Food as Love
We eat. We came together as a species, forming our culture around the getting and sharing of food. So naturally, the giving and sharing of food became synonymous with love and nurturing, imprinted with parental feeding of offspring.
For thousands of years, our cultural rules about food, such as when and what and how to get and share and eat food were based on a reality of food being basically scarce and hard to obtain.
Food makers, breadwinners, hunters and gatherers were high status roles. Now those who make, serve, pick and farm food are among the lowest paid.
And now, food is abundant. It is still offered freely, only now, by great organized entities, called corporations, that photograph and film happy beautiful healthy people freely eating factory concoctions that are anything but healthy. These gorgeous, persuasive, and well produced movies offer a pale facsimile of love; and counterfeit nutrition!
People stagger around packed with these empty calories, but still hungry because they are suffering from slow malnutrition, yet paradoxically their condition is often combined with obesity, and they are looking for love in many of the wrong places.
Our instincts and cultural traditions still drive us to look for love by food sharing, but now, the way to survive and thrive is reversed. Now, the best way to find and give and share love is to refrain from eating. When a well known health and enlightenment teacher was asked for general advice on how Americans can be healthy, he replied, “don’t eat the food!”
Fasting is as important as feasting, yet we do a daily orgy of feasting due to the unprecedented availability of these colorful faux foods, yet rarely do we stop eating, and give the body a rest. Even those of us, myself included, who eat nothing but healthy foods, find it tempting to overeat, just because to not do so requires that one override basic instincts, as well as the deep cultural overlay that screams, “Eat, eat, eat! Food is love!”
It is not that we cannot use our eating instincts for love anymore. This love now needs to be intelligently applied to growing healthy organic whole foods, from healthy, replenished soil, by conscious, well informed farmers. The love needs to be shared in the form of people coming together to eat socially without violence toward their own bodies, their planet which supports all life, and their fellow beings. This is real love, when it comes to food.
