It both saddens and troubles me to hear our son's preschool teacher say that one of the most difficult lessons modern day toddlers have is to sit together and eat family style. Setting the table, eating with utensils, and not rushing are new experiences for many. Most of them eat by unwrapping fast food in their car seats in a traveling car.
I also am amazed to hear a story from a friend of mine who cleans houses for a living: "I no longer clean many kitchens. I just dust them." Meanwhile empty take-out pizza cartons, microwave dinner containers, and leftover bags from fast food restaurants spill out of the trash can in front of the house.
From having worked with many women patients in my practice over a decade, I notice that the women who remain keepers of home and hearth--growing, gathering, and cooking for their families--are also the healthiest, being most resilient of both mind and body. Those who have not let go of their passion for gardening and cooking are also happily responsive to the spiritual nature of their lives. I believe there is a physical and psychological congruence among such people and that these individuals are better able to ride the increasingly volatile waves of societal and personal change. Sadly, many others are caught in the almost impossible juggling of career and home. More often than not, the home front suffers. And so do these women, who report feeling fragmented, stressed, and out of touch with both their families and themselves.
Growing and gathering whole foods and spending long hours cooking and baking restore one's spirit. Our depressions and anxieties are transformed in the slow stirring of a soup or the rhythmic kneading of bread. Cooking ties us into the ever present cycles of life, grounds us, and allows us to pass on love and consciousness to our families and friends via the food we prepare.
The healing of our psyches and bodies begins when we turn over our first spade of soil and it continues when we gather our own apples from the trees we planted and slice them into a pie. There is a continuation of care demonstrated here--we are planting, nurturing, and caring for the earth, and the fruits of this harvest, in turn, care for us.
In naturopathic medicine there is a very basic understanding: "The further we get from nature, the sicker we'll become." It is becoming increasingly difficult in our culture to remain connected with nature. Our suburban homes are on overly concreted lots with sprayed, sterile landscapes. We are so busy acquiring the "next thing," there is no longer value placed on the slowness of a walk in the woods or a swim in a cool lake on a hot day. We have simply not made time to develop or maintain our personal relationship with nature.
Then we go to the grocery store, where we are often met by the smell of chemicals the minute we step inside. The shelves are stocked with overly processed, artificially dyed, irradiated, genetically engineered foods which are chock full of preservatives, additives, and fillers.
One of my friends who is a spokesperson for a major whole foods distributor did an experiment. She bought a hamburger and box of fries from a very well known fast food establishment. She then left them in their original packaging on her desk and, as of nine months now, there is no sign of decay. It comes as no surprise that embalmers these days don't have to use nearly the quantities of embalming fluids as in times past; average Americans have already partially embalmed themselves through their dietary choices.
I see our cultural obsession with speeding through life, combined with remaining isolated and detached from nature and its cycles and gulping down processed "convenience foods," as yet another indication of the wide scale dismantling of our society. We don't realize how shaky the ground is that we are standing upon.
By contrast, Italy for the past twenty years has witnessed a grassroots movement called "Slow Food." This is an economic, social, and political reaction to fast food and its destructive effects on local culture and community. Italy has one of the lowest percentages of fast food restaurants in the world: only 4% of the total restaurants in the country. The manifesto of the Slow Food movement stresses that the modern person must slow down, cook more, and socialize with family and friends. It urges one to live in the happy intersection of nature and community or become extinct in short order.
In my opinion, the pendulum of "convenience" has swung too far and until this is recognized, there will be a continual erosion of culture, community, and the psycho/spiritual health of the American public. We really can't call it "the American way of LIFE" anymore.
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
--Virginia Woolf
Deborah Turvey has practiced naturopathic medicine for over a decade in the Southwest. She, her husband, and their three-year-old son now reside in Eugene, Oregon, where they are busy creating an urban permaculture site. Deborah has turned her focus to patient education, teaching courses on "Food, Community and Culture" and offering healthy gourmet cooking classes as Pepperberries Cooking School in Eugene. She can be reached at (541) 434-6027 or [email protected] .
©2002 Talking Leaves
Spring 2002
Volume 12, Number 1
Food and Spirit, Grief and Hope