Orthorexia, Tai Chi, and Wabi-Sabi
As a nation we have become pretty obsessive about food and health. We worry about it so much that, for lots of people today, the primary daily question is no longer “What’s for dinner?”, but rather “How will what I eat at dinner affect my health?’
The condition of worrying about whether we are eating the right thing even has its own title: Orthorexia.
We are orthorexics, people with an unhealthy obsession about healthy eating.
Other cultures don’t worry about orthorexia. They have more deep-rooted responses to the questions of food and health. They have better, simpler, and more profound, answers.
For example, as my wife has been busy doing a series of Tai Chi lessons each Wednesday evening, I have been busy glancing at her tai chi books. In one of them, the tai chi teacher Angus Clark makes a couple of stunning observations.
“The best way to look after the stomach is to eat with enjoyment and dedication”, he writes in the chapter on “Digestion and Elimination”.
And he goes on: “Digestion is a complex process that is strongly influenced by emotions”.
So, ask yourself just what your emotional state is when you sit down to eat. If we need to eat with enjoyment, we need to recognize that how we feel about our food, and how we feel when we are eating our food, can actually influence the efficacy of our digestion.
But how often do we eat when we are in a state of stress – after an overlong commute, driven nuts by the kids, with the memory of a bruising ‘phone call still in our mind – or find ourselves generally not in any fit state to really take time to enjoy our food?
We don’t need just good food: we need to be in a state in which to enjoy that good food. But what chance have you of getting to that state if your reaction to what is being served is to ask: “Should I really be eating this? Will this make me fat?”. Where is the enjoyment and dedication we need? What are our stressed emotions doing to our digestive powers?
Yet if we also do a little tai chi, or the Qi Gong as practiced by Eileen Murray and described on these pages a month ago, we will manage through some of the exercises to massage the kidneys and to massage the colon, which can improve our digestion, and help with irritable bowel syndrome.
This is a good example of joined-up thinking when it comes to food and health.
Where we in the West have fractured the relationship between healthy eating and healthfulness, other cultures see things in a complete, unbroken chain of logic: you are what you eat, and you are the way you eat.
“Cooking and health have never been divided in Chinese tradition. Food is not simply a means to satisfy hunger; it is always looked upon as an aid to good health and a preventive medicine”, wrote Yong Yap Cotterell in her book “The Chinese Kitchen”, published back in 1986.
Significantly, Ms Cotterell also points out that, “The desire for longevity is another ancient impulse behind the Chinese concern for a healthy diet”.
And what does tai chi do for you? It promotes health, and longevity. Like Chinese cooking, it aims to balance yin and yang, the forces of harmony and change.
“So fundamental is this notion of balance in Chinese culture that a traditional doctor will invariably ask about a patient’s diet before attempting diagnosis”, writes Yong Yap Cotterell.
Whilst my wife has been busy with the tai chi, I have been caught up in wabi-sabi. This is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic that values things that are incomplete, humble and unconventional, and I think it has lessons for us as well, when it comes to eating and enjoying eating.
In his book “Wabi-Sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers”, Leonard Koren fashions a delightful introduction to a world view that has always been closely linked to the Japanese tea ceremony. What is interesting in the historical development of wabi-sabi is the way in which it became a reaction against the perfectionism of the Chinese tea ceremony.
In the 16th century, Sen no Rikyu, a tea master, created tea rooms that were based on simple farmer’s huts, with mud walls and exposed structural elements. He also placed simple Japanese and Korean folk craft objects as part of the complex ritual of the tea ceremony, asserting their value as equal to precious Chinese “treasures”.
What Rikyu was saying was that the labyrinthine tea ceremony should not aim to be perfect and slick: it should be rustic and real, it should be wabi-sabi. According to Leonard Koren, this was “his most enduring aesthetic triumph”.
And that is how our meal times should be.
No matter that it is late, and you are tired, and the kitchen is a mess, and you can’t find the corkscrew. Wanting things to be perfect when you eat is just going to stress you out even more, and shorten your life, mess up your yin-yang balance and slow your digestion down. It’s not that your dinnertime is not perfect: it’s just that it is wabi-sabi, and so it’s perfectly fine, thank you. So, eat with enjoyment and dedication.
26 May 2008
Burren Slow Food
Well, you can't quite see us behind the great windows of the Cliffs of Moher visitor centre, but we were there on Saturday night at An Evening on the Edge of the World, the highlight of the first Burren Slow Food festival.
Wonderful cooking from the Longdock team, best known for their Carrigaholt operation but showing cracking form on Saturday with a menu of superb local foods, including Burren Smokehouse fish, Burren Spring lamb, Bunratty mead, a trio of local cheeses and the sublime Linnalla ice creams and sorbets. Sponsors Febvre had terrific wines, chosen by Monica Murphy, including a magnificent bio-dynamic Barbera from Monferrato.
The Saturday line up included Dianne Curtin, Clodagh McKenna who had flown in from Italy and who is on top form, Siobhan ni Gharbaith of St Tola who was entrancing in her talk about her cheese, Aidan McGrath of the Doonbeg resort, and John McKenna of the Bridgestone parish rabitted on about his theory of the Knowledge Society, which is liable to crop up on this blog sometime soon.
Organiser Brigitta Curtin and her team did a superb job, and this was a joyous weekend, made all the better for the McKenna tribe who stayed at Sheedy's Hotel and loved it, especially the breakfasts which are amongst the very best, and where there is no buffet: first time the McKenna kids had ever seen such a thing!
Slow Food: you know it makes sense, especially when you see it in practice as it was in the Burren. And on now to autumn's Terre Madre in Waterford...
25 May 2008
Orthorexia, Tai Chi, and Wabi-Sabi
As a nation we have become pretty obsessive about food and health. We worry about it so much that, for lots of people today, the primary daily question is no longer “What’s for dinner?”, but rather “How will what I eat at dinner affect my health?’
The condition of worrying about whether we are eating the right thing even has its own title: Orthorexia.
We are orthorexics, people with an unhealthy obsession about healthy eating.
Other cultures don’t worry about orthorexia. They have more deep-rooted responses to the questions of food and health. They have better, simpler, and more profound, answers.
For example, as my wife has been busy doing a series of Tai Chi lessons each Wednesday evening, I have been busy glancing at her tai chi books. In one of them, the tai chi teacher Angus Clark makes a couple of stunning observations.
“The best way to look after the stomach is to eat with enjoyment and dedication”, he writes in the chapter on “Digestion and Elimination”.
And he goes on: “Digestion is a complex process that is strongly influenced by emotions”.
So, ask yourself just what your emotional state is when you sit down to eat. If we need to eat with enjoyment, we need to recognize that how we feel about our food, and how we feel when we are eating our food, can actually influence the efficacy of our digestion.
But how often do we eat when we are in a state of stress – after an overlong commute, driven nuts by the kids, with the memory of a bruising ‘phone call still in our mind – or find ourselves generally not in any fit state to really take time to enjoy our food?
We don’t need just good food: we need to be in a state in which to enjoy that good food. But what chance have you of getting to that state if your reaction to what is being served is to ask: “Should I really be eating this? Will this make me fat?”. Where is the enjoyment and dedication we need? What are our stressed emotions doing to our digestive powers?
Yet if we also do a little tai chi, or the Qi Gong as practiced by Eileen Murray and described on these pages a month ago, we will manage through some of the exercises to massage the kidneys and to massage the colon, which can improve our digestion, and help with irritable bowel syndrome.
This is a good example of joined-up thinking when it comes to food and health.
Where we in the West have fractured the relationship between healthy eating and healthfulness, other cultures see things in a complete, unbroken chain of logic: you are what you eat, and you are the way you eat.
“Cooking and health have never been divided in Chinese tradition. Food is not simply a means to satisfy hunger; it is always looked upon as an aid to good health and a preventive medicine”, wrote Yong Yap Cotterell in her book “The Chinese Kitchen”, published back in 1986.
Significantly, Ms Cotterell also points out that, “The desire for longevity is another ancient impulse behind the Chinese concern for a healthy diet”.
And what does tai chi do for you? It promotes health, and longevity. Like Chinese cooking, it aims to balance yin and yang, the forces of harmony and change.
“So fundamental is this notion of balance in Chinese culture that a traditional doctor will invariably ask about a patient’s diet before attempting diagnosis”, writes Yong Yap Cotterell.
Whilst my wife has been busy with the tai chi, I have been caught up in wabi-sabi. This is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic that values things that are incomplete, humble and unconventional, and I think it has lessons for us as well, when it comes to eating and enjoying eating.
In his book “Wabi-Sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers”, Leonard Koren fashions a delightful introduction to a world view that has always been closely linked to the Japanese tea ceremony. What is interesting in the historical development of wabi-sabi is the way in which it became a reaction against the perfectionism of the Chinese tea ceremony.
In the 16th century, Sen no Rikyu, a tea master, created tea rooms that were based on simple farmer’s huts, with mud walls and exposed structural elements. He also placed simple Japanese and Korean folk craft objects as part of the complex ritual of the tea ceremony, asserting their value as equal to precious Chinese “treasures”.
What Rikyu was saying was that the labyrinthine tea ceremony should not aim to be perfect and slick: it should be rustic and real, it should be wabi-sabi. According to Leonard Koren, this was “his most enduring aesthetic triumph”.
And that is how our meal times should be.
No matter that it is late, and you are tired, and the kitchen is a mess, and you can’t find the corkscrew. Wanting things to be perfect when you eat is just going to stress you out even more, and shorten your life, mess up your yin-yang balance and slow your digestion down. It’s not that your dinnertime is not perfect: it’s just that it is wabi-sabi, and so it’s perfectly fine, thank you. So, eat with enjoyment and dedication.
Angus Clark: Tai Chi (Element Books)
www.leonardkoren.com
The condition of worrying about whether we are eating the right thing even has its own title: Orthorexia.
We are orthorexics, people with an unhealthy obsession about healthy eating.
Other cultures don’t worry about orthorexia. They have more deep-rooted responses to the questions of food and health. They have better, simpler, and more profound, answers.
For example, as my wife has been busy doing a series of Tai Chi lessons each Wednesday evening, I have been busy glancing at her tai chi books. In one of them, the tai chi teacher Angus Clark makes a couple of stunning observations.
“The best way to look after the stomach is to eat with enjoyment and dedication”, he writes in the chapter on “Digestion and Elimination”.
And he goes on: “Digestion is a complex process that is strongly influenced by emotions”.
So, ask yourself just what your emotional state is when you sit down to eat. If we need to eat with enjoyment, we need to recognize that how we feel about our food, and how we feel when we are eating our food, can actually influence the efficacy of our digestion.
But how often do we eat when we are in a state of stress – after an overlong commute, driven nuts by the kids, with the memory of a bruising ‘phone call still in our mind – or find ourselves generally not in any fit state to really take time to enjoy our food?
We don’t need just good food: we need to be in a state in which to enjoy that good food. But what chance have you of getting to that state if your reaction to what is being served is to ask: “Should I really be eating this? Will this make me fat?”. Where is the enjoyment and dedication we need? What are our stressed emotions doing to our digestive powers?
Yet if we also do a little tai chi, or the Qi Gong as practiced by Eileen Murray and described on these pages a month ago, we will manage through some of the exercises to massage the kidneys and to massage the colon, which can improve our digestion, and help with irritable bowel syndrome.
This is a good example of joined-up thinking when it comes to food and health.
Where we in the West have fractured the relationship between healthy eating and healthfulness, other cultures see things in a complete, unbroken chain of logic: you are what you eat, and you are the way you eat.
“Cooking and health have never been divided in Chinese tradition. Food is not simply a means to satisfy hunger; it is always looked upon as an aid to good health and a preventive medicine”, wrote Yong Yap Cotterell in her book “The Chinese Kitchen”, published back in 1986.
Significantly, Ms Cotterell also points out that, “The desire for longevity is another ancient impulse behind the Chinese concern for a healthy diet”.
And what does tai chi do for you? It promotes health, and longevity. Like Chinese cooking, it aims to balance yin and yang, the forces of harmony and change.
“So fundamental is this notion of balance in Chinese culture that a traditional doctor will invariably ask about a patient’s diet before attempting diagnosis”, writes Yong Yap Cotterell.
Whilst my wife has been busy with the tai chi, I have been caught up in wabi-sabi. This is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic that values things that are incomplete, humble and unconventional, and I think it has lessons for us as well, when it comes to eating and enjoying eating.
In his book “Wabi-Sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers”, Leonard Koren fashions a delightful introduction to a world view that has always been closely linked to the Japanese tea ceremony. What is interesting in the historical development of wabi-sabi is the way in which it became a reaction against the perfectionism of the Chinese tea ceremony.
In the 16th century, Sen no Rikyu, a tea master, created tea rooms that were based on simple farmer’s huts, with mud walls and exposed structural elements. He also placed simple Japanese and Korean folk craft objects as part of the complex ritual of the tea ceremony, asserting their value as equal to precious Chinese “treasures”.
What Rikyu was saying was that the labyrinthine tea ceremony should not aim to be perfect and slick: it should be rustic and real, it should be wabi-sabi. According to Leonard Koren, this was “his most enduring aesthetic triumph”.
And that is how our meal times should be.
No matter that it is late, and you are tired, and the kitchen is a mess, and you can’t find the corkscrew. Wanting things to be perfect when you eat is just going to stress you out even more, and shorten your life, mess up your yin-yang balance and slow your digestion down. It’s not that your dinnertime is not perfect: it’s just that it is wabi-sabi, and so it’s perfectly fine, thank you. So, eat with enjoyment and dedication.
Angus Clark: Tai Chi (Element Books)
www.leonardkoren.com
15 May 2008
Baby Jesus in Velvet Underwear
“To be an inspired wine taster, you must be capable of experiencing synesthesia. “Ça descend la gorge comme le bebé Jesu en culottes de velours,” the French say. “It goes down the throat like the baby Jesus in velvet underwear.” A great terroir wine you can visualize as possessing a center, a core; I sometimes visualize terroir wines as planetary systems, with the minerals exerting the gravitational pull of the sun. Or, I see the minerals as the backbone, the skeleton of the wine, that which gives the wine stability and persistence. The various nuances of flavor radiate out from this center, as do the symmetric ripples in a pond”.
I'm not in the habit of quoting the agreeably iconoclastic Californian winemaker Randall Grahm too much, but this paragraph from a talk he gave entitled “The Phenomenology of Terroir” seemed appropriate to the first time I tasted Denis Alary's Domaine Alary La Chevre d'Or, Cotes du Rhone 2006.
In fact, it's appropriate to the first time I sniffed the cork I had pulled from the bottle, even before I poured a drop. Even the cork promised something elusive, idiosyncratic, wild and natural. When I tasted it, yes, it was baby Jesus in velvet underwear sliding down the throat: magic!
Blending Clairette, Bourbelenc, Rousanne and Viognier, M. Alary has fashioned a wine that bewitches with every sniff and taste. This fermented grape juice stopped me in my tracks, no less: a seismic wine.
Tyrrell and Company of Sallins import the wine, and you can find it in The Vineyard, Galway; McHugh's of Kilbarrack, and Vanilla Grape, Kenmare, where it should cost you a few cent more than €14. At that price, it is a steal.
12 May 2008
Deep Waters Run Still
‘My 10-minute meal would be a piece of chicken or a piece of fish, and I chop up a whole lot of herbs, a little salt, olive oil, and pack this on both sides, and I just cook it in a cast iron pan 'till it's all brown. Meanwhile I boil up some new potatoes and I have a salad and I make a vinaigrette that goes over everything. That's 10 minutes. But it's not 10 minutes if I haven't thought about the salad in advance, having found some herbs and grown them in my garden”.
Alice Waters' 10-minute meal, as disclosed to the perceptive Catherine Cleary in The Irish Times just over a week ago, is one of those prescriptions that is so simple it has the profundity to change your life.
If you want more of this simple profundity, you will find it in Ms Waters' latest book, “The Art of Simple Food”. The food is as simple as Ms Waters talks it and walks it, and it is also a very beautifully designed book, published by Clarkson Potter.
Give a copy to your children, or at least to the inner child trying to find profound simplicity in cooking and eating.
Vendemia in Kilknny
Urs and Helen Tobler, of Kilkenny's splendid Vendemia Wines, write...
Just to let you know that we have opened an organic wine bar in Kilkenny. We thought it would be the best way to showcase our wines and so far we have had no complaints! We opened quietly in January and the learning curve continues!
We must be the only organic and biodynamic wine-bar in Ireland!
It is called Cafe del Vino and as the name suggests we also serve a light lunch menu and organic coffee and tea, as well as local cheeses and charcuterie. We are in the Butterslip in Kilkenny and are so pleased to have found such a perfect setting for a wine-bar.
All the best
Helen Tobler
If you can't make it to Ireland's most handsome city this summer, then do check out Helen and Urs' splendid website to source their truly idiosyncratic, signature wines:
www,vendemiawines.com
07 May 2008
Tom O'Connell
The great Tom O'Connell, of O'Connell's in Ballsbridge, is moving on to pastures new, after eight years of running one of the best Dublin destination restaurants.
We wish him and his team well, and only wish we had a hotel dining room that needed a dynamic, hard-working, philosophical proprietor, so that we could hand it over to him and say: “Just do the good thing, Tom”.
We have so many happy memories of O'Connell's, that run all the way from solo dining whilst working, to family dinners with folk from 8 to 80. Our last experience was a pitch-perfect breakfast, served by fastidiously polite and hospitable staff.
Of course, if we owned the Shelbourne, or one of the other big city dining rooms, we would be on the telephone to Mr O'Connell right now...
06 May 2008
Farmers and Prisons
An interesting article by Rosie Boycott, which appeared originally in The Guardian and is reprinted in the Guild of Food Writer's Savour magazine, contains this extraordinary statistic regarding food production in the U.K.:
“On average 37 farmers are leaving the land every day in Britain; there are now more people in jail than farmers”.
Shiver me timbers...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/28/food.ethicalliving
Tea with Tarkovsky
“It is a religion of the art of life”
Joerg Muller and Karin Wieland feature this quote from Okakura's classic, “The Book of Tea”, on their handsome Solaris Botanicals brochure, and it's a presumptive but entirely appropriate borrowing, for if you seek the refinement of tea and tea drinking, then Solaris teas should be part of your culinary culture.
Having sampled several of the teas, the word that comes to mind is “subtle”. Try the Earl Grey, for instance, a tea often saturated with an excess of bergamot, but the Solaris Earl Grey is wonderfully delicate and refreshing, the bergamot notes handled with the élan of true expertise.
Similarly, the smoky lapsang souchang is not too smoky: the pine wood smoke is present, but not overstated, and it is such a pleasure to come back to a tea that I had been alienated from thanks to too many encounters with over-smoked teas that had all the subtlety of Laphroaig whiskey.
It helps, of course, that the teas are also so beautifully packaged, making for the vital elements to create your own tea ceremony. Solaris is a bright and brilliant star.
www.solarisbotanicals.com
Tel: 091 586443
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