“If music be the food of love, play on.”   Shakespeare – Twelfth Night

“Remember, as the dodo said

Feed your head!  Feed your head!  Grace Slick

I wake up in the morning and lie in bed, mentally surveying the contents of my refrigerator.  The meal possibilities of the day dance before me, my mind compulsively re-arranging the left over red cabbage into alternatively a Thai curry, cole slaw and Italian sauté with garlic.  During my morning meditation, I catch myself creating penne with vodka sauce to use up that leftover smoked salmon from a bagel splurge the other day.  My siblings and I all share the same obsession for a full refrigerator.  If there is the slightest space, we start to churn in anxiety.  An insane fear boils up – I am going to starve to death.

We’ve discussed this – wanting to blame it on genetics.  Both of our parents were in the Holocaust and had huge periods of starvation.  When we were growing up, we were expected to eat everything on the table with gratitude.  If we didn’t like the disgusting, gushy baked eggplant, or the entire fish sitting our plate, head and all, we received a lecture on starvation.  “You have no idea how lucky you are.  During the war, we were forced to eat worm soup and drink birch bark tea.”  This never seemed to increase our appetites.

Our poverty growing up made the entire family geniuses with leftovers.  Any Plonka can whip up a surprising feast with a potato, some dried mushrooms and whatever else is hanging out in the kitchen. And whenever I am attacked by any form of self-doubt, I instantly head for the refrigerator, if only to stare and reassure myself that no, I will not have to strip bark off trees this week.

One time, my husband Ron and I did a juice fast.  Ron wanted to cleanse, and I of course, wanted to lose weight.  Eight days later, I was ready to kill someone and Ron had transcended all struggle on this planet and was floating on a cloud of bliss.  He had lost fourteen pounds and I had gained one.  Two days after breaking the fast, I gained another five pounds.  It took over a year for my body to realize that we were not in a famine and I did not have to store every calorie.

There are people on this planet who call themselves Breatharians. They don’t eat.  One Breatharian who was interviewed explained that eating is a very inefficient way of receiving sustenance.  After all, the food we eat comes from the sun and the air.  So they go directly to the source, rising each morning and facing the rising sun.  One man has claimed to have had no food for over a year.

It’s true that breathing is a kind of food as well.  People like Breatharians claim that you can live a long time without food, but no one has yet claimed to be able to live without air.  The nice thing about air is that I don’t have to buy it  – yet. Entrepreneurs are already laying claim to this with everything from Oxygen Bars where people hang out with tubes in their noses inhaling … air,  to bottled oxygen (only $4.95 a bottle for “free” oxygen.). How wonderful it is that the human capacity for ingenuity and commerce can be applied to our deteriorating atmosphere in such a creative fashion.  If only we could find profit in just cleaning up the air we already have!

However, it’s possible that even in the freshest of air, we don’t all take in the same amount of sustenance.  There are those of us, especially in the West, who are living on barely enough air to sustain our existence.  Taking rapid shallow breaths, tensing during inhale or exhale, congestion, and respiratory disease all affect the nutritional value of our air.  A recent study showed that yoga practitioners had the same heart health as people who engaged in regular cardio exercise.  Experts theorize that it is because yogis breathe so much more efficiently than the average person, they process more amounts of useful oxygen than a non-yogi.

One can live for a year without food, a few minutes without air, but I propose that there is another food even more essential.  Call it life force, information, co-creation.  Every second, we are processing (literally) information.  We are receiving impressions – visual, auditory, emotional, intellectual.  From my joy at seeing  the cardinal sitting on the branch outside the window, to my internal dialogue of self worth, to the label I read on the can of pasta sauce, I am being fed.  What if everything around me is a kind of food?  Music, ideas, smells, reactions: coming in, being digested, and then coming out as who we are.  We know this in our deepest selves by the way we talk.  “Mardi Gras is like a feast for the senses!” “ There was so much information at that seminar it’s going to take a week to digest it all.”  “I love that show, it’s total mind candy!”

Joseph Chilton Pearce, the author of many books including the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, has called humans “novelty seeking organisms.” We grow through taking in information.  We literally grow a protein as children, called myelin that sheathes our nerves.  The protein is  information.  Everything a child takes in – Sponge Bob, Mom and Dad fighting, the taste of gushy eggplant, is food that coats the nerves and forms the responses of the future adult.  If we denied the human being this essential food, the human will die.  And if the human is fed a steady diet of junk food – sit coms, inane conversations – the organism will suffer from some of the same symptoms we see in our malnourished yet overweight children today.

If everything around and within me is food, one could say my life is a veritable banquet – perhaps it’s not just feeding my head, but feeding my being.  An exquisite painting, a breath taking (aha!) sunset, a moment of realizing I’m obsessing about dinner, the aroma of Mom’s potato pancakes, an epiphany, a lover’s phone call, a child’s laugh, the sound of Mozart – perhaps it’s not just music that is the food of love, but love itself that can feed my soul – wow, real soul food!  I can only begin to imagine the possibilities for the leftovers.