Fake Foods for Fake Lives

A half a lifetime away I lived in a macrobiotic center for six months. This was before technology took over our lives, back when a computer was something you turned on to do work and turned off as soon as the work was done. Still, my life had become toxic and unmanageable. So I ran away to someplace pure.

For the first few months, I ate nothing but brown rice, miso, carrots cut precisely in half-moon shapes, diced burdock root, seaweed. It was awful at first, the pace of life, the work in the kitchen, the total privation. Gradually, the food started to taste better, my life became still but rich, my mind started to open again and felt like the imaginative space it had been when I was a child.

I couldn’t hold onto it. Once I received the privilege of getting my own room at the center I began smuggling in candy and soda. Then I started drinking again and finding furtive affairs both in the center and outside of it. I retoxified with shocking alacrity. After six months, it was time to move on back into my real twenties, into more mistakes, more drinking, more regret. I continued to run from thing to thing. I slowed down in some ways, eventually, I learned to have a real relationship, but I also let the speed of technology sweep me into a life that doesn’t feel authentic to me.

But something of those six months stuck in me, a memory of being clean and of how the world felt then. The way the smell of the woods during the rain was captured in the scent of burdock root, how to chew food longer than you thought possible to really take in what you are eating, the knowledge that my mind and body could be something different than what they are.

My dreams are vivid now. I can’t always remember them but I dive into bed with a sense of anticipation, feeling that my subconscious is processing things on a deeper level, my brain rewiring itself. I’m strong enough now, you can show me, I whisper to myself each night, feeling at last, ready to review the memories that shame and pain me in order to make my peace with them.

I believe what we eat and how we live are connected. This ceaseless panoply of foods at the grocery store is a sop to our need for more stimulation, more excitement. It doesn’t matter that the basic building materials of all of these foods, wheat, sugar, artificial flavors and colors, are all essentially the same. So many of us do things we don’t enjoy to buy things we don’t really want. Take away one part of that cycle, and the rest falls apart, a game of Jenga crashing down. No glass of wine, no chocolate cupcake, no new unnecessary trinkets and the question looms large, what am I doing all this for?

I’ve never enjoyed holidays, they always feel like a competition to have the most fun. More than any event, secular or spiritual, what we are really celebrating is that chance to put aside our work lives for a few days, to spend time with friends and family, to do something different, to be happy. I’ve never known how to vacation. Work always loomed like a shadow.

I’m preachy lately, the curse of the newly converted. One of the things that always drove me back to eating poorly or drinking again was the sense I was becoming a killjoy, a drab brown clucking bird. This time though, I’m embracing this, leaning into it, because I’ve finally learned which life I really want. Week seven without chocolate and I’m ready to be that annoying person who tells you the things you love are killing you slowly.

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