That Old-Time Religion

In a recent post, I talked about getting outside of the food culture. As I noted, the food culture is a sneaky little beast, hard to see or hear or smell. It’s like the air that surrounds us: we take it in without much thought. In fact, the only time we generally think about air is when it’s absent. Which I suppose explains much of the distress in my life these last few years!

It’s not easy to get yourself free of the food culture’s grasp, partly because of its invisibility, but also because it’s so ingrained in us. Our beliefs about food are not conscious choices, deliberately debated and chosen, but notions that have seeped into the deepest folds of our subconscious brain from the time we came into being. How many of us recall crying as a small child and being offered a cookie to make it all better? And before that, everything you learned pre-memory, being held and comforted by your mother as she fed you? Is it any wonder that food is so strongly connected to feelings of love and comfort and an unshakable sense that all is right with the world?

In many ways, the food culture is like a religion. Think about that for a minute. A religion asks you to have faith in a set of beliefs about how the world works. It explains what is right and what is wrong. It gives you rituals to celebrate and observe that which is sacred. Doesn’t this describe much of how we relate to food?

The beliefs of the American food religion include things like the Food Pyramid and its obsession with whole grains. That ice cream, cakes and pies are acceptable foods as long as they are eaten in moderation, perhaps as an occasional treat, without ever defining what is meant by “moderation” or “occasional.” That chocolate cannot be resisted. What is right? Why a “balanced diet,” whatever that means. And what is wrong? Being hungry. Or worse, being a food radical, as in someone who rejects mainstream foods, you know, those pesky “picky eaters.” The food religion even has a sacred trilogy, those Gods of Good Taste, whom I like to call The Three Little Pigs: fat, sugar and salt.

Giving up the food culture feels a lot like abandoning your religion. You feel excommunicated. Banished. A deserter. And also bereft, for what can replace the cavernous void left behind?

The last five years of my life have been an attempt to answer that question. I’ve had to create a new set of beliefs to live by, in other words, a new religion. I guess that explains why I seem like a convert, even a zealot, at times. My new creed doesn’t quite have the power that the old one did. Not yet at least. But, all things in good time.

It’s not all gloom and doom, by the way. My dinner plans for tonight include poached salmon, a salad, maybe a few asparagus spears, and fresh strawberries for dessert. By golly, I’m starting to feel a religious fervor already!