The Healing Properties of Food

One of the more drastic changes I’ve made to my lifestyle over the past two years is my rate of cooking.

I’ve learned, in steady increments, a pretty diverse array of dishes. I’m by no means an expert chef, but I am finally seeing the value in cooking natural foods. I am also seeing meals less as acts of shoving food down the throat for the sake of “good feeling,” and more as calming social and artistic rituals.

Through the act of cooking I am also gaining more awareness of the healing properties of various foods (and conversely, the inflammatory properties of most modern processed foods).

On Tuesday I made a Sardinian-style herbal minestrone for dinner and woke the next day with noticeably little fatigue. The aches and tightness I often feel from a week of heavy running were minimized. I felt fresh and significantly more mobile. I had what ended up being the fastest run of my life.

My journey to nutritional health began with an experiment several years ago. I wanted to see what would happen if I ate steel-cut oatmeal every day for lunch (mixed with granola and blueberries), for a period of several months. What happened was remarkable: my health improved by a considerable magnitude in almost every category. My blood pressure, for example, is now the best of my life. My LDL cholesterol dropped from more than 190 mg/dL to somewhere around 50 mg/dL. In short, it went from “higher than healthy” to “very healthy.”

I’ll avoid getting into detail of my current diet here. I will note though that my great epiphany has been that health is nearly impossible for the individual who can’t cook his or her own food (or who doesn’t live with someone who can). Without this ability, you are beholden to industry and its pre-packaged shipped goods. Just as bad, the non-cook forsakes a valuable social ritual in favor of timeliness. Cooking is a physical and mental act; it is an art. It’s also a connection to be made with other people, like writing or painting. A writer needs a reader just as a chef needs a diner. To abandon the ritual surrounding cooking is a great loss.

As I think about my recent affinity for cooking, I also find myself increasingly nervous from how my own path seems to be diverging further from hustle culture and what I’ve seen deemed as the “hedonic treadmill.” I can’t deny that the modern, office-oriented sedentary lifestyle is becoming increasingly less appealing.

The silver lining of the COVID pandemic, if there was one for me, was that remaining at home illuminated the poisons that hustle culture may induce into its unaware victims. There is a race, but most of the participants don’t know what actually waits at the finish line: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, neurodegenerative disease, and excess materialism.

Now that I realize how little I want to participate in the material hustle, I can’t help but wonder: what’s next?