, deferential, almost marginal, not the anthrocentric 'man as master of creation'.


As the bleak winds of economic upheaval sweep the floor of presumption from beneath us and leave us fearful and disempowered, huddled in our uncertainty like our ancient ancestors, the solace of the table and of good company can give us comfort and solidity, just as it did them. The shiny sparkle has faded from our Big Bling era, now drawing to a close, leaving us slightly embarrassed that we were ever so foolish as to join in something so tawdry. And as always, we will return to the things that matter and the things that ground us and nourish us.

Now that the irrational exuberance of the last decade has fizzled out and exhausted us, forcing us all to slow down, we may have instead the gift of more time, to spend on what is truly worthwhile---perhaps the pleasures of home-cooking and days punctuated by the ceremonies of the table. They are still there for us, even though we abandoned them for a while.

Perhaps this is one of those times when a shift in human consciousness occurs----one of those amazing seismic shifts---in which we will reconnect with our earth which provides our food, and stop allowing the exploitative greed of some people to destroy it. Could it be, that on this Solstice, a new era is dawning, in which humanity will again reclaim the wonder and love of creation that our ancestors felt when they rejoiced in the icy, clear, dawn skies of the solstice, and watched the sun regain its strength and felt gratitude to the earth which would give us food again next year?

You can see the sun light up the Newgrange chamber at this page on the Heritage Ireland website(naturally, it doesn't do justice to the real experience.)

Blessings on your table this Solstice!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The disgraced ideology of the food industry

We have seen recently the collapse of the financial world, due to lack of regulation and the unfettered pursuit of profit at all costs by sectional interests. Our food is also suffering under this same ideology. The further the consumer becomes separated from the primary producer (the farmer) the more we need strong state regulation, in the interests of the common good. But in the area of food, as much as high finance, there is the problem that our weakened, corrupted democracies, are 'sold' off to the highest bidders, the political donors and lobbyists. A fetishistic adulation of 'the free market' has been cleverly cultivated by those who will benefit from it, and those who should oppose it, seem to have been emasculated by the bright, slick, shiny glare of neo-con buccaneers, and watched from the sidelines as though unable to oppose this sexy, brash ideology, which seemed to slay criticism with a mere sneer or a bit of name-calling---the same techniques the Far Right used so successfully in the McCarthy era, and which were so eloquently deciphered by Arthur Miller in his Harvard lecture The Crucible in History. And again, in our times as before, as Yeats once decried, The best lack all conviction/And the worst are full of passionate intensity. In the area of food this ideology manifests as BSE, dioxins and hormones in meat and dairy, polluted water tables, chemical saturated fruit and vegetables and food that is causing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes which will hit us like a time bomb in the coming decades.




Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Crisis in the Making

Today, in our cash-rich, time-poor society, our lifestyle means that we are not able to feed our children properly. It is now widespread for children, across all social classes, to go to bed hungry. Our children are starving. Yes, starving! Not children in Africa. Not poor children. Not homeless children. Not children from 'dysfunctional families'. But our children. This is the shocking conclusion of an extensive study recently carried out by the World Health Organisation on public nutrition across the globe. Researchers found that all across the Western world, the developed world, the affluent world, the educated world, children are growing up hungry because their parents are not cooking for them. And when they are not actively hungry, they are malnourished and survive on a diet of unhealthy, unsatisfying, processed food. They are, as the Gaelic saying goes, marbh leis an tae agus marbh gan é, dead with the tea and dead without it!

Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Food and the Circle of Life

In Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, families honour deceased relatives, by bringing picnics to their graves and eating there ‘with’ them. Sumptuous dishes are prepared for these feasts-- the dead person's favourite meal, with chocolate drinks, skull-shaped sugar candies and a special bread for the occasion, pan de muerto, the ‘bread of the dead’. The festival celebrates the cycle of life and death and, in this sense, the Bread of the Dead is also the Bread of Life, for life and death are one.
Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The night when the dead return to eat

In Ireland, within living memory, it was common for families to leave food out for dead relatives on the ancient, pre-Christian feast of Samhain, or Halloween, probably the oldest surviving festival in the world. Samhain is the last day of the Celtic year and a very special time, when the veil between this world and the ‘other world’ lifts, permitting the dead to return to earth for just one night. So, of course food was left out for them---if you were a spirit who hadn’t eaten since you’d died, you’d be dying for the pleasure of a lovely piece of barm-brack, or a sweet, ripe apple!

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Why feed the dead?

As in Tibet, the practice of feeding the dead existed in ancient Egypt, where food was placed in the pyramids to nourish the spirit of the dead person, in his journey towards the heavens. In our superficial understanding of this custom we tend to laugh and think, ‘how silly’, but in doing so, we miss the real meaning behind it. The Egyptians were not foolish enough to believe the dead person could eat the food, nor was it just a symbolic gesture. What they did believe was that the dead person’s spirit would metaphysically eat the food, as it were, and be spiritually nourished by the spirit of the food.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Feeding the Dead

Some cultures consider food to be so important that they continue to feed a person even after death. One of the most poignant pieces in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is the passage describing how food should be brought to the dead person in the days after death, so they will not feel abandoned by their loved ones, while their souls make the difficult transition through the bardo, the threshold between earthly and non-earthly existence. There is a beautiful logic to this. If our spirits live on after death and suddenly we find we can no longer partake in the privileges of being alive, such as eating, we might miss being able to do so!

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Sacred Food Ritual in The Sopranos

In Catholic ritual, there is the tradition of giving a Communion wafer to a dying person to spiritually nourish them on their journey out of this world and into the next. Fans of the TV series The Sopranos may have recognised intimations of the Viaticum Eucharistae in the heavily symbolic final episode. Seconds before what we presume is Tony’s death, Tony, Carmela and A.J. eat unusually small, communion-sized onion rings, by placing them flat on their tongues as though taking Communion, exactly as young boys and girls all over the world are taught to do when preparing for their momentous First Holy Communion.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Thou Shalt Feast no More at the Table of Life

I once spoke to a chef whose duty it was to provide The Last Meal for death-row prisoners, when the grim occcasion arose. He regarded it as an important, though small comfort to Souls facing the unthinkable---a physical comfort in the face of metaphysical panic, a crumb in the abyss. With great humility, he regarded his small role in these Souls' last moments of life, as a privileged one, and he carried out his duties with utmost earnestness and care. He recounted that most prisoners did ask for a Last Meal, and most ate their Last Meal.

The existence of this ritual evokes, perhaps deliberate, self-conscious echoes of The Last Supper, both exemplifying the symbolic significance of food in the human narrative.

There are also some ironic, unintended, but unavoidable intimations of the Christian story: The parallel between the condemned Nazarene and the dead men walking----many of them, like The Christ, innocent of any crime, but condemned to die by the might of hysterical mob-rule and by cowardly Governors, who, Pilate-like, fail to act in truth when called upon, allowing the sacrificial slaughters to proceed.

And, like Pilate, they wash their hands and afterwards return to rounds of stately banquets, with laden tables, untroubled that certain Innocents shall feast no more at the Table of Life.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Eating the Peach

To eat is a privilege of the living, a temporal and a short one. We find knowledge of this in strange manifestations---none stranger than the ritual of the US death penalty, where, within the cold barbarism of the legal code, there exists the compassionate, even tender custom of The Last Meal offered to death-row prisoners on the day of execution. One might think ‘how could they eat at such a time?’ And yet, at such a moment, their love of life and all the privileges of the living, must be intense, magnified. From their perspective extremis how could they not savour their very last meal ever, when they will be such a long time without food? Perhaps the dead men walking partake of their Last Meal, reflecting, like Camus' Étranger, on all the ungrasped sweetness of life.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Eating and Living in The Moment

The nourishment of food is what initially grounds us in the physical plane of being. Needing food is what makes us different to spirits, if we believe in spirits. The partaking of food, is the first and most intrinsic consequence of our physical existence in the universe and the non-ability to partake of food is a consequence of being dead. This might seem to state the obvious, but perhaps we would eat better quality food if we considered it from this perspective. Then we might take the advice of Indian mystic, Kabir, who urged:



If you are thirsty, drink now
for further down the road there are no wells
no rivers
nothing.
If you are hungry, eat now
for further down the road
there is no food.

Of course, he meant this in a spiritual way, but it might not be a bad thing to also take his advice literally. How terrible, to live life and never to enjoy one of the gifts of being alive, that of being able to partake of the fruits of the earth, the delicious, beautiful foods that nature gives us and instead pass on them and only eat bland, processed, synthetic foods.
Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Children and the Existential Significance of Food

The role of food is even more important in the life of a child than that of an adult. Food is how children first experience the world. When a child is born, the first thing it does, instinctively, is feed from its mother’s breast. Then all is well in its world, this new planet it has come to inhabit. There is order in its universe. For the first months and even years of a child’s life, food is central. It has nothing less than an existential significance. The physical nourishment of food, together with warmth and bodily closeness to its mother, circumscribe a child’s early life. They are everything. They form the template for the rest of the child’s life concerning feelings of safety in this world, or lack of safety. The sensation of taste and the satisfaction of a full tummy permeate the child’s subconscious.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Soul Food

Good food nourishes the body, but also the soul. When we make our children nourishing, wholesome food, it adds to the love we give them. Although they may not be conscious of it, on some deep level it is vitally important. There is a difference, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually, as well as physically, between eating processed, factory-food and natural, home-cooked food. So when we feed our children good food, we benefit their physical health in an obvious, scientific way, but we also reach them in the deep primal layers of the human psyche. Conversely, when we fail to feed them well, we affect them detrimentally in a very deep way. We are neglecting their most primal need. They may have a full stomach, but when it’s not full with real nourishment, their deepest hunger remains unsatisfied.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Food in Film

When we prepare a meal, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. The extra ingredient is our love. Food has its own metaphysics-----think of the great Danish film, Babette’s Feast, which illustrated this beautifully, showing the transformative power of food and the sharing of
it, in the ritual of the dinner table. Or think of Ang Lee’s wonderful Chinese film Eat Drink, Man Woman, which placed food at the centre of family life, highly charged with metaphorical meaning. As the family’s fortunes changed with the passing of time, the only constant was the ritual of the dining table where the two daughters ate the meals their father cooked for them. In the film Chocolat, Juliet Binoche’s character healed a whole village of its repressed mean-spiritedness with the hand-made chocolates, which she created with love and care. The Mexican book, Like Water for Chocolate, which was also made into a film, explored, through magic realism, how food is always more than just food. And in the recent film Waitress, we see how a pie is so much more than just a pie and always more than the sum of its parts!

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The Sustenance of The Living

When we understand that the question of food is about much more than physical components and scientific facts, our mission to nourish our children well becomes a more inspired and enjoyable one. This can spur us into giving this mission the necessary time and effort, despite our difficult lives.

Food is love---when we cook for our family, we are giving them our love. Love on a plate. Or love in a lunchbox. Or love in a loaf of bread. Cooking is a type of alchemy. No one knew this better than mother and poet, alchemist of words, Sylvia Plath, whose last, heartbreaking act, before she killed herself, was to bake bread for her children’s breakfast. Even in her torment and anguish, as she planned to leave them forever, even in extremis, she sought to feed them, to ensure that on that most awful of days, when they would lose their mother to death, at least they would not be hungry.

A similar universal instinct must have guided a widower colleague of mine on the night his beloved wife died from cancer. When he returned to his home from the hospital and had to tell his two boys that their Mommy was gone, in an act of great love and tenderness, even in his raw grief, he made sure to give them breakfast before breaking the terrible news. Perhaps the Irish wake tradition, with its offerings of food gifts from neighbours and its feasting and drinking through the night, is part of the same instinctual knowledge----when our rational minds might think food to be trivial and unnecessary, our instincts tell us it can be the most crucial thing to attend to, for it offers us sustenance in so many ways, sometimes the only sustenance the living have when death comes a-reaping.

Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

James Joyce and the Carnal Appetites

Here in the Occident, we have, ingrained in our thought, the firewall duality between the carnal and the spiritual, which religion refuses to bridge. Indeed, Christian religions, some more than others, deny the needs of the body, teach us that the flesh and all that pertains to it, is sinful and are deeply suspicious of its natural appetites.

When James Joyce wrote Ulysses, he was ahead of his time in introducing the very Eastern concept of the holistic nature of human experience. It is, at one and the same time, a most visceral, carnal book, and a most spiritual and metaphysical one, both dimensions presented as planes of human consciousness, neither superior to the other. The book's central characters, the wandering everyman, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, inhabit fully the physicality of their existence, relishing its sensations and joys without reservation.

In Ulysses, all the bodily functions are part of the rich texture of human existence, part of the unity of all things and everything, part of the great Om, affirmed by Molly's final, resounding Yes! to life, which concludes the book. But the West wasn't ready for Joyce's all-embracing perspective and it was these elements, relating to the carnal plane of existence, which so scandalised the English-speaking world and caused Joyce's epic to be banned, interestingly, not in his native Ireland, but in the U.S.A.

Blessings on your table!

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The Body-Soul Dualism of Western Spirituality

In Christianity, for example, there is no physical component towards mystical knowledge that parallels yogic teachings, where diet and exercise accompany meditation in the journey towards enlightenment. Some Christians are subliminally taught, even still, that the body is shameful (especially when female), whilst whirling dervish Sufis know the body is another portal to transcendence and dance their way into altered states of god-filled bliss.

Likewise, the sacred Tantric tradition of the East, seems strangely sacrilegious to the Christian mind. The notion that the physical communion of lovers, the ultimate carnal act, could itself be a route to divine transcendence, is so alien to the Western mind, that even in our no-holds-barred permissiveness, it becomes a voyeuristic scandal and source of collective hilarity that a certain popstar professes an interest in the ritual. He has never since been allowed to forget it! (I don't wish to add to the silliness around this matter by repeating his name here!)

Devout Christians, seeking to know their God, when they fast, will do so on stale processed bread and unfiltered water (containing chemicals), or like pilgrims to Lough Derg in Ireland, on black tea and crackers (containing caffeine and chemicals). Hindu mystics, however, like the devotee who emerged from the cave in which he had sealed himself for three years, will eat honey and drink pure fresh mango juice, neither of which contain any chemicals, because the purity of what they take into their soul-temple bodies, is important to their spiritual journey.

In the book The Seat of the Soul, a book based on an Eastern cosmological paradigm, author, Gary Zukav, recommends a cleansing nutritional programme as part of spiritual discipline and a way to increasing intuitive power, recognising that food is somehow more than mere fuel providing for the body:

Being physically toxic interferes with intuition……………………When it becomes necessary, for example, for the physical, emotional body of a person to heal, a dramatic shift in nutrition is often required wherein a person must release every one of his or her eating habits and take on the habits of eating certain foods that are much higher in vibration.

Blessings on your table!

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Nourishing Body and Soul

Perhaps our current one-dimensional understanding of food stems from the Occidental body-soul dichotomy, so inherent in our thinking. In the Western world, born of Christendom, we lack a sense of the spirituality of food that permeates the philosophies of the East. This is despite the fact that Jesus appeared to understand the importance of food and wine and when he provided them, they were reported to be of good quality. But the bread used in the communion sacrament today, unlike the food used in the religious ceremonies of many other cultures, may offer spiritual sustenance, but is not carnally appetising. Indeed, the communion wafer is designed not to taste nice, not to give physical sustenance, not even to be chewed.

Anyone who has studied martial arts in any depth, or become interested in Buddhism, or taken a yoga course even, will be aware of the integration of food into the spiritual practices and purification rituals of the East. Physical purification of the body is also integral to the tribal cultures of the world. Many of us will be familiar with the Native American sweat lodge ceremony, the Oenikika, during which the body is cleansed, the mind is purified and the participant connects with the gods. The sauna removes toxins through the pores of the skin and the drum-beat focuses the mind. Then the divine is within reach. The Oenikika is used by shamans as a prelude to entering altered states of consciousness. Without the purification of the body, the divine cannot be accessed.

Blessings on your table!
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Food, Love and Science

It’s all about the love.
---- Troy Maguire

Cooking is the ultimate giving.
-----Jamie Oliver

Cook from your heart so that you may eat the food of love.
----- Deb Davies

I like these quotes from the three chefs above, because they have an understanding of food that comes from their passion and dedication. But this instinctive understanding that comes from the experience of food is something that many of us are losing touch with in our busy lives, where the complete experience of anything is degraded. Neither is this understanding of the experience of food current in the way food and health issues are discussed in the media.

The subject of healthy food is invariably presented in terms of science, with all the jargon of food chemistry readily invoked when food issues are being explored. The central thesis of all our discussion and education about food is a very simplistic one---that the human body is a machine that needs healthy food, and when it doesn’t get it, the machine breaks down. It’s all very clinical and matter-of-fact. It’s not very inspirational. It’s never going to ignite a passion in us for good food. All it will ever do is make us feel vaguely guilty about our bad food habits, but not convinced enough to ditch them permanently.

Blessings on your table!


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Bread of Life (3)

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The near-impossibility of buying good quality, nice-tasting bread is one of the most frustrating things about food-shopping today. The white stuff tastes like plastic and if we try to be healthy and opt for wholemeal, we are rewarded with the taste of sawdust! Across the Western world, in the year 2008, in our advanced society, we cannot buy proper bread! In fact, the quality of our bread is in inverse proportion to the wealth of our society. When we travel to poorer parts of the world, we often find that we can eat beautiful fresh-baked bread, made by poor women in shacks, or mud-huts, over open fires. Yet, in the West, the more prosperous we are, the worse the quality of our bread becomes----plastic food for a plastic century. That golden wheat-field, which once inspired harvest celebrations like Lughnasadh throughout the world, now inspires only apathy. To borrow a phrase from Mircea Elliade, the sacred has become the profane. The Bread of Life has given way to the Bread of Plastic, a potent representation of what has gone terribly wrong in the way we produce and consume food.

Blessings on your table!

Bread of Life(2)

Even though in the Western world, most of us live at some remove from the land and no longer grind flour for bread, we still carry the ancient ways in our hearts and souls. While we buy bread in neat sliced pans in supermarkets, some part of our deep, wild selves must still be bound to the Wheel of the Year, wanting to jump for joy that the earth has again given unto us the crops to make our bread, for bread is life. Perhaps this is why we feel something is amiss when we go hunter-gathering for our weekly shop through the jungle of the supermarket. How could we jump for joy at the sight, or smell, or taste of a sliced pan, that tasteless, cardboard stuff that turns to mush and sticks like paste to the roof of our mouths? How can this connect us to nature?

Blessings on your table!

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Bread of Life (1)

Even on the streets of our cities, even on consecrated lands, within the distinctly un-pagan precepts of our churches, when we 'scratch the surface' we find that the Lughnasadh tradition and its equivalents, have made their way directly into the Harvest Thanksgiving ceremonies which are celebrated in many Christian churches, as Summer draws to a close.

When religion began to develop, the pagan love of the land and all that it provided, was incorporated into the new religious rituals. Bread, made from flour, ground from harvest-wheat, became a symbol of life. In both religious and non-religious contexts, bread represents Creation’s sacred life-force, giving life to us and through the life-giving earth, sustaining us. Across the Judeo-Christian world, bread has iconic importance. From the era of the Old Testament, right up to today, bread is eaten at the Feast of Passover by Jews everywhere. It was this ritual of the Passover that inspired Jesus to use bread at The Last Supper, making it the most potent symbol in the history of western culture. In the unleavened bread of the sacrament of Communion, which is celebrated every day in the churches of Christendom, we can trace the distant echoes, back through the millennia, of the pagan world beyond.
Blessings on your table!


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Dancing at Lughnasa

Lughnasadh was another ancient pagan festival which celebrated nature's bounty, whose resonances still live on today and were explored in Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa. Lugh was the solar deity, the god of music and light and of the harvest, honoured at Summer’s end, when the crop was gathered in and thanks were given for the earth’s abundance. Remnants of this tradition still live within the ancestral memory of the people and in many communities there are still celebrations when the harvest is brought in. As Friel has commented ‘if you scratch the surface in Ireland, you find the pagan underneath’ and while these words may seem to be less true on the streets of Dublin than they are in the hills of Donegal, it is, in my view, only a question of how deep below the surface you have to scratch.

Blessings on your table!

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Earth Goddess

In Ireland, Brigit was our Demeter, our ancient, pre-Christian earth goddess, honoured at Imbolc, the pagan fire festival which celebrated the start of Spring. Honouring Brigit, marked the return of the harvest season after the barren Winter, when the crops of the fields would grow once more. Christianity then used this pagan template to create ‘Saint Brigid’, whose feast day is the first day of February, coinciding with Imbolc. When I was a child, I remember making a Saint Brigid’s cross out of reeds and hanging it inside our hall door ‘to bring blessings’ to our family. The cross had obvious Christian associations, but its ancient meaning was to represent the Wheel of the Year, with its seasonal cycles of growth and fertility. Today, children in Ireland still weave Saint Brigid’s crosses and there is even something of a renewal in the honouring of Brigit as a nature goddess. It seems that her power is still alive, even after all the centuries of Christianity, bringing to mind J.G. Frazer’s lovely description of Saint Brigid as 'an old heathen goddess of fertility disguised in a thread-bare Christian cloak!'


Blessings on your table!

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The Love of the Land

All over the pre-Christian world, the love of the land and appreciation for the food it yielded, was cause for celebration and thanksgiving. Perhaps we are not as far removed from this world as we might think---- perhaps it is echoes of these occasions that we sometimes hear, ringing in our ears, causing that vague sense of something being amiss about the way we live today. Perhaps our need to be a part of creation and connected to nature is not as dead as we think.

Like many people with roots in the countryside, I never felt completely tamed by the city and I still feel an outsider in urban environments, despite having spent many years living in both the larger and smaller cities of the world. Perhaps we cannot let go some subconscious tie to the land, still feeling its ancient, magnetic pull, like Yeats, hearing it 'in the deep heart's core', longing for some dream-place cabin with 'nine bean rows' and 'hive for the honey bee', far, far away from the 'pavements grey' of our diminished lives.


The Lake Isle of Inisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Inisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

----W.B. Yeats


Blessings on your table!
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The Lost Sublimity of Food (2)

Occasionally, we might happen to pluck a pear in the garden of a friend we are visiting, or be the dinner guests of people who keep an allotment and suddenly, momentarily, we are returned to our other untame, primal selves, in relishing the full, vibrant flavours of fresh, natural food. Or perhaps we might find ourselves wandering, by accident, through some rural place, lost, in the heat of summer and we see a beautiful, golden field of wheat and we cannot resist walking into it and lying on the earth surrounded by the reeds. We smell their sweetness and look to the flute blue sky, watch swallows swoop and feel the pulse of the earth running through us. We breathe deep and drink in the magnificence about us. Our appetite for all that is not synthetic, comes alive and our love of creation and all it gives us, is re-awakened. And we think we understand the bond our ancestors had with this land and the pure, raw, instinctual joy, with which they feasted and celebrated nature’s goodness----we understand them, because their pagan souls are the same as our pagan souls. We are of the same essence.

On the way back from the wheat-field, we pick wild berries from the hedgerow and find we have a hunger for a home-baked cake of soda bread, or some garden-fresh summer salad, or wild salmon with young potatoes and watercress from the stream below. On a day as sublime as this one, it is not a sliced pan we yearn for. This is not the state of being in which we think to order a pizza. We feel too much alive for that type of food, today. Today, our tastebuds want the real thing. Now we see our earth as a garden of paradise and we think about why Eve and Adam had to bite that apple. How could they resist the exquisite fruit from the wild tree, sweet-smelling, sun-ripened, red-green-skinned, fresh-plucked, noisy, crunchy, juicy to the bite, at once sweet and tart, making mouths water, tastebuds tingle and senses come alive.

The bland, tasteless, waxed, chemical-sprayed imitations in our supermarkets, ‘fresh’ from factory-orchards and a year of cold storage, make it hard to appreciate how an apple could be so sublime and so seductive. But on rare days like this day in the wheat-field, when we remember not to forget our true nature, we can understand Eve’s genius and Adam’s predicament and we sense the sublimity of our pagan past----it is the ghost that haunts our artificial present.



Blessings on your table!

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The Lost Sublimity of Food (1)

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!

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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 childhood experiences of food, or the lack of it, 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 of 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 my father'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 my father died, 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 my yearning for what she could not always provide, 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.----
My aunt. 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!

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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!

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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

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