Editorial & Comments

      Meanwhile it is a shame that in a country as rich as ours men, women and children are forced to eat unhealthy food because they simply can’t afford to buy nutritious food.  There is a great need for education about nutrition and affordable and healthy food has to be available for all people.

      The great pleasure in eating and the turmoil surrounding food is all over America and the question is:  Can a person be really sensible about food?  Is there a way of seeing food as such that can make one proud?

      Aesthetic Realism, founded by the educator and critic Eli Siegel has shown that the biggest matter in every person’s life is how we see the world, the place from which all food comes.  Our deepest purpose, I have learned, is to like the world on an honest basis, to see meaning in things and people; but we also have another purpose.  “The greatest danger or temptation of man,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself, which lessening is Contempt.”  These two purposes affect our whole lives including how we see food.  In “An Outline of Aesthetic Realism,” Mr. Siegel wrote:

A child grows from 12 pounds to 80 pounds through making the world himself.  In eating anything, we assimilate the world; that is, the world becomes like ourselves.

I have learned if we don’t like the world we can use food in a contemptuous way.  Like many people, I often grabbed food, feeling I could eat anything I wanted, and as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted it.  And then I could feel as if it was a comedown to show I needed food at all.  For instance, there were times in my life that eating one apple a day was more than enough.  Sometimes as I passed by a restaurant and smelled certain foods I would feel disgusted but also victorious as I saw people enjoying their meal.  “Who needs all of this food," I told myself—and felt superior to everyone.

Can We Learn From Food How We Want to Be?

In my second Aesthetic Realism consultation, my consultants asked me: “Do you think you have a desire to make less of the world?”  “Yes”, I said, “I don’t think I see so much in the world.”  And they explained, “No person really thinks the world can be liked….Aesthetic Realism teaches a person how to see the world so he or she can honestly like it.”  Central to this, is the study of this principle Aesthetic Realism is based on: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”   “Every time you like a flower,” they said, “you’re liking the structure of the world in the flower.”  I was beginning to learn that every object, including food, has as its structure—reality’s opposites which make for beauty.  And I learned these same opposites such as hard and soft, warm and cold, heavy and light are in every person, hoping to be made one.    

     Walking down the street, talking with another person, or eating a meal, I began to see opposites in things and in myself and I felt a new ease I never felt before.   I remember feeling thrilled looking at an egg, something I had loved eating but always took for granted.  When I really stopped to look at an egg and think about it I saw how it is an amazing oneness of opposites.  For instance there is hardness and softness as seen in the hard shell and viscous interior; a drama of inside and outside, paleness and brightness with its white thin shell and surprising and richly exuberant yellow center.  I was also struck by how an egg is one and many: it is one thing yet how many wonderful and delicious forms it can take!—hard boiled, scrambled, poached sunnyside-up. I felt too often, that I could be different ways with different people not for the purpose of sincerity but to have my way, and here an egg was showing me how I wanted to be. An egg maintains its integrity, its ‘eggness’ even as it changes and this gave me hope.

     Another large way I came to see meaning in food and in the world itself is through painting, something I came to care for deeply through my study of Aesthetic Realism.  I found the way I concentrated on one cherry, for instance, trying to be fair to its shape and hue and its relation to other objects near it, was so different from the way I could concentrate on a certain delicacy, impatiently looking forward to devouring it, while dismissing things and people around me.  The art purpose, I was learning, was utterly different—to see and to truly appreciate.        

    Having this purpose in my life increasingly makes for new wonder about the world and has me like and respect myself more.  As I look at the opposites in a specific fruit, a vegetable or a glass of wine, I am eating more sensibly—neither grabbing nor pushing things away.  I enjoy the different textures, shapes, colors and am much more aware of the taste in the food I eat.   

     Because Aesthetic Realism teaches a person to see aesthetically, which means accurately and justly, it enables people to be really proud of how we see the world, which includes the food we eat everyday. I close with some lines from a great and surprising poem by Eli Siegel on the subject: “What Food Deserves: A Canticle”.