a body detached from it’s stomach is like a body without a soul
Posted by Meg
Yesterday I asked of the Post’s Young Lives at Risk series: When did people stop caring about what their food tastes like, and how it makes them feel? They didn’t answer the question in so many words (instead we got a feature on fat camps that kind of appalled me), but I think they’re starting to dance around it.
Somewhat detached from the series, Sally Squire’s regular column, the Lean Plate Club, talks about her trip to Yorktown High’s home ec class. The students are all loving it. The guys are having a great time learning to cook for themselves, and they actually outnumber the girls in the particular class Squires visited.
One student’s mom says, “It’s perfectly fine for him to learn to cook on his own and not make his mom cook all night every night,” said Sukhbaatar Sanjdorj, whose son, Turmunkh, 17, is in one of Molle’s [the teacher] classes. On Mother’s Day, Turmunkh prepared chicken fajitas for his mother. He also regularly makes spanikopita, the Greek spinach pie. “He never ate spinach before,” said Sanjdorj. “Now he even goes out and buys all the different ingredients.”
Buys the ingredients? As in, knows what vegetables actually look like? Understands how things combine to make a finished product? Whoa, revolutionary.
My foodie and I are totally addicted to this BBC America show You Are What You Eat with Gillian McKeith. She’s fabulous. It takes “Britain’s biggest eaters” and cuts them down to size with better nutrition, a little exercise, and dry British sass. Nearly every episode, on the soon-to-be-reformed eater’s first trip to the grocery to buy real food–they have no idea what actual vegetables look like. They have to ask for help to identify anything more exotic than an onion it seems. On another couple episodes, Gillian takes her charges to the farm to see veg growing in the ground. The less detached you are from your food, the more up close and personally you know it, the more likely you are to care about what goes into your body. I won’t even get into her laying out of the weekly eatings in the beginning of the show…
It’s the same with PETA’s Meet Your Meat series: you see what happens to the meat you eat before you eat it, and (they hope) you won’t want to anymore. (It’s almost worked for me–I’m a cage free egg buyer, at the very least).
So then, I posit that if you’re not cooking your food, or at least understanding where it comes from, you’re less likely to care about what you’re eating because you’re too detached from the process. Get intimate with your food, love you food, and in turn, love yourself.
