Welcome back to The Gist as we continue with John Kabat-Zinn's exploration of the senses. He talks about taste as fundamental to our survival. Outside of breathing, eating and drinking are essential to our existence. Our ancestors used a keenly developed sense of taste to forage for food. As humans discovered agriculture, the art and science of cooking grew over centuries into the incredible array of flavours and varieties of food in global cuisine.
Few of us today have to cultivate or hunt for our food but eating remains quite central in our lives. Ironically, as our food supplies have grown and many of us are privileged to have plentiful to eat, we have begun to take food, and in turn taste, for granted. We are no longer just eating for sustenance, but to meet other needs like social bonding over food, eating for pleasure or over-eating as a way to deal with negative emotions.
In Coming to our Senses John describes one particular meal of cilantro fish curry and rice that was intensely flavourful and memorable, bite after bite. And yet, he could not fully communicate this taste experience to anyone else, not even his wife who was enjoying a different meal. Taste is perhaps the sense that is most difficult for us to convey through words. Another person can only truly understand our experience by sharing a bite of what we are eating. Even then, their sense of taste may be a little different than our own.
In his mindfulness work, John regularly has workshop participants engage in eating a single raisin slowly and intentionally. He asks them to hold it in their mouths for a long time, feeling the texture with their tongues, tasting the flavour when they first starting eating. Noticing how it changes as they consume it. This might seem like a silly thing to undertake, but it brings to light how little attention we normally pay to what we are eating. Instead of enjoying the richness of food, we might hurriedly scarf down our meals, often standing and eating, or even in transit on a bus or nibbling as we drive! While this may be unavoidable at times, how would our experience of eating and tasting be different if we took our time?
Perhaps we would take the time to prepare a flavourful breakfast and start our day feeling nourished, aware of what we are putting into our bodies. What if we used our lunches and dinners as opportunities to truly step away from our tightly controlled schedules? To reconnect with our food and with the people or pets who might accompany us as we eat. Could meals be a time to pause in our hectic days and remember the importance of living life as a sensory experience. If we punctuated our days to honor this essential act of eating, to find joy in the complexity of flavours and textures, we might better appreciate how food sustains us day in and day out. And recognize how many people in the world do not have this privilege.
There are still many parts of the world where people struggle to get enough food for themselves and their families. Yet in other parts of the world, food is so abundant, we rarely even think of not having access to it. This almost dims our appreciation of this great resource and can result in tremendously wasteful behaviours. Easy access to food and the low cost of unhealthy food together contribute to the health issues we see today especially in the West - such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Emotional eating has also become more common particularly in countries with little food scarcity and an over emphasis on convenient, highly processed foods.
Kabat-Zinn invites us to eat mindfully and notice how, after the first few bites of a favourite food we might actually feel satisfied, but we keep eating out of habit, to feed an emotional craving, or simply to relieve boredom. A wonderful way to become more mindful about eating is to become more engaged in selecting and preparing the food we eat. The closer we feel to ou
