The Food Chain

Seventy dollars. That is how much more than usual our grocery bill was this week. Seventy—and we aren’t even buying milk, cream, butter, ice cream or eggs thanks to Daisy (our cow), our four faithful chickens, and our kids who milk and gather and feed. Why?

Last week’s headlines of food riots around the world suddenly feel closer to home. How vulnerable we are—dependent for our food on a vast network of relations, whose many fragile links reach all they way back to seeds in the earth. The fall of rain. A shaft of sun. A waft of air. The plants that make themselves. The animals who eat them. The food we buy relates us to all that is.

Shocked, we sit down to study the receipt. Yes, the kids are growing. We are buying more fruit and vegetables, more cereal and juice. We also do our best to buy goods that are either local or organic, and preferably both. Then there are those big ticket items—vanilla for our ice cream making (at $9. a bottle), maple syrup as a sweetener ($14.), and of course, diapers.

Even as we lament, I am thinking. The merchandise in our overflowing cart still costs much more than the ample sum we are shelling out for it. We aren’t paying—not directly or fully—for so many enabling factors: the roads on which our food travels to us, the crop subsidies that keep the farmers solvent, the immigrant labor that picks most produce, the topsoil lost on overly-farmed fields, the pollution of air, water, and earth caused by machinery, pesticides, transportation, and manure. I am trying to feel grateful.

A local farmer brings by a large bag of potatoes—culls from a local operation. Cheap. I get creative. What can you make with potatoes, milk, and eggs?? Custards, quiches and soufflés are right out—too “eggy” for my crew. So I am whipping up bread, pancakes, lasagna, brownies, muffins, and oatmeal bars. Try some!

It is how a cultural diet evolves, via such creative constraint. What do we have in abundance (think wheat, corn, milk)? What food can we make with it (think aisles of cereal, crackers, bread, and snack products; cheeses, butters, and ice cream)? How can we preserve what erupts once a year and have it year round (think tomato sauces, jellies, pickles, frozen everything, and pasta)? And then there is meat.

Our diet is derivative. Economic, political, and geographic forces, not to mention culture and tradition, set the menu. We learn to want what we know we can get.

Food prices soar, and we reexamine our choices. It is not only health concerns that prompt us to do so, though they can as well. We reconsider whether we should buy organic or local; whether we should splurge on the freshest fruits or go for the cans; or whether we should believe the claims made for oats, live bacteria, low fat content, hormone-free meat. Pushed out of our comfortable, comforting rut, the options are bewildering. How are we to decide?

There is an ethic implicit in the approach to desire described here whose reach extends far beyond the contours of our bodily space. What can our bodies know?

When we cultivate a felt sense of our desire for food—when we practice following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough—it is not just ourselves we are serving. When what motivates us to eat or not is pleasure, and when the greatest pleasure comes from an experience of nourishing ourselves, then any information that comes to us about our food hits us in a new way. The news from experts and scientists, journalists and commentators, strikes us in the gut—right where our attention is, and right where our sensations of pleasure register.

As I tune into the sensation of eating grapes, for example, the knowledge that their presence on my tongue represents the sweat on someone’s exploited back dulls the pleasure. Or, as the square of chocolate melts in my mouth, knowing that it was traded fairly heightens the pleasure.

Here, the advice of experts in science, politics, and nutrition does help—not by telling us what we can and should eat, but by providing us with information that allow us to make informed, attuned decisions on our own. There is no formula. Only an ongoing practice of heightening our sense of what we are doing as we eat. The movement I make is making me….

Yet, when we shift to this experience of ourselves, ironically enough, we also realize that our relation to food is not just about ourselves any more. The moving bodies we know ourselves to be are mere moments in an endless rhythm of becoming that is enabling us, alive in us, making the world as it is through us.

The cycle of breaths reminds us. We are earth, air, fire, water. So is the food we see, smell, taste, absorb and become. So is the world in which we live. What we take in to ourselves not only makes us who we are, it makes the world into what it is—and it can be a place that supports us in nourishing ourselves, or not.

As we cultivate a felt sense of ourselves as the movement making us, our desire evolves. It will; it can; it must. Our desire will grow in line with whatever we believe will give us the pleasure we seek. As it does, we no longer want foods that overwhelm and deceive our senses; we no longer want foods that require oppressing other humans or animals. We want what will allow us to find a sense of enough.

This is no temporary correction of calories. No willed deprivation. No feat of self control. It is permanent pursuit of the wisdom in our desire—the wisdom guiding us to the health and well being we seek. It is the only way that we can create a relationship with food—with ourselves and with our world—that will express itself in the health we want.

It takes time. Desire did not evolve in a day, nor will it. But even so, there is pleasure all the way.

Next week: Summing up food