Eating with a Beginner’s Mind
Guest post by Marti Wolfson, MS
When you’re a baby of a chef and culinary nutritionist and you’re named Olive, you know you’ve got the cards stacked in your favor! Your mom is definitely going to get creative, wholesome and fun!
One of the things that strikes me about this blog, and made me think WOW! I want to share this with my readers! is that we SO forget beginner’s mind in SO many aspects of our lives.
Here you’ve got a first time mom thinking about it, about what kind of food experience she’s going to present to her baby. Through Olive’s eyes, the colors are more vibrant, the crunch is crunchier, the smooth is smoother. Every step is vibrant, from the colors she sees with those gorgeous big eyes, to the texture her sensitive mouth experiences and her soft little baby hands touch.
We ALL are attracted to sensory experiences. We just kind of forget it sometimes. One of the most AMAZING meals I ever remember was at a gathering with a friend who’s a farmer. We guests picked ripe things of our choice from his garden… and ate with our fingers. I thought this was sensational. Literally! Very elemental. This is the way a child experiences food… but it’s also a way for us adults to reconnect.
Last night I was eating an artichoke. No forks and knives allowed! Hands required. Dip the leaves in olive oil and lemon, let the oil run down your chin. So refreshing—like skinny dipping!
This is Marti’s modus operandi for teaching. She teaches cooking on a very deep level, with anyone who sits in a class with her. That makes her a superstar in my eyes.
And now she’s doing it with Olive. :)
I just had to share.
Eating with a Beginner’s Mind
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki
In our culture we spend a lot of time talking about WHAT to eat, and not as much focus on the HOW of eating. Watch a baby try new foods for the first time and you can learn so much about eating with a beginner's mind. A beginner's mind is something we are born with and later on rediscover on a more conscious level. It is the mind that lets the knowing self fall back and a more curious and willing self emerge. Here are some insights of the last three weeks introducing new foods to Olive.
Olive at her “dinner table.”
Variety is instinctual
Olive is like any other baby in that she fixes her attention on color, which is why I try to prepare foods different in color from one another. One day her spoon has red from beets and the next day there's green from spinach. I've noticed she tires of something after I've given it to her three to four times in a row. Instinctually, we like variety on our plate. Most of us don't live in the wild Amazon with exotic plants all around us to forage. In our industrialized world we tend to eat the same thing day after day, missing out on a variety of fruits and vegetables that provides vital nutrition. Variety in the diet has beneficial upstream effects. For example, the Harvard-based Nurses Health Study, one of the largest and longest studies to date, showed eating a variety of fruits and vegetables can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke (1). To improve the variety in your diet, try this exercise (I just took part in this with a nutrition practice group): see if you can eat 50 different foods in one week. If you have a smoothie every morning, that's fine, but you can only count the ingredients in it once.
Olive waiting to savor the magical experience of the next bite.
Forget the spoon and fork
A baby's first utensils are their forefinger and thumb as they develop their "pincer" grasp, learning to shovel food into their mouth. Eating for them is a full on sensory experience. The hands according to Vedic tradition are the most precious organs of action, with each finger representing one of the five elements. Nerve endings at the fingertips are known to stimulate digestion. Using your fingers is a way of signaling to your stomach that you are about to eat. And what better way to practice portion control. Research has shown that you can manage how much you eat by using your hands.
Eat with curiosity
Babies are curious to discover every new food they come in contact with. They sit waiting for the next bite or play with a piece of food in between their fingers. As we age, our senses can dull if we are not in the moment as we eat. We may look for more salt, sugar or fat to peek our interest. In my classes and workshops, it's not uncommon for me to give students a sensory exercise with food. I might have them wear blindfolds and guess what they are eating. Taking away one sense allows another one to become more sensitive. You can simply close your eyes the next time you eat; notice how that changes your sense of taste. Another good exercise is to chew an almond or raisin until it's completely liquid. It may seem like the first time you've ever tasted an almond or raisin.
Olive! Beautiful food for a beautiful baby. (Have you ever seen such eyes?)
Practice Hara Hachi Bu
In his bestselling book, The Blue Zones, Dan Buettner writes about lifestyle factors that have promoted the happiest and longest-living populations in the world. Hara Hachi Bu, or the practice of eating until 80% full, is a way of eating that is characteristic of the Okinawan, one of the areas of the world with the greatest centenarians. An instinctive practice of calorie restriction by these people of Japan, babies often exhibit this as well. Olive lets me know she's getting full by looking the other way, putting her fingers in her mouth, or sucking on her tray. If you're not accustomed to stopping before your 80% full, try to remember to take more chews per mouthful; pay attention to your breathing in order to slow your meal down; put your fork down between bites.
Like so many activities we've done over and over again in life, eating is an easy thing to take for granted three times a day (maybe more for some), 365 days a year. The sheer presence babies have with food is enough to remind us that eating can be as nourishing of an experience as we give to it.
1. Hung, H.C., et al., Fruit and vegetable intake and risk of major chronic disease. J Natl Cancer Inst, 2004. 96(21): p. 1577-84.
Read Turning in and letting go, her previous guest post on my blog.
In honor of Olive’s name, I’m happy to share this remarkably elegant recipe for roasted olives—finger food at it’s finest. They seem so exotic, their brininess replaced by a sweet flavor heightened by the oven’s heat, but couldn’t be easier! I’ve surrounded the olives with garlic, fennel seeds, rosemary, red pepper flakes, and Meyer lemon. You’re not going to find anything like this at a supermarket olive bar. :)