When I read this one of the first things that popped into my mind was a wonderful essay called The Keeper of the Keys written by Carol Flinders in the introduction to the first edition of Laurel's Kitchen (1976). I have that cookbook, purchased about the time it was published. I've read that essay at least 100 times over the years. The link that follows is obviously for an edition that was released in Great Britain instead of the U.S., and it's minus a few pages, but it's essentially the same as what I've been reading all these years. I think what astonishes me most when I read it now is that things have only gotten worse in the last 30+ years.Leo Babauta wrote:
It's Time for a New Relationship with Food
“Have you ever stopped to consider what relationship you have with food?
We don’t often think we even have a relationship with food, and yet we do — and it’s pretty intimate.
Think about this: if you’re like me, you spend as much or more time with food than you do with many of the loved ones in your life — several hours a day or more.
And consider this: technically, food is just fuel for living. That’s all — nothing else.
And yet … it has become so much more to most of us:
we use food for pleasure
we use it for comfort
we turn to food when we’re sad, depressed, hurt
we use food to socialize
we use it as a reward
we do it when we’re bored
food can also be a chore
we use food as gifts
we turn to food when we’re lonely
food can be associated with sex
food is equated to health
sometimes, food becomes an obsession
it definitely can be an addiction
food can make us hate ourselves
food is the center of many billion-dollar industries
In fact, the huge food-related industries are at the center of much of our relationship with food: restaurants, fast-food chains, convenience foods, agribusinesses, distributors, grocery chains, snack foods, bakeries, coffee shops, dessert chains, health food, diet foods, supplements, bodybuilding food, and many others. They spend billions upon billions every year trying to get us to eat more and more food — their food in particular — and the horrifying thing is that all this advertising really, really works.
We have been convinced that the answer to almost any problem is food. You truly love someone? Buy them chocolates, or take them to a restaurant, or bake them cookies. Want to lose weight? Eat diet food. Want to get fit? Take our supplements, eat our meat, drink our milk. Want to be healthy? Eat our healthy products. Want to reward yourself? There are too many options to name here. Having a bad day? We’ve got the food for you. Don’t have time? Our food will save time. Want to save money? Buy super size and “saveâ€.
Food is the answer to everything, apparently.
And yet, we forget that food is just fuel. We need to eat a certain amount to live and maintain our weight. If we eat more than that, we will store some of that fuel as fat (or build muscle if we’re exercising). And how do we lose weight? By eating, apparently — eat diet food, drink diet shakes, eat Zone bars, eat vegetarian products, eat meat and other protein sources, eat low-fat products, eat our cereal, drink our diet soda.
But what if we … just ate less?
Despite what the food industries have convinced us, we don’t need to eat as much as we do to survive. Sure, maybe eating that much is fun, and pleasurable, and will stave off boredom, and is fun to do with friends and family, and so on. But we don’t need to eat that much. Actually, we need to eat less.
The problem isn’t that it’s so difficult to eat less. The problem is that we have a complicated relationship with food that started when we were toddlers and has become more and more complicated through the years, through endless amounts of advertising, of eating when we’re sad and lonely and happy and bored and at parties and going out and on dates and watching TV and dieting and so on.
Our complicated relationship with food makes it hard to cut back on how much we eat.
So let’s start building a new relationship with food:
Start recognizing exactly why we eat — is it just for sustenance or is our hunger often triggered by other things (boredom, socializing, pleasure, etc.)?
Start realizing the effects that advertising and the food industries have on how we think about food and how we eat.
Stop eating when we’re bored, out of habit, as a reward, for pleasure, for comfort, etc.
Only eat what and how much we need.
Find other ways to entertain ourselves, comfort ourselves, find pleasure, etc.
Find other ways to socialize than eating large amounts of food.
Stop obsessing so much about food.
End our addiction with certain foods — sugar, for example, or starches. We can still eat them, but we don’t need to eat them as much.
Think about it: how much simpler would life be if you could end this complicated relationship with food? Some changes that might happen:
You’d spend less time thinking about food.
You’d spend less time preparing food.
You’d spend less money on food.
You’d eat less.
You’d get healthier.
In the end, let’s teach ourselves some simple things: food is just fuel. Most of us need to eat less. Food isn’t love or entertainment or anything else like that. It’s just fuel.â€
from Zen Habits by Leo Babauta.
http://books.google.com/books?id=9K49AA ... utput=html
In The Keeper of the Keys Carol Flinders wrote: "For most of us, the moment of truth comes when we first awaken to how our own lives are demeaned by overconsumption. The first glimmering can come in many forms: a week in village Mexico, say, or Greece, where needs may be few, the pace slow, and relationships much warmer than those we're used to seeing. Poverty, yes, grinding poverty in many cases -- but a precious, ineffable something that we don't have, and miss sorely. The clue might be a very harsh one: a heart attack in a forty-year-old salesman, or severe asthma in his child, intensified by badly polluted air. The signals register one by one in our consciousness like those red signs in the street: 'Turn back; you're going the wrong way.'"
It doesn't only have to be overconsumption of stuff, it can be food, and the wrong kinds of food as well.
We don't need a new relationship with food. We need to turn back, because we've been going the wrong way. I think we need to go back to an old one that was driven from the home, not Madison Avenue and "Big Food." It's worked for centuries and still works very well in many areas of the world.
Where there’s a strong, home-based food culture, many of these problems with food exist to a much lesser degree or may not exist at all. The fewer “experts†there are to tell people how and what to eat, the better they seem to eat. When Big Food isn't telling us to eat a fourth meal or that we need a break today, there's an entirely different relationship with food and we don't need to be told that our bodies are temples because they're not being fed junk Food isn’t healthy or “unâ€; it’s food. It’s not demonized. Yes, it’s to sustain and nourish, but it’s also for pleasure, socialization and celebration.
