Munchies and the Mindset

Food, Mood, and the Power of Embodiment

How much do the sales of handcrafted coffee mugs and chunky knit sweaters owe to the self-care/sensory consciousness movement?

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This past Saturday, I attended a puppet show at a charming local theatre offering energetic kids and their perpetually exhausted parents a regular rotation of great shows. This week, the very talented puppeteer worked entirely with cardboard, crafting puppets and props on the fly based on the audience’s suggestions. In the first story, a choose-your-own-adventure tale, the main character went in search of her lost puppy in an abandoned castle, occupied by an angry (and very intricately crafted) dragon. The puppeteer asked the audience, “What should we give this dragon to make him less angry?”, surely anticipating the suggestion of an ice cream cone or a slice of pizza. Several hands shot up in the front row, and after a moment, the selected kid replied, “We should tell him to take some deep breaths.”

A chuckle of bemused appreciation rippled through the audience of chaperones, and the puppeteer’s face broke into a slow, knowing smile. “Y’know, that is really good advice,” he said to the kid. “And we don’t even need to make a new prop to do it!” The dragon on his hand took several deep, measured breaths, as the children in the audience giggled, and the parents elbowed each other in recognition. The dragon didn’t get any treat, edible or otherwise, for calming down—he simply got settled into himself once more.

Even in his corrugated state, watching the dragon calm down got me thinking about the role eating plays in embodied experience. For little kids, providing snacks as a means of calming down isn’t just a recognition of low blood sugar or hanger, especially when almost any snack will do the trick. It’s about giving them something specific to focus their senses on—a few crunchy bites of cereal, or a thick wedge of dried mango, brings them back into themselves. As an adult, it’s easy to conflate the physical and emotional influence of certain foods, as we’ve had a lifetime to believe in their special powers. Coffee provides a jolt of caffeine and a temperature extreme (hot or cold) that announces the start of the day. A glass of wine in the evening not only depresses an excited nervous system, but also delineates the end of the active duty of work, parenting, or otherwise. Certain foods have greater palliative power because of the emotional associations they carry, ones that are built throughout our lives. The decree to “treat yourself” rests on the notion that certain foods will make us feel better because they are treats. A bowl of salty potato chips, a warm glass of bourbon, these things are carrots-on-sticks that we hold out to ourselves when we’ve worked hard, or more often, too hard.

Yet conflating the foods we eat with the moods we experience can be dangerous, especially when we conflate eating with joy without being attentive to not only what we eat, but how we eat it. The health journalist Virginia Sole-Smith (and author of the excellent newsletter Burnt Toast) has pushed back against the arbitrary delineation of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” foods that underpins diet culture and anti-fat bias, especially when it comes to raising kids. Sole-Smith’s experience in retraining her child to trust her body after a medical emergency recalibrated her understanding of what drives people to eat—and the role that sensorial embodiment can have in rediscovering that drive. Reorienting ourselves to trust our senses often requires confronting our unconscious appetites—when we reach for certain foods or drinks not because they genuinely satisfy or feed us, but because we expect them to do the heavy work of emotional transformation. Trusting our senses when we eat also forces us to do something profoundly antithetical to modern life: to slow down and savor what it is we’re eating, to intentionally notice and think about what we feel. The concept of “mindful eating” has become too easily conflated with “healthy eating,” when it’s really about learning to notice as you eat. To listen closely as the coffee trickles from the pot into your mug, to slowly let the heat of the cup warm your fingers, to smell it before you sip it, to notice its sour, bitter, and smoky notes on the first taste—and, most difficult of all, to maintain this intentionality with every sip.

I generally don’t like to write about health or nutrition issues, mostly because, as someone who’s more steeped in the social and cultural history of food, I know how hard it is to separate what we think of as “good”, “natural,” or “healthy” from what has been celebrated or vilified in politics, media, and cultural discourse. Just as the notion of “authenticity” is historically contingent, so too is “healthy,” and if we aren’t willing to unpack the social constructs that underpin the concept of nutritionism, we’re always going to be vulnerable to medical and scientific authorities telling us what to eat and how to eat it. It’s because of my inherent skepticism that Sole-Smith’s philosophy of trusting the embodied experience of eating speaks so greatly to me, and why I had a moment of pause at the puppet show. Out of the mouths of babes came the truth—perhaps what a dragon needs to tame himself isn’t a special snack, but a moment to go on what Michel de Montaigne called the “bodily odyssey,” a re-anchoring of the self in one’s own scaly, fire-breathing skin? And if we could be truly mindful when we eat, who’s to say that a celery stick would be any less pleasurable or transformative than a slice of cake? To close our eyes, breathe in, and really taste what we’re eating—isn’t that the definition of self-care?

Recommendation: After going through our Spotify frequent plays (mostly Mary Poppins and The Everywhere Bear), I introduced my daughter to two of my favorite soundtracks: Really Rosie and The Point! (both amazing examples from the golden age of children’s programming in the 1970s, along with Free to Be You and Me and Schoolhouse Rock). The former was a co-creation of Carole King and Maurice Sendak and a great contribution to the “stoop kid” culture evident in the early seasons of Sesame Street. The latter was crafted as a studio album by the great folk singer Harry Nilsson. What inspired Nilsson to write the album may have been an acid trip, but what results is a brilliant fable on resistance to conformity and authoritarianism, with music that thrums along at a steady, singable beat. (Give it a listen, and you’ll have “Me and My Arrow” stuck in your head all day.)

The Perfect Bite: After the puppet show we walked into a local Sichuan place and ordered a variety of noodles, including what they called Chongqing Street Noodles (xiao mian). I feel like I could eat a million bowls of noodles in the Sichuan canon and never fully appreciate the nuances of each one—the blend of freshly crushed Sichuan peppercorns in chile oil, the topping of ground pork seasoned with red bean paste, the side of yellow lentils, the steamed bok choy, and the chewy alkaline noodles, all working in perfect harmony. Between this and the bowl of “hot dry noodles” (re gan mian) I ate on my way out of Oxford, I’m now obsessed with trying every kind of Chinese noodle bowl I can find. Plus it gives me lots of opportunities to introduce the kiddo to the concept of Ma La, even if I have to rebrand it as “zingy” or “tingly” seasoning that “makes your lips buzz”. (An ideal dish for mindful eating if there ever was one.)

Cooked & Consumed: After a hearty day of eating on Saturday, I wanted something healthy but satisfying to close out the day. So working from the template in Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food, I opted for vegetable soup. I chopped up a leek, two carrots, two celery stalks, and some garlic cloves, seasoned with abundant S&P, then sautéed in olive oil in a large stockpot for about 10 minutes, stirring but not afraid to let them get a little scorched on the edges. After stirring in a bit of tomato paste, I added most of a sunshine kabocha squash (seeded, peeled, and chopped small) and some chopped kale stems, plus a big handful of woody herbs (rosemary, sage, and thyme) then poured 3 cups of vegetable broth over the top. After 15-20 minutes, I added the kale leaves (chopped to bite-size) and 1 cup of green lentils, then cooked until the lentils were just al dente, another 15-20 minutes. (This would’ve been much faster if I opted for canned chickpeas instead, but no use crying over dried beans.) Served with some roasted sausages on the side and thick slices of rosemary focaccia, it was a perfect early fall dinner, and one we all slurped up with enthusiasm.