I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In 2024 The Sun’s founder and editor, Sy Safransky, stepped back from the magazine after fifty years, following a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Though writing is now a challenge for Sy, he amassed reams of journal entries throughout his long career. The essay that follows, written around 1993, is assembled from those.—Ed.
I was eight years old when I went on my first diet. I lost twenty pounds, then gained it back. Nearly forty years later, I’m still trying to lose twenty pounds. Even the Jews wandered in the desert only forty years.
If I fill the emptiness inside me with food, I end up with pounds of insulation from the emptiness, but the emptiness is still there. The extra weight is the sorrow denied, just as I deny my body its nakedness, its wind and its sun. Is the fear that my true body would be too scrawny, too defenseless? Or that it would be too lean and menacing? That I’d look a little mean? Too mean for Dad and Mom?
When I was young, food was eroticized in my family, given as an “act of love.” Yet there were many prohibitions: I shouldn’t eat too much. I shouldn’t eat the wrong food. I came to feel my impulses weren’t trustworthy.
I want to rescue the boy in me from the kitchen, from the past, from the complex and unsolvable dilemmas of eating to please, of not eating to please. He wasn’t fat. He was ashamed. Guilty. Unhappy.
But he wasn’t just sad. It’s that the sadness wasn’t allowed expression. If I don’t allow it, the tragedy repeats. How do I meet the boy in me, sit with him when we eat, acknowledge his presence, his needs?
Weighing and berating myself has become as much a habit as losing and gaining the same few pounds: a message I keep passing back and forth, the words’ meaning never plain.
It’s no secret that diets don’t work, except to the millions of Americans who are always dieting. In a world where a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, whining about a few extra pounds around my middle is obscene. By midlife half of all Americans are overweight—a nation obsessed with thinness in a world obsessed with getting enough food. After all, no matter how many images of gaunt Somalians we see on television, the hungriest most of us get is when the waitress takes forever at our favorite restaurant on a Saturday night. Honey, I’m starving. What can we do but munch another carrot, write a check to Oxfam? Were the starving people in India helped because my parents made me finish that broccoli?
Why do our lives feel obscene set against each other this way? Why does one moment of my life feel obscene set against another moment of my life?
Dieting is like those games in Las Vegas: You might win for a while, but the house never loses. There’s a “scientific” explanation, having to do with a set point: Your body is interested in staying alive, not in being thin, and it has a certain level of fatness that’s biologically natural for you.
(There are many contradictory theories among nutritionists. If there were this many schools of thought about how to change a flat tire, we’d all be stranded at the side of the road, staring dolefully at the spare.)
A more intriguing explanation has to do with resisting ourselves, with the dramas we create just so we can feel defeated.
Change we to I.
I gave up meat and sugar and processed foods and refined flour. Reduced my intake of fat. Made sure I was getting enough amino acids by eating complementary proteins. I now eat mostly fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, but you can be a pig when it comes to these too; health food, when processed, is junk food all the same.
It’s not what I eat but how. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—all get close to God if their focus is on the essence of faith, not the embroidery. Not the language of the prayer, but its melody. Its passion.
Losing the “last” twenty pounds. Eating and paying attention. Being sober. Tasting the food more keenly. Being with the feelings before eating, during eating, after eating. The sorrow that the meal is over. Being civilized: Sitting at a table. Manners. Finishing what’s on the plate. Polite conversation. Eating out of boredom. Talking out of boredom. Reaching for the food, for the warm body.
The night I sat with a peach, the sensuous experience of licking it, nibbling it, sucking it, juice dribbling down my chin onto my chest, my belly.
We all learn there’s no substitute for love, but sex and food both run a close second.
I can go a long time without sweets, but if they’re around, I’m like my friend in AA: I must acknowledge I’m powerless to restrain myself.
Certainly I can’t restrain the guilt. Ashamed of my pain, ashamed that I get lonely or jealous or horny or sad. Instead of feeling the feelings, though, I barricade the heart with food, then with guilt, then with the reformist zeal of a new diet, then with the breaking of the diet.
I want to keep eating. I want life. More life. I want to turn from the simple facts of my existence to consider bigger mysteries, to fret about what might be, to remember what is no more. I want to imagine something other than this food in front of me, already a commodity on some assembly line, moving away from me. Yesterday’s desire.
I want to be doing something more important than feeding Sy Safransky.
I want to be doing something more interesting than chewing on this piece of bread, gift of sun and wheat, yeast and fire. I want to nibble on the endless feast of my thoughts, counting the calories. But there are no calories, not in the way there is this slice of bread. There are no inches or pounds, not in the way there is this body.
Buying the monster carob-chip cookie after struggling with whether to “cheat” before dinner. Leaving Weaver Street Market, turning on National Public Radio. Looking forward to listening to All Things Considered while eating the cookie. Hearing the NPR report about starvation in Somalia, its graphic descriptions of gaunt, withering faces, people in rags, ghost towns.
After I was given a glimpse of what hunger, real hunger, might feel like (call it a mystical experience), I made myself a promise: To vividly imagine the horror of being a man just like me, but hungry, and with a hungry family. Not hungry because dinner is late but because there is no dinner. To open my heart to his suffering, not as an intellectual abstraction, not by making a moral judgment, not just by thought, but to sit with the overwhelming yet utterly commonplace reality of hunger. To know that such a man, no different from me, exists. To be aware of what I’m eating. To realize every bite is a gift. To know that every time I eat something, someone else isn’t—the monumental fact of that.
Three meals a day, no snacks, no distractions: That’s a discipline. Paying attention is a discipline. Discipline as freedom. Freedom as love’s threshold, door to grace.
The other night I had a late-night snack alone in the kitchen: a man eating a cookie on a spinning planet. Tired of reading but unable to sleep, not wanting to go to bed, I ate a cookie instead.
Did I grow this food? Prepare it? Build the cupboard that stores it? Spend time figuring out how to keep it from spoiling? Do I know anything about where it was grown, and how, and by whom? What route it traveled to me? Do I even know what happens to it in my body? How it keeps me alive? Do I know any more about this than I do about the reasons for world hunger?
How I eat is how I live. Mindfully, with respect for my body and everything that isn’t bodily, or with greed and aggression, going for the kill. But even “the kill” has a purity that eating-while-reading doesn’t. The primitive man, exhausted from the hunt, bent over the bloody carcass of an animal he’s been tracking for hours, is hardly likely to be distracted.
In the wild you wouldn’t eat so much you couldn’t run from danger after your meal. You wouldn’t become so absorbed in the food that you couldn’t hear danger, see danger. Maybe not just danger. Maybe beauty too.
In the morning I eat a bowl of oatmeal, sitting on the porch, tasting the food, thinking about different things, feeling glad I’m just eating.
My belly has its weathers, its moods. Or does it merely respond to mine? Bellows of me, leading me to the table. How little it takes to satisfy it. What am I trying to satisfy when it says, Enough? One bite. Two bites. Three bites. Not the whole meal.
The ego creates the meal: scribbles down recipes, cooks something up, insists on a civilized response, on politeness, on table manners.
The body eats.
Hunger, my mother, comfort me. Sit beside me and let me look into your eyes while you teach me to distinguish between different appetites. Don’t let me pretend that food is what you want from me, that you’ll be appeased by one more bite.
Body of Christ. Jesus isn’t out there, up there. He’s here, close as my closed heart. I’m here, behind the words, the moving pen.
Norma says to savor the first bite, because the first bite and the last bite are all you really taste.
Imagine if all I did with books was buy them, hold them, glance longingly at their covers, and put them on the shelf. Dust them three times a day. Count them three times a day. Alphabetize them, categorize them, order new dust jackets, build bigger shelves. But never read them.
Yet I want to keep my food in its cupboards.
If civilization is our refuge from nature, our fear of it writ large, a cave we’ve painted and decorated with so much junk that we’ve forgotten how to leave it, then where does that leave me, a child of civilization? Don’t we all suffer from a kind of Alzheimer’s, lost in our homes, our lives, having forgotten the simplest facts of our existence?
Eating turns my feelings, my thoughts, my being into form, which allows me to continue in a new form. What does it mean to love food? To really love it—not lust after it, adoring its shine; not love it the way a man loves his neglected wife, coming inside her, then rolling off and falling asleep? To love the body that becomes my body: its roots in earth, in the desert air, in the diesel truck carrying it toward me?
Morning is a feast gone by midday. What do I hunger for in the fading light?
