A Short Essay on Feeding!

"If you don’t feed a dog it will die."

Feeding is, at first, the most intimate relationship that can possibly exist between two human beings:  feeding as pregnancy is a meeting of irreducible self-sacrifice and complete dependence.  The body that a mother and her child have in common is the necessity that marks any subsequent act of feeding with its trace of intimacy.

This body is also a reminder of the difference and ab-originality of such subsequent acts of feeding. 

Birth or termination severs the link between mother and child. 

From here on, all the rest is voluntary. This voluntarism - in combination with the trace of that primal mother/child intimacy -  means that the choices we make about who to feed and what to feed them, are choices that define - give meaning, purpose, limits and horizons to - who we are.

Those we feed are those who are closest to us. We feed those we love, we feed those parts of ourselves that we wish to see grow and develop. Feeding is what you give to the present so that it endures into the future. 

Feeding is what you give to the living.

So, feeding, in a social sense is ‘giving’. I think that human beings have a universal reverence for the act of feeding guests. This is not to say that in the kind of depersonalised, techno-social, contractual societies of the 'West' that most or even any feeding answers to this description. Of course not.

Feeding for many people, much of the time is a kind of alienated and alienating ‘McTransaction’ that has nothing to do with generosity, nothing to do with building social intimacy.

And yet I think the rule proves the exception. It is simply not conceivable that guests, even, not –so-special guests, would not be fed.  I don’t think there is any need to draw a Levi-Straussian distinction between the ‘raw’ and the ‘cooked’ (pun intended – sorry!) to accept that feeding guests is, if only at a formal level, a clear message that an intimate relationship is being nurtured.

Feeding is intimate because it is a reminder of the primordial interdependence of human beings. 

Feeding is intimate because it is a relationship, not only of giving and receiving of love, of belonging and of nurturing but also of potentially fatal vulnerability.

If you don’t feed a dog it will die.  You can replace the object of the verb in the conditional clause with anything you please and you’ll get the same axiom.  Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. More than a million people starved to death in this country 160 years ago. Famines will, depressingly, probably kill millions and millions more people in the future.

There are few more despicable, disgusting acts than wilfully actually starving other human beings to death. 

Metaphorically, of course,  we all do this all the time. Few of us (I hope) are Stalin but I think we’re all capable of murder.  More or less intentional killing by starvation happens every day. We don’t feed all of our relationships all of the time – we starve parts of ourselves that for one reason or another we no longer want.

If starving can kill, so too, can feeding. Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about a memory from my childhood. I was five years old. I found a sparrow with a broken wing in my grandmother’s yard. I took it inside and tried to nurture it back to health. I distinctly remember stuffing food into its beak and watching it die.  Maybe I wasn’t solely responsible for its death but I don’t think I was ever in line for the Nobel Prize in Avian Medicine for 1977.

Hopefully I have learned a lot since then. I am not so sure.  When all is said and done do I need to look any further than a 5 year old boy force feeding a wild animal to death with his ignorance?

Now, I occasionally water plants – I think I am on safe grounds there but woe betides the geranium that develops some kind of leaf disease. I am not so sure that I could feed it the right stuff if it needed it.

I also feed my dog and my cat.  Even with them it’s not so simple but I think that’s entirely my own doing; anthropomorphism has spoilt my pets.  

If I had children I guess I could manage not to give them beer and hamburgers but who knows? 

Everyone is a perfect parent in theory.

Right now I think a lot about that bird. I don’t want to force feed the people I love because force feeding kills. I was also very recently reminded that, unlike my siblings, I was a very fussy eater as a child. Maybe I have always had a difficult relationship with eating, with being fed, with feeding. 

When I think about it I remember being forced to eat some disgusting potatoes as - and this I am sure is a false memory - the ice cream van jingle came floating tormentingly in from the street.  So the story goes for me, anyway, and if I am in the mood I make some statement about my choosiness as a survival response to the historical shadow of potato blight, potato dependence and famine. So, on this ‘logic’ it makes perfect sense to be a choosy eater.

Whatever about my imagined relationship with potatoes and the famine there is something in this equation of force feeding and unwanted, unneeded, and lethal gifts.

If you don’t feed a dog it will die. But if you give a bird the wrong food it will die too. In the end no amount of feeding will save us from Mercutio’s pun that we ourselves become “worms’ meat”.

Some feeding will speed us towards the inevitable day when we're the ones on the menu. Some feeding will make the journey worth taking.

My sole ambition is to be the tastiest dish on the menu in the Nitrogen Cycle Cafe!

Since the unitary state of pregnancy/foetal dependence has been replaced by words and the uncertainty that goes with them it's hard to know in advance, and even afterwards what's too hot, too cold or just right.

There is always risk. Fairy tales, myth and religion abound with stories about the dangers of accepting food.

Hansel and Gretel's vulnerability was their hunger - a child has to eat - and it was also, the hunger of the animals who ate their trail of breadcrumbs.

Feeding, perhaps because it is so intimate, so human and therefore, so ungodly, was looked upon with suspicion by Christianity and Judaism. Gluttony is  one of the 'deadly sins' elaborated in  Early Christianity and the middle ages. It is mentioned earlier in the Bible, too: "Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it" (Proverbs)

It doesn't take much to transgress, though: Persephone ate only 7 pomegranate seeds and this sealed her fate.

I don't know about you but I'm starving.