We are gathering a list of films that deal with various aspects of food – whether in intimate family settings, or on a global political scale. Have any recommendations? Leave a comment and we’ll add more titles to our list!
Summarizing…
- being aware of how you are connected to your body when eating, sense of fullness, sense of what’s good to eat
- how does one teach such awareness to children and people who feel disconnected
- the importance of creating an atmosphere for digestion – slowing down, taking the time to eat, not eating under stress
- being conscious of food intake in terms of amount and frequency
- delving deeper into the concept of food as medicine, and which foods are medically useful in a given culture
- bearing in mind the importance of seasonality – what grows when, feeling that connection to the cycles of foods, paying attention to it, being aware that food in such a context can be an intermediary to higher consciousness
- realizing that food has historically been used as a weapon of oppression and how that can affect our food choices
- seeing the commonalities of foods and food practices between different cultures
- knowing that our food choices have a political, economic, and environmental impact, and using this awareness to try to inspire others to make changes in their lives
- understanding that thin line between food and pharmacology – how companies patent foods and their ingredients as “medicines”, no matter what their historical usage
- knowing that if your relationship with food is healthy, it is easier to live within your means, your health is better, and your overall state of mind is more grounded
- the ever-present conflict between the scientific/medical model of what one “should” eat versus a culturally/environmentally-aware way of “knowing” what to eat – analyzing this dichotomy can be a trigger for self-study
- the importance of not dwelling on the negative aspects of how our food is produced, sold, and consumed, but rather being constructive in what we say, how we act, etc.
Personal Relationships with Food – Sensitivities and “Knowing” what to eat…
- Story of attempting to eat soy and soy foods while eating a vegan diet, and ignoring a feeling that it wasn’t “right” for the body. Finally acknowledging that soy is not a native part of the ancestral European diet, and relinquishing the need to what is “healthy” in the popular, marketing sense.
- Reading Diet for a Small Planet and undergoing the process of becoming a vegetarian; giving up sugar and experiencing the boost in energy and well-being that resulted. Undergoing muscle testing for food sensitivities, and discovering that a continuous consumption of corn chips had led to a corn sensitivity.
- Living with a constitution that has trouble digesting proteins – develop bumps on the skin from eating meat or dairy products, as well as spicy foods; now rely on grains and legumes – digest oatmeal especially well
- Story of growing up eating with a focus on quantity and not quality. Always ate very quickly while working as a cook in a restaurant as a young man, and that hurried approach carried over into adulthood. It has taken many years to learn to slow down and savor food as it is eaten. Also learned over the years to eat more seasonally – warmer, heavier foods in winter, lighter foods with less meat in summer. Time of day is also important – always have breakfast, and a large midday meal will cause sluggishness and tiredness.
- Eating seasonally in summer is made much easier when getting produce from a CSA farm share, but children eat less seasonally since there are certain foods they want year-round. Noticed that the day feels much better if breakfast is some sort of native ethnic food, like oatmeal, than something less native and more processed. Cutting out sugar from the family’s diet and learning to bake with honey, and maple and agave syrups. Used to drink gallons of coffee, but now feel very affected by caffeine. Crave chocolate often even though it leads to feeling unwell.
- Had a grandmother who warned against eating tomatoes without every really explaining why, but now know that many people have a sensitivity to nightshade vegetables. Sometimes wonder if mother would not have developed diabetes if she had never left
- Story of experiencing the emotional aspects of eating – has spent a lifetime taking care of others, children, an elderly mother, etc. When stressed get the urge to eat, especially comfort foods, bread, and chocolate. Have a full appreciation of the extent to which anxiety and depression affect eating.
- Isolation is something we continuously have to look at – “humans are healers of one another” – we are constantly dealing with aloneness
Today our CHAT team held a blind taste-test of various foods, some more exotic, and others more traditional. As part of our discussions about how we experience food on a sensory level, we had participants try foods while blindfolded, and describe their thoughts and feelings along the way. People found that eating when not taking in visual information heightened other perceptions, such as taste, smell and texture.
Here are the foods from the tasting:
How Did Your Grandparents Shop For/Grow Food?
- Some grandparents came from farming backgrounds, some came from cities, but still made food from scratch. Some used store-bought foods, but still used whole foods instead of processed products. Used classical American approaches to cuisine – didn’t necessarily eat native cultural foods.
- Class often comes into play in people’s food and shopping choices. The emergence of convenience foods after WWII for example – these foods were seen as desirable and obtainable for wealthier people. People living in the Depression had more of a subsistence, make-do approach to eating.
- Grandparents engaged in common practices of the time, like going to separate stores (butchers, bakers, etc.) to get foods; saw markets develop in the 1950s where all the food was under one roof. This prompted the mothers’ generation in turn to jump on the convenience bandwagon – fish sticks, boxed cake mixes, transitioning from having an icebox to a refrigerator. Remember a time when milk was delivered.
- It wasn’t that long ago that meat was not considered a primary food – it became more available to the average person after refrigeration and transportation improved.
- A recurring theme is the impact of the depression on values surrounding food – lard sandwiches in hard time, adding lots of water to orange juice made from concentrate, Scandinavian milk porridge, etc.)
- The excitement of novel foods in the 50s – Tang, Hamburger Helper, Space Food Sticks – “If the astronauts eat it, it must be healthy”. This exemplifies the enormous change that took place from the grandmothers’ generation to the mothers’ generation.
- Part of the backlash against cooking and making food from scratch came from the women’s movement. It vilified cooking as a form of servitude, and we still feel the repercussions to this day – women still struggle to balance careers with a healthy relationship with food.
- Coming from the Sugar Belt of Kenya: one grandfather did all the cooking while the grandmother did none; grew up with two cultures’ food traditions;
- OVERARCHING THEMES: status and class as determinants of food choices, status-issues causing certain foods to have an “aspirational” connotation, gender politics in the context of food and preparation habits; notions of “male” and “female” foods are tied to cultural values about gender (in Kenya, women do not eat gizzards because they are viewed as resembling parts of the female anatomy); gender as a determinant of the order of eating (males first, females second) in some cultures.
- CHANGES TO MAKE: eat less meat as a way to conserve natural resources; try to garden more; study more about other cultures’ foods; try to make one’s diet more varied with different foods
- NEXT WEEK: personal relationships to food and eating, paying attention to your own body, the taste of food and how much food appreciation is tied to taste and smell, cultural habits of what is “good” to eat
TOPIC: Participants’ Personal Response to Food as Medicine
Other notions/ideas:
- most cultures have traditions of periodic/seasonal cleansing and fasting; tied to spiritual beliefs about renewal and restoring balance
- soup as a healthy food that is consumed every day in many cultures
- Breakfast – we KNOW it’s important, no on really thinks breakfast doesn’t make a difference in how you feel and function – so WHY don’t we eat it, or place more emphasis on eating it?
- Ideas for future discussions – have mini-groups to discuss different ailments and how they are related to diet – insomnia, low energy, GI trouble, high cholesterol, etc.
TOPIC: Food as Medicine
“Mechanization of Nature”
- food systems as controllable, standardizable entities
- dogma of “improving” on nature
- mechanization confronts nature, causing an inevitable breakdown with ensuing problems
- medicine, nutrition and food technology struggle to control problems caused by mechanization, leading to more problems
- science works in isolated contexts, without awareness or connection to wider social, environmental or economic systems
Cultivating Different “Ways of Knowing”
- what feels “right” to eat today?
- Is there an instinctive ancestral knowledge?
- If we cannot rely on modern messages of what to eat, HOW do we guide ourselves in other ways?
- How could/would a spiritual connection to food inform our consumption choices?
- How do you convey medicinal knowledge of food via a cookbook without simply listing ingredients and biochemical properties – this leads to an IDEA: a Workbook/Recipe Book
- The modern legal approach differentiates between Food, Medicine and Dietary Supplements – this conveys the notion that food inherently cannot be medicine
- There is a difference between “preservatives” in traditional food preparation methods vs. modern preservatives
Cultural Examples:
- the price of Ethiopian red pepper went up after it began to be used and marketed as food coloring
- millet & sorghum porridge is used as medicine in different African cultures
- bitter leaves & herbs are used medicinally throughout the world
- pumpkin in
- honey is used medicinally throughout the world, in Kenyan culture it symbolizes the sweetness of life, in Indian Ayurvedic medicine it is thought to have powerful healing properties
- fermented milk with bitter herbs are a medicine in
- all cultures have “routine” foods for maintaining health, in addition to “special” foods for specific maladies; in
- many European countries use fermented vegetables for the maintenance of digestive health, for example sauerkraut and pickled beets
- tea is viewed as having medicinal properties everywhere it is drunk; in
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- laverbread, otherwise known as “Welshman’s Caviar” is a boiled, gelatinous seaweed – traditionally rolled in oat flour and fried with bacon, the Welsh view it as a general cure-all due to its high mineral and iodine content
- many of the herbs that are used in daily cooking (parsley, rosemary, etc.) have medicinal properties
- Many cultures use the seasonal and energetic properties of foods to decide how to use them medicinally – for example, Ayurvedic medicine uses different honeys produced at varying times of the year for specific illnesses
- fermented honey, or mead is used as a celebratory beverage in many cultures, while also having medicinal properties
