On Food

A few days ago, Dandelion was pretending in her playtime activities. I was outside weeding and she stole away to our neighbor's porch, dubbed it her "home" and started "cooking" breakfast and all manner of foods for me.

"Here are some potatoes, Mom."

"Mom, do you want applesauce or pasta. Pasta? I don't have any pasta. You can have applesauce."

I realized as I watched her that much of her pretending has to do with food. Either she's pretending to eat, cook, clean up or serve it to someone else. She loves eating and always seems to be the last child still munching on snacks at playgroup or much to her mother's chagrin, asking her playmate's mother (without having been offered) if she can have a snack.

At first, I must admit I was a little anxious about this because I had a poor relationship to food in my younger years. I've often feared that she would struggle with the same things and that, like many women in our culture, she would hate her body.

Perhaps this was too big of a leap to make from pretending with food to struggles with body image but that just indicates my level of worry about this issue for her.

And then, I had a thought.

What if her playacting indicates a purer relationship to food? What if we, as humans, are supposed to think about food a lot?

I imagine that our ancestors who had no electricity and no trucks or airplanes to carry their food to them from across the state, the country and the world, spent a good deal of their energy on food. It was in the planting, the weeding, the harvesting, the building of the fire to cook, the preparing and cooking, the eating and the cleaning up afterwards. Their energy was in the storing of the food in a place cooled by ice that had been cut and dragged by horses from the frozen river and then covered in saw dust. It was in the pickling and brining, the drying and dehydrating.

Their lives revolved around food. They thought about it a good deal.

And that got me thinking: maybe we were meant to think about our food in such a holistic way. Maybe we were created to have this integrated partnership with food.

But we don't have that relationship to food anymore, do we?

We've lost many parts of the whole and some of us are left with no more than eating. In a culture plagued by eating disorders, fad diets, body issues, heart disease, diabetes and other food-related illnesses, could a solution be to spend not less but more time with our food? I'm not suggesting we disconnect our stoves, microwaves and refrigerators and cook our food on a fire. Nor am I suggesting that we can all live on farms and grow our own food (after all, farmers need customers). I know that our lives are busy with things that are, in many cases, more important than food. But what if we prioritized our food so that it was more important to us than entertainment? What I mean by entertainment is not that we refrain from participating in artistic endeavors or that we isolate ourselves from any type of fun. I believe wholeheartedly that art is one way that God shows himself to his creatures. But what if we spent less time on mindless things, slowed down with our food and took one step toward mending this fractured relationship? Perhaps a different type of enjoyment would emerge from this simplicity.

Just because I live on a farm doesn't mean I have stopped struggling with my broken relationship to food. But what I am discovering is that there are great rewards in entering into a relationship with food that connects me to its source, that literally moves my body with the seasons, that places my hands upon soil and seed and, at the very least, that urges me to care about who is caring (or not caring) for my food.

The rewards have been surprising and meaningful.