The Good Food Angel

Bread of Life (3)

2008-07-04T14:43:00.002-07:00

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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 celebrations like Lughnasadh throughout the world, now inspires only apathy. The sacred has become the profane. Bread of Life has given way to Bread of Plastic, a potent representation of what has gone terribly wrong in the way we produce and consume food.

Blessings on your table!
The Good Food Angel

Bread of Life(2)

2008-07-04T14:37:00.005-07:00

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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!
The Good Food Angel

Bread of Life (1)

2008-06-24T06:55:00.001-07:00

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!
The Good Food Angel.

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Dancing at Lughnasa

2008-06-16T13:44:00.003-07:00

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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!

The Good Food Angel.

Earth Goddess

2008-06-03T13:49:00.004-07:00

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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!

The Good Food Angel

The Love of the Land

2008-05-27T07:05:00.007-07:00

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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!

The Good Food Angel

The Lost Sublimity of Food (2)

2008-05-05T11:22:00.002-07:00

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!

The Good Food Angel.

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The Lost Sublimity of Food (1)

2008-05-05T11:19:00.002-07:00

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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....

2008-05-03T12:22:00.010-07:00

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!
The Good Food Angel

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Zen and the Art of Eating

2008-05-01T05:27:00.004-07:00

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....

2008-04-27T06:31:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

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