This may sound counter-intuitive but I recently watched the movie Castaway and I found it to be surprisingly effective thinspo.
Really appreciating just how difficult it is in the "wild" world of nature, for us (or any animal for that matter) to get food.
You have to physically work your ass off just to open a goddamn coconut! An edible plant is a huge blessing and sucking every drop you can get from it feels like feasting, even if it's only the nectar of a few leaves or what have you. Something like meat is possible, but you risk your life to get it, and in doing so you have to physically wrestle with a living animal, to meet it face to face and actually feel the life leave it, then butcher it yourself. You eat it with the knowledge of that experience, the pain and the triumph of it, and you are nourished by it in a more intense, more enlivening way than anything else.
We have more than lost touch with that primitive experience of food. Not only do we have no physical struggle to get to our food (as physical is replaced by financial), but the food itself is usually totally removed from its original state, processed and shipped and picked by someone very, very far away from you, often with a tiny fraction of the flavor or nourishment that it would have in the wild.
Considering all of this, the food in a shop or a restaurant suddenly looks plastic to me. I don't feel any profound hunger for it, just the superficial hunger that I've learned from habit and clever marketing. I'm more than a little disgusted at the anonymity of it.
I'm not saying that the food industry is evil. After all, I don't particularly want to abandon modern life and become a voluntary castaway just so I can appreciate the taste of coconut water, and I realize that the human race is generally better of with people having more equal access to food, but I do want to feel that connection with my food, that vitality and necessity and gratitude and wonder.
I'm sure there are ways to get it back. Maybe it's by waiting to eat until I'm really, seriously, mouth-wateringly hungry. Maybe it's by growing something myself. Maybe it's by taking the time and care to cook, recognizing how incredible it is to have the luxuries of a sharp knife, a gas stove, a pot.
Even if I eat the same prepackaged food sometimes, that thought at least helps me to understand the full meaning of that convenience, beyond the cooking that it saves me from doing, into the effect it has on the world and on the food going in my body. It stops me from lusting after that convenience, as if my life would be so much simpler if I only had the power to magically conjure my food out of thin air.
That's my thought for the day. Anyone agree?
Really appreciating just how difficult it is in the "wild" world of nature, for us (or any animal for that matter) to get food.
You have to physically work your ass off just to open a goddamn coconut! An edible plant is a huge blessing and sucking every drop you can get from it feels like feasting, even if it's only the nectar of a few leaves or what have you. Something like meat is possible, but you risk your life to get it, and in doing so you have to physically wrestle with a living animal, to meet it face to face and actually feel the life leave it, then butcher it yourself. You eat it with the knowledge of that experience, the pain and the triumph of it, and you are nourished by it in a more intense, more enlivening way than anything else.
We have more than lost touch with that primitive experience of food. Not only do we have no physical struggle to get to our food (as physical is replaced by financial), but the food itself is usually totally removed from its original state, processed and shipped and picked by someone very, very far away from you, often with a tiny fraction of the flavor or nourishment that it would have in the wild.
Considering all of this, the food in a shop or a restaurant suddenly looks plastic to me. I don't feel any profound hunger for it, just the superficial hunger that I've learned from habit and clever marketing. I'm more than a little disgusted at the anonymity of it.
I'm not saying that the food industry is evil. After all, I don't particularly want to abandon modern life and become a voluntary castaway just so I can appreciate the taste of coconut water, and I realize that the human race is generally better of with people having more equal access to food, but I do want to feel that connection with my food, that vitality and necessity and gratitude and wonder.
I'm sure there are ways to get it back. Maybe it's by waiting to eat until I'm really, seriously, mouth-wateringly hungry. Maybe it's by growing something myself. Maybe it's by taking the time and care to cook, recognizing how incredible it is to have the luxuries of a sharp knife, a gas stove, a pot.
Even if I eat the same prepackaged food sometimes, that thought at least helps me to understand the full meaning of that convenience, beyond the cooking that it saves me from doing, into the effect it has on the world and on the food going in my body. It stops me from lusting after that convenience, as if my life would be so much simpler if I only had the power to magically conjure my food out of thin air.
That's my thought for the day. Anyone agree?
