Food is Love, Food is Grief: Healing Our Relationship With Food So We Can Heal The World
After publishing my story of my crazy path through a lifetime of nutrition and diet dogma (if you missed it, read it here)...I got a lot of different reactions, just as I expected. Some people felt very seen and supported by what I had to say. Some felt a bit threatened (which is fine – we don’t all see the world the same way and that’s 100% okay). And some had lots of technical and existential questions to ponder.
For those who are sensitive, empathetic, and deeply compassionate, food is a hard topic. It’s confusing, pushes our “life feels uncertain” buttons, and asks us to participate in death. It’s really, really easy to get lured into food philosophies that feel utopian and those “Just Follow The Instructions In This Box” sorts of formulaic eating theories.
I could write a prescriptive essay on How to Eat Like a Human, complete with charts and graphs and mind-numbing data. But I’m not going to (at least not for now). There are a thousand people in the world who have already done that. Or they’ve done their part.
And honestly, there is no one way to eat like a human anyway. There are many ways, with some basic nutrient guidelines (hint: minerals, minerals, minerals). But there is no one way. We are each biologically/chemically and ancestrally unique individuals starting from different places in life.
I’m very much a science geek and love to dive into the technical details of why some foods work and others don’t. But at this point, I’m much more interested in a meta conversation about why what we eat matters…to us, to our communities, and to the future of this planet.
I believe that food links us to other human beings, to the sentient beings we eat (yes, I’m an animist if you haven’t gathered that yet), to the soil that nourishes our food and in turn also nourishes us, to the ubiquitous water in its ever-changing structure and wisdom, to the very ways in which we stop to admire a breathtaking ancient tree.
No, I’m not going to toss you a linen loincloth and ask you to join me in a cave in the woods. I’m a super practical and functional person (though I have mad respect for people who have primitive skills as their passion).
We are all unique beings in this globalized world. We aren’t like the humans that came before.
Our villages are fragmented.
Our beliefs are highly unique from one another’s.
We have stories we can relate to, and stories that sound foreign.
Our ancestors came from many places, so our community roots aren’t cohesive.
We’re all carrying ancestral grief and baggage that’s different from one another’s.
And this extends to our food and the way we perceive and relate to food.
Food Is Our Second Mother
Food is the second place where we learn about our bodies. Our mother, and our dependent, co-regulational and immediate relationship with her, is our first.
Food is our first autonomous relationship with our bodies. It’s the way we learn to nourish ourselves, separate from our mothers. It’s one of the first vehicles through which we learn about our culture. It’s where we are socialized, where we learn the gender norms/roles for our culture, and where we learn whether we hold value (or not) in our culture’s hierarchy of humans and animals.
Food is, of course, a neutral substance. But the human relationship to food is always and forever LOVE. (And also often its shadow-y counterpart, Control.)
We feed each other because we want to bond, connect, express our love for each other. Language doesn’t carry from culture to culture, but when someone who speaks another language offers you food, you can be damn sure that they are offering you love.
As small children, we feel free in food (unless we live in a family that heavily restricts food from an early age). But as we age, we are socialized to increasingly more toxic beliefs around food. Especially if we inhabit a female body.
Not all cultures and communities are this way. Many cultures teach nourishment and fulfillment to women and young girls. Many cultures want their girls and women to be fed highly nourishing foods (and plenty of them!).
But we come from a long-standing tradition of restriction, deprivation, and self-flagellation in the name of being worthy of God. (Interpretation: recognition in society as a “pious” and “good” person.)
It’s many centuries old and we don’t even realize where it is coming from or why it’s here (unless we take the time to study and learn these old stories – yes, I’ll be telling them in future essays).
We don’t emphasize nourishment above all else. Instead, we hyper-focus on women who are unnaturally thin, unnaturally young looking, and forever controlling their bodies.
And every damn thing around us highlights this obsession…
From supplements and products promoted to women, to surgeries and cosmetic procedures; from the newest weight-loss trends, to the next trendy food group we should all stop eating…to clothes that only fit the most tall and thin (which isn’t the most common body type).
Women and girls are taught from a young age in this particular patriarchal society that they must EARN their worthiness through how they look. That they must EARN respect through behaviors that cast them in the light of the Good Woman.
We are taught from our earliest ages that we are NOT inherently worthy. This is something that must be earned through deprivation, pain, and everlasting discomfort. Through perpetual insecurity, anxiety, and the worry that we won’t ever achieve the gold standard for beautiful and womanly goodness.
This culture preys upon our very-normal discomfort in our bodies when puberty hits, and then triggers that insecurity for the rest of our lives, instead of allowing us to grow into and learn to love our beautiful UNIQUE WOMANLY bodies as adults, as we are naturally meant to. It highlights our differences and encourages us to seek sameness, leading to the loss of recognition of beauty diversity and reduced capacity for radical bodily acceptance.
Food is Worthiness
The deepest message buried in food is whether or not we are worthy. Spend some time carefully listening to the coded language woven through how women talk about food (and this is a highly female thing).
Friends who talk about working out so they can “earn” that ice cream cone. The comments about denial, feeling deeply uncomfortable in their skin, wishing they could just wear a bathing suit without panicking or comparing to other women’s bodies. Talking about avoiding treats as “being good.” Powering through blood sugar crashes and starvation diets just so we can keep to our low-carb or dangerously low-calorie food plans, then joking about it with each other as though it’s a normal way to go about life.
But even deeper than that is the common experience of wondering whether we even deserve to eat.
There are trillions upon trillions of beings on this planet right now.
And when I say beings, I mean every single thing here on this planet with us…
Mammals
Birds
Reptiles
Insects
Spiders
Plants
Fungi
Trees
Rocks
Soil
Water
Bacteria & microbes
Every last atom that exists.
And inherent in the cycle of life is eating food. Every single being on this planet (and in the whole universe truthfully) consumes something else in order to exist, and eventually becomes the thing consumed by another being.
We are all just sharing atoms over and over again. (Which is beautiful, when you can finally look at it from that perspective.)
We truly are the trees, the clouds, and the birds flying overhead… from a biological perspective, as well as a spiritual/soul perspective.
“When we look deeply into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds there could be no rain, and without rain there would be no flower.”
And for most beings, consuming life just happens in a neutral way. No judgment or anxiety about it. It just is.
But humans have a peculiar way of being in the world. We have these highly unique parts of our brains that allow us to pause and reflect. We’re able to consider the past and the future, not just the present. It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s the superpower that makes us the destined servants of life (paired with those incredible opposable thumbs that can help so many who don’t have them!).
And so we sit with this heaviness that is life and death. We sit on the precipice of both. We look behind and ahead. And we self-reflect.
And we start to wonder…
Why me?
Why do I get to live when the multiple beings (animals, vegetables, minerals) on my plate don’t get to?
What makes me more worthy of life than those that I eat?
And when you take away our default indigenous worldview of animism (where all beings are seen as having equal value, instead of our modern hierarchy with humans at the top), add in the restrictions of archaic Judeo-Christianity, and factor in our own perpetual existential crises…
You start to understand why we don’t feel worthy.
When you start to unpack the loss of matriarchal societies and ways of being in the world. When you factor in the highly toxic patriarchal societies that have taken over the world throughout the past 10,000+ years. When you start to take a hard and heavy look at how commodified women are throughout the world and throughout recent history…
You start to understand why we don’t feel worthy.
Reclaiming Our Worthiness
Every person will need to embark on their own journey toward worthiness, because we are all starting from different places.
For some, it simply means they realize their worthiness and get on with healing.
For others, it means spending years in therapy, in holistic nutritional counseling, and through releasing/walking away from toxic relationships around them.
No way is the right or wrong way. There is only Your Way that you need to follow. Don’t let anyone sell you on some one-size-fits-all process (that is a very American, capitalist, contrived idea that never holds up in the real world).
Part of reclaiming worthiness is re-educating yourself. That means learning about how the body actually functions, from multiple perspectives (western science, eastern medicine, current + ancient indigenous worldviews, and others). It means releasing the need to chase the utopian mirage of the Garden of Eden, and instead to start seeing the world for the many complexities that it holds.
It means to start challenging your biases (we all have them, as it is the default way the human brain is socialized for safety). To pick up some theory you cling to and begin to wonder “What is on the other side of this story?”
To begin to see indigenous cultures as simply other human beings. Who we can learn SO MUCH from. But who also do not have all the answers. And who have changed many of their traditional practices over the past 100+ years in response to globalization. And whose cultures are also often based on toxic patriarchal norms that don’t benefit women, babies, and children. And who construct the world in their mind’s eye in ways we could never, ever begin to conceptualize (simply because we have a human brain that loves staying within its own socialized domain, not because we are lacking in some way).
We need to stop romanticizing every damn thing, creating short-sighted thought patterns…and instead start to become the lovers of Nuance and Complexity.
Nothing is ever either/or, but rather Both, And.
As someone who considers herself as recovering from a childhood cult (whether or not a religion is categorized as a cult is irrelevant as cult-mentality can grow out of any belief system)... I am keenly aware of cult-like behaviors.
And the world of holistic nutrition (and other seemingly “good” social movements) is full of cult-like behaviors. Creeds. Mantras. Strict guidelines. All-consuming identities. An unwillingness to read or learn about anything that might contradict our closely-held belief systems. Strict avoidance of anything that might spark cognitive dissonance. Anger and denial that the “other side” has any wisdom that we don’t have. Attacking others for different perspectives that we don’t agree with.
And these cult-like behaviors are rooted in our evolutionary need for safety. Security. Predictableness.
We are not wrong for engaging in these behaviors. We simply struggle to hold the overwhelming sense of uncertainty that plays in all corners of the universe.
But, by giving in to this evolutionary need for All Things To Make Sense, we close ourselves down to the beauty and power of Expansiveness.
We play small. We believe that we are only allowed to occupy a teeny-tiny corner of this thing called Life. We hope no one will notice us. That we can get by without too much suffering. That we can avoid causing others any discomfort. That if we just mirror others enough, we can hide in the safety of their acceptance.
Food is one important door to finding our way to expansiveness and permission to LIVE FULLY ALIVE.
Food is Grief
Life is grief. Full stop.
Our culture SUCKS at acknowledging, holding, processing, and honoring grief.
But every single one of us will experience grief at many points in our lives.
The end of a relationship.
The end of an identity.
The end of The Way Things Were, to make space for The Way Things Are Now.
The death of someone we love (expected and unexpected).
The birth of someone we love or a new relationship (and the death of how things were before).
The loss of physical ability (temporarily or permanently).
The aging process.
A relationship with our mother/father that can never be truly healthy (lack of stable primal attachment).
Children that stop needing us as intensely and move on to lives we can’t quite relate to.
Children, family, lovers, friends, co-workers who deeply disappoint us.
Facing our own looming mortality and the end of relationship with our beautiful bodies.
The loss of a very-wanted baby or a child we loved with every cell of our beings.
The loss of our pets that we bonded to in ways that our society doesn’t fully acknowledge as a true loss.
Big losses. Micro-losses. Losses that are bound up with beautiful gains.
Grief is all around us, all the time.
And our culture’s way of dealing with it is to pretend that it just doesn’t exist. Or to give someone a formula for how they’re supposed to grieve (coupled with a formulaic timeline). Or to tell someone what can be categorized as grief and what can’t. (Hint: all of these formulas are at odds with the real human experience.)
And grief is not exempt from food. Even when we aren’t tuned in and can’t feel it on the surface.
Grief is laced into every bite, sitting next to the experience of joy.
Grief for the beings that willingly or unwillingly gave up their lives so we could continue to live.
Grief for the ecosystems that have been destroyed in the name of industrialization (and the spreading of this pattern across the globe to far-flung places).
Grief for the ecosystems that have been destroyed over food trends: factories, monocropping industrial “farms,” indigenous cultural ways that have been overturned in order to grow acres and acres of soy or grains, manipulation of low-resources settings where people are monetarily dependent on supporting industrialized countries’ constantly changing food whims, manipulation of our own food desires in order to create dependence on non-sustainable “foods” and greenwashing to make us feel like we’re doing something good (when the reality is we are participating in mass destruction of our planet and other cultures).
Grief for our loss of relationship to food: where it comes from, how it grows, how it’s harvested, what it smells like in the heat of the summer rooted in its native soil, the oldest cultural stories about that particular food, the shared burden of killing and butchering an animal (the joys and sorrows that are inherently laced into the process), and our own bone-deep understanding of how we fit into the web of life.
Grief for the ubiquitous nature of disembodiment and how it’s spreading globally (and our participation in that process).
Grief for the disenfranchisement of women from nourishment (and what that truly means).
Grief for the relationships we could have had with our bodies, and the years we lost to self-harming behaviors.
Grief for the body issues we’ve created through our regimens of food restriction and self-imposed starvation, and grief for the processes we have to go through to heal them.
Grief for the times we went hungry because of poverty or ate industrial non-foods because it was cheaper (and all we could afford) – and we were oh-so-hungry for basic calories.
Grief for the many who go hungry every single day because we’ve constructed a global monetary system that prioritizes the wealthy, separating the Haves from the Have Nots (and sending so many women and children to bed hungry every single night…).
Grief for the animals who are pushed through the industrialized factory farm, experiencing their own versions of misery, suffering, and losses, without being seen and without compassion or the required gratitude.
Grief for the loss of the autonomous family and community farms that nourished the soil, created independence for the everyday person, and kept us in our bodies and in the web of life – that we built our festivals around, our spiritual practices, and our shared sense of community (shared foodways was always at the center of community).
Grief for the experiences we DON’T get to share with our children – that connect them to their ancestors, the land, and the beautiful/difficult cycles of life and death.
Grief for the loss of clean oceans and lakes where our ancestors spent so much time diving, fishing, exploring, and nourishing every single person’s bodies in their communities with unpolluted sea creatures and plants – and the toxicity that current aquatic creatures have to abide constantly because of our demand for luxury desires.
Grief for the ways of life we can still feel in our bones, but we can’t see or experience in the world around us or in our current lives.
Sitting With Grief
The only way to “deal with” grief is to simply be with it. To befriend it. To let it teach us. To let it wash through us, again and again (sometimes at such unexpected moments). To find someone loving to witness it with us.
The only way is through. We can’t skip grief.
And so we approach the table of life holding both grief and joy in our hands. We sit down to our meals to share love with others, with humility for the complexity of life, and appreciation for all that is shared.
We don’t take our food for granted – we practice stubborn gratitude in the face of the mundane.
We practice embodiment – reclaiming our beautiful bodies instead of tossing them aside with disgust.
We practice worthiness – truly believing that we exist for a good reason and we must not waste our one precious life.
We vote for the world we want by participating in what we want more of.
We support small farms who work their asses off to change the status quo (often at the detriment of their financial security and physical health – their work is a sacrificial gift).
We sit with death, loss, grief, and we stop running from it.
We practice radical acceptance of this complicated life and the things we cannot change about the nature of life (and we find release and rest in finally letting go of needing to control it).
We stop judging life, Mother Nature, other cultures, our own culture, and ourselves.
We practice deep forgiveness – of our ancestors that made unhealthy/unjust choices, of the past and current power-hungry elite whose agendas are anti-life and anti-wellbeing, of Mother Nature who gives and takes life – and we don’t forgive these things for the benefit of others, but for our own wellbeing.
We learn critical analysis and begin to engage in healthy skepticism – we learn about logical fallacies and mix this understanding into our reverence for life.
We learn about others' worldviews and begin to fall in love with the rich tapestry of human experience (and deepen our humility and commitment to truly understanding that we don’t have it all figured out).
We push ourselves out of our comfort zones and stop hiding in perceived safety.
We spend time practicing un-normalizing everything we see around us – we create cognitive dissonance with the normalization of industrial food practices (even those shiny natural food stores we love so much) and get uncomfortable with politically powerful and demanding/loud agendas that keep us distracted from the real work at hand.
We recognize the love that is imbued into a meal offered by another person – and we stop rejecting those foods on the basis of dogmatic practices – we start saying YES to love.
We start to actually listen to our bodies and how they beg for nourishment, acceptance, and caring – and we give them what they are begging for: REAL NOURISHING FOOD.
We realize that intellectualizing the shit out of everything turns off our ability to access the wisdom of our bodies – and so we practice sitting in silence and humbly listening.
We stop shutting down our emotions (because of fear or toxic positivity), and we stop encouraging others to “just be positive” – and we start actually feeling our feelings so we can end the patterns of turning to food as a dysfunctional coping mechanism (and we learn healthy ways to support others in feeling their feelings with loving witnessing and sisterhood).
We heal our relationships to money, especially as women – so we can commit to feeling true abundance (and freedom!!!), creating that abundance in our lives, feeding our bodies and minds with abundance, paying small farms and artisans for their soul creations (thereby reducing our money-voting for industrial systems), and creating nervous-system-safe spaces where other women can also heal in our presence (women with more abundance is the way we reclaim our feminine power and heal the world).
We commit to healing, we connect with other women who are also healing, and we surround ourselves with those who are more healed than we are – so we can attune our nervous systems to these beautiful humans, learn from them, and re/teach our bodies what safety feels like.
When we embark on the journey of healing our relationship with food, we also commit to healing our relationship with Life. We dance with the complexities of existence. We admit that we actually don’t know what the heck is going on in this beautiful Universe. We surrender to this unknowing and we start to make peace with resting in the flow of What Is and What Could Be.
We let go of our need to control. And we invite in the opportunity for expansiveness and deep embodiment. Our most ancient and wise ancestors can finally speak through us (as they are part of our cells’ memory and deeply embedded in our souls). And so we start to heal the fissures of cultures that have been at war for thousands of years.
Food is never “just” food.
Food is God and food is Love (which, ultimately, is the same thing).
And good food is damn delicious and makes us feel like the warm, contented children that we still are in our core selves.
By reading this, you’ve committed to start expanding your relationship with food… and for that I commend you.
I do NOT have all the answers, and I never will. None of us do. (We are each bio/socially-unique individuals…) But collectively, we have so MUCH wisdom to share. We absolutely need each other.
We need to be open to learning. To bravely share our deepest wisdoms (freely, without gatekeeping, undermining our intelligence, or pandering to “expert” culture). We need to learn to be discerning and teach each other how to take what is good for us from various philosophies and leave what is not good for us (individually and collectively).
I am always at my core a deep optimist. I believe that this bizarre culture we’re living in currently is all part of a process of learning for Life, and we’re uniquely suited to this point in time as assistants in helping to move humanity toward something really, really good. There is a grief inherent in this role, as we will never actually see that someday culture of healing. But we can rest easy knowing that we helped to bring healing to future generations and to this magnificent planet that feeds us so well in Her grand and mysterious intelligence.
And so we begin, one step, moment, day, week, month, year at a time. On and on, until we die a peaceful death of contentment, feeling fulfilled by our choices and commitments to life. And feeling deeply nourished, body, mind, and soul (and leaving a trail of abundant nourishment in our wake for others).
Will you join me?
If you’re tired of diet culture swirling around in your mind, driving you crazy, you might benefit from a 1:1 session with me discussing how you can create more nourishment in your mind, body, and life. You can book a session here.
