Friend or foe: Food can be either

I would guess that about half the time we are eating, we are not thinking about the eating. In our modern world of excess task management and convenient food, eating is just another thing we are doing while we do all the other things.

Because food and eating stimulates our dopamine receptors (the parts of our brain that make us feel joy), it doesn’t quite feel like a chore. It might be why we do it while we’re doing chores.

Indeed, the hypocrite nutritionist is eating a salad while she writes this prose. But for the record, I am stopping to chew and appreciate the complexity of toasted pine nuts and baby spinach.

Our relationship to food has evolved from one of nourishment and sustenance to one of emotional dependency and cultural disregard. Food is readily available, requires little to no time or skill investment to obtain, and can be consumed while driving your SUV down the highway.

It is a classic case of supply and demand laws. Food has been systematically devalued in our culture, from our disassociation of preparing it to our acceptance of processed garbage as a meal. (I’m talking about you, fast food chains.)

This results in a host of eating relationships that are not conducive to physical, mental, or emotional health.

Thus, today’s diatribe focuses on our relationship to food. This is a call for accountability and responsibility. It is a less-than-gentle reminder that we can be a part of the solution or we can be a part of the problem. There’s really no middle ground.

First of all, even though food is available to us all the time, pay it a little respect. Do not slam down a smoothie while you careen down the streets listening to windshield replacement ads on the radio.

Honor your meal and the nourishment it provides by giving it your time. Sit down. Stop doing other things. Chew your meal. Taste it. Think about the nourishment and how it came from the earth to your table to your body. Take at least one conscious moment to sit in gratitude for that with which you are blessed. Even if it’s just a cereal bar.

Secondly, don’t eat cereal bars. Prepare your food. The tradition of food gathering and preparation has long established our relationship with food and each other. The loss of this is one of the great cultural tragedies of modernization. Now our culture around food is about eating it (typically to excess) at restaurants with our friends rather than celebrating the harvest or hunt.

Buy or grow those vegetables and meats, the fruits and nuts, the substance of ingredients, and prepare them in your kitchen, at your camp sites, in your corporate lunch room. Not only does it stimulate the production of digestive enzymes and instigate digestive motility, it begins the process of a joyful neural reward loop without the preservatives and rubbish.

Thirdly, purchase responsibly. Every choice you make in the grocery store and at the market is a choice that impacts your local economy and the global environment. These are not to be taken lightly. We are singularly and as a whole accountable for those choices and the consequences of them.

Are we purchasing food stuffs that contribute to our local farmers or global corporations? Which of those two are giving back to the community and environment? Is your meat part of the methane gas bomb acting as a planetary incubator or did a 4H kid raise it on their ranch?

And most importantly: Is your food contributing to your health or your medical bills? Surprisingly, food does not just disappear into a blank space as the Pepto commercials would have you think. It becomes your body and the functions of your body.

You can function like a spinach salad with some chicken or like a chimichanga. All of these choices are yours to make every time you put food in your mouth. Make them consciously. And enjoy every bite.

Ammi Midstokke, MBA, NTP, is the owner of two birds nutrition, 1207 Michigan St., Suite C, Sandpoint. She can be reached at www.twobirdsnutrition.com.