Developing consciousness, of food

Looking back over my first two blogs on food and consciousness I can see it isn’t just a jog down memory lane. There are many different dimensions to a conscious/unconscious relationship to food and I hit on quite a few of them:

Culture – one of the biggest influences on our food identity

Social responsibility – which includes a huge array of ethical questions all directly connected (whether we like it or not) to the consequences of the foods we choose to eat

The rational, scientific, material orientation – eat it because it’s good for you, or because it’s fuel

Or, the gourmet/gourmand sensory reference point, eat it because it has to be the most wonderful thing you have ever tasted…

And finally the mysterious, unknowable, sacred dimension of food, the transmission of life force and the divine, the fact that we depend on the consumption of other life forms for our own lives.

And I am sure there is more, but even the word food is so underneath the radar of our conscious selves, it’s more a sound, pre-thought and primal…that sound is desire, need, survival….food enters us, becomes us, assuages our unspoken fears, fills the scary emptiness of our insecurities….receiving food is probably our very first experience of love, pleasure and happiness. You can’t think about and be objective about something that close, that intimate, something that basic to our very being, that strips us of our supremacy and individualism, makes us just one more component of a very living system, dependent on every other component for that system to exist. You can’t be objective about something this intimate, unless you get very conscious.