Food Finale

Daughter Jessica (age 10) was sicker yesterday than I have seen her since she was 2. Her head hurt. Her stomach ached. Curled on the couch, she refused all food, and slept on and off throughout the day. When she woke up this morning, seemingly two inches taller, she asked for cornflakes and milk. Then slices of pear. Then a piece of pizza. Then some frozen corn. Not long after she asked for a granola bar, insisting all the while that what she really needed was blueberries. She probably did.

What do our bodies know?

Often it takes being sick for us to turn our attention to our bodily sensations. At such times, our bodies, tired of whispering, explode with a snarl. Listen to me! And we do, for a while, wanting and eating exactly what will nourish us, until the glow of health returns and with it, our illusions of being a master mind. Once again we are vulnerable to suggestion and willing to override our sense of enough for a good time, in search of a comfort that eludes.

What do we really want—from food?

Concern over an increasingly international obesity epidemic, while well meaning, has thrown our relationship to food out of whack—or revealed just how out of whack it is. We want to eat whatever we want, look however we want, and be healthy—all at the same time. What is missing is the sense of our desire for food as having anything to teach us about any one of them.

Our bodies register the effects our persistent lack of attention, and then we blame them for not doing what “we” want. But the movements we are making are making us.

I have been reading a book called Why We Run: A Natural History that plots human evolution as driven by the desire to hunt. We are endurance predators, author Bernd Heinrich argues, whose physiology and metabolism—most notably our ability to sweat—qualifies us to outrun much faster animals in the heat of a prairie sun.

Most interesting, however, is Heinrich’s claim that our capacity to fall out of shape represents an evolutionary advantage—“neuromuscular flexibility.” Unlike some other animals, we easily lose muscle tone. Yet because we can fall out of shape, we can also get back into shape—a different shape—that will serve us in the quarry of new prey.

We evolved with the capacity to remake ourselves.

We can fall out of eating shape as well, moving far from our internal sense of what is best for us, and the reasons are similar. Our gastronomical flexibility enables us to remake ourselves. We can adapt to surpluses and shortages. Season to season, climate to climate, culture to culture, we cultivate a taste for available edibles.

Heinrich goes on to suggest that we not only can remake ourselves, we must. We are creatures who need to move: our own health and well being requires that we be working ourselves into shape. Whether the goal we are chasing is an antelope or a scientific proof, a book contract or a product’s sales, the process of pursuing it feeds us psychologically and physically, releasing cascades of internal nourishment. It primes our health—again not just the goal itself, but the acts of vision, persistence, and endurance that getting it requires.

It might seem that in contemporary culture, we no longer need to hunt for food. All we can eat is ever present, round the clock. However, the same work must be done—not the work of running and spearing, but the work of discerning what will nourish us and consciously going after it. We are born not knowing. As we grow we cannot not learn. We can deny that we are learning and eat what is offered, however, we will only find the pleasure we seek when we do the work that our adaptive, evolving desire requires.

We no longer have to change our menu season to season, but we still need to learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a responsible, renewable sense of enough.

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Every day, we eat. With every mouthful, we engage our senses. As every pattern of sensing and responding registers, it primes a desire for more or less of it, now or in the future. And over time, our desire evolves. We cultivate tastes. We learn what to want and not want. We adapt.

It might seem that this malleability is a reason not to trust our desire. The reverse is true. This malleability is what there is to trust.

Why? Because desire is not an end in itself. Desire is always reaching for what it wants. Desire is movement—a movement that is actively seeking information that will guide us to the pleasure we hope to secure.

The wisdom in this desire, then, lies in the reaching, grasping, sensing, and responding to what we think will nourish us. The wisdom is what erupts in sensations of discomfort and illness, obsession and unease, calling us to attend. We want more. There is more to want. More pleasure. More health.

As we participate in this process, our food becomes more than it is—fortified with ingredients that satisfy our deepest desire to be constantly creating our selves.

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All along the way I have been railing against a mind over body approach to our relationship to food. Yet I don’t mean to disparage our minds—just our illusions of mastery. Mental activity is essential to the process of discerning wisdom in desire.

For minds remember. Minds predict. Minds attend. And in all three ways, minds help open up a space in us where the wisdom of our desire can emerge.

Minds remember to call on the cycle of breaths. Minds predict what will happen when we do. Minds attend to whatever movement the process stirs in us in response to the moment.

Minds remember what we have read and heard about nutrition, food quality, sources, and effects. Minds predict what will happen if we eat as we do. Minds attend to the shifts in our desire that occur as we learn, honoring and enabling them to be what they are.

Minds remind us: we are bodies first.

Next week: desire for sex