“Are you hungry, can I get you something?” My mother is asking this of my nephew Jesse, who is poised between diapers and school.

“Just a little something to hold me up,” Jesse replies.

This phrase is now a family idiom, repeated countless times, eyes twinkling mischievously at a young man, tall with heavy bones, broad with coiled muscles, smiling uncomfortably at this reminder of a childish mistake. The older he gets, the more he will realize that part of the legacy of humanity is bewilderment about food.

Hunger is a complicated phenomenon. If we are stabbed by pangs of starvation, it seems direct. Anything digestible will satisfy. If we achieve a lifestyle that guarantees empty bellies for only short periods between regular meals, if we are fortunate enough to allow our bodies to busily store fat against the scarcity of a congenitally remembered ice age, we easily refuse food here and there, not wishing to upset our emotional equilibrium with a taste that curls the tongue, a shape or hue that disturbs the eye.

When we no longer need to hold ourselves up physically, assuaging hunger becomes a matter of intellect and emotion. Some of us, resentful of what we consider a primitive, time stealing activity, eat without sensual awareness, dreaming of the day when popping pills or injecting a concentrated fluid once a day, in seconds, will free us from another form of physical bondage. Others of us delight in the sensations of the feed, as dependent on the texture and smell and taste of what we eat as we are on the nutrition. Time is not wasted when food is savored, we feel; it is enhanced.

In this country, few of us eat without guilt. Those of us who meticulously cipher calories, nutrients and agricultural methodology are as enslaved to the ambiguities of food as those of us who court obesity, diabetes and environmental illness. Even those of us who fight starvation by shoplifting, ransacking garbage or appearing at charity kitchens harbor guilt over our inability to provide for ourselves and our charges in a refined manner. We are perilously close to legislating diet when we allow the legality of selective insurance company coverage. Why should it surprise us that insurance companies proscribe, first, treatment for diseases that can be prevented, largely, by diet? It was not so long ago that our ancestral law contained dietary proscriptions; the breaking of some of which brought death upon the convicted. Lack of insurance coverage for certain illnesses smacks of the same solution.

It is curious to me that the two drives fundamental to the continuation of our species, sex and hunger, have a reputation for being haggled over in congresses and quorums throughout history. It is almost unthinkable that we should allow ourselves to follow both our sexual and our dietary wills with abandon. There is, for instance, the possibility that certain types of cheeses fermented from a variety of raw milks will soon be illegal to import into this country. It is, as I write, certainly illegal to transport someone across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. Should we ban certain products because other countries recognize the value of non-pasteurized milk, but we fear it? Should the selling of sex, in the first place, be illegal?

We exercise our political beliefs through food. We show our appreciation through food. We punish through food. We rarely talk about these aspects of food and hunger, but they motivate us as strongly as a chemical deficit causes a child to reach for a vegetable instead of candy.

It would be easier, we imagine, if we could wrestle food into a strictly nutritional category and shackle it. We’d all be properly nourished and healthy. Arguments would cease. The world would be peaceful. This is the way of animals, we tell ourselves.

The truth is, animals also select and reject food for emotional and sensual reasons. You’d know this if you witnessed how alert and active Lou, Jesse’s pet iguana, becomes when offered a slice of apple instead of his usual mixture of greens. Wild mammals, when confronted with the abundance of summer, will eat what they like, first; then, what they must. From the time an infant suckles milk from a warm, comforting body, food becomes a emotional experience that, like a prism, splits mere survival into an explosion of color.

A few months ago, on a dimly remembered, serendipitously watched episode of “Oprah”, a guest chef was, once again, explaining to Oprah Winfrey and her audience the fundamentals of healthy eating. I was about to tune out when I heard him say, “Number One; enjoy what you eat and eat what you enjoy.” I couldn’t believe it. Although I know why I do this, I wondered how a food guru would defend his position in this era of extreme food prudence. To paraphrase his justification: Stress about food is as deadly as stress about other areas of our lives.

Does this mean that we can (gulp!) trust ourselves with food? What about rampant obesity in our nation? What about rampant anorexia? What, I ask in response, about rampant hysteria over what appears to be our ultimate lack of control? That is the first question we need to answer. How much more congenial to do it over a salivatingly aromatic meal.

My mother knew that couched in Jesse’s strictly nutritional request years ago was the implication that if she offered him something distasteful, he would refuse the morsel and endure or forget his discomfort until served something more palatable. If she had, however, tyrannically answered his request with a piece of raw liver rather than the slice of cheese she gave him, a different kind of hunger would have ravaged him; the hunger of detachment and impersonality. She would have lost her grandson as surely as if she had deliberately starved him to death.

When we belittle the complexity of food in our lives, we also neglect the importance of people in our lives, both politically and personally. It’s that simple.

Text, Recipes & Graphics ©1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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