Sometimes we turn to people when we are down; but other times we turn to food. After I dropped my in-laws off at the Airporter, feeling bereft I headed to Arizmendi, a cooperative bakery in San Rafael. Baked goods: that’s my go to food. Not chocolate or candy, not cookies and whipped cream but scones and muffins. To the extent that when I’m struggling with something, in a can’t-get-my-head-around / can’t-figure-it-out / feeling-sick-to-my-stomach way, or I’m just stressed, busy and can’t be bothered with food, I will stop eating completely except for flour/butter laden products. Add coffee and water and I can subsist on that diet for days.

And I’m not alone. We each have some kind of food that we look to during psychologically exhausting times; we all have an emotional food style. But though these foods can offer comfort, I found out at a class on Mindful Cooking and Eating that, like most things we desire, the strategies that we have developed around eating just might not be the right ones.

Over an evening at 18 Reasons (this being the Part-Two that I mentioned in the previous post), Carley Hauck and Kristin Cole took a group of 12 or so of us through the emotional relationship that we all have with food, how certain foods help deal with stress in life, and how certain foods can actually compound it.

In her practice as an integrative life-coach and wellness consultant, Carley brings together the science (she also a research consultant with UCSF’S Osher Center for Integrative Medicine) with its real and practical application on a personal and societal level. That evening, the focus was on how to tune into the emotion around food, stressing how we need to pay attention not just to hunger but also to what we are feeling at the moment that we reach for the fridge or sneak into the kitchen. Although we operate in a culture not entirely comfortable with feelings, we need to recognize that our emotions can change, all the time; that we can have many, and sometimes conflicting, feelings during the day. Moods shift, thoughts change, attitudes differ. And this can be compensated or complemented with what we consume.

Given that we are all all emotional beings, its makes sense to take the time to check in. This particularly applies to those things called ‘cravings’. Quoting Eckhart Tolle, 'What we resist, persists,' Carley talked about how we might first suppress a craving, then indulge it which in turn makes us want more, and finally we rationalize it away. But just because we feel desire doesn’t mean we need to act on it. Carley suggests rather than we "surf the urge." And we do this by asking ourselves: "Am I really hungry right now", or "am I stressed?"

“Be with desire without acting, sit with it, see how it feels, delay and see if it is still there and you want to act." Carley suggests. Ask "what do I really need right now" and "what am I feeling?" Then look for ways to nourish ourselves that have nothing to do with food, such as "calling a friend, walking, yoga" etc.

So with talking done with, we were into the practical program for the evening: communal cooking. Kristin is a strong advocate for going through life, mindfully, and her approach to cooking is equally as intuitive – creating relationships with people, the community and environment through working with seasonally driven, farm fresh, and locally sourced ingredients, working rhythmically in the kitchen, and sharing the table and food with others. All strands that were reflected in the recipes that she had conceived for the evening and that it was now our task to replicate in the 18 Reasons kitchen.

This was the first time that I’ve made baked sweet potatoe fries and maple lime yogurt sauce with a team of people, while happily chatting about Mission neighborhoods, knife skills, or lack thereof, and some cooking show on cable that I don’t quite remember now. Collectively, we learned to make an alternative to a burger, a Plant-inspired Veggie Beet Burger, and a healthier way of consuming chocolate in the form of a Chocolate Cherry Smoothie. There was no flour, no fat, no sugar.

Then it was time to sit down and eat the dinner that we had prepared together, but that’s where the sharing of stories and skills ended, at least for a while; the first part of dinner was conducted in silence. And this is the key component of shifting our relationship to comfort eating, learning to be more mindful in our relationship to food on all levels.

Mindfulness is one of those words that is bandied about the bay area – as with compassion, gratitude, and happiness. It’s such a key part of any discussion about life practice here that we’ll come back to it again and again as with those other concepts.

But for now, lets just say this: Mindfulness – the “awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experiences moment by moment”, borrowing writer Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition – extends to every aspect of life, including food; it applies to the practice of cooking and eating, the practice of what we consume and what we cook. Mindful Eating involves listening and being aware of the body, nourishing ourselves, listening to what we want, and not necessarily giving in to that impulse, without first understanding and questioning it.

This shifts an understanding of the preparation and consumption of food from one of merely filling bellies and mealtimes, to one of food as ‘healing, meditation, and nourishment’. Accordingly, as Carley said, “You are not just working on food, you are working on yourself, you are working on other people.”

Sitting in silence with my fellow learners, cooks and diners, I have to say that I didn’t feel affinity or joy, I felt clumsy and noisy. My knife scraped, I dropped a salad leaf, I overly communicated with my face whether someone wanted more. I was hyper aware. And perhaps that’s the beginning. Paying attention. To every detail including what’s happening in our bodies on an emotional level. Knowing exactly this, what we feel, and what to do about it can be, and it’s a cliché, one of the hardest things to learn. And if eating a strawberry slowly and noticing texture, colour and smell of what we eat, can help with feeling connected to our environment, our community, and even ourselves, then I’m there. Even if, or maybe especially if, that means having Kale salad for dinner.

a plate full

Joe's Daughter