How Spirituality Rekindled My Relationship with Food...
I’ve been lingering on the topic of my spirituality and how it helped me have a better relationship with food. I have to discuss how making cooking my hobby helped me connect with people more.
Food is a universal language that most people can understand. Even your four-legged family member understands food. Food is life. It’s our way of enjoying the fruits of planet Earth. However, as I learned a bit more about our history with food, I began to understand how food became a tool for control for the power-hungry in life.
One of the major issues that happened was restricting certain foods to certain social classes. Before the socioeconomic hierarchy of today, there was the caste system. Based on whether you were born into a peasant family or an upper-class family, your food list was decided. I’m speaking more from Western European medieval history with food since that was my current interest for a while. My interests shift often, so you are warned about my habits.
Heavy red meats were for nobility and royalty, including chicken. If you were born a peasant, you could not eat chicken, and it was rarer to raise chickens for poultry because it was costly. It was strictly forbidden to be consumed by the peasant class, but you could eat the eggs the chickens produced. Chicken meat was for the upper class. In the modern era, meats associated with class have changed. Now, chicken is considered a peasant food. Shrimp used to be “poor man’s food,” and now it’s expensive to buy. That’s all influenced by the wealthy and capital C-ism.
Men who revere knights—you would have never become a knight because that was determined by the social class you were born into. And knights were not chivalrous either. Actually, they caused a lot of issues in society with their inappropriate behavior. So, not only was becoming a knight next to impossible unless royalty elevated your station in life, but they were not the romantic figures we see in TV shows or films. They were part of an upper class that had more access to a variety of foods, such as boar or stag, which peasants couldn’t eat either. You’ll notice I’m not mentioning harlots, shamans, and slaves. They had their own place in the caste system as well. They were the most dehumanized and could actually be killed by someone of a higher station with no repercussions.
Even the color of bread was assigned to every station. White bread was for nobility and royalty; black bread was for peasants and below. Peasants could eat fish, eggs, and whatever herbs or root vegetables were grown or harvested from the wild. And spices dictated how wealthy a house was—the spice box was its own decider of wealth.
You learn why alcohol was a part of the human diet back then—because of the contamination of water. Water spoils after a while, especially if it’s not filtered like today. It grows nasty things, which is why on naval ships and even pirate ships that were out at sea for long stretches of time, they had to mix rum with water and add citrus fruit and a bit of sugar to combat dehydration, scurvy, and contamination. Even in small villages back in the day, children drank a bit of light ale.
So, I saw the creation of wine, beer, and even hard alcohol as a means of survival—medicating the very things we don’t have to worry about as much today. Because we invented ways to filter out parasites and bacteria that would make us sick for a long time or even kill us, we don’t have to survive on drinking alcohol anymore. Now, it’s for social reasons.
Every grain harvest, the local priest was the first to eat the grain to test if it was contaminated, because there was a fungus that could cause mass hallucinations and make your fingers turn black. Scary things when you think about it.
Therefore, when I think about food today, it’s a blessing. It’s also a blessing to have access to other cultural foods. It’s amazing how many cultures have similar dishes but prepare them differently according to the spices used or other added ingredients that make them more flavorful.
Now, how did my spirituality help me develop a much stronger relationship with food again? Living in the U.S., surrounded by people policing each other’s looks—mainly their size, how muscular or lean, how curvy someone looks, or their weight on the scale—and demonizing certain foods, calorie-restrictive diets, and so on, all relate to orthorexia. It’s a newer focus on people who are hyper-focused on what they eat and who police each other’s standards of eating.
Even worse, they ignore registered nutritionists and the actual science entirely—the long-term studies and data showing how over-consuming animal-based products such as red meat can put you in the grave early and cause performance problems in other areas of life. Let’s call that “the other life’s pleasure.” Orthorexia isn’t classified as a mental illness yet, but it is considered an eating disorder. It’s on its way to describing the phenomenon of today, driven by societal expectations and bullying that happens when you don’t fit the mold—and really, that’s societal abuse.
No one wants to be categorized as an abuser, but when you police and shame someone, that is abuse. And that means you’re an abuser. I always talk about critiquing the human more than the system. The system is bad, obviously, and needs to change heavily, but it’s just a tool for the humans in power to use. The system favors the people who use it to abuse others. People constantly fall prey to systems of power that strip away their agency and, worse, get them to dehumanize and destroy other people to fall in line. For what, though? That just tells me the person who polices others hates themselves and wants other people to share the same agony of not eating a tasty meal.
Of course, I say, “You do you. I’m going to eat that bowl of Japanese ramen over there with miso.” I absolutely love miso ramen.
I love to cook, especially for people in my life.
But before I tell the story of cooking for my friend, I have to talk about an encounter beforehand—when I was at the grocery store buying ingredients for the week because I planned to grill a lot of food. I gathered a lot of manager’s special meat, corn on the cob, and cucumbers to blend with a romaine salad or just eat the cucumbers salted.
A lady stood beside my carriage in the meat section and automatically said, “You look like you enjoy cooking.”
That was an interesting statement to hear. I answered, “I love cooking.”
Within five minutes of discussing food hauls at different stores and me talking about buying up manager’s special meats so I could grill a spread for people, the lady mentioned it had been a year since her son passed away. She said it was just so sudden—how one day he was alive, and the next, he fell down a flight of steps, and that was it. That’s all it took, and a life was over.
I’m not the best at finding the right words to say to people during their time of grief, but I started with, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then I talked about all the cousins I lost who were just a few years younger than me, all in their early thirties. One who came home one evening, fell asleep, and never woke up. It wasn’t accident-related—just a subtle and silent thing you’d never think actually happens to people.
I followed up with, “This is why I cook the tastiest food for people.” I can be mindful of allergies and preferences, but everyone who eats at my table is going to eat the tastiest food before they leave. They’ll leave remembering that good meal. Because life can end just like that—a snap of a finger.
How does that tie into my spirituality? Accepting mortality. Accepting the cycle of life and death. And accepting that tomorrow is never promised. It’s not a grim way to think with a mindset like that—it actually helps me enjoy every ounce of food that hits my tongue. It teaches me to appreciate more of the things we take for granted in life.
Power-hungry people throughout history have always controlled how we look at food, how we experience food, and our access to it. It deters women from enjoying food through beauty standards, body standards, and gender roles—all man-made fictional fantasies. They’re not real.
The average human being is LARPing in some way because someone with rigid biases came up with theories and ideas. No one likes to be told they’re live-action role-playing a human fictional narrative of life. I have to admit, I enjoy coming up with metaphors to describe human behaviors that are under the influence of socially constructed fictional narratives. New tools introduced into society gave more opportunities for power-seekers to abuse them against others. That’s a human problem.
A lot of people choose to follow narratives and the people who construct them because they don’t want to be left alone to figure things out for themselves. They don’t want to become leaders because leadership requires accountability and action. I see it happen with people around me—they gather in one room, not wanting to be alone in the room we all have to be in anyway. Then one says, “I don’t want to be the leader.”
However, I don’t follow anymore. There have been moments in life when I had to take the leadership role—to take action and accountability for the group to get things done. A leader also has to be comfortable standing alone in a room. As an artist and fiction writer, I’m used to being alone a good portion of the time. It’s how I reflect on everything and understand myself better.
Cooking, however, has brought me closer to the people in my life.
So, now the story of cooking for my friend. Recently, my best friend visited me for her birthday. She thought, Oh, we can go out to eat somewhere. I told her, I’m going to cook for you. I asked what she would like to celebrate. Of course, she loves seafood, so that’s what she wanted. We settled on surf and turf.
I got shrimp to put on skewers and steak, which I brined for a few hours before grilling. I boiled corn in advance to toss on the grill. I also marinated and prepared chicken breasts to cook on the grill and prepared pork ribs as well. If I go into too much detail on the cooking preparation, this blog post would be too long to get to the rest of the story.
Everything was prepared in its own way to explode with flavor. When my friend arrived, she was eating a feast. I also had her try one of my new cocktail concoctions, which paired perfectly with the meal. Because, of course, with learning to cook, I learned to make cocktails. And because I’m particular about the ingredients I use, without those ingredients, the cocktails I make will never taste the same with substitutions. It makes my drinks personal—something you can only truly experience with me, versus someone else trying to make it.
Because this drink was so personal, I came up with a name for it: “The Backhanded Buddha.” And I mean it—it needs the particular ingredients I use for it to be the official cocktail I make. It’s been over two weeks, and my best friend still texts me about that drink and how much she misses it. That and my quesadillas—because with the grilled chicken breasts, I made quesadillas for breakfast the next day. After drinking a couple of my cocktails the night before, the hearty breakfast was well received.
As the day went by and she planned to stay longer, we talked a lot while watching the World Cup. She mentioned wanting to get married again.
Suddenly, I just blurted out, “Meatballs.” The shock on her face after I said meatballs right after she said she wanted to get married again was priceless. But with how my mind was working, I said, “I’m going to make a meatball soup.” She looked at me like, What the hell are you talking about? Then I clarified, “A wedding soup. A meatball soup is considered a wedding soup. I’m going to make you a wedding soup to bring you luck with that.”
And sure enough, I spent the rest of the day making her the wedding soup—a mock version catered to her. The scent during its final stages was so enticing that she had to end a phone call because it smelled too good. She was already sipping another “Backhanded Buddha.” She absolutely enjoyed two full bowls of that soup, and I packed her leftovers for the next day to travel with.
To end her birthday, I let her pick out an ice cream cake. During her time with me, she ate and drank like a queen. Everything I made worked out beautifully, and everything tasted phenomenal. I fulfilled my vow to that lady I met in the grocery store—to make sure whoever eats my food has the best experience to remember.
People who choose not to enjoy food anymore, and not enjoy tasty food together with people who matter to them, make me sad to think about. Throughout cultures and history, we’ve always used food as a way of connecting with each other. It’s the universal language. They don’t want to be part of that connection. And I guess all I can say to that is, “You do you.” I’m eating that bowl of miso ramen.
If you made it to the end of this blog, thank you. May you continue to enjoy tasty food and never let anyone convince you otherwise. Best of luck.