Food connection

Tomorrow is a big food day all over the country so i decided to dedicate this week’s blog to food and some of its remarkable abilities to connect us all up and help with the big picture.

i’m going to skip foods development and history and go straight to how important it is to eat together.

Studies done on the outcomes of positive future human behavior seem to come up with one common thread. Daily meals, usually dinner, eaten together as a family appeared most frequently in the list of research subjects whose overall mental and physical health was located at the top of the charts.  Those test subjects found with more negative social behaviors tended not to have engaged in communal eating while developing.

My kids are grown now but one thing i remember about eating together every night was the long discussions.  Lots of great talk about how to solve problems, how someone was feeling whether it was negative or positive, current events and questions about something learned in school.  We ran the gamut, no subject was taboo, and everything was discussed and debated openly.

Lots of families today can’t find the time to meet up for dinner.  Work and after school activities play havoc with the limited time available in the evenings so that too many families eat on the run.  A hectic lifestyle makes eating together difficult but certainly not impossible.  Even if you and your children’s schedules are full, try and find one or two days a week when everyone can sit down and enjoy a meal together.  i guarantee the benefits will accrue for all of you and will become apparent in no time.

Eating together creates a sense of belonging, it gives parents the opportunity to teach social skills like how to listen, speak and think; and gathering together for a family meal has emotional, health, and educational benefits that last a lifetime.

My husband and i still eat dinner together every night.  We work together to make the dinner and clean up after, we even set place mats and turn TV’s and radios off.  It is our connect up time, where we really focus on each other without any other distractions.

But families eating together are not the end of the story.  Friends play a role in our overall emotional and physical health and eating with them is just as important.  The sharing of food with friends is an essential ingredient of our social and cultural well-being.

Here on St. Croix a group of us has been meeting up every Friday night for as long as i can remember to eat.  We change the location, eat at one of our homes if the weather is bad or someone is sick, but hardly ever cancel that time together.  We are definitely bonded.

Contrary to those that believe society is falling apart, friends eating together is alive and well.  All over the country people get together for pot-lucks, barbecues and intimate dinners either at home or on the town.  We eat with our friends because that is what humans have always done since our earliest ancestors from the Stone Age.  Those stone agers understood the importance of establishing and maintaining the reciprocal bonds and loyalties that were essential to survival and that hasn’t changed to this day.

Tomorrow, food banks all over the nation will be at full tilt boogey.

Church’s, non-profits that cater to the needy, schools that collect canned goods to donate have all been working non stop all through the year to tend to food instability; this is a regular thing for them.  Too many will not be able to provide a complete meal for their families tomorrow but hopefully they will find open doors where food will be available to them.

Everyone here knows i hate war…well there is a group called Food not Bombs that shares free meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world to protest war, poverty and the destruction of the environment.  With over a billion people going hungry each day they ask how we can spend another dollar on war.

If you’re looking for a place to donate this holiday season consider them.

Within us is a universe of trillions of cells that need nourishment.  Outside us billions of people also need nourishment so please think about that tomorrow while enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with your family and friends.  Serving food and communing with those you feed is way better than dropping bombs on them.

Hope you all have a fabulous Thanksgiving see ya next week.

PS..Blueberries---are the new hot food.  They are being touted for their ability to zap free radicals, those nasty baddies that can cause cancer, attack the collagen that keeps you from wrinkling, or affect your LDL.  Scientists at Tufts University are claiming that ½ cup of blueberries a day may slow down the cancer, wrinkles, dementia and even failing vision.