Ask the Food Fairy!

You guys are making me sad!

Not really. The foodblogosphere – and the over-compounded word “foodblogosphere” – are making me sad.

I am getting a lot of (awesome, positive) feedback about the posts, in part about how unusual it is to see fat-positive writing in a food blog. That’s been my experience too; soooooo many blogs either focus on mirthlessly, ruthlessly cutting the fat out of recipes, or just indulge in the all-too-common self-shaming talk around things like fat, calories, chocolate, sugar, butter, cream, ice cream, food….

FOOD IS GOOD. EATING IS GOOD. I know those statements should be obvious, but… well, they’re not, are they? The messages I hear from blogs, commercials, magazines, et cetera are more conditional: “(Healthy) food is good. (Nonfattening) food is good. (Skinny) food is good. (Natural) food is good. (Cheap) food is good.” The unspoken message varies, but the underlying common fear that food, in general, is not food – that you have to be wary, cautious, with food, or terrible things will happen – remains.

And of course some of those things are true. Healthy food IS good. It is good for food to be healthy. It is good to eat things that are good for us. But it’s like brownies. Yesterday I was telling my friend Cola that I don’t like brownies, because they are often a waste of chocolate. Too fluffy and airy and not chocolatey enough. And she was like, “So, you don’t like BAD brownies.” And I think that’s true of any food. My fiancee Annie always says that when people think they don’t like carrots or fish or whatever, it’s because they haven’t had it prepared right.

My point is: you don’t have to say “Brownies are good when they’re made with good ingredients. Carrots are nice if you don’t overcook them. Fish is good if you don’t let it go bad.” You know? These things kind of go without saying.

And: food is the same way. Of course good, healthy food is good for you. Moreover, it seems like the more we learn about nutrition, the clearer it becomes that processing food messes it (and us) up and that regular old FOOD, the way it comes from nature, without weird chemicals added, without all the nutrients stripped out of it, et cetera, IS GOOD. Good for us, good for the earth, good.

And you know the cliche that food is not love? I don’t think that’s true.

Or rather: food is food and love is love. And food will never fill that hole inside of people that can only be filled with love.

But also, feeding ourselves is a loving act. Eating when we’re not hungry in an attempt to fill that hole is an ultimately painful exercise in futility, but even that is on some level loving – that we are trying to fill that hole in the first place. That, however inappropriately, we’re looking for love for ourselves.

And when we eat because we are hungry? Loving. When we eat food we LIKE because we are hungry? Loving. When we enjoy it, prepare it for ourselves, choose the best stuff we know how to choose for our bodies? Loving.

Maybe it’s more true to say that food is not love, but eating is loving.

As a former sponsor of mine said, what we put our attention on is what grows. Certainly it’s important to be aware of what is and isn’t good for us – but it’s crucial to integrate that information and move on. We can focus on everything bad about food, and that fear and restriction will grow inside of us. Or we can focus on the glorious, joyful, healthy, positive things about it, and live in sensuous delight.