Soul Food

I think I've finally figured it out, sort of:  there is food that makes my mouth and mind happy, and there is food that makes my body happy.  Unfortunately, I've yet to discover many foods that exist in both categories.

Over the past few years, I've become increasingly obsessed with food literacy.  The addiction started as I read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and led me to Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma (and more recently his In Defense of Food/Food Rules, which happily concluded:  eat food, not too much, mostly plants), then finally, most recently, to Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions.  There were others peppered in along the way:  Mollie Katzen and her famous Moosewood cookbooks series, Novella Carpernter's Farm City, and Jessica Prentice's Full Moon Feast.

This pursuit has widened my culinary talents, and hopefully improved my family's health.  These food studies have led me to my local farmers' markets and Whole Paycheck, ahem, I mean Whole Foods.  I've concluded that pure, whole foods are best for me and my family.  Cooking from scratch feeds my soul and body.  So then why do I continue to eat crap and then feel like crap?

Well, I think I've found the answer, in yet another book:  Geneen Roth's Women, Food and God .  This book makes my shortlist of life-altering reads.  It took me a good six months to make it all the way through, because I needed time to, uh, digest it.  I laughed, I cried, I related.  Now, I'm reading it again.  This time I'm completing Oprah's Study Guide as I read.  Yes, that may be dorky, but frankly I'm ok with that.

One thing Roth suggests is to meditate (yet another of my life teachers sending me the same message).  Tune in to your body, to your hunger, to the emotions swirling about inside you.   Sort them out, give them attention, let them be (don't smother them with ice cream).  The book is relatively short (224 pages) but profound, there's a lot going on, a lot to sort out.  Yet it's light and witty.  Like me. (Ha!) 

So anyway, I've been trying to make some small changes.  As Roth says, "it takes great effort to become effortless."  Knowing all that I do about nourishing my body, about what is healthy, I am sometimes perplexed why I continue to eat things that make my body feel so bad (#1 culprit = sugar).  As I've been paying more attention to how I feel (body, mind, mouth) before, during, and after eating, I've come to some realizations.

My mouth and mind like sugar.  A lot.  They become frenzied with the idea of consuming more.  And more.  Even when my body is saying "please please please no more," my mouth says "but it tastes soooo good.  Shut up, just a few more bites."  My mouth and mind also like fatty, rich, heavy foods.   My body, not so much.   I've been experimenting.  The other day I ate a raw food roll up (butternut squash, apricots, walnuts wrapped in collard greens), my mouth was all "ehh, it's ok, not bad", but my body felt euphoric.  The same feeling my mind and mouth get from the peanut butter kiss cookies I made this week.

So what's a girl to do?  Can I please all parts of myself at the same time?  It seems with some further research that there may be hope for that.  But in the meantime, I'm trying to find balance.  Some meals may be for my mind/mouth, others will be for my body.  If I continue to be aware of the messages my body, mouth, and mind are sending me, maybe I will find the true soul foods:  those which meets the needs of my whole self.

Got any suggestions?