Food For Thought: Eating with pleasure, joy and peace

By Lisa Turner

As I prepare for a class I’m teaching, I’m focusing for the moment on pleasure. This, I realize, amounts to heresy in the modern world of deprivation dining. Denial of sugar, abstinence from gluten, dairy, saturated fat, wheat, is tantamount to sainthood. We mean well, but when we constantly deprive ourselves of foods that are frankly pleasurable, aren’t we also depriving ourselves of some measure of joy?

When we speak of being nourished, we imply that we’re taking food in—not that we’re shunning or rejecting it. But what, exactly, are we taking in? I began to think of what it means to be nourished—really, deeply nourished. Is it a function of consuming the right foods in the right amounts, with some exact balance of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients? Or maybe it’s something more. Maybe being nourished is the sum total of our food experience; we’re taking in not only a certain lineup of nutrients, but also the company we’re with when we eat, the atmosphere of the dining locale, the air around us.

I believe that healthy eating is way more than lining up a parade of popular nutrients. I believe that pleasure, joy and peace are key to being deeply nourished. (For the idea of pleasure, I credit Marc David, local nutritionist, author and expert on pleasure. His book, Nourishing Wisdom, is one of my lasting favorites.)

So, as I looked at my notes, I started to think about what we want from food. Obviously, nutrition; that’s apparently non-negotiable in our crusade of healthy eating that rivals the most brutal triathlon in its rigors and competitiveness. We want food to help us lose weight, lower cholesterol, reduce blood pressure, prevent cancer, work harder, train better and generally render us infallible. For those with a boot camp mentality, a strict get-healthy-and-never-age diet is simple enough. The rest of us want more.

We want pleasure. We want food to taste good, to arouse and delight our senses, to feel velvety or coarse on the tongue, to vary in texture, temperature, flavor. More than just tasting good, we want food to make us feel good. We want it to comfort us when we’re sad, keep us company when we’re lonely, soothe us when we’re anxious or afraid, make us happy when we’re not, bring us joy and peace when we’re feeling put upon, indulge us when we’re feeling deprived. That’s more than we expect from our romantic relationships.

And when we talk about “indulging” in food, we’re usually referring to a pursuit of pleasure that promotes guilt, rather than deep satisfaction or nourishment. “Indulging” is sometimes equivalent to committing nutritional suicide. We indulge with cheap, highly processed foods--ice cream, donuts, fried and heavily salted chips, cookies by the dozen, the vulgarians in the food world. This seemed strange to me. Logically, it makes more sense to indulge in refined fare, in rich and sensual foods that are whole, unadulterated and magnificent in their simplicity: foods like truffle oil, Bethmale goat cheese, extra ripe avocados drizzled with Arbequina olive oil, Black Mission figs and chanterelle mushrooms, fresh blackberries, eaten by the pint—these are the foods that give me great pleasure, and at the same time, leave me feeling deeply nourished.

Maybe there’s a way to incorporate many or all of these requirements, indulging and comforting ourselves, allowing food to bring us pleasure, while still nourishing us. It’s interesting, too, that many of these fine, indulgent foods can easily be incorporated into nearly anyone’s version of a “healthy” diet, be it low-glycemic index, organic, whole-foods, gluten-free. (Fat free? Don’t even get me started on that subject.) Maybe, then, instead of saying no to “bad” foods, we would instead begin to say “yes” to clean, organic, whole foods.

More food for thought: what if we took the idea of pleasure and joy into our food selection and preparation as well? Years ago, when I cooked in a spiritual setting (this was after they made me wash toilets for a year), we came to the kitchen after meditating, in a tranquil state of mind. We moved slowly and spoke in calm, happy voices. We learned to sing beautiful Hindu chants as we chopped onions and stirred beans. We laughed, a lot.

The great peace and calm in the kitchen, the sweetness of the atmosphere, the melodic, rhythmic sounds of devotional chants—all conspired to render a meal as simple as dahl and rice a gourmet masterpiece. This sense of reverence for the practice of nourishing our bodies extended to how we learned to eat the food. We paused before eating. We ate first with our eyes, taking in the colors and textures of the food. As we ate, we chewed slowly, breathed deeply, paused often to notice how the food was feeling in our bodies.

I would like to say these practices have become so automatic to me that they’re second nature. It’s not true. I still find myself falling into bad habits from time to time—eating at my computer as I write articles on the importance of being present while we eat, eating ice cream when I really want fresh blackberries, rushing to get dinner on the table before my little boy launches another spoonful of ketchup against the kitchen wall. Which brings me to my final point. Incorporating mindfulness, pleasure, joy and peace into your cooking and eating is a lifelong practice. Like any practice, it requires patience, determination and, ultimately, compassion, understanding and forgiveness for ourselves.