Welcome to The Sensuality Of Food!
Week 1 - Welcome and Introduction to the Course
Audre Lorde's Essay "Uses of the Erotic"
Telegram Thread
https://t.me/joinchat/GZiX1DeDJ8nBFex6
Post your reflections from class, favorite frames, assignments and experience with exercises and celebrations for your noticings. It's all welcome!
This Week's Assignments
- Ask (and answer in the thread!)
“What is pleasurable right now?”
“What would bring me pleasure today?” (if you come up with an answer see what happens if you act on that pleasure).
- Choose one meal to pay complete attention to, either in the preparation or in the consumption. Turn off the music or the news, put away the phone and just attend to your sensory experience of that process. Note what happens, what comes up, what you see. This can be surprisingly difficult!
- Repeat the sensory meditation we did at the end of class!
As always ALL the assignments are optional and I welcome you to do ONLY what feels good, what feels alive.
Week 2 - Touch
This Week's Assignments
- If you weren't in class practice awakening your hands with different sensations and awareness. Eat one thing very, very slowly and notice all the ways it feels in your hands, against your fingers, your lips, on your tongue and in your mouth. Notice the space it takes up in your mouth before chewing.
- Explore touch while in the kitchen and notice all the things that feel good: plunging your hand deep into a bag of rice, separating egg yolks with your fingers, toss a salad by hand etc. Pay attention to the things that bring particular pleasure and notice where that sensation of pleasure occurs.
- Ask repeatedly "Where is my body right now?" and "What does it feel?"
- Make something with dough! Pizza, biscuits, a pie. If you have a favorite recipe feel free to share it on the Telegram thread.
- Share any observations from this week or last week on Telegram!
For Fun:
Watch "Woman On Top" on YouTube or Amazon Prime (in the US).
Recipes:
My favorite buckwheat pie dough (which feels like satin under my hands when rolling it flat)
Basic Biscuits (from The New York Times)
- 2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
- 2 tablespoons baking powder
- 1 scant tablespoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 5 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter, preferably European style
- 1 cup whole milk
- Preheat oven to 425. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar and salt into a large mixing bowl. Transfer to a food processor. Cut butter into pats and add to flour, then pulse 5 or 6 times until the mixture resembles rough crumbs. (Alternatively, cut butter into flour in the mixing bowl using a fork or a pastry cutter.) Return dough to bowl, add milk and stir with a fork until it forms a rough ball.
- Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and pat it down into a rough rectangle, about an inch thick. Fold it over and gently pat it down again. Repeat. Cover the dough loosely with a kitchen towel and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.
- Gently pat out the dough some more, so that the rectangle is roughly 10 inches by 6 inches. Cut dough into biscuits using a floured glass or biscuit cutter. Do not twist cutter when cutting; this crimps the edges of the biscuit and impedes its rise.
- Place biscuits on a cookie sheet and bake until golden brown, approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
Week 3 - Sound
As this week unfolds pay extra attention to sound in your world. What sounds do you notice when in the kitchen or when eating? What makes you drop further into your body? What sounds wake up your senses and make your body sing? What sounds make your body contract? See if you can detect a change in the sound of food cooking as it progresses through the different stages of doneness.Sounds that I notice:- the slide of a metal lid against the rim of my favorite cooking pot
- the shunk of a knife passing through celery and making contact with the cutting board below
- the quiet jet engine of my electric kettle and the sound of the bubbles colliding with the sides of the container as the water boils
- the wet sound of mixing meatloaf
- the sound of water filling up a metal bowl
- swallowing
- the ring of a teacup connecting with a saucer, or the damp thud and scrape of setting it down on wood
- the slide of grains of rice against the bottom of the bowl while rinsing them
Feel free to share throughout the week!And always always be present to the joy that arises in the noticing.Find out where it lives in your body. We can’t think our way to joy but we can feel our way there.Follow those pathways of pleasure.Some fun extras:
This crazy commercial for cooking wares
and
This wild contemporary percussion piece composed by David Lang and performed with tea cups and flower pots (best appreciated wearing headphones). The teacups come in for part 3.
Week 4 - Smell
"Through the gateway of our senses, we can enter a realm infinitely wider and deeper, where the limitations of time and space dissolve and the whole universe is present in one moment, in one single point."
- Francesca Fremantle
This week we discussed further how our senses act as a vehicle for connection and transformation.As the week unfolds pay attention to:• What scents you associate with certain memories. My son once said that plums smelled like his great grandmother's pool and then made a point to clarify that they smelled like the memory of her pool.• Practice food as simile: what connections can you make between seemingly disconnected smells? (Eg. parsley smells like watermelon, cardamom like menthol) How can you use language to describe something that sometimes feels beyond language?• Pay attention to scent as information. How does food communicate to us that it is passing through stages of ripeness or transforming through stages of doneness as it cooks? If you bake something this week see if you can notice when it's finished baking based on smell rather than based on time.• Play with the smelling exercise we did in class and really smell something, deeply and with attention. Notice where the scent travels, where it settles on your tongue, what temperature it has. Follow the scent as it travels on the breath. What happens in your body when you take in certain smells?Some fun extras this week:
This great documentary about a man who created a garden as a sensual experience in northern Quebec: The Gardener
One of my favorite movies from my youth that echoed my own familial teachings about food: that we can convey emotion through food. My mother was very insistent that I never cook while angry or sad lest the food carry those emotions to the people who would eat it: Like Water for Chocolate
(it's streaming for free through other services, your luck will vary based on location)
Week 5 - Sight
We eat first with our eyes! How does sight affect appetite, how does it affect taste?Sight communicates ripeness, and freshness. When I put oil in a cold pan and turn on the heat I can tell the pan is hot enough by observing the way the oil begins to slide across the surface.Sight gives us a preview for other senses and makes other senses richer. Sight, more than any other sense for me, conveys vibrancy, aliveness, humor, whimsy and creates affection.This week:• notice any warm fuzzy feelings you may have about food. This doesn't have to be the result of visual cues, but a lot of what we are doing here is seeking out those moments of connection and delight that exist in our lives which in turn develops more affection for ourselves and for the meals that feed us.• roast some beets and peel them by hand (while they're cool enough to touch but still warm)! Notice what the experience is like with your eyes open and with them closed. If you need some ideas about what to do with them once they're cooked try any of these recipes.• watch your food as it cooks! Pay attention to bubbles! Bubbles that cling to the edge of a glass, bubbles on the tops of pancakes, buttles foaming in butter.• look at your food. Really look, before you eat take a moment to take it in as if you were breathing.• take some photos!*As the week progresses consider what we think of as "imperfections" and how embracing them might contribute to our pleasure even more. What is imperfection even? Consider your assumptions about food based on what it looks like. If a plate is beautifully arranged does that signal that it will taste better? If a wrinkly old parsnip actually tastes better (because its flavors are more concentrated and because there are some foods that improve with maturity) can that be applied more broadly? Do we have a requirement for perfection that is unreasonable and keeps us from being able to enjoy and appreciate what IS?In addition take note of how you experience color, light (the interplay of shadows in particular), shape, pattern, movement, and visual texture with the food you encounter this week.*remember that every exercise is optional and that translating what we see with our eyes to an image we capture with a camera requires a whole bunch of skills that few of us have without practice. There is no wrong. If any exercise contributes to feelings of disappointment or unworthiness or self attack CHUCK IT. If you notice that you can't access your senses the way you hoped celebrate the observation and be gentle with yourself. There are so many reasons this could be and we are nuanced, complex, fascinating human beings. It's fascinating that we don't react in the ways we expect. It is all merely information which gives us a little insight into our current state and condition. Look with gentle eyes and warm curiosity. Look with love.Additional reading:
Eating With The Eyes - The Guardian
Instagram accounts to take a scroll through:
Kimberley Hasselbrink has beautiful photos of simple ingredients
Salad for President - great photos of salad
Thalia Ho takes close up shots of dessert
Betty Liu's shadows and textures make me swoon
Nik Sharma has written a couple of beautiful cookbooks and his instagram account is a delight as well
Week 6 - Taste (finally!)
Taste! It seems like the first thing we would discuss in a class about the senses and food and yet it comes at the end because as we've seen there is an entire rich, nuanced world of sensory exploration available to us before we even put anything in our mouths.This week:• Repeat the exercise we did in class using other ingredients.• Play with taste tests! Try four different kinds of apple and see how they taste differently from one another. Or go very simply with salt (I have at least 4 different kinds of salt at home! A salt taste test would be an easy one for me to try).• Notice as you eat this week where you taste the food on your tongue. Notice how the temperature of your food changes your experience.•Notice if what you're eating tastes like anything else (ex: olives that taste like suntan lotion, edible flowers that taste like dusty oatmeal)• Consider your favorite flavor combinations and share them in the thread. Try some new combinations this week and see if you discover something that excites you.As a bookend to our adventure together go back to pleasure this week. Re-center pleasure and ask again "what brings me pleasure right now?" and as you're eating ask yourself what is most pleasurable about what you're eating. At what point do you feel that sense of satisfaction? Where is it? What does it feel like?
