Gardening is not only an outcome of a healthy food relationship, but can be the approach to starting one. Let’s dive deeper into how gardening and growing your food enhances and promotes a healthy food relationship.
A solid and aligned food relationship knows what food is doing FOR them, what food is doing TO them and how they go about USING food.
The entirety of this affects our relation to food. Someone can have an unhealthy relationship with food, someone can have a healthy relationship with food, and someone can fall anywhere in between in this vast space between the two.
One of my biggest pillars of a healthy food relationship is CONNECTION.
Food will always taste best when we have a connection to it.
To put this into perspective, I like to use the analogy of children. You may like children, you may even enjoy children. But no other children, no matter how sweet they are, will ever have the depth of love from you, than your own children. And that is because of the CONNECTION you have to them. It’s because of the nurturing, growing and coming alongside them that you create this unique connection to them. The same goes for food.
The food on your plate may be just food. Probably you picked it up from your local grocery store, possibly you have no idea how it got there. It could be someone made it for you, perhaps your microwave cooked it for you and likely your freezer stored it for you. But you lack connection to it because until you start asking questions about what is on your plate and learning the details about it, you’ll never discover its full potential.
You must be present with the nourishment in front of you.
You’ll sense a shift in your presence and awareness with the food, the more present you become. Instantaneously there is more connection, more ownership for what you are about to eat- more information means you are left with a choice, of whether to eat it or not eat it. And perhaps the most important piece that slowly begins to form when you have more connection to what is on your plate, is that of trust. Now it’s really beginning to sound like a human relationship, isn’t it? Except maybe without the ownership part…
Trust that what you are about to eat, is going to do for your body what your intended purpose of eating it is.
This could be pure enjoyment, it could be wanting energy, it could be for relaxation, or decreasing inflammation, the options are endless…but you now have a trust interaction with this piece of food on your plate.
This takes us to growing our own food. If you want the ultimate food connection experience, all you have to do is start growing your own food.
I have never been a gardener. That may come as a little shock. Surprise! Not all Holistic Nutrition Professionals know how to grow their own food. But it’s been the past two years that I have begun to teach myself the art of gardening. I’m starting small. But every time I’m in my garden, I’m deeply entrenched in this intimate relationship with my food. And I can’t help it.
A few possible questions to ask yourself before growing your own food could be:
What is my intention in growing my own food? Is it food security? To educate myself? To have something beautiful in my yard?
What purpose will this serve? Nourishment? An outlet for creativity? A hobby perhaps? Content for social media?
Once you have answered these questions, you have set the perimeter for your motivation to keep the garden thriving.
It takes work. Any gardener knows the hours that need to be given to tend to and care for a garden. But out of that yields abundance of food and nourishment.
Gardening engages your senses and produces an appreciation for food that is otherwise nonexistent.
In my two years of time spent in thoughtful reflection as I tend to my garden, I have realized that the garden teaches us many things about our food, and not just that it comes from dirt.
1. It teaches us patience: It takes patience to watch food grow, but it also takes patience to watch the benefit from eating whole foods and its healthy impact on our body. We do not always see the results of our efforts right away.
2. The act of pulling out roots: The more you plant, the more you need to weed out the roots to have a successful garden. This aligns with eating our food and the desire to have a healthy and cleansed way of food relationship. The healthier food you eat, the more your body will find itself begging for more. We crave what we give our body and that goes for healthy food as well, eventually. Your body will be asking you to weed out the rest of the not so healthy in order to give itself more whole food.
In fact, our skin is kind of like the last layer of dirt in a garden. When skin issues arise, it’s often one of the body’s last cries for help. In order to heal what’s going on in the body, you have to dig deep through the dirt to reach the root and pull it out.
It’s then in this process of digging, getting dirty and exposing the dirt in the under layers, that we find what our individual bodies actually need for real nourishment.
In the garden you plant, care for, nurture and tend to your food. You are intentional, purposeful, grounded and take ownership for this space and its purpose in your life.
It’s easy to think that first must have a healthy food relationship to be a gardener. But this is not always the case. Often, it’s in the very act of gardening, that the food relationship transforms.
Article written by Amy Soudek, Certified Holistic Nutritionist and co founder of MORE with Amy
