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
30.8.08
24.8.08
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
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
16.8.08
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
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
2.8.08
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
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
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