Owner: The Intellectual Foodie URL:http://blog.your-healthy-eating-helper.com Join Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:33:54 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The Intellectual Foodie explores how natural food has been destroyed, not just by food additives and chemicals, but also by politics, greed, the chipping away of our frail democracies and our loss of connection to nature. Site statistics:Click here
Food Matters 2008-07-28 05:49:15 Food is elemental to all living creatures. Eat, is the first thing we seek to do after we take our first breath of earthly air. And eat we shall do, on all the days of our lives thereafter. To eat, is to have a relationship with our planet, the source of our food. It is also to have a relationship with each other, when we cook for each other and eat together.
The food we eat and how we eat it,
Food Is Not Just About Food.... 2008-07-28 05:48:10 In recent years, as an eater with a life-long preference for fresh, natural food, as an environmentalist, as a writer, as a feminist, as a full-time mother and later as a working mother, attempting to juggle career and family responsibilities, I found myself, in the mundane act of trying to put dinner on the table every day, at the centrifugal point of all the forces----economic, environmental,
Zen and the Art of Eating 2008-07-28 05:47:10 If you are hungry,
Eat now!
Because further down the road
There is no food.
-------Songs of Kabir
I love that quote from Kabir, because even though its true meaning is metaphorical and refers to the spiritual journey of life, it also reminds me that eating is one of life's sensual pleasures, to be enjoyed only during the short time we are alive---that little window 'twixt Read more:Zen
A Mother and Three Angels.... 2008-07-28 05:46:36 In all our lives as Little People, it is the Big People, our parents, who are the authors of our experience, shaping the mould that makes us who we are. When our parents fall short in making our experience a good one, others sometimes offset the damage, so that it is not critical, and we can at least go limping into adulthood, where we try and figure out the missing bits of the jigsaw, learn how Read more:Angels
, Three
The Lost Sublimity of Food (1) 2008-07-28 05:45:54 Today, our food is mediated and changed as it travels the line of production, from field to table, or even seed to table, as seeds themselves are mediated and changed by genetic engineering. The more developed our society is, the more separate we are from the natural world, cut off from the source of our nourishment, the earth herself. From the perspective of the early 21st century, it is hard
The Lost Sublimity of Food (2) 2008-07-28 05:44:46 Occasionally, we might happen to pluck a pear in the garden of a friend we are visiting, or be the dinner guests of people who keep an allotment and suddenly, momentarily, we are returned to our other untame, primal selves, in relishing the full, vibrant flavours of fresh, natural food. Or perhaps we might find ourselves wandering, by accident, through some rural place, lost, in the heat of
The Love of the Land 2008-07-28 05:43:59 All over the pre-Christian world, the love of the land and appreciation for the food it yielded, was cause for celebration and thanksgiving. Perhaps we are not as far removed from this world as we might think---- perhaps it is echoes of these occasions that we sometimes hear, ringing in our ears, causing that vague sense of something being amiss about the way we live today. Perhaps our need to
Earth Goddess 2008-07-28 05:43:12 In Ireland, Brigit was our Demeter, our ancient, pre-Christian earth goddess, honoured at Imbolc, the pagan fire festival which celebrated the start of Spring. Honouring Brigit, marked the return of the harvest season after the barren Winter, when the crops of the fields would grow once more. Christianity then used this pagan template to create ‘Saint Brigid’, whose feast day is the first day Read more:Earth
, Goddess
Bread of Life (1) 2008-07-28 05:40:40 Even on the streets of our cities, even on consecrated lands, within the distinctly un-pagan precepts of our churches, when we 'scratch the surface' we find that the Lughnasadh tradition and its equivalents, have made their way directly into the Harvest Thanksgiving ceremonies which are celebrated in many Christian churches, as Summer draws to a close.
When religion began to develop, the pagan Read more:Bread
Bread of Life(2) 2008-07-28 05:40:03 Even though in the Western world, most of us live at some remove from the land and no longer grind flour for bread, we still carry the ancient ways in our hearts and souls. While we buy bread in neat sliced pans in supermarkets, some part of our deep, wild selves must still be bound to the Wheel of the Year, wanting to jump for joy that the earth has again given unto us the crops to make our Read more:Bread
Bread of Life (3) 2008-07-28 05:39:06 www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com
The near-impossibility of buying good quality, nice-tasting bread is one of the most frustrating things about food-shopping today. The white stuff tastes like plastic and if we try to be healthy and opt for wholemeal, we are rewarded with the taste of sawdust! Across the Western world, in the year 2008, in our advanced society, we cannot buy proper bread! In Read more:Bread
Food, Love and Science 2008-07-28 05:38:23 It’s all about the love.
---- Troy Maguire
Cooking is the ultimate giving.
-----Jamie Oliver
Cook from your heart so that you may eat Read more:Science
Nourishing Body and Soul 2008-07-28 05:37:39 Perhaps our current one-dimensional understanding of food stems from the Occidental body-soul dichotomy, so inherent in our thinking. In the Western world, born of Christendom, we lack a sense of the spirituality of food that permeates the philosophies of the East. This is despite the fact that Jesus appeared to understand the importance of food and wine and when he provided them, they were
The Body-Soul Dualism of Western Spirituality 2008-08-11 07:44:44 In Christianity, for example, there is no physical component towards mystical knowledge that parallels yogic teachings, where diet and exercise accompany meditation in the journey towards enlightenment. Some Christians are subliminally taught, even still, that the body is shameful (especially when female), whilst whirling dervish Sufis know the body is another portal to transcendence and dance Read more:Spirituality
, Western
James Joyce and the Carnal Appetites 2008-08-11 07:43:23 Here in the Occident, we have, ingrained in our thought, the firewall duality between the carnal and the spiritual, which religion refuses to bridge. Indeed, Christian religions, some more than others, deny the needs of the body, teach us that the flesh and all that pertains to it, is sinful and are deeply suspicious of the natural appetites of the flesh.
When JamesJoyce
wrote Ulysses, he
Food in Film 2008-08-24 10:53:17 When we prepare a meal, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. The extra ingredient is our love. Food has its own metaphysics-----think of the great Danish film, Babette’s Feast, which illustrated this beautifully, showing the transformative power of food and the sharing of
it, in the ritual of the dinner table. Or think of Ang Lee’s wonderful Chinese film Eat Drink, Man Woman, which plac
The Sustenance of The Living 2008-08-16 18:11:33 When we understand that the question of food is about much more than physical components and scientific facts, our mission to nourish our children well becomes a more inspired and enjoyable one. This can spur us into giving this mission the necessary time and effort, despite our difficult lives.
Food is love---when we cook for our family, we are giving them our love. Love on a plate. Or love in Read more:Living
Eating and Living in The Moment 2008-09-14 07:24:05 The nourishment of food is what initially grounds us in the physical plane of being. Needing food is what makes us different to spirits, if we believe in spirits. The partaking of food, is the first and most intrinsic consequence of our physical existence in the universe and the non-ability to partake of food is a consequence of being dead. This might seem to state the obvious, but perhaps we Read more:Living
, Moment
Children and the Existential Significance of Food 2008-09-05 18:10:31 The role of food is even more important in the life of a child than that of an adult. Food is how children first experience the world. When a child is born, the first thing it does, instinctively, is feed from its mother’s breast. Then all is well in its world, this new planet it has come to inhabit. There is order in its universe. For the first months and even years of a child’s life, food i Read more:Children
, Significance
Soul Food 2008-08-30 11:40:12 Good food nourishes the body, but also the soul. When we make our children nourishing, wholesome food, it adds to the love we give them. Although they may not be conscious of it, on some deep level it is vitally important. There is a difference, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually, as well as physically, between eating processed, factory-food and natural, home-cooked food. So when we
Sacred Food Ritual in The Sopranos 2008-10-06 03:03:24 In Catholic ritual, there is the tradition of giving a Communion wafer to a dying person to spiritually nourish them on their journey out of this world and into the next. Fans of the TV series The Sopranos
may have recognised intimations of the Viaticum Eucharistae in the heavily symbolic final episode. Seconds before what we presume is Tony’s death, Tony, Carmela and A.J. eat unusually small, Read more:Ritual
Thou Shalt Feast no More at the Table of Life 2008-10-01 08:32:53 I once spoke to a chef whose duty it was to provide The Last Meal for death-row prisoners, when the grim occcasion arose. He regarded it as an important, though small comfort to Souls facing the unthinkable---a physical comfort in the face of metaphysical panic, a crumb in the abyss. With great humility, he regarded his small role in these Souls' last moments of life, as a privileged one, and Read more:Feast
, Table
Eating the Peach 2008-09-28 07:42:31 To eat is a privilege of the living, a temporal and a short one. We find knowledge of this in strange manifestations---none stranger than the ritual of the US death penalty, where, within the cold barbarism of the legal code, there exists the compassionate, even tender custom of The Last Meal offered to death-row prisoners on the day of execution. One might think ‘how could they eat at such a Read more:Peach
The night when the dead return to eat 2008-10-27 15:52:04 In Ireland, within living memory, it was common for families to leave food out for dead relatives on the ancient, pre-Christian feast of Samhain, or Halloween, probably the oldest surviving festival in the world. Samhain is the last day of the Celtic year and a very special time, when the veil between this world and the ‘other world’ lifts, permitting the dead to return to earth for just one
Why feed the dead? 2008-10-19 08:31:58 As in Tibet, the practice of feeding the dead existed in ancient Egypt, where food was placed in the pyramids to nourish the spirit of the dead person, in his journey towards the heavens. In our superficial understanding of this custom we tend to laugh and think, ‘how silly’, but in doing so, we miss the real meaning behind it. The Egyptians were not foolish enough to believe the dead person
Feeding the Dead 2008-10-11 18:13:59 Some cultures consider food to be so important that they continue to feed a person even after death. One of the most poignant pieces in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is the passage describing how food should be brought to the dead person in the days after death, so they will not feel abandoned by their loved ones, while their souls make the difficult transition through the bardo, the threshold Read more:Feeding
Food and the Circle of Life 2008-11-09 15:40:01 In Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, families honour deceased relatives, by bringing picnics to their graves and eating there ‘with’ them. Sumptuous dishes are prepared for these feasts-- the dead person's favourite meal, with chocolate drinks, skull-shaped sugar candies and a special bread for the occasion, pan de muerto, the ‘bread of the dead’. The festival celebrates the cycle of lif Read more:Circle
The disgraced ideology of the food industry 2008-12-07 11:21:23 We have seen recently the collapse of the financial world, due to lack of regulation and the unfettered pursuit of profit at all costs by sectional interests. Our food is also suffering under this same ideology
. The further the consumer becomes separated from the primary producer (the farmer) the more we need strong state regulation, in the interests of the common good. But in the area of food, Read more:industry
Crisis in the Making 2008-11-23 13:16:45 Today, in our cash-rich, time-poor society, our lifestyle means that we are not able to feed our children properly. It is now widespread for children, across all social classes, to go to bed hungry. Our children are starving. Yes, starving! Not children in Africa. Not poor children. Not homeless children. Not children from 'dysfunctional families'. But our children. This is the shocking Read more:Crisis
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