Barbara Ramsay reflects on what’s good in food and best in diet.
‘Always
read the fine print’ used to refer to mortgages, contracts and
important business deals. Now it’s cereal boxes, soup cans and bottles
of juice. We stand in supermarkets peering at labels, trying to
decipher strange codes with numbers attached, and search for things are
‘poly’ or ‘mono’ or ‘un’. When Linus refused to eat his peanut butter
sandwich and Lucy demanded to know why, he looked at her with horror
and said, “Look at the label on the jar. This thing is full of
ingredients!”
The food pundits have a lot to answer for. They
say we shouldn’t eat dairy foods. They cause mucous. Vegies are okay
but watch out for the dreaded eggplant. It has the same cellular
structure as a cancer cell. A tomato? Well, that’s part of the deadly
nightshade family. Follow ‘Pritikin’ and you’ll eat lots of grain
before noon. Be macrobiotic and you’ll eat almost nothing else all
day. ‘Live mostly on fruit but always cook it.’ they say. Except, of
course, for the ones who say, ‘live mostly on fruit, but never, under
any circumstances, cook it.’
And it’s not only eating that’s
fraught with danger. Drinking is almost as complicated. Hot chocolate
is out, after all, it’s made with milk. Coffee? You might as well say
‘arsenic’. Tea is almost worse than coffee because it not only has
caffeine, it also has tannic acid. Soft drinks don’t have tannic acid,
but they do have the caffeine. They also have sugar, except for the
diet type and they’re all mini chemical factories just looking for a
stomach to pollute. Juice should be freshly squeezed or it has no
nutritional value at all and for heaven’s sake don’t drink it with
anything else. Of course, there’s always water, but the stuff from the
tap is full of dreadful things and the stuff that bubbles up from
springs—well, who knows what’s in the ground these days. There’s
always mineral water, but then the minerals aren’t really all that good
for you. Listen to it all and you’ll end up living on distilled water
and wind-fall apples and I’m not too sure about the apples.
Then
there’s the ‘vegetarian’ question, a subject that has caused many a
long discussion with friends. For me, when my daughter was small and
we’d just been singing ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and then there were
chops for dinner, it gripped my mind and wouldn’t let go. But... if I
say I don’t eat anything that thinks, or is conscious, huge debates
spring up filled with facts about carrots than scream when you cut
them, and questions like ‘how can you prove a fish thinks?’ To save
the trouble, I just say I don’t eat anything that has a face. No
matter what our food choices or opinions of all the arguments, with all
the facts and figures, the speculations and investigations, something
very important is usually left out.
Food feeds more than just
the stomach and it nourishes more than just the body. Food comforts
the heart as well. After all, how many mothers offer a cookie as well
as a hug, when a child falls down? When food is given with loving
hands, it has the power to soothe a crying child. Even when we’re
grown, its power to comfort is still there. In many cultures, when
someone is bereaved, it’s traditional for neighbours and friends to
bring food to the house. Far more than simply saving the mourning from
having to cook, it means ‘I care ... I’m here ... there is life after
this’.
Celebrations too, often have food at their heart. We
invite people to share a meal as a sign of friendship, and we celebrate
birthdays with a cake. And what is nicer, warmer or friendlier than to
bake something sweet for people you care about?
Life being what
it is, there are lots of special treats for the palate, the tummy and
the heart that will never disappear—whether or not they’re good for
us—and the most important of these are the things that are made by
hand, by someone you know.
Sure, cakes and biscuits from the
supermarket, or frozen dinners and tins of things save people lots of
time. There’s no reading of recipes or spending extra time in the
kitchen or washing up afterwards. But you can’t make them carefully,
with love, and they will never fill the kitchen with the good smells of
culinary care and cosiness. You can’t serve them still warm from the
oven and you can’t bake them with your children.
But there is
even more to home cooked food than the way it tastes and they way it
smells. More, even, than the act of sharing. Though it’s true that
‘We are what we eat’, it’s even ore true that ‘We are what we think’,
for the human mind is a powerful thing. Few people these days would
doubt that our minds send out vibrations constantly and that these
vibrations effect the world we life in. It’s something that people
always seem to have sensed on an instinctive level.
Once when I
was small, I remember overhearing my mother talk about a quarrel and
the atmosphere it left. “You could cut the air with a knife”, she
said. To my child’s mind this was incredibly vivid. I could almost
see that air ... thick and kind of gluey. It would be hard to walk
against such air, I thought, and impossible to run or skip. For a long
time whenever there was quarrel, I looked hard, trying to actually see
the air in the room, but I didn’t have to get much older before I
understood what she meant.
In the days of the happy hippies and
the flower children, people said, ‘Good vibes, man’, or ‘heavy’. It
made total sense. An atmosphere filled with antagonism or jealousy or
anger is heavy and it does create a feeling you can almost cut with a
knife. We all know these things. There are endless numbers of books
written on how to use the right thoughts to create your own life, to
change it into what you want it to be. Everyone agrees that thoughts
are powerful. It is accepted that our moods can affect the
atmosphere. And if the way we think affects the vibrations, it also
affects the food we cook. Every day we deal with vibrations that we
can’t see and yet completely accept. Many of these vibrations travel
incredible distances and are picked up so clearly and so strongly that
they arrive as pictures and sound, clear enough for anyone to see. The
only reason we don’t look at television as a little cosmic, the only
reason we don’t view it with scepticism, is because we’re used to it.
With
the click of a switch, light happens, and we never waste any time
considering how impossible that seems. Indeed, if it depended on our
belief, we’d probably still be living in the dark. Some miracles we’re
used to and some are simply still new to us.
When we are
cooking, our minds are working, minds do that all the time, whether we
want them to or not. That’s what our minds do. When we are stirring
and rolling and baking, we’re thinking, and thinking creates
vibrations, whether we want it to or not, because that’s what thoughts
do. If we are thinking positive thoughts, then our vibrations are
happy, peaceful ones and these affect the food, so they will affect the
people who eat the food.
Except in places where survival is
so hard that food simply holds the body and the soul together, the
sharing of it has always been part of deeply significant moments ...
milestones in life: the wedding breakfast, the christening feast, the
funeral feast, the shared feast of thanksgiving that commemorates an
older sharing of food between two cultures. Even the words ‘breaking
break’ signify friendship and peace. Deeply spiritual moments use food
as their coin of passage, whether in the West, where Christ and his
disciples shared the Last Supper, or in the East, where worshippers are
given food that has been offered in temples, or cooked in remembrance
of God.
Thoughts are powerful and the vibrations created by what
we think affect Life. If our thoughts are filled with negativity, if
we cook when we are angry or upset, we run the risk, like an old wives’
tale, of metaphorically ‘curdling the sauce’. Cook with care, cook
with love and know that this is one miracle you have control over ...
one miracle you can perform.
It’s in our power to give this
miracle, like a gift, to the people who eat what we cook. It’s in our
power to give them food that holds peace and love and warmth and even a
little bit of magic. We must never forget that in the best of recipes,
love is the secret ingredient.
Barbara Ramsay is a Freelance Writer based in Melbourne, Australia
Food for Thought
