Today’s post is in honor of Blog Action Day, an annual cooperative reflection on a given topic. The focus this year is Food.
As I mull over possible ways of talking about this theme, I arrive at the muddled confusion that everything is food. Whether sentient or non, all we know is in an unending cycle of eating and being eaten. When eating, we are confident and we grow. When being eaten, we fear and perish. This refers to people, animals, and plants; but it also includes stones, stars, and atoms.
Food is fuel; food gives energy. Without food, movement ceases. Without movement there is nothing.
If food is fuel, it’s like any other kind of fuel, whether for cars or heating systems or rocket ships. We want fuels to be of a high quality and we take care to conserve them at all times.
By abusing food, the body’s fuel, we threaten our own survival.
It’s a cruel trick that this simple equation of food=fuel becomes associated with all manner of perversions and addictions among humans.
Why does food get tangled up in mental games?
I have a strong, if unpopular theory about that. It seems apparent to me that unsatisfactory contact between an infant and mother or mother-surrogate in the first months of life is highly likely to result in dysfunction in that child’s future. This statement is not scientific, but the concept is widely studied. If a child lacks not only proper breastfeeding but continuous contact with the care giver during the first year, the emotional wounds will fester and cause imbalance.
A great many contemporary adults of all ages were bottle fed from birth. No small number of us also lacked the intimacy we craved, having come fresh from the womb. I believe many of our present-day food-related problems are directly related to these phenomena.
The mother who gives unbroken devoted attention to her child for two years straight at least is not what we call a ‘working’ mother, and so the idea that all children should receive such care may be simply unrealistic in our economy. Yet if there is no substitute for breastfeeding or heartfelt intimacy, what is our hope for survival as a species? As it is now, our obesity is making us victims. We will have to change the economy.
Of course, changing the economy is a long-term proposition. In the meantime, we can change our own personal economies. A good place to start is to meditate on the equation, food=fuel, until you’ve assimilated and understood it in every cell of your body. Forgive your Mama, she did not know the confusion she brought upon you.
Know that what you eat is who you are and where you’re going.
