Can we not just eat for joy anymore?

Food is meant to be just fuel for us, but as we all know food is so much more than this….what I notice is food being labelled as bad and we shouldn't not go near it and may evoke a sense of guilt that we should eat it as it isn't nourishing enough or it has too much sugar etc…

Take a bowl of pasta for example…you think of this as not nourishing for us, a food made of flour and eggs, something to avoid. However what about thinking of food as nourishing the soul?  I think of people with Italian background, as little kids who used to make fresh pasta with their nonnas, picking and preparing the tomatoes for the pasta sauce, stirring the sauce together and being in the garden and putting your face in a bunch of basil and smelling the aroma of it…..picking the basil and throwing it in the pasta sauce…but now pasta seems to be such a cuss word…to be honest it makes me a little sad that we can no longer enjoy the occasional bowl of pasta without the voices (and face bookers) in our heads telling us this is bad, this has little nutrition etc…it’s not all about the nutrition sometimes!!

1 bowl of pasta (or insert a not so nourishing food here) does not equal an unhealthy diet just as 1 salad does not make a healthy diet. Can we not just eat for joy? For memories? Because we like it? We want it? It is your overall dietary pattern that makes your diet a good one. The best diet is one that you enjoy, you embrace, one that you can stay on for the rest of your life.

This is a page about enjoying your food, embracing new flavours, trying new cooking techniques, finding new foods to try, trying new recipes, making things you have never made before, making small changes along the way, making better changes, it isn’t a paleo page, it isn’t a low fat page, its not a page about being 100% perfect with your diet and then you screw up and feel massively guilty about it. Yes, food is fuel, food should be able to nourish you….but food is more than that. When we celebrate there is food, birthdays there is food, Christmas there is food, funerals there is food, and everything we do is evolved around food. Even in cultures around the world we see the same thing everyone coming together, spending time together, laughing together, cooking together and just enjoying what they are eating without some tribe member making them feel ashamed for eating that coal roasted turtle brain or whatever! There are plenty of other pages around that are straight up, never eat this, never eat that, this way is the only way of eating etc…do not come here and criticise my food choices just because you choose not to eat them. You can go somewhere else and do that. This is wholefood, nutrition, information, cooking page for everyone to come and enjoy. Information I present is not to be taken in place of medical advice nor is it about anyone feeling guilty or ashamed. You can read my posts and decide for yourself what you want to do with it.

You only need to watch certain cooking shows where contestants have beautiful memories of food with their loved one, remind them of a special time they had together, a moment in time that they always cherish, so many emotions, tears…how powerful are these memories and smells?!?! We don’t need to take that away, we need common sense and a diet that contains mostly whole foods. Some people will need to be more careful what they eat than others. That is just how it is.

A smell can bring on a flood of memories, influence people's moods and even affect their work performance. Because the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it's sometimes called the "emotional brain," smell can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously.

The olfactory bulb has intimate access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning. Despite the tight wiring, however, smells would not trigger memories if it weren't for conditioned responses. When you first smell a new scent, you link it to an event, a person, a thing or even a moment. Your brain forges a link between the smell and a memory -- associating the smell of chlorine with summers at the pool or lilies with a funeral. When you encounter the smell again, the link is already there, ready to elicit a memory or a mood. Chlorine might call up a specific pool-related memory or simply make you feel content. Lilies might agitate you without your knowing why. This is part of the reason why not everyone likes the same smells.

Because we encounter most new odours in our youth, smells often call up childhood memories. But we actually begin making associations between smell and emotion before we're even born.

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