Thursday, March 13, 2014

What's for dinner?

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more that clothing?" -Matthew 6:25 NRSV

I understand worry. Everyone understands worry, don't they? We're out-of-control people, and that's necessarily unsettling. We have no sway over anything, yet we desperately wish we did. The best we can make of that is worry. It's natural. Like breathing.

I've spent a lot of time worrying about my place in the world, whether my life will amount to anything. Worrying if I'll perform well enough, what people will think of me when I fall on my face. Worrying if my family will self-destruct, leaving literally everything broken. When I read that passage in Matthew, those are the things I think of. "Don't worry if you'll ever amount to anything, Emily. Don't worry if your life appears to be spiraling into a pit. I'm taking care of everything," says the Lord. But lately, I'm reading that passage more literally.

A couple weeks ago, I made radical changes to my diet after a couple of very informative medical consultations. I decided to stop eating several things and also told myself I needed to eat more consistently. The things I eliminated are at the core of a modern American diet, so all of the things that are convenient, that my diet has rested upon my whole life, are no longer available to me. Thus the subject of food has become paramount to my brain. That's the first trouble.

But it's not much unlike trouble I've had before. In our sparsest times, I would allow myself to eat once in a day in order to preserve food for later, because I wasn't sure where else I would get anything to eat. I know what it's like to not be rolling in food. So that in itself does not bring a fresh perspective to Matthew 6.

My second trouble does, however. All the time in my past when I've intentionally plowed on without food, I was rarely distractedly hungry. Quite often I wasn't hungry at all, but when I was, it was easy to ignore. Thus food, although I lacked it, did not keep me preoccupied. But these changes in my diet have rendered me ravenous. I don't know why, but I have never been so hungry before. Even when I eat, a lot, it's only a short while before I feel like eating again. I had fashioned my lifestyle, my self, abound being as close to indifferent to food as I could be. If I wasn't hungry, I didn't eat. If I was a little hungry but it wasn't convenient to eat, I forgot about it with very little trouble. Physical urges did not rule my days, my brain did. But lately, I can't forget about being hungry. I'm frankly tired of eating.

Which brings me to my last trouble. I was told I'm in the prime position to develop diabetes. One of the greatest enemies of a glucose level is fasting. Self-denial has always been one of my greatest virtues, and, I'm finding now, weaknesses. No matter how hungry I am, I could still press on and not bother myself with food whenever I don't want to deal with it. But I really don't need to do that. Ugh.

For the first time in my life I have genuinely worried about food., what I'm going to eat and drink, and when. This is not a #firstworldproblem. Even at my poorest, it still wasn't much of a problem. There's so much food in this country that sooner or later I've always come across something to put in my mouth to keep me alive. I would eat it posthaste, then move on.

But imagine if we didn't live with so much food that it rots in dumpsters. I think there would be a lot less worrying about where one has to be when, who's mad at them, who they're mad at, and how well they're going to do on their chemistry test.

Although my recent scrambling for food has not been motivated by poverty, it has helped me more thoroughly realize how cushy my culture is. We really miss out on so much.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I like conversation. Your comments promote conversation. You know what to do. Vielen Dank.