Many thanks to my dear friend Christine, who has been an early supporter of this blog, for planting the seed for today’s post.  Christine broke her leg, and I mean really broke it severely, while traveling in Norway recently.  When I volunteered to take her some supper last week, she suggested that an exploration of the relationship between food as bodily nourishment and as a means for nurturing friendships might be worthy of a blog post.  I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on that topic, as well as on the relationship between the concepts of nourishing and nurturing more broadly as they relate to food.  I suppose I should not be surprised at how complex and interesting these topics have turned out to be.

Yesterday morning, just after I sat down to start writing, I had an inspiring discussion about all this with my college roommate.  She is an avid home cook and mother of two to whom both the nourishing and nurturing aspects are deeply important, and she observed that there probably are at least three posts’ worth of material embedded in this topic.  After all the places my mind has gone over the last few days, I agree!  In the interest of getting the discussion underway, I’ve decided to start with a recitation of my early observations, with the intent to explore each of the various threads more deeply in later posts as the blog develops.  As always, I welcome the views and ideas of others in the comment section.

Nourishing versus nurturing as a technical matter

Being a word nerd, I began my consideration of the nourishing-nurturing relationship by looking up both words in the dictionary.  Although many dictionaries and thesauri (or thesauruses, depending on who you ask) indicate that the words “nourish” and “nurture” are synonyms, based on the most common definitions I think there’s an important shade of meaning that distinguishes them.   “Nourish” seems to relate to the simple of act of providing another living being with required nutrients, whereas “nurture” means going about the task of nourishing in a manner that specifically encourages positive development and well-being.  At least where food is concerned, I think there are many ways in which this distinction can be appreciated.  Eating by definition is nourishing, but whether, and the extent to which, it truly nurtures depends critically on the context.

First thoughts: when the link between nourishment and nurturing is missing 

Nourishment and nurturing are concepts that easily can, and I would argue should, go hand in hand.  My  first thoughts on the subject, however, took me back to my earliest relationship with food, which is a sad demonstration that the provision of nourishment can at times be entirely devoid of the nurture element.  During my early elementary school years, my pediatrician labeled me as having “a weight problem” and, with the consent of my mother, decided that I needed to report for biweekly “weight checks” for the duration of my youth.  This was coupled with periodic trips to a nutritionist whose main instruction to me about food involved tricks for how to deprive myself of it.  (My mother’s first stop on the way home from many of these humiliating visits was the fast food drive-thru — I’ll let you, dear reader, connect the dots as you see fit on that one. . . .)   Weight, and therefore food, became a deep source of shame and guilt for me from a very young age.  Instead of feeling nurtured by food and the people who provided it, food became an enemy I hated to love and tried assiduously, yet ultimately never very successfully, to avoid.  To the extent food and eating “nurtured” anything, it was self-loathing (although “nurture” I think is a term misplaced in this context. . . .).

Food remained hopelessly entangled with shame and guilt in my psyche for a very long time.  How I later was able to find inspiration, and eventually even pleasure, from cooking is a long story that will require its own post (hint: it involved many hours with a most excellent therapist).  For the time being, I will say that, thankfully, I now spend a lot more time looking for food, and the act of preparing it for myself and those I love, as an opportunity for true nurturing as I understand that term.  Thanks to my friend Christine, I’m now consciously appreciating more fully the many ways in which that opportunity abounds.

The beauty of dining as an experience, and its importance to families and friendships

One of the keys to understanding nourishment and nurturing is the recognition that both are much more likely to result when eating is done mindfully, as its own experience.  It is my strongly held view that food consumed while driving the car, standing at the kitchen counter, watching TV, or walking down the street is never as nurturing as food that is served at the table where it is the sole focus of attention.  Foods consumed “on the fly” also often aren’t even particularly nourishing, because they are likely to be the kind of highly-processed items that are easy to eat while doing something else.  Although edible and the source of some nutrients, meals eaten while multi-tasking undernourish the body and certainly do not feed the soul and the overall being.

Once upon a time, the mindful dining experience of eating real food was widely recognized in the form of the family dinner.  That is one thing for which I will give my parents large amounts of positive credit.  No matter what each of the four of us in our immediate family had been doing earlier in the day, we almost always sat down and had supper together.  This provided an opportunity not only to eat but also to converse about the day’s events and appreciate one another.  

I am under the impression, perhaps wrongly (I fervently hope wrongly!), that the home-cooked family dinner is largely becoming a thing of the past.  In my own home,  even though I cook almost every night, ensuring that we eat our home-cooked meal at the table together and pay attention to the meal and to each other sometimes still can be a challenge.  When I told my college roommate this, she noted that in her neighborhood in New York City even taking the first step of cooking at home is an anomaly, and quipped that most of her neighbors used their ovens to store sweaters.  I don’t doubt it a bit, and I give her tons of credit for resisting the neighborhood trend and placing such careful and loving emphasis on cooking for and eating with her children, nurturing them in such a fundamental way as she provides their required physical nourishment.  It is so encouraging to know that the home-cooked family dinner does still live on, even in places like DC and New York where there’s a very big temptation to abandon it.

Thankfully, food as a means to nurturing is not limited to the confines of family life.  There are so many ways in which the preparation and sharing of food with friends does indeed nurture those friendships, as my friend Christine observed.  The beauty of food as nurturing in this context is that it serves as a source of goodness and strength both in the times we tend to label “bad” and in the times we tend to label “good,” such that the opportunities for giving and receiving this type of nourishment abound.  

When someone is incapacitated or grieving, one of the first things his or her friends do is take over some home cooking or, if appropriate under the particular circumstances, get them out of the house to go find something good to eat together.  This not only sustains the body during a time when the physical act of providing for one’s own physical nourishment is challenging, but also cares for the ailing person’s spirit and enriches the bond between the giver and the recipient.  What could be more nurturing than that?

Well, maybe equally nurturing is the act of providing food to friends and family for the purpose of celebrating!  This could be because it is Thanksgiving, New Years, a birthday, or a religious holiday, all of which traditionally and with good reason tend to revolve around eating together.  Or, it simply could be because it is Saturday (or Tuesday) and, hey, wouldn’t it be fun to have some friends over?!?  Preparing a meal for others for the sheer pleasure of doing it is, in my book, one of the highest forms of friendship.  Although, I understand that maybe not everyone sees it that way, which gets me to what I think will be my next-to-last point.

The relationship between giving and receiving

When one person is providing food to another, whether it be in a restaurant or at home, the nourishing and nurturing aspects of food are not one-sided affairs.  There’s what the giver intends, and then there’s how the recipient feels about it.  Sometimes their attitudes about the offering are in perfect sync, but that certainly is not always the case.  

In my recent experience with my friend Christine, who is vegan, I made a vegan casserole with loving and caring thoughts about her recovery in mind, and she received my offering with deep appreciation that I had done so.  I think that food is at its most nurturing of body and soul when the giving and receiving wavelengths line up in this manner.  

It is equally possible, however, that a meal cooked with such positive thoughts of love and caring will be received as just another acceptable meal, or god forbid might even be considered lacking in some way.   As a person for whom cooking is deeply important, until recently the knowledge that this can happen has been very hard for me to accept (with the StoveTop incident of Thanksgiving 2015, discussed in a previous post, being a recent case in point).   Slowly, and more than a little reluctantly, I have come to realize that not everyone will appreciate the care and good karma I strive to bring to the kitchen.  This potential for a mismatch between giver and recipient is, as they say,  what it is, and I have recently come to the view that it is better to accept it than become indignant about it.  And it could be worse.  I believe the least nourishing and nurturing food experiences occur when neither the cook nor the eater has brought awareness to the higher salutary purposes food can serve.

Please god, if you are in the business of reincarnating people, let me be born in Italy or France next time!

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a place where care is taken in both the preparation and enjoyment of food as a matter of course, and where the familial dining experience occurs on a daily basis?  I’m thinking that maybe one or two such places still exist, and they most likely are called Italy and France.  Maybe I am just being overly-romantic because my view of those beautiful countries is through a tourist’s eyes (and because, let’s face it, from time to time in the past, I have had my share of crushes on Italian and French men).  I have noticed in the course of my daily life, however, that my Italian and French friends as a group have a much more reverent and healthy attitude toward food, and they also have much higher standards concerning food quality, than most of my American-born friends.  Because I dream of a place in which everyone is of a like mind about the importance of these issues, I really do hope that if reincarnation exists, then I can be born in Italy or France the next time around to get proper food training from the very start.  Spain and Greece perhaps also are contenders. . . .

Well, I have rambled on enough for one day (two days, actually, because that is how long I’ve  been writing this), so I will sign off for now and welcome any thoughts you might have on this multi-faceted subject.