Savoring. Being in the moment. Taking Pause. Can prepping vegetables help you find happiness? Maybe.
As I listened to the podcast episode, Slowing Down, on my favorite channel, Hidden Brain, it brought to mind a recent Saturday activity of foraging in Wyoming’s Snowy Range. In the podcast, Fred Bryant PhD shares with Shankar Vedantam a wonderful story of how his mother created expectations and ideas with Fred to expand and savor the act of foraging mushrooms in West Virginia. What could have been an ordinary task for a middle school science project of searching, tagging, and posting mushrooms and then just being “done”, became a slow event of creating expectations and wonderment to savor nature at its best.
I wonder sometimes if that is what I find luxurious and wonderful about my own foraging - bringing them home, sorting them, inspecting them, researching genus and species, gently cleaning the caps and pulling off the aging gills of older boletes, slicing, sauteing, then savoring the soft texture and warm taste, and then perhaps packaging them into the freezer for future use. Boletes many times are so infrequent and haphazard in my foraging, that I tend to cherish a recipe that focuses on one beautiful mushroom plated with a complimentary vegetable or grain. I found that in Alice Water’s fennel, mushroom, and parmesan salad. Quite outstanding.
There is something magical about taking a beautiful drive into the mountains, having a tempered amount of excitement that there MIGHT be mushrooms, finding some inedible options for learning, and then, there, upon the soft mulchy floor of the forest, it is, an edible mushroom, however perfect or imperfect it might be in its natural state, part of the interconnections of the forest. It is almost impossible to forage at any pace above 2 mph. It slows you down to be thoughtful, and experiential and requires time to adjust your eyes to finding those elusive fungi.
Dr. Gray suggests in his research and writings that happiness is not the opposite of sadness. Happiness does not seem to be something that happens to us like pain and suffering to which we are always guarded and on the lookout for those people, things, or events that may harm us. Our brain does not actively search for happiness. It may search out “fun”, but not necessarily contented happiness. We must intently search for it and cultivate behaviors and actions that bring happiness into us.
With that said, is it possible to create happiness by prepping vegetables? In our fast-paced world of pre-packaged, pre-cut, fast food and takeaway meals in the fresh and frozen sections of our grocery store, have we lost the ability to discover what a fruit, vegetable, or grain looks like? What a real marvel they are and goodness, how did that orange bell pepper become such a beautiful curved work of art? How wonderful can a fresh-shelled English pea be to the taste buds? To open up the shell and find three remarkable peas nestled quietly ready to be enjoyed?
Hyper-palative food definitely tantalizes the brain to want more, eat more, stuff more, and thus buy more, to have on hand when the brain wants more. And so it goes. But, is a chip really, truly, magnificently gorgeous? Is it a work of nature? or art? Does it speak with the eye as does a purple carrot, a cut heirloom tomato, or the gentle folds and creases of a delicata or sweet dumpling squash?
Whole foods, on the other hand, can be something to create moments of awe as we pause, caress, and feel the undulations. We experience the smooth, sticky, bumpy, fuzzy, leathery, or prickly exterior. Cut it open and wonder at the seed or pit patterns, the color of the flesh. Taste it. Is it sweet, sour, tart, firm, fleshy, moist, dry, crunchy, warm, cool, nutty, or perhaps, sometimes – quite nondescript? That can happen with jicama – just can’t pin down what it takes like but it is certainly in the root family of fresh, moist, and crunch.
The meditative qualities of slow prep remind me of Herbert Benson’s and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work on mindfulness in the 1990s– being in the moment and storing away what real food looks like, feels like, smells like, and tastes like in the brain. Creating file cabinets of gustatorial goodness. The promise of a future event of a thoughtfully prepared meal and the memory of discovering and feeding good nutrition to my body – rather than a bag of chips that has no personality other than salt, fat, and more.
Perhaps if we participate more in the whole food process, savoring the act of prepping and preparing, committing to experiencing a purple potato or orange cauliflower, we might find hints of happiness blossoming like magic from the cutting board.