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