Eat These Words

     I don’t tend to read books about food, eating and dieting. But when I have, I usually began by bracing myself. I know I will have to learn a whole new way of being, and conform to this system if I want to experience success, and re-learn which foods I should eat and which I absolutely am not allowed. There is an inevitable loss of dignity and adult self-sufficiency as I am told all that I have been doing wrong. I wonder again if I will be able to whip myself into a whirlwind frenzy of hope blended with enough self-hatred, so that I might try again a new system, revolutionize myself, and become a whole new, slender person. If I just do what I am told, then I may be able to do it.

     Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being by Marc David is a voice of calm and clear reason in the relatively new genre of holistic books about intuitive eating. The author provides a lucid counterpoint to nearly every bit of popular assumption and black-or-white thinking regarding eating that people tend to take for granted. He points out the inevitability of a changing diet with the passage of seasons, years, ages of life, and explains how the body goes through periods of building up and letting go. Desires and longings for food are also affected by mood, relationships, nostalgia and inner attitude. By shedding light on the variability of the human experience of eating, he clarifies how one single diet is in itself a myth, that a one-size-fits-all diet for every person is itself a trap.

     Simply acknowledging this is unique. When most popular thinking about food tries to make food choices ever more concrete, tries to make restricted food certain and immoveable, and nearly criminalize certain diet choices, one can read this book and simply take in a deep breath of fresh air. Slow down, and gather some perspective. Truly, bask in a depth of wisdom.

     Marc David goes on to gently clarify the fascism (my word) of diet programs, that accepting a diet is the same as accepting the author’s entire worldview. The possibility that the reader has their own wants, needs and personal wisdom never comes into question. To follow a diet, one gives up their own interior knowing, swallowing whole a completely foreign way of thinking.

     David states that food itself is neutral, and that moralizing about it results in both lending a restricted food a shine of irresistibility and it represses the individual’s personal process of gathering information about food; it shuts down the act of making self-propelled choices based on a human being’s inner growth and knowing.

     The author reveals also what fast eating means, hunched eating, eating without breathing. I especially appreciated his reading of “one-minute eaters” who

“…find it hard to take time to enjoy themselves, have difficulty receiving nurturance from others or listening to the promptings of their own hearts.”

     As I tend to eat very quickly, particularly shocking for me was his characterization of eaters who swallow things whole, that they “want their hungers in life satisfied but are unwilling to take the necessary steps.” Ouch.
As a teacher of mine says: “How you do one thing is how you do all things.”

How we eat is how we approach the world.

     Just when I was wondering how exactly I could attempt to align myself with healthier eating without simultaneously giving sweet, addictive foods that extra sparkle of eat-me-ness, David uses one chapter to explain a five step exercise for slowing down and being present during a meal. It is immanently doable. It takes only presence, it takes listening. It takes receiving the food.

     This is a good book with profound integrity, and I am glad I read it. When I thought there wasn’t anything left that anyone could teach me about my own addictive eating behavior, David’s truth-telling exposed my blind spots. His is an especially common-sense work regarding the inner experience of eating.

Nourish is the Word

To begin at the beginning. Enchanted cooking must begin by deeply feeling the first experiences we have of being nourished on earth. In our mothers’ wombs, the nourishment comes into us directly, we don’t have to seek it or cry for it. But after we are born, we begin to acquire experiences of nourishment, which are either holistic and loving, or can be fraught with the static passed on by those who feed us.

Being fed our mothers’ milk is the first experience of intense worldly intimacy we experience. As Stephanie Demetrakopoulos writes in The Nursing Mother and Feminine Metaphysics,
“The flowing of the milk is a holistic bodily metaphor for maternal caritas, an open, nurturing world love.”

She writes of the holy union that suffuses baby and mother during the act of nourishment.

“There is nothing like the monumental status of the filled, often dozing baby and the relief of the previously taut breast; being and becoming merge in a concrete way. As the mother lets go of her own ego, identifying instead with the baby’s satisfaction, she may feel a sense of total unity with the child that is not unlike the more mystical moments of pregnancy. The gradual relaxation of the infant and the mother is a form of mysterium conjunctio, both psychic and physical unification.”

This is the ideal. I breastfed my three children, and while each child was a wholly individual drinker, I experienced a tranquillity and timelessness during breastfeeding that was deeply meditative and nourishing to both of us.

But sometimes, things go wrong: especially when the child begins to eat table food. Our caregivers don’t intend to traumatize us during feeding, but in the hurry of daily life, and with unconscious patterns dominating their behaviors, it is exactly what can happen.

I was once called to bless a woman with a spoonful of ritual food during a ceremony. I was to gently feed the sacred food into her mouth, and she was meant to accept it. But as I advanced, I could feel her fear of being dominated, a fear that I would feed her unkindly, a shame that people around us would see her being fed. I knew at once that she had rarely, if ever, been fed with love. I mean, whoever fed her did not consciously feed her lovingly, with tenderness, with the intention of nourishing this beautiful soul. I could see this grown woman as a small child, doubtful and afraid of feeling violated while being fed. It is a violation to feed a baby, a child, without tenderness, without sensitivity, without presence.

A man I know used to gobble his food terribly. If you sat behind him in a movie theatre, as he ate his popcorn, you would immediately be struck (sometimes literally) by shrapnel fragments of popcorn madly spinning into a three foot radius of space as he gobbled uncontrollably. At some point he underwent a hypnosis to cure this and found himself sitting as a baby in a high chair, being fed by his mother. One spoonful after the other was jammed into his mouth, and he could barely taste the food, much less take it in and swallow it in a comfortable succession—instead he gasped and choked, gulping for air, and learned to eat as quickly as possible, to get it over with. He could eat nearly an entire meal without breathing.

Uncovering and healing our own “food issues” is the first step to learning how to relate to food as love, and is necessary in enchanting our cooking. Nourishing and being nourished is incomparably intimate, and the emotions that come up in us while either being fed by others or by becoming aware of how we actually feed ourselves will always reveal what composes our inhibitions to intimacy.

As MFK Fisher wrote, “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it...and it is all one.”