Mindful Eating: Start With Chocolate
By tristero
A terrific article in the Times on mindful eating. I never thought of it as a specifically Buddhist practice, or even in the remotest way a religious/spiritual thing to do, To me, it’s something I kind of figured out ad hoc over the past few years as one of the easiest ways to increase the sensual enjoyment of good food. And it’s easy.
My suggestion: start with chocolate. Rather than scarfing down a whole honking bar of the stuff, take a small bite and let it melt in your mouth. Don’t chew, just let it melt, and wait as thousands of tastes – all related, all different – appear in different proportions as the temperature of the chocolate changes and dissolves. Doing this with great chocolate is a peak experience. And get this: not only do you enjoy it a lot more, but a whole bar can last a long time.
Next, try good wine, the classic mindful food (when enjoyed for its tastes). And with these gateway drugs, it’s fairly easy to extrapolate into concentrating on the tastes of other foods.
Sure, as per the article, you can reify mindful eating into a discipline – silent eating, extreme slowness – but there’s no reason for that (although it sounds like it might be fun every once in a while to concentrate that hard). But simply getting together with friends over a good meal – a really good meal, either homemade or in an excellent restaurant – does the trick. The conversation inevitably turns to the food, and for some reason that often seems to serve as a catalyst, in a way that an indifferent meal doesn’t, to help us forget our daily concerns and find new things to talk about.
I don’t know if any of this is religious or spiritual, but I do know that paying close attention to the experience of eating with really good food is deeply pleasurable, both personally and as a way of truly sharing an evening with good friends.