Today’s subject is a very human response to hunger. Eating. We eat specifically for survival. Eating was not done for any other reason but to continue the species. We didn’t think about it except to be in the active state of pursuit of food to sustain life. Our ancestors from the beginning of time worked very hard for their food. Men would get out daily to kill their food, bring it home and the women of the clan would prepare it. Everyone in the community had a purpose in the sustaining of their existence. The point to living was to hunt, gather, eat, repeat. Which gave great purpose to everyone involved.
Over time however, this purpose has diminished. Society today has changed our relationship to food greatly. We no longer have the purpose to find, prepare and store our food. We simply go out buy it and then throw it out if it goes bad. This transition to the purpose of eating has caused incredible changes to our mental health, physical health and our connection to our food.
The removal of our purpose to food has completely changed our relationship with it. We no longer need to forage; we no longer actively work to find food. This lack of connection has created a void in why we eat.
How does this affect our mental health? The easy availability of food, and the lack of need to work for it, has created an unhealthy relationship with eating, which impacts our mental health. Food and eating have become an avenue for comfort rather than survival. We eat now not for survival but often overeat for comfort which has also created an avenue for addiction.
There are studies into overeating that show us most overweight people eat for comfort. Eating has become a distraction from pain, much like the use of substances like alcohol or drugs for addicts. Food has become a crutch.
How, what and why we eat has also changed drastically. We used to eat what was available seasonally: meat, herbs and fruit in spring; meat, dried herbs, stored root vegetables and canned fruits in winter. We no longer eat this way. It has become very complex. We have ready made food full of preservatives, fast food full of unhealthy fats and even the foods we might think are healthy are usually grown in hot houses and many chemicals and pesticides are used to grow them quickly and keep them from being destroyed by insects.
All these factors contribute to an unhealthy way of eating. We have been led to believe the food industry is working in our favor, but they are only working for their own interest. If you think about how our meat is grown, and our vegetables are cultivated, it is very hard to find ecofriendly food sources. It’s hard to eat healthy these days. However, if we are mindful, we can start to find purpose once again in our foraging for good food rather than just food that is easy to buy and what we are used to.
Food is a necessity. Using it to distract ourselves from our pain and not being mindful of what we are putting in our mouth, leads us to being overweight, which leads us to being unhealthy, physically and emotionally.
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