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Pleasures of Food

By Sudha Hamilton

Published in WellBeing Magazine

I have always been passionate about food. It has, in fact, been a cornerstone of my existence. I recognised the signs early on, when I did not come off the bottle (alas breast feeding was out of vogue at this time) until I was about four years old, and I made quite a commotion about it then. That warm white milk spurting forth from that rubber teat was obviously a sensual and nourishing feed. Following that I remember a wonderful meal that mother used to make me, consisting of warm runny soft boiled eggs mashed up with torn crustless fresh white bread, the merest splash of milk and salt and pepper, mmmmm.

Ah food…it is a heady mix of psychological spells wound up in tasty matter. Foods that comfort us, foods that excite us and foods that calm us down. Our palate and our attachments to certain foods are I think all born of a time when we inhabited a yeasty humid world of milk sops and wet nappies. Textural considerations are of utmost importance when discovering dishes that provide us with inner sensual happiness: viscous soups and sauces, gooey eggs and soft steaming scoops of mashed potato, or balls of sweetened sticky rice and slippery steamed dim sum.

Eating food is pleasure and filling the empty tummy with something very scrummy is best. Pleasure. Is it a universal primary motivation? Or is it simply the avoidance of pain? Is hunger, once satisfied, the end of the matter? Or do we seek to enter that satiation by choosing just what we put in our mouths? The pursuit of pleasure: to achieve sensual gratification. Is it inextricably linked with our need for nourishment? Babies must have succour and must be touched to survive, and thrive to adulthood. Food in my opinion is not just fuel and not simply the sum of its parts. It is more than a list of kilojoules, fats, carbs and proteins. Like love it must be made pleasurable to do its work well.

Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) states: “The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.  The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Nevertheless the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life.”  However, perhaps Oscar Wilde put it more succinctly when he said, “Pleasure is the only thing to live for.”

Has my passionate relationship with food ever got out of hand? Yes. I was a fat child for a couple of years, and I paid the price with my slim, bordering on acetic father, ridiculing me whenever possible about my new found weight. Lolly addiction was a real problem for me at this time, as my mother, who did not enjoy making cut lunches, would endow me with forty cents tuckshop money and I would invest it at the corner shop in a large white paper bag stuffed with mixed lollies. I would share these with my best friend at the time, and he would entertain me with half his lunch, which consisted of sliced white bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.  So as you can see my flirtation with food as pleasure flourished a long time ago. Trips to the dentist, despite all that fluoride in the water, were far too common.

Appetite and control

Appetite – the desire to eat until one is full, or to eat a certain kind of food; to experience a particular feeling as that substance slides down your gullet. Control or denial – the decision not to satisfy that desire and to go without, or to distract oneself by exercising; having sex or working. Or to appease or tease, by allowing only one mouthful, or two or three mouthfuls, or just a homoeopathic dose of your bodies desired dish. The sins involving food and the bible’s condemnation of gluttony inhabit us culturally and permeate all realms of our western civilisation. The way fat people are ostracised in our communities and portrayed in popular media as sad laughing stocks, and perhaps we all secretly feel that our derision will inspire them to lose weight and return to the company of the slim.

Can you remember the power of the lolly? Or do you have children who have reignited your experience with this over whelming obsession with these sugared jewels? The startling variety of colours, shapes and flavours. Surely these are the building blocks of taste experience for us all, as we sit quietly on the footpath outside the local deli sucking upon that first lozenge of truth. Milk bottles; musk sticks; bananas and sherbets, cobbers, raspberries, snakes and jelly babies, just to name a few of these highly desirables. Of course these addictions were managed in a cloak of normality, whilst competing at sport and doing homework, but always at the core of the pleasure principle was the lolly… and for me pleasure was life. I remember going to visit my maternal grandfather who was a doctor and lived in another geographical state, and he had a huge jar of jelly babies on top of the fridge. I thought this was great as we didn’t have anything like this at home and he was a doctor after all. Such was the alluring power of the lolly that it permeated even the highest levels of society.

Later, working in a liquor store I came upon that same phenomenon again; but this time for adults. Shiny bottles of spirits and wines were their lolly equivalents. I could feel their hardly suppressed excitement as they fingered the bottles and read those colourful labels with gleaming tiny gold and silver medals stuck to them. Alcoholics; drug addicts and sugar fiends we are all dependent on the balance between our appetites and controls, and the psychology of our passions. What did the Buddha say, “that all life is suffering and suffering is caused by desire.”

What about the neurological pleasure systems in the brain? Michael A. Bozarth from the University of New York’s Dept of Psychology says “Neurological research has identified a biological mechanism mediating behavior motivated by events commonly associated with pleasure in humans. These events are termed “rewards” and are viewed as primary factors governing normal behavior. The subjective impact of rewards (e.g., pleasure) can be considered essential (e.g., Young, 1959) or irrelevant (e.g., Skinner, 1953) to their effect on behavior, but the motivational effect of rewards on behavior is universally acknowledged by experimental psychologists.

Motivation can be considered under two general rubrics—appetitive and aversive motivation. Appetitive motivation concerns behavior directed toward goals that are usually associated with positive hedonic processes; food, sex, and wine are three such goal objects. Aversive motivation involves escaping from some hedonically unpleasant condition; the pain from a headache, the chill from a cold winter’s night are among the list of conditions that give rise to aversive motivation.”

Hedonism then appears to be something that we should understand. The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines hedonism as “belief in pleasure as the highest good and mankind’s proper aim”. Personally I have been a big fan of hedonism and have lived my life as hedonistically as possible. However, having been brought up in a Christian /Presbyterian household, where hedonism was given a pretty bad name, it was necessary to throw off the shackles of the church’s wowserism and to embark single mindedly upon the pursuit of pleasure. I imagine that many people reading this have felt similarly about their lives in terms of giving to themselves and grasping the true meaning of ‘charity begins at home’ – and in my case the kitchen.

One of the most fulfilling aspects of cooking that I have found is making up new dishes. When you are cooking everyday for hundreds of people, and although often making batches of the same dishes, it is in my nature to want to break out and try something completely different. I was at this stage in my own little restaurant cum takeaway and like many young people I found pleasure in novelty and variety. I had one particular customer, who by tacit arrangement, would receive whatever I could challenge myself to come up with. A dish or plate created right then and there with no prior thought, and as luck would have it, he would often arrive at the busiest possible time during service. I would be swearing sweating and smiling, and making haste with the pans. Usually the result would be rather good, and although frazzled by the experience it was ultimately rewarding. Creativity can be a hard task master, especially when you operate out of chaos. Cooking is however one of the few great arts that you physically put inside yourself, try eating a painting for instance.

So food has always been important to me and although when I first began cooking professionally I had not really recognised that, as I always thought that it would be something I would do until I found my true vocation. Cooking was not the supposedly glamorous job, that it is perceived to be today. Then, no, it was just another trade but I found it to be a very satisfying one. It was essentially creative once you had mastered technique, each day I would be challenged to come up with new and diverse dishes. Regular trips to the produce markets would have me coming across vegetables that I had never seen nor heard of. What does one do with a box of Kasava?  Well here’s one from Africa to get you started:

Kasava Cake
Ingredients:
3 cups (or 2lbs.) grated kasava or manioc root
1 cup shredded frozen fresh young coconut
1 12 oz. jar of Macapuno Balls
1/3cup evaporated milk
1 14 oz. can unsweetened coconut milk
1/3cup. whole milk
1/4tsp salt
1/2cup white sugar
3 eggs
1cup light brown sugar
1tbsp melted butter

Mix everything together, and bake in a buttered 9 X 13 inch pan for 2 hours at 325 degrees.

Other pleasurable delights…

Sudha’s Baked Spinach Pie

2 bunch field spinach washed and bottom stalks removed

2 med brown onions diced

½ cup strong white wine

4 large cloves garlic minced

1 Tsp ground cumin

1 Tsp ground coriander

2 Tbsp olive oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

2 cups fresh ricotta

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

2 free range eggs lightly beaten

1 cup chopped fresh basil

½ cup chopped fresh oregano

1 cup chopped walnuts

12 sheets filo pastry

½ cup melted butter

Sauté your onion, garlic spices in olive oil until translucent, cook in wile lastly before setting aside. Steam or blanche your spinach until just done immerse in cold water to stop the cooking process and then gently wring out excess water and chop into smaller segments and add a squeeze of lemon juice or a teaspoon preserved lemon rind finely sliced. In a large bowl mix together spinach, cheeses, egg, herbs, walnuts and your onion sauté and salt pepper to taste. I often add a little splash of a good quality soy sauce here and to most dishes really.  In an appropriate baking dish spoon out your filling before laying sheets of filo pastry and brushing every second one with melted butter. Bake until golden brown in a moderate to hot oven. Serves 6-8.

Pumpkin and Pistachio Nut Soup

1 ripe butternut pumpkin peeled and chopped

2 large brown onions

1 Tsp minced fresh ginger

1 cup dry white wine (optional)

4 large cloves garlic minced

2 Tbsp olive oil

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

½  Tsp ground cumin

1 cinnamon quill

1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

½ Tsp ground coriander

1 cup peeled pistachio nuts

2 cups chicken or strong veggie stock

2-3 cups purified water

1 cup watercress

1 cup pouring cream (optional)

In a large heavy based saucepan sauté your onions, garlic, ginger and spices in olive oil until translucent adding your wine in a few minutes before they are ready. Add in your pumpkin, stock and cover with water and continue to simmer for at least 40 minutes. In a blender blend your remaining ingredients with the cooked pumpkin and onion mix, leaving your cream if desired to whisk in by hand at the end. Serve with a sprig of watercress, a few sprinkled sliced pistachios and a dob of sour cream and fresh black pepper.

Oven Dried Tomatoes

Doing these at home will fill your house with an irresistible aroma that will have you salivating against your will. Hedonistic terrorists could use this process in their battle against the forces of parsimony.  This operation will take a considerable amount of time and consumes quite a bit of energy/electricity or gas, so you get maximum slow food brownie points and I recommend that you do a big batch at one time to conserve energy and because they are so delicious you will kick yourself if you only do a few.

Lots of tomatoes (Cherry Tomatoes or small Romas)

Corn of garlic

Bunch of fresh rosemary

Bunch of fresh oregano

Bunch of fresh marjoram

Salt and pepper to sprinkle

Set your oven really low to around 80 degrees Celsius.  Slice your tomatoes in half or quarters depending on size but smaller is quicker, place on baking trays sprinkle with finely sliced garlic, chopped herbs and salt and pepper and bake or dry for around eight hours. Serve on fresh crusty Italian bread with the finest extra virgin olive oil and your favourite cheese.

Savoury Mediterranean Vegetable Muffins

I made these muffins recently to take along to a night of chanting for Guru Purnima day, an Indian religious festival celebrated by those in the Hindu faith. I took along a journalist friend, Chris, and he enjoyed them so much that he has been haranguing me ever since to include the recipe in one of my columns.

11/2 cups plain flour

2 cups SR flour

1 tsp baking powder

200g unsalted butter

Salt and pepper to taste

5 whole 60g eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup sauted chopped onion

1 cup roasted chopped red capsicum

1 cup grilled chopped eggplant

½ cup black olives pitted and chopped

1 cup pecorino grated cheese

1 cup crumbled fetta

1 cup chopped fresh basil

1 cup chopped fresh parsley

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C. Grease muffin trays at least 12 muffin spaces. Sift flours, spices, baking powder into large mixing bowl and rub in butter to form a bread crumb like consistency – can do this in your mix master if you like. In a separate bowl beat your eggs, milk and add in cheeses, gently pour this into your big bowl of dry ingredients and fold remaining ingredients in to form raw cakey base glug with visible chunks of vegetable. You may like to stir in a further splash of extra virgin olive oil for consistency. Spoon into muffin trays and bake until golden brown and cooked through for about 40 minutes check with skewer.

Stages and Phases of the Mental Journey

By Sudha Hamilton

Published in WellBeing Magazine’s Good Health Special Edition

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all- what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?”

Exert from Julian Jayne’s book, The Origins of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind.

This journey of mind we set out upon hopefully fearlessly, but invariably not, is unique to each of us. It has been indelibly influenced by our childhood and the love we did or did not quite receive in the particular manner that we would have preferred. From the very beginning we start with a sense of our self, a nascent spark that will emerge in time like a sculpture quite unlike any that has ever been before. So defined by our life experiences and in turn our reactions and responses to them, that the twisting formless space that seems to be located behind your eyes might be beautiful art or something else again.

Does the aging process effect our thinking and feeling sense of self and if so how does it?

I once read, that according to a study conducted amongst a cross section of age groups, that most people feel in their mind’s eye that they are twenty five years old, irrespective of their actual body age. That whether they be fifty, sixty or seventy years old, inside they see themselves as that bright, shiny twenty five year old. Perception and self image are powerful things, and perhaps we function best when we feel young at heart. It beggars all sorts of questions, like what is wisdom and how does one get it? Is it the stoic acceptance of the vicissitudes of life and the bearing of tragedy with uncommon grace? Is a flexible quality of mind something that we should foster in the hope of a life well lived?

The mental journey through life could be said to be the only real journey we take, as we modern folk don’t live much below the chin. We think ourselves through life, from a moment somewhere between conception and birth up until physical death takes us we are marching to the constant thinking, taking place in our brains. Rene Descartes’ old dictum, “I think therefore I am,” sums it up pretty well. A few qualifications I think are needed before we can continue. Is our mental journey the journey of consciousness and what is the definition of consciousness? Is our beginning located in developmental psychology or in the actual origin of consciousness itself? Who am I? What is consciousness? Pretty heady stuff as you can see.

The word consciousness is used in a multitude of circumstances to mean:

  1. awake in the literal sense (as in not asleep or in a coma).

  2. general awareness of things happening around you.

  3. the totality of a person’s thoughts & feelings.

  4. a spiritual merging of your awareness with Gods.

I think we will take c. here – the totality of a person’s thoughts and feelings – to be our definition in this instance. Looking briefly at the development of consciousness in the individual we need to understand its beginnings in our infancy.

Developmental psychology begins its inquiry with the conceptual sense of self. When the child is born, and first breathes its breath separate from the mother and perhaps even earlier as foetus inside the womb, it is that sense of self that we know that defines us as truly us. When a baby first begins to smile in response to its parent’s gaze at the age of two to three months it is due to an altered subjective experience within the baby. It is the beginning of a predesigned sense of social awareness that all babies are born with and which Daniel N Stern, infant psychologist and author of The Interpersonal World of the Infant, views as the beginning of the development of the core, separate self. He states, “the subjective experience of union with another can occur only after a sense of core self and a core other exists. Union experiences are thus viewed as the successful result of actively organising the experience of self-being with another, rather than as the product of a passive failure of the ability to differentiate self from other.” So we begin with a sense of the self. As that sense of the self, within our own mind, grows with age we continue to differentiate what is us and what is not. The child begins to understand that its inner thoughts are not automatically known by those around him or her but that he or she can still convey that information by facial expressions and the like.

Our minds and in particular their use of language is what really sets us apart from other animals on this planet. It has indeed been posited that our experience of consciousness is in fact a result of metaphorical language and the constructs this has caused. Put simply we do not just see, hear, touch, smell or taste something, we immediately place that experience in the context of our own unique reality or story. We name it according to our rules and define its reality in line with our wishes. There is no true objective reality but only our mental interpretation of it. Everything is interconnected in a web of language that explains something by referring to it in comparison to something else. For example words like ‘heart of the matter’ or ‘bring to a head’ are all words that have been taken from our bodies to describe situations. Metaphors have created our languages and perhaps language has created our consciousness.

In this quoted passage from Julian Jayne’s book, The Origins of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind, we can grasp the essence of the mystifying question that has plagued us down through the ages – what is consciousness?

“We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.

Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.”

What I am conveying here is that much of what we trust in our shared realities are in fact complete delusions – we do not really know what happens inside a thunderstorm but we have a story that we all agree upon. Our mental worlds are all uniquely different and we share tenuous imaginary links that hold our communities together – that perhaps stop the sky from falling in. Our minds are magical things that have been directed to think in certain ways by the adherence to traditions. We have an innate ability to believe in things and thus make them appear real. Religions are a great example of this, when you do a little investigating into many of the religions of the world you find an incredible willingness to believe things based simply on tradition & the handing down of beliefs from generation to generation. In the Christian tradition, Mormonism, a relatively late comer to the field has an extraordinary tale to tell of solid gold giant tablets inscribed with the words of the angel Moroni, that nobody except the profit Joseph Smith Junior ever saw. Far fetched fantastical stories that apparently only occurred a couple of hundred years ago in the United States of America and yet now several generations down the line these things are solemnly accepted as true by bicycle riding missionaries around the world. Now I don’t wish to merely pick on Mormonism, as the stories in Catholicism and the other bands of Christian faith are equally as unrealistic with virgin births and the raising of the dead. We have an inordinate faith in anything that has been written down or passed down to us as true by our forefathers. Even when faced with incontrovertible evidence of the impossibility of these things we hold them near and dear to us – in fact we place them as the very bedrock of all our civilising institutions – myths that we swear by in justice, in love and in government.

Our minds are malleable and impressionable and our consciousness is very likely a construct of exerts of our sensory reality, which are glued together by the lie of language. No wonder there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Socrates was apparently a very ugly looking chap and every day he would go into the city square and challenge the truth of various statements made by his fellow citizens. He would not back down and would not accept the little white lies that we all share in, and as if peeling back layers of the onion he sort out the truth. Of course it all ended badly for Socrates. We are all so conditioned to accept lies, untruths and tall stories that it is a very hard road if one chooses to seek the truth.

Develop a healthy aptitude for doubt in your life and mentally this will take a great deal of the bullshit out of everything. As we age be vigilant for the desire to take ‘short cuts’ and to limit the size of your world – remain open to the mysteriousness of life in all its strange and varied nature.

Following ideals in your life can be a two edged sword-  it can inspire and motivate you to reach for things and states that are seemingly beyond you but it can also make you immune to the spontaneity and passions that mark our existence as well. As we get older the attachment to certain ideals can cause us to become rigid and inflexible. Compassion and the ability to truly say you are sorry are the hallmarks of a great soul.

In returning to the question of what is wisdom. Is it knowing that you are right? Or is it knowing that you don’t know the answer to any of the really important questions in life? Or perhaps it is having experienced the very real pain of losing someone that you loved forever? When I meet much younger people than myself I notice that they have an almost bullet proof idea of optimism in the future and I sense an absence of depth that only tragedy can truly provide.

Releasing control over your life or rather letting go of the illusion that you have any control anyway will free up a great deal of your mental faculties. You are going to die and people close to you and loved ones are also going to die – accept these facts with good grace. The compulsion today to always have a fantastic time and to avoid any pain or discomfort has created in many of us a vacuum where the other side of life’s experience once resided. Without the fullness of sadness in our lives we cannot scale the heights of ecstasy and we will be forever in the shallows of ‘searching for happiness.’

Age can give us perspective on things, allowing one not to get all ‘het up’ over the details. Having experienced the ups and downs of a life well lived, we can refrain from being so quick to judge things at this particular juncture in time.  I am reminded of a hundred cliches and truisms that point this very fact out.

Of course our minds are not able to live in isolation, they are a part of our monkey bodies and they will not function at their highest level without being exercised. A healthy body – a healthy mind, the interconnectedness of our brains with the other major organs and our autonomic nervous system really places our mind throughout our body. For peak mental performance, lots of stimulation both physical, emotional and intellectual is desirable.

New research into depression and Alzheimer’s disease is now seeing inflammation within the body as a cause for these very serious conditions and imbalance in our diet and lifestyle is a strong contributing factor. Feeding our brains a diet rich in Omega3 essential fatty acids will improve their functioning ability and re-dressing the imbalance in our diets by reducing the intake of foods rich in Omega6 fatty acids with further this.

In my own experience I have found the strategy of making decisions about things highly effective – don’t dither or procrastinate over choices in your life, trust in your instincts and make a decision. If it turns out in hindsight to be the wrong choice then review and be flexible enough to change tac. There is no value in over identifying with your life choices. We are in my view travelers through life and there are no prizes for getting everything right first time. I used to be very fearful of making mistakes as a young man and found parallels for this in my father’s attitudes to life. That whole thing of only attempting things that you know that you are good at and avoiding everything that may embarrass you. At a certain point, as a young adult, I needed to confront and make conscious this aspect of myself and let go of this life strategy as it was not aiding my journey. I remember someone sharing with me the story of how an aeroplane reaches its destination by continually correcting its course.

Life is a mental journey and it is far more interesting than many of us acknowledge. Thinking techniques based on fear avoidance and pain avoidance severely limit your life experiences. Drop the mental barriers and go fearlessly where you have not gone before. Start conversations with people who you do not know what their replies will be and relax into a sense of unknowingness because you will never know everything anyway. Smile at the sky sometimes and encourage gratitude for the showering flowers in your life. And if you cannot see those flowers look a little deeper.

©Sudha Hamilton

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