wake up America!

Go WWOOFing

World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) is part of a world-wide effort to link volunteers with organic farmers, promote an educational exchange, and build a global community conscious of ecological farming practices.  You can search through their database and hook up with a farm and work for a week or a whole Summer.  Rethink your vacation time.

Go to: http://www.wwoofusa.org ... and WWOOF now!

Dhanvantari, the god of Ayurvedic medicine

The belly rules the mind.  (Spanish Proverb)

According to Ayurveda (or ayurvedic medicine, a system of traditional medicine native to India), digestion is the cornerstone of health. Good digestion nourishes the body. Eating the proper foods will make a big difference in your well being. There are two aspects to the food and nutrition in Ayurveda. One is the physical food you eat, digest, and assimilate. In this process, the organs of your digestive system has a big role. The second aspect of it is what you consume through your mind-body. What you see, hear, taste, smell, feel, and think are all important for your well being and impact your health considerably. For example, stress plays a key role in our health. Ayurveda had recognized the importance of the environment in our total health. Remember, everything in your environment is composed of doshas (the bodily humors that make up one's constitution) that interact with your own doshas. You are affected by everything else which goes on in this universe as you are part and parcel of this cosmos. Thus we have the "big picture" or "holistic outlook" in Ayurveda. (information from www.holisticonline.com)  

The question of food and our relationship to is also a question of the relationship between mind and body. The nature of the relationship between mind and body, whether you believe it divided or of the same substance, will, after much debate, bring us to exploring the nature of our relationship to the environment we live in.  In Ayurvedic medicine, it is acknowledged that the human body is a microcosm of the earth. If that is so, there is no divide between mind, body, environment.  So again, what then is our relationship to food?

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Cocina, by the great Quino.

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I typed the word FOOD into Google images this morning.  The images above are the first two that appeared in the search results.  The one on the left, a congested stage set of the "classic" food groups with, of course, a hunk of pork, jar of milk, and a bagel balancing on good ol' wiener dogs as the center piece of the scene.  The second: food as clip art.  The question arises: what is our relationship to food? The distance created here is done through aesthetics (though poorly executed).  On the left, an overload of semi waxy, dried out, and highly saturated (color as well as fat) food products (because they are food as products more than food as nourishment (if that is what food should only be)), and on the right, image of food product generated by computer. What is our relationship to food brings us then in this case to the semiotics of food.  "Claude Lévi-Strauss used cooking as a metaphor for the way the 'raw' images of nature are 'cooked' in culture so that they may be used as part of a symbolic system. Food can function as a commercial strategy (the business lunch), a social event (the feast), a gift, or a means of telling fortunes (plum stones, fortune cookies)." (source: http://www.eng.umu.se/culturec/FOO.htm).  Typing FOOD into Google gives me the same result as going to the food court at my local mall.  I'm not sure what our relationship to food is, but it seems that FOOD as a word needs to be redefined before this debate can move on. 

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For Your Health.

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If only doctors today were as wise as Dr. Muppet here to know that the simplest of remedies taken directly and purely from Mother Earth, such as a lime and a coconut, could effectively relieve Kermits foot ache. Save a trip to the podiatrist and your insurance policy co-pay and learn a lesson from the Muppets, keep it simple, buy some coconuts (organic of course).

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