Eating is the first thing we do when we are born. Our first independent act? And that is why it is something so broad that it could be said that our entire history is set up and built on the act of eating.
This is not a partial activity. She is the mother of them all. Our way of connecting with others has to do with it.
Love begins by incorporating what they give us It is liquid and sweet. It is the first acceptance. Then things with other flavors will come, and with surfaces that offer more resistance. And we will accept them out of love. Or not. At that time love and pleasure are born together. And they separate soon. But not totally. Like the sea and the river, they are once again united and disunited at key moments but not without meaning.
Pleasure without love leads to death. Food under the exclusive rule of pleasure, too. Freud already describes how before the register of pleasure everything gives way. Until the need subsides for a while. All of this is why eating is so linked to loving, loving, nursing, sucking, slurping, biting, longing, waiting, and, sometimes, despairing.
Eating presupposes a couple, a duo Even in the loneliest act, eating reconstructs a lost other. The anger of a child who feels hungry and is not assisted in its voracious immediacy is the same irrepressible and indelible anger of the eternal angers that destroy all will.
Eating without filling all the gaps is a work of maturity; As a result of the famines that once plagued humanity, the question “Are you full?” It is still in use in many places. Learning to give up an extra bite, to enjoy what is just, is an activity where the outline of will is exhibited.
Saying “no thanks” or accepting something new and unknown are gestures of love. This requires the renunciation of the known. To what has already been experienced. To go through the miracle of knowing again.
Eating is an act of great passivity
It is the passive par excellence. When one eats “one is filled.” How from outside oneself, complying with who knows what external, unfathomable mandate.
Then one renounces this position of being an object of worship and adoration, of transcendental projection, to wield our own shortcomings as our first genuine attributes
What we lack is the primarily active. Giving up offering the body is accepting the decision to have a beginning and an end.
Choose. A enjoyment is renounced, by acquiring control of one’s own pleasure. The body as inhabited implies a renunciation of the body as an object to be filled.
Eating is an act of blind surrender
Then it becomes a social act integrated into coexistence and shared pleasure. The third party that breaks the mother-child dyad is accepted, and is even celebrated with the banquet where everyone eats and everyone dedicates themselves to showing the lack that the other can help fill, or at least calm.
Hunger is a human sign It supposes that someone can, from outside my own bowels, manipulate my nothing, my everything, and the whim of what I want and what I lack.
When a child accepts a meal, he meekly surrenders to the customs of his parents, of his environment. It is a battle won against the inertia of voracity.
In the ritual of shared meals there is usually an acceptance of giving up certain foods for others to eat, and I can also give up my measure to respond to the image of others eating. It is eaten and imitated in the same way Eating is a totally primitive way of imitating, loving and agreeing.
A sign of trust
And finally, when one gathers with others to share a meal, one confidently exposes oneself to the intention of the other. The original gathering to eat and share constituted the act of “commensality.”
It is a sign of trust to eat with others. Peace is celebrated with food. No one in the middle of a war shares a meal
For all this, rethinking the function of food when we reduce it to a secondary role performed automatically and under patterns of which we are not even aware, is to ignore the emotional and affective, vital importance that the act of eating contains and its ability to resist the attacks of the environment that does not take into account its social face mixed with the sieve of the first sense.
