IWU Environmental Wellness: Safer Path: Food for the Hungry Soul

Food for the Hungry Soul

By Laurine Brown, PhD, MPH

Food is the soul’s earliest experience with miracles. The phrase alights from the pages of Nourishing Wisdom which I’ve stumbled upon in a bookstore. I think I’ve found a clue to understanding my culture’s disturbing food fight - this embroiled love-hate relationship that riddles us with gorging and guilt. I mull over the meaning. We cried out as a babe and were soothed to complete bliss by our mother’s milk. Every time we ate we were saying “I chose life. I yearn for something more.” Food has connected us to our complex world full of people and other earthly things in a most profound way. Indeed, through food, the earth and its life becomes us as the molecules in soil, plants, animals and water are broken down and rearranged into our own flesh and blood. I’d call that a miracle.

But far from being a source of nourishment and miracles, food for many of my fellow Americans today is quite problematic. Food is the enemy, to be evaded or controlled. It makes us fat. It gives us cancer. Heart disease. One moment we love it, so we gorge ourselves. The next moment, we abhore the food we’ve gorged on. Maybe we even make ourselves throw up.

What has gone wrong?

For eons the gnawing hunger in our bellies has consumed us. Excerpts from a famous Bangladeshi poem “Give me Food…” highlight the depths from which we have cried out for food and the promise food holds in releasing us from pain and suffering. I’m terribly hungry: in the depth of my belly… Like summer corn-fields seared with drought, my body is ablaze with the fire of hunger… What I ask for is little. I want food. If I get two square meals a day, I tell you, I’ll give up all other demands of mine. If you can’t satisfy this demand of mine things will go very wrong in your kingdom. This simple hunger for food, if allowed to grow…will surely bring about a disastrous end. Give me food…

Less than a century ago in this country, many of our ancestors were hungry, wanting for little more than two meals a day. The majority of the world’s 6.3 billion people today still long for a mere two meals a day. Given the miracle of food to ease our past pain, it’s no surprise why we continue to reach for it, even though our bellies are sated. We do what we’ve always done when in pain. We eat. But today the hunger pangs often cry out from somewhere else. The food we are lacking may not be in the form of plants or animals. We may need to nourish our aching soul.

Such was the case with Mary, a woman with a rapid “unexplained” 100 pound weight gain who had come to see me for nutritional counseling. She could not stop stuffing herself with food. As we explored what was going on in her life when her weight began climbing, she began to cry. Her best friend had died. As the tears flowed and flowed she realized “I guess I haven’t gotten over it”. Despite her best efforts, gorging on chips or chocolate could not drown this pain.

“Emotions are a not a bad thing—they’re just what your feeling” mind-body expert Jon Kabat-Zinn told Bill Moyers in the PBS series Healing and the Mind. Fascinating new research suggests the body may actually have a “brain in the gut” (alias “gut feeling”, “butterflies”). No wonder emotions become wrapped up with food. In fact, scientist Candace Pert has shown that molecules of emotion (called peptides) run in every system in our body. This communication system is the body-mind's intelligence and Dr. Pert tells us it is wise enough to keep us healthy… if we listen, that is. These chatty peptides (which regulate all our body processes) get bogged down with pent-up emotions. By allowing long-buried feelings to surface, things like meditation get the emotional peptides flowing again, promoting health and well-being. Rachel Remen, physician and author of Kitchen Table Wisdom, says our wounds are doorways of change. Healing flows when we break down the emotional dams.

Studies show that one-third of Americans are on antidepressants. Are we numbing ourselves to the emotional dams crying out for attention? What would happen if we allowed ourselves to truly smell the roses along with the rotten eggs in our lives? Healing means to “make whole.” We cannot become whole by stuffing our hole - the vacant part of us crying out in pain - with soda and ice cream, or even antidepressants. If we listen with the wisdom scientists tell us is in every magnificent cell in our body, we will know what food we need to invite that miracle of healing back into our life.