Loving food

May 20, 2010

Dear Patty,

Last spring I experimented with a horticultural innovation named lasagna gardening, so called because the growing area consists of multiple layers of newspaper, mulch and compost. The benefits are no tilling, supposedly no weeding and no herbicides or pesticides.

No was the operative word. The garden produced a few peppers and some squash and not much else. I attributed the lack of a harvest to my ignorance, getting a late start and weather oddities. I also didn't give the garden much attention.

But as every baseball team except last year's world champions predict, this year will be different.

It already is. The garden went in as soon as the threat of frost disappeared, rain has been abundant and I'm weeding and making sure everything gets enough sun. The Marion and Early Girl tomato plants are waist high, and the potatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, basil and radishes are growing well. Only the corn is lagging behind.

We've already eaten some of the lettuce. The fantasy, of course, is to go out to the garden and pick our dinner every summer evening. Part of that fantasy is to nourish ourselves well. It sounds odd that we don't only put nourishing foods in our mouths, but few of us can claim to.

Maybe because we have so much, Americans have developed a strange relationship with food. We have turned food into something other than sustenance. We have made food an obsession. A third of American adults are obese, and a sixth of our children already qualify. Add those of us who are anorexic, bulimic or simply overweight and the size of the obsession is staggering.

But is it about food? While mindlessly jamming chips into my mouth, I sometimes am aware that my real desire is to push down some feeling I don't want to come up. Subconsciously we know our feelings exist somewhere in our gut (I just can't stomach that), so we block the feelings or numb them with food or something else.

But the feelings don't go away. Now we feel bad for having inflicted a new insult on our body, for not having enough willpower, for not being good enough. Maybe we punish ourselves by eating more.

In her transformative book "Women Food and God," Geneen Roth says the way to escape this dead end is to pay attention to how, how much, what, why and where we eat but to trust in what our bodies want. And to be brave enough to acknowledge the feelings we've avoided. Our feelings won't kill us. Being afraid of them might.

How we eat reflects our beliefs about ourselves and even about God, Roth says. For her God is another name for feeling whole, for coming home to ourselves.

Here is her description of wholeness: "Can you remember a time, perhaps when you were very young, when life as it was -- just the fact that it was early morning or any old day in summer -- was enough? When you were enough -- not because of what you looked like or what you did, but just because everything was the way it was. Nothing was wrong."

Roth spent most of her life on one diet or another, including the All-Grape-Nuts diet and the One-Hot-Fudge-Sundae-a-Day diet. Perhaps she directed her book at women because our culture indoctrinates them with the belief that once they are thin they will be happy and worthwhile. Obsession comes from believing that lie.

The formula for healthy gardens or healthy people is simple: Sunshine, water, nutrients the Earth provides and love.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.