for various reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. I’m at the point where I just want to scream FUCK YOU FOOD and be done with it.
Except I like food.
Something I’ve been thinking about a LOT and has a lot to do with my ostentatious relationship with food right now: I’ve been sick for a long time because of my food choices–not eating food that is good for my body. So–I’ve been looking for “how to eat in a healthy way” literature.
This is something I *literally* have only very minimal ideas on how to do. As I told a friend, home cooked meals as a kid (supposedly the healthier option, right?) was fried bologna, tortillas (made with white flour!) and canned baked beans.
Ok–so if entire communities are growing up this completely distanced from “health” and “food”–how the hell do people in these communities process the advice given to us: “eat healthy” “make healthy choices” etc?
What the fuck is “healthy”? What does that mean? Is it home cooked fried bologna? Is it a diet rich people can afford? Is it “traditional” food? And what the fuck is traditional food any damn way?
All I know for sure right now? It’s a freaking privilege to tell somebody to “eat healthy” if only because it assumes that we all have the same understanding of WTF “healthy” means.
- Share
May 7th, 2009 at 7:08 pm #
Yea….to people here, a healthy meal might be considered greens cooked with ham hocks, cornbread, and of course, there must be meat…
May 7th, 2009 at 8:58 pm #
The strategy that has stayed with me as really useful and easy to follow is: throughout your day and in your meals and when you’re shopping try and eat as many different colors as you can. Foods have colors for a reason and they denote different nutrients, so if you have a bunch of colors in your diet regularly, there’s a good chance you’re eating healthy. That and upping your intake of leafy greens and taking down your intake of meat is a great start. I’m still working on it myself, but at least it’s easy to remember. lol.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:42 pm #
You know, I think gardening is intimately tied to this question.
May 8th, 2009 at 3:29 am #
bfp–for me this is a deep question. even though i use the word ‘healthy’ alot i have a strong critique of words like: natural and healthy. in that both natural and healthy refer to idealized bodies and practices that are based on the imaginations of white, middle class, european, able bodied–bodies.
i started to realize this more when i was pregnant and was being prescribed a high amount of protein. and that protein was making me sluggish and sick. and when i said that i think certain forms of protein are making me sluggish i was told–no–what i needed was more protein. i just felt guilty.
i think we do this alot. for instance i feel really good on a vegan diet. but i dont think that a vegan diet is the best for everyone. but we as vegans tell folks that veganism is healthier for every body no matter what. and when we do that we deny the specificity of a persons body and mind and what it/they need.
we create these idealized bodies in the imaginary and then tell everyone to get as close as they can to that ideal. and not only are these standards imaginary. but they are harmful. whatever works for one person will not necessarily work for another. for me eating lots of raw fruits and veggies feels really good and light. for another person they would feel too ungrounded and unsettling causing them to launch into anxiety or depression. and yet you still have ‘health food gurus’ who have the answer: protein! raw foods! no dairy! goats milk! wheatgrass! etc. no matter what the question is or who the person is.
and poc have to deal with this imposition of the idealized body and ‘health’ even more. in part because we deal with social authorities a lot more and one of the first things to be restricted (whether through welfare/wic/prisons/pcs etc) is food options.
god i remember wic. which was useless for me and my family and i was so mad. cause we needed assistance. we used the formula a bit…but i was breast feeding primarily. im lactose intolerant so the all those dairy options were useless. and then i could have dried beans and peanut butter. and only of big agribusiness brands.
i guess what i am saying is that as a health worker when some one asks me about a ‘healthy diet’ or what have you. i tell them to experiment. think about what they have eaten before that produced the mental/physical effects they want. i say eat slowly and consciously and feel what the food is doing in the body. write it down. what you ate and how you felt. is there a connection? think about your family biological/social/adoptive…is there a connx between what they primarily ate and how they lived and their energy level and how they died and whether or not they were happy?
May 8th, 2009 at 7:09 am #
I think one of the things people are alluding to when they talk of home cooked meals, and the association it has with eating healthy, is less processed foods. But of course that would mean no bologna, and maybe a different more nutritious flour than white. It is extremely difficult to eat a healthy diet and get enough to eat to fill you if you live in poverty. The cheapest foods are processed and have less nutritional value than fresh fruits, vegetables, meats etc. but because they are cheap you can buy more to keep the hunger at bay. It’s sort of like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the first need is to fill your stomach before you can even consider whether what you are filling it with has the right vitamins, minerals, calories, etc to be healthy.
Most of the time I really don’t even like to think of the things that go into many of our foods, the pesticides, hormones, drugs, chemicals, additives, preservatives, dyes, and all that can’t possibly be healthy. If I don’t want to think of these things for my own health, it makes it much harder for me to consider how these same pesticides, hormones, drugs, chemicals etc are affecting the people who work in the food industry and come into continual contact.
May 8th, 2009 at 8:21 am #
“it makes it much harder for me to consider how these same pesticides, hormones, drugs, chemicals etc are affecting the people who work in the food industry and come into continual contact”
AMEN to that! I know there are people working on these issues but they don’t get publicity in the mainstream, upper-middle-class white Whole Foods world of eating organics for your own personal health and that of your very special precious white children. Where is the love for labor there, for the folks who BROUGHT YOU THE DAMN FOOD, not to mention bringing you the weekend on which to shop for it?!?!
May 8th, 2009 at 8:27 am #
On a less ranty note, really relating to what Maia says about being a health worker and wrestling with these questions from that angle. “Experiment and see what works for you” is also my philosophy, but I know that having the space and time and energy to experiment and observe and remember is also a privilege, so it’s hard – sometimes people just want a more concrete answer, which I understand but it also feels like a disservice.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:07 am #
I don’t know, but this made me cry. I know that beans and rice = poverty to me, so eating beans and rice together is hard. Just eating right now is hard.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:08 am #
I was blessed to be able to go to the Brooklyn Food Conference last weekend where there were amazing people from all over the spectrum. A community garden food pantry in Bed Stuy working with Campesinas from the landless movement in Brazil collaborating with rural Wisconsin farmers on everything from growing techniques to fair trade policies and the speculative markets on crop prices. Greenmarkets lobbying to get matching programs for folks on food stamps so they get a 20% bonus. WOC environmental justice lawyers who work on land use. People addressed how agribusiness is harming bodies and communties, and how people are organizing around it. And amongst all these passionate people, after several hours of listening, it was a relief to hear such a wide variety of speakers who listened to each other, offered up their contributions, and never claimed to have all the answers.
I think they video taped each of the workshops and may be posting them online. I wasn’t in any of the nutrition workshops, but I bet some of the people in the health workshops might be people worth researching.
Personally, aryuvedic nutrition, which I just found online, helped me to contextualize what my body craves (sometimes good sometimes bad). I don’t follow its prescriptions to the letter, but it was the first thing that made nutrition accessible for me. From there I worked on working in less processed food, and from there learning more about what minerals and vitamins my body craved. Six years later I’m still learning.
May 8th, 2009 at 11:06 am #
To me healthy is whole grains, the colourful fruits and vegetables, a little milk or cheese and a little something else for protein (meat or nuts or tofu or beans). It’s basically following the food guide.
As for doing it cheap, I like to shop at bulk food places. A bowl of oatmeal is 12 cents plus brown sugar and milk. I think we figured four servings of rice is 50 cents. A 10lb bag of potatoes is $4 here (though I don’t have a car so I never buy that). Pasta costs more especially for whole wheat but there’s usually a cheap pasta at the grocery store. Every night I think if I want pasta, potatoes or rice for the base. Then I think about what I want to do with it, what vegetables I want to add. So since grains/potatoes are pretty cheap, I spend most of my food money on fruits and vegetables, bread and milk. I get protein from grains, milk, and nuts. Beans are also cheap and healhy but I have yet to acquire easy yummy recipes for them. I get a lot of iron from fortified cereals. Plain peanuts and tofu are cheap here too.
May 8th, 2009 at 1:00 pm #
The best thing I ever did for my health was to stop eating dairy; later I found out that a lot of people who have the same health challenges I do have had similar results with cutting out dairy. I wish I had heard sooner. Food is such an emotionally charged topic for so many reasons that people are often hesitant to share what they know.
May 8th, 2009 at 3:59 pm #
@nora
i feel what you are saying about experimenting with food as being a privilege. this is what i felt being pregnant (and so many other times) that the very act of being able to experiment is a privilege. a privilege of time. a privilege of money. a privilege of access to different types food. (i mean most places i have lived have not had a ‘health food store’ near me)
so where does this leave us?
even the privilege of having the time to eat slowly. that is def. a privilege that alot of working class dont have.
i am not sure. but i believe that by deconstructing what ‘healthy’ means we may be able to create the space to redefine and re imagine how we relate to our bodies and food.
what that redefintion looks like is concrete…but not essentialzed…not an answer that covers everybody…
and yet to claim that answer is individual is also untrue. because it is communal. societal. historical. generational.
sometimes i hear my ancestresses whispering in my ear: eat this. dont eat that. sometimes they point me to a food. a root. an herb to give another…that is not a medical, essentialized answer…but their answers are real…so real…
May 8th, 2009 at 4:25 pm #
I think the issue for me with health is “dislocation” if that is even a word or has a meaning. To *me* when I think it, it makes me think of how food has “traditionally” been something associated with your current environment. You ate off the tree that sat outside your yard. You ate the eggs that your chickens made you. etc. but when you are a person who comes from a migratory family, from a migratory community–how does one do that? To me, what I eat is SO connected to being “chicana”–first and foremost–with ‘working class’ bringing up the rear. I would say 99% of the people I grew up around and even live around today learned how to eat based on what is easy and fast and cheap and can be cooked by young children. Which equals out to mac and cheese, sandwhiches, sugar snacks, etc.
And parents thought–at least they’re eating something. They aren’t going to school hungry. They don’t complain of being hungry. Their bellies are full. A sign of health, right? Full bellies means you have enough calories to grow like you need to.
But “back home” in Texas or Mexico, a home cooked meal would mean tortillas, beans, some meat, rice. But even then–poverty makes beans equal overcooked beans with lots and lots of grease to make up for the lack of flavor–and *that* sort of diet was introduced because of poverty and again, dislocation–being forced into migrant camps, being forced into reservations, being forced into ghettos…Food *is* used to control–and I think that for migratory peoples, high starch, high fat, high sugar food was all introduced as a way to convince people that they weren’t starving. That all the moving and lack of stability is ok, because at least your kids aren’t starving.
Ironic, yes?
May 8th, 2009 at 4:36 pm #
And I admit that I am a person who is SO frustrated with the abstract “experiment” and “eat what feels right” thing–because yes, it is a privielege to say that in all that ways covered already–but it’s ALSO a privilege in that it assumes that people *know* how to experiment–how to try new things. I mean, as I was saying to my friend who I was talking to about this–I’ve spent about 34 years without even the basic concept of how to *cook* food–I am not a fucking chemist. And to me–coming to cooking *real* food after struggling through cooking mac and cheese and living off of P&J–it *feels like cooking is chemistry*. Like “experimenting is something gods do.
because no recipe says to you==if you add to much salt, you can add a little water to dilute or more of other spices to even out. So to somebody like me–if you add to much salt that means throw that shit away because it’s inedible. It’s only been recently that I’ve *started* to figure that shit out. And I’ve only gotten to the point that I sort of vaugly know what to do if I add too much of something.
I have to say, in the way of skill sharing–vegan cooking, in particular the post punk kitchen folks–is really good about breaking down the “how to” basic skills of cooking. I’m not anywhere close to being a vegan, but I do eat a lot of vegan food now because the recipes in the post punk kitchen cookbooks tell you very basic things like–cut up your vegitables first and then set them aside. Then get your grill started. Or—the “cupcake cookbook” says *why* you add vinegar to your soy milk And what effect apple sauce will have on your cupcakes. and why X flour is better to use than Y flour.
That’s the shit that I don’t know. That I struggle to understand. That is *totally* inaccessible to me. That makes me scared to experiment and try new things. that people *assume* when saying “eat healthy”–that you know the basic fundamentals of fucking chemistry/cooking
And I will tell you right now, it takes freaking *time* to learn those fundamentals. And when you have kids who aren’t good sports about “trying new stuff” (but who can blame them, who wants to eat undercooked lentils with too much salt and overcooked onion?)–cooking is just a treasure trove of pressure.
May 8th, 2009 at 4:47 pm #
oh, and then the other thing–when people say experiment–and you’ve grown up around mac and cheese etc–you think experiment means *eat raw carrots* because that’s something you don’t do. But how do you make raw carrots the foundation of a new diet? because basically that’s what pretty much entire communities really NEED to do–is find/create entirely new diets! So all of us are eating raw carrots and don’t lose weight and our blood pressure doesn’t go down and we’re all still addicted to sugar–but we’re eating raw carrots! A hugely significant thing for us because we can go *months* or *years* even without eating any veggies at all–but this HUGe thing for us doesn’t create the changes we need–and nobody is talking about ok, instead of lecturing you on “eating healthy” we’re going to hold classes on how to cook, where to find and how to afford meals that are largely plant centered. We’re going to SHOW you how to make a transition to a healthy diet by showing you how to cook, how to buy food, how to *prepare* food you’ve never heard of before in your entire lives…
you know?
I’m talking basic fundamental shit here. did you know how many loaves of bread I baked that were completely inedible because I was using a recipe for bread made w/white flour and I didn’t realize that Whole wheat flour was thicker and that means you use less of it or add more water? And if I were a woman who didn’t have the recources or time to sit and make inedible bread over and over again, would I have kept trying? Hell NO!
But that’s a very *basic* thing! So why aren’t the people/organizations/governments that are saying “eat healthy’ TELLING people basic shit like that so that they don’t have to experiment in order to get a decent fucking loaf of bread? You know?
May 8th, 2009 at 4:51 pm #
EKS–I’m off diary too–I still ocassionaly have a little cheese–but for the most part, I’m off it, and I feel SO much better–stomach problems are almost gone–which has a LOT to do with acupuncture as well–but getting off of dairy was the starting point.
May 8th, 2009 at 4:53 pm #
mpb–that conference sounds *amazing*. I wish I could have gone. I’m going to be looking around to see if I can find videos–I am just astounded about the landless movement and people in wisconsin organizing together–
May 8th, 2009 at 4:53 pm #
such amazing things happen when we decenter bullshit “reform”
May 8th, 2009 at 5:20 pm #
BFP, I was thinking about stuff. My mom always puts a real emphasis on being *full* because of a history of food scarcity, and a lot of the new healthier foods don’t give that *full* feeling…
There have been some suspicions that maternal and early life nutrition can set up a person for health problems down the line, but most people can only eat what’s available. If your car really sucks, you’re not going to drive the 30 minutes to whole paycheck.
May 8th, 2009 at 5:32 pm #
what does “healthy” mean? is a great question. i was vegan eating a supposedly healthy diet, yet for my body and my particular illness/disability–interstitial cystitis, it was actually really unhealthy. because i was eating tons of tomatoes (spaghetti was like my main vegan meal) and soy products as a vegan. i felt lethargic a lot of the time without a lot of energy. i’m not vegan at all now, i eat chicken, eggs and some dairy. i have been wanting to post about this on the vegans of color blog for ever but don’t want to open myself up to vegan judgement! (dealing with all the food stuff is hard enough on its own, thnx)
but what about the point a friend of mine brought up: is this diet within our genetic memory? none of my ancestors were eating soybeans. that’s why i like how ur talking about your traditional foods here.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:41 pm #
If you can look at a food and know it used to be part of the ground at one point, it’s healthy. It helps to teach each other about new foods and what they taste like – I love telling my grandma about the new foods I eat in Oregon. Unfortunately the produce back home is not so great…
also, the govt secretly wants to kill us through food. That is my theory. So we, as human beings, must rise up against the govt by keeping ourselves healthy.
Nadia > I think it’s something vegans SHOULD talk about, especially because of the whole color problem that seems to seep into veganism. While we shouldn’t be limited to the foods in our genetic memory, we should use that as a base to expand on. Not only that, but we should explore the foods from our origins – there’s got to be things that we have overlooked!
May 9th, 2009 at 12:28 pm #
Yeah, oh yeah. In my family, “healthy” was a code word for “skinny” and my mom pushes that kind of trope even today. Everyone in my family is short and heavy, and for awhile it looked like I was the one that would break free of what my mom and sisters considered the fat curse, but here I am and I look just like they do. My body has totally changed in the last five or six years. I’ve put on weight, took on a half-sedentary/half-laborious job, and moved in with a chef. Mom is all judgey because I’m not as “healthy” as I used to be — it’s so fucking ironic.
My food intake difference is huge. The hubby cooks everything we eat and cooks it all from scratch, and before when I was “healthy”/skinny, it was because I ate shit. I wasn’t taking in calories, but the calories I did were total crap. You know, I’d go weeks and weeks without even looking at a piece of fruit or a vegetable, but because I appeared “healthy” it was okay.
And now that I’ve got someone here cooking for me, it’s like I’ve forgotten how to cook altogether. I get in the kitchen and get pissed off that I can’t manipulate the ingredients like he does and just give up. When I cook, it’s mac and cheese and grilled cheese (the only really good thing I make is a terribly inauthentic curry dish), and it’s unsatisfying and frustrating because I know now what real, unprocessed food should look and taste like. I just don’t know how the hell to make it.
Thus I end up falling into the carrot trap. I actually bought carrots this week for this very reason. *sheepish*
May 9th, 2009 at 12:32 pm #
The best thing I ever did for my health was to stop eating dairy; later I found out that a lot of people who have the same health challenges I do have had similar results with cutting out dairy. I wish I had heard sooner.
Oh word. And this is part of my problem too. I have bad GI problems and this is alleviated when I cut out dairy, but as you may notice above my cooking repetoire is basically cheese-based dishes.
The time and energy to experiment and learn new skills is such a privilege — it’s a privilege to be able to fail with YOUR GROCERIES, like BFP was saying above. I just don’t have the money to just go out and buy new groceries if I screw up the ones I have.
May 9th, 2009 at 6:38 pm #
you know i have been thinking alot about vaccines…mainly because my daughter just turned two. and i had basically told everyone…we re delaying vaccinations till 2 years…and then we will think about it. well. now we kind of have to think about it.
and my friend derek is asking me basically how can we trust folks not to harm their kids. and the only answer i can give is: we have to find a way to build the capacity of parents and children to listen to their intuition.
what does this have to do with food?
i eat intuitionally. at some level i came to the conclusion that i have to listen to my heart, my ancestresses, my guide as to what i should put in my body.
they said no cheese no milk no meat long before i knew what the word vegan meant.
they said drink lots of soy milk. even though there were these concerns coming out about too much soy and cancer.
they said dont cook so much. eat it raw. before i ever heard about raw foods.
and they said for the person sitting next to you — health to them would be an entirely difft thing than it is for you.
and dont get me wrong. i come from traditional southern black folk. they eat pig. all parts of the pig. chitterlings. pig brains. feet. and i just couldnt do it. couldnt eat it. greens soaked in pig fat. so i ended up having to forage and find something that my body would take in.
so for me when i cook. i hear that whisper in the back of my head (normally it says: more garlic…ha ha ha) telling me what to put in and what to leave out.
and i admit it is that. that intuitional base of knowledge that i want folks to tap into. that intuitional knowledge in which each of us knows what we need and our families need at this moment. in this season.
i also admit that sitting in a cooking/nutritional class for me is really difficult. i just get squirmy.
like right now my kids favorite food is…french fries with ketchup..wtf? but she loves them. and so we make fries. and she loves eggs. and i hate eggs. and when she asks for eggs i just get all grumpy cause i have no idea how to cook an egg. so i end up feeling like a horrible mother and calling my partner in to make eggs.
and i am learning to trust her to know what she needs at the moment. and trust that later that same sense of intuition will be there responding to what she needs to intake at various moments in her life.
and i want to say that while my family is a pig centered clan. they did give me certain knowledges that i hold dear. because they are rural-based. and so ‘good’ food meant from the garden. okra. and shelled peas. and watermelon in the summer. kale. and fresh herbs. and the plants that you pick by the pond when you are sick in the winter.
and so for me…as i grew older i discovered…yes through trial and error and through the ancestresses breath what i needed to live.
alot of what i eat is raw. so it is harder to screw up.
May 10th, 2009 at 12:42 pm #
ha! but you know what girl? My ancestors are all “girl, u deserve that fucking ice cream, none of us ever got that shit–EAT IT”
)))))))
seriously tho, I was telling somebody the other–it’s such a confusing thing when you start peeking into “food choices” through the lens of “love” or “ancestors” or something along those lines–because, as an example, fried bread has become the thing that a lot of native peoples recognize as not being healthy, and as *hurting* people-and fried bread has a colonial past, where native women were given mealy flour and told to feed a family of five with that shit…and they *did it*….and they did it *well*–homemade fried bread is SOoooooooooooooo freaking good–it is something that women clearly put a lot of love and tenderness and practicality into it, because how the hell else are you going to get your kid to eat that shit? I mean, picky kids didn’t just pop up with my kids! So they made it tasty and good and something that kids could look forward to even if it wasn’t good for them in the slightest–
there’s *love* in that, right? and there’s a lot of food that each of our cultures have that exists in that same way–all women had was X ingredient, and so out of forced practicality and love–they figured out a way to make it into some tasty ass food! I can hear ALL of those women talking to me when I’ve got 40$ and two weeks of groceries to buy.
I don’t know where the women are who had traditional diets back pre-colonization. I don’t know if they exist. I don’t know how to hear them. I don’t know what they have to say. And I kind of wonder if they’re too busy haunting the streams where they were murdered to give a damn about some fat privileged whiny ADD laden brat that keeps begging for “The Secret”
not to mention the fact that I really have a problem with chicanas that get all “My native great great great grandmother visits me in the night and tells me how to make dove rose soup that gives everybody orgasms when they eat it” I mean–chicanas–I grew up thinking I was a big old mexican only to find out as a 20something year old that actually I’m Apache and don’t have a drop of mexican blood in me! (I consider myself chicana because that identity *assumes* mestiza background–I am “blood” indian, culturally mexican, etc etc) So it’s like–we all dream about and talk to an assumed old native grandmother–but really we got us such a mixed tribe in our backgrounds–we really *should* be talking to the nordic asshole who beat his wife but was the last person in our lineage who ate a traditional diet!!!! hahahaha….
I guess what i’m saying is that it’s hard to talk to ancestors and consider “traditional” food when you have mestizaje background–or are adopted or whatever. you know?
May 11th, 2009 at 7:20 am #
and girl your last comment dinged up so much shit in my head
May 11th, 2009 at 11:30 am #
i am just starting to figure out what “healthy” means to my body, and have started to try to eat intuitively, but it’s taken a lot of time and experimenting to get to this point. years, really. and there’s still a long way to go.
it took learning how to cook, which was a slow, painstaking process for me because i had such terrible associations with it. (namely a mean stepmama who made me feel like poo because i couldn’t make pancakes when i was 19, etc.) so i hear you on needing really step-by-step help on the cooking front. once i made cornish hens that didn’t cook because i hadn’t removed the gizzards. people made fun, but i’d never *made* hens before. how was i supposed to know a) what gizzards were, and b) how to remove them?
one of the most frustrating things about learning to cook on a tight budget has been getting all of the ingredients for something, making it, and then either discovering i don’t like it or messing it up. there goes dinner for the next three days. only recently, because i didn’t know anything about fish sauce and its sodium content, i made an inedible soup. i could not barrel through that sucker.
so mainly this is all to say: yes, i hear you and yes, it’s hard.
on the positive side, one of the nicer things about experimenting has been discovering foods that i like to eat. like, who knew i liked cabbage so much? i could eat that stuff every day!
May 12th, 2009 at 12:19 pm #
there is a little bit of me that is feeling defensive. and in trying to figure out why i realized that what i am saying is: i’m crazy. and not incredibly practical. and i dont know what traditional food from my peoples are…if i did i might approach the whole food/cooking/eating thing differently. but i dont.
honestly when i went to east africa i hated the main staple: ugali aka fou fou. hated it. refused to eat it. yeah it is only the base of every fucking meal we were served.
so i am one of those really picky eaters. my family hated it. and that is part of my defensiveness as well. because they saw me not wanting to eat what they served as a deep insult. i just didnt want to throw up again. and i know they were showing me love the only way they knew how. and i knew i had to save my life.
and that is why i cling to my intuition as the only thing i can trust. that soft voice that says no and yes.
and yeah sometimes it tells me to drink a beer, smoke another cigarette, i figure that is the best option available…
i know not everyone is crazy. hell, not everyone wants to be. but since it is that intuition that tells me what to eat is the same that tells me that my kids diaper rash is caused by the cheese she is eating is the same intuition that tells me this woman in labor needs to relax her jaw and it tells me that this street is safe to walk down but that is not…
it is all ive got. you know?
and someone else’s wisdom never seems to work that well for me.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:37 pm #
oh, girl, I hope I’m not making u feel defensive. I’m crazy too! I know what you mean you say you can’t listen to others intuition–I’m SO not trying to say listen to me or to others!!!! And believe me, I”M CRAZY TOO!
I guess tho, where I’m coming from is that I can’t go linearly–which is what “what did people eat historically” means to me. How do you go linearly to find “The Answers” when you’ve had that line ripped apart and burned to shreds? Which is why I think I identify so much with mothers around me saying: this is how you feed a family of four on 5 dollars a day–but have such a hard time hearing “traditional wisdom” you know? when I say I can’t hear them–it isn’t for a lack of trying–and believe me, I am the FIRST to wish my rose dove soup would make people orgasm!!!! (and in case you don’t know, I am referencing the movie/book Like water for chocolate, which is a chicana staple and really intersects food with chicana identity in a way that really pisses me off, but a lot of chicanas love)–
but I just had a acu. treatment–and one thing that sprang out from my guts was “don’t eat anything without first asking your stomach if it is ok”–and I think that this might be something closer to what you are talking about mai’a-when you say listen to your intuition-i have really prioritized my head’s needs, without listening to my stomach’s needs at *all*–when, isn’t my whole philosophy around organizing based on meeting the needs and prioritizing the needs of the people most affected by a particular situation? Thus, shouldn’t I be listening to my stomach’s needs first?
And when my stomach lurtches because it smells corn, shouldn’t I listen to that, rather than my oh so practical brain that says, but bfp, it’s CORN, how could corn be bad for your stomach, besides, you’re hungry and what else are you going to eat? so I’m getting it on that level–
but I also have to recognize that for me, “ancestral wisdom” is something I personally have a lot of baggage (politically,familialy, practically and emotionally) with. I don’t know who I’m talking to over the massive destroyed bridge I live on…I don’t know who is over there, and I can’t hear their yells….
May 12th, 2009 at 1:33 pm #
oh! i cant go linearly either. that is my problem. i have no idea who my people are.
story: two miles down the road from my grandparents land in south carolina is a white family with the same last name: lowery. did they own us?
twenty miles from my grandparents land is a federally unrecognized ndn nation where one of the most popular last names is: lowery.
the food that agrees with me? traditional ethiopian/somalian…(and that is the wrong part of africa for me to trace any lineage) rice and beans, spicy curries, and raw fruit and veggies…
so when i say my ancestresses…i dont mean some biological ndn or african or hell, white grandmother…i mean the knowledge in my body and spirit that cares for me even when i cannot care for myself. that personified. i do believe that there are those spirits, that inborn intuition that we can unravel from all the cultural, social, political colonial muck that has dried on top of it.
i cant go pre-colonial. and i have a strong distrust of frankly white folks’ nutritional advice. not when i grew up with the ‘milk does a body good’ commercials. and i cant trust my family who think that spicy pig intestines is the height of cuisine and healthy eating ( i guess it works for them but for me … no) and so i use that intuition/ancestress voice to guide me.
and yeah i know like water for chocolate. i didnt know how it functioned in chicana culture. frankly, i loved the book. but we black folks have the movie (and tv series!) soul food. where big mama dies from eating all that soul food and then everyone sits down every sunday and keeps eating the food that killed their mother…because it is an expression of love.
trying to find a way out of that is why i say that our survival is a spiritual discipline.