Week 11 :: Appetizer (Singing the Body Electric)

I have been sadly absent from the kitchen as of late, having been kept busy with the preparations for my sister's wedding. I have been eating out more. Too much sushi. Too many light green tea Frappucinos.

Life keeps piling things up, and the next thing you know, you're eating Double Sour Skittles for breakfast instead of your usual half-cup serving of oatmeal with flax seeds. It's not so much that I feel some sort of moral inferiority for having eaten little pebbles of high-fructose corn syrup instead of long-lasting carbohydrate-flakes, though admittedly, there is something really poetic and Dickensian in the consumption of oatmeal. It is the most literary and humble of foods...not to mention I'm one of those people who actually enjoys the taste and texture of plain oatmeal, which, apparently, makes me an oddity.

Really, though, what I have let go of in the past few weeks - and likely the past month or two - is my strong drive to re-build my body's health and wellbeing. I find that I am exquisitely sensitive to additives and preservatives; I haven't had a diet beverage in a very long time, because one or two sips into it, I find my head pounding and a wave of heat and dizziness rolls through me.

So it's back to the basics, and back to what I know and love. I'm grateful that when I was growing up, my mother taught me what really GOOD food is - rice, whole wheat pasta (and this was in the EARLY days of WWP, before they learned how to make it taste like something other than cardboard), miso soup, oatmeal, fresh vegetables. My mother taught me that lentils are little medallions of ancient wisdom; she taught me that rice can be savoured grain by grain; she taught me that nothing is as wonderful as a rivulet of juice running down your chin after that first bite into a summer-fresh peach.

I had been a vegetarian for many years of my life; in the past two or three years, as I worked to regain health after a spate of illness, I reintroduced meat and fish into my diet - rather sparingly, maybe once or twice a week. I ate more yogurt, more cheese (my bones are more than grateful).

Now, as I venture back through vegetarianism into dietary veganism (and no, I'm not entering into a debate about this term, because I think it's an old debate), I search not for the high moral ground that some of my vegetarian acquaintances attempt to embody (in spite of their use of other toxins, drugs, etc.); I am on the hunt for something more. I want to know food. I want to love it exquisitely, to know it from its very source. I want to take more time to prepare my foods; to tenderly wait for rice grains to blossom. I want to understand how a garbanzo bean knows itself.

This isn't a declaration of some radical change in lifestyle; it's a deepening of a practice of faith; faith in self, above all. It's an experiment in nourishment. I care about the world, and animal cruelty, but my god - how many souls and hearts have been lost in the search for everything else? I can't afford to lose myself in yet another cause at the moment, and since food has been such a long and drawn-out source of difficulty for me, it IS the thing I must devote myself to. I can debate the ethical merits of playing a piano with ivory keys later (not that I have any interest in doing so). And I may, after this month-long experiment in strict vegetarianism, simply return to a lacto-ovo lifestyle, or indulge my sushi-love with pescatarianism.

I digress. What I'm beginning to realize is that I have been poisoning my body: too much Facebook, doing exercise for reasons of self-hatred rather than of self-care, too many negative thoughts. I thought that because I neither drink or consume drugs, that I was doing alright. A body fed by toxins of any kind reflects them deeply.

I want to hear the hum of my cells renewing themselves. Whitman wrote about "singing the body electric" - and maybe that's more erotic a description than the consumption of legumes and grains and vegetables really deserves, but it seems fitting, somehow.